Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment. (This was a story common enough to have become a joke, another therapist told me: “You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”)

The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth. Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.

Finding beauty in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The marmot’s early wake-up call. A long-form comic on sinking prisons. An ebullient character with the power to manipulate TikTok. And the reasons for a good scare.

1. I Loved “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Before I Loved Myself

Zefyr Lisowski | Electric Lit | October 26, 2023 | 3,553 words

Apparently, this month marked the 49th anniversary of the seminal horror film Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (That odd-number-ness might explain why you haven’t been bombarded with oral histories, retrospectives, and inane listicles like “11 Times Leatherface Gave Glam-God Chic While Dismembering Hippies and We Can’t Stop Crying About It.”) I’ve never seen the movie, but that didn’t stop me from being mesmerized by Zefyr Lisowski’s essay about its outsized role in her life. Though the piece will linger with you, “haunting” is the wrong word here. Nothing about Lisowski’s prose is uncertain or vaporous; she shows the reader her scars from sentence one, and the next 3,500 words are equally stark and vulnerable. She came to Chain Saw in high school, a miserable adolescent desperate for the distraction of a watch-it-if-you-dare YouTube challenge. What she found was revelation: a brightness and beauty that helped her embrace her Southern roots, and ultimately her own self. “There are marks that are left on us, and there are marks we leave on ourselves, and I’m not sure there’s a significant difference between the two,” she writes. At multiple turns, she expresses a thought with such economy that it becomes nearly aphoristic, escaping the borders of an individual experience to become universal. That’s the mark of a great essay—whether you can stomach horror movies or not. —PR

2. The Broken Clock

David Gessner | Orion Magazine | October 11, 2023 | 1,997 words

I recently read that we’re in for an El Niño winter, which brings less precipitation and increases temperatures. I thought this was a cause for celebration—I’ll gladly take any relief from our brutal winters—until David Gessner helped me understand how global warming is altering the habits and habitats of birds and wildlife with his piece at Orion Magazine. “Consider the lowly marmot,” writes Gessner. (Up until this point, I had not considered the marmot at all other than being mildly amused at the screaming marmot meme, despite our recent move to its natural habitat.) All jokes aside, warmer winters cause marmots to emerge from hibernation earlier, before the green shoots they feed on sprout from the soil. “’The salad bar was open,’ is how Anthony Barnosky, a University of California paleoecologist, put it. ‘But now with warmer winters, they wake early and stumble out into a still snow-covered world. They starve.’” What I loved most about this piece—in addition to learning more about how habitats are stretching farther north—is how Gessner conveys that all is not doom and marmot gloom. Later hard frosts let marmots feed longer before hibernation, allowing them to put on more fat so that they’re better equipped to survive a shorter winter. “We humans have changed the basic cycles of the years. We have altered the clock of the world. . . .Noticing, it turns out, matters.” Now, if only we could turn back time. —KS

3. In Harm’s Way

Susie Cagle | The Marshall Project, in partnership with Grist | October 24, 2023

In the ’80s, a prison complex was constructed in Corcoran, a poor community in California’s Central Valley, in the dry Tulare lakebed. (Historically, Tulare Lake has been the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi.) The Department of Corrections convinced lawmakers to exempt the facility from environmental law. Fast-forward several decades, and the two prisons now house 8,000 people, the largest incarcerated population in the state. California’s very wet 2022-23 winter resulted in a record-high Sierra snowpack—great for drought conditions, but a threat to the state’s agricultural interior, bringing epic flooding to the region. In this engaging long-form comic, the first of its kind at The Marshall Project, Susie Cagle chronicles how decades-old decisions to hastily build the prisons has put thousands of incarcerated people at risk. (If you enjoy this piece, I also recommend Cagle’s illustrated Longreads feature about another rural Central Valley community, “After Water,” which offers a different angle on California’s climate and water crisis in a similarly engrossing way.) —CLR

4. Watch This Guy Work, and You’ll Finally Understand the TikTok Era

Brendan I. Koerner | Wired | October 19, 2023| 6,959 words

Brendan I. Koerner’s splendid, exuberant piece took me a long time to read. For starters, it’s nearly 7,000 words—but then there are the links. So. Many. Rabbit holes. Although not one to usually click on every link on offer, after becoming engrossed in how Ursus Magana’s company, 25/7, elaborately manipulates algorithms to link music with TikTok videos, I needed to see the wrestler videos that launched YoungX777’s “Toxic” and the teens twerking to Syko’s “#BrooklynBloodPop!” (No, I was not previously familiar with these works.) Despite the time invested, I remained fascinated throughout this deep dive into the creator economy—a mystical world that Magana can weave to his will like a magician. (Probably less mysterious for those who didn’t grow up in an era where a mobile phone’s greatest wonder was Snake.) The musicians and content creators are a diverse collection, being pulled out into the light from behind their bedroom doors, but they still pale against Magana, whose backstory demonstrates true entrepreneurship in the face of adversity. His frenetic, joyful character is what repeatedly pulled me back in from the wilds of the TikTok video vortex. —CW

5. The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses

Athena Aktipis, Coltan Scrivner | Scientific American | November 1, 2023 | 3,137 words

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a Halloween event. It was a big deal, with different haunted houses built in old farm buildings. As someone who jumps a mile if a piece of paper blows across my path, I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect—but my niece and her friend dragged me along. I’m not proud of how tightly I gripped the hands of those teens, or that I made them lead the way through rooms where witches and ghouls jumped out of the shadows (different teenagers, dressed up and trading their dignity for holiday money, but still terrifying). So why exactly did I do this to myself? Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner know. Their absorbing essay details how this is all a part of our evolutionary past. A morbid fascination with danger is widespread amongst all animals—we inspect threats to know how to face them in the future. I was subconsciously rehearsing for when a real witch came to whisk me away. (Spoiler: she’d get me.) The modern decline in risky play has even led to increased anxiety in children. Full of such intriguing facts, Aktipis and Scrivner’s exploration into the psychology behind the scare will keep you on your toes—and inspire you to go out for some proper frights this Halloween weekend.  —CW

Audience Award

Who won the most sets of eyes this week?

(The excerpted text below is integrated and displayed within illustrations in the story.)

We can be prepared.

That’s a choice the state can make and it is choosing not to.

Emily Harris is Co-Director of Programs at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and advisor on a report on climate hazards facing California prisons.

A lot of the California prisons are located in remote areas, they have aging infrastructure, and a long history of overcrowding.

It’s very clear that people in prison are distinctly vulnerable.

Corrections says it has plans in place to deal with climate emergencies at its facilities.

As the incarceration rate drops, the department says it is prioritizing prisons for closure based on factors mandated by state law.

Those factors do no include environmental hazards or climate change.

In the overgrowth of Cypress trees older than humankind, a vast expanse of marshy waters became a mirror. In the morass of swing limbs and undisturbed brush, there was a refuge to be found. The people who found it, the ancestors—familial or collective—who willed their freedom across untamed horizons, were called maroons. While there is no official record or documentation of these free people, history estimates thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of formerly enslaved Black folks made homes in the Great Dismal Swamp throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

The news cycle after Hurricane Katrina was constant, a 24-hour-loop of rising flood waters, record high temperatures, “looting,” unsubstantiated claims of rape, murder, and lawlessness in the Superdome, where a city and country had abandoned its citizens. New Orleans, a city forged by Blackness, Black people, and Black culture became the epitome of a mythic recklessness. The recklessness born from the wrath of nature, the recklessness cradled by untamable waters, the recklessness bred by Blackness. Blackness, in this biased retelling, was an invasive plant watered by the floods, a plant left overflowing and uncontrollable.

But what the news coverage never showed was the ways Black people, at the nexus of nature’s calamity and systemic disinvestment, came together to care for one another, to look out for their neighbors who were also stranded, to plead for help together, and then, when they realized help wasn’t coming, to become that help themselves.

Across the region, roads buckled, car windows cracked and power cables melted. The emerald fringes of conifers browned overnight, as if singed by flame. Entire cherry orchards were destroyed, the fruit stewed on the trees. More than 650,000 farm animals died of heat stress. Hundreds of thousands of honeybees perished, their organs exploding outside their bodies. Billions of shoreline creatures, especially shellfish, simply baked to death, strewing beaches with empty shells and a fetid stench that lingered for weeks. Birds and insects went unnervingly silent. All the while the skies were hazy but clear, the air preternaturally still, not a cloud in sight. The air pressure was so high they’d all dissipated.

Halfway down the chute, Bishop and Cooper watched in horror as the fire, hungry for fuel, snaked its way around the backside of the ridge and emerged in front of them. Flames engulfed the trail below the gully, consuming their escape route, roaring like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. “Oh fuck,” Cooper said. “That came fast, dude.” “Hopefully you guys get to see this video,” Bishop added, brow furrowed. “Otherwise, we didn’t make it.” He sent another message to his wife: “We’re trapped.”

Their breathing short and shallow, they considered their only option: Scramble back up the scree they’d just descended to huddle below Baring Mountain’s jagged peak, the rocky, open space a potential refuge — or a dead end.

Despite growing up in rural South Texas without air-conditioning, I don’t remember being uncomfortable in the summers, at least not in the house. The old thing was uninsulated and drafty, inviting in the sea breezes that bring thunderstorms from the Gulf to the coastal plains. After school and in the summer, I spent hours at the town library, devouring books in the delicious AC. Plus, summers just weren’t as hot in the eighties and early nineties—I know; I looked up the data. The seven hottest summers on record for DeWitt County, where I grew up, have all occurred since 1998. 

Glacier calving is a natural phenomenon that has been accelerated by global heating, part of the wider collapse and run-off of melting ice in the polar regions (and beyond) whose impact, because of the resulting rise in sea levels, is likely to be catastrophic for low-lying landmasses and communities around the world in the near future; by some measures, it already is. From Patagonia to Greenland, calving is also a tourist attraction which, thanks to improvements in smartphone camera resolution, has given rise to a YouTube subcommunity. I’ve watched scores of these videos, which may come closer than anything else on the internet to evoking Romantic sensations of the sublime. But as enormous shelves of ice break off into the sea in surges of blue and white, like slow-moving comets, it’s jarring to hear their creaking tectonic bass drowned out by a shrill treble line of hoooooly shits and whoooahs and hysterical clapping. This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but applause.

To celebrate these events, knowing what we know, is only a particularly flagrant example of the cognitive dissonance we all experience in different ways.

Even the most optimistic version of the future, involving reduced demand and robust recycling, will still require some mining. What this ought to look like increasingly preoccupies Patrick Donnelly, who works for the Center for Biological Diversity in Nevada. I know Donnelly—as do a lot of other journalists in the West who cover extractive industries—as a ferociously dedicated conservation advocate. A few years ago, Donnelly realized that no one was tracking all of the American lithium projects and decided to do so himself. His map now shows more than 115 potential mines, clustered in his home state. “It’s the biggest mineral rush of our lifetime,” he told me over the phone. 

In an ideal world, Donnelly said, the U.S. government would put a moratorium on speculative claims and instead survey all of the country’s mineral deposits in order to identify the least harmful places to mine. This isn’t happening and won’t anytime soon. In May, the U.S. fast-tracked a manganese and zinc mine in Arizona, the first mining project added to a program designed to expedite the clean-energy transition and other infrastructure developments. But Donnelly also fears that anti-mining sentiment is turning people against electric cars—and against lithium extraction altogether. “There is zero chance we can recycle our way out of the problem,” he said. This is true. There isn’t enough lithium on the market for battery recycling to realistically meet present demand, let alone the expected increase.

“There is an element of the mining resistance movement that opposes not just particular mines but all lithium and all electric vehicles,” Donnelly went on. “Unless we’re talking about deindustrializing society, which I don’t think appeals to most people, we need to be thinking about how and where we’re getting our lithium, and critically examine our own use of these minerals, like the cell phone I’m speaking to you on now, with minerals from South America, where locals say the mines are destroying their environment and community.”

Such are the paradoxes of the globalized green economy, in which blocking a mine in one place means shifting extraction somewhere else. We want to decarbonize, yet our lives require ever-increasing supplies of energy. And so climate-minded consumers and the mining industry are locked in a self-justifying embrace. We buy an E.V. and think we are doing right by those vulnerable to rising temperatures and tides. But in trying to continue consuming as we are used to, buying stuff and zipping down the highway, we have exposed many of those same vulnerable people to another threat—the market’s readiness to kill, poison, and displace them to get minerals and metals. The mining industry, meanwhile, benefits from the self-satisfied consumerism of the E.V. buyer. For all of its disdain for environmentalists, the industry needs green consumers who seek absolution for their carbon-intensive ways of life. With their complacent inattention to the injustices inflicted by the green economy, these consumers not only fund the industry’s expansion but give it moral cover. 

Overtourism isn’t a new story. But Antarctica, designated as a global commons, is different from any other place on Earth. It’s less like a too-crowded national park and more like the moon, or the geographical equivalent of an uncontacted people. It is singular, and in its relative wildness and silence, it is the last of its kind. And because Antarctica is different, we should treat it differently: Let the last relatively untouched landscape stay that way.