Notes and links from 9 Aug

While talking with my niece at the tea party yesterday she described her kids as “going all yampy” which was the first time I’d heard this midlands expression in the wild. I felt like an ethnologist who’d stumbled upon a tribe he’d only read about in old Lew Stringer comics. Cynicism and naïveté in the summer of a thousand fires Rebecca Solnit on the myth that the more you know about a crisis, the more dispirited and cynical you become. But cynicism comes from not bothering to learn more: One arena in which this is startlingly true is climate. I have been around the climate movement for more than fifteen years. Everyone who’s up to their neck in climate politics, economics, and science knows the situation is serious, alarming, dismaying – but not doomed, and so they keep doing what they can do. Their valor, generosity of spirit, dedication is so profoundly beautiful that being around these people one of the rewards for doing climate work. […] But outside that world of informed people…