Vanity Fair ... and Radhika?

I will admit it; I hadn't known about the publication Vanity Fair until Christopher Hitchens started writing there.

No, I take that back.  I first heard about it when Tina Brown became the editor of the New Yorker.  Reports said that she was a huge success at Vanity Fair, which made me wonder what the deal was.  Turned out Vanity Fair had quite some back story.

As I read those sentences that I have written, even I am amazed at how far from electrical engineering I have come, and how much I have immersed myself in the literary world.  Maybe this is another piece of evidence for why I continue to think a lot about CP Snow's Two Cultures.

Anyway, back to Vanity Fair.  Just as much as Tina Brown caused a sensation, it is the news about the appointment of a new editor that the literary/journalism world is talking about.  The editor's name is Radhika Jones.

The all-knowing Wikipedia notes:

Radhika was born in New York to an American father (Robert L Jones) and an Indian mother. They had met in Paris in 1970s. Jones grew up in Ridgefield, Connecticut. She has a brother and a sister (Nalini).

Talk about globalization, eh.  An American and an Indian meet in Paris, and the story unfolds!

What are Radhika Jones' credentials?

Ms. Jones graduated from Harvard College and received a doctoral degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. She has lived in Taipei and Moscow, where she got her start in journalism as the arts editor at The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper. (Her Russian, she said, is rusty.)

Harvard undergrad, and then a doctorate from Columbia.  Holy shit; you don't want to mess around with such an academic background.

Interesting that Jones did not then transition into the role of an academic, right?  Good for her.

There are plenty of intellectuals like Jones who crossed over into the world of journalism after earning their PhDs.  Some of my favorites, even when I mostly disagree with them, include Bill Kristol and Andrew Sullivan.

Sometimes, I wonder if the path of academic credentials and then writing for the public is the path that I would have traveled had I known better, or if I had grown up in the US.  The roads we travel, and the forks that we diverge on, is what life is all about, eh!

You can have this virtual cake ... but, eat you cannot!

After the meeting, I was hanging out at the airport killing time by walking around and observing life.  I spotted two colleagues waiting for their flights.  I walked over and chatted with them.

One talked about how she enjoys having a second home in Brooklyn, even as she continues to work and live for the most part in a town four hours away.

"The two mortgages are tight ... sometimes I feel like I can't ever go on a real vacation.  But, then I reach Brooklyn, and my friends are right across from me, and I am happy," she said.

"Yes, ultimately it is all about the human-human interactions, right?  It is not really about the vacation travels."

People increasingly seem to be forgetting the importance of the human interaction in real time and space.  They fail to understand that virtual is not the same. It is like my favorite example that you can't eat a virtual cake.  It is only real water that quenches the thirst, not the virtual.

David Brooks writes in his column that "Online is a place for human contact but not intimacy."  But, people seem to be mistaking one for another, and fail to understand the difference between contact and intimacy, between acquaintance and friend.

There is no turning back.  The virtual will increasingly be the preferred choice, even as people know within that it is the real that they truly seek. 

And then one day in the future, humanity will run into the very scenario that E.M. Forster wrote about years before all these developed:

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

Cry is all we can do!

Should I be positive about negative emissions?

When two of my favorite magazines have essays on the same worrisome issue, it can only mean one thing: Curl into a fetal position, suck your thumb, and pray to your favorite gods!

First it was The New Yorker and then The Economist on "negative emissions."  Here's how the Londoner puts it:

The Paris agreement assumes, in effect, that the world will find ways to suck CO2 out of the air. That is because, in any realistic scenario, emissions cannot be cut fast enough to keep the total stock of greenhouse gases sufficiently small to limit the rise in temperature successfully. But there is barely any public discussion of how to bring about the extra “negative emissions” needed to reduce the stock of CO2 (and even less about the more radical idea of lowering the temperature by blocking out sunlight). Unless that changes, the promise of limiting the harm of climate change is almost certain to be broken.

Yep, if the CO2 that is piling up cannot be sucked out of the sky, well, your grandkids are in for some deep trouble!

The New Yorker's treatment of the subject is an awesome essay by the Pulitzer winning Elizabeth Kolbert.  She writes quoting Klaus Lackner:

The way Lackner sees things, the key to avoiding “deep trouble” is thinking differently. “We need to change the paradigm,” he told me. Carbon dioxide should be regarded the same way we view other waste products, like sewage or garbage. We don’t expect people to stop producing waste. (“Rewarding people for going to the bathroom less would be nonsensical,” Lackner has observed.) At the same time, we don’t let them shit on the sidewalk or toss their empty yogurt containers into the street.

Of course CO2 is a waste product.  We have been allowing factories and cars to throw the waste into the air that surrounds us.  So, what does Lackner suggest?  What is the paradigm shift that he wants us to think about?

One of the reasons we’ve made so little progress on climate change, he contends, is that the issue has acquired an ethical charge, which has polarized people. To the extent that emissions are seen as bad, emitters become guilty. “Such a moral stance makes virtually everyone a sinner, and makes hypocrites out of many who are concerned about climate change but still partake in the benefits of modernity,” he has written. Changing the paradigm, Lackner believes, will change the conversation. If CO2 is treated as just another form of waste, which has to be disposed of, then people can stop arguing about whether it’s a problem and finally start doing something.

I am all for it.  The guilt talk does not work.  It is way more practical to talk about trash removal.  Except, removing this trash ain't easy!

If we keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere, what will the story be?  Like I said, adopt the fetal position, and suck on your thumb!

The I.P.C.C. considered more than a thousand possible scenarios. Of these, only a hundred and sixteen limit warming to below two degrees, and of these a hundred and eight involve negative emissions. In many below-two-degree scenarios, the quantity of negative emissions called for reaches the same order of magnitude as the “positive” emissions being produced today.
“The volumes are outright crazy,” Oliver Geden, the head of the E.U. research division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told me. Lackner said, “I think what the I.P.C.C. really is saying is ‘We tried lots and lots of scenarios, and, of the scenarios which stayed safe, virtually every one needed some magic touch of a negative emissions. If we didn’t do that, we ran into a brick wall.’ ”

Are you all curled up yet?  No?  Ok, then read on:

Early last month, the Trump Administration announced its intention to repeal the Clean Power Plan, a set of rules aimed at cutting power plants’ emissions. The plan, which had been approved by the Obama Administration, was eminently achievable. Still, according to the current Administration, the cuts were too onerous. The repeal of the plan is likely to result in hundreds of millions of tons of additional emissions.

So, what is Elizabeth Kolbert's bottom-line?

As a technology of last resort, carbon removal is, almost by its nature, paradoxical. It has become vital without necessarily being viable. It may be impossible to manage and it may also be impossible to manage without. ♦

Boy will the grandkids curse us all!