Telling You Today, August 3, 2025
Dear Friends,
It's been a busy Summer. In June we left town for heat-domed North Carolina, to attend a boisterous wedding weekend and go to the beach, and Philadelphia, where I hung out with lefty librarians, had a great sandwich twice, and reconnected with some dear old friends. Then back to L.A., which we fled briefly to escape July 4th chaos and backpack in the Eastern Sierras. I truly love the mountains here, and the few times a year we backpack or even just see the peaks from the Owens Valley, I realize that I've found a reliable setting for peace and rejuvenation. I bought Birdy a sleeping bag for this trip, so she'd have a warm little pouch to burrow into at night. Later in July, my mom and 15-year-old nephew visited, and we split our time between L.A. activities and jaunts to Santa Barbara and Palm Springs. I saw said nephew just a year ago, but it was remarkable, even since then, what an vastly interesting and pleasant person he's become. I hope we blew his mind with exposure to some novel experiences.
Recs
I have just one. Please, please read Bill McKibben's piece detailing the absolutely insane global ascendancy of solar power generation. There's many reasons to be pessimistic on the climate front, but I find over and over that I talk to peers who seem to have no idea how rapidly the shift to solar energy is occurring – and succeeding. I think it's important to understand how good, cheap, and ubiquitous solar has become around the world, literally just in the last two years. It's the most hopeful thing going, and if you are an absolute climate doomer, you might be operating from very outdated information. I'm not saying anything is solved, but the tools are here - we simply need to grasp them.
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