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4 weeks ago | 
criterion.com | J. HOBERMAN |Nathaniel Rich
Cotton Comes to Harlem, Bye Bye Braverman, and The Plot Against Harry revel in their locations. Coogan’s Bluff and Little Murders used locations to produce an abstract city suitable to their respective theories of New York. Rosemary’s Baby and The Angel Levine did the same to evoke an imaginary Manhattan appropriate to their supernatural stories.
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Nov 30, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Nathaniel Rich
A unifying theme of this year's extremely active Atlantic hurricane season, which officially concludes on Saturday, has been the disbelief echoing from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Ozark plateau. "I had always felt like we were safe from climate change," an Asheville, N.C., woman told The Times after Hurricane Helene. "But now this makes me question that maybe there's nowhere that's safe."To which the obvious rejoinder is: You're right. Nowhere is safe. But some places are less safe than others.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Nathaniel Rich
Donald Trump in Las Vegas, September 13, 2024:Listen to this, very important I think: you haven’t heard the word environment in seven months. You know why? It doesn’t play. It doesn’t play. We want clean air. We want crystal clear water, beautiful water, and we want an unbelievable country, and we want an economy that’s better than it’s ever been before. The environment isn’t playing. They don’t mention it anymore. On this point Trump and Democratic strategists agree: the environment doesn’t play.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Nathaniel Rich
The 2008 coal ash spill was among the biggest industrial disasters in U.S. history. In a new book, Jared Sullivan recounts the accident, the lawsuits and the lasting damage.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
ourcommunitynow.com | Nathaniel Rich
ShareA concise summary of Jared Sullivan’s “Valley So Low” is offered halfway through the book by its hero, Jim Scott, a plain-talking, suspender-wearing, Skittles-addicted plaintiff’s lawyer: “They had a toxic tub of goop, and it blew up.”The tub began as a spring-fed swimming hole. It stood near the site of the T.V.A.’s Kingston Fossil Plant, which, when it was completed in 1954, was the world’s largest coal-fired power station.
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Jul 25, 2024 | 
criterion.com | Nathaniel Rich
It may be difficult to remember that fifty years ago New York was headed the way of Detroit. New Yorkers fled the city by the hundreds of thousands, arson was measured by the square block, and each year the city’s debt grew by a billion. A national poll in 1977 found that the percentage of Americans who considered New York to be a “good place to live” had fallen to six. The city was only marginally more popular among its residents, a million of whom had been forced onto the welfare rolls.
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Jun 30, 2024 | 
laphamsquarterly.org | Michael Dirda |Matthew Power |Nathaniel Rich |Caroline Alexander
When we look at the history of the world, it resembles nothing so much as a police blotter. Even the Bible is predominantly a record of crime and punishment, of sinfulness, large-scale and trivial, followed by rather Technicolor retribution—floods, plagues, ethnic cleansing, holocausts of every description.
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May 19, 2024 | 
laphamsquarterly.org | Brent Cunningham |Scott Korb |Jason Goodwin |Nathaniel Rich
Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse.
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Mar 28, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Nathaniel Rich
D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic has all the trappings of a sober ethnographic study of unidentified flying objects. Its organizing thesis holds that belief in the existence of shapeshifting extraterrestrial visitors can be understood as an emergent religion, offering communion with a higher power, reassurance of universal interconnectedness, and a simplifying explanation for a chaotic world. Yet American Cosmic is itself a shapeshifter.
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Mar 17, 2024 | 
laphamsquarterly.org | Christopher Hitchens |Nathaniel Rich |Brent Cunningham |Meehan Crist
Arthur Koestler opened his polemic against capital punishment in Britain by saying that the island nation was that quaint and antique place where citizens drove on the left hand side of the road, drank warm beer, made a special eccentricity of the love of animals, and had felons “hanged by the neck until they are dead.” Those closing words—from the formula by which a capital sentence was ritually announced by a heavily bewigged judge—conveyed in their satisfyingly terminal tones much of the...
