Nathaniel Rich

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.