Alan Jacobs

So can divestment, I asked, be an effective strategy? Can it generate enough economic leverage to make a difference?

“I think it’s a way to a get a fight started,” Bill said without hesitation, “and to get people in important places talking actively about the culpability of the fossil fuel industry for the trouble that we’re in. And once that talk starts, I think it does start imposing a certain kind of economic pressure. Their high stock price is entirely justified by the thought that they’re going to get all their reserves out of the ground. And I think we’ve already made an argument that it shouldn’t be a legitimate thing to be doing.”

In other words, as in South Africa, as with Big Tobacco, there’s economic leverage in the moral case?

“Absolutely.”

What, then, I wanted to know, is the “theory of change,” right now, in Bill McKibben’s mind?

“It’s not a question of coming up with the right set of policies,” he said. “Nobody’s really come up with a new set of policy stuff for 20 years. We just haven’t ever tried the things that the economists all told us to try, because the fossil fuel industry got in the way. So it’s about figuring out what power is in the way.

“Look, our job as organizers, our most important job, is to take the next step — throw a big rock in the pond, see what ripples it creates, and then figure out how to surf those and how to launch the next one. We think that if we’re able to explain to people what the fossil fuel industry is doing, it will weaken their position — weaken it morally, politically, and economically. And that will make more things possible than are possible now.”

At its root, our mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone. When a person in Peru, or Siberia, or rural Haiti falls ill, PIH uses all of the means at our disposal to make them well—from pressuring drug manufacturers, to lobbying policy makers, to providing medical care and social services. Whatever it takes. Just as we would do if a member of our own family—or we ourselves—were ill.

It’s probably also true that climate change is far too complex an issue to write a definitive novel about. But is it too complex an issue for fiction writers to make a contribution? To write not so much a definitive novel about it, but one of many complementary ones? My own attempt at this, From Here (2012), tells the story of a group of ordinary people (a supermarket cashier, an ex-banker, a hipster girl), who’ve come together in an unlikely alliance – realising how this one issue touches them all to the core. It’s full of the contradictions surrounding climate change, and the confusion many people (even those actively involved) feel around it. Telling people that I was working on a story that tackles the issue head-on, and with a clear stance on it, the response I often got was: are you sure? Which, more than once, probably meant: are you completely out of your mind?

There’s a school of thought that says novels shouldn’t (even can’t) be about a very current issue. One could reply that climate change isn’t very current in that sense – it didn’t start yesterday, and it will be with us for a long, long time – but I won’t, because our response to it (or lack thereof) is as current as it gets. But ought that really to prevent us from writing about it?

Zadie Smith beautifully described the dangers of writing fiction that’s grounded in the now in a recent Guardian podcast. People tend to find their own time “uninteresting, vulgar and stupid,” she said, and they will constantly accuse you of “shallowness, because there’s a sense that literature must be timeless”. And yet, the novels that “end up being important to people are the ones which in some way express their time” – provided you’re not simply producing a “springboard to talk about whatever is in the news.”

Yes, some mouth-breathing upskirt enthusiasts actually are ardent defenders of free speech in a constitutional context, just as some couch-surfing stoners are actually deeply committed to stumping for recognition of cannabinoid compounds as legitimate instruments of medical therapy. Speaking as someone who is both for free speech and for the disprohibitionmentation of marijuana, however, I will suggest their actual number, as a ratio against those dude who just want their whack and weed, is low indeed.

Which is why, upskirt dude, when you come at me with your “free speech” argument, I am skeptical, shall we say, concerning your sincerity regarding, knowledge of, and commitment to, free speech. I will judge you if it quickly becomes apparent — as it so often does — that you haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about on the subject. Because then not only are you a creep, you’re an insincere creep, and you think I am as ignorant as you are, which is also unsurprisingly offensive to me.

If all you want to do is be a creep, then please don’t drag free speech into it. Free speech really does deserve better.

There would be no haggling. The man spat a dry white circle in the dirt.
Eleven fifty.
And it was over.

I have tried, Prezi — you can’t say I haven’t tried. But I’m done with you now.

The core idea of Prezi is a terrific one: allow people to create presentations based not on static slides but on dynamic visualizaton of ideas, and then make those presentations available online. Wonderful! Fantastic! Why didn’t anyone think of it before?

But see, it doesn’t work. There are many problems, but let’s boil them down to two.

One: So you create a Prezi that shows all these ideas in spatial relation to one another — but when you look at a whole Prezi each component is so small that you can’t see what anything is. And then when you zoom in on an individual component it’s impossible for anyone lacking an eidetic memory to remember how it’s related to all the other components. So you really end up with nothing more than slides, but slides that are supposed to be in significant spatial relation to one another, which makes you feel uneasy and inadequate when you can’t discern that relation.

Two: The way Prezi zooms around makes me seasick. Actually physically queasy.

All the recommended Prezis on the website have these problems, including the demo created by Prezi’s makers. So while I’d like to say, Prezi, that it’s not you, it’s me … I really think it’s you.

Moses, the orphaned baby elephant being raised by a human

A Google data center, courtesy of Nick Carr

Why shouldn’t newspapers around the world, or at least in the most internet-saturated parts of the world, just stop the presses — especially if they know they’ll have to do it anyway, and in the meantime the cash is draining away? What are the restraining factors? Habit and tradition? Powerful executives who have known the print world for so long that they can’t imagine life without it? The half-conscious feeling that paper and ink are real in ways that pixels and bits are not, and that if you only have pixels and bits you might as well be just a blogger, without a saleable product you can hold in your hand?

This inquiring mind really, really wants to know.

My thesis is that the academic novel stems from the rise of mass higher education in the United States. It follows the demographics; the fact that two thirds of Americans go to college provides an audience. College is no longer a cloister but as common as the shopping mall. (For good or ill, it seems England is trying to catch up to this American tendency.) Professors were rare in the U.S. in 1900 — only about 1 in 3,167 people was faculty. Medical doctors and lawyers were much more common — about 1 in 600. However, by 2000 professors came to constitute 1 of 243, so they were a familiar professional to most American people — especially to those who read literature, who in all likelihood went to college.

Also, the novels show academe not as removed but in the thick of public culture, embroiled in the culture wars and subject to the vicissitudes of adult, middle class life. The academic novel no longer depicts a pleasant enclave, but faculty are subject to pressures that any other professional experiences. In fact, one wing of the recent wave depicts those just hanging onto tenuous jobs in academe. It’s no longer close to a sinecure. In short, the academic novel portrays class in the USA, touching a chord with the reading public.