A few days before the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dropped its latest report, the climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis issued a warning to her followers on Twitter: “Your feed is going to be filled with all of the horrible things that a warming climate will do.”

She was, of course, correct. Several outlets quoted U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’ statement calling the report a “code red for humanity.” Eric Holthaus called the IPCC report “difficult” to read: “Chances are, you’ll learn new truths about the climate emergency that will be terrifying in a way you haven't yet felt.” The New York Times reported that, whatever we do now, 1.5 degrees of warming is essentially “locked in” within the next couple decades. At that point, “[n]early one billion people worldwide could swelter in more frequent life-threatening heat waves. Hundreds of millions more would struggle for water because of severe droughts. Some animal and plant species alive today will be gone.”

But it was not the dire state of affairs that Pierre-Louis wanted to call attention to now; it was what we could still do about it. Much of the former Times staffer’s most recent work as a reporter and producer on the podcast How to Save a Planet has been an attempt to turn the lens in climate reporting from problems toward solutions. Her most powerful work goes beyond the low hanging fruit of tweaking our existing society with energy efficiency and renewable fuels and asks readers to completely reimagine the way we live in the world.

In her contribution to the book of essays All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, Pierre-Louis digs into the widely held idea that humans will inevitably destroy any environment they inhabit. Taking a survey of pop culture representations of our relationship with the natural world, Pierre-Louis finds that we have a hard time even imagining what it could look like for people to live in harmony with the planet — the one exception being Black Panther’s Wakanda. This is a problem, Pierre-Louis has noted elsewhere, because “film and television don’t only reflect culture; they also shape it.”

“The stories we tell about ourselves and our place in the world are the raw materials from which we build our existence,” she wrote. How can we build a new world if we can’t even imagine it first?

In the wake of the harrowing IPCC report, The Postscript reached out to Pierre-Louis to find out what recent stories and solutions she’s found inspiring, and which solutions it’s time to let go of. Here are her picks.

I. All the Right Words on Climate Have Already Been Said

Earlier this summer, as a heat wave enveloped much of western North America, Sarah Miller perfectly articulated what it feels like to be a climate reporter in this era of inescapable climate change for Nieman Lab; chiefly, like writing about it is no longer enough. “Recently, a fellow climate reporter lamented to me that it’s gotten to the point where she feels like she’s rewriting the same climate stories but with different words,” Pierre-Louis says. “Miller’s story captures that feeling that I think many people who’ve been steeped in climate work for awhile feel. We understand the scale of the problem and we need fewer words and more action at this point.”

II. The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere

The trouble with so many of the climate solutions we’ve turned to so far is that they don’t get to the root of the problem — and might actually make things worse. Swapping out every gas-guzzling car on the road for an electric one sounds great until you learn that companies plan to start destructive, deep sea mining for the precious metals required in batteries. We don’t need to drive different cars, we need to drive less. Similarly, as Lisa Song of ProPublica and James Temple of MIT Technology Review reported, offsetting rather than reducing carbon emissions hasn’t gotten us any closer to our climate goals.

“For decades companies have tried to convince us that we don’t really need to reduce our carbon emissions, we can offset them, by planting trees that absorb CO2 and other activities designed to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or reduce the amount of carbon emissions we emit,” Pierre-Louis says. “This story does a good job at illustrating how, while the concept might be theoretically sound, the actual application leaves a lot of problematic wiggle room that leaves the rest of us much worse off.”

III. ‘Fire Is Medicine’: The Tribes Burning California Forests to Save Them

Contrary to popular belief, the solutions that do work won’t necessarily come from new and innovative technologies. The state of California has spent decades and trillions of dollars fighting wildfires, and all the while the fires themselves have grown larger, hotter, and more destructive. What gives? All that fire suppression actually created a landscape that was primed to go up in smoke as temperatures rose and precipitation fell across the state. One of the most promising solutions, profiled here by Susie Cagle in the Guardian, is to bring fire back to landscapes that used to burn.

“One of the hardest messages to convey is that fire is an essential part of many landscapes and that, in a warming world, we need more (carefully managed) fires not fewer,” Pierre-Louis says. “Cagle does an incredible job of capturing the wrongheaded legacy of fire suppression and of the belief that adapting to a warming world means turning to new solutions. At least some of the ideas that we need to reduce emissions and adapt to the climate crisis are not new but were abandoned in favor of ideas around technological progress.”

The Essentials is a recurring column that introduces readers to a subject, concept, or notable individual’s work, with expert recommendations for what to read, watch, and/or listen to.We’ll get you up to speed in minutes, but provide resources for taking a deeper dive, when it works for you.

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The Postscript

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Listen: Recycling! Is It BS?

If you’ve ever stood over your recycling bin wondering if the piece of metal, paper, or, most likely, plastic in your hand is actually recyclable, this episode of How to Save a Planet is for you. Kendra Pierre-Louis walks host Alex Blumberg through the ins and outs of the widely misunderstood process, including how to decipher those numerical codes on plastics and what that triangle of arrows we associate with recycling really means. (Spoilers: It doesn’t mean the piece of plastic is recyclable!)

Listen: Where’s Our Climate Anthem?

Every social movement needs an anthem. Where are all the climate bangers? Pierre-Louis talks to How to Save a Planet host Ayana Elizabeth Johnson about what makes for a great anthem, based on one of the most well-known anthems from the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome,” and how to apply those lessons to create a climate change anthem for the future.

Meet: About the Author

Kate Wheeling is a freelance journalist based in California covering the environment, climate change, and our relationship to each other and to the natural world. You can find her work in Smithsonian, The Nation, The New Republic, Outside, and others.

Ed Yong saw this coming. In 2018, a century after the 1918 flu pandemic killed some 675,000 Americans and millions more abroad, Yong wrote a feature suggesting that the next pandemic was inevitable, and that the United States was “disturbingly vulnerable.” In early 2020, as the novel coronavirus raced around the world, Yong, a staff writer for The Atlantic, returned early from book leave to cover the virus. Everything played out almost exactly as he said it would. Throughout much of 2020, tens of thousands of Americans were falling ill every day, medical supply chains linking back to China and India were breaking down, hospitals were over capacity and underfunded, and the White House under President Donald Trump was promoting conspiracy theories and claiming victory over the virus. Today, COVID-19 has claimed nearly 610,000 American lives.

Yong’s reporting over the first year of the pandemic — somehow both disconcerting in its content and calming in its clarity and comprehensiveness — earned him the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He’s continued to investigate what the virus is doing to our countries, our communities, and our bodies as the pandemic stretches on into year two. Here, The Postscript has gathered an essential reading list for understanding COVID-19 and what comes next, including recommendations from Yong for the writing that he found indispensable.

I. How the Pandemic Defeated America

This feature from the September 2020 issue of The Atlantic contains what Poynter called the “sentence of the year,” defining the many ways Trump himself exacerbated the effects of the virus. But Trump was a “comorbidity,” not a cause, and here Yong catalogs the fragilities throughout American leadership, health care, and social contracts that together led to the nation’s utter failure to contain the spread of the virus. These are all lessons for a new administration facing stagnating vaccination rates, new viral variants, and a populace that’s burnt out economically and psychologically.

“Normal led to this,” Yong says. “We long to return to the way things were, but we have to deeply, viscerally understand that the world we existed in made it all-too-possible for a pandemic to occur, made it harder for us to contain it, and left countless groups of people vulnerable to it.”

II. The Fundamental Question of the Pandemic Is Shifting

Here Yong chronicles the inherent conflict between American individualism and public health in the pandemic era. Rather than remaining united against the virus, the vaccinated in the United States have been “liberated” from collective protections such as masking and social distancing, while the unvaccinated, who Yong notes are disproportionately from disadvantaged communities, are left to fend for themselves. But treating risk as an individual problem doesn’t make it one: the longer the coronavirus circulates in unvaccinated populations, the more time it has to evolve around the vaccines. For now, those defenses are largely holding against increasingly transmissible strains like the Delta variant. The inequalities in the vaccine rollout mean many Americans are moving on, while the country’s most socially vulnerable communities are still suffering.

“What is America’s goal,” Yong asks, “to end the pandemic, or to suppress it to a level where it mostly plagues communities that privileged individuals can ignore?”

III. What Happens When Americans Can Finally Exhale

What is the most important thing for Americans to know about the COVID-19 pandemic? “It’s not over,” Yong says. It’s not just COVID variants that threaten the health of people around the globe.

Across the country, but especially in vulnerable and minority communities, Americans lost loved ones, jobs, homes, and a year or more of their lives to the virus. Millions are living with grief, survivor’s guilt, and the economic and existential anxiety that accompanies a disaster of this scale. Trust in authority, community, and a sense of belonging all make people more resilient in the face of trauma. But, Yong writes, the pandemic has “eroded the very social trust and connections that allow communities to recover from catastrophes.”

“Even if 100 percent of people got vaccinated tomorrow and all cases disappear, the lasting scars of COVID-19 will take years and decades to heal,” Yong says.

Ed Yong’s COVID-19 Reading List

• They Say Coronavirus Isn’t Airborne — but It’s Definitely Borne by Air — Roxanne Khamsi, Wired: “Khamsi has been ahead of the curve throughout the entire pandemic, and this incredibly prescient piece from MARCH 2020 (!!!!) presaged much of the ensuing debate about airborne transmission,” Yong says. “It is astonishing how well it holds up.”

• I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same. — Helen Ouyang, The New York Times Magazine: Ouyang’s haunting account of the impossible decisions doctors had to make as hospitals attempted to treat soaring numbers of patients with dwindling supplies.

• We Need to Talk About What Coronavirus Recoveries Look Like — Fiona Lowenstein, The New York Times; ‘I Wish I Could Do Something for You,’ My Doctor Said — Mara Gay, The New York Times; and Very, Very Mild: COVID-19 Symptoms and Illness Classification — Felicity Callard, Somatosphere: In the early months of the pandemic, patients were expected to recover from “mild” COVID-19 in a matter of weeks. But for some, their symptoms were lasting months. These pieces “radically transformed my understanding of ‘mild’ COVID-19,” Yong says, and “laid the groundwork for my reporting on the group that came to be known as long-haulers.”

The Essentials is a recurring column that introduces readers to a subject, concept, or notable individual’s work, with expert recommendations for what to read, watch, and/or listen to.We’ll get you up to speed in minutes, but provide resources for taking a deeper dive, when it works for you.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Watch: 76 Days

In the first documentary film to emerge from the pandemic era, filmmakers Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, and an anonymous journalist put viewers into the apocalyptic scenes from hospitals in Wuhan, China, with health care workers as they learned to care for patients amid the chaos.

Watch: Totally Under Control

The film by Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger serves as a “report card” for the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus, juxtaposing scenes of the president and administration officials playing down the risks with the voices of whistleblowers and critics who called out the government’s blindspots from early on. There’s no satisfying conclusion here — for one thing, filming wrapped before Trump himself contracted COVID-19 in the fall of 2020. But also because it’s still unclear what, if anything, America will learn from the mistakes made in the first year of the pandemic.

Listen: America Dissected: Coronavirus

In this weekly podcast from Crooked Media, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and epidemiologist, interviews other experts and breaks down how science, culture, and policy all influenced the path of the pandemic in America — and charts a better way forward.

Meet: About the Author

Kate Wheeling is a freelance journalist based in California covering the environment, climate change, and our relationship to each other and to the natural world. You can find her work in Smithsonian, The Nation, The New Republic, Outside, and others.

The media is not a monolith, but it came close last month in its collective mourning of Janet Malcolm, the New Yorker staff writer who died of lung cancer at 86. Malcolm, who at first struggled to learn english when her family escaped from Czechoslovakia to New York just before WWII, became a writer’s writer, and her work has often been described as “delicious,” “literary,” “funny,” and, above all, “precise.”

When The Postscript asked me to compile a list of her essential works for this inaugural column, I struggled. Malcolm is the author of a dozen books and countless articles that all prove her to be an expert on subjects as varied as art and photography, true crime, psychoanalysis, journalistic ethics, and the act of writing itself. Which ones are “essential”? These lists, by definition, can’t be exhaustive (my editor said I should make this “long enough to be maximally useful and interesting but not so long that it’s boring or repetitive”). So where to start?

After much thought, psychoanalysis feels right because, one could argue, this topic is where Malcolm herself began (her father was a psychiatrist, and her first longform “fact piece” for the New Yorker was on family therapy), but also because it’s where I started reading Malcolm, and it helped me to appreciate the thread of penetrating, psychoanalytic insights throughout all of her work.

I. Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

“The patient leaves the analysis older and wiser about the analysis: it is finally borne in on him that the purpose of analysis is not to make sense of his life but to make nonsense of his neurosis,” Malcolm wrote in a later book, but I think this describes what it’s like to read Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, her portrait of psychoanalytic society in New York City, which began as a two-part New Yorker story in 1980 and was expanded into a book the following year. Malcolm traces the evolution of psychoanalysis, from the time when the Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, repression, the Oedipus complex, transference, and more, coalesced into a theory, and the ways it’s mutated over time — for better, for worse — under his intellectual descendants. At its conclusion, the reader understands the quirks of Freudian psychoanalysis in the context of its past.

Aaron Green, the pseudonymously named, middle-aged, “unswervingly” Freudian psychoanalyst at the center of Malcolm’s work, is infantilized by his field, ceaselessly seeking the approval of his superiors. Another analyst embodies the indefatigable detachment of orthodox psychoanalysis: “You felt that he didn’t sit down to meals but furtively gulped his food, like a stray animal; you fancied that his wife had left him years ago, and that for several days he hadn’t noticed she was gone.”

It’s filled with the kind of apt and ambiguous descriptions — “the exquisitely relaxed analyst, inclining toward his patient’s psyche as a sinuous, long-stemmed plant languorously yields to the law of tropism” — that Malcolm is known for. As Wyatt Mason would later write of her use of language, “all that verbal care delivers news from Malcolm’s well-stocked mind.”

II. The Journalist and the Murderer

Malcolm’s most famous line comes from this, another essay turned book about the boundaries crossed by the writer Joe McGinniss while writing about the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, a doctor convicted of killing his wife and young children. I first heard about this book, like many aspiring writers, in journalism school. In the opening line, Malcolm demonstrated both her skepticism of her own trade and her mastery of one of its most important tenets, an attention grabbing lede: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

The book-length version was published in 1990, and it was the first of Malcolm’s many piercing critiques of narrative non-fiction writers that would lead the field to see her as a “remorseless philosopher of journalism.” The New York Times called it a “feisty book ... laced with the jargon of Freudian dogma.” Malcolm, who I think will forgive me for using a block quote here, paints journalists as confidence men, and their subjects as naive patients:

Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all noticing, unforgiving father.

Malcolm makes a convincing case that McGinniss deceived the doctor, claiming the book would proclaim his innocence while simultaneously describing to his editor how the narrative would slowly reveal MacDonald to be a psychopathic killer. McGinniss, unsurprisingly, took issue with her charges, noting, fairly or unfairly, depending on who you ask, that Malcolm herself was facing a libel case brought against her by the subject of her 1984 book, In the Freud Archives. The case was the climax of a period in Malcolm’s career that Sarah Nicole Prickett described as a phase when, “she will embody the Bakhtinism of the listener becoming the speaker and enemize men who, when all is said and done, are shocked by what she writes to a degree that suggests they thought she was a Typist.”

III. Janet Malcolm, The Art of Nonfiction No. 4
Katie Roiphe, The Paris Review

Malcolm refused to sit for an interview with The Paris Review until the publication agreed to her demand that it be conducted largely in writing, and, as a result, this 2011 interview is as much a work of Malcolm’s hand as it is of Katie Roiphe, a journalism professor and author whose father was a psychoanalyst and whose work is often devoted to the same kind of messy narratives Malcolm pursued. The writer herself remains largely hidden behind carefully crafted responses, and her insights are applied broadly: On psychoanalysis, Malcolm wrote that “[b]oth the journalist and the psychoanalyst are connoisseurs of the small, unregarded motions of life. Both pan the surface — yes, surface — for the gold of insight”; on her writing style, that “[w]omen who came of age at the time that I did developed aggressive ways to attract the notice of the superior males. The habit of attention getting stays with you”; and on journalism, that “[w]e are certainly not a ‘helping profession.’ If we help anyone, it is ourselves, to what our subjects don’t realize they are letting us take.”

But perhaps, in the general observations, you learn a little something about the observer. After all, in her 1992 collection of essays called The Purloined Clinic, Malcolm wrote that "it is as if we all need in some way to take possession of whatever passes through our hands, to leave our mark, to show that we have been there.”

Extra Credit

• Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial — Trial narratives were another common topic for Malcolm, whose mother was a lawyer. Here she examines their role in the murder trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, who was found guilty of hiring her husband’s cousin to kill her own husband: “In life, no story is told exactly the same way twice. As the damp clay of actuality passes from hand to hand, it assumes different artful shapes. We expect it to. Only in trials is making it pretty equated with making it up.”

• "Forty-One False Starts" — Malcolm's structure-defying profile of David Salle. To quote E.B. Bartels: “This is no ordinary journalism. This is Janet Malcolm.”

• Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography — A collection of essays on photography: “If ‘the camera can’t lie,’ neither is it inclined to tell the truth, since it can reflect only the usually ambiguous, and sometimes outright deceitful, surface of reality.”

The Essentials is a recurring column that introduces readers to a subject, concept, or notable individual’s work, with expert recommendations for what to read, watch, and/or listen to. We'll get you up to speed in minutes, but provide resources for taking a deeper dive, when it works for you.

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Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Remember: Janet Malcolm, a Life

David Graham, staff writer, The Atlantic: “Malcolm’s best work can induce days-long intellectual vertigo — a far different effect than the tinny hangover one gets from reading brilliant but adolescent polemicists in the Christopher Hitchens mold.” —“Janet Malcolm the Magician,” June 20, 2021

Nathan Heller, staff writer, The New Yorker: “No greater feat for a non-fiction writer than to invent a way of seeing and saying that renders a whole constellation of illuminating, not obvious, and previously unrenderable relationships — and to do it in a way that’s utterly distinctive but unoccluded by ego. RIP Janet Malcolm.” —Twitter, June 17, 2021

Fergus McIntosh, Malcolm’s fact checker: “If journalism really is morally indefensible, as she wrote at the start of The Journalist and the Murderer, then fact-checking her pieces could only be absurd. … Checking her was like being shut in with a leopard: she was entrancing, variegated, prone to pounce. I’ll miss that feeling dearly.” —“Janet Malcolm, Remembered by Writers,” June 19, 2021

Helen Garner, Australian author: “To open any one of her books at random is to find myself drawn back into that unmistakable sensibility, that unique tissue of mind, and to grasp how deeply I am indebted to her. … I learned from watching Malcolm in full flight that I could go much further than timidly nibbling at the edges of people’s peculiar behaviour. I saw that I could get a grip on it and dare to interpret it, to coax meaning from it.” —“Helen Garner on Janet Malcolm: ‘Her Writing Turns Us Into Better Readers,’” June 24, 2021

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Meet: About the Author

Kate Wheeling is a freelance journalist based in California covering the environment, climate change, and our relationship to each other and to the natural world. You can find her work in Smithsonian, The Nation, The New Republic, Outside, and others. She is currently pursuing a master’s in clinical psychology at Pepperdine.