Archive - June 11, 2024

In the news —   For its July/August issue, The Atlantic has made climate change its focus, leading with today’s cover story by staff writer George Packer  on the rise and possible fall of Phoenix, Arizona. In his cover story, “The Valley”— the second-longest that The Atlantic has published in the past 40 years — Packer provides a sweeping, kaleidoscopic look at the precarious political and physical ecology of Phoenix, demonstrating that the country’s fastest-growing and most dynamic region contains, in microcosm, all of America’s most contentious and dangerous issues: climate change and election denialism, education and immigration, homelessness and zoning, the future of the working class and of a multiethnic democracy. Phoenix’s contradictions are so great — explosive population and economic growth paired with existential political and environmental challenges — they raise questions about the city’s sustainability, and about the sustainability of the American political project. Phoenix, Packer argues, makes . . .