From London Review of Books.

In Praise of Difficult Children

I see bits about this on the news but hadn’t realized the scope. From Axios.

China’s unrivaled 70-day heat wave

While still in a drought, Dallas has a “1,000 year flood”.

Dallas area hit by 1-in-1,000-year flood

The dirty (or perhaps clean) little secret is that solar is keeping the lights (or at least the A/C) on during this brutal Texas summer. It seems Texas solar is up over 39x in six years. And it’s on a steep upward curve.

Texas solar output is up 39x in six years:

June 2016: 69.8 gigawatt-hours

June 2022: 2,729 gigawatt-hours

From the BBC.

Ukraine war: Thousands of Jews quit Russia amid fears of persecution

from Slow Boring.

Dark Brandon, explained

I ran across this a while back, but I tend to ignore Twitter. These folks on Digg pick out the best (worst?) of Twitter on a daily basis.

One Main Character

From Mississippi Today.

Mississippi now leads the world in mass incarceration

There seem to be three “1000-year floods” in as many weeks here in the US. This is happening in July and early August, a time not known for heavy rainfall, especially in the places it is falling, like Death Valley. Here in Texas we are in an extreme drought. Somehow, it is humid here every day, so it is an odd sort of drought. To this amateur meteorologist it seems like southern gulf breezes push lots of moisture right past Texas, then it ends up being unleashed somewhere of the edges of the drought area.

Death Valley Experiences 1,000 Year Rain Event

St. Louis and Kentucky flooding: 2 different 1-in-1,000-year flood events in same week