Solar energy is powering more of our lives, but the Earth keeps getting hotter—and we’re nearing what has been called a “point of no return.” Plus:

• Why bother posting on social media? 
• A marriage unfolding on the high seas
• Amy Bloom recommends her favorite family novels

Daniel A. Gross
A story editor at The New Yorker.

A ray of good news: this summer, the sun is generating record-breaking quantities of electricity—steadily displacing energy production from coal, oil, and gas, which are the leading causes of the climate crisis. In a new piece about the rise of solar power, Bill McKibben reports that at one point in May, California was producing more than one and a half times the energy it needed with renewable sources alone. There have been similarly impressive gains across the world, in places from Texas to China. “If this exponential rate of growth can continue,” he writes, “we will soon live in a very different world.”

And yet, also this summer, the sun beat down oppressively on Europe, causing a heat wave that lead to the deaths of an estimated twenty-three hundred people; in June, parts of New York City surpassed a hundred degrees. As I write in a piece today, the world has been rapidly approaching a grim milestone: 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter, on average, than before the Industrial Revolution. The Paris Agreement, a binding treaty signed by nearly every nation on Earth, exists in large part to keep us from passing this threshold. Once we do, scientists predict bigger and more frequent disasters: wildfires, flash floods, hurricanes. Even so, they are focussed on what can still be achieved. “Why are we giving up on the future of life on Earth so fucking easily?” one told me. “Where is our tenacity? Where is our fortitude? We can do hard things.” Look for reasons to worry and you will certainly find them—but look for hope and you can find that, too.

Read the stories about the solar boom and life beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming.

“I feel like everyone in my generation is kind of a voyeur now,” one twenty-four-year old tells Kyle Chayka, about the rise of scrolling over sharing. Social media once felt like “a grand project that valorized amateurism, banality, and a sort of content-based meritocracy.” But, these days, as influencers, artificial intelligence, and horrifying headlines saturate the internet, what’s the point of posting? Read the column »

P.S. The director of the new “Superman” movie, James Gunn, seems to have bothered some people by pointing out that the Man of Steel (born on the planet Krypton) is an immigrant. Read the full origin stories of the hero and his creators. 🦸🏻‍♂️

Ian Crouch contributed to today’s edition.