Leif’s Reviews > Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore > Status Update

Environmental melodrama: “She tells me that she illustrated her latest piece with a collection of photographs she and her husband took on a road trip ... . “Hold on. I’ll send it to you,” she says. When I hear “Hold on,” I think, with my eyes focused on the world out the window, “To what?” Just beyond the construction crane cantilevered over the base of what will soon be yet skyscraper.”

Unbearably precious, like a self-imposed, sugar-inspired headache: “These days all it takes is a little unusual warmth to make me feel nauseated. I call this new form of climate anxiety endsickness. Like motion sickness or sea sickness, endsickness is its own kind of vertigo—a physical response to living in a world that is moving in unusual ways, toward what I imagine as a kind of event horizon.” Ugh.