'Many of us have warned for years of a rising ecofascist threat in response to climate chaos'

Opinion, comment and editorials of the day

An American flag flies amid burned structures at the Altadena Town & Country Club during the Eaton Fire on January 8, 2025 in Altadena, California
An American flag flies amid burned structures during the Eaton Fire on January 8, 2025 in Altadena, California
(Image credit: Mario Tama / Getty Images)

'The social and political knock-on effects of global heating will destabilize countries'

Wen Stephenson at The Nation

Read more

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

'Sociability is vital but true solitude is precious'

James Marriott at The Times

"Loneliness is a scourge," says James Marriott, but "voluntary, genuine, well-used solitude" counts as "one of life's high pleasures" — one that's "rather underrated." Our "concern with the evils of isolation" means we "forget its rewards." Those "compulsively sociable characters" head out "every evening" because "they cannot stand their own company," but "it is only when we are really alone that we see ourselves." I'm "not opposed to sociability" but solitude is "a source of contentment and self-knowledge."

Read more

'We have had an oligarchy for years and it's been the wrong one'

Gerard Baker at The Wall Street Journal

"Bring on the new oligarchy," says Gerard Baker, including "Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos." These men "until a few months ago were mostly eager defenders of the old order," but the "world has changed" and "people with something to sell understand and act accordingly." If AI is to "define our prosperity," we should "want the U.S. to be led by people who ensure the maximum space to grow and enhance that intelligence."

Read more

'Age is perhaps the most important predictor of human health'

Saul Newman at The New York Times

"The allure of extreme longevity has beckoned for centuries," but the "data on people living to an unusually old age is deeply flawed," says Saul Newman," who "tracked down data on 80% of the world's people 110 or older and found that in many cases their advanced age is highly improbable." These "errors and anomalies do not stop at individual cases" — they "permeate extreme-age research," raising "questions about how false claims" about supercentenarians "could persist for so long."

Read more

Anya Jaremko-Greenwold has worked as a story editor at The Week since 2024. She previously worked at FLOOD Magazine, Woman's World, First for Women, DGO Magazine and BOMB Magazine. Anya's culture writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Jezebel, Vice and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.