2025-07-15 19:00:00
A truism about stories (courtesy, more or less, of the novelist John Gardner) is that there are only two plots: a person goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. The joke is that they’re the same story, from two different perspectives. In the first half of 2025, I’ve found that my favorite books have lived up to the claim.
The best books I’ve read so far have all been preoccupied with the problem of travel, of leaving home, of being visited by strangers: how it broadens us and how it damages us, its attractions and its horrors. They are about how frightening it can be to enter a strange new place, and how frightening it can be when a stranger enters the familiar place we’ve known all our lives.
In the books I’m going to tell you about, a married couple is stranded on a life raft for four months. A spinsterish aunt leaves home to become a witch. And a woman sexually attracted to airplanes travels from one airport to the next, searching for the plane that will marry her.
For your convenience, I’ve further divided these books about our fair travelers into two categories: the whimsical and the arduous. (There’s overlap, of course, because how interesting can whimsy be if there isn’t a touch of work to make it worthwhile? And how can anyone make it through unrelenting toil without a dash of whimsy?) These should help guide you to the perfect book to accompany you on your summer travels. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.
In this deceptively warm comedy, a middle-aged Shakespearean actress who is a tad high and a lot anxious spends Thanksgiving Day roaming the streets of New York City, her little dog in tow. Profane, self-indulgent, and conflicted over the recent cancellation of her disgraced mentor, Mona Zahad is indeed acting out.
Although, speaking of self-indulgence, the mentor in question writes to Mona: “I am dying, Egypt, dying,” scrawled on a postcard that pictures Mona in character as Lady Macbeth, covered in blood. The missive, from the theatrical director Milton Katz, prompts Mona to begin her walkabout.
Milton discovered Mona, but he’s been fired for sexual harassment. Officially, Mona’s on Milton’s side: after all, he’d never hidden the fact that the price of working with him was to put up with a little unsolicited handsiness. Unofficially, Mona can’t help noticing that she’s become a more relaxed and dynamic actress since Milton was drummed out. She knows that Milton has re-invented himself as a martyr, and she can’t decide whether she wants to be a part of that martyrdom or not.
Reeling from pills and emotional foment, Mona stumbles her way down the length of Manhattan, quoting Shakespeare to herself as she goes. Mona Acts Out is the only Me Too novel I have yet to read that’s both sweet and sophisticated, an alchemical combination it must have borrowed from the Bard himself.
Read if you: have a favorite Kenneth Branagh-directed Shakespeare and are still a little bitter he never did cast Judi Dench in one of the plays.
Michael Lincoln, the hapless narrator of this metafictional romp, spends most of the events of Metallic Realms holed up in the Brooklyn apartment his parents pay for, eavesdropping on his roommate through a hidden microphone stashed in a house plant. But Mike is telling us his story from an undisclosed location somewhere in upstate New York. As we learn more about nerdy, awkward Mike — “deeply introverted, Sagittarius sun and Libra rising, Ravenclaw, Water Tribe citizen, lawful neutral, and an INTP” — it becomes clear that it would take a real tragedy to get him that far away from home.
Mike, Michel’s funhouse alter ego, is a classic geek fanboy, unable to mention the object of his obsessions without making bombastic claims about how it has “shattered the calcified worldbuilding paradigm that dominates science fiction.” In this case, however, Mike is hyperfixated on the deeply mediocre science fiction that his roommate’s writing collective, Orb 4, has been churning out for fun. They’ve denied Mike entry into the collective, so he’s appointed himself lore keeper instead. (The rest of the group doesn’t know that he believes his role requires complete records of their meetings; hence that hidden mic.)
It’s a tragedy, a story about the grinding miseries and disappointments of trying to build a life that leaves you room to be creative and make art.
Michel has described Metallic Realms as “Pale Fire meets Star Trek,” and the Nabokovian comparisons aren’t off-base. According to Mike, what we’re reading is the collective work of Orb 4, interspersed with annotations and historical context from Mike in his capacity as lore keeper. Mike’s commentary, however, lets us in on a bigger story behind his pompous bloviating and creepy stalking. It’s a tragedy, a story about the grinding miseries and disappointments of trying to build a life that leaves you room to be creative and make art. Even if the art you create is, to all but the most biased possible observer, never more than just okay.
Read alongside: Pale Fire for the structure, Vladimir for the Nabokov pastiche, and Among Others for the heart.
In Woodworking, the debut novel by former Vox critic Emily St. James, leaving home is the dream, the impossible ideal. To leave one’s old life and parents behind, reinvent oneself, and move to a new city where no one can ever say you were anyone different, like moving out for college but with no Thanksgiving homecoming.
In the case of Woodworking’s two narrators, Erica and Abigail, the dream specifically is to move to a new city where no one will ever know that they’re trans. For Erica, a high school English teacher, the dream feels impossible: she’s already built a whole life as a man in small-town South Dakota, complete with an ex-wife she’s still in love with. For 17-year-old Abigail, Erica’s student and the only out trans person she knows, the dream feels tantalizingly close. Abigail already hates her parents anyway, so what’s one more level of estrangement?
Woodworking is a charming, sparkling, and very human novel that packs a heavy punch. Its heart and soul lies with the vexed relationship between Erica and Abigail, forced into alliance after Erica comes out to Abigail and Abigail, horrified, realizes she’s going to have to be her dorky English teacher’s trans mentor and teach her how to paint her fingernails. This book is a hoot and a ride.
Read accompanied by: Something fizzy and sweet with a little bitter kick in the background. Blood orange San Pellegrino, maybe?
The memoirist and novelist Nina Stibbe first arrived in London in the 1980s as a bright-eyed 20-year-old nanny. Her time caring for the children of a London Review of Books editor left her enmeshed in the literary scene of the moment, and the letters she wrote her sister about brushing shoulders with the bookish who’s who became the basis of her 2013 bestseller, Love, Nina.
In her new memoir Went to London, Took the Dog, Stibbe returns to London as a 60-year-old for a year-long sabbatical from her regular life in Cornwall. She plans to write her diary, she announces, in the style of celebrity playwright Alan Bennett: “He just writes what he’s been up to. Say he’s had Ian McEwan over for tea …”
Snoops rejoice: she does name names.
Accordingly, Stibbe takes us to pub trivia with Nicholas Hornby and discusses the dishwashing abilities of her landlady, the novelist Deborah Moggach. Hilariously, she goes out of her way to sideswipe the notorious contrarian novelist Lionel Shriver. (Stibbe speaks at the same literary festival as Shriver and takes great care not to be caught alone at breakfast with her.) And all the perimenopause discourse around All Fours last summer should meet Stibbe’s accounts of prolapsed uteri and menopause-induced incontinence. Snoops rejoice: she does name names.
Every so often, however, Stibbe allows us a peek at what drove her back to London. It’s a trial separation from her husband, whom she never mentions by name. Likewise, she never tells us what, exactly, the problem is with her marriage, only that her coupled-up friends act “as if I’m going to infect their marriage,” and that “sometimes I must forget to breathe or something and have a terrible headache afterward.” Then the diary entry ends, and she moves on, as breezy as though she had never made such a deeply sad revelation, to the next day’s lunch meeting with Hornby and plumbing travails with Moggach.
Read accompanied by: good crunchy salt-and-vinegar potato chips, for an easy, addictive pleasure.
For a certain type of reader, among whom I count myself, Lolly Willowes will be a nearly perfect novel. First published in 1926 amid an England unsure of what to do with its newly-liberated women, and reissued this year by Modern Library, it tells the story of Laura “Aunt Lolly” Willowes and her decision to become a witch.
Selling her soul to Satan, Laura concludes, feels like a much better move than spending her whole life making herself useful to an unending stream of children.
Laura is a decorous spinster who, in middle age, decides she is fed up with taking care of her family and moves away to a village by the woods. There, Laura makes the acquaintance of a supernatural cat and witnesses a macabre black Sabbath with a coven of witches. Selling her soul to Satan, Laura concludes, feels like a much better move than spending her whole life making herself useful to an unending stream of children.
Lolly Willowes presents itself to the reader with all the placid charm of a comic English country novel, a Cold Comfort Farm or a Love In a Cold Climate. Yet its pleasantly arch, witty voice is hiding a deep well of fury. “The one thing all women hate,” Laura tells Satan, “is to be thought dull” — yet Laura’s whole life is a series of dull, mean contrivances, built for her by other people. A little bit of witchcraft of her own volition does her good.
Read if you: wish the Mitford sisters had written something a little more queer; have been known to mess with Tarot cards; go wild for a walk in an autumnal forest.
To say that Dream Count is probably the weakest of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels is less an indictment of Dream Count than it is a recognition of how high she’s set the bar. From Adichie, even a minor effort is worth a read.
Dream Count tells the story of four women, all from Nigeria, all either currently living in the US or having recently returned to Nigeria from the US. Stranded in the early desultory days of the pandemic, they begin going back over their relationships with the (mostly terrible) men they have known — their “dream count,” says one.
Much of Dream Count is satirical, and Adichie is at her sharpest and most biting when dealing with the flummoxed reactions of white liberal Americans to wealthy, cosmopolitan Africans. “They can’t stand rich people from poor countries because it means they can’t feel sorry for you,” remarks Omelogor, who hates America and moves straight back to Lagos.
There’s a jarring tonal shift, however, when Adichie delves into the mind of Kadiatou, the only poor woman among her four protagonists. Kadiatou’s story is based on the account of Nafissatou Diallo, a hotel housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted assault in 2011. Adichie writes Kadiatou with a touching, at times reductive naivete — but what becomes deeply moving is the relationship Kadiatou develops with the other three women of this novel. America may not know what to do with African women of such disparate yet overlapping backgrounds, but they understand one another.
Read if you: want to remind yourself that before that viral TED Talk and Beyoncé sample, Adichie was also a very good novelist.
In 1972, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a real-life British couple, set sail in the little yacht into which they had sunk all their life savings. Obsessed with the idea of escaping the suburbs and exploring the wilderness, they planned to make their way from England to New Zealand. Instead, nearly a year into their voyage, their boat sank.
The Baileys found themselves stranded on their tiny inflatable rubber raft, along with the few supplies they’d managed to salvage: fresh water, canned food, a biography of Richard III. There they would remain, surviving against all odds, for the next four months.
The story of the Baileys became a media sensation after they were eventually recovered, but it has long since faded from the collective memory. In this elegant and electric account, journalist Sophie Elmhirst reconstructs every day of their four-month ordeal, and the blistering aftermath of their eventual rescue.
Surrounded by far more wilderness than they ever counted on, the Baileys caught fish and sea turtles, tried and failed to signal to passing ships, and read every line of that damn biography over and over again. The book, optimistic Maralyn tells fatalist Maurice, will form the basis of their library once they get home.
In Elmhurst’s hands, the story of the Baileys’ ordeal becomes a portrait of a marriage: how two people can drive each other to the edges of despair, and how they can keep each other alive in a time of almost unimaginable horror.
I galloped through it in a single night. You will too.
Read accompanied by: plentiful supplies to gloat over as the Baileys’ condition gets worse and worse. Imagine you’re a kid reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s worst winter again, and go from there.
Susan Choi’s last book, 2019’s Trust Exercise, was a structural triumph, so fine and precise it cut like a knife. Flashlight, her new novel, is a looser, less showy affair. It creeps up on you, so you don’t quite register how deeply it’s gotten its hooks in you until days later, when you’re still thinking about it.
Flashlight begins with a girl and her father on the Japanese beach at twilight, heading out to look at the stars. The girl, American-born Louisa, is a precocious 10-year-old. Her father, Serk, is a Japanese-born Korean man who is almost always angry. A day after they go star-watching, Louisa is found unconscious on the shore. Serk is lost and presumed dead, his body never recovered.
Part of the deep pleasure of Flashlight is how finely Choi renders the mind of Louisa, who soon finds herself to be, like her father before her, always angry. Louisa is filled with rage at the adults around her: her teachers, who she considers stupid and incompetent; the school psychiatrist, who isn’t smart enough to understand her; most of all her disabled mother, whom Louisa believes to be a liar and a malingerer. Louisa is angry in the way of a child: betrayed by the adults who have failed to live up to the expectations she set for them. And as Louisa grows into a fraught, uneasy adulthood, we see how her child’s rage continues to shape her psyche in ways that she herself observes with surprise and confusion.
Read alongside: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910–1945
The narrator of Kate Folk’s sly, clever Sky Daddy presents her problem to readers on the first page. “This was my destiny,” candid Linda says, with characteristic transparency: “for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate midflight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.”
Linda is sexually attracted to planes. She believes the only way to marry one is to die in a plane crash. With that simple equation in mind, she devotes her paltry salary to taking as many plane trips as she can; mostly regional ones, to nearby midsize cities. Nevertheless, none of the “fine gentlemen” who woo her on each flight has yet taken her to be his bride. Desperate, Linda starts exploring the world of vision boarding to see if it can bring her closer to her destiny.
There is a version of Sky Daddy that treats Linda as an object of malicious fun, but Folk never stoops so low. She takes Linda completely seriously: Linda, after all, has devoted her life to the pursuit of love, accepting the prospect of her own self-destruction with steely equanimity. Linda is part Ahab, part Ishmael, and her white whale is the first plane she ever fell in love with. This is a strange and tender novel, and it has lingered in my mind for months.
Read if you: feel Elinor Oliphant Is Completely Fine would have benefited from being weirder, or Moby-Dick would have benefited from more sex.
2025-07-15 18:00:00
In the wake of the record-breaking wildfires in Los Angeles in January — some of the most expensive and destructive blazes in history — one of the first things California Gov. Gavin Newsom did was to sign an executive order suspending environmental rules around rebuilding.
The idea was that by waiving permitting regulations and reviews under the California Coastal Act and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), homeowners and builders could start cleaning up, putting up walls, and getting people back into houses faster.
But that raised a key question for housing advocates: Could California do something similar for the whole state?
Earlier this month, Newsom took a step in that direction, signing two bills that would exempt most urban housing from environmental reviews and make it easier for cities to increase housing by changing zoning laws. Newsom also signed another executive order that suspends some local permitting laws and building codes for fire-afflicted communities with the aim of further speeding up reconstruction.
Housing reforms can’t come soon enough for the City of Angels. Blown by hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds over an unusually dry, grassy landscape, the wildfires that tore through LA burned almost 48,000 acres and damaged or destroyed more than 16,000 structures, including more than 9,500 single-family homes, 1,200 duplexes, and 600 apartments in one of the most housing-starved regions of the country.
Los Angeles is a critical case study for housing for the whole state, a test of whether the Democratic-controlled government can coordinate its conflicting political bases — unions, environmental groups, housing advocates — with a desperate need for more homes. Revising the state’s environmental laws was seen by some observers as a sign that the Golden State was finally seeing the light.
But despite the relaxed rules, progress in LA has been sluggish. More than 800 homeowners in areas affected by wildfires applied for rebuilding permits as of July 7, according to the Los Angeles Times. Fewer than 200 have received the green light, however. The City of Los Angeles takes about 55 days on average to approve a wildfire rebuild, and the broader Los Angeles County takes even longer. (Los Angeles County has a dashboard to track permitting approvals in unincorporated areas.)
“LA’s process is super slow, so that’s not surprising,” said Elisa Paster, a managing partner at Rand Paster Nelson based in Los Angeles and specializing in land use law. “Anecdotally, we’ve heard that a lot of people have decided they don’t want to go through the process of rebuilding in LA because it is quite onerous.”
Now, half a year out after the embers have died down, it’s clear that changing the rules isn’t enough. Advocates for CEQA say the 55-year-old law is really a scapegoat for bigger, more intractable housing problems. Other factors, like more expensive construction materials and labor shortages, are still driving up housing construction costs, regardless of permitting speeds. And some environmental groups worry that the rush to rebuild everything as it was could recreate the conditions that led to the blazes in the first place, a dangerous prospect in an area where wildfire risks are only growing.
CEQA is one of California’s tentpole environmental laws, signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970. It requires that state and local governments preemptively look for any potential environmental harms from a construction project, like water pollution, threats to endangered species, and later, greenhouse gas emissions. Developers need to disclose these issues and take steps to avoid them. The law also allows the public to weigh in on new developments.
In the years since, CEQA has been blamed as a barrier to new construction. Many critics see it as a cynical tool wielded to prevent new housing construction in wealthy communities, even being invoked to challenge highway closures and new parks on environmental grounds. It’s one of the villains of the “abundance” movement that advocates for cutting red tape to build more homes and clean energy.
However, CEQA isn’t necessarily the gatekeeper to rebuilding single-family homes after wildfires, according to Matthew Baker, policy director at Planning and Conservation League, a nonprofit that helped shepherd CEQA in the first place.
For one thing, CEQA already has broad exemptions for replacing and rebuilding structures and new construction of “small” structures like single-family homes. “Our general take is that the executive orders around revoking environmental review and environmental regulations around the rebuilding [after the fires] did little to nothing beyond what was already in existing law,” Baker said. He added that the vast majority of projects that face CEQA review get the go-ahead, and less than 2 percent of proposals face litigation.
But the mere threat of a lawsuit and the precautions to avoid one can become a significant hurdle on its own. “CEQA can be an expensive and lengthy process, especially for large or complicated projects. This is true even if there is not litigation,” according to a 2024 report from California’s Little Hoover Commission, the state’s independent oversight agency. “Preparation of an Environmental Impact Report under CEQA can take a year or longer and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even, in some cases, more than $1 million.”
In addition, CEQA does come into play for people who want to make more extensive changes to their property as they rebuild, like if they want to expand their floorspace more than 10 percent beyond their original floor plan. The law is also triggered by broader wildfire risk reduction initiatives, namely brush clearance and controlled burns, as well as infrastructure upgrades like putting power lines underground to prevent fire ignitions or installing more pipelines and cisterns for water to help with firefighting. Exempting these projects could help communities build fire resilience faster.
For multifamily homes like duplexes and apartment buildings, CEQA can be an obstacle, too, if the developer wants to rebuild with more units. “We have multifamily buildings in the Palisades that had rent-controlled units, and what we’ve been hearing from some of these property owners is like, ‘Yeah, sure. I had 20 rent-controlled units there before, but I can’t afford to just rebuild 20.’ Those people want to go back and build 50 units, 20 of which could be rent-controlled, or all of which are rent-controlled.” By bypassing CEQA, higher-density housing has an easier path to completion.
Rebuilding after fires is always going to be expensive. Your home may have been built and sold in the 1970s, but you’ll have to pay 2025 prices for materials and labor when you rebuild. California already faces some of the highest housing costs in the country and a shortage of construction workers. The Trump administration is pushing the price tag higher with tariffs on components like lumber and its campaign to deport people. About 41 percent of workers in California’s construction industry are immigrants, and 14 percent are undocumented.
But even before they can rebuild, one of the biggest challenges for people who have lost their homes is simply becoming whole after a loss. “From the clients that I’ve spoken to, they’ve had to argue with their insurance company to get full replacement value or reasonable compensation, and that’s where they’re getting stuck,” said David Hertz, an architect based in Santa Monica.
On top of the tedious claims process, insurance companies in California have been dropping some of their customers in high fire-risk areas, leaving them no option besides the FAIR Plan, the state’s high-priced, limited-coverage insurer of last resort. But after the multibillion-dollar losses from the Los Angeles fires, the FAIR Plan had to collect an additional $1 billion from its member companies, a move that will raise property insurance prices. People who can’t get property insurance can’t get a mortgage from most lenders.
There’s also the concern of exactly where and how homes are rebuilt. In 2008, California updated its building codes to make structures more resistant to wildfires, but bringing burned-down old homes to new standards in high fire risk areas adds to the timeline and the price tag.
“There’s this tension between all of us wanting to have people be able to rebuild their homes in their communities, and there’s the question of ‘Are we just going to build back the same thing in the same unsafe place? Are we going to try to do things better?” Baker said.
All the while, wildfires are becoming more destructive. Wildfires are a natural part of Southern California’s landscape, but more people are crowding into areas that are primed to burn, and the danger zones are widening. That increases the chances of a wildfire ignition and makes the ensuing blazes more damaging.
With average temperatures rising, California is seeing more aggressive swings between severe rainfall and drought. The 2025 Los Angeles fires were preceded in 2024 by one of the wettest winters in the region’s history, followed by one of the hottest summers on record, and bookended by one of the driest starts to winter. It created the ideal conditions for ample dry grasses and chaparral that fueled the infernos.
“The question is, how does one really exist within a natural system that’s designed to burn?” Hertz said. Reducing wildfire risk on a wider scale requires coordination between neighbors.
For example, Hertz said that in many of the communities that burned, there are likely many residents who won’t come back. Neighbors could coordinate to buy up and swap vacant land parcels to create a defensible space with fire-resistant trees like oak to serve as fire breaks and water storage to help respond to future blazes. Hertz himself leads a community brigade, trained volunteers who work to reduce wildfire risk in their neighborhoods.
He also cautioned that while there’s a lot of well-deserved pushback against regulations like CEQA, the reasoning behind it remains sound. Development without any environmental considerations could put more homes in the path of danger and destroy the ecosystems that make California such an attractive place to live.
“I think there’s a balance,” Hertz said. “Nature doesn’t have its own voice.”
At the same time, without speeding up the pace at which California restores the homes that were lost and builds new ones, the housing crisis will only get worse. The state will become unlivable for many residents. Long after the burn scars fade and new facades are erected, communities will be altered permanently.
2025-07-15 06:06:14
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump announced a new plan to get American weapons into Ukrainian hands on Monday, as his patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be running increasingly thin.
What just happened? Trump said on Monday that NATO countries will start buying US weaponry to deliver to Ukraine. While the US has been supplying Ukraine directly, funding appropriated for that purpose is on the verge of running out — but Monday’s news should keep weapons flowing to Ukraine.
Trump has said the deal, which he announced alongside NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, is already finalized and that weapons will be “quickly distributed to the battlefield.”
What’s the context? This is the second bit of good news for Ukraine in as many weeks, after Trump announced last Monday that he would lift a pause on US deliveries of air defense missiles and other weapons to Ukraine.
It also comes as Ukraine faces an ever-greater threat from Russian drones and missiles. The two largest attacks of the war, with hundreds of drones apiece, have struck at Kyiv this month, though Ukraine has been able to intercept most of the drones.
What else did Trump announce? On Monday, Trump also threatened “very severe tariffs” on Russia if the war doesn’t end within the next 50 days. That’s not likely to have much of an impact, as the US and Russia have a limited trade relationship — but Trump said the US would also impose secondary sanctions targeting countries that do business with Russia at the 50-day mark, which could have more bite.
Why is Trump stepping up his support for Ukraine now? Trump’s tone toward Putin has shifted in recent weeks, suggesting he’s increasingly frustrated with the ongoing war and Russian intransigence. Last week, he said, “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin. … He’s very nice to us all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
This story from my colleague Benji Jones, about efforts to save the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, is worth your time. Benji’s in-the-field reporting about the natural world is unmatched, and this story, from near Asheville, North Carolina, is no exception. The salamanders are tiny, visually striking — and endangered, after their natural habitat was devastated by flooding last year. Now, scientists are hoping to save the species by establishing a breeding population in captivity. I hope you give it a read, and that it inspires you to take a moment and appreciate how incredible nature can be.
2025-07-14 19:00:00
For much of history, humans probably got pretty lousy sleep. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, many people slept in the same bed alongside their family in dwellings lacking any temperature control beyond a fire or air ventilation. Those homes were littered with bed bugs, fleas, and lice that not only feasted on their hosts at night but also spread diseases, which — in the absence of modern medicine — kept the infirm awake and suffering. The noises of cities and rural life alike also made sleep difficult, thanks to the all-hours bustling of laborers, horse-drawn carriages, and livestock with whom farmers might’ve shared a home. “Because in the winter they generated warmth,” says A. Roger Ekirch, a history professor at Virginia Tech and author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past.
Nighttime itself was a risk. Slumber left people vulnerable to crime or death from fire or other natural disasters. Some prayers throughout history sought God’s protection from the litany of threats adherents encountered in the dark, says Ekirch.
For those who are lucky enough to have access, modern marvels like central heating and air conditioning, comfortable beds, and even Tylenol have all but eliminated many of these barriers to sleep. “We don’t have to worry about the myriad perils to sound slumber and our physical well-being that people did 300, 400 years ago,” Ekirch says.
“We don’t have to worry about the myriad perils to sound slumber and our physical well-being that people did 300, 400 years ago.”
Still, sleep doesn’t come easily to millions of Americans. Over 14 percent of adults had trouble falling asleep most days in 2020, according to the National Health Interview Survey. Nearly just as many people — 12 percent — have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia, according to an American Academy of Sleep Medicine survey. Among the 33 percent of US adults who get less than seven hours of sleep a night, native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander and Black adults are the most likely to get shorter durations of shut-eye. Those with an annual household income of less than $15,000 are also likely to be sleep-deprived.
Despite seemingly prime conditions for sleep, why do so many suffer from restless nights? The most comfortable bed in the darkest room might not be enough to overcome a mix of environmental, systemic, and behavioral forces preventing quality slumber.
American sleep culture is marked by contradictions.
Anyone who’s endured a night of terrible sleep can attest to its importance in cognitive functioning, mood, hunger, and overall health. Yet, many people act in ways that sabotage their hope for a good night’s sleep. We stay up later than we should to catch up on work or news or precious free time — what is sometimes called revenge bedtime procrastination. We consume content on our phones so upsetting or attention-grabbing as to prevent our falling asleep, although many of us know by now that screen use an hour before bed results in delayed bedtime and less sleep overall. We settle into bed and realize that late-afternoon coffee or nightcap too close to bedtime has come to collect its vengeance.
Some people innately need more sleep than others, and these so-called long sleepers simply cannot find the time in their busy schedules to devote to 10 hours of slumber. Try as we might to have it all, optimizing our waking hours might come at the detriment of our sleep. “We’re trying to have our cake and eat it, too,” Ekirch says. “The less time we accord to sleep, the more perfect we want it to be for when we do nod off.”
Ironically, a population of people with no notable sleep issues has turned sleep into a competitive sport, leveraging mouth tape, expensive mattresses, and sleep trackers like the Oura Ring in pursuit of the perfect night’s sleep. This fixation on enhancing sleep may actually do more to promote insomnia than peaceful slumber, experts say.
Most disruptions to sleep cannot be blamed on personal choices, though. Parents and other caregivers are among the most sleep-deprived, often contending with their children’s inconsistent sleep schedules. And the sleep patterns of shift workers — which account for 20 percent of the US workforce — are dictated by their employers.
The ill effects of poor sleep can negatively impact mental health. The opposite is true, too: Mental distress has consequences for sleep. “Stress, anxiety, weird work schedules,” says Jessi Pettigrew, a clinical social worker who focuses on sleep disorders, “can lead to the development of sleep disorders like insomnia or circadian rhythm disorders, which basically means being misaligned with your biological sleep schedule because of social reasons.”
Outside of individual behavior, where we live has a role in sleep.
Not having the ability to control the temperature in your bedroom because you lack effective heating or air conditioning can be a barrier to sleep, Pettigrew says. If you feel unsafe in your environment, you’re less likely to get restful slumber, too, she adds. This tends to impact people with housing insecurity, refugees, and those who are incarcerated.
Beyond the bedroom, noise and light pollution from bright street lights and traffic have been shown to interrupt sleep and contribute to insomnia — and those in low-income neighborhoods are more susceptible to these conditions.
“People who live in places with good natural light, green spaces, the ability to control the temperature and light and noise in their environment,” Pettigrew says, “helps them to sleep better and better regulate their circadian rhythm during the day and sleep at night.”
All of our waking experiences impact our ability to sleep, says Anita Shelgikar, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan Medical School and the president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine board of directors. And some of those waking experiences may be colored by racism and discrimination. Stress associated with racial discrimination has been linked to poor sleep. Among shift workers, people of color are more likely to work alternating day/night schedules, resulting in disrupted circadian rhythms. “If that disrupts your sleep enough, that technically qualifies as shift-work sleep disorder,” says Jade Wu, a behavioral sleep medicine psychologist and author of Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications. This disorder is marked by excessive sleepiness, insomnia, or both.
The knock-on effects of altered sleep-wake schedules are profound, ranging from cardiovascular disease and obesity to mood and immune disorders. “Sleep health disparities disproportionately affect the same populations who suffer from overall health disparities,” Shelgikar says.
Those in rural or low-income areas who generally lack access to healthcare, let alone specialized sleep medicine, may continue to suffer from poor sleep, in addition to any number of physical and mental health conditions. Without individualized care, Shelgikar says, the disparities may only widen.
If you work odd hours or have a fussy baby, hearing the common advice of keeping your room cool and dark and only retreating to bed when you’re sleepy can seem trite. Wu suggests identifying the environmental or circumstantial reason you aren’t getting restful sleep and doing whatever you can to mitigate it. For those who live in spaces that aren’t conducive to sleep — hot bedrooms or the constant wail of sirens all night — there are few things people can do beyond getting a fan or earplugs, Wu says. People with means and flexibility can seek out a doctor specializing in sleep medicine to diagnose potential disorders like insomnia or sleep apnea.
If you work odd hours or have a fussy baby, hearing the common advice of keeping your room cool and dark and only retreating to bed when you’re sleepy can seem trite.
But if your conditions for sleep are pretty good and you still struggle to get shut-eye, the key, according to Wu, may be to not obsess over it as much. “What you see in people with insomnia is that they’re trying too hard,” she says. “They’re tracking their sleep too closely. They are perfectionistic about their sleep hygiene and doing things like going to bed too early or trying to take too many naps, trying to achieve a certain number of hours of sleep, or a certain score on their sleep tracker.”
The human body was meant to sleep. And despite all the constructs and complications society throws our way, we still require sleep. Ironically, though, the more we fret over it, the more elusive it can become. As difficult as it seems, the best advice may be to surrender to the circadian rhythm. “One thing that can help with sleep,” Pettigrew says, “is just saying, I’m going to trust my body to take care of this.”
2025-07-14 18:30:00
When Bryan Kohberger entered a guilty plea on July 2 in the case of four murdered Idaho students, it brought an abrupt conclusion to one of the biggest true crime sagas in decades, but it has arguably left the public with more questions than answers. Soon, a new wave of true crime content, including two documentaries and a major book co-written by James Patterson, will attempt to answer those questions.
Kohberger’s trial, previously scheduled to begin in August, would likely have surfaced much more information regarding the killings of Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Madison “Maddie” Mogen, and Xana Kernodle — students at the University of Idaho in small-town Moscow, Idaho, slaughtered in a late-night off-campus home invasion so horrific that it instantly became global news.
Years of delays in the journey to trial, paired with strict ongoing gag orders in the case, have meant that even three years later, most of what we know about the crime still comes from the initial probable cause affidavit filed against Kohberger prior to his arrest in December 2022, about six weeks after the murders took place on November 13. (He was charged, and eventually pleaded guilty, to four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary.) Since then, other pieces to the puzzle have been filled in primarily from anecdotal reports shared by friends and family of the Idaho Four and Kohberger, as well as clues gleaned unofficially from social media accounts and occasional investigation leaks.
The end result is that while the public can play connect-the-dots with much of the information surrounding the Moscow murders, the biggest question of all — why? — remains unanswered.
Here’s a look at what we know so far, what we’re likely to learn from upcoming media in the case, and what’s next for the players in this awful saga.
Given that Kohberger staunchly maintained his innocence for nearly three years, his sudden reversal might have come as a surprise to anyone not following the court proceedings closely. In fact, it may have been inevitable.
After stalling the judicial process for years, Kohberger’s defense team had swiftly been running out of plays following a series of judicial rulings favoring the prosecution and limiting the defense’s strategies. These included the court rejecting a potential alibi defense — with Judge Steven Hippler ruling that Kohberger’s claim to have been driving around looking at the stars during the time of the murders was not actually an alibi — and rejecting a potential alternate suspect defense, with Hippler dismissing the defense’s coterie of alternate perpetrators as “rank speculation.” With few other moves left, Kohberger faced a mountain of overwhelming evidence, including his DNA on the knife sheath left at the crime scene, phone records tracking him at the location and across town the night of the crime, and a recently revealed second eyewitness, a Door Dash driver who delivered a meal to Xana Kernodle and claims to have seen Kohberger at the 1122 King Road address just before the murders.
Kohberger’s guilty plea — which prosecutors shared directly with the victims’ families before the news broke on June 30 — allows him to avoid the death penalty. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 23, where, per the terms of the agreement, he will receive four consecutive life sentences on the murder counts and the maximum penalty of 10 years on the burglary count. But while avoiding a trial means avoiding trauma for witnesses and victims’ families, not everyone is happy about this outcome. The family of Kaylee Goncalves, in particular, has been vocal in their displeasure that Kohberger will not have to stand trial or face the death penalty, though other victims’ families, including that of Goncalves’s lifelong best friend Mogen, have stated their support for the plea deal.
Onlookers hoping that Kohberger’s plea deal might yield some new insight were left disappointed when his plea hearing included no additional admissions from Kohberger about why he committed the crime, whether he premeditated any or all of the acts, or why he apparently chose to leave the two remaining housemates, Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen, alive.
In the absence of any official answers, and without a trial to provide them, the public will instead be getting a deluge of new media about the case, most of it releasing in mid-July, originally intended to drop just before Kohberger’s trial. Instead, what we have left is a fairly broad spectrum of journalism around the case, ranging from investigative reporting via Dateline to interview-heavy streaming documentaries from Amazon and Peacock to classic true crime narrative nonfiction via mega-bestseller Patterson and his co-writer, British journalist Vicky Ward. Additionally, media outlets have asked the judge to lift the remaining gag orders in the case, so that witnesses and authorities who have been banned from speaking until the trial might finally have a chance to do so.
The lack of a trial “makes it all the more consequential,” Patterson’s publicist told me in an email. “The book now is the only chance people will get to delve into what happened that night.”
What did happen that night? Here’s what we know so far, and what we’re likely to learn from July’s new onslaught of updates.
During the six-week national manhunt for the perpetrator, the roommates, friends, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, and family members of the Idaho Four were put through the ringer in terms of public scrutiny and speculation. The new cache of media puts this community front and center and allows them to talk about their experiences. Among them is One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, a new Amazon Prime docuseries released on July 11, co-directed by documentarian Liz Garbus, who more recently helmed a documentary about the Gilgo Beach killer for Netflix.
Over four 60-minute episodes, Garbus and her co-director Matthew Galkin focus on the stories of the victims’ friends and families, including heartbreaking details from family interviews, like Ethan Chapin’s siblings — now the remaining two triplets — spending their last night with him together at a sorority formal just hours before his death. A second documentary for Peacock, The Idaho Student Murders, premiered the day after Kohberger pleaded guilty. It similarly gathers friends and family together to remember Ethan, Kaylee, Maddie, and Xana while opening up about their own trauma and loss.
Then there’s The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy, the book by Ward and Patterson, due out today. While Patterson co-authors the book, it’s Ward who has done the bulk of the investigation, conducting hundreds of interviews in and around Moscow, as well as Kohberger’s home back in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania. The book is a true deep-dive into the case and the context of the murders — as much as any book can be while still obeying the court gag order. Ward spends time early on laying out the complicated dynamics of the King Road friends group, and what a large, interconnected community the four were a part of — a community that was absolutely shattered in the wake of the crime.
While all of this is an important piece of the story, it’s only half. One of the most striking things about the Idaho murders is that the motives of the suspect have, up until now, been largely opaque. What little we know about Kohberger has come mainly from his turbulent academic history. Once a star criminology student who studied under premier true crime writer and forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland (who recently opened up about Kohberger for the very first time in the New York Times), Kohberger moved to Pullman, Washington, near Moscow, Idaho, in the fall of 2022 to do his doctorate at the Washington State University. After becoming a teaching assistant, however, he quickly bottomed out. Over the course of one semester, he was reprimanded, then fired for reportedly grading students too harshly and getting into an altercation with his supervising professor during a performance review. Just over a week after Kohberger was placed on a performance improvement plan, the murders took place.
Still, apart from his academic spiral, up until very recently, there’s been little indication of what, if anything, could have prompted Kohberger’s actions. Even Ramsland, veteran author of books on serial killer psychology, told the New York Times that at first she doubted he could possibly be the culprit.
Recent insight leaked from the investigation to Dateline for a May episode of the show, however, shows that Kohberger had an incriminating search history, including searches for pornography with the keywords “drugged” and “passed out.” He also searched for serial killers like Ted Bundy, though as a criminologist, that might be excusable. Less excusable, however: Dateline’s reveal that according to cell tower records, Kohberger had been in the vicinity of King Road no less than 23 times in four months.
The Idaho Four leans into the idea of Kohberger as an obsessive with dark tendencies. One source — the father of a childhood friend — alleges in the book that as a teen, Kohberger stalked him over a long period of time, frequently breaking into his house and stealing small items that belonged to him. Multiple sources recount Kohberger’s harsh and condescending treatment of female students and his difficulty interacting with women.
Patterson and Ward also hammer home the many similarities between Kohberger and the 2014 Isla Vista mass shooter Elliot Rodger, the patron antihero of the misogynistic incel movement. There’s very little direct evidence that Kohberger was influenced by Rodger, but Ward (who has written about this theory elsewhere) and Patterson draw out every similarity they can, all but implying that Kohberger intentionally styled his murders after the notorious woman hater. There’s been no official confirmation or indication that Kohberger was consciously imitating Rodger.
Even factoring in Kohberger’s alleged misogyny, though, none of that exactly answers the question: Why these four students? There’s no evidence that any of the students in the King Road circle knew Kohberger at all. Yet almost since the crimes unfolded, informal suspicion has fallen on Kohberger as being fixated on Maddie Mogen in particular. The most compelling reason for this is that, according to victims’ family and friends, an account believed to belong to Kohberger had allegedly previously liked and followed Mogen’s Instagram posts. Authorities reportedly confirmed that an Instagram account belonging to Kohberger followed the accounts of all three of the women he killed.
At the plea hearing, prosecutors confirmed that when Kohberger broke into the King Road house he went directly upstairs to Mogen’s room, where he also encountered Goncalves. While this still isn’t as satisfying as a confession with a motive coming from Kohberger himself, the implication is that Kohberger had his sights set on Mogen. Her room was easily visible from the street and adjacent parking lots. She was an exposed and vulnerable target.
And so, Goncalves, who no longer even lived at the house but was visiting her best friend, and Chapin and Kernodle, who appear to have been awakened by the struggle upstairs in Mogen’s room, were likely all collateral damage. We may never know why Kohberger spared their roommate Dylan Mortensen, who exited her room and made eye contact with a masked man in a hoodie, with only his eyes and infamous “bushy eyebrows” visible as he walked past her out of the apartment, nor their downstairs roommate, Bethany Funke.
The event — the cruel and seemingly random killing of young people near a college campus, as if ripped from a slasher movie — is almost impossible to comprehend as real life, which was also true as it was unfolding. Once Mortensen, in a panic, ran downstairs to join Funke, the two decided that she must have been exaggerating the whole event. (Mortensen told investigators she had been drunk at the time and unsure if what she’d seen had even been real.) Not even later, as the two of them gradually realized over the course of the next morning that something was very strange, did the two survivors understand what had happened in their house. Not even as they were calling 911, passing the phone around to their equally confused friends.
Even three years later, it’s difficult to understand anything that happened that night in Moscow. The more we learn, the more it becomes clear that no answer will ever truly bring a satisfying end to a truly haunting case.
2025-07-14 18:00:00
HENDERSON COUNTY, North Carolina — Once again, I found myself staring at a crack in a large rock on the side of a mountain. It was June, and rainy, and I was searching for a glossy amphibian called the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander. These animals, about the length of a human finger, are black with splotches of mint green. That makes them nearly invisible against the lichen-covered rocks they typically hide in.
I had previously traveled here — to this very rock — in the spring of last year for a story about the salamanders of southern Appalachia. They are spectacular. With somewhere around a hundred species, the region, and particularly western North Carolina, near Asheville, is a global salamander hot spot. It has a higher concentration of salamanders than anywhere else in the world.
At the time of my 2024 visit, some of Appalachia’s salamanders, including the Hickory Nut Gorge green, were already in trouble. These amphibious animals have an incredibly small range — they’re found only in one valley, the Hickory Nut Gorge, southwest of Asheville. Commercial development, logging, and other threats shrank their population from as many as tens of thousands to just 300 to 500 individuals total, according to recent estimates. In 2021, North Carolina listed them as endangered and, in 2024, federal officials said protection under the Endangered Species Act may be warranted.
Then came Hurricane Helene.
The storm, which struck North Carolina in late September, killed dozens of people. It destroyed thousands of homes, many of which are still in pieces today. But it also took a severe toll on the state’s wildlife, the species that make southern Appalachia so unique. Record flooding, landslides, and even some of the recovery efforts have drastically changed the landscape that salamanders rely on. This sudden destruction of habitat — some areas look as though they’ve been clearcut — is pushing the region’s most endangered species even closer to extinction.
So this June, I came back to witness a rescue mission. Flooding from Helene uprooted the forest around one of the only known breeding populations of Hickory Nut Gorge green salamanders, which makes up a significant portion of the entire species. It’s not clear whether they will survive without trees or withstand another severe weather event. Government forecasters have again predicted an above-average hurricane season this year and central North Carolina has already faced deadly flooding from the remnants of storm Chantal, which struck parts of the state earlier this month. In the long term, warming from climate change is expected to intensify both hurricanes and flooding.
Now, to save this population of greens — and perhaps the entire species — scientists are working quickly to bring a number of them into captivity. It’s a strategy that’s increasingly common in a heavily altered world: To save animals from blinking out, scientists have to build backup populations and manage them under human care.
If you’re just passing through Asheville, it’s hard to imagine that less than a year ago the city was hit by one of the worst natural disasters in state history. Downtown is bustling. The River Arts District — which was under water just months ago — looks like any trendy area with busy restaurants and bars.
But if you look more closely, signs of Helene’s devastation start to appear. Some sidewalks are missing pieces. Piles of dead trees fill empty lots. There are construction vehicles everywhere. And in some areas the damage is impossible to miss. In a charming district called Biltmore Village, which abuts the Swannanoa River, only the skeletons of some buildings remain, their insides rotted out or washed away.
Even against this backdrop, however, Hickory Nut Gorge still looks worse. Carved by the Broad River, the steep valley of the gorge is harder to access and less populated, and so cleanup has been slow. The original road connecting the gorge’s small towns, which were once local tourist destinations, doesn’t exist anymore — it was swallowed by the river. You can only reach the gorge now on a temporary road that doesn’t show up on Google Maps.
Homes and inns are broken in half, still unrepaired. Cars and small buildings look like they’ve been tossed around like toys in a kid’s room.
The flooding here that destroyed human infrastructure also wrecked the forests that blanket the ravine. Downpours triggered mudslides, unearthing boulders and uprooting trees, ultimately leaving large chunks of the gorge deforested.
That’s bad for salamanders, and especially for the Hickory Nut Gorge green, said JJ Apodaca, executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, an environmental group. Greens are lungless — they breathe through their skin. But that bit of biological magic requires water, so it only works if their skin is moist. That’s why they live within the cracks in rocks on the forest floor: The shady canopy above helps keep their habitat cool and moist. Without shade, they dry out. Plus, greens spend part of the year in trees, where they feed on insects like ants and beetles.
None of this works without trees. And today, much of this habitat is treeless.
Researchers are still assessing the damage, but early estimates by Apodaca, a salamander scientist, suggest Helene destroyed as much as 30 percent of the greens’ total habitat in the gorge. According to the North Carolina Forest Service, the storm damaged more than a quarter of all forested areas in North Carolina counties that it passed through.
One especially destructive blow is visible from the new road through the gorge: High up on the ravine, a large section of forest is missing, leveled by floodwaters or a mudslide. That bald spot is exactly where a population of breeding greens resides — and it’s where this rescue mission has been taking place.
Thunder gurgled in the distance as Apodaca and I hiked into the gorge late one afternoon. Apodaca has a soft spot for the Hickory Nut Gorge green — he was part of the team that first described this animal as a new species in 2019. “They’re just cool,” he told me, before explaining that they’re visually striking, lungless, adapted to live in rock cracks, and skilled at climbing trees.
After parking on the side of the road that wasn’t on Google Maps, we waded across the Broad River — the water was calm and the color of chocolate milk — and then hiked into the woods. The easiest path uphill was through the large patch of forest cleared out by Helene’s floodwaters. The ground was muddy and rocky, like the bottom of a river.
It took us about 20 minutes to reach a large granite outcropping that Apodaca calls Party Rock, so named because it’s where loads of greens normally hang out. The boulder, which was lined with several thin crevices, used to be shaded by the forest canopy, but now it’s exposed to direct, harsh sunlight that’s drying out the rock.
This spring, once the gorge was accessible and he obtained permits, Apodaca began a rescue operation for the greens living in and around Party Rock. The plan was to bring about two dozen animals into captivity — animals that might otherwise die in the wild — as a sort of insurance policy for the species.
“The writing was on the wall,” said Lori Williams, a conservation biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, the state wildlife agency, who’s involved in the rescue. “We knew we were racing against time to do something.”
So far Apodaca has rescued 15 individuals, mostly from Party Rock, which he brought to the North Carolina Zoo. Apodaca has a permit to collect another 10 salamanders. That’s why we were here now. According to Apodaca and Williams, 25 salamanders is enough to establish a breeding population, but not so many that it will further endanger the wild population.
“The fact that we’ve pushed this species so close to the edge makes it really hard to sit back and do nothing once something like this happens,” Apodaca told me. “It’s just to the point where we have to do something now or we’re gonna lose a species.”
Apodaca and I spent hours at Party Rock, staring into cracks with a flashlight. We spent so long doing this that I started seeing cracks even where there were no cracks. Every time my brain sensed movement I’d feel a jolt of adrenaline. But 10 times out of 10 it was a giant, leggy camel cricket. Party Rock was a bust.
As the afternoon dragged on, we searched other boulders and explored some newly opened caves, which are good spots to find greens because they’re cold and damp, Apodaca said. At one point I army crawled into a tight opening and when I looked up, careful not to ram my head against the ceiling, I saw a different salamander species staring back at me — a crevice salamander. It was black with cool blue spots. It stood frozen, and I was suddenly very aware that I was an intruder in its home.
We came across several more crevice salamanders. I managed to cover myself in poison ivy. But we found no greens. Apodaca was still 10 individuals short of his quota.
It could be that we were too late in the season, Apodaca said. As spring warms to summer, the heat drives the salamanders deeper into their crevices. But another, more troubling explanation is that not many of the greens here survived the damage from Helene, and Apodaca has already captured most of those that did. “This site is probably gone,” Apodaca told me.
Apodaca plans to return to Party Rock in the fall to try and collect more individuals, though he’s not sure if they’ll be able to hold on that long. For now, the captive population relies on just 15 greens — all but four of which are male.
In a small windowless room at the North Carolina Zoo, several containers labeled with masking tape sat atop a folding table. They were made of thin plastic and shaped like circular cookie tins.
Each container, though unremarkable, held something precious inside a bit of damp paper towel: a Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander. Their green splotches looked even more vibrant up close, like they had caught crossfire in a paintball match. Their eyes bulged from their heads and their hands, painfully adorable, had tiny digits that looked like ET’s fingers, but in miniature.
These salamanders — which are now in quarantine, away from other amphibians at the zoo — may hold the key to the future of their entire species.
The goal is to breed these individuals in captivity, said Dustin Smith, the curator of reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates at the zoo, which is also involved in the rescue operation. And luckily, the four females they have in the collection were already pregnant when they were captured and each carrying a dozen or so eggs.
On the afternoon I visited the captive salamanders with Apodaca, Shaina Lampert, a research associate at the zoo, took out what looked like a very old laptop. It was a miniature ultrasound machine. A cord connected a small probe to the machine, which she gently ran over the belly of one of the female salamanders. Several black circles appeared on the screen: eggs. “This is the next generation of this species,” Apodaca said.
Ideally, the females will soon lay their eggs, the captive population will grow, and the team overseeing the rescue mission will return some of them back to the wild, Williams said, assuming there’s high-quality habitat left in the gorge. That’s still unclear.
But ultimately, the success — or failure — in saving the Hickory Nut Gorge green will go largely unnoticed. These animals live in a remote region, tucked away in crevices; they’re hard to find even for the few people who know what to look for. Why then does it matter that we save them?
Like any salamander, like any animal, the greens play an important role in their ecosystem, as both predator and prey. They help limit the number of insects, including those humans don’t like. That’s been shown to help keep carbon locked up in the forest that might otherwise contribute to climate change. They’re little climate heroes.
It’s not a stretch to say that without salamanders, forest ecosystems in southern Appalachia could collapse. And those are the ecosystems that provide water to towns and attract tourists that fuel the local economy.
But more than that, Apodaca says, these salamanders simply have a right to exist. That’s why he’s fighting to protect them — why he’s been hiking into a disaster zone week after week.
“I can’t make you care more than I can convince somebody that doesn’t care about art that the Mona Lisa is priceless,” he said. “You either relish in nature and view the world that has a right to exist beyond us, or you don’t.”