Other writing

I love a good biography. But even so, when contemplating a multi-volume, 3,000-pages-and-counting study of a US president, I might have been tempted to cheat a bit, and skip straight to the one about the subject’s time in the White House. That’s not really an option with Robert Caro’s epic The Years of Lyndon Johnson series.

Madrid was hailed as a public health beacon when it rolled out ambitious restrictions on the most polluting cars. Seven months and one election day later, a new conservative city council suspended enforcement of the clean air zone.

As its refugee crisis recedes, Europe’s increasingly powerful nationalist and populist parties have found a new cause — attacking what they view as elitist hysteria over climate change. Will these movements succeed in blunting European action on cutting CO2 emissions?

ULAANBAATAR, MONGOLIA — Coal is everywhere in Mongolia’s frigid capital. It sits beneath the towering smokestacks of power plants in piles as big as football fields. Drivers haul it through town in the open beds of pickup trucks.

While most of us do not have the power to make the air cleaner, there are some ways to protect yourself.

Nicole Grobert is German, but she has spent almost all of her career in Britain, developing tiny nanomaterials and figuring out how to use them in everything from artificial bones to super-efficient batteries.