It's hard not to write about America - historically, the world's largest emitter of CO2 - when you're writing about climate change, and hard when writing about America not to write about America's sense of itself - its exceptionalism and spirit of individualism. Because at the heart of any debate on climate change lies the relationship and/or responsibilities that exist between the individual and the group. (Or between one country and other countries.) For any playwright, this would be the great theme.
A new book on marriage The Marriage Go Round by Andrew Cherlin offers a useful slant on this. It's well known that Americans treat marriage very seriously. But one of the details that jumps out from Cherlin's book is that a child in the U.S. has a greater chance of seeing his married parents break up than a child of unmarried parents in Sweden. The author explains this strange finding in this way:
I think Americans have two conflicting values in their heads: one is the high value placed on marriage and other is the high value placed on personal choice and individualism.
Hyperelastic gel is one of the stretchiest materials known to science
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A super-stretchy hydrogel can stretch to 15 times its original length and
return to its initial shape, and could be used to make soft inflatable
robots
3 hours ago
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