From today’s Times:

Some experts say that emis­sions from air­line travel are simply so large that it may be impos­si­ble to offset them.

“Buying off­sets is a nice idea, just like giving money to a soup kitchen is a nice idea, but that doesn’t end world hunger,” said Anja Koll­muss, a staff sci­en­tist for the Stock­holm Envi­ron­ment Insti­tute who is based at a branch at Tufts University.

“Buying off­sets won’t solve the prob­lem because flying around the way we do is simply unsus­tain­able,” said Ms. Koll­muss, who has researched air­line offsets.

A recent study in Britain con­cluded that one flight from London to Los Ange­les pro­duced more carbon diox­ide per person than the aver­age British com­muter pro­duces in a year by trav­el­ing by train, subway or car.

Also, from The Awl:

Pity the long lead. Quick on the heels of Michael Hirschorn’s Atlantic attack on “quirk” comes a sim­i­lar effort by Melvin Jules Bukiet in this month’s Amer­i­can Scholar.

Hirschorn’s piece saw quirk every­where: in books, movies, and pre­em­i­nently in public radio’s This Amer­i­can Life. Bukiet’s arti­cle goes after some­thing he rather clum­sily calls “Brooklyn Books of Wonder”:

Take mawk­ish self-​indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nos­tal­gia, season with magic real­ism, stir in a com­pla­cency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness….BBoWs are escape novels, albeit gar­nished with intel­lec­tual flour­ishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kun­dera defined as “the trans­la­tion of the stu­pid­ity of received ideas into the lan­guage of beauty and feel­ing [that] moves us to tears of com­pas­sion for our­selves, for the banal­ity of what we think and feel.”

But though the éminence grise in Bukiet’s account is Paul Auster, not Ira Glass, it’s clear that he and Hirschorn are talk­ing about the same thing. Sev­eral names (Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s) show up in both accounts. And their diagnoses—in Bukiet’s words, vanity mixed with “mock-naïve astonishment”—are pretty much the same.

I wrote before that Hirschorn went too soft on the soft­ies. Bukiet’s not going to let them escape so easily:

Cod­dled and cos­seted, they’re the first gen­er­a­tion of nov­el­ists who grew up read­ing the young-​adult pap that they’ve now regur­gi­tated with a decon­struc­tive gloss learned in col­lege. Of course, such aspi­ra­tions require equiv­a­lently high sub­ject matter. Hence the BBoWs’s mock encounter with enor­mity. Still, they have no teeth. They’re sheep in wolves’ cloth­ing who manage to write about bad things and make you feel good.

If Bukiet strikes deeper than Hirschorn, it’s prob­a­bly because he work­ing in fields not far from the better-​known writ­ers he’s aiming at.