In the years before Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, pressure from her husband, as well as her own appetite for risk, led the famed aviator to fly well beyond her limited abilities. And, then, Bill McKibben on FEMA’s lack of preparedness as we enter hurricane season. Plus:
• Life and death in New York City’s biggest cemetery
• Democracy wins—for now—in South Korea
• “Mountainhead” crushes the tech bro
Earhart, in a hangar in California, with the Lockheed Electra 10-E plane that she piloted in her two round-the-world attempts.Photograph by Bettmann / Getty
Amelia Earhart’s Reckless Final Flights
Reëxamining the aviator’s path to the Pacific.
Members of the press had assembled in Hawaii to watch Amelia Earhart take off on the second leg of what was scheduled to be a gruelling round-the-world voyage. Instead, they witnessed a near-catastrophe and a total embarrassment. “Sparks flew, a wing bent, and the landing gear snapped off as the silver Lockheed Electra 10-E plane smashed into the runway at Luke Field, outside Honolulu,” Laurie Gwen Shapiro writes of Earhart’s failed departure. “The pilot’s only stroke of luck was that the aircraft, which contained nearly a thousand gallons of fuel, didn’t explode.”
In a deeply engrossing piece from this week’s issue, Shapiro explores how Earhart’s aviation career was largely orchestrated by her media-savvy husband, who pushed her to take greater and greater risks, despite her lack of experience as a pilot. The crash in Hawaii was just one of the many warning signs that those around Earhart ignored ahead of what would be the aviator’s famous, fatal flight.
Read the story »
How Bad Is It?
FEMA’s newly installed acting director, David Richardson, left staffers “baffled” when he said in a speech this week that he had not been previously aware that the United States had a hurricane season, Reuters reported. (The Administration later said he had been joking.)
How bad is it? “It would be somewhat unnerving if Richardson, who has no emergency-management experience, actually didn’t know we had a hurricane season each summer and fall; it might be worse if he was making a joke, because he seems very likely to be the punchline,” Bill McKibben, a longtime New Yorker contributor who writes about climate policy, tells us, noting that the various computer models are predicting more storms than usual this year, owing in large part to hotter than normal waters around the U.S.
“What Richardson—and the rest of us—should fear most is that we’re headed into this hurricane season with blinders on, due to the cuts imposed with all the precision one would expect from Elon Musk and his DOGE cohort,” McKibben writes. “The National Weather Service is suddenly missing large numbers of forecasters and supervisors in key places such as Houston and Miami—and offices are launching fewer balloons, which are key to accurate forecasting. (But perhaps renaming the local body of water the Gulf of America will mollify it.) And DOGE has cancelled four hundred million dollars of the billion-dollar grant budget for AmeriCorps, leading to thousands fewer young people ready to muck out basements and toss debris after storms.”
“As for FEMA, CNN obtained an internal agency review last month which stated quite plainly that it was ‘not ready’ for the commencement of foul weather. About a third of the staff is gone, including many of its most experienced administrators, and the remaining ones are spending part of their time undergoing lie-detector tests to see if they are leaking to the media. And the agency is announcing that it will try to pass more of the costs of disasters on to local governments. ‘I say you don’t need FEMA, you need a good state government,’ the President explained earlier this year. Heckuva job, Donnie.”
Editor’s Pick
“We want to have life here,” Joe Charap, a horticulturist who resides on the property with his family, said. “How do we do that while respecting the fact that this is a place to inter the dead?”Photographs by Andrew Moore for The New Yorker
Green-Wood Cemetery’s Living Dead
“A grave at Green-Wood is the only real estate that some New Yorkers ever own.” Paige Williams offers an authoritative tour of one of the largest privately owned properties in the city, home to nearly six hundred thousand “permanent residents” and some very loud monk parakeets. Read the story »
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Daily Cartoon
“I’m just a bill, a big, beautiful bill, la-la-la, you get it, I’m cutting Medicaid.”
Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein
Puzzles & Games
P.S. The pioneering queer writer Edmund White died yesterday at the age of eighty-five. “In the nineteen-fifties, high culture was forbiddingly high,” he wrote, in an evocative essay about the foundations of his writing and reading. “Learning to be gay felt not unrelated to learning to be cultured.”
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