A classic collection of the New Yorker's most urgent and groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of the climate emergency In 1989, just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind's heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet. At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben's work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face. The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change - its past, present, and future - taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben's seminal essay 'The End of Nature,' the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he called it a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists in the modern era—among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Calvin Trillin, Garrison Keillor, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, Jr., Steve Martin, and Christopher Buckley. Fierce Pajamas is a treasury of laughter from the magazine W. H. Auden called the “best comic magazine in existence.”

"The New Yorker" is, of course, a bastion of superb essays, influential investigative journalism, and insightful arts criticism. But for eighty years, it's also been a hoot. In fact, when Harold Ross founded the legendary magazine in 1925, he called it "a comic weekly," and while it has grown into much more, it has also remained true to its original mission. Now an uproarious sampling of its funny writings can be found in a hilarious new collection, one as satirical and witty, misanthropic and menacing, as the first, "Fierce Pajamas." From the 1920s onward-but with a special focus on the latest generation-here are the humorists who set the pace and stirred the pot, pulled the leg and pinched the behind of America.
S. J. Perelman unearths the furious letters of a foreign correspondent in India to the laundry he insists on using in Paris ("Who charges six francs to wash a cummerbund?!"). Woody Allen recalls the "Whore of Mensa," who excites her customers by reading Proust (or, if you want, two girls will explain Noam Chomsky). Steve Martin's pill bottle warns us of side effects ranging from hair that smells of burning tires to teeth receiving radio broadcasts. Andy Borowitz provides his version of theater-lobby notices ("In Act III, there is full frontal nudity, but not involving the actor you would like to see naked"). David Owen's rules for dating his ex-wife start out magnanimous and swiftly disintegrate into sarcasm, self-loathing, and rage, and Noah Baumbach unfolds a history of his last relationship in the form of Zagat reviews.
Meanwhile, off in a remote "willage" in Normandy, David Sedaris is drowning a mouse ("This was for the best, whether the mouse realized it or not").
Plus asides, fancies, rebukes, and musings from Patty Marx, Calvin Trillin, Bruce McCall, Garrison Keillor, Veronica Geng, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, Jr., and many others.
If laughter is the best medicine, "Disquiet, Please" is truly a wonder drug.

"From the Hardcover edition."