FlashFeed

Full text

He doesn’t remember me, but I know who he is. The biographer and I met at a party Nathaniel took me to about a year after I arrived in New York, a literary fundraiser at one of those apartments where the elevator opens right into the living room. “Wilhelmina, this good man wants to write about me,” Nathaniel said. “Your assignment tonight is to persuade him of a better idea.”

A tray of miniature hamburgers floated by, and the biographer grabbed one and ate it looking down at my feet. He was squarely middle-aged, with a saddish face and damp-looking skin that suggested an indoor life. He followed us from the bar to the bookshelves and back again as Nathaniel drifted through the crowd greeting people. Nathaniel, as I recall, was kind but distracted, and probably irritated by how I hovered at his elbow, laughing a beat late at every joke. I was too new to that scene to talk to anyone without them addressing me first. And who would? I was, what, twenty-four, conspicuously younger than every other guest. For months, I’d wanted Nathaniel to bring me along to one of his obligations, as he called them—but when I got there, I found it sterile and frightening. All those long-haired women with their stylish glasses, the men, like the biographer, looking at me in that furtive, knowing way, like I was something—a dollar bill, or a pen—Nathaniel might drop for them to pick up.

“I’m going to do it, you know,” the biographer said, grabbing another tiny hamburger. “Write that book.” On the mantel above the fireplace—a fireplace, in a penthouse!—the hosts grinned from a photo, bookended by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

“The definitive biography! Get in line,” I said, taking a sip of wine. I’d never heard anything from anyone about a biography, but amplifying Nathaniel’s importance seemed a key task in my vague job description, along with maintaining the orderliness of his sock drawer and always being available for a daytime trip to the movie theater.

“To think he wanted to be an actor,” the biographer said. “Can you imagine?” Nathaniel was already a few steps away, making a quarter he kept in his suit pocket for this purpose appear and disappear behind an elderly woman’s ear.

“Nathaniel as an actor?” I said. “Of course I can.” “I mean a world where he never wrote his books.”

In those early days I could be disarmed by the performative fandom of Nathaniel’s readers. They were contributing to a different conversation, a secret one about influence and loyalty and status that underpinned the one happening on the surface. I hadn’t learned to hear it yet. “No, I can’t,” I agreed. And wasn’t it true? Nathaniel’s books had made this world for me. They’d been the doorway, and now here I was, on the inside.

At the time of the party, the biographer had not yet written a single biography. I had written many poems, but not yet anything Nathaniel liked. Nathaniel had written six collections of poetry, two screenplays, four literary novels, one essay collection. A book of food writing; a pocket-sized collection of aphoristic wisdoms about the weather that sold better than all the poetry books combined. A best-selling memoir that had been adapted into a movie; a gritty, out-of-character romance that had been adapted into an even more famous movie.

Lili had not yet written the piece that would change all our lives.

I took a hamburger, too, and ate it looking into the biographer’s eyes. A piece of bun fell straight out of my mouth. The biographer watched it fall and then stepped on it, as if to hide my bad manners from both of us. In Nathaniel’s settings, I was mostly quiet and accommodating. But sometimes an urge to be distasteful would overtake me. I didn’t know how to explain these urges to myself—or to Nathaniel, when he noticed—and they were always followed by an effervescent, almost pleasurable burst of shame. After I finished the burger, I wiped my fingers on my thigh, blushing.

The biographer got to talking about his apartment in Williamsburg, a neighborhood being gentrified into oblivion. In five, six years, he said, living on Graham Avenue would be like living in a juice bar. 2017 seemed as far away to me as Michigan. When he asked, I said I was living in Manhattan, and then I changed the subject. I was living in Nathaniel’s spare room. I was Nathaniel’s spare girl. Assistant, I told him, in response to the biographer’s precisely executed question about my relationship to Nathaniel. Literary assistant.

The sun had set. The cityscape through the windows was like a starry night from the future, galactic and buzzing. Over by the bar, Nathaniel gave me the signal for let’s split, the one we’d planned on the walk over—a finger gun raised to his head. But then a woman in a long dress grabbed his arm and he turned toward her, taking the drink she offered. I tried not to look disappointed.

“Stop touching your hair,” the biographer said. We’d been trapped together all evening, two shy losers.

“What?”

“When you talk, you touch your hair over and over.” He made an effeminate swooping motion; it took a beat to recognize he was showing me myself. “It makes you seem insecure.” He reached out and paused my hand. I was startled to find he was right—his hand and mine were in my hair now, almost cupping my face. There was something funny about this intimacy and I laughed without meaning to, but when the biographer didn’t join, I stopped, a bit afraid. He brought my hand down slowly, as if I couldn’t be trusted to do it myself. When my arm was safely by my side, he wrapped his fingers around my wrist, measuring its perimeter, and then squeezed my hand.

“That’s it,” he said. “Relax.” I tried not to move my arm. Adjusting my hair would prove a point, but I couldn’t guarantee he would interpret the action as rebellion, instead of more involuntary female idiocy. So I pretended I had no arm, no hand at all. When my hair drifted into my face, I blew it away, wishing I were a different sort of woman.

Oh, the relief when Nathaniel appeared beside the biographer with my purse. The thing about living in New York City was that no matter how bad an event was, when you left, you were still in New York City. Down on the street, I skipped, I was so happy, and that made Nathaniel laugh. “Never take me to another party again,” I said, and we shook on it.

“Shall we run back?” he asked. I didn’t think he was serious, but he took off, his jacket winging as he weaved between clusters of people on the sidewalk. They cursed at him, jumped aside, stared in wonder at the gray-haired man galloping in his dress shoes. Within a minute he had a block on me, but then—I was just drunk enough for this—I kicked my kitten heels off and held them in one hand as I ran. The city under my feet had an animal’s warm, breathing give, scaled with glass and bottle caps and still-burning cigarettes. I caught Nathaniel by the coat and only then did he slow. I was sweating; he was not. We got dollar slices a block from Nathaniel’s apartment, licking oil off our fingers as we made fun of the way the biographer stuck to my side, afraid to be seen in that room standing alone. “I can only imagine the questions he’d ask,” Nathaniel said. “What was your mother like?” He started in on his crust. My heels were bleeding, but I couldn’t feel it yet. I loved him very much.

Now, the first line of the biographer’s email: I don’t think we’ve met.

Outside the window of my temporary office, everything is gray—gray leaves, gray sky, gray sidewalk, the students walking in pairs and trios toward the cafeteria, which hulks grayly on the horizon. It’s been five years since that awful party; Nathaniel is due to arrive in Rosendale in a matter of days, for a reading I couldn’t manage to get canceled. I am writing the authorized biography of Nathaniel Fellow, writes the biographer. Authorized! Was it possible Nathaniel had agreed? Worry churns in my gut at the thought, and I try to ignore it. Not my problem anymore. I was told you knew him well, the biographer writes. Would you be open to a brief interview?

Maybe he’s just being polite, but the email is worded stiffly, a modification of a form. This happens to me often. I was a pretty girl in a city full of pretty girls. Easy to forget.

*

If you want to write fiction, Nathaniel said, start with as many real details as possible. His women were mostly based on women he’d known. His men were mostly based on him. Versions of him, he said. One can sort of throw one’s voice. The writer’s job, first and foremost, is to make what they are lying about feel true. We were on a blanket in Sheep Meadow when he told me this, finding shapes in the clouds, a game I’d never played, not even in childhood. And then, once the thing is written, change it up just enough so the person you’ve stolen from doesn’t recognize themselves. Elephant, he said. The Mackinac Bridge! The clouds floated into new shapes. A strawberry burst in my mouth.

The biographer probably wouldn’t think to ask me about Nathaniel as a teacher—he’d ask his verifiable former students, if he could get any of them to answer.

Another one of Nathaniel’s rules: If you need the past to tell a story, you’re telling the wrong story. When I started writing fiction, he handed all my stories back with the first three or four pages cut. I learned he did this to most of his students. He’d skim the first few pages, scanning for something interesting, and then write: Start here. Almost always, the second drafts were improvements.

I know where he’d start our story. His office, late August, New York City. A woman, opening the door. I’d read scenes like it so many times; when he called for me to come in, looked up from his desk, it wasn’t him I saw, not exactly, but him seeing me. The moment, as I lived it, played through his eyes: the girl with her long hair down, lip-stick an endearing bid to look older, bare legs shiny with lotion. A heavy bag of books, the pretense for this meeting, slipping off her shoulder, tugging the strap of her cheap dress with it.

I’ll begin our story much earlier than he would, and with a fact.

Nathaniel didn’t know I existed until I made him learn my name.

__________________________________

From Famous Men by Julie Buntin. Copyright © 2026 by Julie Buntin. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Full text

Extreme coastal flooding events are occurring far more frequently in our warming world than ever before, threatening countless communities that will only become more vulnerable as climate change intensifies.

A recent study found that once-in-a-century flooding events now strike on our planet about once a decade. The study, published June 10 in the journal Nature Climate Change , also found that human-driven climate change has quadrupled the frequency of coastal sea level extremes since 1900.

The findings were released alongside another study by a separate team, published in the journal Science Advances , that found human-caused sea level rise was clearly measurable at 97% of sites sampled around the world, and was responsible for around 58% of the observed daily extreme water level exceedances between 2000 and 2018. In other words, human activities are the primary drivers behind sea level extremes — which include storm surges, high tides and rising sea level anomalies.

As the ocean's potential to devastate coastal communities surges, Live Science spoke with Sönke Dangendorf , lead author of the Nature Climate Change study, to learn more about what's to come. Here's what he had to say.

Patrick Pester: How do you separate human-driven sea level rise from natural forces?

Sönke Dangendorf: The absolute basis for doing these kinds of investigations is to work with observations, but observations are unfortunately sparse. We have a few more than 100 tide gauges [distributed worldwide] that offer long, century-scale records of sea level change since the early 20th century. We see that sea levels are changing at those locations, but we cannot tell a whole lot about what is happening elsewhere. So, what we can do is use the same climate models that we use to produce future projections of sea level change.

If you compare observations with the models, then the models need to be able to reproduce what the observations have shown. That was the first step we did, and indeed we proved in this study that the climate models are capable of reproducing observed climate. The nice thing with climate models then is that if you are able to reproduce what has been observed, you can start doing experiments. For instance, you can keep greenhouse gases constant in the modeling and then assess the influence of natural climate variability on the changes that we have observed. That's what we did in the study.

We found that we have seen already a 12-fold increase on average globally in what used to be a once-in-100-year event in 1900. And when we do these forcing experiments, we have also seen that anthropogenic forcing [human-driven change], in particular since the 1970s, has become the dominant force.

PP: What does this mean for coastal communities around the world?

SD: A couple of centimeters of sea level rise doesn't sound like a whole lot in theory, but if you live along the coast, it hits you much harder than you might think. Just an example: I used to live along the U.S. East Coast in Norfolk, Virginia. The community was built along the water, and they used to be fine in the 1950s and 1960s; they wouldn't see flooding at all, or maybe just once every five or six years. But due to sea level rise, what happens now is that high tide leads to flooding. You see flooded streets, and that affects your commute, so people increasingly cannot make it to work.

It affects your daily life suddenly. And then it makes it very hard for you and your coastal community because you have increasing insurance costs — the accumulated costs of these events can easily be as much as a major hurricane making landfall. So, this is a daily experience that many people already have, and it's a direct impact of sea level rise.

With respect to what we assessed in these more extreme events, people may absorb a once-in-a-100-year event once in their lifetime. They may experience something like a Storm Sandy , and they may be able to recover from that, but if you think about recovering from that basically every eight years — the frequency of these events nowadays compared to 1900 — that's of course way more difficult and not feasible for many people.

PP: What can we do?

SD: We can adapt. The silver lining here is that we have shown humans are the dominant forcing factor behind these changes. That's the silver lining because it means if we react, we can do something about it.

The reaction to changes in climate is often delayed, so we have sea level rise that we are already committed to. For instance, if you look into projections, they all agree with respect to what happens until around 2060, independently of how much greenhouse gases are emitted. There's no way around that. We could stop emitting greenhouse gases today, and we would still experience it. So, we need to adapt to that sea level rise, but if we mitigate climate change, if we stop emitting greenhouse gases, then we can avoid dangerous sea level rise, and that's very important.

Flooding is becoming more severe and disruptive as our planet warms. (Image credit: Roberto Westbrook via Getty Images) PP: What will the world look like in 2060 with the committed sea level rise?

SD: According to the last IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report , what used to be a once-in-a-100-year event in the present day will occur annually at 19% to 31% of tide gauge locations by 2050. So, at about a quarter of the locations, you will experience these once-in-a-100-year events annually, and that is something that is just mind-blowing.

RELATED STORIES

'Food insecurity is no longer just about low-income countries': Environmental economist explains how climate change is pushing agricultural systems to the brink

Water shortages could prevent the US from mining more lithium, deepening reliance on foreign imports

'The biggest El Niño event since the 1870s': 'Super' El Niño is now the most likely scenario by the end of this year ‪—‬ and the humanitarian cost could be huge

The changes are happening much quicker in low-latitude locations. The reason is that in the tropics you typically have a less variable climate. You don't have these massive swings all the time. For instance, in the North Sea, we have a storm season, and we have huge tide ranges. We are already adapted to pretty massive changes of multiple meters, so a couple of centimeters of sea level rise do not play out that hard, but in the tropics, where it's more calm, it makes a huge difference.

As an analogy, think about two hurdle runners. You have one hurdle runner that's compared to the tropics; he jumps very consistently but always below the hurdle, so he never makes it over. Then you have another hurdle runner that's the North Sea type of guy. His jumps are very variable. Sometimes he's very high and makes it over that hurdle, but very often he also jumps very low. Now think about lowering that hurdle, which is comparable to increasing sea levels. Suddenly, that hurdle runner who is very consistent makes it over all of the time, while the guy from the North Sea may jump over the hurdle a couple more times, but he also still has the very extreme lows. So, the constant jumper is way more sensitive to these changes.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Full text

Apple @ Work is exclusively brought to you by Mosyle , the only Apple Unified Platform. Mosyle is the only solution that integrates in a single professional-grade platform all the solutions necessary to seamlessly and automatically deploy, manage & protect Apple devices at work. Over 45,000 organizations trust Mosyle to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with no effort and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple .

In this episode of Apple @ Work, Jitesh Ubrani joins the show to discuss IDC’s recent PC shipment report , where shipments declined, but revenue rose .

Full text

BRUSSELS — French university Sciences Po is considering opening a campus in Brussels, arguing that the EU capital is “paradoxically” missing its own elite academic institution.

Brussels conspicuously lacks a significant presence of elite schools, according to an internal report obtained by POLITICO, and Sciences Po in particular is absent despite the dense network of alumni who staff the EU institutions, says the 18-page document.

One way to resolve that would be for Sciences Po to open a Brussels campus — called “Maison de l’Europe de Sciences Po, Paris-Bruxelles” — that could specialize in both EU-level research and training the next generation of Eurocrats, according to the memo.

The report draws a contrast between Brussels and Washington, D.C., which is home to elite schools like Georgetown University or Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Unlike its American counterpart, the EU power center lacks such institutions “even though all the other protagonists in the debate are located there,” says the report, which contains other recommendations that would promote Sciences Po’s EU-level standing, like launching a “European thinker prize.”

The French school is making the proposal with an eye on the competition. Students interested in Europe “do not spontaneously choose Sciences Po” and instead turn to the College of Europe in Bruges or the London School of Economics. A Brussels campus would be a way to win them back.

The leadership of Brussels’ existing SciencePo faculty reacted coolly to the pitch.

“We have already seen projects of this type, and many have failed,” said Jean-Benoît Pilet, the dean of Université Libre de Bruxelles’ Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, in comments to Belgian daily La Libre.

The report was written by the school’s 38-member committee, which includes Laurence Boone, a former French minister for Europe, and luminaries such as former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, Nobel-prize-winning economist Philippe Aghion and the novelist Giuliano da Empoli . It was first reported on by French daily Les Echos.

In 2024, a pro-Palestinian protest at Sciences Po sparked accusations that a Jewish student linked to the UEJF was barred from entering, claims disputed by the university’s Palestine committee. French President Emmanuel Macron and then-Prime Minister Gabriel Attal swiftly condemned the alleged antisemitism , prompting Sciences Po academics and students to accuse the government of political overreach and importing American-style campus culture wars.