The Weekender, February 19, 2021
Hi!
Let’s keep today’s Weekender short: the freeze in Texas is putting millions of people’s lives at risk, and I’m sure many of you want to help. I don’t have any specific insight into how to do that, though, so I’m instead going to refer you to people who may. Here are three media outlets that put together ways we call can help:
Also, via my friend Diane, comes this list put together by… well, it’s not clear who. It’s an enormous document filled with lots of ways to help, but you may want to do a little bit of vetting if you decide to support any of the listed organizations, as the source of the list — being unknown — limits its reliability.
Also, instead of the long reads this weekend, here are a couple of articles I’ve read about the crisis that helped me understand it better. Both come from The Texas Tribune, a non-profit media organization that covers Texas with extraordinary depth and deft.
- “Texas largely relies on natural gas for power. It wasn’t ready for the extreme cold.” — Usually, low temperatures and a lot of snow do not result in power outages, and certainly not widespread power outages. (I’m in the Northeast, we’re regularly seeing sub-freezing temperatures and there’s a ton of snow, and electricity hasn’t been an issue at all.) This story explains why Texas is struggling.
- “Texas was “seconds and minutes” away from catastrophic monthslong blackouts, officials say” — What’s happening in Texas is bad. It could have been worse.
If you want to read through all of their coverage, you can, here.
The Now I Know Week in Review
Monday: Presidents’ Day — No Now I Know
Tuesday: The Search For Life on Earth: A trip to Venus looks backward, to help us look beyond our own neighborhood.
Wednesday: The Rock-Paper-Scissors Lizards: Orange beats blue beats yellow beats orange.
Thursday: Why Barns are Red: It’s not paint. Well, now it’s paint. But it wasn’t in the beginning.
Have a good weekend,
Dan