Hoppers, like Pixar's pre-Disney films, is a delight. The beavers' world is immersive and richly realized, grounded in science but never dry. The plot zigs and zags between moments of absurdity and emotional heft to stirring effect; I cried multiple times, and not just because of the low-hanging fruit of grandma death.
Covering Climate Now was formed in 2019 in response to the climate silence that then prevailed in much of the press, especially in the United States. Over the years that followed, hundreds of newsrooms joined our effort, and press coverage of the story began to reflect the scale of the crisis. Newsrooms beefed up their climate reporting teams; they confronted misinformation that sought to play down the problem; they thought creatively about how to find the climate connection on every beat.
When British author Karen Armstrong won the TED prize in 2008, she used the money to convene a group of religious thinkers from a wide range of faiths to craft an updated version of the Golden Rule for the 21st century. What emerged was the Charter for Compassion, which calls on people around the world "to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect."
The better you are at managing your emotions, the less emotional support people offer you. It's not cruelty. It's perceptual bias. People take your composure at face value because it's efficient for them to do so. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people consistently underestimate the emotional needs of those they perceive as high copers.
I, too, have been having difficulty conjuring up visions of a better future either for myself or in general. I posted this insight on social media in the final throes of 2025, and received many responses. A lot of respondents agreed they felt like they were just existing, encased in a bubble of the present tense, the road ahead foggy with uncertainty.
When Storm Dennis hit the UK in 2020, a wall of dirty, frigid water from a tributary of the Taff threw Paul Thomas against the front of his house in the south Wales village of Ynysybwl. He managed to swim back into his home before the storm surge changed direction, almost carrying him out of the smashed-in front door. I was holding on to downpipes to stop myself being dragged out again.