''As Yale goes, so goes the nation"

PREFACE: On July 4, 2017, blogger Dan Bloom reported a mysterious portal appearing in the eastern wall of his home office in Taiwan. Faint sounds of ocean surf from the scenic East Coast of Taiwan could be heard through the boundary, which seemed to shimmer with the light of a gentle sun filtered through waving palm trees. Early experiments with his newly-acquired transdimensional scanner revealed that the portal would remain open until July 10. Sorties with his robotic explorers revealed that no electromagnetic communications could penetrate the barrier. Especially email.
After assessing the situation and finishing his fermented tofu sandwich, Dan determined to enter the portal and learn what he could in the service of science and imagination. He announced his intention to return on July 10  with a renewed sense of optimism and/or the secret of sudden translittoral ergonagnosia. In his absence, he..... ​ [RADIO INTERFERENCE]

.....requests that all queries, mysterious packages, kosher snacks, and legitimate correspondence be directed to [EMAIL ADDRESS REDACTED] .....

======================================

Now to the business at hand:

 ''As Yale goes, so goes the nation"

That's what I want to talk about here. A very good climate awareness website published via Yale University's "Yale Climate Connections" area has recently been taking up and discussing with links the rise of the cli-fi literay genre in North America, Europe and Australia.

Recently articles and brief podcasts featured cli-fi columns and books by Amy Brady at the Chicago Review of Books, Michael Svoboda at George Washington University, Craig Russell in Manitoba, Canada and others. Professor Svoboda writes about cli-fi cinema and cli-fi novels for the YCC website, and some of his previous links can be seen here and here and here.

It's heartening to see a major American university like Yale reporting on the cli-fi meme, and hopefully other universities around the world will find Yale's approach useful and inspiring. I envision similar websites about cli-fi cinema and novels appearing from literature departments at Tufts, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Middlebury, UPenn and UCLA.

As the title of this short summer blog post says: ''As Yale goes, so goes the nation.''

In this Age of Trump where the U.S. government belittles the reality of climate change and global warming, even going so far as to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords, it's heartening to see Yale, among other prestigious universities in Europe and Australia, leading the way with its must-read Yale Climate Connections website and reports on the inexorable rise of cli-fi in the 21st Century. Long may it thrive!