The saddest nine words in the world
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

The cover was black, with a barely visible dark gray masthead. All that stood out were nine simple words.
Thirty years ago, we could have saved the planet.
That sentence sums up the cover story — the only story — in the August 1st issue of The New York Times Magazine.
I didn’t read Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth when it was first published. I thought I…

