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I used to love shooting photos on Pixels, but recently I’ve been feeling let down by the once high-flying series. While I have quite a few quibbles about Google’s latest entries, my biggest camera bugbear is undoubtedly the phone’s portrait mode — the results just don’t look good enough for me to ever want to frame my snaps.

Whether I’m grabbing pics of friends and family or trying to add some bokeh to a macro crop, there’s always some artifact or issue that sticks out like a sore thumb. In fairness, these complaints apply almost equally to Apple and Samsung, but as the Pixel 11 series is right around the corner , I’ve been jotting down my wish list for Google’s upcoming flagship. Number one: I really hope they can fix my lingering portrait grievances.

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“The reader,” says National Book Award-winner Sigrid Nunez, “will forgive the novelist certain things. Like, in a 400-page book, you can have a dozen flat sentences. But in a [short] story? No. You can’t.”

Twelve middling sentences, in a book of maybe 6,000, comes to an authorial hit rate of 99.8 percent. It’s a high bar. But Nunez has thrown the number out as an aside; she’s not speaking to the novel but rather to the semantic density of short fiction, which she’s been pondering in the lead up to her first ever story collection, It Will Come Back to You , out July 14 from Riverhead.

“I finished writing The Vulnerables ,” says Nunez of her 2023 novel, “and then, for me, an unusual thing happened. I had an idea for a story, I wrote it, and I was happy with it. This doesn’t usually happen. And then,” she says, “strangely enough, I had another one. And then another one. And one more. So I had a group of stories that were written very recently.”

Along with some encouragement from her agent, the hot hand convinced Nunez that she had something. She roped in the start of an unpublished novel and a few older pieces, but only those that stood the test of time without edits. “If something’s published already,” she says, “there’s something about going back and touching it that’s weird. Also, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

Enjoyment counts for a lot in Nunez’s craft. There’s no central theme in It Will Come Back to You , not in the traditional sense, but on a language level, Nunez’s quirky, jigsaw puzzle paragraphs are the nodes from which hidden motifs—the overall strangeness of human society, the prevalence of severe emotional isolation, the value of creativity—emerge. This artistry is perhaps most evident during character introductions, key in short fiction, when personalities must enter the page memorably enough to keep track of but quickly enough not to derail momentum.

The first thing we learn about Ace, a love interest in “Philosophers,” is that he “often began sentences with some variant of There are two kinds of people in the world.” Ace’s teacher thinks he “looked like James Dean, which just wasn’t true, even if we knew she was really talking about his aura.”

This teacher, Mrs. Mint, “was an unhappy woman with tastefully teased hair and large, distracting breasts. Her aura was that of a woman whose husband had married her for those breasts and was now tired of her.”

Later on, in “It’s All Good,” the protagonist phones a nursing home supervisor, “though I’ve never found that woman easy to talk to. About as old as my mother but sharp as a tack, she has unusually pale, watery eyes that look like a headache is gathering behind them, and such a precious standoffish manner you get the sense that if you leaned in too close an alarm would sound.”

“I don’t understand why people don’t seem to remember what it was like to be that age. They say they do, but they don’t behave that way. They’ve completely forgotten everything.”

Not every character appears with such aplomb. But it’s remarkable how Nunez churns out these introductory descriptions, each of them a sort of Borgesian, self-contained flash fiction. “I think a lot depends on serendipity,” she says, when I ask her what makes a memorable foible. “I’m writing along and I say something about the character, and it just hits me to describe her that way in the first draft. I think it works, and I keep it. Or in subsequent drafts, it will come to me.”

(A common juncture in asking great writers about their craft. Drill down far enough, you hit the water table: explanations get muddy. “It will come to me.”)

“It’s never something that I want to pause and struggle with,” says Nunez of character intros. “If it doesn’t come to me in a natural way, it’s too forced. But you know, it can’t be a name, the color of the eyes, and the hair and the height. You need some detail about them. And you only need one if it’s strong.”

Nunez’s process here seems to rely less on technique than on pure “Imagination,” which happens to be the collection’s third story, kicking off in relevant fashion: “In walked Dick Franz with his look of a warlock…”

Published in The Sun in 2012, “Imagination,” intentionally or not, sheds light on Nunez’s creative engine. Its protagonist is a quixotic teenage girl named Elsie, who weaves dreamily through a party at her parents’ country home.

“An inventive imagination was a gift of the gods,” Nunez writes, “or a curse if you couldn’t control it. Elsie would sometimes start talking, telling a story, say, and get so carried away, piling it on so thick, flying off on so many tangents, that she might as well have been speaking in tongues. If you pointed this out to her, her response was to clam up.”

Nunez says she still has “a vivid memory” of what it was like to be a teenager. “I’m always surprised when I see how adults are worried about the kids,” she says. “I don’t understand why people don’t seem to remember what it was like to be that age. They say they do, but they don’t behave that way. They’ve completely forgotten everything.”

As an example, Nunez cites the average teen’s obsession with looks, like when Elsie becomes infatuated with the soirée’s 30-something bartender. “Not old enough to be her father, but close,” Nunez writes. “[Elsie] tried to imagine what she herself might look like at that age. As pretty as she was now? Prettier? (Doubtful.)”

There’s a kind of “narcissism,” says Nunez, to being young. “But it’s not unhealthy. It’s about finding yourself and trying to decide what you look like. You know, everything is a potential disaster, the end of the world. It’s wonderful, wonderful!”

Perhaps fiction writers, I venture, are forced to carry more adolescence into their careers than the average person. “I think they probably do,” says Nunez. “Being able to access what you were like as a child is one of the greatest tools that you can possibly have as a writer. I mean, brain surgeons: you want them to be very adult.”

Nunez, as befits her subject matter, is high on today’s crop of young authors.

The “wisdom” of age plays a major role in three of the collection’s closing stories but is most provoking in “The Rabbit’s Foot,” published last year by The Yale Review , in which Carmine, a downtrodden maid in a chic New York City hotel, is later criticized by her successful Ivy Leave daughter for being taken advantage of as a young woman. Nunez says the setting was inspired by Sherman Alexie’s 2017 New Yorker story “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest.” Apart from the setting, and some idea of a forward time shift, Nunez began writing the piece and left the rest to improvisation.

“I usually just write my way into things,” Nunez says of her plotting. She believes that “probably all” of the stories in this collection changed direction mid-writing, which in some ways is unsurprising given the nature of putting words on a page, but in other ways points to what Nunez said before, about leaving the door open for wandering bouts of inspiration.

“It just comes to me…”

“It’s never something that I want to pause and struggle with…”

A resistance to plotting seems as if it might lead to a certain type of story, one filled with Elsie’s famous digressions (“piling it on so thick, flying off on so many tangents”). Nunez avoids this trap with writerly resolve. Once she begins drafting a short story, she says, “I definitely try to finish it. I would never start another story. I start, and I want to finish as fast as possible.”

Nunez has heard of other writers who proficiently multitask, setting down a partial manuscript while starting another, interspersing it all with stories and essays. “That’s very foreign to me,” she says. “I need as narrow a focus as possible, and as few drafts.”

With this mindset, it’s unsurprising that the protagonist of the collection’s title piece mourns today’s crisis of distractibility, calling it “a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.”

“It’s very worrying,” says Nunez. “I mean, technology in general is extremely worrying, for many different reasons. We are aware that there seems to be some kind of damage [to memory and focus]. But we don’t really know the specifics.”

The narrator of “It Will Come Back to You” wonders if these problems might be affecting younger generations more than older ones. But Nunez, as befits her subject matter, is high on today’s crop of young authors. Whatever distractions afflict contemporary novelists, she says, “I don’t think it’s a prevalent problem, that the quality of the work is going down. It’s not like we only now have bad writers. Nothing could be less true.”

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New Jetta M6 will have an electric motor with as little as 118 kW.

The front end of the M6 looks very much like a Tesla Model 3.

Beneath the sedan’s skin will be CALB lithium-ion batteries.

The Volkswagen Group’s standalone Jetta brand in China continues to chug along and is now working on its very first electric sedan. VW already sells several EVs in China , so the new Jetta M6 looks set to fight at the affordable end of the market, where its designers appear to have borrowed heavily from one of the world’s best-selling EVs .

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As these images from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) show, the Jetta M6’s front fascia looks suspiciously like that of the Tesla Model 3 . The slim, angular, and aggressive headlights adopt a very similar shape to that of the center of the front bumper, which is free of a traditional grille.

Read: VW’s New Compact Sedan Costs Less Than Half What Americans Pay For A Jetta

The rest of the car’s exterior design is rather mundane, particularly by Chinese EV standards. We can see the charging port is located on the passenger-side front quarter panel, there are flap-type door handles, and the door skins have pronounced creases to give the car a little bit of personality.

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As for the rear, it’s fairly typical, including a blacked-out lower section of the bumper, slim LED taillights, and a light bar. Measurements released by the MIIT reveal that the M6 is 189.2 inches (4,806 mm) long, up to 74.6 inches (1,895 mm) wide depending on configuration, 59 inches (1,500 mm) tall, and has a 111-inch (2,820 mm) wheelbase. It will weigh in at between 3,432 lbs (1,557 kg) and 3,589 lbs (1,628 kg).

This Is No Sporty EV

The M6 is not one of those EVs from the Far East with a gazillion horsepower and enough torque to twist the Earth in half. Instead, it will be sold only with a single electric motor, delivering 152 hp (113 kW) in the base configuration and 194 hp (145 kW) in the flagship model. There’s no word on how large the battery pack will be, but we know it’s a lithium-ion pack with cells sourced from CALB and manufactured through the FAW-Volkswagen joint venture .

Earlier this year, Jetta announced plans to launch five new models by 2028, with four of them set to be new energy vehicles, meaning they’ll be either BEVs or PHEVs. Another Jetta model just around the corner will be a production-spec version of the recent Jetta X Concept SUV .

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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.

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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.