Bill McKibben’s divestment project—which is aiming to get city governments and universities to divest their pension funds from fossil fuel companies—is gaining some traction. They’re now up to 10 cities that have pledged to pursue divestment, plus four institutes of higher ed. The goal is to get the largest pension funds in the country to divest. You can see if there is a campaign in your city or school here. (You can also divest your own investments but that’s basically meaningless unless you have ONE ZILLION DOLLARS. Better to work for a campaign. More here.)

The ten cities: Seattle, Wash. Madison, Wis., Bayfield, Wis, Ithaca, N.Y., Boulder, Co., Rochester, Minn., Eugene, Ore., Richmond, Calif., Berkeley, Calif., and San Francisco, Calif.

The four colleges: Unity, Hampshire, Sterling, and College of the Atlantic

Grist outlines everything that can and will go wrong one day in Phoenix, at it’s a lot. “As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns: infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time.”

KUT public radio in Austin named fracking as one of their top stories of last year (earthquakes, contaminated drinking water, ya know, nbd) and things are just going to get MORE exciting in 2013. Via Naked Capitalism, here’s Midland, Texas Mayor Wes Perry explaining why he’s allowing fracking within city limits and within 150 feet of people’s homes: “People are still not really happy when an oil well turns up in the backyard, but we are an oil town. We can’t be hypocrites.”

So the one week it would make sense to be ALL ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD, I’m kind of over it and not that interested, actually, in talking about the end of the world. We all have our own personal worlds, and those worlds all end sometime, anytime. What does it matter if it’s all together or individually, really. It’s all equally horrifying. ANYWAY if recent events and foretold coming events are having an opposite effect on you, The Verge starts a five-part series today by Joseph L. Flatley looking at this country’s obsession with the apocalypse. Part I is about the New World order and people who think we’re all pawns. The accompanying video has really scary music and might leave you with a sense of dread, FYI.

At Edge, a lot of really smart people answer their annual question and explain what we really should be worried about. HAVE FUN WITH THAT. (Hold me.)

Josh Miller talked to his 15-year-old sister about her social media habits and her answers will make you feel old and unhip and old and uncool and old. (“I don’t read links. I don’t read blogs. I don’t know. You mean like funny videos on Facebook? Sometimes people post funny links there.”)

Keith Gessen’s New Yorker cover story about a ship carrying iron ore from Murmansk, Russia to China via the Northern Sea Route is a must-must-must-must-read.

Here’s a fun bit of information about working on a ship: “Most of the men were on six-month contracts, with monthly pay ranging from eleven hundred dollars, for the mess boys, to around ten thousand dollars, for the captain and the chief engineer—pretty good money in the Philippines and Ukraine.”

And here’s a fun bit of information about what we’ve done to our planet: “The thickness of the ice … is also decreasing, from an average thickness of twelve feet in 1980 to half that two decades later. The primary cause of this decline is warmer air temperatures in the Arctic, an area that has been more affected by global warming than any other place on earth.”

The article is subscription-only online, so you have some options if you aren’t already subscribed: 1. Get a login from a friend (in these trying times, etc.). 2. Go buy a hard copy for $6.99 (THIS IS WHAT I DID)  3. Subscribe! It’s $60 a year. For a magazine you get every week that PAYS WRITERS TO GO ON BOATS TO THE END OF THE WORLD. They also have cartoons.