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The New York Times Magazine has done something unprecedented. On Wednesday, it released an entire issue containing just one article on the subject of global warming. “Losing Earth,” by Nathaniel Rich, chronicles the ten-year period from 1979 t0 1989 in which scientists reached consensus about human-caused climate change, and politicians nearly came to a global-scale solution. Informed by more than 100 interviews and 18 months of reporting, the piece twists and turns around a zany cast of characters who bravely risked their careers to solve the climate crisis.

There’s no spoiler alert needed for the ending: They failed. But it’s a fascinating look at how close the world once came to a binding emissions reduction agreement. Given the polarization on climate change today, it’s almost hard to believe there was a time when a left-wing environmental lobbyist from Friends of the Earth could help persuade Republican members of Congress to consider phasing out coal. That detail alone makes the lengthy story worth reading, along with several others.

But as with most large-scale, pioneering works of climate journalism, “Losing Earth” has quickly come under fire. The bulk of the criticism surrounds Rich’s conclusion: That neither the fossil fuel industry nor Republican politicians can “be blamed” for inaction on climate change. The reason they can’t be, Rich says, is because both entities were on board with climate action in the ten-year period he describes. Thus, the real blame for climate inaction belongs to all of humanity. “Human nature has brought us to this place,” he concludes. “Perhaps human nature will one day bring us through.”

The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer was among the first to take issue with this thesis. Not only was Rich’s conclusion wrong, he argued on Wednesday, it paints a false picture about what humanity must overcome to solve the climate crisis. “Telling the wrong story makes the case for action look easier than it is,” Meyer wrote.

In other words, Meyer argues that Rich’s focus—the decade during which consensus was built and action attempted—can’t possibly tell the whole story of who’s to blame for inaction. Because even if the fossil fuel industry and the Republican Party were on board with climate action in 1989, it’s been 30 years since then. And both have engaged in coordinated campaigns to prevent action on the climate crisis within those three decades.

“It was a Republican president who, in 2001, declined to implement the Kyoto Protocol, a binding global treaty to reduce carbon pollution” Meyer points out. “It was a Republican-led EPA that, in 2006, argued the Clean Air Act could not regulate greenhouse gases. It was a Republican administration that, in 2007, insisted that all future climate treaties remain nonbinding and unenforceable. And it is a Republican president who, in 2017, abandoned the Paris Agreement, the nonbinding and unenforceable climate treaty that emerged from that old demand.”

Rich’s conclusion also appears contradicted by his own reporting, Meyer points out, because he shows that Republicans and the fossil fuel industry were trying to undermine action in the 10-year period of 1979 to 1989. The piece explains that, after President Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he promptly defunded climate change research, increased coal mining on public lands, and appointed an “anti-regulation zealot” named Anne Gorsuch to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Rich also notes that ExxonMobil had ulterior motives for engaging in climate research at the time. “Exxon didn’t concern itself primarily with how much the world would warm,” Rich writes. “It wanted to know how much of the warming Exxon could be blamed for.”

Rich called Exxon’s research into climate change in the 1980s a “good-faith” effort. But it was that research which ultimately fueled Exxon’s future campaign to mislead the public about it, according to Ben Franta, a history of science doctoral student at Harvard. “Research to understand pollution problems and their solutions does not contradict public denial of them,” he wrote in an emailed statement. “Research and denial are parts of the same overall strategy to control the regulatory environment.” Franta added that Rich’s account leaves out some historical information. “For the record,” he wrote, “the American Petroleum Institute publicly downplayed the dangers of global warming as early as 1980.”

I agree with these critiques of Rich’s thesis. The fossil fuel industry, and the Republicans who heed its beck and call, are most certainly at least partly to blame for humanity’s inaction on global warming. Rich appears to agree with that as well, according to remarks he gave on Tuesday night.

FWIW, when asked about that critique at a private dinner last night, @NathanielRich said these words: "I think the fossil fuel industry is guilty of crimes against humanity."

Suggesting that the story deliberately gives industry a pass seems like a pretty shallow take to me.

But I also believe Rich is correct about human nature—at least, our inherent inability to grasp long-term threats. And “Losing Earth” provides a necessary window into how human nature influenced America’s first big failure to create climate policy. A memorable example is Rich’s description of a 1980 meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida, where U.S. bureaucrats met to discuss policy recommendations. At the beginning of that meeting, National Climate Program economist Thomas Waltz asked a pointed question: “Do we care?”

“It was not an emotional question ... but an economic one,” Rich wrote. “How much did we value the future?” Not enough, it seemed. The three-day policy meeting ended without any proposals, or even a statement of mutual interest. This failure was not the fault of the fossil fuel industry or the Republican Party. Those would come later. This failure was down to how humans thought about the future.

“Losing Earth” is an impressive piece of journalism for several reasons. One is simply that it’s the Times’ longest-ever article—and it’s about global warming. This comes at a time when much of the news media is failing to live up to its responsibilities covering climate change, an issue that affects the entire population, hundreds of ecosystems, and every economic sector. Rich’s story, too, is proof that the climate story can be told in an engaging—fast-moving, human-centric, funny, and frustrating—way.

And the insights about human nature are worth pondering. “We’re a medium-term species,” he said in April. “We plan ahead, but only so far. We’re willing to sacrifice comfort in the present for security in the future, but within reason.” But the fossil fuel industry and Republicans know that, and have successful exploited it for the last thirty years. “Losing Earth” is thus not the whole story of human’s failure to act on climate change. Its flaw is that it’s painted as such.

Last month, Los Angeles Times reporter Esmerelda Bermudez accompanied Hermelindo Che Coc, an asylum-seeker from Guatemala, as he was reunited with his six-year-old son. She recorded the exact moment that Jefferson met his father again after two months apart, a video that perfectly captures the human toll of the Trump administration’s migrant family separation policy. Take note of the young boy’s reaction:

Tonight, Guatemalan asylum seeker Hermelindo Che Coc was reunited w/ his 6-yr-old son, Jefferson at LAX. The two were separated at the border, didn’t see each other nearly 2 months. The boy had a vacant look in his eyes. Also a cough, bruise on his eye & rashes all over his body. pic.twitter.com/231bn1wlsN

Jefferson does not speak, or cry, or even hug his father back. “The boy had a vacant look in his eyes,” Bermudez wrote in the tweet that accompanied the video. “Also a cough, bruise on his eye & rashes all over his body.” In her account of the reunification, she reported that Jefferson seemed to blame his father for the experience. “Papa, I thought they killed you,” he told his father while crying. “You separated from me. You don’t love me anymore?”

Jefferson’s apparent trauma does not appear to be an isolated incident. The New York Times reported this week that children who were separated from their parents by U.S. officials earlier this year have, since reunification, “are exhibiting signs of anxiety, introversion, regression and other mental health issues.” The Times focused on one child in particular, a five-year-old Brazilian boy who “pleaded to be breast-fed,” despite having been weaned years ago, and hides behind the couch when strangers visit their home.

Other disturbing stories abound. According to migrant advocates, children have told stories of Customs and Border Protection guards kicking them while in custody and threatening to have them adopted by American families. A lawsuit alleges that children were being injected with psychotropic drugs, prompting a federal judge this week to order the government to stop doing so without parental consent. One mother alleges that officials told her daughter that she’d been abandoned and would spend the rest of her adolescence in a shelter. “When they reunited, the daughter believed that and wanted nothing to do with her mom,” wrote U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, to whom the mother told the story.

A federal judge intervened in July to force the Trump administration to reunite all of the separated families. As of the court-ordered deadline on July 26, the Department of Homeland Security said that 1,422 children had been reunited with their parents while another 711 children remained in its custody. A separate group of 378 children were released, to their parents or sponsors, by the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s unclear how many children have been released since that deadline or what will happen to those still in custody whose parents can’t be located.

These reunifications do not mark the end of the family-separation crisis; the real damage may only have just begun. The medical community has warned since the separation policy went into force that traumatic experiences during early childhood can lead to lifelong mental and physical ailments. “There’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child,” Jonathan White, a top Health and Human Services Department official, told lawmakers at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday.

White left his previous job, as deputy director in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, shortly before Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy was implemented earlier this year. He told the senators that he and other ORR officials had warned of the consequences of the policy, to no avail. During the hearing, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin called on Kirstjen Nielsen, the head of Homeland Security, to resign over the family-separation crisis, telling witnesses that “someone in this administration has to accept responsibility.”

Resignations alone won’t solve the problem. Nielsen’s departure, warranted as it may be, will not improve the wellbeing of the children who were traumatized under her watch. However, Congress can take more aggressive steps to remedy the injustices that have been committed: They can compensate the victims.

There are precedents in American governance for a comprehensive approach to righting wrongs. Three decades ago, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 to provide reparations to the living survivors of the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. The statute authorized payments of $20,000 to each survivor as restitution for their internment and for the property they lost when the government sent them to the camps. More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were interned in the camps; about 80,000 who survived until 1988 received compensation for what the U.S. government put them through.

A parallel measure also offered compensation to Alaska’s Aleut community for its treatment by the federal government during the war. U.S. officials forcibly relocated more than 800 Aleutians to internment camps elsewhere in the state and commandeered the island communities for defense purposes. Many of the Aleutians remained in camps for more than three years until they were allowed to return to their wrecked and ransacked homes. In a 2014 feature on the “forgotten internment,” the Anchorage Daily News noted that the traumatic experience led to a spike in alcoholism and that some villages never reconstituted themselves after their depopulation.

States have also occasionally sought to redress their past actions. In 1923, a white mob of rioters descended on the black community of Rosewood, Florida, destroying almost every building in the town, driving residents from their homes, and killing eight people. State officials did nothing to halt the violence at the time. Seven decades later, in 1994, Florida approved $2 million in payments for the elderly survivors of the race riot, offering a belated measure of restitution. “Our system of justice failed the citizens of Rosewood,” one state senator told his fellow lawmakers during the final debate. “This is your chance to right an atrocious wrong.”

In each of these cases, reparations came long after the original injustice. Many victims died without receiving compensation, while survivors received payment late in life. With the family-separation crisis, lawmakers have an opportunity to act more quickly, and to take a more thoughtful and targeted approach than simply offering money.

Sending reunited families back to their home countries, to face the same conditions they’d fled, would only compound their trauma. Even the constant fear of deportation is a sort of trauma. So Congress could start by passing a law that automatically grants asylum to every family that was forcibly split apart by the Trump administration.

The 1988 law that compensated Aleutian survivors of wartime internment included provisions that allowed funds to be used for medical care for children and the elderly, for historic preservation, and for improving local community centers. Lawmakers could take a similarly creative approach with the family-separation crisis. At a bare minimum, Congress could set up a fund that pays for the affected children’s medical care—including any long-term mental-health care—until they reach adulthood.

The 1988 reparation laws originated with a commission established by Congress in 1980 to study wartime internment policies and report on potential legislation. The group spent three years taking testimony from survivors across the country and reviewing government records before issuing a 467-page report. A similar commission could be warranted to provide a full and comprehensive account of the family-separation crisis alongside other restorative measures. Congress could even grant it the power to issue subpoenas for documents and testimony from recalcitrant Trump officials.

That last part—determining who contributed to this tragedy—is essential. The children harmed by the administration’s policies will likely be haunted by the experience for years to come, if not for the rest of their lives. At a bare minimum, any federal officials who participated in the systemic abuse and mistreatment of children should never be allowed to forget it, either.

It is 1990, and Whitney Houston is in a hotel room with her mother. She is in her twenties, a sprightly pop star with lungs of gold. She has already made hits of “The Greatest Love of All,” “How Will I Know,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”—all those ’80s classics. She hasn’t started dating Bobby Brown yet, and she’s still years away from appearing on television visibly high, as she did when Diane Sawyer interviewed her in 2002. Houston leans back on the hotel couch and grimaces. “Paula Abdul ain’t shit,” she says. “That girl is singing off-key on the record.” It’s downright surreal witnessing young Whitney, who was in this early part of her career picture-perfect and hyper-competent at all times, lapse into vulnerability. The moment, which occurs in a new documentary, Whitney, reminds you how thickly the varnish of purity was painted over the fledgling star, how much was covered up. She was powdered in pink eyeshadow, touted as the happy child of happy parents, and trained to smile wide onscreen. Cissy Houston reminds her daughter that she has a gift from God that Abdul will never have, and the young woman snuggles into her mom’s arms.

There are now two Whitney Houston documentaries. The first, Whitney: Can I Be Me?, came out last year. The work of Nick Broomfield (Kurt and Courtney), that movie—which was unauthorized—splices together archival footage with interviews of Houston’s family, friends, and entourage. It is straightforward about her drug abuse, and about the control exerted over her by her family and production team. Her brothers recall that they and Houston did drugs starting around the age of 10. Old colleagues of her producer, Clive Davis, recall that he deliberately marketed her to white listeners. Most controversially, perhaps, the movie confirms that Houston was romantically involved with Robyn Crawford, her “best friend,” a relationship that was discouraged by her homophobic family and production team while it lasted and hushed up after it was over.

Robyn Crawford is not a household name, but—as Broomfield’s documentary makes abundantly clear—her romance and close friendship with Houston was a defining feature of the singer’s adult life. A high school contemporary of Houston’s brothers, Crawford moved in with the singer when the two were in their late teens. She was maid of honor at Houston’s 1994 wedding to Bobby Brown. Brown has admitted that he “knew” that the two women were together, though it’s unclear when and how friendship became romance and vice versa. Brown recently told People that “if Robyn was accepted into Whitney’s life, Whitney would still be alive today.” (He skims over the fact that Crawford left Houston after giving her a “him or me” ultimatum in 2000.)

In a 1997 interview on NBC, Houston denied being in a relationship with Crawford. When Katie Couric probed her for details, Houston wasn’t forthcoming. “She’s a damn good basketball player,” she said of Crawford. “She can beat any guy there is.” For her part, the only time Crawford has spoken publicly of Houston was in an obituary for Esquire. In the article, she described Houston’s beauty, how she missed her laughter. “Houston’s hit ‘I Will Always Love You,’” Crawford wrote, “was the absolute pinnacle of what she could do, of what anyone could do—and then she had to keep on doing it.”

The lovers did not have a smooth go of it. In the unauthorized documentary, Oprah Winfrey speaks to Houston’s mother, Cissy, herself a famous and accomplished singer. “Would it have bothered you if your daughter Whitney was gay?” Winfrey asks. “Absolutely,” Cissy responds.

The new film, by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), is the estate’s implicit riposte to the first. Clive Davis himself appears to say glowing things about Whitney that have nothing to do with race. Cousins, brothers, Whitney’s mother: They all pop up to set the record straight. Only six years after Whitney left this world, her legacy is already trapped in the same reputation tennis that she dealt with in life, and her family are still speaking for her.

And the record is set “straight” here in one particular way. In this movie, we hear nothing from Crawford herself, but several very nasty things about her from Houston’s brother Gary Garland-Houston, who toured with Whitney as her back-up dancer, did drugs with her, and “protected” her. Garland-Houston twists up his face at the idea of his sister and another woman. That Whitney grew up in a deeply homophobic milieu and also had to keep secret her relationship with a woman who, the documentary must admit, cared for her well, is very sad.

Crawford’s sexual orientation is only addressed as a way of separating her from Houston. “I knew what she was,” Garland-Houston says of Crawford. “I knew she was something that I didn’t want my sister to be involved with.” He calls her evil, wicked. In this movie—though not in the previous one—we hear the Houston clan confirm that they paid a man to break Crawford’s legs. (He went to the tabloids instead.)

If there was some kind of deal cut over access, Macdonald got a big payoff for his concession. Garland-Houston also corroborates a startling claim about Houston’s childhood. Mary Jones worked as Houston’s assistant for many years, and was the last person to see her alive. In the documentary, she confirms the rumor that Whitney and Gary were molested as children by Dee Dee Warwick, Dionne’s sister and a well-known singer in her own right. Garland-Houston verifies that he was molested by a woman. After this revelation the documentary shows black-and-white television footage of Dee Dee singing, looking straight into the camera. This is the movie’s “aha” moment, the admission that is meant to explain exactly how and why the singer became the sort of person who would talk shit about Paula Abdul.

Repressed queer Whitney; abused Whitney; a Whitney who was controlled by a jealous husband; Whitney who was sued by her father: The documentaries present the singer as pure victim. Whatever the accuracy of the portrayal, it’s a lousy thing to do to somebody who can’t speak back. In the Manhattan theater where I watched the Macdonald film on a Monday afternoon, the scene was downright glum. A few scattered fans and I watched a child grow up, succeed, destroy her voice with drugs, then die. Every now and again somebody sobbed.

This tussle over the life and pain of Whitney Houston, barely six years dead, makes both films about her feel more like lawsuits than elegies. Cissy Houston has retracted her approval for the second movie. In a statement to People co-authored by Dionne Warwick, she wrote, “We cannot…overstate the shock and horror we feel and the difficulty we have believing that my niece Dee Dee Warwick (Dionne’s sister) molested two of my three children.” Even if the allegations are true, Cissy writes, “I do not believe she would have wanted it to be revealed for the first time to thousands, maybe millions of people in a film.” Unpleasant though Cissy comes off at times, she has a point.

How uneasy should we feel about the voyeuristic thrill we get from watching intimate scenes in the lives of the famous? Houston retained her privacy in life, so the ambiguous pleasure of accessing her secrets—or what seem to be her secrets—after her death is even greater. A woman in the theater with me stood up as we watched Houston sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl in 1991. In that moment, Houston resembled a national monument or a state park more than a human being, I realized. Her voice is a symbol of Americanness; it’s at home among the many God-given natural phenomena of which this country can boast. Watching Houston be mean about Paula Abdul is like hearing the Lincoln Memorial ask you for the time. The contrast—between the greatness of the singer and the pettiness of her comment, between the sublime and the trivial—reminds us not that she was human like the rest of us, but that she wasn’t.

The problem with Whitney (2018) is the same one that hampered Whitney: Can I Be Me? (2017). The documentary form turns human life, with all its random foibles and day-to-day ordinariness, into a story. The only standard to which we can hold the genre is honesty, and this film—in its neglect of Robyn Crawford, in particular—is less honest than its predecessor. But both films rob the subject of her own voice. She speaks, of course, yet what she says is bent in service of a certain narrative. In the newer movie, she’s become a symbol of the damage wrought by child abuse. The last time around, the moral was about the toll of drugs and homophobia.

In the end, neither the authorized nor the unauthorized version of Houston’s life has a greater claim to veracity. The big screen demands that the “truth” become partial, in order to make the story work. An authorized documentary has the wider level of access, but is more likely to be manipulated by the interested parties. An unauthorized documentary might be wilder in its claims, but is by the same token freer to speak the facts. Which should we trust?

The answer is both and neither. We get closest to reality by adding the stories together, but it doesn’t follow that still more documentaries would better approximate a life’s full complexity. And even the most exhaustive account of what happened when and who was there would lack a certain fundamental element. Whitney Houston sang bang on key, every single time. The most genuine account of her life is her art. That’s the story she told her fans, and it’s the only version we can call the truth.