Iran and the burden of knowledge

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

A cascade of IR6 centrifuges at the Natanz facility in Iran: a single IR6 can enrich a kilogram of U-235 from 60% to weapons grade (90%) in about 10 months.

After World War II ended, there began a running debate between American scientists and the American government about how to properly wield the fearsome nuclear power that America had discovered and unleashed. The government believed that this power could be hoarded and used by the U.S. to play geopolitical games in which they held all the cards. The scientists argued that the power that the government thought it possessed exclusively depended on discovering the basic laws of physics, chemistry and engineering, laws that were accessible to scientists in any country.

The scientists were right. Estimates of when the Soviet Union would get nuclear weapons ranged from three to twenty years, revealing a gulf between the scientists and the political and military establishments, with the latter betting on the longer timelines. As it turned out, the Soviets detonated their first bomb in August 1949, a little more than four years after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1955 they detonated their first thermonuclear bomb. While the Soviet fission bomb was aided by espionage, the discovery of the critical Teller-Ulam mechanism that makes thermonuclear weapons possible was an independent discovery, attesting to the ubiquity of scientific know-how. Britain, China and other countries followed with their own atomic and thermonuclear tests. The Soviet event marked the beginning of an eternal struggle between science and politics in which the government tried to use science for their national interests and the scientists, while sympathetic to this goal, tried to use their expertise to tell the government what was wishful thinking and what wasn’t.

That debate continues to this day and ignores a fundamental truth about science and weaponry that is so deep, fundamental and simple that it seems to be easily misunderstood and misused. That truth is the sheer inevitability of science in enabling the construction of weapons of mass destruction. The latest example of this misunderstanding is the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 21, 2025. The military used 14 “bunker busters” (Massive Ordnance Penetrators) to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan. These bombs are designed to destroy targets that are 200 feet deep and were targeted at Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities.The enrichment facilities contain centrifuges that can enrich uranium to both reactor grade (4%) and weapons grade (90%) levels. Read more »

A Visit To Lana Del Rey’s World

by David Beer

Lana Del Rey exists in a meticulously crafted world of her own. It’s a world apart. I purchased an invite to drop-by this summer, so that I might glimpse its finer details. Along with the crowd at the Anfield stadium in Liverpool, I was standing at its perimeter, gazing inwards, wondering. The atmosphere seemed rarified, there were even lily pads on the custom-built pond. 

Afterwards, standing in the well organised queue for the shuttle bus, it occurred to me that Lana Del Rey is an artist suited to these baffling times. That’s not to say the music is escapism, it’s much more artful than that. It may be a bubble, but it has far greater intricacy than we expect of pop, and a depth of ambiguity too. Spinning at about 80 beats per minute, it’s an alternative planet. The music comes packaged with a possibility of being somewhere else, of joining an inner sanctum. This other time and space brings a promise of leaving things behind. 

The show was quite a spectacle. The stage was deeply dressed with trees, plants, a pergola, candelabra, that pond, and a full-scale wooden house. There are details everywhere, fleshing-out the little ecology of the stage.

The house itself, I assumed, was supposed to be idyllic or perhaps even quaint, yet squint and it might be the type of place Norman Bates’ mother is silhouetted at the window. When preparing the stage prior to the event, one of the road staff carefully cleaned those windows. Or perhaps the structure had been rescued from the studio lot of one of the Scream franchise films. There is a slight undercurrent to it. Though it does provide a space of sanctuary, a closed-off part of the stage that the crowd cannot see into. Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

If you talk about it, it’s not Tao
If you name it, it’s something else
What can’t be named is eternal
Naming splits the eternal to smithereens
………………………….. —Lao Tzu, 6th Century BC

Lao Tzu’s Lament

At first I think, I’ve got it—
Then I think, Oh no, that’s not it.

I think, it’s more like a flaming arrow
shot into the marrow
of the bony part of everything
………. but some summer nights
………. it’s hanging overhead so bright.

Then right there I lose it,
let geometry and time confuse it,
then it’s silent and won’t sing a thing,
………. but some summer nights
………. it’s croaking from a pond so right.

Then again I lose it,
let theology and time confuse it,
then it’s silent and won’t sing a thing.

Sometimes I think, I’ve lost it,
though I never could exhaust it,
because it’s lower than low is,
and wider than wide is,
deeper than deep is,
higher than high is,
………. but some fresh spring days
………. it’s cuttin’ through the fog and the haze

………. I’m thinking I’ve been here before
………. feet two inches off the floor
………. thinking, is this something true?

Jim Culleny,
7/15/15

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Sunday, July 6, 2025

Down With the Ship

by Steve Szilagyi

Elbert Hubbard, “A new and characteristically American type of humbug” —H.L. Menken.

How would you act as a great ship slipped beneath the waves? Freeze? Panic? Leap into the sea? If you were a man, would you quietly help women and children into the lifeboats? We all wonder. Elbert Hubbard wondered too. In 1912, less than a month after the Titanic vanished into the Atlantic, he sat at his desk and wrote The Titanic, a vivid imagining of the ship’s final moments. He studied the behavior of the wealthiest passengers, John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, George Dunton Widener—and found it good.

“There was not a single case of flinching—not one coward among the lot. The millionaires showed themselves worthy of their wealth,” Hubbard exulted. He reserved special admiration for Isadore Strauss, heir to the Macy’s fortune, and his wife, Ida. When offered a place in a lifeboat, Ida refused to leave her husband. “All these years we have traveled together,” she said. “And shall we part now? No, our fate is one.” The two were last seen walking into their stateroom, arm in arm, to meet death side by side.

Most of us will never face that test. But Elbert Hubbard did. Three years later, he and his wife Alice were first-class passengers on the Lusitania’s final crossing. And when German torpedoes tore through the liner’s hull, Hubbard found himself living the very scenario he had once so confidently narrated. How would he face it? Did he flinch?

Before departing, a friend warned him of the danger. Hubbard waved him off. “I have no fear of going down with the ship,” he boasted. “I would never jump and scramble for a lifeboat.”

Brave words—but Hubbard was above all, a man of words. By then, he had moved perhaps a hundred million copies of a pamphlet called A Message to Garcia, delivered countless lectures, and built a public persona as an oracle of success. Admirers called him an inspiration; critics called him a huckster. He was hard to categorize, slippery to define.

To understand how he ended up on the deck of a sinking ship, we need to return to where his journey began. Read more »

The Novel Endures: A Conversation with Ross Barkan

by Philip Graham 

Ross Barkan is certainly having a moment. His third and most ambitious novel, Glass Century, set in New York and encompassing over fifty years of the city’s history, has recently been published and is enjoying a raucously enthusiastic critical reception.

I wasn’t surprised by the praise for Glass Century. Having been a New York City cabdriver in the ’70s, a volunteer near Ground Zero in 2001, and the father of a daughter who refused to abandon her West Village apartment and beloved city during the Covid crisis, I found myself utterly convinced on every page by Barkan’s long game of interweaving intimate family secrets with the public unfolding of the city’s historic crises. And he can write a mean tennis match, too.

Meanwhile, this week Barkan’s long-time friend and political comrade-in-arms, Zohran Mamdani, has triumphed in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. One might say that Ross Barkan, a 35-year-old novelist, journalist, essayist and political commentator, is feeling the warm embrace of the zeitgeist.

Philip Graham: Your novel Glass Century begins with the two main characters, Mona Glass and Saul Plotz, as they prepare the final arrangements of a false marriage. That their wedding will be staged is a secret built on another secret: Saul is already married and has two children. Mona believes this fictional wedding with her lover will fool her parents, who are relentless in their insistence that their fiercely independent daughter settle down and start a family.

Somehow, they manage to pull off the deception, not only for the wedding but for the many years of their actual committed relationship. A lot of people in this novel have to maintain the secret, and at least an equal number need to ignore or adopt a complicit silence about their suspicions—Mona’s parents and Saul’s wife and children, in particular. And somehow you manage as author to maintain this tightrope trick throughout the novel. It certainly rang true for me. Every family, I believe, cloaks some truth or truths that must remain silent.

Ross Barkan: Secrets are everything: shameful, powerful, ennobling, destructive. There isn’t a family without secrets. It’s only a matter of how large they are. Secrets were on my mind as I wrote Glass Century. How do we keep them? Whom do they hurt? Who benefits? A secret, sometimes, offers something of a counter-life. You slip in and live in a way you might not have otherwise. Already married Saul, in this instance, finds Mona to be something like his counter-life. And Mona, in turn, has the image of marriage, which was so important to her traditional parents in the 1970s. Of course, what makes this all interesting, as you point out, is that there are others aware of the ruse. There’s complicity. It’s plausible, certainly, to be skeptical of all of this—how is it possible? In a fictional world, there can be a just-so quality to events but I wanted to write in a manner where it didn’t seem so fantastical for secrets like these to be held. Men and women do have affairs, lives are carved out within lives, and families, in a way not so dissimilar from organisms, must adapt gradually to all of it. As I wrote the novel, I considered image versus reality, and how, from the outside, we know so very little about people. That’s the beauty of the novel form, and why I love it so: there’s the ability to excavate that interiority, that consciousness. I loved living in the pages with Mona and Saul. Read more »

Friday, July 4, 2025

Managers and Clowns

by Bill Murray

Today’s modest topic is the future of the West. Will it end in a bang, whimper or maybe just sort of muddle through in some zombie stagger? Whatever happens, a quarter of the way through the American Century, the standard of liberal democracy we hoisted as global inevitability twenty years ago hangs by the scruff of the neck and its enemies are eager to boot it straight into irrelevance.

Let’s consider each side of the transatlantic alliance. The NATO summit, the yearly expression of North Atlantic muscle held last week in the Hague, illuminates the Europeans.

And to set the table, when you have five minutes, listen to John Cage’s 4’33”. Not many musical compositions can capture the spirit of an allied summit, but this one does.

THE EUROPEANS: Shortly before ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning in June, Mark Rutte entered the World Forum Convention Centre auditorium in The Hague to open the NATO summit. He might have chewed his nails in the limo; he surely dreaded this meeting of the most powerful leaders on his continent, with the North American they depend on.

The Americans created the alliance he leads. The Secretary General’s mission was to keep the founders of NATO from taking their troops, weapons and military capabilities and going home.

Rutte labored since he took the job to make this meeting a success. In June alone he visited Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden and attended the G7 in Canada, trying to pull together and hold tight to NATO cohesion. Now, on a mild summer day with a gentle wind off de Nordsee, the longest-serving prime minister in Dutch history welcomed the allies to his hometown. Read more »

Brian Wilson, Love, and My Need for Mercy

by Scott Samuelson

One of my big regrets in life, the kind that tortures me at three in the morning, may not seem like a big deal when you first hear about it: I once said that I hated the Beach Boys.

In the wake of Brian Wilson’s death, I want to apologize for that vicious lie—though I’m afraid that my apology comes decades too late to the one person I really wish I could give it to.

The Beach Boys made the music that I first fell in love with. When I was a kid in the early 1980s, my family had only a handful of records and tapes. We rarely listened to music unless it happened to come from the TV. I wanted to try out a new pair of headphones and plugged them into the boombox that my mom and sisters used for their Jane Fonda workout. Because the Beach Boys compilation Endless Summer was lying around, it was what I stuck into the tape deck.

A few drumbeats—suddenly the glorious ahh-ahh-ahh-ahhs of “Don’t Worry, Baby”! Enchanted voices and swirling instruments appeared out of nowhere. It was the first time in my life that my mind was blown by music. Brian Wilson had unlocked the door where my soul was. Was I supposed to worry or not? I had no idea, but I was thrilled whenever the chorus cycled around. Immersed in the headphones, I rewound the tune and listened to it over and over.

“Little Deuce Coupe,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” “California Girls”—I came to adore every song on the album. “In My Room” was about just what I was feeling when I was listening to “In My Room.”

At the same time that I was falling in love with the Beach Boys, I started hanging out with a fourth-grade classmate of mine named Pammy. We’d spend all recess talking atop the monkey bars. The other kids began to taunt us about K-I-S-S-I-N-G. We were just nine years old. I had no idea what a romantic relationship would involve beyond chatting all recess. But our classmates weren’t wrong. She entered into that room inside me that the music of Brian Wilson had opened.

One day I peered into her eyes and said, “Have you ever heard any songs by the Beach Boys?” Little dimples formed in her cheeks, “I love the Beach Boys! My favorite album is Endless Summer!” She told me I should also check out the song “Good Vibrations,” which to me was an insider tip about a deep cut. I was in heaven. Read more »

Last Of The Traditional Wood Craftsmen

by Mike Bendzela

Junior high woodshop project made with hand tools and all hand-planed. Pictured here hanging upside down as the eye hook came out of the other end long ago.

One of the last of the traditional wood craftsmen in New England was born in the nineteen-fifties outside Boston, appropriately, historic home of many spindle turners and chair caners, lumber joiners and paint-stainers. His most vivid memories of the period involve his grandmother’s house in Cambridge, including the smell of cabbage from her tenants boiling dinner in their kitchenettes. After his parents’ marriage and his birth, the family lived on the first floor of her house for several years before moving further out of town. Unbelievably, even though he would have been only around two years old at the time, he remembers the fancy wallpaper that was still in the room and all the original woodwork having been painted white from earlier owners who had tried to un-Victorianize the old house.

Throughout his childhood he would frequently visit his grandmother’s house, and he can describe the layout of the place even though he was less than eight years old at the time. The structure was a late nineteenth century three-storey, mansard-roofed tenement building that was originally a single-family home with a carriage shed. The second floor consisted of three great rooms with double doors that his grandmother shared with tenants. His father had built a wall to make a little room four feet wide between two big rooms to function as a kitchenette for one of the tenants. The room he stayed in as a boy on the third floor was only large enough to accommodate a three-foot wide bed, an armoire, and a chair. He understood at the time that the room’s small size corresponded to the layout of the bathroom below and that the diminished ceiling was caused by the pitch of the mansard roof above. He claims to be able to draw the entire house from memory to this day. Read more »

What I Learned from the Birds

by Carol A Westbrook

Hungry baby sparrows awaiting feedings

As the days get longer and warmer and more humid, and the early spring flowers start to bloom, and the flowering trees show their finest… there’s an anticipation in the air…Then suddenly one morning you hear it—the birdsong is back. After a winter of silence you can now hear the birds. The migratory birds are returning from the south.

The towns that lie at the southern end of Lake Michigan have a special significance for migratory birds, because we are along the main flyway. As the migratory birds fly north they come upon a large body of water they must cross—lake Michigan. Tired of flying almost non-stop, eating insects that they catch on the wing, avoiding predators, they stop. They stop at an area with an abundance of trees, and they find wetlands, fields, gardens, and even birdfeeders remembered from last year. Refreshed, some resume flying around or over the lake headed to their ancestral homelands; others decide to remain in the area and breed. Because birds of the same species tend to move north at about the same time they arrive within a few days of each other. Because of the relatively large number of birds of the same species, finding a mate is straightforward.

This year I was fortunate to have several birdhouses and feeders under the eaves in front of the house, near a window where I generally sit and do my writing. I was able to follow the nesting and breeding behavior of several species of birds—the black-capped chickadee, the house sparrow, and the ruby-throated hummingbird. These birds are known as altricial birds, which are born blind and featherless, as are most of our songbirds. Other birds, such as fowl and waterbirds, fall into the precocial category: they are born with feathers and eyes open, and are independent and mobile a few days after hatching. I was interested in parental behavior and the division of labor between the sexes in caring for altricial birds, as they require a lot of care before they are able to live independently. Read more »

Thursday, July 3, 2025

Letters

by Richard Farr

Kitagawa Utamaro: Woman Reading a Letter

My sister and I live five thousand miles apart, but since we both reside in the early twenty-first century it’s easy to stay in touch. Of the many channels available to us we use WhatsApp messages mostly, with a call once a week or so. You might wonder then why we have chosen to revive the old old habit of writing letters to one another. The answer is not far to seek — it’s inefficient.

Fifty-some years ago, growing up in rural England, our parents had a black GPO 700-series telephone that weighed as much as an iron kettle. A settled part of the Christmas ritual was to book a call in advance with the International Operator, gather around at the appointed hour, and spend not a second more than three minutes very expensively exchanging the season’s greetings with our cousins in Ottawa.  

Nobody wants to go back to that, but in leaving it behind we lost something. As we have learned from the instant availability of all music, freedom from constraint has costs. We anticipated those special moments of communication, viewed them from various angles, and discussed them in advance. So it is with writing: we used to think about it. Now we drop texts and emails by the bushel, like overloaded September trees. Our devices have made it easy for us to “communicate” almost literally without a thought. 

People who write for a living, and therefore need to write with care, often report that their work is frustrating, irksome, paralysingly difficult, and at the same time comforting, exhilarating, and as optional as oxygen. Somerset Maugham: “We do not write because we want to. We write because we have to.” Red Smith: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit sown at the typewriter and open a vein.” George Orwell: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” 

Orwell is only half correct about my demon. I can’t resist it, but I understand it pretty well. Many aspects of the world and my place in it are puzzling to me; itching for enlightenment, I’m forever attempting to think about them. But I’m bad at thinking: trying to think is a recipe for staring out of the window. The subject could be what’s happening in the Middle East, whether we have free will, or why Chapter Fifteen of the novel I’m working on has become so truculent and unbiddable. In each case, it’s only when I put my head down and write (and write, and delete, and rewrite) that actual thinking occurs. On a good day, careful, intricate writing allows me to approach careful, intricate thinking. Not often. As the historian David McCullough put it, “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

Good writing can be casual, though, and the written personal letter is a gloriously special form because of the opportunity it offers us — unlike the two years on a novel or the two minutes on an email — to find a line between casualness and care.   Read more »

I Have Nothing to Say; I Must Say It

by TJ Price

“What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.” —Gilles Deleuze

I struggle sometimes to write this column. See, it forces me to confront an essential question, which is: what exactly do I have to say? Which of course then leads to what exactly do I have to say that is worth saying? My typical form of writing originates from the headwaters of poetry—when it comes to critique or feedback, I prefer the analysis of syntax over plot structure and debate regarding semantic choice over character development. But when I consider this column space, the blankness of it is daunting. Because of its placement in the larger magazine, it is something which I know will be read, or at least scrolled past, so I have to recalibrate my thinking to encompass getting attention.

image not found

One of the themes I have been working with a lot lately in my fiction writing is this very thing: drawing attention to oneself, akin to the Lacanian theory of the Gaze, but extrapolated outward, in the direction of cosmic horror. I am aware that this is not a feeling many others share. Some folks even thrive on attention, craving the spotlight, sometimes to the extent of elbowing others out of the way. This feeling is anathema to me—I recall the cartoons of my youth, in which the hapless creature, suffused with pride, looks down to see the big black X painted on the ground they stand. This mark, of course, is quickly blotted out by the rapidly-expanding shadow of something enormous, plummeting from an unknown point above. Then, cue the quick-cuts: wilting ears, constricting pupils (maybe a little umbrella,) followed by the decisive and inevitable sound of a discordant piano exploding on impact, the woozy creature’s teeth replaced by tinkling ivories.

To me, being noticed is terrifying enough when it’s just another human on the other end of the Gaze. I don’t speak of casual interaction in neutral spaces, a soft frisson of recognition and dismissal, though—for me, to be noticed implies a certain level of interest or fascination. A sort of hunger, even. It’s the cruel potential for envy or jealousy that frightens me, I think. Envy coupled with power. Read more »

A Look in the Mirror #2: More Loopy Loonies

by Andrea Scrima

For the past ten years, Andrea Scrima has been working on a group of drawings entitled LOOPY LOONIES. The result is a visual vocabulary of splats, speech bubbles, animated letters, and other anthropomorphized figures that take contemporary comic and cartoon images and the violence imbedded in them as their point of departure. Against the backdrop of world political events of the past several years—war, pandemic, the ever-widening divisions in society—the drawings spell out words such as NO (an expression of dissent), EWWW (an expression of disgust), OWWW (an expression of pain), or EEEK (an expression of fear). The morally critical aspects of Scrima’s literary work take a new turn in her art and vice versa: a loss of words is countered first with visual and then with linguistic means. Out of this encounter, a series of texts ensue that explore topics such as the abuse of language, the difference between compassion and empathy, and the nature of moral contempt and disgust. 

Part I of this project can be seen and read HERE

Part II of this project can be seen and read HERE

Part III of this project can be seen and read HERE

Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen HERE

 

Andrea Scrima, LOOPY LOONIES. Series of drawings 35 x 35 each, graphite on paper. Exhibition view: Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, June 2024.

10. AWWW

I look at you and offer an encouraging smile: it’s an awkward moment. You tell me of your suffering and I feign compassion. I feel my face subtly shift as it transforms into its own mask: eyes slightly widened, brow furrowed, I gaze back at you in simulated empathy. Seated opposite me, you are stripped bare; you expose your weakness. Then something in you collects itself, grows cautious, alert suddenly to the spectacle of your unprotected state and your own vulnerable self and my detached vantage as I coolly view you. You excuse yourself, embarrassed; I assure you that there is no need for apologies.

We praise people for enduring their pain in silence; admiringly, we say that they never complain. But do we consider their loneliness as they spare us the obligation of expressing sympathy, of imagining ourselves in their place? Surely we wish no harm; surely our response is sincere: we would do anything to alleviate their suffering, or so we believe. We think of Schadenfreude as a despicable character trait. We wince at the sight of physical injury, the display of the self unraveled, unable to maintain its composure, its dignity and pride. But we are also curious, absorbed by an almost scientific interest. Finally, we give in to our fascination—so these are the symptoms of a body as it breaks down; these are the utterances of a mind as it falls apart. Safe in our perch of good health, we observe the soul in all its nakedness as it watches its future shrink before it, dissolve into the vanishing point of an unknown horizon. Read more »

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Swords and Ploughshares: Of Those Who Kill and Those Who Grow

by Mark Harvey

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Watching Israel and Iran lob bombs at each other these last few weeks makes me tired. Just when the world seemed completely destabilized and clinically looney, two countries who both trace their religions back to Abraham or Ibrahim decide to make things worse. I know you’re supposed to reach for the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs or parse treaties on nuclear non-proliferation to make sense of this missile orgy, but this latest war might make you reach for your earplugs and blindfold instead.

It’s easy to come up with reasons why one of these fanatical leaders–Ali Kamenei or Benjamin Netanyahu— is right and the other is wrong, back it up with obscure historical data and tables of fissionable materials, but there might be a simpler explanation: a good portion of mankind lives in the reptilian and limbic parts of the human brain, is soaked in the desire for revenge, and is completely lacking in reason and forbearance.

In the few days since I began writing this, the United States has cast our lot into the mess with bombing sorties over Iran as well. This is all red meat for the pundits of every stripe. Along with the hypersonic missiles flying back and forth over the Zagros Mountains and the Syrian Desert, you can bet there will be a barrage of hyperbolic opinion pieces either extolling or condemning the war.

My college degree was in International Studies and I used to try to find some real logic in foreign affairs. There were a few writers and theorists like the late George Kennan and Samuel Huntington who actually did a pretty good job of breaking down international affairs into some sort of mechanics or predictable psychology. Huntington believed that the modern conflicts were determined by the clash of cultures and religions, not economics. Read more »

I Understand You’ve Been Running From the Man

by Dilip D’Souza

Superimposed human and sloth feet
Superimposed impressions of human and sloth feet (from the Bustos paper)

Many years ago, I spent a lazy evening in the Parque Balvanero Vargas in Limón, Costa Rica. I use that word deliberately, because I was lulled into laziness by the animal I was watching. In a diary I kept about that trip are these lines: “A small sloth is hanging upside down and munching on the leaves, a cat-sized light brown mat of hair. After a while he turns and comes near enough to touch. That appears to startle him, though his surprise is as slow and measured as his movements.”

That charming experience came back to mind some years after that, when I read a paper about giant sloths. A team of scientists examined a series of fossil sloth footprints in the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. They dated these prints to 11,000 years ago, that dating a feat in itself for various reasons. But their further inferences from these ancient impressions in the clay were even more impressive, and their paper tells that story. (David Bustos et al, Footprints preserve terminal Pleistocene hunt? Human-sloth interactions in North America, ScienceAdvances, 25 April 2018.)

Among the prints the sloths left were several human ones. Examining them closely, the scientists concluded that these humans were probably stalking and harrying a giant sloth; that the animal eventually stopped to face its tormentors; that the humans may have then run up to throw spears at the sloth. That is, these tracks in White Sands may be telling the story of a long-ago hunt. And if that’s so, and if humans did regularly hunt those animals, they may be part of why giant sloths are now extinct.

All fascinating, yet the reason all this came back to mind this week is still another paper. Or two, actually.

Some background: In the 1970s, RM Alexander studied fossil “trackways”, like the one in White Sands. He measured stride lengths – the distance between successive impressions of the same foot – of the animals that had left footprints. The question he wanted to answer was, how fast did these ancient animals move? More to the point, could he estimate that speed from just this fossil record of footprints? Read more »

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

The Via Appia: Elegy For a Queen

by Alizah Holstein

A painting of a swampy area dotted with flowers and cypress trees below an orange sunset
Pontine Marshes by Antonio Reyna Manescau

Think of a Roman monument. What leaps to mind? The Pantheon? The Colosseum? The Arch of Constantine? Maybe even the aqueducts? I’ll wager that when you thought of the word “monuments,” your imagination traveled upwards instead of down. For what is a monument if not a tall, grand thing, large, and to some perhaps, looming? I do recognize it’s possible—though unlikely—that you conjured the catacombs. And it’s even less likely that you thought of roads.

Cultural critic Robert Hughes described roads as Rome’s greatest physical monuments. Their network extended some 50-75,000 miles and they were the sine qua non of Rome’s expansion. I should add a minor but nonetheless relevant detail here: some of my happiest moments have been spent on Roman roads. As were some of yours, in all likelihood, if you have ever felt ebullient in Rome or on the Italian peninsula, or indeed in Spain or France or England or Germany or the Balkans or Greece or Turkey or Syria or Israel or Gaza or Egypt or Algeria or Morocco.

Let me put another question to you. What is your favorite Roman road? If you’re a pilgrim, you might say the Via Francigena. And should you offer the Via Flaminia, Via Aurelia, or Via Aemilia or some other ancient equivalent, I imagine you have your reasons. But if you are a romantic like me, the only possible answer is the Via Appia, which is, after all, the regina viarum, the queen of roads. Think of cypress trees, ancient, crumbling tombs, jasmine and pinecones and fields of wildflowers. Think also of tourist traps, gladiator impersonators, a War World II massacre site, and prostitution. Think of paradox as the defining feature of the human condition. Still, even its name is beautiful: Via Appia. Look at all those a’s and i’s, like a palindrome just off its center, the V and A the very valleys and arêtes through which the road cuts. Read more »

Our first loss

by Thomas Fernandes

Rafflesia: When pop culture is our best window into biodiversity

We might know more about biodiversity than ever before, yet we see it less. When life is talked about as “carbon sinks,” “pollinator services,” or “extinction curves,” it flattens into numbers: computable but unfeeling. But the loss we face isn’t just biological. It’s perceptual. We no longer notice life. Our first loss, then, may not be biodiversity itself, but our ability to see it. And nowhere is this blindness more widespread, or more foundational, than with plants.

Plant blindness is not simply a lack of interest in flora but a systemic failure to perceive the living structure of the world around us. We might pause for a flower’s scent or color, but how often do we notice the complex strategies behind its form?

Let’s begin, then, not with the abstract notion of biodiversity, but with the particular of flowering plants. At first, they had no roots, relying on fungi to supply water and nutrients in exchange for sugars produced by the plant through photosynthesis. With time plants started to develop their own roots systems but still lacked flowers. They were mostly ferns and conifers like pines.

In a baffling new evolution angiosperm (flowering plants) appeared about 170 million years ago. Flowers are the product of natural selection to attract and use pollinators to reproduce. They use scent, color, shape and sometimes temperature to signal to pollinators. Smell for instance is a primary attractor for many pollinators. In Europe, flowers that rely on bees and butterflies often emit sweet scents. But not all strategies are pleasant to us.

The Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower, smells like rotting meat to attract flies. The Titan Arum goes further, heating itself to human body temperature to volatilize more effectively corpse smelling compounds detectable hundreds of meters away. The temperature also imitates that of a body, an attractor in itself for carrion beetles. Read more »

Monday, June 30, 2025

Can We Still Have a Soul?

by Katalin Balog

It was the first day of a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in 2016. We were about to participate in a ritual of chants and burning sage. Before we proceeded outside, the head teacher asked all of us to invite someone we would like to share this moment with. Instantly and vividly, my grandfather appeared in my mind. I found the defiance embodied in this choice shocking. My grandfather was the rock of my childhood. Kind, optimistic, a fountain of knowledge about the world, a lover of poetry and music, he was the undisputed authority in the family. He was a heir of the Enlightenment, and he would have been horrified by my association with religion, even the nontheistic Buddhist variety. At that moment, I realized that when the chips were down, I would choose my Enlightenment heritage over the enlightenment Buddhism promised. I was at this retreat (and later joining a synagogue) in an effort to recover parts of my soul that my secular rationalist upbringing made me feel I was missing. My being here was my rebellion against this very Enlightenment heritage.

But once here, feelings of unease increased with every chant about the “basic goodness” of humans, with every question waved away with impatience, with every forced debate on topics the leader of the organization set for his ostensibly grown-up disciples, with the disapproving jibes about “too much thinking”. The dissonance became too much, and by the end of the retreat – six long weeks later – I was out, no longer a disciple.

The tension I was experiencing was a small manifestation of the central problem of modernity. Can the common-sense, first-person, subjective view of ourselves as souls or subjects be reconciled with a scientifically informed, objective perspective? Can reason be overridden in the name of mindfulness, of systematic attention to subjective experience? This question preoccupied two very different thinkers of the 19th century, Auguste Comte and Søren Kierkegaard, who, though they seem to have been unaware of each other, lived at the same time and have come to very different conclusions. Read more »