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Hope and Love

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one –
not knowing even
that was what he did –
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.

by Jane Hirshfield

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Ryan Ruby in Bookforum:

DESPITE HER REPUTATION as a long-winded writer, Gertrude Stein had a talent for pithiness. Of Oakland, the town where she grew up, she famously remarked: “There is no there, there.” Of one of her literary nemeses, Ezra Pound: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if not, not.” Of the younger American expat writers who flocked to Paris during the ’20s: “You are all a lost generation.” Of the atomic age: “Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” Of pithy remarks: “Remarks are not literature.”

According to Alice B. Toklas, the woman who had for forty years served as her devoted secretary, editor, cook, bouncer, companion, and lover—as well as the narrator of her most famous book—Stein kept her wits and her wit to the very end. On July 27, 1946, the two waited in a hospital in a suburb of Paris, where Stein, who was suffering from stomach cancer, would undergo the surgery that would kill her. Toklas recalls: “I sat next to her and she said to me in the early afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question?”

More here.

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Erin McMullen in Time Magazine:

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Brittany Wallman, Aaron Leibowitz, Shradha Dinesh, Susan Merriam, Daniel Rivero and Joshua Ceballos at the Miami Herald:

Brightline is the nation’s most dangerous passenger train, reporters found, killing someone every 13 days of service, on average. In addition to those deaths, 99 people have been injured. In at least 101 cases, the train crashed into vehicles, but no one was hurt.

The company has not been found at fault for any of the deaths on its tracks. It has faced at least a dozen lawsuits for deaths and injuries, according to court records. None have gone to trial. Some have been settled for undisclosed amounts. In a written statement, Michael Lefevre, Brightline’s vice president of operations, reiterated what the company has been saying for years — that the deaths were self-inflicted.

More here.

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Maziar Motamedi at Al Jazeera:

Authorities are scrambling to provide drinking water across Iran, particularly in the capital, Tehran, as Iranians grapple with the effects of multiple ongoing crises.

If there is no rain by next month, water will have to be rationed in Tehran; in fact, the city of 10 million may even have to be evacuated, President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a speech on Friday.

While experts say evacuating the city is a last resort that will likely not come to pass, the president’s stark warning is indicative of the mammoth burden facing the country of more than 90 million, its ailing economy reeling under sanctions.

Iran is now grappling with its sixth consecutive year of drought, while heatwaves pushed temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) during the summer.

The past water year, ending in late September 2025, was one of the driest on record, with the current year shaping up to be worse, with Iran receiving only 2.3mm (0.09 inches) of precipitation by early November, down by 81 percent compared with the historical average of the same period, the Meteorological Organization said.

More here.

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Quico Toro at Persuasion:

The yearly Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—COP, to habitués—has morphed, over the years, into a kind of travelling circus grotesquely mismatched to the problem it’s meant to address.

There’s a soul-deadening regularity to the proceedings. Tens of thousands of politicians, negotiators, activists, NGO-types, journalists, and hangers-on of every description declare themselves shocked that global carbon emissions are even higher now than they were when they met a year earlier. Looking solemn, they make heartfelt pledges to do better, to really change this time. A year later, they do it all again.

Having gone through this rigamarole thirty times now, you’d think the world would have caught on that the COP process doesn’t work, and doing it harder won’t help.

But why doesn’t it work?

More here.

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Barry Schwabsky at The Point:

Everyone agrees that modern poetry in France—and therefore in Europe—starts with Charles Baudelaire. But no one agrees on why. His successors, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, are each in their own way more patently radical, and the same is true of his American contemporary Walt Whitman. How modern do you have to be to be a modern? Compared to their works, those of Baudelaire, despite their sulfurous aroma, are far more traditional; while he was an early adopter of the prose poem, his most influential poetry used received forms. “Baudelaire accomplished what classical prosody had always required, or rather what it had inaugurated. … His prosody has the same spiritual monotony as Racine’s,” Yves Bonnefoy once remarked. And beyond matters of form, some of Baudelaire’s content was familiar too. His exacerbated ambivalence toward his Haitian-born lover Jeanne Duval, the subject of so many of his poems, is as ancient as Catullus’s odi et amo; praise of drunkenness dates back to the Greeks; and his proud sense of damnation, of his “Heart great with rancor and bitter desires,” would have been second-hand news to Lord Byron. Was the “new shudder” that Victor Hugo perceived in Baudelaire’s writing new enough to make him, rather than the last of the Romantics (the one in whose work Romanticism, you might say, curdled), the first of the moderns?

more here.

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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

Somehow I keep coming back to Nicholas of Cusa, that late medieval Renaissance man (1401-1464), a devout church leader and mathematical mystic who was at the same time one of the founders of modern experimental science—propagator, for example, of some of the first formal experiments in biology (proving that trees somehow absorb nourishment from the air, and that air, for that matter, has weight) and advocate, among other things, of the notion that the earth, far from being the center of the universe, might itself be in motion around the sun (this a good two generations before Copernicus), and yet, for all that, a cautionary skeptic as to the limits of that kind of quantifiable knowledge and thus, likewise, a critic of the then-reigning Aristotelian/Thomistic worldview. No, he would regularly insist, one could never achieve knowledge of God, or, for that matter, of the wholeness of existence, through the systematic accretion of more and more factual knowledge. Picture, he would suggest, an n-sided equilateral polygon nested inside a circle, and now keep adding to the number of its sides: triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, and so forth. The more sides you added, the closer it might seem that you were getting to the bounding circle—and yet, he insisted, in another sense, the farther away you would in fact be getting. Because a million-sided regular polygon, say, has, precisely, a million sides and a million angles, whereas a circle has none, or maybe at most one.

more here.

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Saudade

A thousand years ago a song was sung
near a campfire at night
by a singer who was alone, exiled
perhaps, or seeking;

a song whose words were not meant
to be understood, only to be heard,
offered to the silence
and sung in the key of loss.

It confirmed the universe is empty
and dark and knows nothing of us.
Of what we offer, life takes what it wants
and goes.

Exhausted with living
we all listen for a sound
we don’t expect to hear.

A thousand years ago a singer
tended the last coals of a fire and sang
the most beautiful song ever sung,

which no one heard,
and it is the song I need now.

by Robert Rice
from Rattle #89, Fall 2025

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From The World Economic Forum:

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Matt Lutz at Humean Being:

Within the broader discipline of philosophy, there is a split between what is called “analytic philosophy” and what is called “continental philosophy.” The gulf between these two camps is wide, and the dispute between them extremely acrimonious, although it is hard to articulate precisely what the difference between the two is. Any proposed account of this distinction – analytic philosophers are like this, while continentals are like that – will inevitably result in very angry objections. For one thing, any proposed distinction will inevitably mischaracterize several paradigmatic continental or analytic philosophers. But more importantly, the person proposing the distinction is usually a partisan of one camp or the other, and they characterize the distinction in terms that are extremely flattering to their own side. “Analytic philosophers prize rigor and clarity,” says that analytic philosopher, “whereas continentals do not.” “Go fuck yourself,” the continental philosopher replies.

Despite the difficulty with giving a strict characterization, analytic philosophy and continental philosophy have very different vibes.

More here.

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Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine:

Rats have gotten a bad reputation over the years for being dirty, garbage-eating carriers of disease. But these ubiquitous rodents are also clever and capable of learning complex tasks, even using their imaginations to navigate in virtual reality.

Now, new research adds another odd skill to their résumés: hunting bats. In a new study published in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation, scientists describe the first-ever observations of brown rats snatching bats out of the air, then chowing down.

The novel behavior is a “remarkable” example of the rodents’ ability to make the most of their environment, the researchers write.

But it may also spell bad news: The two species could be exchanging pathogens—interactions that could eventually trickle down to affect human health—and the rats, which are not native to Germany, might be killing enough bats to harm the local populations.

More here.

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