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I Went Out To See All the Downed Trees

Nothing was where it was supposed to be
or even where it was twenty minutes ago,
one of the only times I’ve understood
what nature was trying to say
to me. But the people I always see
at the farmers market being very specific
about their mushroom selection weren’t
listening, already dragging branches
onto the curb, fixing their lawns,
resetting their Black Lives Matter signs.
These were the people blasting
‘Celebrate good times, come on!’
from their front porch window
on the day Joe Biden was elected.
One of them was high-fiving
a police officer. The branches were still green,
on the ground. The sun hadn’t browned
the dead leaves yet. There was part
of me that trusted them, my neighbors.
I hadn’t locked my door when I left.
One neighbor said, I hired an arborist
just a few weeks ago, and he said
this tree was fine. The neighbor
motioned toward a tree currently
pulling black power lines down
on top of their red Subaru.
Who could afford an arborist?
I would never own a house,
or a tree, or my own car,
but these were my neighbors, and we
had to clean this up together.

by Sasha Debevee-McKenny
from The Poetry Society Literary Hub

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Sopan Deb at the New York Times:

Chuck Norris once gave a horse an uppercut and now we have giraffes.

Chuck Norris doesn’t sleep. He waits.

Chuck Norris is so tough he can slam a revolving door.

Chuck Norris’s calendar goes straight from March 31 to April 2, because no one fools Chuck Norris.

There was a time — in the days when the internet was still a force for fun — when Chuck Norris jokes flooded our screens.

It was the mid-2000s. Twitter and Facebook were not yet ascendant. We weren’t yet glued to our phones. People were still making prank calls using Jack Black soundboards. We allowed Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” to become a megahit.

And Norris unwittingly became a pioneer of memedom.

More here.

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Robert Lynch at The Laughing Ape:

Robert Trivers, who died on March 12, 2026, was arguably the most important evolutionary theorist since Darwin. He had a rare gift for seeing through the messy clutter of life and revealing the underlying logic beneath it. E. O. Wilson called him “one of the most influential and consistently correct theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time.” Steven Pinker described him as “one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought.”

I was Robert’s graduate student at Rutgers from 2006 to 2014. Long before I knew him personally, however, he had already established himself as one of the most original and insightful scientists of the twentieth century. In an astonishing series of papers in the early 1970s, he changed forever our understanding of evolution and social behavior.

The first, published while he was still a graduate student at Harvard, confronted one of the deepest problems in evolutionary theory: how can natural selection favor cooperation between non-relatives? In The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism Trivers proposed that cooperation could evolve when the same individuals interacted repeatedly, making it advantageous to help those who were likely to help in return while avoiding cheaters who took benefits without reciprocating — i.e.“you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

More here.

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Quico Toro at Persuasion:

There used to be an academic discipline centered on a straightforward question: what helps poor countries get richer? It was called development economics, and it was the intellectual engine behind sprawling government bureaucracies: USAID, Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID), the World Bank, and many others.

Across the rich world, left and right understood these entities to be in the national interest. Then, starting in the early 2000s, that discipline began to morph into something different—something so narrowly rooted in progressive pieties that, when the political winds shifted, the government programs built on its insights could be gutted without anyone much caring.

What happened?

More here.

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Robert Mariani at The New Atlantis:

You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America. The visual evidence is everywhere. Start with what you can see.

You’re in a small town in Wisconsin, the heart of Normal America. The transgender assistant manager at CVS has a septum piercing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads “Finn.” A block away, the 4channer construction worker in the Sam Hyde shooter shirt listens to Bladee and plots his impending virality. At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle.

These aren’t random weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aesthetic bleeding through the cubicles: anime stickers on laptops, Discord running on second monitors. They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were. I call them dinergoths: what you get when economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.

more here.

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Justin Smith-Ruiu at Wondercabinet:

Higher education is no longer expanding; it is contracting, or transforming to the point of total discontinuity with what it had once been. It is only natural that this transformation should bring with it a rediscovery of the historical fact that there is nothing intrinsically “elite” about reading Homer or Shakespeare. Yorkshire coal miners used to do it, together, with great joy and satisfaction. It was a lie and a betrayal on the part of the hermeneuticists of suspicion to have told their students—and their deans—that humanistic inquiry is, in its essence, anything but democratic. The humanities are democratic precisely because they do not come down to us through blood ties, but must be cultivated anew over the course of an individual life. As Seneca said: “If there is any good in philosophy, it is this—that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods.” (Of course, since the early 20th century the dominant strain of Anglophone philosophy has sought to distance itself from the humanities and to find its niche somewhere closer to the positive sciences—yet another case of hoverflies sneaking into the beehive. But this has been a futile effort—one which, again, we’ll have to address on another occasion.)

more here.

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Will Self in Harper’s Magazine:

How could we satirize all sorts of different people, with different faiths, without implicitly arguing that they should abandon their ethical precepts in favor of our supposedly superior ones? Under such circumstances, all the satirist could responsibly do—especially if he lacked moral certainty himself—was get his readers to think about the problems they were all facing.

The test case for this had been the publication of Salman Rushdie’s not-unsatiric novel The Satanic Verses: Western liberals convulsed over the fatwa issued against the author by Iran’s ayatollah—largely because they were concerned about an enemy from within. Not that liberals would acknowledge their own bad faith in this regard; if they could have, they’d have had to do a lot of hard thinking, instead of indulging in the sort of empty attitudinizing many did when the next climacteric arrived, in the form of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which caused certain satirists, such as my old friend Martin Amis (who really should have known better), to completely abandon their moral compasses and argue that the Muslim community deserved “to suffer until it gets its house in order.” And if a society’s most prominent public intellectuals are incapable of sustaining a discourse informed by a defined position on right and wrong, then there really is no discourse anymore.

More here.

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Gemma Conroy in Nature:

The brain is a noisy place. Sometimes two brain regions that are far apart are active at the same time, suggesting that they work together to support the same function. Such regions are said to be functionally connected, even though they do not necessarily sit close to each other in the brain.

To understand how this functional connectivity is organized, brain areas are plotted along a scale, or axis, on the basis of their connectivity patterns with the rest of the brain, says study co-author Patrick Taylor, a computer scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who focuses on neuroscience. There are three main functional axes. The sensory-to-association axis, for example, allows researchers to describe brain regions that lie along a continuum from those that focus mainly on processing sensory information to those that are engaged in sophisticated processes such as integrating sensory information into complex thought. The brain regions at each point along the axis have similar patterns of connectivity.

More here.

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The first notion of Spoon River poems came to its author upon reading a Greek Anthology.  After reading he was determined to write his own anthology following a conversation with his mother of the old days. He began to write Spoon River to give voices to the small-town dead and living as “characters interlocked by fate.” Here is one of the
214 poems written over some ten months:

Yee Bow

They got me into Sunday-school
in Spoon River
And tried to get me to drop Confucius for Jesus.
I could have been worse off
If I had tried to get them to drop Jesus for Confucius.
For, without any warning, as if it were a prank,
And sneaking up behind me, Harry Wiley,
The minister’s son, caved my ribs into my lungs,
With a blow of his fist. Now I shall never
sleep with my ancestors in Pekin,
And no children shall worship at my grave.

by Edward Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology
Collier Books, NY 1962

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Rebecca Morelle, Alison Francis, Paul Sargeant and the Visual Journalism team at the BBC:

Four astronauts will take a trip of more than half a million miles around our celestial neighbour and back home in a mission filled with wonderment, but also danger.

Nasa’s Artemis II mission – which is scheduled to launch as soon as 1 April – will bring us stunning views of the Moon and a new understanding of the lunar environment.

It will also pave the way for a landing and, eventually, a Moon base – our first step in learning how to live on another world.

But the voyage comes with serious risks – the crew will fly in a spacecraft never used by humans before.

And there will be personal challenges: the astronauts will spend 10 days cramped together in a spacecraft the size of a minibus.

So how will this high-stakes mission work?

More here.

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Blake Scott at H-Environment:

Why is it that a tourist can visit Panama—or any “supposedly fun” vacation destination from Baja to Colombia—and be welcomed like the second coming of divine capitalism? Yet at the same time, a weary migrant traveling through the same country is robbed and abused by state officials and officers they encounter along the way? The migrant journey, marked by mistreatment, also costs far more financially than the average tourist’s week-long vacation package. This problem of mobility/immobility is at the core of our modern predicament. And in recent years, like many contemporary crises, it appears to be worsening—especially in the Americas, from Minneapolis to Texas and southward along the maritime and land routes linking the United States with South America.

It is a moral contradiction with life-and-death consequences: Some people are permitted to travel in comfort and luxury, while others are forced to move in the shadows of legality, facing violence and uncertainty.

For anyone seeking to better understand this situation, journalist Belén Fernández’s newest book, The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey Through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas, is essential reading. The Darién—a stretch of undeveloped rainforest and mountainous terrain separating Colombia and Panama—is the only “gap” in the Pan-American Highway, which otherwise runs from Alaska to Patagonia.

More here.

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Megan O’Grady in The Yale Review:

I had failed to grasp an obvious fact of parenthood: that I had bound myself irrevocably to the world and made myself freshly vulnerable to it. Nothing had prepared me for the cruelty of a culture that aggressively advocates breastfeeding and attachment parenting but has no federally mandated paid family leave. (Working wasn’t optional for me, as it had been for my mother; as a writer under contract, I was back at my desk within ten days.) I had not really understood, before giving birth, that parenthood was where society met my body, and that caregivers were continually making up for civilization’s many lacks, expected to embody all things lovingly boundless, unconditional, and selfless in a bottom-line world. I felt reduced to a symbolic ideal that didn’t align with the values of the society in which I existed as an actual woman, under real circumstances.

More here.

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Arjun Appadurai in The Wire:

The shocking West Asian war unleashed by the USA and Israel is a source of relief to Donald Trump because it has temporarily taken media attention away from his greatest domestic  scandal, his long and sordid ties with the deceased sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. But the Epstein story will return to haunt Trump forever.

It is now evident that Jeffrey Epstein was both a financial conman and a depraved sex trafficker. These were his twin paths to cross breeding the most disparate elites on both sides of the Atlantic, and well beyond. He was the patriarch of what is now often called The Epstein Class. The connection between the sexual and financial elements of his career merit a closer look, which involves two keywords in modern finance: leverage and derivatives.

More here.

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