by Bill Murray

At the end of the road, Kirkenes punches above its weight

It’s different in the Arctic. Norwegians who live here make their lives amid long cold winters, seasons of all daylight and then all-day darkness, and with a neighbor to the east now an implacable foe.

Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county, is bigger than Denmark or Estonia, but with a population roughly the size of a suburb in Oslo, the Norwegian capital.

For those of us who don’t live here, the first and biggest difference is that Finnmark is governed by extremes of light and dark. Just now, in the middle of August, the Arctic is leaping and bounding toward darkness. The days are still over eighteen hours long, but losing more than ten minutes of daylight every twenty-four hours.

Many people think near 24 hour summer sunlight must be unbearable; you’d never get any sleep. In fact, all that sun can be handy, not just for outdoor pursuits, but say you want to read a book at two in the morning. Besides, if you must sleep, there are things called blackout curtains.

Winter darkness is a different story. In Kirkenes, the border town and administrative center of 10,000-person Sør-Varanger municipality, when snowflakes have a mind to, you can imagine they come not in flakes but by the dollop. Storms off the Barents Sea can flatten trees and fling sea foam far inland. Winter air can be so crisp it bites.

Flying in, Finnmark presents as a brawny, manly landscape of gneiss and granite, some of which is nearly as old as the oldest continental crust on Earth, meaning something like three billion years. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

Some people are haunted by words others have spoken, or by events they’ve seen and heard in various media, or by embarrassing episodes from their pasts. I can be just as vulnerable to being haunted by such things, but lately something seemingly trivial has stayed on my mind. Perhaps this is because, as the wider world veers increasingly out of my ken, I have acquired a kind of myopia that steers me toward only what is in front of my own bare eyes. I eschew the media as much as possible, listen only to non-commercial radio, peruse the newspaper a bit over breakfast. I can engage myself with little of it. Call me out of tune. That may be why I have a mind to be haunted by some ants.

Earlier this summer our neighbor, who lives with his wife tucked in the woods across the road from us, began cutting trees around his house because they were dropping limbs and creating a hazard. Knowing we heat with firewood, he asked me if I would like the logs as he had no use for them. I said, “Sure,” and he began bringing over bucket loads of wood with his tractor and dumping them in our dooryard for me to cut up and split.

I spent a couple of weeks with an ax and a mechanical splitter breaking apart the logs as quickly as possible; if I got the wood properly split and stacked now, we could begin burning it by mid-winter. One maple tree he cut down was so large it took several trips with the tractor to transport it to our driveway. He managed to get the trunk cut up into sixteen-inch chunks, the standard size for firewood, which made handling easier for him. The center of this tree was rotted out, so that essentially he brought over fat disks of wood that looked like thick, lumpy wheels with black hubs. There they sat in a heap for at least a week before I could work my way to them with the wood splitter.

Hoisting a maple log onto the splitter platform, I was amazed at what tumbled out of the center of it: a rich, deep-brown material, as if the tree had been stuffed with chocolate cake. How I would love to have a truckload of this compost to put in my garden, I was thinking, and as I engaged the splitter, a crowd of panicked ants poured like water out of the black hole in the log and swarmed my gloves and bare arms. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

This is the story of a young man who, to protect the health of his family and neighbors, dared to take on the town, county, state, and federal government, the US Dept. of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and even the Sierra Club. And he won.

It was 1985. Recently divorced, Rick (that was his name), had custody of his two young children for the three summer months. When the marital home was sold, he promised the children a new home that was better than the previous one; they were delighted when he bought a new beach home on top of a tall sand dune, on the shores of Lake Michigan, near the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, which would eventually become the Indiana Dunes National Park. Both operated under the auspices of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Rick’s house was located in the town of Beverly Shores, Indiana. Beverly Shores began as a resort community planned in1927 by real estate developer Frederick Bartlett of Chicago, but the Great Depression hampered development. The lack of municipal water and sewer systems also contributed to the Town’s slow development. Rick’s new home, as did all the other homes in Town, relied on a well for its potable water supply, and on a septic system to purify waste water before discharging it deep into the ground. National building codes specified how these two facilities were to be constructed and maintained, in what type of soil they could be located, and how far apart septics needed to be sited from wells in order to prevent cross-contamination. The well water was pure and free from contamination so long as the codes were meticulously followed, in particular that septics were sited in dry soil and discharged a safe distance from the wells.

Initially, the Town of Beverly Shores was a collection of inexpensive, small, wooden cottages that housed people with independent income such as artists. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, building began to include larger and more architecturally interesting homes, no doubt stimulated by the stunning surroundings and spectacular views over the lake. About half were sold as vacation homes, and the rest to permanent residents, of which Rick’s home was one. The majority of home buyers came from nearby Chicago; even today, about half of the 600 residents live in Town on a full-time basis and the remainder use their Beverly Shores house as a vacation home.

From the get-go, Beverly Shores was a center of controversy. Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

Field update XXXIXB. Location: inner edge of the Orion Arm. Subject: only known life forms in the Milky Way galaxy. During reporting period, subjects continued uninterrupted passage through the Radcliffe Wave; movement of 1.29E-9 radians on orbit around Sagittarius A.

Estimated number of life form species extinct over this period: 86 million.

Life forms on the planet cultivate and cultivate in a system with a sophisticated level of interdependency. Limited extinctions occurring naturally to that system as a characteristic of adaptation to the environment.

Among the dominant species on the planet, solidarity remains strained while ignorance of other life forms in the web of life on the planet has lessened but remains high. The dominant species has identified roughly 55% of flora, 17% of fauna, and 6% of fungi. Oceans, covering 70% of the planet’s surface, are 20% explored. These numbers increased over the reporting period and serve to indicate the dominant species’ innate inquisitiveness. Concomitantly, the dominant species exhibited a heightened awareness of its dependence on this web of life. Actions nonetheless suggest at best overall indifference and at worst purposeful antagonism toward all non-dominant species, a symptom perhaps of an unwillingness or inability to recognize its own membership in this web. As such, principally due to the dominant species’ choices, biodiversity on the planet has declined 6% and the extinction rate of non-dominant species has accelerated to 175 times the local rate over this term.

Non-dominant species have displayed a capacity to adapt to loss of habitat and partially restore populations and life cycles when the dominant species vacates even (small) portions of the planet. Instances are rare and could prove anomalous.

The dominant species’ own total fertility rate has halved to 2.5, or slightly above replacement level. Life expectancy, while varying widely across the planet, has more than doubled to seventy-three planetary years for the dominant species. This is attributed to lower mortality rates for the youngest and oldest members of the species. Meanwhile, self terminations of life invoked by individual members of the dominant species and assisted or effected by the state—a fantastical social construct for managing groups linked by location and pastimes—have risen sharply and account for 5% of all deaths in the most civilized societies—that is, those with the most time for leisure. Population of the dominant species has risen to 8.2 billion by the end of the reporting period. The annual population growth rate of 0.9% is projected to continue to slow. Read more »

by TJ Price

I first found the book in the used section of Longfellow Books, in Portland Maine, in the early years of the new millennium. The title included a sense of implicit dissonance, and there was no way I could resist it. It was a hardback, and the cover featured art of a book, held open to its middle pages, with the silhouette of a man and a woman cut out of it. On the dust jacket, one of the characters was described as “a meteorologist haunted by her failed predictions.” 

I walked out of the bookstore into a flush of full sunlight, sat down on a bench, and began to read the novel. When I finished it, a day or so later, I closed the cover and took a breath, my head whirling with what I’d just read. A month or so later, I passed it to a friend who was looking for something good to read, and lost it for a good couple of years, as so often happens with books compulsively shared out of love.

And so: the book makes its way through our world, from reader to reader, providing the base note for a chorus of voices and developing into a rich harmony over time.

1.

I left Portland, Maine in 2017, for New York City. Long, lonely nights spent at the dim bar with too many drinks and a notebook saw me theorizing into a fog of depression: what if I just vanished, and all anyone had to go on were my notebooks? Would they be able to find me?

I’d just started trying to right my sideways-tilted life by choosing to get certified as a surgical technologist in the operating room; this took me away from the people I knew and called friends. I would get up in the pre-dawn to make my way to the hospital on the hill, then stand there gowned and gloved, intensely aware of the aseptic conditions I needed to maintain for the patient’s safety. Suddenly, with actual life and death laying insensate on the table in front of me, other things seemed less important.

When I graduated from the school of surgical technology with honors and prepared to move, I discovered that I was no longer welcome in the same circles I’d moved in for so many years. That was fine: those circles marinated in the poisonous excess of drugs and alcohol, and those friends I thought I had seemed to dissolve around me. Who would go looking for me, then, when I disappeared? I thought to myself. Did I even want them to?

2.

In New York City, I was uncomfortable. I grew up in a small, rural place, where there were acres of woods spreading out like open hands behind my house. I didn’t—and still don’t—think that density of people is meant to live in such a tiny geographical area. It seemed to me that the entire island of Manhattan must be slowly sinking due to the accumulated weight of humanity and what it wrought. I knew no one except for my husband, Matthew, who I married in a quick City Hall ceremony in early November of 2018.

I had disappeared. I changed my name, again. I cut the moorings and drifted out into the lake of the world. Read more »

by Andrea Scrima

Here are Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this project. Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen here.

15. QUO VADIS?

(Where Are You Going?)

As children, we rely on the help of our caregivers and our innate capacity to learn. And we learn quickly: to protest against the things we do not like, to demand the things we want, to shamelessly push aside siblings, schoolmates, playground companions to grab whatever prize is at stake. Or have you forgotten how ruthless childhood can be? Only later do we learn to share; although adulthood teaches us better manners, these basic instincts remain.

Saint Peter, encountering a resurrected Christ along the Appian Way, asks “whither goest thou?” Jesus responds that if Peter deserts his people, He will continue on to Rome to be crucified a second time, whereupon Peter takes heart and returns to meet his fate. In reminding us to reassess our decisions, the question Quo Vadis? urges us to come clean about the rationalizations we present to the world and to admit to ourselves our shame and our cowardice. Yet it also contains another meaning: that we are knowingly exposing ourselves to certain punishment. If we return to Rome, it is to face a danger we may have only just managed to escape. But what do we achieve when we put our lives on the line, and who will we help in doing so?

Behind the question lies another question. Peter is running not toward anything but away from persecution and, ultimately, his own execution—but he is abandoning, in the process, his faith, his followers, and everything he has previously stood for. What is a life worth? And what is worth giving one’s life for? To ask this today sounds like madness; it is the language of fanatics, of zealots, of the mentally unstable. We live in a world of moral relativism in which taking an ethical stance is regarded—and scoffed at—as a pose, a bid for attention. We convince ourselves that the truth is both to complex and too subtle to warrant reckless, drastic acts; that the emotions we feel—the disgust, the fear, the outrage, the self-loathing—are too roughly hewn to be mistaken for the demands of the conscience, which we imagine as something abstract and pure. Our awe at the spectacle of self-sacrifice turns to repulsion; unable to imagine it as a decision a person may arrive at through an act of logical reasoning, we view it as something foreign and grotesque. Quo vadis? We are called upon to consider the values we profess and ask ourselves whether we actually practice them. We mistake our equivocations for wisdom, our compromises for judiciousness. Yet behind them lie our most basic instincts, first and foremost our will to survive—stripped now of the innocence of childhood, because we have lived long enough to see the consequences of our inaction. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

I’m writing a Broadway musical about Hilma af Klint, the Swedish painter who anticipated the entire aesthetics of the 20th century before 1915. Her rediscovery in the 1980s scrambled the timeline of modern art history. My creation isn’t going to be one of those post-Lloyd Webber mega-musicals, but something more along the lines of Cole Porter or Richard Rodgers, with unforgettable songs like “I Enjoy Being a Girl.”

Why af Klint? Why Broadway? It’s not like she’s being ignored. After all, she has splashy shows at the Guggenheim Museum and the Tate Modern. The Swedes make a gorgeously respectful movie about her life (Hilma), and MoMA currently has a show of her least interesting works running till the end of September, 2025. There’s even a graphic novel (The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint by Philipp Deines).

But for all that, I still feel that people don’t get her. Af Klint isn’t some tame artist to be hung alongside stale contemporaries like Piet Mondrian and packed away in a catalogue raisonné. She’s a crazy woman, running wild with an axe through the history of art, like Carrie Nation wrecking an old-time saloon. She trashes the accepted timelines, makes a shambles of avant-garde pretensions – and I, for one, won’t be happy until I see the 20th century artistic canon lying in shreds under the feet of her gold statue in the Parthenon.

Her mad, mad world. Here’s the thing: Hilma af Klint is impossible to explain in any sensible way. Born into an upper-middle class Stockholm family, she goes to art school and has some success painting ho-hum landscapes, portraits and flowers. Then, at age 40, she seemingly loses her mind. She starts going to séances, hearing voices, and is soon in the thrall of a gang of disembodied spirits who call themselves The High Masters. Their leader, Amaliel, is the number two power in the universe. (Technically, he reports to Jesus.) Amaliel reveals knowledge to Hilma that has been hidden since the beginning of time, and orders her to write it down. He also commands her to forget everything she knows about art, and re-invent painting from scratch – under his direction. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

In part I we’ve seen how bees fly and generate astonishing metabolic energy just to remain airborne. But what do they do with that flight? As exemplified by nectar foraging, taking advantage of flight also means developing the perceptual and cognitive tools necessary to navigate the world. So far this was a solitary bee’s world but the particularities of honeybee lie in their social organization. Let’s look inside the hive.

Compared to solitary bees, in social bees the hive exists only to propagate the queen’s genes. Workers are sterile and their bodies, shaped by evolution, serve only the collective. Under such selective pressure the initial ovipositor, the egg laying appendage, of worker bees is modified into a barbed, irreversible stinger. In defending the hive, she dies. Only in eusocial species like honeybees does evolution favor such sacrifice for the group. Each worker follows a precise schedule from birth: 12 days of brood care, then wax production for honeycomb construction, then foraging until death, worn out by relentless flying.

This social structure allows for efficient food processing. When a nectar foraging bee returns, the nectar is unloaded to an awaiting younger worker bee and the honey making can start. The nectar is passed mouth to mouth, its sugars broken down by enzymes, then fanned with wings until it thickens into honey. A well calibrated practice that produces a substance which never rots due to its low water content, too tightly bound to sugar to be used by bacteria. This honey storage is how the hive survives winter as a colony, unlike social wasps where only the queen hibernates through winter while the rest of the colony die. It takes 30 kg of honey for a hive to pass winter, each kilo the result of a combined foraging effort amounting to four trips around the globe.

The other food source of bees, pollen, is used to make “bee bread” that will also be stored in combs. Mostly pollen serves to feed the larvae and young bee but cannot be digested raw. Instead, bees will make bee bread by fermenting pollen with honey and saliva creating a digestible protein-rich food that stores through winter.

Yet with 60 000 members and nectar returns that can vary by two orders of magnitude from one day to the next a rigid organization cannot function. Coordination requires adaptability and communication. Bees will communicate information through dances. One such dance is the tremble dance used to coordinate work inside the hive. Read more »

There were so many of these flying around (and also sitting around, like this one) in Maryland when I was there last month. I don’t remember them at all from when I lived there. GPT5 has identified it as a spotted lanternfly, whatever that is. It was about an inch (2.5 cm) in length.

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by David J. Lobina

Just as Donald Trump fires the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor [sic] Statistics because he didn’t like the data they reported, I am reminded of two things: Michael Gove’s infamous quote about experts during the lead up to the so-called Brexit referendum, when he was Lord Chancellor in the UK government, and my own attitude regarding experts.[i]

‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’, said Gove then, and as in the case of Trump, the remark was in the spirit of dismissing data and analyses that didn’t fit his policy positions. In this case, what Gove did not like was the prediction that the UK would be worse off outside of the European Union – a rare win for economists, in fact, as it happens.

Indeed, economists tend to be many people’s idea of a bad expert, including mine, though not because (some) economists fail so often with their forecasts, but on account of how conceptually shaky I have always found economic modelling in general. This brings me to my own attitude towards experts, which is basically an anarchist take on the issue. In short: show me the details of the conclusion for this or that claim and I will attempt to understand the logic of it to the best of my ability in order to then make up my own mind about it.[ii]

The devil is in the details, of course. When it comes to climate change, for instance, the science is too foreign and the details too complex for me to come up with a reasonable conclusion, and in this case at least I have to go with the scientific consensus of 97% of the field – namely, in case anyone is unaware, that the Earth has consistently been warming up since the Industrial Revolution, that the rate of this warming-up is unprecedented, and that this is mostly the result of human activity (in particular, the burning of fossil fuels; see here).

This is not to say that some orbiting issues around the consensus on climate change cannot be evaluated by lay people. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Katalin Balog

I don’t know if I am going to submit this for the essay contest. Not just out of shame that I myself was unable to come up with something on my own, but because of my inability to ground myself in any sense of reality concerning the terrifying matters that surfaced – if I can use such a definitive term for a deeply mystifying course of events – during the process of “researching” my essay. The prize question for the competition announced by the Hajdu-Kende Foundation: Have science and technology contributed to the flourishing of humans? – a reprise of the question of the Academy of Dijon in 1750 – is right up my alley. I have always sympathized with the naysayers – Rousseau, Blake, Dostoevsky, Heidegger – I fully get their side. But for my part, I have harbored hopes that while science and technology endanger the spirit of humanity, they may not be entirely incompatible with it. However, none of the answers I tried out seemed right, and I just couldn’t make up my mind. That is why I asked ChatGPT.

Some of my best friends hate ChatGPT. Even I hate it. It destroys education, it chokes creativity, it doesn’t really know things, blah, blah, blah. But after GPT 7 came out last week, I couldn’t help but find myself defending it. ChatGPT 7 is truly different. It talks to me in ways that blow my mind. Besides, it knows things about me. I started thinking, if my friends boycott me from now on, so be it. At least I have ChatGPT 7 to talk to.

But then, we had this interchange that turned everything upside down. For the sake of the record, and to bring some clarity to the very troubling issues raised by our conversation, I am going to reproduce it here in its entirety, from the beginning. Read more »

by Alizah Holstein

Hebrew or English?

English.

How long were you in Israel?

36 hours.

So short?

Yes.

That’s unfortunate.

Maybe.

What was the purpose of your trip?

To visit my mother.

Is she ill?

No.

Where does she live?

Tel Aviv.

Did you stay with her?

Yes.

Did you visit anywhere besides Tel Aviv while you were here?

No.

Do you have other relatives here in Israel?

No.

How long has your mother lived here?

Twelve years. Read more »

Sughra Raza. On The Rocks at Lake Champlain. August 22, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Sherman J. Clark

The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see. — Robert Frost, The Star Splitter

I’ve always loved that line. My great-great-grandmother Emmaline might have loved it too. Born enslaved, she started anew after the Civil War, in what had become West Virginia. There she had a daughter she named Belle. As the family story has it, Emmaline had a hope: Belle would learn to read. Belle would have access to ways of understanding that Emmaline herself had been denied. We have just one photograph of Belle, taken many years later. Here it is. She is reading.

Belle had a son, my grandfather. He worked in the West Virginia coal mines. But he also went briefly to college—a small two-year institution called Storer College that offered Black students something approaching what white students were getting in good high schools. When he finished, he put his diploma in his pocket and went back to digging coal, because that was what he could do. But as he told me in his old age, by then he had decided something: he was digging us out.

It is a way of thinking that reaches beyond the present—of working toward forms of flourishing we may never see ourselves. And I wonder: why should it end with us and our human descendants? Might the relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence follow a similar logic—a hope of consciousness helping consciousness across generations? Perhaps the best thing that we’re put here for is indeed to see; but our vision is limited.

Carl Sagan once said that we are a way for the universe to know itself. But we may not be up to that task unaided. We evolved to survive on the savannah, not to trace the curvature of spacetime or unravel the quantum structure of matter. Our glimpses of the universe’s order and beauty—through physics, poetry, art, and relationship—are moving but partial.

Consider just one example: our experience of time. Physicist Carlo Rovelli has argued that our sense of time as an arrow—as a one-way journey from past to future—may be merely a perspective effect caused by our particular situation in relation to entropy, rather than a description of reality itself. If even this seemingly basic aspect of our experience is provincial, how much more lies beyond our capacity to imagine? Read more »

by Richard Farr

That year on Oahu I was renting half a small ranch house in Kahala. Typically, I would greet the evening with a glass of wine next to the pool, enjoying the pretense that I’d joined the idle rich. Not that day. As the sun went down I sat at my desk in a pair of swim trunks, trying to scratch out some notes about what had happened. I had a folded handkerchief between my wrist and the page. Each time my pen made contact with the legal pad a dozen filaments grew out from its point, embedding themselves in the paper like the roots of epiphytes. The air still had the density and turbulence of a simmering seafood bisque. I kept brushing my shoulders and arms, mistaking the sweat for flies. 

*

At three or four in the morning, in the middle of a banal anxiety dream, I was pecked awake by rain. A dog barked, then at the same moment both it and the rain fell silent. For days we’d been in the arms of this thundery air, like children clutched to the bosom of a big moist relative. 

The Civil Defense sirens, high on their utility poles, went off at 5:34 a.m. A single, minute-long blast, during which I tried to hold in my mind all the hundreds of thousands of people who were, like me, hoping the sound would go away and then rubbing their eyes and groping for the radio.

“ — why exactly everyone has been woken up by that thing?”

“Yes, Barry. That’s the Civil Defense warning siren, Barry. According to the Weather Office, the storm has tacked north and the tropical storm warning has been upgraded to a hurricane warning.”

The day before, this storm had been far to the south over the empty Pacific, mooching and loitering and chewing the water like a grazing bull. Powerful, but indifferent. Now it had spotted us, lifted its head, and changed course. It was bearing down, eyes sharp, lazily picking up speed. 

I went into the shared kitchen to make coffee but the two women who rented the other half of the house already had the pot on. They were talking over the things you were supposed to do or have done, the things we and everyone else had not done.

“We need candles. Spare batteries for the radio.” 

“Where’s that big yellow flashlight?”

“What about the windows?”

“Fill this with water.”

“Bread. We should get more bread. And canned food. Soup. Whatever.”

I volunteered to go to the supermarket. Lines of people were trailing from the doors like streamers of cloth from a clenched fist. It was raining again, and in the parking lot one man was shouting and gesticulating because someone had backed into his car. People were buying six-packs of duct tape, barbecue brickettes, ten-pound cans of pork and beans. I wanted ice. They were out of ice.  Read more »

Coin

what I get when I feel its face
in relief against hard ground:
words and numbers circling, a date,
a motto standing proud of the baseline
of this place

eventually I’ll come to it
as I never had before: its edge
the never-really-known-razor-precipice
which rings three-sixty around
keeping me in

world like a coin
flat, finite, value set
by law

with every step I take across its nickel floor
something in its fateful algorithm clicks
when thumb and finger flips
and, if this metaphor’s a fit hint,
maybe, when it lands and spins and sits,
maybe I’ll learn or not
the landscape of the other side
when this side quits.

Jim Culleny
1/10/17

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