by Mary Hrovat

When I was 17, I took an introductory course in physical geology at a community college. I was enchanted by the descriptions of the physical processes that created land forms, and also by the vocabulary: eskers and drumlins, barchan dunes, columnar basalt. I like to know how things form and what they’re called. My strongest memory of this class, though, centers on the final lecture. The professor put Earth and its landforms and minerals in a larger context. He told us about the life cycles of stars, which have produced most of the elements on Earth.

The central fact of the lecture was that the mass of a star is a key characteristic determining how long it exists and what happens as it ages. Stars are formed when gravity causes a portion of a gas cloud to collapse until its internal pressure, and thus its temperature, are high enough for nuclear fusion to begin. The energy released when, for example, two hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium supports the mass of the star against the pull of gravity. A star’s life unfolds as a story of the equilibrium (or loss of equilibrium) between these two forces pulling inward and pushing outward. As one fuel source is depleted (for example, as hydrogen is converted to helium) other types of fusion occur in the core of the star using the new fuel source (and creating increasingly heavier elements). At the same time, hydrogen continues to fuse in a shell surrounding the core. Mature stars may have shells dominated by various elements undergoing different fusion reactions, although the available reactions depend on the mass of the star.

The professor probably described stars according to their type. I don’t remember if he mentioned the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, although it seems likely that he would have. The HR diagram plots the luminosity of stars (the amount of light they emit) versus their temperature. When stars are plotted this way, most of them fall on a curve called the Main Sequence, which runs from hot blue stars to cool red stars along the sequence O-B-A-F-G-K-M. (In some HR diagrams, the stellar type or color is plotted on the horizontal axis as a proxy for temperature.) Stars remain on the Main Sequence as long as the gravitational and thermal forces are in equilibrium. The larger and hotter a star is, the shorter its time on the Main Sequence, because hotter stars consume their fuel more rapidly.

As they age and leave the Main Sequence, stars undergo different processes depending on their size. The universe is still too young for the very smallest stars to have exhausted their fuel, so they’re still on the Main Sequence. Stars with masses ranging from slightly less than that of the sun to 10 times the mass of the sun go through a red giant phase, ultimately undergoing core collapse and forming dense white dwarfs. Larger stars have more complicated end-of-life scenarios, typically exploding in supernovae and leaving behind superdense neutron stars or black holes. Some elements are created only in supernova explosions. Read more »

Risham Syed. The Heavy Weights, 2008.

Mixed media on paper.

More here and here.

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by Richard Farr

If we could dig up Karl right now, he might be tempted to look at all the current drama in D.C. and say: “Red Scare Theatre repeats itself, but the first umpteen times it’s tragedy and then eventually it’s farce.” That’s not quite right though, because this kind of perennial crowd-pleaser always did have a strong element of farce — and the show that recently opened on Pennsylvania Avenue may evolve into something even more tragic than the others. Still, it’s important to record the fact that Trust Us, We’ll Save You From the Communists is getting a revival, and perhaps even more important to note how farcical it is. 

Skipping over the 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1980s, let’s take a moment to recall that in the 1940s this type of theatre had an especially good run at “The House,” that grand old venue for popular schlock on Capitol Hill. Especially fondly remembered are Lenin is Coming for Your Children, Your Mother Is A Trotskyist, and Only Balding Rich White Men Can Save You. Classic American Theatre of the Absurd — but gradually it became too screwball for its own good. Even box office receipts for Reds Under Your Bed dwindled at last. The era ended not so much because it was all nonsense as because leading man Joey “Senator” McFraud kept tripping over the flag he used as a costume and exposed to public view the fact that underneath he was both naked and shockingly ugly. 

Yet American Conservative Theater never quite forgot that it was money in the bank to describe anyone mildly uncomfortable with haute-bourgeois authoritarian class warfare as a radical leftist traitor. This is why stock commedia dell’arte characters evolved, notably the hilariously incompetent extremist “Hillary Clinton” — red beret, bandoliers jangling against the pearls, teeth full of baby parts and hands covered in the blood of innocent entrepreneurs, shrieking about the immolation of all that true patriots hold sacred from a podium at Goldman Sachs. 

Now the lights have been lit again, the handbills are printed, and a new show, a new apotheosis of the Absurd, is upon us. Most exciting of all perhaps, we learned recently that it will star one of the greatest melodramatists and over-actors of his generation, Russell “Nutter” Vought. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Despite the fact that Newcomb’s paradox was discovered in 1960, I’ve been prompted to discuss it now for three reasons, the first being its inherent interest and counterintuitive conclusions. The two other factors are topical. One is a scheme put forth by Elon Musk in which he offered a small prize to people who publicly approved of the free speech and gun rights clauses in the Constitution. Doing so, he announced, would register them and make them eligible for a daily giveaway of a million dollars provided by him (an almost homeopathic fraction of his 400 billion dollar fortune). The other topic is the rapid rise in AI’s abilities, especially in AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Soon enough it will be able, somewhat reliably, to predict our behaviors, at least in some contexts.

With this prologue, let me get to Newcomb’s paradox, which is a puzzle that suggests that the rational thing to do in some situations results in an outcome much worse than doing what doesn’t make sense.

As mentioned, it was first reported in 1960 by William Newcomb, a physicist at the University of California, but it was developed and popularized by the philosopher Robert Nozick in 1969.

The puzzle involves an assumed entity of some sort – a visitor from an advanced civilization, a robot with access to lightning fast computers, an all-knowing network of AI enhanced neural agents, whatever – that has the financial backing of a multi-billionaire. This billionaire claims that his ultra-sapient agent can predict with good accuracy which of two specific alternatives presented to a person he or she will choose. The billionaire further announces a sort of online lottery to demonstrate the agent’s abilities.

He explains that the agent’s assessment of people will utilize two types of boxes. Boxes of type A are transparent and all contain $1,000, whereas boxes of type B are opaque and contain either $0 or $1,000,000, the cash prizes provided by the billionaire, of course. Read more »

First Communion

Three bells rung thrice boys kneeling,
a candle at the altar burning,
god’s portrait on the ceiling,
priest lifts a holy wafer,
do mythic circles make us safer?

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by Barry Goldman

Following the news makes me feel sick. Not following the news makes me feel guilty. This conflict has been going on in my head for years, but recently it has become painfully acute. I don’t make any progress, I just go round and round. I’ve given the voices in my head the names of the two imaginary friends I had when I was a toddler, and I’ve transcribed some of their dialogue below.

Bearky:                   If we don’t stay informed and keep up with the outrages and stay engaged, the theo-plutocrats win.

Berry-Derry:       Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown. They already won. They control the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court. They own Twitter and Facebook and the Washington Post and the LA Times and Fox and talk radio. Whether you follow the news or not makes no difference at all except that it makes you miserable. How does your being miserable help anything?

Bearky:                  It doesn’t help, exactly. But it makes it help possible. If I don’t stay engaged, if I check out and just keep bees – because I’m a rich old man and I can – then help is not even possible. They want me to give up and let them control everything. If I retreat into my own protective bubble and just read novels, they can do whatever they want.

Berry-Derry:       And if you don’t? If you read every Substack and every blog post and email, and listen to every podcast, what difference will that make?

Bearky:                  I don’t know. But I do know it’s important to resist evil. And I know, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Berry-Derry:       Yeah, right. But as far as the actual world is concerned, watching internet commentators and reading blog posts IS doing nothing. It’s sitting quietly in front of a screen. It doesn’t DO anything. You want to know what the enemy wants? He wants you to sit in front of your screen being mad at the world until you get tired and go to bed.

Bearky:                  So what do you think we should do, go to protest marches and demonstrations? I hate everything about protest marches.

Berry-Derry:       Well, it’s a collective action problem, right? If everybody does it, if there’s a general strike and it shuts down the country for a few weeks, the government has to respond. But if it’s just a few thousand hippies marching around chanting slogans, no one cares. The government can ignore them or arrest them as it sees fit. Read more »

by Rachel Santarsiero

For decades, the Central Intelligence Agency—an organization best known for its espionage and secret missions—has been spying on climate change. Well, maybe not spying. Not at first, at least.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA conducted a top-secret US program using satellite imagery to capture images of Soviet military installations. The program, codenamed CORONA, dramatically improved U.S. knowledge of Soviet and other nations’ capabilities and activities, and allowed the U.S. to catalog Soviet air defense and anti-ballistic missile sites, nuclear weapons related facilities, submarine bases, IRBM sites, airbases—as well as Chinese and other national military facilities. In total, the CORONA mission, along with sister programs ARGON and LANYARD, yielded almost a million images of the Soviet Union and other areas of the world.

While these satellites were capturing images of Soviet bases, however, they were unknowingly spying on something else: climate change.

Because satellites typically orbit on north-south paths, their sensors can capture the vast majority of the Earth’s surface as the planet turns over the course of a 24 hour period, cataloging sweeping Arctic and Antarctic images. Over the twelve years that CORONA was in operation, the satellite captured approximately 850,000 static images of retreating polar ice, ecosystems’ extent and structures, species’ populations and habitats, and human pressures on the environment.

Due to their highly classified nature, these images weren’t readily available for public and scientific use. In the early 1990s At the urging of first Senator and then Vice President Al Gore for the CIA and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to consider releasing environmental information gleaned from classified data, the CIA established the Environmental Task Force (ETF) to review the classified reconnaissance CORONA satellite imagery and determine whether or not “classified information could help on particular scientific questions.” According to a 1996 speech by former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch, the ETF found that data collected by the Intelligence Community (IC) could fill critical gaps for the environmental science community and could be studied outside of the spy community without revealing “sources and methods.” Read more »

by Derek Neal

I read the opening of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and immediately thought of Camus’ The Stranger. Here is how Handke begins:

The Sunday edition of the Kärntner Volkszeitung carried the following item under “Local News”: “In the village of A. (G township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.”

My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks….

In The Stranger, Camus also begins with the notice of a mother’s death by way of print media:

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

One gets the feeling from Handke that after Camus, one can only write of a mother’s death in the shadow of Camus, that one either follows Camus or rebels against him, yet his presence is always there, undeniable. This goes in the opposite direction as well. When I read Handke’s account of his mother’s death, it led me to reconsider the beguiling opening of Camus’ novel. On some readings, Meursault has seemed indifferent to me at the beginning of The Stranger—how could someone not know whether such an important event happened this day or the day before? Yet reading Handke makes me see things differently. In Handke’s account, I see the decision to depersonalize the story as a way of coping with a terrible reality; relaying the information from the newspaper is not heartless, but the only way to dull the horror of an inexplicable event. It takes something boundless and sets limits on it, creating an official account upon which all can agree. Meursault’s decision to tell the reader about the telegram is similar. He begins by recounting his own version of events and is immediately destabilized; his inability to remember if the death occurred one day or another is not indifference but a loss of lucidity as he is overwhelmed. He then takes comfort in the objective, totalizing nature of the telegram, only to question it again after (“That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”) This is the conflict of The Stranger which plays out over the course of the novel—the meaningless, impersonal, social world represented by the telegram versus Meursault’s own subjective experience of reality, which goes beyond the limits of language. Read more »

Fourteenth way of looking at a blackbird? Photo taken last week in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Thomas R. Wells

Many environmentalists find the climate change policy problem baffling. The core mechanism of how certain molecules create a greenhouse warming effect on the earth is extremely clear (and has been known for over a century). Evidence that human activities are releasing greenhouse gases in dangerously disruptive quantities is also very clear and well-established, as is the obvious conclusion that humanity has to stop doing this. Moreover, the economic costs of transforming the global economy to run on non climate-destabilising energy sources, while substantial, are quite affordable.

Of course there are myriad important sub-questions to investigate about climate change, the answers to which are still contested by the relevant expert groups of scientists (like how all the extra heat being absorbed by the world is distributed geographically, and its precise impact on different weather systems). However, basically, the science is clear. Moreover, more or less all the world’s governments accept the scientific definition of the problem and the solution. And yet the solution remains unimplemented.

So, why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about a huge problem? Read more »

by Philip Graham

A conversation between Christine Sneed and Philip Graham

Since 2010 Christine Sneed, winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (among other awards), has published six acclaimed books: the story collections Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry, The Virginity of Famous Men, and Direct Sunlight, and the novels Little Known Facts, Paris, He Said, and Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos. With each new book Sneed has expanded her impressive range of vision, combining cultural insight with the everyday strangeness of her fictional characters.

Having explored in her novels the subtle and not-so-subtle mechanics of craft and inspiration in the art world, or the corrosive effects of Hollywood fame on an actor and his family, Sneed has recently set her sights on the contradictions of American capitalism. Please Be Advised is a deliciously droll novel (told entirely through the surprisingly illuminating lens of interoffice memos) that takes the reader on a journey through successive rings of corporate hell.

Philip Graham: Pleased Be Advised stunned me when I first began reading it—the novel is a wild and hilarious romp that’s entirely presented through the office memos of a struggling company named Quest Industries, which makes “collapsable office products” of dubious utility. Your earlier work, both short stories and novels, are quieter, even contemplative, and incisive in their paring away of your characters’ illusions and presentations of self. Those memos of Please Be Advised are laugh-out-loud funny on nearly every page. And yet, as I read further, I remembered that your earlier novels also made use of various documents to arrive at a deeper level: an artist’s sketchbook, a secret diary, obituaries, a character’s attempted memoir.

Christine Sneed: Hybrid forms have long been of interest to me as both a reader and a writer. When I started writing seriously in the early 1990s, it was poetry, not fiction, that I was attempting to put on the page. I did try to write a few short stories too, but it was clear I wasn’t ready—as with acting, the artifice must not be visible in fiction-writing, and everything I initially wrote was awkward and mannered. The compression and playfulness of a poem seemed both a challenge and an invitation. The short lines I was working with and the sensory imagery and concrete detail helped me focus on language, and as I got a little older and read more widely, I started to write fiction with more confidence. This was after earning my MFA in poetry. By that time, I had a better sense of how to create a character that seemed real and was not simply my surrogate.

The playfulness of hybrid and found forms like the memo or the resume or diary entry offer a chance for me to return, I suppose, to the compression of a poem. When I was writing Please Be Advised, it was great fun to begin every new memo, and to write in a different character’s voice. It was a bit like writing comedic prose poetry. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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Sughra Raza. Self Portrait, Kigali, January 17, 2016.

Digital photograph.

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