by Charles Siegel

Last week I learned of the recent death of Roberto Chaves Chavarria, of San José, Costa Rica, aged 90. His work benefited thousands upon thousands of his countrymen, and many thousands in other countries as well, who will never know his name. And he had a profound effect on my career as a lawyer, and on the direction of my life as a whole.

Chaves was a forensic toxicologist, and the first head of the Department of Forensic Sciences, an office in the Costa Rican “Poder Judicial,” or judicial branch. In the Costa Rican legal system, as in that of most Latin American countries, judges and other judicial officers often conduct their own factual investigations into cases before them.

In the late 1970s, Chaves learned of a large group of workers, on a banana plantation near the small town of Rio Frio, who were sterile. Over the course of many investigative trips, he interviewed workers and their wives, plantation managers, doctors and others. Chaves eventually concluded that the men had been sterilized through contact with a pesticide they applied to the roots of the banana plants. This pesticide, known as “DBCP,” was used to kill worms that infested the soil beneath the plants.

DBCP was invented by scientists at Shell Chemical Co., a subsidiary of the oil giant, and originally tested on pineapple plants in Hawaii. It proved to be very effective, and was used on pineapple and banana plantations around the world. DBCP-based pesticides were manufactured by several American companies, including Dow Chemical  and Occidental Chemical as well as Shell.

The cluster of sterile banana workers that Chaves discovered in Rio Frio was not the first such group. A few years earlier, men who worked in the Occidental factory making the stuff in Lathrop, California, had also been found to be sterile. This eventually led to a ban on DBCP use in the United States, but Dow and another smaller company continued to sell it overseas.

Meanwhile, Chaves continued his work in Costa Rica, and learned about the American developments. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

The assertion that religion is a tool for preserving social order and for organizing large-scale cooperation may vex many people for whom it represents first and foremost a spiritual path. However, just as the gap between religion and science is smaller than we commonly think, so the gap between religion and spirituality is much bigger. Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey. Religion gives a complete description of the world, and offers us a well-defined contract with predetermined goals. ‘God exists. He told us to behave in certain ways. If you obey God, you’ll be admitted to heaven. If you disobey Him, you’ll burn in hell.’ The very clarity of this deal allows society to define common norms and values that regulate human behavior. —Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, 2015

In his books Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century and Nexus, celebrated author and Professor of History Harari goes further positing spirituality is an altogether different thing. The spiritual path involves an individual quest. Seeking, learning and experiencing are part and parcel to someone finding their way to the divine.

In Harari’s view, religion was a form of governance – in essence the creation of a common platform – before secular government came about. Religion is present in hunter-gatherer societies whereas true secular government doesn’t really begin until a society reaches the agrarian stage.

Even as societies create secular governments, they don’t usually abandon religion. In fact, the most successful liberal democracies including the United States have protected freedom of religion, recognizing that the moral core and social cohesion offered by various religions benefits society as a whole. Countries that have banned religion altogether – such as the Soviet Union – found repression their only tool for keeping social order. Not the recipe for thriving or longevity.

Forty years before Homo Deus, the founders of Singapore were wrestling with how religion would impact their society. The goal was how to harness the benefits of religion without opening the door to the volatile tribalism that can also go with it. Read more »

by Angela Starita

Large-scale housing projects have been the subject of the public’s wrath and ardor for at least the last 70 years. Considering the extraordinary housing crises in cities across the country, it’s not surprising that Herman Jessor, the engineer-turned-architect behind the best-known cooperative developments in NY, is the subject of two studies and exhibitions, both coming out of The Cooper Union, Jessor’s alma mater. I work as a writer at Cooper, so perhaps my Jessor-looms-large-in-the-zeitgeist notion is skewed in his favor, but I can’t help but think that his work, which so promoted community bonds, is ripe for a reassessment exactly because we seem suddenly aware of the dangers of solitude. It’s also a moment when most everyone wants to beat a fast exit from civilization. Magazine and newspaper articles describe women starting their own small-house community, LGBTQ collectives built around farms, and MAHA families embracing back-to-the-land philosophies reminiscent of the Whole Earth Catalog.

What makes Jessor all the more intriguing, though, is that his solutions were decidedly urban, on a very large scale, and highly successful by any number of metrics—he is estimated to have built more than 40,000 residences most of which are still occupied and have low turnover. The March 2025 exhibition at Cooper included a map of the five boroughs with all of the Jessor-designed projects, including Penn South in Chelsea, Seward Park Houses on the Lower East Side, Co-op City in the Bronx, and Rochdale Village in Queens, the largest Black-majority housing co-op in the world. Most were built for unions like the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the United Housing Foundation which was run by Abraham Kazan, an organizer and frequent Jessor partner.

The buildings, variations on the towers in the park scheme popularized by the modernist architect Le Corbusier, prioritized ventilation, eat-in kitchens, and numerous shared spaces. Co-op City, for instance, includes gardens, playing fields, a cooperative grocery store, and schools. Jessor and Kazan developed streamlined construction systems that made for more affordable buildings. Most of them remain affordable thanks to programs like the Mitchell-Lama program in New York State that subsidizes housing for middle-class residents.

What Jessor’s work doesn’t provide is anything akin to low-rise neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and the aesthetics associated with them. Read more »

Sign in the Alter Schlachthof restaurant in Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Brooks Riley

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Sughra Raza. Landings, Dec 23, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Rafaël Newman

At the end of each of the past twelve years I have written a long rhyming ballad, reviewing the period coming to a close, giving thanks for some events and lamenting others. I began in December 2013, while I was recovering from a lengthy illness; and I recited what would be the first of a series at a family New Year’s Eve party, among some of those whose support had been indispensable to the recrudescence of my health, and to whom I therefore wished to express my gratitude.

My poem began that year with these lines:

Let’s raise a glass this festive day,
On Saint-Sylvestre or Hogmanay,
And toast to all both far and near
Who graced the now departing year:
To cracksource Cook, who nearly gotcha,
To Edward Snowden in his dacha;
To Granta, Guardian and Gawker,
To David Denby, and Tom Scocca;
To Pauline Marois, our own Grand Mufti,
As well as Josh and Benny Safdie;
To Edie Windsor, Stephen Fry,
And Malala Yousafzai;
Barack Hussein—“Make Drones, Not War!”—
Dan Savage, and the myriad score
Who hailed with glee, or rising gorge,
The birth of Once and Future George.

This initial ode to a year gone by, following its “public” proem, then went on to become more private in substance—with cryptic tributes to the various attainments of my assembled kinfolk—for all that it borrowed its tone and humor from “Greetings, Friends!”, the Christmas poem written every year for many decades by Roger Angell and published annually in The New Yorker. Angell, better known as a baseball reporter, would compose his retrospectives as jokey commentaries on notable happenings in the public sphere; they featured sometimes quite ingenious (if often groan-worthy) rhymes on topical celebrity names, for which he evidently required increasing guidance from younger advisers as he grew more venerable (he died in 2022 at over a hundred) and less plugged in. Read more »

A Simple Ontology

maybe flower petals are held to stems by thought
and the wind’s a counter-thought that plucks
and sets them elsewhere in the grass
to grow in contemplative resolution
beside the notion of a grub-pulling crow

maybe the wind itself’s a palpable bright idea,
something about motion and the abhorrence of vacuums
something about coming and going,
about ferocity and stillness
about war and its absence

maybe the moon’s the concept of fullness,
loss, abatement, regeneration from slivers,
hope at the hour of the wolf, the opposite of
darkness at the break of noon, the
upside of shadow

maybe Descartes had it right
and this, from horizon to horizon, is
a simple ontology,
an inherent daisy chain of ideas chasing its tale
regardless—

one
…….. idea
hatched in this synapse nest
is to harvest
…….. thought
from thought
under a
….      perception
of blue
while the
….      conception
of breeze
riffles the
 ,,,,,     hint
of hair
and I place them
like
….       dreams
of plums
into the
  ….      essence
of basket
and give them
with the
  ,,,,      intention
of love
to my
c….      belief
in the natural being
of….
………. you

by Jim Culleny

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by Ken MacVey

Donald Trump has creatively explored ways to monetize the presidency. These include launching the $TRUMP crypto business a few days before resuming office on January 20, 2025 or using Truth Social–a private business venture he helped start– to platform his presidential and personal pronouncements.

Monetization began early in the first Trump administration with the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, which  became, according to an October 18, 2024 House Committee on Oversight staff report, a hotel of choice  for foreign and domestic influencers and would-be appointees to government positions, such as judgeships and  ambassadorships.  According to the  report,  it was also the hotel of choice for  various presidential pardon recipients. This report alleged that at least five such recipients stayed at the hotel spending thousands of dollars in 2017 and 2018.  The report went on: “[T]hese expenditures are particularly troubling in light of allegations that former President Trump’s former personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was involved in efforts to sell presidential pardons for $2 million apiece—an amount Mr. Giuliani reportedly planned to split with President Trump.” (These allegations stem from a lawsuit against Giuliani by someone who used to work for him– Giuliani denies the allegations.) Since this report, Trump has pardoned Giuliani for his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

A number of Trump pardons in the last few months have caught the public’s eye. For example, in October Trump pardoned billionaire crypto entrepreneur and convicted  felon, Changpeng Zhao. Zhao and his company pled guilty to failing to stop money laundering, which according to the Department of Justice aided  terrorist groups like Isis. Forbes reported that Zhao’s company had made a deal in May 2025  with a Trump family  affiliated company that helped boost Trump’s net worth by  hundreds of millions of dollars. Liz Oyler, head pardon attorney for the Department of Justice until last March, is quoted by Forbes as saying:  “Trump has created a pay-for-play pardon system.” Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

Cruelty, at least the old-fashioned kind, has a shape. It announces itself. It arrives with words you can quote later, replay, contest, reject. Even when it stings, it offers a surface against which the self can brace. Ghosting, by contrast, has no edges. It leaves no fingerprints. It is not an act so much as a disappearance, and it wounds precisely because it refuses to declare itself as one.

To be ghosted is not merely to be rejected. It is to be rendered uncertain about the status of reality itself—about what happened, what was meant, whether the past you shared was ever mutually understood. The pain does not come only from loss, but from ambiguity. And ambiguity, it turns out, can be more violent than an explicit no.

There is a reason direct cruelty, however unpleasant, often feels cleaner. A rejection, an insult, even a harsh goodbye acknowledges a shared frame. It says: We are in the same room. I see you. This is my position. Ghosting refuses that acknowledgment. It leaves you alone in a room you didn’t know you were exiting, wondering whether the lights will come back on.

At its core, ghosting is an injury to recognition.

Philosophers have long argued that being recognized—seen, addressed, responded to—is not a luxury but a basic human need. Recognition confers reality. To be recognized is to be confirmed as someone whose presence registers, whose existence calls for response. Ghosting withdraws that confirmation retroactively. It doesn’t just end the relationship; it quietly calls into question whether the relationship existed in the way you thought it did.

This is why ghosting can feel like erasure rather than rejection. Rejection says, I choose not to be with you. Ghosting says nothing at all, and in doing so, suggests something more corrosive: You do not require an answer. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot

Robert Kurson closes Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 with a deceptively simple scene. Decades into the twenty-first century, he takes his teenage son, armed with an iPhone, an Xbox, and all the distractions of modern technology, to see a Saturn V laid on its side, bursting out of its building. The boy doesn’t check his phone. He doesn’t take a picture. He just stands there, staring at the five enormous F-1 engine nozzles, each taller than a person, and after several silent minutes asks if they can stay longer. The Saturn V guarantees turning every person, no matter how young or old, into that boy.

I had just returned from a visit to NASA myself, standing beneath the behemoth and feeling something close to vertigo. You can know the numbers – 363 feet long, millions of pounds of thrust, nearly a million gallons of propellant – and still be unprepared for the physical reality of it. The rocket overwhelms abstraction. Like Kurson’s son, I found myself wordless, pulled into a long stare, asking the same unspoken question: how did anyone dare build this thing? Rocket Men provides part of the answer.

What the book does better than almost any account of Apollo is make the case that Apollo 8, usually treated as a dress rehearsal for Apollo 11, may have been the most consequential spaceflight of them all. Apollo 11 was about arriving. Apollo 8 was about leaving, about the first time human beings severed the umbilical cord to Earth and committed themselves to a quarter-million-mile journey with no rescue, no precedent, and no margin for error. Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins’s later remark, quoted near the end of the book – that a century from now Apollo 8 might be judged more significant than Apollo 11 – sounds provocative until Kurson patiently shows why it may simply be accurate. Read more »