by Adele A.Wilby

Books on nature abound. More recently, physicist Helen Czerski’s deep knowledge of the seas functioning as an ‘ocean engine’ in Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes the World, elevates our understanding of the ocean and provides us with a new appreciation of its integral role in the Earth’s ecosystem. Volcanologist Tamsin Mather ‘s Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves is also another beguiling journey into the awesome history of the ‘geological mammoths’ that are volcanoes and their dynamics, that have changed the surface of the Earth and impacted on its environment.

But these books are more than the science of the specialist subject being explored: they have literary value also. The authors are to be lauded for the elegance of their prose that make the books not only fascinating and illuminating, but accessible and a real joy to read. Deeper knowledge of the planet’s ecosystems is made available to us, and they excite a sense of wonder and awe at the complexity of life on planet Earth. Cumulatively, these books highlight just how far the interrelatedness of different aspects of the natural world is. Ferris Jabr’s  Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life is in that tradition. His book is a real feast for readers of books about life on Earth and for those who appreciate literary work: Jabr is not only knowledgeable, but a master of lyrical prose also.

Jabr’s book does not specialise on one aspect of the planet, such as volcanoes or the oceans. Instead, Jabr is concerned about the planet and how it came to ‘life’. In that sense he breaks with what could be considered the more conventional wisdom that posits life on the planet as being subject to its environment, and the Darwinian scientific paradigm that the changing demands of the environment dictate how life evolves and those best able to adapt will survive. Instead, Jabr focuses on what he considers the ‘underappreciated twin’ of evolution and posits a more interrelated view that ‘life changes the environment’. His book is, he says, ‘an exploration of how life has transformed the planet, a meditation on what it means to say that Earth itself is alive’.

To claim that the ‘Earth itself is alive’ truly does demand that a reader stretch the perimeters of conventional views of the Earth as an inanimate planet where the conditions for life were possible. Although the earliest iterations of an understanding of the planet as a living entity were mooted centuries ago, it is only since the 1960s when scientist and inventor James Lovelock and his association with the little known and unrecognised Dian Hitchcock, introduced the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ and  later developed by American biologist Lynn Margulis, that more seriousness was given to the idea. Initially scientists subjected the ‘hypothesis’ that ‘life transforms the planet and is integral to its self-regulating process’ to rigorous criticism, but it remains, according to Jabr, the fundamental tenet in earth system science today. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Herb Gobel opened Trophy Recording in downtown Boston in 1948. It was a state-of-the-art studio. Perfect for the artists Herb idolized. Big bands like Artie Shaw and Stan Kenton. Vocalists like Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee. An era of composers, arrangers and sight-reading musicians. By the time I saw Trophy Recording in 1972, the place had gone to ruin. Cobwebs on the music stands. Cigarette burns and coffee stains on the control board. A flock of pigeons roosting in the ceiling. The proprietor himself didn’t look much better. Pale, bleary-eyed, tie dangling under the open collar of his dingy white shirt.

Herb looked like a man who didn’t know what hit him. But appearances deceive. Herb knew quite well what hit him. Rock ‘n’ Roll.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” he said, pulling a whisky bottle from under the control board. “It should have come and gone. Like all the other novelty fads” – meaning calypso, Hawaiian and “that Desi Arnez stuff.”

No union musicians. Rock ‘n’ Roll was a joke at first. The musical establishment put Be-Bop-a-Lu-La into the same category as Aba Dabba Honeymoon. Guys like Herb thought it would be absorbed into the musical mainstream. Rock ‘n’ roll songs would be arranged for horns, strings and accordions, and life would go on. No union musicians would lose their jobs.

But that didn’t happen. To survive, Herb had to push the music stands into the corner and learn how to record garage bands. It wasn’t hard. Suburban kids with new guitars weren’t very demanding. In time, Herb stopped seeing recording as a craft, and came to view it as a grift. Read more »

by Daniel Shotkin

I was in 9th grade when I first heard the name Rudyard Kipling mentioned in school. My history teacher had decided to inaugurate a unit on imperialism, and Kipling’s zealous verses soon rang loudly through the classroom:

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

My teacher explained that Kipling exemplified the racist and jingoistic attitudes of late-19th-century European colonial powers. I was surprised because, to me, Kipling represented something else entirely.

I didn’t disagree with my teacher’s assessment—certainly, no one could after hearing a poem called “The White Man’s Burden.” But my confusion wasn’t unwarranted; it stemmed largely from the fact that the Kipling recited by my teacher and the Kipling I had known prior to that fateful history class seemed to be two radically different authors. Read more »

Rain on the Autobahn from Innsbruck to Munich.

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by Carol A Westbrook

In our third year of medical school we began our clinical studies. After two full years of classroom work, it was time to apply what we learned to real patients. One can spend years in the library, reading all the books and journals that you can get your hands on, but there is no substitute for seeing a patient with disease. The stories I’m recounting here are all true, as I experienced at the University of Chicago Hospitals (then called Billings Hospital) while I was a medical student in 1977-78. I’ve changed the patients’ names, and I’ve made up some details I couldn’t recollect.

Billings hospital had a locked psychiatry ward, and it admitted patients for brief interventional stays, with a Medicare limit of two weeks. If a longer stay were required, the patient would have to be transferred to a chronic care facility. Patients could be either voluntary admissions or legally committed.

Psychiatry rotation for a third-year med student was 1 month long, of which 2 weeks were spent on the inpatient service. That was just long enough for the student to admit a patient and follow them through discharge; we each had our own individual patient. We had a four-member team (3 students and one resident) The resident took call every third night, which means they stayed overnight and answered the pager for problems on the ward or in the emergency room. We students were expected to come along. We did not carry our own pagers, but we took orders from our resident, who did carry a pager. Although call requires an overnight stay—with little sleep—it can be one of the most valuable experiences of med school, because that’s when you get to see the extreme cases, the ones you’ll never forget. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Bill Murray

It’s raining in Russia. Thunderheads boil up in the afternoon heat over there, behind the limestone block fortress on the other side of the river. Which is not a wide river. You can shout across it.

Here’s how close Russia is: on Victory Day, May ninth, commemorating the Nazi defeat in World War II, Russia points big screen TVs over here toward Narva, Estonia’s easternmost city, to explain the way things really are to all these misguided Estonians.

This year Estonia put on their own concert on the town hall square. This side of the Narva River, May ninth is called Europe Day. Estonia hung a poster on its own castle wall that read “Putin is a war criminal.”

Both riverbanks are park land, well kept, landscaped, trees trimmed as if by respectful neighbors. These dueling castles mark the spot where the Teutonic Order, Swedes, Danes, Poles, Lithuanians, Slavs and local Finno-Ugrics have bumped up against each other since medieval times. This point on the map has been the tip of somebody’s sword since the 13th century.

Everybody in the train spoke Russian, Russians and Estonians both. For the confluence of Vladimir Putin’s “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” with Estonia’s triumph of independence, it’s far more Russophilic out here than I expected.

Thirty-three years after Estonian independence, that’s something to puzzle out. Part of the explanation, I think, is cultural. The other part is that it just takes time to start a new country. Read more »

Sughra Raza. On the Train to Franzensfeste. September, 2024.

Digital photograph.

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by Richard Farr

Even if you are sympathetic to Marx — even if, at any rate, you see him not as an ogre but as an original thinker worth taking seriously — you might be forgiven for feeling that the sign at the East entrance to Highgate Cemetery reflects an excessively narrow view of the political options facing us.

For years I had planned to come here, to his final resting place, and pay my genuine if heavily qualified respects. In the end the visit was almost accidental. My wife and I were walking off vast quantities of melted cheese sandwich that had accosted us in Camden Market, our destination was Hampstead Heath, and Google Maps suggested to us that the detour was slight.

The six quid you pay to get in helps the Cemetery Trust keep most of this beautiful sanctuary neat and trim, with broad main avenues and benches spaced at convenient intervals for rest and contemplation. But much of its appeal lies in a strange duality of character. Large sections are so crowded, so ivied, so root-heaved and broken that I was put in mind of Mayan temples in the Yucatan, reduced to fragments and being digested by the rainforest. Stones pristine and sundered. Inscriptions legible and illegible. Some Victorian pillars standing proud and straight but others leaning against one another like end-of-day commuters slumped shoulder to shoulder on the Northern Line. 

Hopeful sentiment is engraved here over and over: Never Forgotten; Always in our Thoughts. But you look at relentless climbing nature and wonder how long any of this remembering can really last. Two generations? Three? A bit more, for the famous — but the truth is that they too will “fly forgotten as a dream,” as Isaac Watts has it. Even at George Eliot’s grave, tended lovingly by a woman with gloves and garden tools, the name itself has all but evaporated. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

How happy to have discovered the history of other species, as well as our own. How fortunate to be alive during the time when the evolutionary puzzle has been so masterfully worked out, assembling a picture so stunning in its completeness, that mere school children now know more about Darwin’s great idea than even Darwin himself knew.

And yet, how mortifying to be stuck with natural selection as “the mother of beauty,” to crib from the poet Wallace Stevens. (“Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,/ Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/ And our desires.”) Accepting this brute fact of life is a tall order, and I still recoil whenever I contemplate what Darwin called the “sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time.”

The central tenet of life is directionless, indifferent, insensate, implacable natural selection. And yet . . . here we are.

*

We have — or had — five cats. Four are sibs, seven years old now, Girly, Rocky, Pinky, and Scooter. They showed up, mere kittens clustered near their scrawny mother, behind our barn, as my husband Don was recovering from a stroke that occurred the year before. The fifth, Maggie, showed up just last summer, barefoot and pregnant, on our back doorstep. She hated and still hates the others. She eventually gave birth to four kittens of her own, which we judiciously distributed, but we still have to keep her separate from the other cats.

While returning from teaching one day earlier this month, I saw Rocky, our black, tuxedo male, vaulting across the road, his skinny ass stretched out like a black snake as he made it safely to the other side.

“I just saw Rocky sprinting across the road in front of me,” I said to Don. “Prepare yourself. We’re going to lose that cat.” I sometimes actually believe that articulating a fear helps to diminish it . . . Read more »

‘Tis The Little Things

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by Gary Borjesson

Become who you are, having learned what that is. -Pindar
Become who you are. —Nietzsche

I want to be authentic and so probably do you. It’s a virtue fostered by philosophic and therapeutic inquiries. In popular culture, “authenticity” is broadly used to mean being true to oneself—often with an emphasis on not caring what others think. Thus its critics see authenticity as encouraging a culture of narcissism, since it appears to focus on self-actualization at the expense of other ideals, including healthy relationships and communities, and the social values such as honesty, fairness, and justice that support these. Here I offer a philosophically informed definition of authenticity, drawing attention to why, despite popular usage, it is a prosocial, ethical ideal.

Authenticity may indeed be the virtue of being true to oneself, but what does that mean? To some it means being the creator of one’s own truth and value, and living solely according to these. Imagine a bright, rebellious teenager who’s read a little Nietzsche. They decide that the first step to becoming authentic is to take up their philosophic hammer and use it to smash all external claims and constraints —those truths, values, and beliefs that come from family, religion, community, customs, traditions, even from nature herself. This apparently asocial or even antisocial tendency is partly how authenticity gets associated with nihilism and moral decline, rather than being the virtue I suggest it is.

As many have pointed out, including Allan Bloom in Closing of the American Mind, this narcissistic-fantasy version of authenticity stems from a philosophy of “cheerful nihilism,” a memorable phrase borrowed from Donald Barthelme. It’s cheerful because it’s about freedom from responsibility, rather than being freedom with responsibility. The roots of this nihilism can be traced to reductive materialism in the sciences and postmodernism in the humanities—ideologies that find fertile ground in individualistic capitalist societies, where everyone competes to get the most they can. These days one can see this “ethic” prominently displayed among politicians and tech billionaires, but this is not authenticity. (Philosopher Charles Taylor’s short book The Ethics of Authenticity offers a good account of the history and future of authenticity.)

The ethical definition of authenticity includes the observable fact that we own our lives and truth in the world. Specifically, becoming authentic concerns taking our place in the world—even if it’s the place of a rebel. For where else but in a world do we learn who we are, and actualize ourselves? Our very power of living, thinking, and speaking owes its development to others. Thus, a free spirit or rebel or Libertarian may imagine they are powered by their truth alone. But without a world, there’s nothing to rebel against, and nothing from which to liberate the spirit. Read more »

by Mark R. DeLong

Once a real irritant and frustration, the routine has become a slap-stick show staged in our living room. Today, it’s only slightly tinged with impatience. Someone wants to watch a movie, which is a challenge itself, since that means having to find one worth watching. But there are lists, online reviews, thumbs-up (and down) from friends, and Rotten Tomatoes flung (or not) and Metacritic. You make a guess. You land on a title, and that’s when you engage The Bureaucracy. From that point on, your smartphone’s glass screen no longer stays your own. The flat and wide display across the room becomes possessed by something else—just as you agreed would be the case back when you clicked “I agree” on the annoying “End User License Agreement.” You never read it. You’re in good company; no one reads the “EULA.” The run-up to the show is, well, a ping-pong of passwords, a inchoate suspicion or hope that the app you’re using will actually connect to … to … something that will “cast” your movie to the display.

“Cast” is a word loaded with magical innuendo, word of spells and the luck of fishing.

I like to think that the rituals of my devices somehow unite a community—in my case, I guess, a community of Android phone users who dangle Google-provided services through a Chromecast dongle that hangs limply from the edge of an ancient plasma flat-screen. But unlike ritual’s usual rigidity, the technological rituals mystify with nuance; they follow subtly different paths, so you never really learn the trail by heart. (And, it’s not just Google in the priestly robes waving the thurible.)

Half of the adventure of watching a movie at home is just getting to sound and picture. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Rich and powerful people commit a vast amount of crime. According to Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime, by law professor Jennifer Taub:

White collar crime in America, such as fraud and embezzlement, costs victims an estimated $300 billion to $800 billion per year. Yet street-level “property” crimes including burglary, larceny, and theft, cost us far less – around $16 billion annually, according to the FBI.

But rich and powerful people do not go to prison. There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States. None of them are members of the Sackler family, despite Purdue Pharma being responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Sacklers have had to pay out billions of dollars for pushing OxyContin, but they have been able to keep billions more. And none of them has done any time.

This week Martin Winterkorn, formerly the head of Volkswagen and Germany’s highest-paid executive, went on trial. He led the company when it manufactured 9 million vehicles designed to cheat on emissions tests. Readers will recall that the cars and trucks were equipped with “defeat devices” that switched on pollution controls only when the vehicles were being tested. When they were out on the road the vehicles spewed many times the allowable amounts of pollutants and caused unknown damage to public health around the world. Winterkorn’s trial is starting nine years after he resigned from Volkswagen. He is not expected to serve any prison time.

None of the greedy bastards actually responsible for the 2008 financial crisis went to prison. According to the New York Times:

the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression resulted in the jailing of a single investment banker — one who happened to be several rungs from the corporate suite at a second-tier financial institution.

If you pay any attention to the news you can supply your own examples of this pattern. Wells Fargo and ExxonMobil come immediately to mind, but the list is very long. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

Though there are stories about people trading their souls with the devil in exchange for power and knowledge before, it was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 play that firmly entrenched that variety of character in the literary imagination. Incidentally there was a real Johann Faust in the sixteenth century, a German wizard of whom little certain is known, but the similarly dissolute figure of Marlowe was who granted that mysterious figure a variety of immortality. Drawing inspiration from anonymous pamphlets about Faust, Marlowe crafted one of the most chilling tales about how the insatiable thirst for power can lead to damnation when we’re willing to trade our very soul. Notorious at the time, both for the author’s reputation for heresy and sodomy as well as for claims that the script itself was capable of conjuring demons, it was said that Satan himself was in attendance at the premier to evaluate how accurately he’d been depicted. “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d,” said the play’s infamous demon Mephistopheles, “where we are is hell,/And where hell is, there must we ever be.” A despairing vision born in Marlowe’s own life, the second most celebrated Elizabethan playwright after Shakespeare who was rightly valorized for the genius of his “mighty line,” ultimately stabbed to death in a tavern fight at the age of 29.

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Marlowe may have been the one to make the diabolical contract a mainstay of European literature, but it was the nineteenth century German poet and polymath Johann Goethe who elevated the story into the canon of eternal works. A genius who dabbled in everything from botany to anatomy, Goethe is nonetheless most celebrated for his brilliant writings responsible for the inauguration of the passionate and emotional literary movement of Romanticism. His Faust, written in two voluminous parts respectively published in 1790 and 1808, was intended to be a “closet drama,” a type of verse play meant to be read rather than performed. Drawing from the same wellspring of German myth as Marlowe, Goethe nonetheless reinvents the details and purpose of the Faust legend. Fleshing out a love interest for the wizard, Goethe also more importantly reorients the focus of the devilish contract into a wildly expansive philosophical vision, having Faust sell his soul not for power or even knowledge, but rather a very Romantic zeal for unadulterated human experience. Most arrestingly, the Faust of Goethe’s poem finds a salvation denied the magician in Marlowe’s play, though the questions raised about human freedom and depravity along the way remain disturbing, this sense that “Man errs as long as he strives.” Read more »