Before Simard and other ecologists revealed the extent and significance of mycorrhizal networks, foresters typically regarded trees as solitary individuals that competed for space and resources and were otherwise indifferent to one another. Simard and her peers have demonstrated that this framework is far too simplistic. An old-growth forest is neither an assemblage of stoic organisms tolerating one another’s presence nor a merciless battle royale: It’s a vast, ancient and intricate society. There is conflict in a forest, but there is also negotiation, reciprocity and perhaps even selflessness. The trees, understory plants, fungi and microbes in a forest are so thoroughly connected, communicative and codependent that some scientists have described them as superorganisms. Recent research suggests that mycorrhizal networks also perfuse prairies, grasslands, chaparral and Arctic tundra — essentially everywhere there is life on land. Together, these symbiotic partners knit Earth’s soils into nearly contiguous living networks of unfathomable scale and complexity. “I was taught that you have a tree, and it’s out there to find its own way,” Simard told me. “It’s not how a forest works, though.”
Why is it that such a regular occurrence feels so horrific and surprising? Why don’t we better remember that when it seems like it’s approaching time for dinner or a cocktail, it’s barely 4 p.m.?
There is a memory-based explanation, said Signy Sheldon, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at McGill University: It's because the way we interpret and encode our current experiences is all based on expectations. Memory is, after all, a tool to help us survive in the world, and so it, in part, operates to make predictions.
In a poetic but disjointed second novel, at times as harshly illuminating as a fluorescent-lighted operating room and at others as confusing as an overwhelmed ER, British writer Emma Glass — herself a working nurse — depicts a London hospital nursery ward where tiny humans struggle to survive. Her focus isn’t the suffering children but a few agonizing days in the life of one particular nurse, Laura, who is nearing complete systemic collapse. Is a faulty and unjust system to blame?
An Inventory of Losses seems at first no more optimistic than the earlier books: our desire for human creations to endure, as evidenced by the etched copper discs of cultural markers attached to the Voyager space probes, is “a kind of magical thinking … a means of self-reassurance for a species unable to accept its own utter meaninglessness”. But for Schalansky it’s the failure to last that gives our efforts not just pathos but also power, and her book is a philosophical embrace of loss.
Getting older, you never got old.
A gold mine of girl: doe-eyed, sold.
in the South, a body might do that, or
it makes a body feel some type of way.
Here rounding at the knees to support