Going out to dinner with Juan Tamariz in Madrid is a little like accompanying a cartoon character on a journey to the real world. As I walked with the 80-year-old magician on side streets off the city center’s main drag, the Calle Gran Vía, heads turned left and right. Tamariz has been a professional magician for 52 years, and in that time, he has managed the singular feat of becoming both a household name in his home country and a living legend in magic everywhere. He is referred to by magicians all over the world, and waiters all over Madrid, as Maestro. David Blaine has called him “the greatest and most influential card magician alive.” But in Spain, Tamariz is an icon, less like Blaine or David Copperfield and more like Kermit the Frog.
A cluster of young men smoking a joint, heads bowed and pupils dilated, whispered, “Tamariz?” uncertain if they could believe their eyes. (Imagine getting good and baked in public and seeing Kermit strolling by.) One passing woman did a Buster Keaton-grade double take, culminating in an expression of such uninhibited delight that witnessing it seemed to amount to a violation of her privacy. Tamariz is used to this. He will pause midsentence to say hello, or pose for a picture, before returning seamlessly to whatever conversation he was engaged in the previous moment. A preternatural night owl — he often goes to bed when he sees the sun coming out — Tamariz is the last to leave any restaurant he dines in, permitting just about every other customer to approach him on their way out. “They always make the same joke,” he whispered to me, after a man asked him to make his wife disappear. But Tamariz reacted as though it were the first time anyone had come up with the notion.
Earth records provide us with this information: Ice cores, tree rings, ocean sediments, stalactites and stalagmites in caves, growth rings in corals, tusks, and mollusks. These archives accrete memories on time periods varying from months to millions of years, allowing us to see a spectrum of Earth changes on various temporal and spatial scales—how biology, ocean, and ice respond to climate change in signature patterns, and the points at which those systems are pushed past thresholds.
This is one of the most important insights that paleoclimate archives provide: They show us how the real world breaks. How resilience folds into catastrophic failure. They show us the edges and asymmetries of the climate system: the thresholds of tolerance in ecological networks; the slow steady slog of diversification and the quick ax of extinction; the long timescales it takes for ice sheets to grow—accumulating million-year memories—and how fast they can melt, puddling history into storm surges that erode the banks of our futures.
But the leap second has always represented a deeper discrepancy. Our idea of a day is based on how fast the Earth spins; yet we define the second—the actual base unit of time as far as scientists, computers, and the like are concerned—with the help of atoms. It’s a definitive gap that puts astronomy and atomic physics at odds with each other.
“Now Is Not the Time to Panic,” the sixth novel from New York Times bestselling writer Kevin Wilson (“Nothing to See Here”) delves into the capacity of teenagers to create — but not also control — transformative art, and into the conjoined questions of culpability when that artwork takes on a momentum and meaning all its own among its consumers.