Researchers like Hughes have been raising concerns for nearly 50 years about the glaciers that flow into Pine Island Bay and the surrounding Amundsen Sea embayment. Yet coordinated international research of the region only took off in 2018, with the formation of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. Today, the potential collapse of Thwaites Glacier is among the largest environmental threats to global civilization—and we’ve barely begun to understand it. What took us so long?
As it turns out, Pine Island Bay is one of the hardest places in the world to reach. The story of how we know what we know about Thwaites is also a story of the challenges—and triumphs—of science at the bottom of the world.
For whatever reason, cottage cheese has an especially maligned reputation among dairy products. It frequently pops up on scientifically dubious surveys gauging people’s most hated foods, listed among other polarizing edibles like anchovies and liver. But that designation feels especially outdated in 2022, when cottage cheese is better than it has been since people were making it in their actual cottages, and pretty much everyone should be eating more of it.
I’ve always wanted this, I realize now: a small corner of the world that I don’t have to leave, where I am occasionally visited by the people whose company I enjoy the most (or whose company I can dread in an entertaining way), and a job that casts only a vague shadow across a personal life of hijinks and witty repartee. I don’t need to travel. I don’t need adventure. I’d trade every vacation I’ve ever taken for a life of short drop-ins with friends and family and a refrigerator that magically replenishes itself.
Paul Auster’s Bloodbath Nation – part memoir, part essay – offers a reflection on the role that the gun has played in history, society and the novelist’s own life. We learn of his gradual, uneventful introduction to guns, from childhood toys to the rifle he tries out at summer camp and a double-barrelled shotgun at his friend’s farm; when he joins the merchant navy he meets people from the south and marvels at their reckless relationship to firearms. We also discover that while there were no guns in the Auster home, there was a significant, if rarely mentioned, gun death in the family’s history: his grandmother shot his estranged grandfather in front of his uncle.
How places and choices have shaped people is the book’s main theme and the stories share similar undercurrents—dislocation, family separation, uncertainty, ambition, backbreaking labour. But “Have You Eaten Yet?” also explores how Chinese immigrants have shaped their adopted countries. Places like Noisy Jim’s New Outlook Cafe are “an institution in towns across the Canadian prairies: a community centre, a place where families grow up together”. Soupe chinoise is “an adopted national dish” in Madagascar. Across the Caribbean, “in every village and town, there’s always a ‘Chinese shop’”—a small general store. Enrichment is a two-way street.
Any architecture lover has certainly pondered what is possible when it comes to buildings in seemingly unbuildable locations—and Agata Toromanoff’s new book, Living on the Edge: Houses on Cliffs, explores more than 40 gravity-defying houses.