Much of astrobiology research involves searching for chemical “biosignatures”—molecules or combinations of molecules that could indicate the presence of life. But because scientists can’t reliably say that ET life should look, chemically, like Earth life, seeking those signatures could mean we miss beings that might be staring us in the face. “How do we move beyond that?” Johnson asks. “How do we contend with the truly alien?” Scientific methods, she thought, should be more open to varieties of life based on varied biochemistry: life as we don’t know it. Or, in a new term coined here, “LAWDKI.”
It’s easy to become desensitized to the news of yet another restaurant closing — especially if you have no personal relationship with that restaurant. But closing one is never easy for the people who run it. A closure is the end of a chapter, and sometimes represents the death of a dream. Not just another COVID-19 casualty, the death of Miri’s was the result of the endless grind of owning a restaurant while digging out after a world-changing event.
“The hardest thing about closing is thinking about the dream that was but isn’t anymore. And how to reconcile and honor both feelings as true,” Plowman said. “And maybe missing that juicy new creative space. Dismantling it is way less juicy.”
On the surface, The Shards is a relatively simple story about an obsessive young man learning to navigate the interstitial space between being a teenager and adulthood. However, it's also much more; this is a novel about obsession, the masks everyone wears as they go through life, and how isolation exacerbates paranoia — and one that could only have come from Bret Easton Ellis.
“The Half Known Life” is a masterful merging of Iyer’s past and current concerns, a book of inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors, of hopeful optimism for a world rooted in the paradise of being home.