In a decidedly digital age, the modest postage stamp seems to be slowly vanishing from daily life—no longer ubiquitous in wallets or pocketbooks, useful but maybe not essential.
They’re so overlooked that the comedian Nate Bargatze has an entire bit about how stamps make him “nervous.” “I don’t know how many you’re supposed to put on [a letter],” he says. “And they change the price of stamps, and that’s not in the news, you know? You don’t find that out on Twitter. You have to find out from old people. They’re the only people that know.” (As someone in the news, I am duty bound to report that stamps’ price increased from $0.66 to $0.68 on January 21.)
Scientists should consider plastic, now a ubiquitous feature of the ocean, a kind of mineral, Zalasiewicz says. He compares plastic to amber, a rock formed from fossilized tree resin, which he calls its close geological equivalent. Though amber is chemically different from most plastics, it is also made of complex long-chain organic molecules that can survive for millions of years when buried in the ground.
That recognition and its ample rewards animate The Paradise Notebooks: 90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada — the soulful chronicle of thirteen summer days the poetic geologist Richard J. Nevle and the Buddhist poet Steven Nightingale spent walking across one of the world’s most majestic mountains with their wives and teenage daughters, recording and reflecting on those devotional acts of pure attention in diary entires, essays, and poems that interleave science and spirit, observation and metaphor, grandeur and smallness. What emerges is a love letter to “a tender whole that is so much sweeter than the sum of its lonely parts.”
It’s the texture of Gabriel’s story that grabs you, much more than its portrait of American complacency and complicity.
Waiting for the Monsoon is a compelling and clear-eyed dispatch in the face of a cruel and relentless illness, or what Nordland describes as the “hawks’ boil”, a description of birds of prey circling their quarry. It is also the journalist’s autobiography, revealing how he survived appalling malevolence in his childhood and went on to have an award-winning career as a war reporter.