The trees’ twisted crowns are evidence of the forest’s scrappiness: A black spruce seed riding the wind in 1728—the year the first Danish explorer crossed the Bering Sea between Asia and North America—might have found purchase in the rocky till revealed by retreating glaciers. When ice turned Captain Cook back from the Arctic Ocean a few decades later, the sapling would have just been bearing its first cones. A century later, when the United States purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in gold, the slow-growing tree might only have reached 30 feet. By the time the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act created the sprawling system that now manages many of these forests, the aging spruce might still have been a spindly perch for some of the billions of birds that wing north as the days lengthen.
These flocks have thinned in recent years. One in three of the birds that used to make the arrowing trip have disappeared. The boreal forest, meanwhile, is now teetering. As temperatures rise, the permafrost that supported its roots is thawing, drowning whole stands. Many of its trees have been logged, and development has plowed through its muskeg, destroying the habitat that more than half of North America’s birds rely on. The majority of Alaska’s bird species are now at least moderately vulnerable to extinction.
We may be living in a doughnut. It sounds like Homer Simpson’s fever dream, but that could be the shape of the entire universe – to be exact, a hyperdimensional doughnut that mathematicians call a 3-torus.
This is just one of the many possibilities for the topology of the cosmos. “We’re trying to find the shape of space,” says Yashar Akrami of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid, a member of an international partnership called Compact (Collaboration for Observations, Models and Predictions of Anomalies and Cosmic Topology). In May, the Compact team explained that the question of the shape of the universe remains wide open and surveyed the future prospects for pinning it down.
So, in April, I gave up my headphones for a month, in the pursuit of greater awareness of my surroundings and my relationship to my headphones – which is dependent, to say the least. They were intricately linked to my daily routine. Taking the bins out, exercising, washing dishes, writing, eating lunch, trying to sleep. The only time I lived without them was when their battery died. It was never – and I mean never – by choice. The anxiety that followed, until I was able to charge them, should have been enough to tell me that I was, at the very least, habitualised.
It is angry, wry, at times merciless, and I wish there was more of it, but only because I like her so much. This is a character that truly lives.
Questlove, the accomplished musician, filmmaker and author, most recently of “Hip-Hop Is History,” is no doubt aware that his title cuts more than one way. It indicates both that hip-hop is a significant musical genre and that some of its significance is located in the past.