In half century or so since the demise of Camp Century, global warming has begun melting large amounts of Greenland’s ice. The past 10 years are the warmest on record, and the ice sheet is shrinking a bit more every year. That’s science, not fiction, and a world away from the heady optimism of the Cold War dreamers who once envisioned a future embedded in ice.
Since then gravitational waves have become an essential new tool for scholars exploring the universe. But we are still at the very beginning of our explorations. What signals might we see in the data, and will they change how we see the physics of the cosmos?
There is, however, a more practical question that often gets overlooked – if something is out there, how would we recognise it?
Growing up, I understood exactly what my mom meant the first time she said nearly all of the Singlish phrases I’m familiar with. I used to think these words were just odd derivatives of Mandarin words, but I’ve come back to California with a greater appreciation for the language my family grew up on and that I now hear in my own home.
Cisco Bradley’s The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) chronicles a vital and now-vanished facet of American musical and cultural history in New York City from the mid-1980s to 2015. The book investigates how, amid hypercommercialism and mutating audio technologies, bold musicians, expert and amateur alike, impelled by a big-hearted DIY ethos, made new, imaginative music as public, independent, and free as possible by exploiting urban niches and cultural interstices, using dive bars, loft spaces, garages, warehouses, restaurants, and cafés as musical laboratories for experiments in sound, installation, and performance.