From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing.
Year after year of endless megafire is not inevitable or an eternal state of affairs. The causes of this decades-long march of megafire incidents are recent. Depending on how the current ecological bottleneck is resolved, the increasing emergence of megafires as unceasing, yearly events may be temporary. This chapter does not describe a situation without hope of relief from endless, repetitive fire. Developing and popularizing a nuanced understanding of wildfire’s perennial and dynamic character will lead to the development of a road map through many perilous years to come. California is at a crossroads, and what choices are made in the near future regarding the issue of fire will be remembered by future generations as perhaps the most important that the people of the state ever had to collectively make.
Scientists would like to go beyond these isolated scenes. They want to understand what feelings surge inside animals when they lose kin. They want to know whether animals are haunted by death, as we are. But they’re hampered by certain practicalities. They cannot interview animals (or at least not yet). They can monitor their hormonal shifts—baboon cortisol levels spike when they lose someone close—but these can be triggered by other stressors. They don’t give us the texture and grain of their grief, if indeed it is grief that they feel.
Scientists would like to go beyond these isolated scenes. They want to understand what feelings surge inside animals when they lose kin. They want to know whether animals are haunted by death, as we are. But they’re hampered by certain practicalities. They cannot interview animals (or at least not yet). They can monitor their hormonal shifts—baboon cortisol levels spike when they lose someone close—but these can be triggered by other stressors. They don’t give us the texture and grain of their grief, if indeed it is grief that they feel.
Football food is changing. Gone are the days of lukewarm pies with indeterminate fillings. A vegan club may be extreme (although most are expanding their plant-based offerings) but from the Premier League to the amateur game, food is shifting from being mere fuel. Those watching the Euros this summer may have noticed culinary-themed rivalry, banners proclaiming “Belgian fries better than French fries”, or “tapas better than pasta”. Inane taunts, but a symbol of food’s increasing prominence. Last season, Tottenham Hotspur even displayed a fried chicken artwork in their ground, a celebration of “match day ritual” by artist and Spurs fan Jack Hirons.