Elliot Carol, the C.E.O. and co-founder of Lunar Resources, is thirty-three, with a cherubic face and curly hair speckled with gray. Although he grew up in Connecticut and previously worked as a hedge-fund manager, he was wearing black cowboy boots. He led me to a provisional-looking conference room—the company hadn’t had a chance to renovate yet—and uncapped a dry-erase marker. Then, on a whiteboard, he drew a large circle, to represent the moon. Inside the circle, he drew a small square, which represented about two hundred square kilometres of the lunar surface. This was the potential site of the FarView radio-telescope array.
Unlike telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb, which are made from mirrors and lenses, FarView would comprise a hundred thousand metal antennas made on-site by autonomous robots. It would cover a Baltimore-size swath of the moon. To show the FarView site up close, Carol drew a big square filled with dots. Each dot represented a cluster of four hundred antennas; all the clusters together would be sensitive enough to detect a cell phone on Pluto. They would perceive light that is nearly undetectable from Earth: radio waves from a mysterious period known as the Cosmic Dark Ages.
Parents have plenty of valid reasons for feeding their kids nuggets — they’re cheap, they’re fast, and kids tend to like them, for starters. But the shame that seems to adhere to their crunchy, golden crusts says a lot about the expectations placed on parents, and especially moms, to give their kids fresh, whole foods in an economic and social environment that makes it punishingly difficult.
Chicken nuggets are a reminder of the ways “our choices are taken away from us” in American food culture, Tompkins said. They’re “both delicious and suspicious.”
But the greatest takeaway from the novel, which brims with love for humanity and the planet, is that while change is inevitable, the fragile enchantments of life — underwater and on land — are worth savoring and saving.
Frank O’Hara himself is not a recurring presence in Susan Aizenberg’s new volume, but the themes introduced in the title poem, which opens the book, weave themselves through the rest of this wise and elegant collection.