At 8:30 p.m. on 16 May 1916, John J. Carty banged his gavel at the Engineering Societies Building in New York City to call to order a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This was no ordinary gathering. The AIEE had decided to conduct a live national meeting connecting more than 5,000 attendees in eight cities across four time zones. More than a century before Zoom made virtual meetings a pedestrian experience, telephone lines linked auditoriums from coast to coast. AIEE members and guests in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco had telephone receivers at their seats so they could listen in.
More than five centuries ago, only eight years after Columbus’s slipper touched the white sands of San Salvador and seventeen prior to Luther’s hammer hitting the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, either Hieronymus Bosch or a student of his purchased from a Brabant merchant a rectangle of Dutch poplar about five feet long and four feet wide and with oils as red as blood and as blue as Heaven, as green as the earth and as black as death, painted the aforementioned scenes in a composition entitled The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things. An entire moral universe recorded on wood from a tree felled in the Low Countries more than half a millennium ago, the vagaries of pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, envy, greed, and wrath rendered in exacting detail, and the costs of such transgressions indicated in the corners of the piece.
It was one of history’s monumental moments – but if John Glenn hadn’t popped into the supermarket to pick up a Contax camera and a roll of 35mm film on his way to board the Friendship 7, there may have been no visual document of it. The photographs the American astronaut took from the window of his capsule as he orbited Earth on 20 February 1962 gave an unprecedented testimony of the Mercury Project’s first orbital mission. The Soviet Union might have beaten the Americans in the race to human spaceflight – but the Americans had now shot the first galactic colour photographs.
Monday was for the blahs. Wednesday was hump day. Sunday—or Saturday, depending on your Lord—was God’s day. But Friday was your day, the bright-line demarcation between when your body belonged to The Man and when your body belonged to you. As Loverboy sang back in 1981, “Everybody’s working for the weekend.” But now everybody’s just working. The wired-all-the-time technological “innovations” of the past two decades mean that we never stop punching the clock. Now the clock punches us.
None of which augurs well for TGI Fridays, the original fern-bar-turned-mall-canteen-turned-ubiquitous-franchise, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this month. Why thank anyone that it’s Friday when Friday is just another day?
When she’s not gazing up into the night sky, the teen narrator of Inga Simpson’s terrific new dystopian novel, The Thinning, spends a great deal of time looking anxiously at the bright orange watch her mother has strapped to her wrist. Fin Kelvin is her name, and like the reader, she doesn’t know whether she’s living at the end of the world or on the cusp of something new.
Undoubtedly, the various genres require different approaches, but Moss largely confirmed my own beliefs about the creative process. It’s hard work, as book’s title suggests, but you do it because you love it, you can’t stop doing it, and, above all, you believe that something worthwhile will come out on the other end.
Zeldovich has spun a thrilling tale, but one hopes it’s just the beginning and middle of the story, with the climax of phage-fueled medicine yet to come. Indeed, as Zeldovich writes, “These phages might be our best weapons against the next bacterial pandemics.”