The Moon’s influence on our planet is undeniable. Its gravity pulls the waters of our oceans, creating the tides. Its light cues the migration of birds, the foraging of wildebeests, and the synchronized mating of corals. It is not surprising, then, that since ancient times, humans have wondered if the cycle of the Moon might exert similar power over our minds.
When you see a mammatus cloud, you can’t believe it’s real. It’s as if it were sculpted or painted by a drugged artist, even though it is completely natural. We know how clouds form: from water vapor evaporating from the warm Earth and rising. The warm water vapor is less dense than the cold upper air and rises due to buoyancy pressures, like those that lift a balloon filled with helium or some other gas lighter than air. And we understand that there are complicated variations of temperature and density within clouds. But we really don’t know exactly what leads to these weird pouches dropping down from the undersides of clouds.
This revelation reinforced my realization that science knows a lot, but it doesn’t know everything, even about purely physical phenomena like mammatus clouds. I must admit that even though I am a scientist myself, I prefer a world in which there are still mysteries.
But amid such promising developments are worries among some scientists and environmentalists who fear humans will repeat the errors that resource extraction has wrought on Earth. There have been multiple ecological catastrophes — from the mountains beheaded in West Virginia to the tailings dams that poison watersheds in South America — resulting from our efforts to mine coal, gold, lithium, and other minerals to sustain ever-more-complex supply chains and fuel human growth.
If we have mining in space, do we need a preemptive anti-mining campaign to protect our solar system from rampant exploitation before it is too late? Earth-bound environmental advocates and astrobiologists alike have concluded that, indeed, we need an environmental movement in space.
Along a gentle bend of the Los Angeles River, in a stretch of land called Taylor Yard, a sound like a high-pitched record scratch can just be heard above the cacophony of city life. This is the call of the least Bell’s vireo, an olive-gray songbird that is only five inches from tip to tail. The riparian species native to Southern California has lived an endangered existence for more than 40 years. Now, the small bird’s return here symbolizes a new future for one of the country’s most maligned waterways.
What follows is the story of how a century ago, forgotten voices foresaw the present dawning age of synthetic intelligence: envisaging futures wherein humans might cede their role as the apex cogitator and become subsumed within budding systems of nonhuman cunning.
More profoundly, their unease regarding the future of human sovereignty and solidarity rings even truer today. As our climate deteriorates and geopolitical stability crumbles, there have been renewed calls for planetary coordination and control, whether through geoengineering or governance.
What does this difference in name for a similar concept—one having the sense of including everything, the other the sense of remainder—imply for those who live in these languages? How do the two concepts affect creative practice? When do we feel compelled to say “etcetera” or “ityadi” or even “blah blah,” not just literally or in a manner of speaking but in the way we experience and create the world?
Nevertheless, Hall’s novel is much more ambiguous than a simple “NO!” After all, saying no to the past is the easiest of gestures. His vision is far more ambivalent, given the slipperiness of language. Literature – and art in general – doesn’t save us from atrocity or the progress of history, even when it is a protest against it.
It is also a protest against time and ageing and the inevitability of death. One gets the sense that the novel’s exuberance, its long, looping sentences, is what keeps Hall going: so long as there is a thread, no matter how shredded, there is life, there is meaning.
What is a day? It is a cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds. It is a human fiction, a means of imposing order on an unfathomable duration called life. It is an embodied experience that can feel long or short, interesting or boring, each a unique confluence of meteorological, physiological, and sociological variables. Billions of us go through one at a time. Afterward, we expect the next to come, punctually and without fail. But what if it doesn’t? What would we do?
Ask Tara Selter. The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balle’s miraculous septology, On the Calculation of Volume, has been trapped in the same day with no end in sight.
Can there be art after Auschwitz? Can there be peace of mind? In The Land in Winter, Miller’s characters have looked into the abyss. It makes the ordinary business of living at once very difficult and very necessary.
“Real change is often only seen in hindsight,” Irish writer Niall Williams observes in “Time of the Child.” This theme runs through many of his novels, which look back on pivotal points when the winds of change, however subtle, could be felt rustling through rural communities.
Oaks are primed with genetic flexibility that allows them to solve ecological problems. But the current rise in global temperatures far outpaces its fastest previous climb, posing a problem even these “protean” adapters cannot solve without human intervention. Hipp’s work shows that conserving oak species will preserve invaluable nodes in our genetic web.
It’s difficult to approach a figure such as Parker and say something new. Haven’t we heard it all before? And yet, as Crowther observes, the writer Wyatt Cooper “famously wrote that whatever you think Dorothy Parker was like, she wasn’t.” Throughout the book, Crowther leans into this unknowing, a move made all the more impressive since it has been achieved without the assistance of any dedicated, official archives. Parker’s Hollywood years have long been overlooked because people didn’t put too much stock in her work there. To be fair, neither did she.