At my family’s apartment in Los Angeles, there was a swimming pool that overlooked a tributary of the Los Angeles River called the Tujunga Wash. In the summer it was barren, an empty expanse of concrete, but sometimes, after a storm, a murky stream would thread through it and join the river near Studio City. I barely noticed this backdrop to my summers until a schoolfriend from London came to stay for a few weeks and asked about it. I told her it was a stream that fed into the river that fed into the ocean, and she drily suggested we’d been lied to by our realtor. Later, she suggested we drive up the winding canyons that separate the valley from the rest of LA to look at the mansions lining the hills. I hadn’t yet learned to covet homes like jewels (or the Tiffany necklace she wore) and, until then, had seen our apartment as only a haven.
For all the upward mobility that Sherpas have recently enjoyed, they have yet to make the leap from being guides who climb in their off-hours to athletes being paid to chase their own dreams. In aiming to be the first, Nima hopes to earn a measure of respect and equality that his people have long been due. But to grasp the opportunity before him, he’ll have to transcend the world of commercial climbing that has both elevated and circumscribed his community for generations.
In late 2005, five months after a car accident, a 23-year-old woman lay unresponsive in a hospital bed. She had a severe brain injury and showed no sign of awareness. But when researchers scanning her brain asked her to imagine playing tennis, something striking happened: brain areas linked to movement lit up on her scan.
The experiment, conceived by neuroscientist Adrian Owen and his colleagues, suggested that the woman understood the instructions and decided to cooperate — despite appearing to be unresponsive. Owen, now at Western University in London, Canada, and his colleagues had introduced a new way to test for consciousness. Whereas some previous tests relied on observing general brain activity, this strategy zeroed in on activity directly linked to a researcher’s verbal command.
Moderation is, at its core, a book about the moment when everything we’ve been repressing comes back to the surface. You can hide from yourself for only so long: until the work day ends, until your favorite show is over, until the feed runs out of content, until the digital tide recedes and all that is left is your broken, beautiful life.
“Just as any advanced comrade must have a watch, he shall also possess mastery of a photo camera.” So declared Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1926, in his role as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment. This programmatic statement was included in the very first issue of the photography journal Sovetskoe Foto, published that same year. In fact, such amateur photographic practice—as Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko make clear in their book In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos—was a key form of active Soviet citizenship. A photographer’s manual published in 1931 openly ordered all to turn their cameras away from family, friends, and other mundane subjects and demanded, “Not one photograph devoid of social significance!”