by Anton Cebalo

In the first century AD, a passionate didactic poem was written in Latin and later bundled with Virgil’s work. However, the style is so drastically different from his that the author’s real name is likely permanently lost.

Aetna is a poem that revolves around explaining how Mount Etna (“Aetna” in Latin) on the island of Sicily erupts. Whoever wrote it must have made an altar in his mind devoted this volcano which was the most active in the region then. Mount Vesuvius had not destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii yet.

Aetna shall be my poetic theme and the fires that break from her hollow furnaces.

The poem is written romantically, as an ode to nature and to not underestimate the fiery infernos of Earth. It may be one of the few classical works that deals explicitly with the Earth as a victim and the consequences of taking from the land without paying it back in kind.

What’s also unique about the poem is that it is explicitly naturalistic. In a time of lyrical myth-making, the author spends the opening dismissing three leading myths about Aetna. No, he writes, Aetna is organic and has to be understood on her own terms. He speaks of Aetna as a body full of underground rivers, caves, and winds that carry the fire. He describes them in great detail to rationally understand how the volcano lives and moves.

This would be rare in classical poetry on its own, but the real emotional heart of the poem is what follows this naturalistic exploration. For it’s not really just about Aetna, but how by understanding Aetna, one lifts one’s head to the sky and grows closer to higher things. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

Some mornings, I wake up thinking of Ahmedabad. It’s a city I’ve visited a few times; for a few reasons, it’s a city I’ve never really warmed to. But I’ve roamed widely there, often by autorickshaw. And on those mornings I’m talking about, it’s two of those rides I remember.

The first: I’m going to see a friend. My rickshaw is operated by a burly man, greying and unshaven, I’d say in his mid-50s. We stop at a traffic signal. The little bump we feel as we wait, it doesn’t seem like anything to be concerned about. The white car behind has nudged us accidentally (we think) but gently. I mean, so gently that I’m certain there isn’t even a scratch registered. My driver must think the same – he waves his hand in what I can only describe as half-hearted irritation, doesn’t even get out to look. The light changes, we drive on.

Seconds later, the white car pulls alongside, then ahead, forcing us to the side, then to a stop. Man leaps out. Gleaming black shoes, spotless white shirt, creased trousers, looks 30 years old – must be an executive somewhere, I think. Right now, his face is twisted in fury. He bears down on us, yelling that he honked three times, wanting us to move over. (So maybe it wasn’t an accidental bump?) My driver steps out. He and executive-man go nose-to-nose, abusing each other loud enough for passing drivers to do a double-take.

I try to pacify them. I’m not even fully sure what the executive is really upset about, and there is no visible damage on either vehicle. For a moment, I think I have succeeded in calming him down. But only for a moment. Because he suddenly turns, lopes back to his car, reaches in and pulls out … absolutely the last thing I expect. It’s a long, sturdy stick.

He lopes back. Before I can react, or even comprehend what he’s doing, he swings at my driver’s forearm with a ferocity I would not have believed had I not seen it. The sound the stick makes, as it connects with flesh and the firmness of bone underneath, is nauseating. He has hit the driver so hard that the stick … it breaks in two. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

Those who study history as a field of knowledge production (like myself) often differ in their understanding of what it is from the general public. Much of the public views history as entertainment or a boring list of names and dates, not anything critical to modern life. In some cases, its positioned as a mode of predicting what will most certainly come next. Historians tend to view history as more dynamic and in flux depending on the present. But where do perceptions of the past between the two groups diverge and is there a danger in that divergence?

I would argue that the difference is in how more popular perceptions understand the past as dead while those engaged in knowledge production view it as alive, speaking to us, demanding our attention to rethink the world around us. That disconnect is fed by popular historical narratives found in nationalist, teleological histories and by mass mediated narratives in film and television. For many, history is something back there, not something that informs us in the here and now. As such, the public is missing out on the power that understanding history in a more holistic way can hold. That does cause real problems as history for most isn’t something that is fully real nor something that can shape our understanding of what’s possible in the world.

Popular perceptions of the past rests in two ideas, that of inevitability of events of the past and the second is the objectification or flattening of the past. First, popular historical narratives tend to rest on the idea of a singular, teleological narrative, either progressive or sometimes cyclical, such as in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. What happened, happened and that’s just fate. Nationalist historical narratives tend to embrace that framing along a continuum from liberal to fascist. The “nation” in these histories are an inevitable outcome of history or a body that has always existed in the past and will into the future. Messier aspects of the past are ignored or glossed over. Let’s take US history and the rise of modernity. Modern liberalism is seen as the inevitable outcome of the Enlightenment – a direct line from one to the other and the only real outcome that matters. The modern nation-state is an inevitable outcome of the historical process of the Enlightenment, in other words. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

High-acuity vision and depth perception give Portia a detailed and stable visual world. But vision alone does not explain why Portia is famous. What makes this genus remarkable is not just what it can see, but how it uses what it sees to manipulate the perceptual systems of other spiders.

Portia does not simply overpower its prey. It engineers situations in which prey behave in ways that make them vulnerable through careful behavioral manipulation.

Before examining Portia’s hunting strategies, we need to understand how it moves. Unlike almost all animals, spiders have no muscles dedicated to straightening their legs (extensor muscles). Instead, spiders evolved a hydraulic system that does this work for them by using hemolymph, the spider’s blood equivalent, as a hydraulic fluid.

To extend a leg, spiders pressurize hemolymph throughout the body, forcing fluid into each of their eight legs. Connections at the leg–body interface act as valves that open or close to adjust which legs extend. Pressure straightens the joints, while flexor muscles fine-tune movement. This is why dead spiders curl inward. When hydraulic pressure collapses, only the flexor muscles remain active, pulling the legs into the characteristic death curl.

This mechanism has several advantages. First, it reduces muscle mass at the extremities and concentrates it near the center of the body. More importantly, it makes holding an extended posture not just easier but nearly effortless, since legs are maintained by pressure rather than sustained muscle contraction. We say spiders “sit” in their webs, but they do not really sit; they hold their legs extended, waiting for information. Maintaining such stillness for hours would be nearly impossible using constantly tensed extensor muscles, especially in a web where immobility is essential. Read more »

by Herbert Lui

By definition, in order to be prolific, you only need to produce and publish a lot of work.

When you set out to produce and publish a lot of creative work, you focus on what’s in your control. Your time will be limited, as will the size of each project, as well as your expectation for each one. There’s no time to get in your own head—for example, thinking about the prizes the work may earn—which means there’s no time for you to get blocked. Instead of getting too precious about a single piece of work, and falling into the trance of hesitation, you focus your energy on making a contribution to your body of work by finishing this one and starting on the next.

When you aim to produce a vast quantity of acceptable work, you also naturally find opportunities to improve along the way. Being prolific turns out to be a structure to improve your skills. Joseph Mallord William Turner’s practice of travel and painting led him to create and complete a vast quantity of work, including more than 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolors, and 30,000 works on paper. Ray Bradbury advice comes to mind, “If you can write one short story a week — it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones.” Read more »

Reflection selfie in the window of a train I was about to catch at the station in Franznesfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Mike Bendzela

I have mourned the fact my entire life that we, as a species, no longer have tails. —Robert Sapolsky

It’s too bad the most basic fact of our existence is overlooked, ignored, even denied, and railing against this state of affairs is largely pointless. I’m talking about our essential animal nature, written in our genes and imbued in our gray matter. I’ve scribbled on the topic before, working against a tide of careless language that swamps public discourse with confusion, particularly in politics. As a writer who is hardly a scientist, I sometimes resort to using the fable and the parable over the essay form for illustrative purposes, as I’m a better storyteller and analogy fabricator than an expository writer. I like these forms as they are instructive as well as entertaining.

As I’m a mere lay observer, my knowledge comes by way of books and lectures from writers whose knowledge exceeds my own by orders of magnitude. We all know the names: Darwin and Wallace themselves; Dawkins, Dennett, Gould, Sapolsky, Mr. Braterman of this very website, and so on. I’ve taken every evolution course I can find at the University where I am an adjunct instructor of writing, sections in both the Biology and Anthropology departments. I was privileged to be admitted into all of the courses taught by Harvard PhD Professor Kenneth Weber (1943-2023), some of which I audited, others I took for grades. I was flattered when he told the class that I, a university employee, was not an undergraduate biology student but an evolution “enthusiast.”  Yes, that’s the right term for it. I am enthusiastic about what Darwin called “descent with modification.” This idea should be the centerpiece of all our lives, the same way evolutionary theory is the centerpiece of all the life sciences.

But if gifted writers and teachers such as those mentioned cannot make a dent in the consciousness of the American public, who am I to think I can? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Steve Szilagyi

A few weeks ago, I came into possession of a bound volume of Time magazines from late 1950. As I leafed through it, admiring the cover art, I came to the issue of December 11—which showed a portrait of the young Mao Tse-tung surrounded by a swarm of locusts. Reading inside, I was gripped—not by nostalgia, but by something closer to vertigo. The prose was so dire, the political situation so apocalyptic, the leaders involved so reckless and unpredictable, that I had to keep reminding myself: this is 1950. This is not now.

Which got me thinking. We hear a lot today about the fertility crisis, and one explanation that circulates is fear—fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of the future. “What sane person would bring a child into a world like this?” But the world of 1950 seemed no less on the verge of self-immolation than ours. Yet that period produced the largest sustained surge in births in American history.

Tyrants and thrill killers. Those of us born in the early 1950s were conceived during what appeared to be one of the bleakest, most frightening periods in American history: a three-year stretch when tyrants ruled half the earth, nuclear war seemed imminent, and the entire effective ground force of the U.S. and United Nations was on the verge of annihilation in Korea.

Domestically, it was a time of deadly weather disasters, gruesome thrill killings, government persecution of dissent, and widespread racial segregation. Oh yes—and a housing shortage that put home ownership out of reach for thousands of young families.

Our parents knew what was going on in the world. Mass media made sure of that. And how did the young people of the time respond to this avalanche of horrors? According to the mass of aging, but still living, evidence, they gave each other sad looks, threw off their clothes, and hopped into bed. Read more »

by TJ Price

I’m going to have to change the names in this story, but not to protect the innocent. As the telling would have it, none involved in the following can claim that status, either objectively or by adhering to the legal definition. I can’t tell you why he did what he did, or what about what I did made him do what he did, and I can’t tell you why his friends did what they did, either. I can’t explain the policies or procedures of law enforcement at the time, nor fathom the way in which the trial unfolded; neither am I in contact with anyone mentioned any longer, to confer over shared memory.

There will be some description of physical assault and sexual aggression in what follows. If these things are something to which you are sensitive, please be advised.

It probably will also end on a mostly unresolved note, so please also be advised those of you sensitive to lack of catharsis.

Sadly, that’s just how things like this go, most of the time.

This will serve as the first part of the story, as the writing of it has gone on much longer than I’d anticipated. The conclusion will be posted in four weeks’ time.

1.
It was in the fall, in New England. The way most stories in this time and place begin is with a skirl of autumnal leaves and the crisp, austere smile of winter beginning to curve over the land. This year, though, there had been more rain than normal, and I remember that everything was shiny and wet. It hadn’t got cold enough for anything to freeze, and yet the world had a glossy, plastic sheen already. Some nights, ice crept in around the edges, but only hesitantly, and never with a bold intent to stay.

Still, there was a sense of something new in the air for me. College was finally becoming something that had a purpose to me—in my sophomore year, I’d declared my major. It was a lot less dramatic than I’d thought it would be, requiring more in the way of paperwork than any kind of actual declaration, I thought. A pretentious teenager, my idyll of higher education had involved vaulted cathedral ceilings, immense libraries, hushed veneration of the Pursuit of Knowledge—I’d imagined some kind of solemn ceremony for the declaration of one’s major, but was disappointed. I should’ve known it from the first visit, driving states’ worth of road to get there and being greeted by an array of desultory, squat buildings that resembled the uninspired façade of high school (all over again!) moreso than anything venerable, I thought.

Perhaps fittingly for such a dramatic idyll, the major I’d declared was theatre. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Under the Bridge at Deception Pass, Washington. April 2026.

Digital photograph.

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by John Allen Paulos

Donald Trump has famously called climate change and global warming a hoax. Ignorant and benighted as he is, he is far from alone. Skepticism about global warming and its causes is widespread. One overly kind reading of this skepticism is that it is, to an extent, a consequence of the general problem of dealing with very big numbers and very small numbers. Such numbers fall outside people’s familiar mid-size range, and so intuition about them isn’t well-developed. Also unfamiliar to most are the effects of exponential growth or decline.

To illustrate the latter, let’s first consider a classic illustration of exponential decline and the huge effect of repeated tiny declines over time. Say you put $1,000 into a bad investment and it loses just 1/10^th of one percent of its value every day. After ten years when you finally sell, it will be worth $26.  ($1,000 x .999^3,650 = $26)

Money can be discussed with some precision but, having mentioned Trump, I note a different kind of very steep decline. Small erosions of political norms and practices can lead over time to a similar enormous decline as in the monetary example above. An increase in daily lies and misinformation leads inexorably to growing suspicion of politicians’ motives and then to policies tainted or even dictated by special interests. At first this is somewhat tolerable, but over time these transgressions metastasize and the body politic becomes dysfunctional.

Relevant to the above sort of examples is the notion of a discount rate. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

I’m tired of hearing about parades of planets. That term is used by astronomers to describe the presence of more than a few planets above the horizon at one time. Although it’s genuinely unusual to have five or six planets above the horizon at the same time, it’s not always an impressive sight for casual viewers. Moreover, the term is sometimes used rather loosely, and some sources provide incorrect or incomplete information about what constitutes a particular parade or how easy it will be to see.

The only planets that are reliably easy to see without optical aid such as binoculars or a telescope are Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (and, of course, Earth). The visibility of even those four planets depends on how high in the sky they are. A recent parade of planets included a few that were very low in the west after sunset, which made them difficult to spot. It wasn’t much of a parade, in my opinion. Moreover, you’ll need optical aid and fairly dark skies to see Uranus and Neptune, and you’ll need to know your way around the sky well enough to locate them.

Moreover, the images that accompany some stories about planetary parades are misleading. Planets may be more spread out on the sky than the drawings indicate, and if they’re not at their brightest, they might not stand out well against a starry background. Read more »

The Cardelaveo Abyss

Without you would be the
Cardelaveo Abyss

which is no place I know
or which even exists
unless by coincidence
because I just made it up
to convey the vast emptiness
I would know without you

Awakening in a 2 a.m. funk
what I was doing up
was being down,
not in a dreadful sense
but in the way of anyone
suddenly too tuned to everyday events
once hidden in convenient clouds
but now laid bare as an avocado pit
exposed in half a fruit
staring at the dark heart of it
and first time seeing it
from head to boot.

Jim Culleny
2008

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by Thomas R. Wells

All things come to an end eventually, including the human species. From the perspective of the universe it won’t matter, and so it also shouldn’t matter to us now. The discontinuance of a taxonomic unit is not particularly interesting or important, especially since no one will be around to notice.

My basic point is the same as Epicurus’ philosophical medicine against the fear of death:

Death should not concern us because as long as we exist, death is not here, and when death is here, we are not.

People think they are worried about death, but in fact they cannot be since they will never experience it. Their actual worries are about how unpleasant the process of dying might be, and of what will become of their worldly interests, from family to reputation to half-completed projects.

In the case of Homo sapiens there is even less reason to care about its ending, because a species is merely a taxonomic unit within which creatures of similar and compatible physiology can be grouped to distinguish them from members of other sets when that seems helpful (other definitions are available). The human species lacks the integrated psychological cohesion of an individual human life. It contains but is not reducible to supra-individual entities like societies. It has no ‘life projects’. It does not really exist in any meaningful sense – less than a tree, or even a rock – and so can have no interest even in its own persistence.

Neither do any individual humans have an interest in the persistence of the human species. Individual humans may care about their children’s future, and about the intergenerational social institutions, like countries, which they hope will secure that future. If there were no more humans then those things we actually care about would necessarily also end. But we still would not care about the end of the human species itself.

Disaster movies are the main way in which the esoteric topic of human extinction is brought to our attention. They have taught us to worry about it, and thus made us too ready to believe that extinction must be worth worrying about. Read more »

by Derek Neal

I had meant to read Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, but in a process I don’t understand, all the e-books were in use at the library; I borrowed his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), instead. I’d never read Lerner, this despite having written a long essay defending autofiction in The Republic of Letters (Lerner is considered one of the genre’s main exemplars), focusing instead on the non-American writers of autofiction (Knausgaard, Cusk, Ferrante). I’ve always preferred European literature to American literature, the one exception being Americans who write about Europe, like Henry James or James Baldwin, but when I opened Leaving the Atocha Station, I discovered that Lerner also writes about Americans in Europe; in this case, the American is Adam Gordon, a version of Lerner who is on a poetry fellowship in Madrid, much like Lerner was a Fulbright scholar in Madrid in 2004, the year the book takes place.

The novel is full of doubles, copies, and repetitions, which seems to be Lerner’s signature preoccupation—before reading the novel, I’d read a handful of reviews of Transcription, thinking I’d be reading that book, and I’d listened to Lerner’s interviews with Michael Silverblatt about his first two novels; somewhere in this reading and listening, I’d read/heard about the focus on doubles, which must have primed me to appreciate this aspect of Leaving the Atocha Station, and indeed, when I read the opening section about Adam making espresso in his attic apartment overlooking La Plaza Santa Ana, then walking through the streets of Madrid with a bag of books, I thought, wait a second—that’s me! I, too, had rented “a barely furnished attic apartment” overlooking a bustling European square; I, too, had wandered the streets with a book in my backpack and a notebook to write in while sitting on a park bench or at a café table; I, too, had wondered if I was going to be a writer, was already a writer, or was simply a fraud, a stereotype of the young American in Europe. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

I am an American, a lawyer, and a Jew. That is to say, I’ve been fed a lot of bullshit over the years. I was brought up to believe the United States is a shining city on a hill; Israel is a light unto the nations; and the law is a learned profession and the noblest of callings.

In the wonderful movie Little Big Man, the Dustin Hoffman character explains about the Cheyene, “The name of their tribe was Tsitsistas, which in their language means The Human Beings.” It’s common for tribes to think of themselves as the human beings. My tribes are as susceptible as any other.

When I was a kid they told me Columbus discovered America. The people who lived here at the time quite literally didn’t count. The arrival of Columbus was the arrival of human beings. They told me Israel was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” They didn’t tell us the Palestinians weren’t human, exactly. What they said was they weren’t really a people, just a loose population of nomadic herders. They also told us the Muslim population of Palestine left voluntarily when Israel became a state. Too bad for them, we learned, because their Arab brothers refused to allow the Palestinians to assimilate and instead confined them to refugee camps. If they had stayed in Israel, they would have enjoyed the benefits of Israeli citizenship. I never heard the word nakba until I was an adult.

Israel’s wars, we were told, were purely defensive. All Israel wanted was to live in peace with her neighbors and to make the desert bloom. My mother once showed me a map of the Middle East. She pointed to the tiny sliver that was Israel. The Arab countries were enormous. Why, she asked, can’t they just leave us alone?

To someone raised on that history, the Israeli war in Gaza is hard to grasp. One of the foundational ideas I learned as a kid was that some things are nisht Yiddish. They are things a Jew does not do. We do not eat corned beef on white bread with mayonnaise. We do not kill journalists or torture prisoners. We do not starve babies or blow up hospitals. We do not commit mass murder.

The conclusion necessarily follows: Netanyahu is nisht Yiddish. Israel is nisht Yiddish. But how can this be? Read more »

by John Ambrosio 

Liberals, progressives, and others who closely follow U.S. national politics often experience a sense of vertigo and disorientation, of being emotionally upended and mentally exhausted trying to untangle and refute the incessant barrage of lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories emanating from the White House. While Trump frequently makes outrageous and inflammatory remarks to elicit a response from his political opponents and dominate the news cycle, the primary effect of his rhetoric is to envelop people in a fog of incoherence, to psychologically overwhelm them by flooding the zone with a tsunami of falsehoods, inconsistencies, and contradictory narratives that leaves them cognitively numb.

But when we dismiss Trump’s incoherent rants and inscrutable word salads as the utterances of a disorganized and deranged mind, which they clearly are, we overlook the political appeal of his rhetoric. Trump does not seek to persuade people by appealing to reason and the intellect, but to create a feeling of uncertainty, doubt, distrust, and chaos that disables and short-circuits the capacity of people to engage in rational and fact-based dialogue, that bypasses the intellect in order to appeal directly to deep feelings of anger, resentment, and racial grievance in his supporters.

We should not assume that people who espouse ostensibly crazy ideas and conspiracy theories are incapable of coherent reasoning. While this may be true in some cases, the problem is not that Trump’s supporters are incapable of rational thought. What may appear irrational to some can make rational sense to people who inhabit Trump’s invented reality. That is, when people have marinated in the far-right news and information ecosystem and become emotionally and psychologically invested in Trump’s lies, and when belief in his falsehoods is essential to their identity, rational thought can become detached from empirical and fact-based reality. For Trump’s core supporters, the sense of belonging to a supportive and affirming community of shared belief and feeling is more important than facts and truth.

Like others, I rarely paid attention to the noise, to the craziness and nonsense, and simply dismissed far-right propaganda as the irrelevant chatter of marginal voices. But I was mistaken to assume that these voices would simply disappear or would remain in the margins forever. Read more »