by Steve Szilagyi

Woodman, Spare That Tree is a poem by George Pope Morris, published in 1837, and quickly set to music by the prolific songwriter Henry Russell (Cheer, Boys, Cheer). It begins:

Woodman, spare that tree! / Touch not a single bough! / In youth it sheltered me / And I’ll protect it now.

By the late 1830s, much of the primeval forest along the settled East Coast had already disappeared. One of the striking discoveries in 19th-century photographs of American towns and countryside is the sheer emptiness of the landscape beyond the main streets and Carpenter Gothic houses. If you can tear your eyes away from the corpses in the foreground of a Civil War battle photograph, you’ll see, behind them, treeless vistas that seem to go on forever.

In muscular young North America, trees were the enemy. Once you got your land, the first task was to clear it of trees and stumps — no easy thing to do with an axe. All across the continent, strapping young men went to war against the forests. They were so successful that, by 1837, those once-heroic fellows could appear as villains in poems of performative sentiment.

I’ve been listening to Woodman, Spare That Tree since 1977, when it was released on the Nonesuch LP An Evening with Henry Russell, sung by Clifford Jackson, accompanied by William Bolcom on piano. I’m still moved by the poem and its plangent musical setting.

So you can imagine my discomfort in July of 2026, when I found myself in the same situation diagrammed by the figures in “Woodman, Spare That Tree” — with one big difference: I was both the woodman and the poet. Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

Biohackers pour in effort to extend it, the ultrarich pour in money to make it eternal. Life, that is. But death does not discriminate. It takes us all.

We know this, and yet a death rarely fails to shake us out of our routines.

Death likes to creep up at inopportune times. While people are skipping rope or cutting a rug on the dancefloor. Riding a scooter without a helmet or chopping down a tree. Number crunchers can narrow the likelihood of death’s arrival by parsing the demographics: income, gender, whether we brought a gun into the house and where that house is located. Avoiding such places and activities doesn’t change the outcome. Death finds you, somehow to your surprise.

Tornadoes, earthquakes, high rise fires, war—death works in bulk at these events. We know this. Yet we so often tsk tsk the final body count.

Murderers—the solo and the state variety—try to put death in their service, but that only lasts so long, and it never wins them a free pass. Death comes for them, too.

We don’t like to think about death, the yarn goes. That’s why it catches us off guard. Maybe. But we’re also getting used to the idea that it operates way out there, in the foggy future. Because while death still operates in the freak accident genre, among others, in much of the world its work has gotten increasingly predictable. It sidesteps the young and thrives among the elderly.

Improved nutrition, basic hygiene, proliferating lawfulness, and widening food supplies—banal hallmarks of civilization—have all helped push lifespans higher. They’re about 80 in the U.S., 80-plus in Canada, China, Japan, Australia, and throughout Europe. Globally, they average 73 years. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

It goes without saying that one can talk oneself into problems. Your own stories become pathological like a slow drip eroding your senses. And you may find yourself circling a narrative so many times over that language starts to fail. What’s left then is just feeling. Exhaustion with it all gives way to resentment and anxiety as many morbid symptoms appear. This used to be called “neurosis.”

Zeno’s Conscience (1923) by Italo Svevo is the story of one such man suffering from talking too much (to himself). Zeno is a person with deep interiority, long meandering monologues, and feeling. However, despite his never-ending rhetorical skills and eccentricity—having gone through the tunnels of his mind many times over—he ironically enough lacks a conscience. He fails in health, in love, in his addictions, and in business. Rumination and ceaseless inner conversation do not produce moral clarity for Zeno. Instead, his often-comical interior life is insidious because his obsession with sentimentality and grand justifications prevents his self-actualization. And so, he lacks a real moral center. However, he does not fail to be incredibly entertaining as a personality.

World War I enters the story in the last section of the novel, largely as an afterthought and an inconvenience to his lifestyle. The whole time, the catastrophe slowly forming outside is ignored because the obsession is instead inward. The book is intended for his psychotherapist, who publishes his words to spite Zeno because he stopped meeting him. Even the supposed doctor is obsessed with petty grudges.

The novel is in conversation with the general social environment of Europe then. High-speed rotary presses and new typesetting machines made print media ultra-accessible and cheap, and for the first time there was a mass public to enjoy it. In just Germany alone, thousands of newspapers printed some 14 million copies per day by 1912. In England, The Daily Mail was the first publication to sell a million copies daily as early as 1896. And in France, daily press circulation reached around 5 million per day by 1910.

The result was a collapse of meaning, not more of it. Many felt they were trapped in their heads. In The Chandos Letter (1902), Hugo von Hofmannstahl fictionally writes of a man (Lord Chandos) describing a world where language fails him:

For me, everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea.

Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.

In the decades before World War I, Europe might as well have ‘talked itself into a catastrophe.’ As we, too, live in a time flooded by narratives and discourse, we risk finding ourselves like Zeno—exhausted by it all, receding into our inner lives, and making the world into just a passive ornament: “If only the world understood my ‘true intentions and difficulties,’ then all would be well.”

by Thomas Fernandes

Hot days bring the urge for cold drinks. I’ve never been much of an ice user for cooling but, in a rare event for me, I walked into a Starbucks and was given a cold brew with more ice than liquid in it. It looked suspiciously like a way to sell water at a premium, but it also got me wondering: how much ice do you actually need to cool a drink?

We have so much data on the properties of materials now that a quick calculation gets you the answer. For 500 ml of liquid at 26 °C (room temperature on a hot day) you need 134 g of ice, about 18 cubes 2 cm a side, to reach a final temperature of 4 °C. I included the fact that the ice also has to cool the glass holding the drink, though that only accounts for 7 % of the total energy. The rule of thumb is roughly 25 % of the drink in ice.

Four times less ice than liquid matches everyday experience well enough, which makes the Starbucks move look plainly dubious. But if you think about it, it’s almost magical that so little matter can cool so much, and the reason is the energy of fusion. The energy needed to turn ice at 0 °C into water at 0 °C is enough to heat that water from 0 °C to 80 °C. Overall, 86 % of the cooling from ice starting at -17 °C comes from the melting itself, not from the cold.

Knowing how much ice you need is one thing, how fast if cools your drink is another. I wanted a back of the envelope estimate but this soon turned into a real engineering problem and reminded me of the messiness of fluid dynamics. Nobody understands it, people just pretend to by using neat formula masking a messy reality. Here is what I simulated anyway.

I checked the no-stirring case myself by timing how long ice takes to melt, about 400 seconds, though it was nearly done by 300 s, which lines up with the prediction. Read more »

by Sean Murphy

i.

I learned about death and taxes later but first; I understood that there was also the World Cup. It loomed almost as large as reality and, for large segments of the world, was as important as existence, was existence—at least every four years. Those of us in the states didn’t have those emotional or historical attachments, but in the ‘70s we all had Pelé.

It’s difficult to explain to someone raised in this century, but it’s not enough to merely suggest Pelé was the Michael Jordan of his time. He was much, much more: an amalgamation of every single athlete in every sport, as well as the coolest rock star, actor, politician, and superhero. He was Pelé, and he didn’t wear a cape. He played football, or Jogo Bonito (The Beautiful Game, translated from the Portuguese and the Brazilian team that, for a decade as golden as their shirts, epitomized the ethereal grace of this sport, elevating to its own artform.)

Pelé was among the first icons who could be—and always was—known by a single name, and he was ubiquitous before attaining ubiquity was the apotheosis, after achievement and wealth, of any celebrity’s career. It’s all but impossible, in 2026, to articulate how well-known, and beloved, Pelé was in a pre-internet world. As the man himself once remarked, the arrogance underscored by its unassailable truth: “Wherever you go, there are three icons that everyone knows: Jesus Christ, Pelé, and Coca-Cola.”

Pelé also did the impossible on more than one occasion. No, I’m not referring to his bicycle kicks, or his single-handedly making soccer gain traction in the United States (that it still languishes as the least popular of our major sports is a travesty that he can in no way be faulted for), or his winning role as a big-time movie actor (via the seminal young man’s soccer fantasy flick Victory); no, Pelé was even able to make Henry Kissinger, the seemingly unkillable cretin who never found an opportunity or occasion he could not personally sully, seem prescient, even brilliant. Read more »

Larger shadow of me on the grate which is the floor of the new bridge across the river Eisack in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Smaller shadow is on a metal plate a couple of feet under the grate.

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by TJ Price

An excerpt from “The Collectors,” by Matt Bell.
No self without these ghosts.
No ghosts, without—
No. No ghosts, or rather:
No ghosts except in things.
They surround you, press closer, waiting for the rapidly approaching moment when you too will be just a thing, an object, a static entity slowly falling into decay.

Packrat. My maternal grandmother was what we called a “packrat,” when I was growing up—we never used the word “hoarder” to describe her until after she died. After a backyard picnic, she would direct my sister and I to gather up the used plastic utensils, to wash them at the sink before tucking them away in plastic containers. These containers themselves had once held pre-sliced deli meat, purchased at the grocery store, and had been used and reused until they went filmy like cataracts. She “saved everything,” we used to say. But that wasn’t the extent of it—she was also a collector. She would make pilgrimage to the McDonald’s on the Berlin Turnpike for the toys that came in the Happy Meals, yet would never be lucky enough to acquire the entire set of a particular run. To this day, I recall her bedroom, every nook and every cranny jammed full of boxes or bags, every drawer teeming with the luscious susurrus of plastic-wrapped plastic. “Someone might need it,” my grandmother protested thinly at any mention of her habits. “I’ll bring it to the church bazaar, or drop it off at the hospital.” Despite the fact that nobody would want any of it, she clung to it desperately. Despite the fact that she herself often forgot she had something, she wouldn’t let any of it go. It seemed to me that she was attracted more to the idea of having something rather than actually having it; drawn to the sheer mass of accumulation. She seemed to nurture it, constantly feeding it with more—I would see her duck into her room, which she kept locked and to which lock she wore on a thin piece of twine around her neck, clutching some plastic-wrapped souvenir that might have a second life. She seemed determined to throw away as little as possible, a habit which I respected and by which I felt a kind of awe. Mom always called it “junk.” Said, “your grandma’s a packrat.” I figured it had something to do with Depression-era mentality: save, save, save, for you don’t know where your next anything will come from, if it will come at all.

Instructions for My Funeral (I). On the hard drive of my computer, I have a document entitled “Instructions for My Funeral,” which addresses my husband. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

Potholes and education. What connects the two? Not much, I imagine. But in recent days here in India, I’ve been musing over one, possibly tenuous, link. Especially on the night before I started writing this column, when we bumped and rattled through various pothole-ridden Bombay streets on our way home from a distant suburb.

Let me start with a list of statements made by Eknath Shinde. Shinde is now the Deputy Chief Minister of my state, Maharashtra. But between 2022 and 2024, he was the Chief Minister.

• On July 22, 2022, Shinde said “roads in Mumbai will become free from potholes within two years.”
• A month later, on August 23, 2022, Shinde was “confident” that Mumbai’s roads would be “free of potholes” in the next two years.”
• Through the rest of 2022, he repeated these assurances on August 28, November 4 (Marathi), December 8 (2.5 years) and December 8 again.
• In 2023, he repeated these assurances on January 23, February 26, March 3, April 29, May 1, June 25 (“2-3 years”), July 30 (“30 days”), August 27 (“2-2.5 years”) and December 11 (“2-2.5 years”).
• In 2024, he repeated these assurances on February 16, April 26, June 22, August 18, August 26, September 12 (I’ve spared you those links) and September 25 (a “guarantee”).

To sum up: That’s over two years of Shinde promising my city something in two years. There’s something poetic there. The promises may have continued beyond September 2024, too. That month is when, somewhat wearily, I gave up keeping track of the man’s pothole pronouncements. So I have no idea if he has repeated them.

But remember: nearly two years after the last one I noted, I did bump and rattle through various pothole-ridden Bombay streets on our way home from a distant suburb. So much for a city free of potholes.

Still, considering that politicians the world over make empty promises all the time, why am I inflicting this man’s pronouncements on you? Because recent events in India have brought me a reminder.

Maybe you know what events I refer to. Still, the sheer energy, inventiveness and passion we’ve seen in recent weeks demand at least a quick recap. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Bill Murray

For most of the last hundred years, ships sailed the globe without much thought to who ruled the sea. Governments agreed on organizations and protocols for getting along, capital flowed, scientists collaborated and manufacturers built supply chains stretching around the world. The international commons became so ordinary as to disappear from view. That didn’t happen by accident, and it isn’t guaranteed to continue.

To preserve America’s place in all this, its next president must abandon the Trump administration’s goal of hemispheric dominance. The future won’t be secured by controlling more territory, but by building stronger networks of allies across institutions, industries and technologies. America’s next leader must be a builder.

Former Secretary of State George Schultz once compared diplomacy to gardening. Maintaining relationships, he thought, was “one of the most underrated aspects of diplomacy.” He believed that “the way to keep weeds from overwhelming you is to deal with them constantly and in their early stages.”

The United States spent the seventy years before Donald Trump pruning away at the public commons, deterring great-power war, developing and enforcing trade rules, keeping the dollar the global currency and the sea lanes open—in short, maintaining the alliances that made its global position possible.

Neglected for the past decade, the public commons is in disrepair. The question for our moment is how future American leadership might restore an international commons that promotes progress based on common interests, and fend off the return of the law of the jungle. Read more »

by Philip Graham

In December of 2025, Miriam Sagan published a stunning merger of memoir and fantasy fiction, Mother of Assassins: A Memoir of the Imagination. In a conversational prose that is deceptively simple, this short book weaves together what is remembered and what is imagined with such uncanny glue that at times they can’t easily be distinguished from each other. I’ve read Mother of Assassins twice now, and look forward to another return to its subtleties and pleasures.

My conversation with Miriam Sagan began with a discussion of Mother of Assassins, but soon enough we delved into some of her earlier work, and we found intriguing connections between her newest book and her extensive oeuvre of poetry, memoir, and fiction. Then we spoke of how this oeuvre has been built: over forty books created, thanks to her singular approach to a writing career. Rather than overly worrying about the world discovering her writing (thereby avoiding the often exhausting trap of self-promotion), Sagan has focused her main concern on discovering the world and herself through the simple act of writing, quietly producing a steady flow of book after book after book.

*

Philip Graham: The first chapter of Mother of Assassins begins with Layla, an old woman recounting her long life that began in the exotic Blue City. The second chapter begins with you, Miriam, declaring that you invented the Blue City when a child, though you’ve neglected it for over fifty years. In the wake of an alarming medical diagnosis, you allow yourself to return to that imagined world and discover it has continued to exist. Its characters live their lives without you. And this is where the subtitle of your book kicks in: A Memoir of the Imagination.

Miriam Sagan: We often hear writers say that their characters take on a life of their own. This can be confusing to readers and the writer too—as in “who’s in charge here?” But for me writing a book can be like living in an ongoing dream. And it isn’t a lucid dream. I don’t feel like I’m controlling the initial action at all times. How can this be? I feel like it asks an essentially unanswerable question—where does the creative impulse to make a narrative come from? I most usually find it in a half conscious state, a consciousness that lies between sleep and waking. In the past few years I tried to “work” that slippery state, or at least be aware of it. I was writing poems from a hypnagogic mind, and the Blue City seems to be there too, located on an initially private map. Read more »

Zahabia Khozema. Untitled I, 2023.

Etching and aquatint.

“… Khozema’s enigmatic screen prints, What Remains I, II, III and IV, use the sharp contrast between red and white to create images of disintegration. Largely linear and devoid of tonalities, the works are stripped bare to depict the fragmentation of Kauser Niazi Colony, once a lively brick and steel residential area reduced to wooden anchors and thick plastic sheets doubling as ceilings, walls and curtains.”

More here and here.

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Odder Still

and here—

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by Derek Neal

Lea Ypi’s first memoir, Free, began with a scene of her hugging a headless statue of Stalin in Durrës, Albania as a child. The image was effective in showing the young Ypi’s devotion to communism, which was important as the book dealt with her disorientation upon its fall and the realization that much of what she believed about her life had been a lie. Some readers, however, took issue with what they considered Ypi’s excessive use of artistic license: there was no statue of Stalin in Durrës, just a small bust with its head intact.

This controversy was related in Thomas Meaney’s review of Free in the London Review of Books, with Meaney siding with Ypi’s critics. Ypi responded, in the first instance, by referencing Walter Benjamin’s essay “Excavation and Memory,” which argues for a more nuanced understanding of truth and history, and in the second instance, by questioning those who would try to “police the memory of an eleven-year-old.” In Indignity, Ypi’s new book detailing both the life of her grandmother and her own investigation into that life, Ypi doubles down on her storytelling approach blending memory, historical fact, and imaginative literature, but she faces an even more difficult task as she is dealing not with her own memories, but those of her grandmother.

In “Excavation and Memory,” Benjamin writes that memory produces “an image of the person who remembers” and that this person must note “where he gained possession of” a memory. In other words, how one remembers is just as important as what one remembers, and the two cannot be neatly separated. Understood in this way, Ypi’s memory of hugging Stalin could be considered “genuine” in that it captures a historical consciousness unavailable to the present-day reader—the feeling of an eleven-year-old girl who thinks there’s nothing better in the world than communism—and it does so more effectively than a dry accounting of historical fact can. Ypi’s insistence on “the memory of an eleven-year-old” is key as well—for the past to come alive, it can’t be revisited through the perspective of the adult Ypi, only that of the child.

But how does one do this with memories that are not one’s own? Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

Just came back from a trip to China, my first in a decade and my first focused specifically on AI risk. Covering Beijing as well as Shanghai, conferences as well as university events, this was a highly illuminating trip from several perspectives. China has continued to develop extremely quickly since my last visit and has grown even more fascinatingly different from Western countries.

The most interesting takeaway, however, was how jagged China’s modernization is. In some ways, China is ahead of the West, while in others, it lags significantly behind. This can be seen in ways big and small, in different contexts. The trains are faster than in the West, but the toilets are squat-only. Everything is done on a few key apps on your phone, but wi-fi is spotty. The malls and airports are gleaming, while most restaurants are hole-in-the-wall. The conferences are full of robots, but the conference apps themselves are glitchy and frequently break down. The hotels have electronic toilets, but water still leaks in when it rains. The streets are full of electric vehicles from a plethora of local brands, but most people get around on dinky bicycles. The hotel’s cleaning robots take the elevator independently, but the coffee machine doesn’t work. Stores manned by robots are shiny and efficient, while the roads are still swept by men with brooms with a design last updated in the 18th century. The list goes on; the examples are endless.

Now, some of these are of course the result of deliberate choices. Provinces have been incentivized to set up electric car manufacturers which has pushed the cost down and created a huge supply of cheap electric cars. All countries of course prioritize spending on its airports as a key country branding exercise.

Other paradoxes, however, seem like they might be the result of ongoing friction and barriers. It is much easier to insert a cleaning robot and optimize for a small area where it can operate without hiccups, than to ensure every appliance in a hotel works well. Apps used by almost a billion people can afford to streamline the experience inside the app, but that does not mean that there are incentives for every venue to offer decent wi-fi.

It seems therefore that Beijing and Shanghai might offer a compelling vision of what extreme modernization coupled with day-to-day real world friction could look like. This could be similar to the world that we will inhabit in the rest of the world in a few years, as continued rapid AI evolution leads to unprecedented progress in some areas, while other areas remain stubbornly stuck in the 20th century, full of friction preventing progress. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

About thirty years ago my wife and I rented a car in London. The experience is seared into my memory forever. The steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car, and I was expected to drive on the wrong side of the road. It took all my concentration, but I was able to manage, more or less, until we came to a roundabout. I had never seen a roundabout before. Didn’t know what it was.

There was no GPS in those days. We were trying to follow a paper map. And we weren’t on some sleepy country road. There were several lanes involved, and we were moving at a pretty good clip. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what I was doing. All my driving instincts were giving me bad information. And people were honking at me. I don’t know how many times we went around that thing before we finally got off.

Over the next few days, I learned to get in the car on the correct side, but it wasn’t easy. I had to consciously override twenty-five years of experience. At first, I automatically went to the usual side. Open the door. No steering wheel. Ah yes, we’re in England. The steering wheel is on the other side. Go to the other side. In the next phase, I was able to remember before I opened the door. I was able to say to myself, “Wait, stop, you’re about to go to the wrong side. You’re in England. They get in on the other side. Go to the other side.”

Then came the moment I want to talk about. I’m walking to the car with the key in my hand. I remember that I’m not supposed to get in on the usual side. I’m supposed to get in on the wrong side. But now I don’t remember which side is the wrong one. Both sides feel wrong. That moment.

I get a similar feeling writing these columns. Sometimes I get to a who/whom decision and they both feel wrong. “Who” feels ignorant and “whom” feels pedantic. Same thing with the subjunctive case. If I were to use the subjunctive, it reads fussy. And if I was not, it sounds illiterate.

Time for one of my favorite jokes. This guy is on the Harvard campus. He stops a tweedy-looking fellow and says, “Excuse me, can you tell me where the library is at?” Tweedy says, “Here at Harvard we don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Would you like to try that again?” The guy says, “Sure. Can you tell me where the library is at, asshole?”

But what I really want to talk about here is politics. And what I want to say is that we seem to be stuck at a moment when all the possible ways forward seem wrong. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I was going to write about a recent study [1] on raccoons, where the adaptable little critters were given puzzle boxes to solve in order to access food rewards. On each box there were three small doors with their own distinct mechanisms, each requiring a different kind of manipulation to open. What made this study notable was that, unlike previous experiments where solved puzzles were locked out or removed to focus on new puzzles, the experimenters left the previously solved puzzles accessible to the raccoons in subsequent challenges. The raccoons were able to manipulate mechanisms that they had previously figured out, in addition to the new challenges, although they received no additional food rewards for their extra work. The upshot of the results is that the raccoons displayed an intrinsic motivation to mess around with latches, locks and doors, even when no obvious extrinsic reward was to be had. This will surprise nobody who has tried to prevent raccoons from getting into their property. There is a straightforward adaptationist explanation for this: if the animals find it psychologically rewarding to muck about with things for the fun of it, they are more likely to acquire new information and behaviours that could be useful later. Much like how the intrinsically rewarding experience of sex makes reproduction more likely.

That’s about all I have to say about the study itself, besides a slight expression of surprise that nobody had tried this before, but that’s quite common in experimental science. It’s all too easy for bystanders like me to claim that something should have been obvious, after the fact. Still, a promising avenue for future experiments to probe the exploratory and recreational side of animal problem-solving. As someone who watches a lot of mechanical engineering nerdery, much of which is more squarely in the category of “play” than necessity, it is intriguing to think that this drive to idly faff about with the physical environment is shared across the wider animal kingdom. The hedonic value of repeating known solutions is interesting, too. Read more »