(some are paywalled/membership,
but you get the idea)
Shifting Landscapes (Emergence Magazine)
Exploring the Arbitrary Creation of Meaning Through Smoke Photography How perception shapes the familiar in the unfamiliar, from smoke patterns to everyday life. Davor Katusic at Medium
A climate fiction syllabus from Bryan Alexander
Astronauts could one day end up eating asteroids New Scientist
oh brave new world:
Future astronauts could eat a nutritionally perfect diet made from bacteria reared on ground-up asteroids, to produce a kind of milkshake or yogurt.
El Niño pattern can bring wet weather to UK one year later New Scientist
Ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific can trigger climate patterns with global effects. Every three to five years or so, the Pacific flips from La Niña conditions, where surface water temperatures in its equatorial region are relatively cool, to El Niño conditions, where these waters become warmer than average.This cycle, known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is caused by changes in winds blowing across the ocean and the movement of water between the cooler depths and the warmer surface...
Rachel Kushner's covert op against realism Alexandra Schwartz in New Yorker
(excerpted from the book)
The real Europe is not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate, baby macaroons colored pale pink and mint green, children bratty from too much shopping ... The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of superpasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors. The real Europe is highways and nuclear power plants. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a giant grid called "Europe," a Texas-sized parcel of which is called France.
Schwartz comments:
"Creation Lake" is studded—you might say clogged—with such musings. What is Bruno actually proposing in these hundred and twenty-nine words? That we all come from somewhere, from someone. The inflated pedantry of his style, all those technical-sounding terms and incantatory clauses in the service of a simple idea, seems practically comic, but Kushner presents it earnestly, without a hint of irony. She has staged her novel as a kind of dialectic; if Sadie is all superficial knowingness, Bruno seems to represent actual knowledge, his mystical isolation offered up as a counterweight to her worldly glibness, and a salvation from it.As a literary conceit, this is all well and good. As a literary device, it deadens the page. Between Bruno's philosophizing and Sadie's speechifying, your enjoyment of the novel may depend on your tolerance for being lectured. Mine, low to begin with, vanished as the book progressed, or, rather, failed to...
How Fentanyl Drove a Tsunami of Death in America NY Times Op Ed, 27ix24
Most addiction results from attempts to self-medicate isolation, social disconnection, psychiatric disorders, trauma and severe economic distress. It's not coincidental that the exponential rise in overdose deaths has occurred in tandem with a profound increase in income inequality. Punishing people for trying to feel better in a world that doesn’t seem to want them doesn't help.
The Top 10 Things Israel did to Gaza before October 7, 2023 Juan Cole
Elderly Activists vs. Decrepit Plutocrats: It isn't Age that matters but What you use it For Robert Lipsyte aat Tom Dispatch / Informed Comment
Why Human-Caused Climate Change is coming for the vulnerable Carolinas Russ Schumacher, Colorado State University and Kathie Dello, North Carolina State University, via Juan Cole, Informed Comment
106 Photos ...506 of Them Alan Levine
What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation Robert A. McLeman et al. (pdf available)
And four Medium member-only stories:
Sunset Sound Studios, Hollywood and 19-Year Old Me Candi MiloFirst off, Sant Clara U was in my hometown, and all the girls I'd known forever and ergo couldn't become someone else in front of, went there. The lucky ones went to San Diego and partied.7 Secret Portmanteaus That Have Been Hiding in Plain Sight Jack Shepherd
Solving the Mystery of Consciousness Wolfgang Stegemann
Understanding AI as a "Concept Information Processor" katoshi