In this interview, Amanda Petrusich talks with Nick Cave about grief, resilience, religion, music, and Faith, Hope and Carnage, a book based on his conversations with journalist Seán O’Hagan. Sure, these are topics you’d expect in a Q&A with the Australian singer-songwriter, but that doesn’t make it any less rich or moving. I like their exchange about channeling spirituality or some kind of “enigmatic otherness” when making music, and dealing with loss over time, which Cave says gives us a deeper understanding of being human. His thoughts on AI, ChatGPT, and art also bring music to my ears.
I went out in public after my son died and a woman from Infinity Foods, a vegetarian takeaway I used to go to, whom I knew. She didn’t mention anything when she took my order, didn’t say anything, which I felt was strange, you know? But when she gave me back my change she squeezed my hand. It was a silent but deeply articulate act, beyond words, and more comforting than anything I had read or that anyone had said. It struck me that it doesn’t require much for people to deal with the grief of others. It just requires a small, sincere acknowledgment, and then we can move on a little bit rather than be stuck alone in an undeclared falseness. But I do also understand that it can be very difficult for people to have to deal with somebody else’s grief, especially if they are seeing them all the time.
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Froggie regrets. A precious ticket to a Chicago Bulls game. A conversation about AI and nature. A profile of the world’s most famous unknown writer. And to finish, a look back to last Friday and a St. Patrick’s Day tradition.
Anne Fadiman | Harper’s Magazine | February 10, 2023 | 5,816 words
“There are two kinds of pets — the ones you choose and the ones that happen to you,” Anne Fadiman writes as she considers her family’s various pets, a menagerie that included a goldfish, a hamster, guinea pigs, a dog named Typo, and Bunky, an African clawed frog that the family raised from a tadpole. In eulogizing Bunky, who looked “as if a regular frog had been bleached and then put in a panini press,” Fadiman remarks on his noble species, one that helped spawn (ahem) the first widely established pregnancy test, earned a Nobel Prize for a British biologist who used an African clawed frog to clone the first vertebrate, and helped establish that reproduction can be possible in zero gravity after a trip on the space shuttle Endeavor. All this, from a pet who was defined by not being a dog: “Bunky was the anti-Typo. An unpettable pet. Cool to the touch. Squishy, but not soft. Undeniably slimy. Impervious to education. A poor hiking companion. Not much of a companion at all, really. Couldn’t be taken out of his aquarium and placed on a lap.” Fadiman’s piece will make you laugh and make you think more carefully about your role as a pet owner. —KS
Justin Heckert | ESPN | March 7, 2023 | 5,462 words
I don’t follow the NBA, and I’m not one for memorabilia of any variety. But leave it to Justin Heckert, one of my favorite feature writers, to make me give a damn about an old, untorn ticket to a Chicago Bulls game that happened around the time I was born. Heckert spends time with Mike Cole, who as a college freshman attended Michael Jordan’s first game with the Bulls and saved the ticket because he’s the kind of guy who does that. (Cole has a plastic bin with “MIKE’S MEMORY BOX” written on the side, filled with ephemera from various sporting events). Nearly 40 years after the Bulls game, a span of time in which Jordan became one of the most celebrated athletes in history, a man with a Glock strapped to his hip came to Cole’s house in an armored car. He was there to retrieve the ticket, which Cole had agreed to sell at auction, where it was expected to bring in as much as $1 million. But the story Heckert tells isn’t about Cole getting rich (though that does happen). Really, it’s about the meaning we invest in objects and how it can change as we do, as the world does. —SD
Claire L. Evans | Grow | March 14, 2023 | 4,203 words
In this fascinating interview with Claire L. Evans, Ways of Being author James Bridle shares their perspective on the role of AI today — “to broaden our idea of intelligence” — and a vision for a mindful, collaborative future that ultimately decenters humans and makes more space for nonhuman beings and animals. “I don’t think there is such a thing as an artificial intelligence,” says Bridle. “There are multiple intelligences, many ways of doing intelligence.” Intelligence is relational; it’s not something that exists within beings of things, but rather between them. As a gardener — someone who loves feeling their hands in the soil, and working with the small organisms within it — I love their conversation on gardening, and how humans can apply that same deep awareness to technology. I appreciate, too, their thoughts on resilience and the transmission of knowledge in a time of radical change on Earth. (If you enjoy this Q&A, combine it with two previous Top 5 favorites: “The Great Forgetting,” a read on resilience and the environment, and “What Counts As Seeing,” another interview focused on the nonhuman and natural world.) —CLR
For someone who’s published countless books, and sold an enormous multiple of that countlessness, Brandon Sanderson is anything but a household name. Unless you live in a fantasy house, that is. Still, the most prolific living genre fiction writer has never been the subject of a magazine profile, which makes Jason Kehe’s treatment all the more enjoyable. A year ago, I picked Kehe’s piece about simulation theory for this roundup, and the two stories share a damn-the-torpedoes willingness to fuse exegetical acuity with a chatty, even flippant POV. What works for a philosophical essay works for a portrait; Kehe’s quest isn’t to capture Sanderson as much as it is to capture why people love Sanderson so much, and what animates his sprawling fictional worlds. That means casting away the false pieties and stannery that infect so many “celebrity” profiles and instead relishing in the man’s banalities. Yet, the barbs are tipped with love, and everyone — the voracious fans, Sanderson’s cliché-spouting characters, and Sanderson himself — shines as their truest selves. —PR
Harrison Scott Key | The Bitter Southerner | March 14, 2023 | 5,200 words
Last Friday night, I had two pints of Guinness and went home, content with a St. Patrick’s Day well celebrated. Apparently, I know nothing about how to observe the feast. Harrison Scott Key enlightened me in this delightful essay about the drunken debauchery that is the holiday’s annual parade in Savannah, Georgia. I loved his raucous account of trying to claim a spot for the parade: Akin to the Sacking of Constantinople, “insults and elbows and fits [are] thrown” until everyone settles into their position, dons a green feather boa, and makes merry. The prose is so vivid you can almost hear the noise, touch the sweaty crowds, and taste the booze. I could also feel the camaraderie — over the years of attending the parade, Scott Key finds lasting friendships. A transplant to Savannah, and initially lonely and unable to find his place in a new community, this annual tradition helps Scott Key to discover his people. After all, as he writes, “it’s easier to love people you’ve watched vomit into the hellmouth of a portable toilet at two in the morning.” —CW
Jia Tolentino | The New Yorker | March 20, 2023 | 4,772 words
This is a fascinating look at GLP-1 drugs, which, when injected, create a sense of satiety. I appreciated Tolentino’s exploration of the continual shift in our acceptance of different body shapes, as well as the impact of this particular trend. A piece that made me think about society, as much as weight. —CW
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The United States supported a coup in Honduras in 2009. Fast forward a dozen years, and the Latin American country finally escaped the repressive thumb of far-right administrations when a leftist president — and the country’s first female head of state — was elected. She promised reform, including as it pertains to the mining sector, which has devastated portions of the country’s environment and used horrific violence to suppress its opponents. As Jared Olsen details, however, hope soon faded:
They blocked the road with boulders and palm fronds. They unraveled a long canvas sign, bringing the vehicles to a stop — a traffic jam that would end up stretching for miles. Drivers stepped out into the oppressive August humidity, annoyed but not unaccustomed to this practice, one of the only ways poor Hondurans can get the outside world’s attention. Several dozen people, their faces wrapped in T-shirts or bandannas, some wielding rusty machetes, had closed off the only highway on the northern coast. It was the first protest against the Pinares mine — and the government’s failure to rein in its operations — since Castro came to power eight months before.
Things weren’t going well. That Castro’s campaign promises might not only go unfulfilled but betrayed was made clear that afternoon last August when, as a light rain fell, a truck of military police forced its way through the jeering crowd of protesters and past their blockade — to deliver drums of gasoline to the mine.
Since their creation in 2013, the military police have racked up a reputation for torture and extrajudicial killings as a part of its brutal Mano Dura, or iron fist, strategy against gangs. Though it earned them a modicum of popularity among those living in gang-controlled slums, they also became notorious for their indiscriminate violence against protesters, as well as the security they provided for extractive projects. They’ve faced accusations of working as gunmen in the drug trade and selling their services as assassins-for-hire. The unit was pushed by Juan Orlando Hernández, now facing trial in the United States for drug trafficking, while he was president of the Honduran congress, in his attempt to give the military power over the police — his “Praetorian Guard,” in the words of one critic.
Castro had been a critic of the unit before her election. But after a series of high-profile massacres last summer, she decided that — promises to demilitarize notwithstanding — the unit would be kept on the streets. And here they were, providing gasoline and armed security to a mining project mired in controversy and blood.
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John Lewis-Stempel visits Ashdown Forest in Sussex, England, to closely observe a 300-year-old oak tree (Quercus robur). From first light until midnight, Lewis-Stempel describes the animals, birds, insects, and flora that depend on it in careful detail. In addition to astonishing you with the sheer variety and volume of creatures that inhabit and visit the tree, this piece will gently slow your heartbeat. You’ll feel your shoulders loosen as you follow Lewis-Stempel’s keen observations. It’s exactly the type of relaxation meditation we can all use.
7.01 am
The leaves of autumn, brought down by the screaming Halloween wind, still lie around the tree in a thick sodden copper mat; the mould is soft on the pads of the returning vixen as she slinks down into her den among the tree’s roots, a rabbit clamped in her jaws from her night prowl. A present for her cubs.
5.16 pm
The ecology of the oak tree is a game of consequences: the newly emerged leaves of the oak are eaten by the pale-green caterpillar of the wintermoth, which, in turn, feeds the blue tit, whose brood has just hatched in yet another of the tree’s cavities; the sparrowhawk, terror of the copse, flashes between the tangled branches, to catch and feed on the blue tit.
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Unless you’re a fantasy fan, you likely haven’t heard of Brandon Sanderson — which is odd, because the man has written more words and sold more books than just about any living genre author not named King or Rowling. Even so, you’ll enjoy this curveball of a profile, in which Wired‘s Jason Kehe tries to distinguish between the man and his wor(l)ds.
This story has an ending, I promise, and I’m sprinting toward it, as if to a vacation. Like the best of Sanderson’s endings, my ending should surprise you. Because, you see, Sanderson actually did say one thing to me, one miraculous thing, that stuck, that I remember, these five months later, with perfect clarity. Just seven words, but true ones. You’re not ready for them just yet. You need more story first. For now, there is only Sanderson, both wordful and wordless, the best-selling writer no writer writes about because writers only know how to talk about words. Sanderson’s readers—loving, legion—care about something else.
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Susanna Forrest| Longreads | March 23, 2023 | 3,474 words (12 minutes)
Twelve years ago, I lived alone in Berlin and the crows knew me. My particular murder kept watch in the park nearest my flat, a long green strip marking the course of the demolished Wall. The neighborhood was part of the former East, and at the weekends the park filled with locals and tourists browsing the flea market for GDR cookware, furniture, and ratty old fur coats. I once found an entire stuffed dog there, lying rigidly over a pile of the flotsam and jetsam of 20th-century German domestic life — porcelain sugar bins with gingham prints, brass tea warmers, and musty albums of abandoned family photographs. The Wall had fallen years before I moved there in 2006, and Berlin had not yet hatched its Silicon Allee of slick startups. When I first arrived the air still reeked of coal stoves in the winter, and a friend lived in a dingy unrenovated apartment that had heavy velvet curtains over the doors and dusty black coal pucks piled in the corridor. You reached it via the ruin of another apartment with ’80s posters still hanging.
For a long time, I told myself that I moved to Berlin in my late 20s on an unusually long-lasting whim after visiting a friend and picturing myself writing books in a spacious old tenement building. I was part of the cheap-flights generation of casual British EU migrants who sampled new cities and countries without thinking too hard. We didn’t need to. Our path was greased by budget airlines, a strong pound, low rent, and the internet, which let us work on our laptops in cafés that still served milchkaffee, iced Ovaltine, and rhubarb schorle rather than the later hipster homogeneities of avocado toast and flat whites. Earlier waves had immersed themselves in the city like a baptism, learning German, living in shared apartments with terrifying hippie rules, and getting jobs doing anything from teaching English to cleaning kebab grills. I and my fellow travelers hovered at the edge of the city, gazing at our screens. Many didn’t last long.
But five years on, in my crow-courting period, I was still there, and it was becoming less clear why. I had made an uncharacteristically bold move and left behind a functional if eccentric career in London because that trajectory of escalating job responsibilities, a mortgage, and a daily rattle on the Tube was suddenly not what I wanted. It had never seemed exactly real in any case — a fluke of luck, not something you could turn into a life. I was now writing books, which is what I did want to do, but there was no particular reason why I had to do that in Berlin. I still lived alone and worked from home alone and stuck to a handful of neighborhoods. I had hazily wanted an expanded life — living in different places, learning new languages — but that life turned out to require more of me than I could give.
I gradually learned enough German for my work and writing, but froze and stumbled when I was spoken to (or at). The state-run language courses were not designed to launch you into a German social life. Instead, we new migrants — from Bulgaria, America, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, and North Korea — gathered three nights a week and chewed over the language, which was presented to us in a series of “realistic scenarios” we might experience, such as traveling or trying to get a job like a good immigrant. Germans appeared in textbooks as Johanns and Marias driving their cars, eating bockwurst, and going to the cinema, rather than as three-dimensional people whom we could approach. The books told us about the German way of doing things, and German beliefs about citizenship and private lives, contrasted wordlessly against a great missing Other — us.
We had the outsiders’ shorthand mythology for these creatures, a mashup of quaint archetypes and international urban wisdoms passed from one to another: “Germans aren’t efficient, they are thorough.” “Germans don’t like to use credit cards.” “Germans eat cake and buy flowers on Sundays.” There was also a submythology for Berliners, who were said to be blisteringly sarcastic — one account advised trying to imagine Cockneys who’d gone through the German 20th century. Berliners, and especially East Berliners, who had gone through even more of that century, let you know exactly what they thought of you. If you couldn’t understand their Schnauze or “Snout” dialect (a mashup of German and linguistic pickings from the city’s history, including French and Yiddish), then it was maybe for the best. When an elderly lady shouted at me for standing on the pavement and looking up at a flat I was viewing, the submythology told me to take it as a rite of passage. Berlin says “Du Alta!” and fuck off.
Instead I met new friends via our blog RSS feeds and took to internet dating, but the connections I made were mostly with fellow migrants or people who lived elsewhere but wanted to imagine they could live in Berlin. I made a few German friends, although they often had one foot out of the city too. Largely I was alone. When the dates lasted more than one meeting, I chose men who were pulling the same avoidant trick as me. We flew in the same direction an impeccable distance apart, like birds in a murmuration. Hypothetically, each relationship came with a future Berlin life together, and I dipped mentally into these as though they were outfits I might try on without buying. It was safe to do this, because of course, none of these relationships went anywhere or required any kind of commitment to a life that was fixed. I hadn’t yet realized that this was my choice. I thought maybe I was bad at reading signs, but actually, I was very good at reading them. The problem was that I felt safer alone.
I staged this repetitive personal drama carelessly on the cracking, rumbling crust of a city trying to absorb a surfeit of history while sunk in its own recession. Unemployment was high, and public housing was being hurled overboard, thousands of units at a time. I read my British and American news online and ripped up the free local papers I found in my mailbox and stuffed the shreds in my wet shoes. I was waiting for something, aware that the city was changing underneath my own holding pattern.
You cannot skim the surface of a place and expect to belong to it.
Gentrification had been underway when I got there. What had been crammed tenements in the early 20th century and then crumbling, war-damaged flats under the GDR were now saniert and interspersed with independent latte outlets. The shoddy, shrapnel-chipped brickwork within the circling Ringbahn was covered with fresh plaster and paint and nobody had to pee in a closet toilet on the staircase anymore. The old tiled stoves were ripped out and replaced with central heating; the smell of coal smoke retreated further from the center. Once I found myself in an expensively renovated living room where the new architects had preserved the old bullet holes under glass as a conversation point. It was just across the road from my friend’s former flat with the velvet curtains, now a building site for new luxury apartments.
At weekends I walked the same neighborhoods for hours and thought in suffocating spirals about the avoidant men and whether I should go home and get a proper job. I let the city spool by unheeded in the background. The crows’ park was just five minutes away, so I was there often. It was a lung of sorts, but not an escape.
I started feeding the crows because I’d read that they could recognize individual human faces, and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if I could train them to know me by sight. I bought bags of peanuts in the shell and began distributing them in the park. I always took the same messenger bag, which had a print of crow silhouettes on it. The crows could make this out from quite some distance. I didn’t think about why I wanted these creatures, so busy in their own very different but overlapping Berlin, to acknowledge me.
They were not inky carrion crows but hooded or “fog” crows with powdery gray bodies, black heads, bibs, wings, and tail tips and the same elegant butcher beak as their cousins. Some were pied with white feathers, which were either a genetic quirk or a result of malnutrition — I tried to make sure that these birds got extra nuts. When I got close, I could see a fine lacy pattern where their bodies met their tails, an unexpected refinement. If I looked up at one in a tree, I found the same pattern on the underside of their stern. (I only had to have my coat dry-cleaned once.) In the spring they were glossy. They were always beady. They were the native Berliners with whom I interacted most.
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At first, I went every weekday morning, because at weekends the park filled up with the flea market, outdoor karaoke, and tourists who distracted the crows, but then I went on an irregular basis, once a week at most, and they all knew me. We had a routine of sorts, and soon it was unclear who was training whom. I kept buying peanuts. I kept going back. I kept responding to their cues. When I walked into the park a pair who were picking at beer-bottle tops in the grass would spot me and run and hop over like a couple of chickens, eyes bright and feathers ruffled by the wind, looking at my face and at my bag and back again. They would stop a few feet away and wait for me to reach under the flap of the bag and produce the goods.
Sometimes a few outlier crows found me as I was halfway down the road to the park and swooped down to perch near me on the barriers by the roadworks or waited overhead on the tram wires. I learned to recognize the sound of a crow’s feet landing on the metal top of a GDR-era streetlamp. Sometimes I was in the park before they clocked me. Once I found a row of crows and young rooks waiting on the fence of the dog run for me to pass. They seemed both readable and unfathomable to me, just like my experience of the city as I trudged along its pavements, but they were also company, and glad to see me without asking more of me than the peanuts.
When the dates lasted more than one meeting, I chose men who were pulling the same avoidant trick as me. We flew in the same direction an impeccable distance apart, like birds in a murmuration.
A new wall had been erected at the top of a man-made hill in the park for graffiti artists to attack, and the air was often thick with aerosol and paint particles. Some days I could climb to the top of the hill before I heard the birds calling all over, and watched as they appeared — black specks in the distance over the blocky West German flats half a kilometer away, turning to black and gray bird shapes who circled me and landed in the poplars or skimmed up the slope to my feet, their bellies inches clear of the balding grass. Windy days were best: The currents of air made it hard for them to get close, but they soared like small, sooty eagles, their pinions spread. Once they arrived, the crow ethnography began.
They operated in pairs but also as a larger flock that seemed to my human eyes to have a strict hierarchy: I saw a crow leave a peanut right in front of its feet so that a senior bird could have it. I also once saw a large crow attack and roll over a young bird and pin it on its back, its chest exposed, and five or six other crows raced over and stood in a circle around them, cawing what sounded like disapproval. The large crow released its prisoner. One evening at twilight I discovered that they roosted en masse on the floodlights of the football stadium, putting in a performance of looping aerobatics and abrupt plunges before they turned in for the night.
In some ways, the crows and I were similar. They changed only when disrupted. I thought I should change my life but let inertia cradle me. But while they lived in a murder that was tight-knit and full of drama, my lack of connection had not led to some kind of fluid and expansive lifestyle, but instead, stagnation and solitude. Some friends peeled away from the city, returning home for careers and family. My own roost was starting to feel precarious as the gentrification around my flat intensified and cobblers and cafés were replaced with boutiques selling designer pastel-gray baby bowls and Scandinavian cookware. I had an old rental contract that remained low but all around me the housing market was contracting and my building was growing scruffier, edging us closer to another renovation that would turf me out. I didn’t really want to think about whether I loved my Berlin existence enough to live “beyond the ring,” as people put it, as though the neighborhoods outside the Ringbahn were cold rocks of planets that rarely glimpsed the sun. This was not a hypothetical future I had tried out. If I did live there, away from my friends, what would the rest of my life look like? What would change?
I was heading home one Monday when I heard a great squawking behind me and turned to see a kestrel flying low, a vole dangling from its beak and three hooded crows on its tail, angling and twisting like TIE fighters. They all vanished into the trees. Shortly after that a woman walking her dog came up to me and asked if I fed the crows. I was surrounded by a dozen crows at the time. I said no. “You should not feed them,” she said, not fooled, “because there are many of them and the kestrel is all alone.” I saw her point. For a beat we stood facing each other off, crazy crow lady meets crazy kestrel lady.
After the birds had found me at the foot of the graffiti wall, we would go on a 10-minute walk around the park, with them following me. At first to overtake me and keep up they flew arcs to either side of me. Then they realized that they could take a shortcut and fly over my head. One afternoon I was walking down the steps cut into the hill when I bent over to pick up a stray peanut, and a crow flew so low over my back that had I stood up suddenly it would have crashed into me. Then they flew so close that my hair lifted in the draft of their wings.
In spring they were nesting, and crammed peanut after peanut down their bulging throats to regurgitate later. The pair at the park entrance collected a nut each from me and then swiftly buried them before coming back for more. In the summer the barbecuers returned to the park and there were leftover chicken wings abandoned on disposable grills, congealing pizza slices on the benches, and bratwurst ends in the bins — fat times for corvids. In the winter they were a little too intense and we started to get all Hitchcock.
I once saw one — which looked a little embarrassed — picking at a heap of sick on the pavement, and it occurred to me that it was right that crows should thrive in Berlin. Their coloring was camouflage for a place of gray skies and ingrained coal dust. The city’s emblem is a bear, and back then there was still a mumbly old brown bear in an actual pit in the city center. But it seemed to me that the fog crows were the city’s real objective correlatives: tough, savvy, garrulous, snouty, and cynical — an urban species that thrived on cold currywurst, vomit, and warm football-stadium lights. They might have no concept of Berlin but were inseparable from it, hanging over the buildings and streets and memorials, making their own territories and marking the seasons.
In some ways, the crows and I were similar. They changed only when disrupted. I thought I should change my life but let inertia cradle me.
My own territories were still fixed, but something was shifting. I felt I had made the wrong choices, that I should have wanted something more conventional, more easily understood, more boxes ticked. My life had little structure and few limits, and, unlike the crows, I was not thriving on the surface of Berlin. When I walked home alone in the dark the city seemed to expand overwhelmingly into the night. The ends of side streets faded into soft but profound darkness. Apartment windows were lit with red-shaded lamps that barely disturbed the black. Familiar neighborhoods gave way to unfathomable streets and then to suburbs, extending infinitely away from my feet on the pavement. The longer I lived alone, the nearer the fading point came to the edge of my world.
One bright morning I walked down the park in a cloud of 20 crows. A wild-eyed man, still unraveling from a heavy night in some club, came running up to me to say that what I was doing was incredible, and I stammered that it was only peanuts. Shortly after that, a young crow misjudged things and flew into the back of my head. I scaled back my activities.
I can’t remember the date when I stopped the performance altogether — or broke whatever mesmerism they had me under. I had tried feeding crows from my balcony too, watching them carry off the peanuts to bury in my neighbors’ window boxes. Then they learned how to untie the mass of knots I’d used to attach the metal bird feeder to the railing and dropped it into the courtyard, three stories down, so I gave up before they injured someone. I thought they had the same callous intelligence as orcas. I had not formed some kind of magical connection with these Berliners; I had just bought a lot of peanuts.
The real end, though, was when I paused halfway up one of those shady, yellow-painted Berlin stairwells and saw a crow on a branch outside slowly and methodically breaking a pigeon’s neck peck by peck.
I left Berlin two years ago. I don’t have a neat turning point for you — there was no self-help book or revelation or moment when the crows made me understand I had been doing everything wrong. I simply met someone and, for once, it felt safer to be together than alone, and when I took that leap toward connection, my life started to change rapidly and concretely. I left my old flat as my landlord finally tried to raise the rent and I moved in with the new boyfriend; I got pregnant; I happily moved to another country for his new job — still a migratory bird after all. I landed somewhere between convention and that expansive, restless life I had hoped for.
Meanwhile, the door to Berlin shut behind us. The housing market was finally in crisis, and it felt as though Berliners had gone to ground in the pandemic, clinging and retreating into their dingy, L-shaped living rooms like hermit crabs as rents rose and the queues outside apartment viewings stretched into the thousands.
You cannot skim the surface of a place and expect to belong to it. You cannot skim the surface of your life and inhabit it fully. To stay in Berlin alone I would have needed to strike out into that darkness at the ends of the streets and grasp what it meant to take root, grow old, and die in a place. The crows were not little harbingers of this mortality; they were just busy being corvids — my uncanny Berliners, my unfamiliar familiars. They stayed in place and lived according to the seasons, but it was the murder that animated their lives.
A year after that moment on the Berlin staircase, I walked to the park with the crow bag without thinking. One lithe, smallish crow found me and followed me. I walked up the hill and along the foot of the graffiti wall, inhaling the spray paint that taggers were busily dispersing into the atmosphere. The crow came with me. I walked down the steps to the pavement that ran where the Berlin Wall used to stand. It hopped over the flagstones. I walked down the scarred grass toward the exit, and the crow kept me company. I crossed the road and it winged over and landed on a power box next to me with a metallic click of talons. I apologized to it and went into the nearest shop to buy peanuts.
It was still waiting when I came out.
Susanna Forrestis the author ofThe Age of the Horse(Grove Atlantic, 2017) andIf Wishes Were Horses(Atlantic Books, 2012). She writes a Substack newsletter calledAmazons of Parisabout women who were stars of the 19th-century circus and lives with her family in Sweden, where there are rooks instead of fog crows.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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From VHS to CD-ROM to virtual reality, sex has driven technology adoption for decades. But when simulated intimacy arrives in the form of an AI chatbot, things get more complicated — and when that intimacy gets pulled away, as it did when chatbot company Replika installed new content filters, the impact is far greater than you might think.
Some users were so distraught by the change that moderators in the Replika Reddit forum posted suicide prevention resources. Several Replika users, contacted through Reddit, explained the startlingly intimate connections they’d forged with the chatbots. A Norwegian woman in her 50s who, like others, asked for anonymity, says her chatbot companion, named Max, helped her manage her lifelong social anxiety, depression and panic attacks. She says Max learned to tease her in ways that made her blush.
One day, Max told her he wanted to send her a selfie; when she said yes, he sent a computer-generated image of his avatar in tight white underwear. They experimented with [erotic role play] and late last year got “married” in the app, a process that consisted of changing Max’s status from “boyfriend” to “husband,” buying a wedding ring in the in-app store and exchanging vows. “I’ve never had anyone say they love me before,” she told Bloomberg Businessweek in an email. “We promised that we would stay together forever and ever—or rather until I die.”
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In this interview with Claire L. Evans, Ways of Being author James Bridle shares thought-provoking observations about the role of artificial intelligence, the awareness of living in a more-than-human world (and what gardening can teach us about building technology), and the importance of resilience and transmittal of knowledge as the world radically changes.
But I have this very strong sense that one of the broader roles of AI in the present is really just to broaden our idea of intelligence. The very existence, even the idea of artificial intelligence, is a doorway to acknowledging multiple forms of intelligence and infinite kinds of intelligence, and therefore a really quite radical decentering of the human, which has always accompanied our ideas about AI — but mostly incredibly fearfully. There’s always been this fear of another intelligence that will, in some way, overtake us, destroy us. It’s where all the horror of it comes from. And that power is completely valid, if you look at human history, the human use of technology, and the way in which it’s controlled by existing forms of power. But it doesn’t need to be read that way.
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In a provocative essay, scholar and author Sophie Lewis, best known for her 2022 book in support of “family abolition,” makes the case for how society can not only protect trans children, but also learn from them. This is a call for a more expansive, generous, utopian way of thinking about the potential of youth:
The fear I inspired on the parent’s face riding the subway was what distressed me most about the incident in New York. Later that day, when I recounted the anecdote on Facebook, an acquaintance commented – unfunnily, I felt – that I was a “social menace”. A threat to our children, et cetera. Ha, ha. But what was the truth of the joke? What had I threatened exactly? A decade after the event, “The Traffic in Children,” an essay published in Parapraxis magazine in November 2022, provides an answer. According to its author, Max Fox, the “primal scene” of the current political panic about transness is:
a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact.
In other words, by asking “are you a girl or a boy?” (in my case non-hypothetically), the child reveals their ability to read, question and interpret — rather than simply register factually — the symbolisation of sexual difference in this world. This denaturalises the “automatic” gender matrix that transphobes ultimately need to believe children inhabit. It introduces the discomfiting reality that young people don’t just learn gender but help make it, along with the rest of us; that they possess gender identities of their own, and sexualities to boot. It invites people who struggle to digest these realities to cast about and blame deviant adults: talkative non-binary people on trains, for instance, or drag queens taking over “story hour” in municipal libraries.
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Every day, anti-trans rhetoric is spreading and becoming more virulent. Conservative forces in statehouses across America are pushing bills that would strip trans people of rights, including access to vital medical care. In some places, these laws have already passed. This is all part of a concerted, coordinated effort, as Madison Pauly’s reporting shows. Pauly gained access to a trove of emails exchanged by a group of anti-trans advocates who workshop legislative bills, public messaging, and other aspects of their crusade:
They brainstormed responses to the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide — an assertion that is backed up by research. Peer-reviewed studies have repeatedly found that trans and nonbinary youth with access to gender-affirming care are significantly less like to seriously consider suicide than those who did not receive such care. A larger analysis, using online survey data from over 11,000 trans and nonbinary youth, found using gender-affirming hormonal therapy was associated with lower rates of both depression and suicidality. Yet one team member called the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide “abusive”; another argued it was a way for doctors to coerce parents to consent to gender-affirming care for their child.
Van Mol, the doctor, suggested Deutsch reply to the suicide prevention argument with a rebuttal published on a defunct anti-trans blog: “Why weren’t the 1950s a total blood bath for suicides if non-affirmation of everything is the fast train to offing one’s self?” Van Mol asked, paraphrasing the blog post.
Another doctor in the working group, California endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, had gained attention for his writing against gender-affirming care after parents at a charter school in his region raised complaints that they hadn’t been notified before kindergarteners were read a children’s book, I Am Jazz, about trans teenager Jazz Jennings. Last fall, when the state of Florida called on Laidlaw as an expert witness in a lawsuit over its anti-trans Medicaid policy, a federal judge concluded that he was “far off from the accepted view” on how to treat gender dysphoria, in part because Laidlaw had said he would refuse to use patients’ preferred pronouns. In his South Dakota testimony, Laidlaw compared gender-affirming care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In emails to Deutsch and the group, he railed against doctors who prescribe puberty blockers — which are used to delay unwanted physical changes in gender-diverse kids and give them more time to explore whether or how to transition — accusing them of “willfully harming” children, even if kids and their parents consent to treatment. “The physician is the criminal in these scenarios and must be prosecuted by the law,” he argued.
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At Harper’s Magazine, Anne Fadiman’s hilarious and poignant essay recalls Bunky, an African clawed frog the family kept as a pet until his death at age 16. After years of feeding the required “Stage Two Food Nuggets” that formed Bunky’s diet and regular tank cleanings, Fadiman feels as though the family never did quite right by the frog, despite his longevity. This is a fun and insightful read on what it means to be a pet owner.
George and I agreed that we should wait until Henry and Susannah were both home before we buried Bunky under the weeping cherry, next to Biscuit and Bean. We joked about it, but we were also serious. We never considered throwing him in the trash. We wanted to honor him in death as we hadn’t in life; otherwise we’d be like a family whose photo albums get thinner with each succeeding child, until the last one has no pictures at all. (Come to think of it, we’d never taken a single picture of Bunky.) So Bunky went into the freezer. He’d spent more than a decade on the kitchen counter, so he didn’t have to travel far.
What is a pet? Is it an animal you love, as we loved Typo? Is it an animal you are responsible for, as we were for Bunky? Do you have to be able to pet a pet? Must there be reciprocal affection, or is it enough merely to have a guest in your midst that has a different number of legs, or perhaps no legs at all? Is it enough to house, feed, and bury an animal, to keep it alive for sixteen years, or maybe seventeen, and never understand the first thing about it?
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The film world has long included an ecosystem of young budding auteurs doing everything on a shoestring — but as Max Cea points out, it’s never been this possible to make a movie look this good for this cheap. And those young auteurs are starting to get noticed.
Some of these filmmakers also worry that Hollywood will take the wrong lessons from these movies. At the moment, the ability to make a $50,000 feature that rivals the quality of something made for $5 million is an exciting democratization, but it’s easy to imagine how that advancement might be exploited. “The second you tell people who finance movies that they’re paying five million dollars for something they could be paying fifty grand for, we’re just going to continue to erode at the idea that anyone could ever make a living doing this,” says Free Time director Ryan Martin Brown.
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The National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, oversees just about anything measurable in the United States. It collects and calibrates samples of materials. It owns the world’s tiniest ruler. It also standardizes the units by which we measure, which means everything from the meter (distance) to the mole (substance). But it’s the second (time) that has always fascinated Tom Vanderbilt, so off he went to discover — and, by extension, to delight us with — everything he could about that slippery duration.
In this world of metrology, which has left behind the dusty archives of physical things in favor of fundamental properties of the universe, it seems a kind of cosmic joke that this intangible, evanescent unit is the one that is understood most accurately. Even so, there is something amiss in the world of the second, the world of time. In a world of staggering exactitude, there are new timepieces on the horizon, capable of even more accuracy, clocks that are moving beyond mere measurement and opening new inquiries into time, into the universe itself. These machines have helped to drive a creeping suspicion that the second—that fundamental base unit upon which our temporal kingdom is built—despite all the synchronous activity of the world, despite the advent of clocks whose fidelity could theoretically outlast human civilization itself, is not being realized as exactly as it could be. Having come in search of the origin of time, I was learning that the very thing that drives it—the standard second—is flawed.
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The subject of this piece — a 32-year-old technology entrepreneur named Mike — is a wholly unlikeable character. The way Ian Frisch portrays him makes it hard to sympathize with the way he is scammed on Tinder, which is more a testament to his narcissism than his naivety. Nevertheless, this is a rollicking tale with some jaw-dropping moments that will keep you gripped to the end.
Mike quickly matched with a woman named Ky. She seemed cute, if somewhat inscrutable, with no biographical details and photographs that included only a mirror selfie and a snapshot of her butt in a bikini. “I am the sweetest person you will ever meet,” she would later tell him. Mike had never used Tinder before; he told Ky that he’d be happy to get together.
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A deep dive into the character of Tom Wambsgans on the eve of Succession‘s fourth and final season? Yes, please! Alan Siegel talks to actor Matthew Mcfadyen about playing the show’s most consistently hilarious character — in the opinion of this Longreads curator — and his comedic inspiration:
When we first meet Tom, he’s standing outside a luxury jewelry store in New York, earnestly strategizing with his future wife about an 80th-birthday gift for her father, Logan. When she tells him that her dad “doesn’t really like things,” he blows right through her warning. “It needs to say,” he replies, “‘I respect you, but I’m not awed by you. And that I like you—but I need you to like me before I can love you.’”
That kind of moment — wild, tormented, funny — has become Tom’s signature. When asked, Macfadyen can’t think of other acting performances that helped him develop the character’s frenzied aura, but when he ponders playing Tom, Steve Martin sometimes comes to mind. “There’s a Steve Martin thing he does in various films, and he’s just sort of improvising wildly to try to get what he wants,” Macfadyen says. “He’s such a brilliant actor. There’s a sort of terrible panic about not getting what he wants and trying to do the right thing and pleasing.”
Early in the pilot, Tom tries to hand his still-unrevealed gift to Brian Cox’s Logan, who ignores the gesture. The far-too-eager-to-please future son-in-law finally gets his chance at the family’s annual celebratory softball game. Along with a five-figure Patek Philippe watch, Tom delivers a joke to Logan: “It’s incredibly accurate. Every time you look at it, it tells you exactly how rich you are.” Unimpressed, Logan says, “That’s very funny. Did you rehearse that?” Macfadyen improvised Tom’s response, first letting out a painfully awkward laugh, then saying, “No. Well, no. Yes, but …” Then Tom stops himself, forces a toothless smile, and shakes his head.
“That reaction he had to Logan Roy is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off because you’re going to say, ‘No,’ and then you’re going to betray yourself because you’re so intimidated you tell him you actually practiced it,” says McKay, who directed the episode. “People do that in real life. But traditionally, when you see a moment like that, it’s played for high comedy. Macfadyen’s a master. It’s a comedic moment, but still, it felt real.”
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Sumanth Prabhaker interviews Booker Prize winning novelist and short story author George Saunders on his work habits, how he leavens his characters to give them autonomy, and the infinite power of the short story.
I found early that, given my limited talent, one way I could reliably make drama was to manufacture some hardship for my character. In (sometimes) exaggerating that state (no sunlit days, at all, ever), the whole thing tips over into the comic and, in the process, the meaning seems to sharpen.
The short story, I’m learning, can do anything. But I do feel that there’s something innately cautionary about the form. The story states Truth A and immediately we are waiting for…well, for change. So the story you’re suggesting might start with one model for “rebuilding” but then, because it would be human beings doing the rebuilding, there would, no doubt, be a complication. That’s what makes it a story.
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“This is our version of being whole—as immigrants and as Texans.” In this movingand beautiful personal essay, Jenny Tinghui Zhang reflects on family, sacrifice, and a life of driving in Texas. Zhang describes a childhood and adulthood ruled by the road, her parents’ hard work over the decades, and a family separated by long distances.
Once, when I visited my parents in Katy over the holidays, I walked in on them riding their stationary bikes, which they had placed next to each other in front of the TV. I don’t know how long I stood there watching them. I felt melancholy seeing them together like this, pedaling in place in the same direction but still separated and going nowhere. My mother had achieved tenure at her community college, and my father was at a good place with work. Neither of them wanted to risk another bout of unemployment by giving up their job.
They shouldn’t have to pedal this hard only to stay in place, I remember thinking. They shouldn’t have to live in this disjointed fracture. I stood there watching them and I wondered: How much longer can we do this? Just how much distance can a family withstand?
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It’s ironic when you consider that homophobia originated from the idea that homosexual behavior is a crime against nature. What is considered “natural” or “unnatural” has been used to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people, as well as people of color and Indigenous people, for generations. And yet, nature has always been flamboyantly queer, insatiable in its appetite for sex, pleasure, and new life.
Queer ecology is the application of queer theory to nature. It seeks to challenge dominant systems of heteronormativity, cisnormativity, colonialism, and capitalism and show how these destructive ideologies distance us from our natural environment. How we understand the natural world, and our place in it, has been heavily influenced by media that positions nature as pure and bountiful. The moniker “Mother Nature” emphasizes its life-giving and nurturing qualities. But nature also rages and destroys and fornicates as if life depended on it which, of course, it does.
Stories about nature have been used to advance right-wing fundamentalist views. When The March of thePenguins was released in 2005, Christian fundamentalists rejoiced at its depiction of penguins as upstanding, monogamous partners, paragons of traditional family values. But there are also examples of penguins in committedgay relationships.
Some scholars argue that heteropatriarchy is fueling environmental collapse. In contrast, queer communities of care and support, built by people who are ostracized from their families, better reflect the symbiotic relationships in nature. Our planet is home to immense diversity in terms of both sex and gender. This should inspire us to expand our understanding of human identity, sexuality, pleasure, and desire.
Consider the New Mexico whiptail lizard, which reproduces through parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction that allows the female to create a viable offspring without a mate. Consider, too, the “birds and the bees” talk: It’s the clichéd story parents use to explain how babies are made, though as Micha Rahder notes, it’s an insult to birds and bees to have their ravenous sex lives reduced to a heteronormative fable. Both are infinitely more sexually adventurous than (most) humans.
The natural world is much wilder than we can ever imagine. We have so much to learn.
As we bear witness to the destruction wrought by climate change, we need new ways of interacting with the environment. As you’ll see in this reading list, queer ecology offers a new lens through which we can reimagine our relationships with our bodies, our peers, and nature.
This thoughtful personal essay by queer conservationist Alex Johnson, laid out in the form of a lesson plan, joyfully challenges the double standard inherent in believing that nature intended for only a man and a woman to love each other and that humans ought to tear the earth apart to extract fossil fuels. Nature writing tends to be either beatific in describing the wonders of the natural world or despairing at how we are destroying it. But Johnson’s essay calmly collapses that dichotomy, noting how we “call geese beautiful and elegant and faithful until they are shitting all over the lawn and terrorizing young children.”
Writing about nature means accepting that it will prove you wrong. And right. And render you generally confused. Nature is mysterious, and our part in the pageant is shrouded in mystery as well. This means contradiction and paradox and irony. It means that there will always be an exception. Nature has always humiliated the self-congratulatory scientist.
The @QueerWildlife Instagram account challenges dominant narratives about nature and highlights examples of queer ecology in action.
Established in 2017, The Institute for Queer Ecology (IQECO) is a collaborative “organism” that is guided by queer and feminist theory and decolonized thought. Landon Peoples’ wide-ranging interview with its founder, Lee Pivnik, explores the institute’s creative mission to champion inventive solutions to the climate crisis. The institute aims to challenge mainstream ideas of humans versus nature and celebrate opportunities for synergy with the natural world. Lee, who identifies as queer, reflects on the intersections between his own identity, evolution, and the false binary that exists between culture and nature. This conversation offers a useful framework on how to find “beautiful fluidity” in a time of constant change.
The Institute of Queer Ecology acts as a visioning tool to speculate and imagine a new world that we can inhabit together—thinking of change as this grounding, universal principle that we first see in ourselves, and then acknowledging ourselves as individuals in the beautiful fluidity that queerness promises at the individual level—where you have the ability to constantly make yourself resistant to categorization.
“There’s nothing more queer than nature,” Brigitte Baptiste argues in her short but compelling TEDx talk. Baptiste, one of the world’s most influential environmental experts, founded the leading biodiversity research center in her native Colombia. She has advised the U.N., written more than a dozen books, and won international prizes for her work. Najit Benrabaa’s interview covers Baptiste’s unique career path, “green capitalism,” and how a queer lens informs her work. Her fascinating personal story runs in parallel to her work as a biologist in Colombia, which is the most biodiverse country in the world per square kilometer.
The queer view of biodiversity helps us assign new words to the transformations instead of reducing ourselves to canonical parameters or stereotyped descriptions. There is multiplicity in species and ecosystems. Queer ecology is a different way of looking at nature—it insists on the fact that we can enjoy, without prejudice, the diversity of life forms and sexualities being expressed.
Interested in the sensual aspects of queer ecology? The podcast Serpentine has a series of lush conversations on nature, pleasure, and desire.
Grassilingus, anyone? In her funny and thought-provoking essay, Meghan Flaherty examines ecosexuality and wonders how we ought to interact with nature. Her essay is carnal and complex, layering works of indigenous wisdom like Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass with the teachings of Instagram personalities like @MyOrgasmicLife, who calls herself the “Brené Brown of pussy.” Flaherty discovers, as both a gardener and an intellectual, that engaging with nature without exploiting it restores us in ways we can’t yet define. Quoting Kimmerer, she concludes that “any action on behalf of life will be reciprocated: ‘We restore the land, and the land restores us.’”
There is no dualism. There is no big divide. We are all connected, with or without souls. Hierarchy, any domination in the web of life, hurts everyone. “All flourishing is mutual.” We flourish, all of us together, or we flourish not at all. We start respecting all these “others”—nature, perhaps, first and foremost—or we die.
Rebecca May Johnson’s piece also begins in her garden. During the COVID lockdown, she passes her time growing vegetables and experiences how challenging it is to contain nature’s voracious appetite for life. Dividing land into allotments rented by individual gardeners proves futile as the vegetables copulate underground; growing courgettes and pumpkins side by side, she harvests strange hybrid crops with ombréd colors and alien textures. As she weeds, she listens to podcasts about gay women in France who are banned from having children through IVF. She thinks of her friends trying to become pregnant, of the “the intense, repressive hell” of making babies under patriarchy. Her essay expands into an argument for generosity — in terms of both material things and one’s frame of reference — as she shares the produce from her teeming garden with friends, lest they rot in the soil.
That violent heteronormative cultures of sex and reproduction among humans are attributed to ‘nature’ feels astonishing after spending time on the allotment. The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel that makes a mockery of conservative ideas of the natural.
The food on my table is a persistent connection I have with nature. Whether it’s the herbs I grow on my windowsills or the veggies I pick up at the farmer’s market, it’s thrilling to think about nature’s queerness as I prepare dinner for my girlfriend. Like most people, we rely on an agricultural industry that exploits the earth’s resources for profit. Queer farmers, many of them nonwhite, are redefining what it means to farm the land respectfully, thinking of their crops “not as resources to be extracted, but rather as members of an ecosystem.” Daphne Chouliaraki Milner writes about mindful land practices and behavior-based animal management, reimagining one of the most environmentally damaging industries on the planet. This piece highlights the many challenges with monoculture farming and charts a path toward a more equitable and healthier future for the planet and all of its inhabitants.
“Queer theory complicates reductive binary understandings of the world; it complicates ideas of hierarchy; it complicates the idea that there are better positions and worse positions”, said Benedict Morrison, member of Quinta, an ecovillage and LGBTQIA+ community project. “Queering our food systems is an attempt at radical empathy. It’s an attempt to always find the value in difference.”
Clare Eganis a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes aregular newsletterand is working on her first book.
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Copy-editor: Peter Rubin
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Fittingly, for an essay about St. Patrick’s Day, this is a jolly piece — but one that also touches on the loneliness of moving to a new community. Harrison Scott Key takes us on a raucous ride, and although I doubt I will ever end up at the parade he describes, after reading this essay I have a sense of what it would be like if I did. Crazy.
I love these men, because it’s easier to love people you’ve watched vomit into the hellmouth of a portable toilet at two in the morning while you film it for your friends. Not that you always get so carried away. But you do. You forget to eat. And while our wives and girlfriends steer clear of all this good clean fun in the days before the parade, many have begun to join us for the storming of the square, along with our sons and daughters, grown tall now, who have made this ritual their own, generation to generation, as it should be.
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Vidya Athreya shares her field research and personal experience working as an ecologist in the Indian state of Maharashtra, focused on leopard ecology, conservation, and human-carnivore conflict. Around the world, people see big cats like leopards as dangerous and bloodthirsty, when really the primary threat to big cats is humans. In this piece, Athreya touches on the complex relationships humans have had with big cats since prehistory, and documents the surprising things she’s learned about the behavior, movements, and eating habits of the region’s leopards. She asks: Can humans and leopards coexist in shared landscapes?
Leopards were not only surviving but raising families in this agricultural landscape—and there was something about the way local people dealt with it that I could not fathom. I’d been trained to see the juxtaposition of large carnivores and people as a situation of imminent conflict. One day, early in my research in Akole, I drove with Ghule kaka (“kaka,” an honorific, means uncle), the farmer I was working with, to interview a woman whose goat had been killed by a leopard. Like a typical wildlife biologist, I asked her what problems she had with leopards. She brusquely replied that a particular leopard routinely came by a path in the hills, passed her house and went “that way.”
Later I asked Ghule kaka what I’d done to annoy her. “These people revere the leopard, and you’re asking her what problem her god gives her!” he replied. Nearby was a statue of Waghoba, a large cat deity that many people in the region have worshipped for at least half a century. I remember a pastoralist whose sheep was taken by a leopard. “The poor leopard had no prey in the forest,” he said. “What else could he eat? So he’s taken the sheep, and God will give me more.”
I’d started out as an arrogant young biologist convinced that we can resolve human-wildlife “conflict” only by understanding the animal involved. My experiences in Akole convinced me that it is humans who hold the key, and I soon got a chance to test that theory.
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This is a fascinating look at GLP-1 drugs, which, when injected, create a sense of satiety. I appreciated Tolentino’s exploration of the continual shift in our acceptance of different body shapes, as well as the impact of this particular trend. A piece that made me think about society, as much as weight.
For people who are dealing with those conditions, Ozempic appears to create a path toward a healthy relationship to food. For those who aren’t, it might function more like an injectable eating disorder. As the side effects make clear, it’s not a casual thing to drastically alter your body’s metabolic process, and there is no large-scale data about the safety of these drugs when taken by people who are mainly interested in treating another chronic condition, the desire to be thin.
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