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.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/fvXGhj7
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/EoOQyAw
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.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/SBHQKro
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/EoOQyAw
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.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/sO4iDaf
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/EoOQyAw
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.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/AcNJTGL
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/EoOQyAw
“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?
from Longreads https://ift.tt/zHdraCh
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/EoOQyAw
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.
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.
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.
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.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Peter Rubin
from Longreads https://ift.tt/VDYqIni
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/a8qJlkh
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.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/lGOsqQV
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/a8qJlkh
