The Dance of Śiva

Drawing on religious and poetic texts about the god Śiva, Kanya Kanchana weaves a remarkable piece about movement, art, cosmic cycles, and other enormities. Expansive, lyrical, and more than a little mind-bending. Make time for this one.

“In the night of Brahma, Nature is inert, and cannot dance till Shiva wills it: He rises from His rapture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! matter also dances appearing as a glory round about Him. Dancing, He sustains its manifold phenomena. In the fulness of time, still dancing, he destroys all forms and names by fire and gives new rest. This is poetry; but none the less, science,” Coomaraswamy writes.

There has been a long line of physicists—Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer, and many others—who, regardless of whether they are confounded or outraged or intrigued or inspired by Indian intellectual traditions, engage with its philosophies, texts, and practitioners. But it is not until Capra’s much-lauded and much-criticised 1975 book The Tao of Physics that the door to such crossovers is unlocked in the popular imagination. When a door is open, all sorts of things tend to blow in, but I digress.

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America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem

Lex Pryor takes into the world of two professional bee keepers to explain the critical role that bees have in the foods we put on our table and the parasites, diseases, and farming practices that are decimating their populations, putting our food chain at risk.

There is a bee twiddling its legs on the moonlit dashboard of Bill Crawford’s pickup. I tell him we’ve got a straggler before it crawls under a stack of stained papers. There are roughly 4 million more in the back. He is not even slightly concerned.

“There’s probably bees all over. Inside the truck, outside the truck,” he says, eyes scanning the dim country road ahead. “You’re just as liable to get stung in here as you are outside.”

Crawford is a bee man. More than once, he refers to what we’re doing—driving a load of 80 honeybee colonies from western Massachusetts to a wild blueberry farm in central New Hampshire—as “haulin’ bees.” He is active behind the wheel, but he is not gung-ho. When the road bends, he slows down. On the highway he drives the speed limit.

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Phoebe Invincible

An entertaining romp with Phoebe Waller-Bridge. There may not be anything you didn’t already know in the profile, but Press gives you a true sense of Waller-Bridge’s character—she seems to be a real joy to spend time with.

So how did a rogue British playwright swan dive into the center of American culture so quickly? A shell-shocked Waller-Bridge has been wondering the same thing.

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How Social Media Apps Could Be Fueling Homicides Among Young Americans

Between 2014 and 2021, the national homicide rate for 15- to 19-year-olds increased by 91%. But as Alec McGillis reports in this co-published feature, something has fundamentally changed even beyond that staggering statistic—and the adults who try to defuse youth violence find it nearly impossible to stop.

Smartphones and social platforms existed long before the homicide spike; they are obviously not its singular cause. But considering the recent past, it’s not hard to see why social media might be a newly potent driver of violence. When the pandemic led officials to close civic hubs such as schools, libraries and rec centers for more than a year, people — especially young people — ­were pushed even further into virtual space. Much has been said about the possible links between heavy social media use and mental health problems and suicide among teenagers. Now Timpson and other violence prevention workers are carrying that concern to the logical next step. If social media plays a role in the rising tendency of young people to harm themselves, could it also be playing a role when they harm others?

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The Jerk Aficionados

As part of “Jerk Week” at The Ringer, Alan Siegel takes on the archetype of the lovable a-hole and the actors who specialize in portraying them—from Julia Louis-Dreyfus to Alan Rickman. If you’ve ever cracked up at Adam Scott’s alpha inanities from Step Brothers, this is one for you.

Unsurprisingly, though, not all A-listers are comfortable making even the occasional foray into sleaze. That’s usually left to character actors who spend years skillfully pretending to be slimy. It’s not an easy job. Because once you get that reputation, it can be hard to shake—whether you like it or not. Seann William Scott played the (ultimately) good-hearted meathead lax bro Steve Stifler in four American Pie movies. He lost count of the times he met fratty young men who thought he was his character in real life. “They would realize that I was nothing like that and it was kind of fucking up their universe,” Scott told me for a 2019 interview. “I’d always see confusion. Their circuits firing off and then there was always a little bit of sadness. It was kind of breaking their heart because they had this idea of how I’d be. Sometimes I was like, ‘I don’t want to break their heart.’ So I would say something outlandish. And they were like, ‘Oh yeah, OK.’ And then I’d just walk away. These guys have given me a career. I can’t crush their spirit.”

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Remembering the Rappers We Lost

As every single imaginable journalism outlet covers hip-hop’s 50-year legacy this week—the culture “officially” kicked off with a Bronx block party on August 11—Danyel Smith drops the mic with this haunting, sober, even life-affirming elegy for its many casualties. Read the final section and tell me you don’t have goosebumps.

So much of Black journalism is obituary. Early deaths — literal, artistic, carceral — are commonplace. And Black men in hip-hop exist in an endless loop of roller-coaster success, hazy self-worth, bullets, fame and its cousin, paranoia. There’s earned distrust of white people in white medical coats and of the so-called thin blue line. In this loop, the death of Black male potential is a recurring theme.

There should be more soft-focus memorial in this brief alternative history of rap, told through the deaths of artists as opposed to their benchmark albums. But Black men who die as they come of age, or in their prime, are high-def, even in afterlife: livid yet unsurprised to still be doing the backbreaking work of fueling a cultural imagination. On Jay-Z’s 1996 track “Can I Live,” he was premonitory. “We feel we have nothing to lose,” he said, “So we offer you/Well, we offer our lives.”

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The Ones We Sent Away

In her gut-wrenching piece—a masterpiece of thoughtful longform journalism—Jennifer Senior profiles her aunt Adele, a woman eventually diagnosed with Coffin-Siris syndrome 12 after being institutionalized for decades. Senior attempts to understand the trauma Adele and her family suffered after being deprived of one another based on medical advice considered best at the time.

I was 12 when I learned. My mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table when I wondered aloud what I’d do if I ever had a disabled child. This provided her with an opening.

Her name is Adele.

My grandmother told my mother that she instantly knew something was different when Adele was born. Her cry wasn’t like other babies’. She was inconsolable, had to be carried everywhere. Her family doctor said nonsense, Adele was fine. For an entire year, he maintained that she was fine, even though, at the age of 1, she couldn’t hold a bottle and didn’t respond to the stimuli that other toddlers do. I can’t imagine what this casual brush-off must have done to my grandmother, who knew, in some back cavern of her heart, that her daughter was not the same as other children. But it was 1952, the summer that Adele turned 1. What male doctor took a working-class woman without a college education seriously in 1952?

Only when my mother and her family went to the Catskills that same summer did a doctor finally offer a very different diagnosis. My grandmother had gone to see this local fellow not because Adele was sick, but because she was; Adele had merely come along. But whatever ailed my grandmother didn’t capture this man’s attention. Her daughter did. He took one look at her and demanded to know whether my aunt was getting the care she required.

In March of 1953, my grandparents took Adele, all of 21 months, to Willowbrook State School. It would be many years before I learned exactly what that name meant, years before I learned what kind of gothic mansion of horrors it was. And my mother, who didn’t know how to explain what on earth had happened, began telling people that she was an only child.

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