In this excerpt adapted from her book The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush recounts an expedition to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. As she reflects on the thrill of visiting the glacier, she recounts the gargantuan task of communicating the experience with precision.
I hadn’t imagined how profoundly apart this place would feel—how it would appear gigantic and fully formed, an entity all its own, well beyond the limits of human understanding and resistant to whatever language I might try to pin on it.
Afterall, this floating ice shelf is comprised of snow that dropped before the rise and fall of Rome, before Jesus or the Buddha were born, before the invention of the alphabet. Before sound became symbol.
At some point, I sprint to the galley, scarf down two hard-boiled eggs and half a cinnamon bun, and run back up, taking the stairs two at a time. Soon I am outside again, attempting to honor the ice by looking away as little as possible. Thwaites’s calving edge stretches over a hundred miles, and so it takes us hours to travel its length. Sometimes the margin appears steep and sturdy and sheer; in other places it loses its sheen, seems chalky and distressed. We turn a corner and the face rockets upward into a wall. A wild line twists along the top of the shelf, tracing gorges into the blue-white snow. Then, just as abruptly, the parapet has crumbled, cluttering the water with floating pieces of brash.
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A delightful essay about a small piece of history (sometimes not so small). Why did men start wearing pockets of fabric over their crotch? Why did they stop? Zaria Gorvett finds out with some attention-grabbing reporting.
Some time around 1536, Hans Holbein the Younger was finessing Henry VIII’s crotch. With a fine brush in his hand and a palette of watercolour paints beside him, the master artist took pains to give his client’s ornately decorated bulge its due prominence.
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In 79 AD, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed several ancient Roman towns, including Pompeii and Herculaneum. It also buried the Herculaneum papyri, a collection of ancient scrolls in an Italian villa, in the process. To date, about 800 scrolls have been recovered from site excavations, but classical historians think there may be thousands more. There have been unsuccessful attempts over the centuries, however, to unroll these fragile scrolls.
In this entertaining read for Businessweek, Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet describe computer science professor Brent Seales’ more recent quest over the past 20 years to decipher them. With the help of a former GitHub executive, more advanced technology, and a machine-learning competition called the Vesuvius Challenge, it’s finally happening.
Terrible things happened to the scrolls in the many decades that followed. The scientif-ish attempts to loosen the pages included pouring mercury on them (don’t do that) and wafting a combination of gases over them (ditto). Some of the scrolls have been sliced in half, scooped out and generally abused in ways that still make historians weep. The person who came the closest in this period was Antonio Piaggio, a priest. In the late 1700s he built a wooden rack that pulled silken threads attached to the edge of the scrolls and could be adjusted with a simple mechanism to unfurl the document ever so gently, at a rate of 1 inch per day. Improbably, it sort of worked; the contraption opened some scrolls, though it tended to damage them or outright tear them into pieces. In later centuries, teams organized by other European powers, including one assembled by Napoleon, pieced together torn bits of mostly illegible text here and there.
The files generated by this process are so large and difficult to deal with on a regular computer that Friedman couldn’t throw a whole scroll at most would-be contest winners. To be eligible for the $700,000 grand prize, contestants would have until the end of 2023 to read just four passages of at least 140 characters of contiguous text. Along the way, smaller prizes ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 would be awarded for various milestones, such as the first to read letters in a scroll or to build software tools capable of smoothing the image processing. With a nod to his open-source roots, Friedman insisted these prizes could be won only if the contestants agreed to show the world how they did it.
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A network state starts as an online community of like-minded people, connected by something—a big idea, an innovation, a commandment—then moves offline into the physical world. Consider Vitalia, a pop-up city on an island off the coast of Honduras that’s focused on prolonging life. Or Praxis, a VC-funded group that wants to build an “eternal city” in the Mediterranean, free from the clutches of America’s flawed democracy. Given the US’s history of “secessionist yearning,” this idea is not new, and “[i]n hindsight, the network state is clearly the dream that Silicon Valley has been building toward since the very beginning,” writes Kaitlyn Tiffany. In her piece for the Atlantic, she recounts her experience from another network state, Zuzalu, the two-month experiment hosted in Montenegro last year and organized by the inventor of Ethereum.
Other than that, the model is choose your own adventure. Hypothetically, Srinivasan suggests network states for people who eat specific diets (kosher, keto), for people who don’t like FDA regulation, for people who don’t like cancel culture, for people who want to live like Benedictine monks, for people who might want to limit internet use by putting public buildings in Faraday cages. It doesn’t matter what the state is based on, but it has to be based on something—a “moral innovation” or a “one commandment.”
These projects are pitched with a sense of grandiosity and grievance: The twisted bureaucracy of democratic governance is constraining humanity. Decades ago, we went to the moon; why don’t we have flying cars? Centuries ago, we praised frontiersmen and pioneers; why are they vilified now? Why all this disdain for the doers and the builders? Why all this red tape in the way of the best and the brightest?
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“Are you traveling alone?” the agent asks as I hand over my passport.
“Yes . . .” A nod would have been louder. “Yes,” I try again, uncurling my shoulders.
I’m out of practice with confidence. I’m out of practice with a lot of things.
It’s late October and I’m flying to Milan to wrap myself in its chestnut-scented fog. I’m headed back to the city where I lived in my 20s, because I miss it, because I miss myself.
I move my carry-on behind my knees, partly to hide its size but mostly to stabilize myself. I’m such a fool; my angst is totally self-inflicted.
I must’ve been about 5 when my dad drove me to a playground to meet a friend. He parked across the street from a house that had just burned down. I have always been petrified of fire; I usually avert my eyes from anything to do with it. Somehow, that day, I forced myself to study the scarred skeleton in a curious, steady analysis of hurt.
I am prepared to mourn myself the same way in Milan by staring the loss straight in the face.
Just how much has this illness engulfed?
“Let it all in,” Ethan said earlier as we pulled into the drop-off lane. “I think you’ll find that your nerves are also excitement.”
In our 20 years together, I’ve never had to justify to Ethan that I feel six emotions in one breath. While so many others shame me for my emotionality, he considers it a gift. By all, he means: the joy, the pride, the grief, the fear, the giddiness, the awkwardness, the loneliness, the triumph.
He’s right—I am excited. I’ve planned a homecoming not only to Milan but to my other beloved northern Italian places: Cinque Terre and Venice, on opposite coasts.
“You’re planning to do all that? On yourown?” My loved ones are concerned. They’ve witnessed every act in my drama, every tango between force and fragility. I’ve done it before; do they think I can’t do it again? Their doubts become mine. Or maybe they were mine all along.
I live on the fault line at the intersection of two axes—illness and wellness—and two planes: what is and what could have been. My body is the most unpredictable factor in every day. My decisions, however mundane, involve a constant negotiation of energy. My time is dissected into pacing and pushing, with episodes of hurling myself past the breaking point and paying for it, only to feel a semblance of normal, of able, of the before—if there ever truly was a before, a time when this beast didn’t inhabit me.
Resilience has a cost.
Sadly, though, French has changed my vowels and endo has changed my bowels.
“You’re leaving Ethan alone? Is there food for him in the freezer?” My grandmother’s notion of independence is one thrust onto her as an immigrant and a widow, not an elective independence like mine. “No,” I want to tell her, “but I’ve left him love notes in the sheets and in his boxer drawer.”
Our independence had always been our defining feature; we lived as individuals first and a couple second. Much of our story has unfolded on separate continents, with us chasing our own dreams. We honor our distinct cultures and faiths. Even our wedding bands don’t match—he prefers yellow gold, I prefer white.
My independence also once meant I’d take so many flights a season that I’d fall asleep during takeoff, unfazed—or debilitatingly fatigued, unknowingly, even back then. Predicting my future from the sludgy swirls at the bottom of my cup of Armenian coffee was an easy task for our elders. “There’s a voyage around the corner,” they’d say, seeing open horizons in patterns of coffee grounds, and they were never wrong.
But the weed inside me tethered my organs and bound my ship to its anchor. It suffocated the independence that pulsed through me since I last stood in Milan. I went from winning more scholarships than I could accept to watching my savings dissolve into medical debt. I walked out on a dream career in academia after my PhD and became self-employed to give myself breathing room between surgeries—a “choice” my Italian supervisor called a real shame for the field that had invested in me.
I asked Ethan for more and more: to do my dishes, to run my errands, to support me financially, to speak for me, to bend down for me, to pull up my underwear, to carry me back to bed. He dealt with the stress of being our household’s sole contributor. He dealt with our shared PTSD from medical appointments gone badly. He dealt with us being late to everything because I couldn’t get myself off the toilet. He dealt with our rattled intimacy, with my screams in the night, with the sight of me depleted, pale, immobile. With every thank you and I’m sorry that he collected from me, my individuality unspooled.
Through it all, he’s been more than stoic—he’s been loving. He swaddled me in acceptance long before I could even entertain the idea of acceptance myself. But I often wonder: How fine are we, really? How far can we bend without breaking? And so, when I remember, I refrain from complaining. I try to balance taking with giving. I test how long I can hold out without letting the word “pain” sneak into my sentences. I make myself lovable, to the extent possible. I’ve come to rely so much on Ethan. Do I even make sense without him?
I tuck my boarding pass into my passport. I’m flying solo to test my wings.
There’ll be no one to help lug my suitcase, my groceries, my body. But surely, Milan will feel good. . . . But what if I don’t feel anything at all? What if healing has left fragments and fissures that can’t be made whole? What will Ethan do with his time now that he’s unburdened by me?
My seat on the train into Milan has me going backward. Fitting, I think, to be pulled into my city in reverse, my life on rewind.
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Soon, I have an ornate key in my purse again and my address refers to a peach house with trees sprouting from its rooftop and balconies crowded with pots. Milan is a city of handsome façades and secret universes tucked backstage in interlocking private courtyards, and my neighborhood—Brera—is its artistic heart.
I have a type when it comes to cities; Milan isn’t it. Its dense smog veils the Alps and gives me a chronic cough that only disappears if I go to Switzerland for the weekend. Every intersection is a chaos of squealing trams, cars, scooters, and pedestrians, each fighting for their slice of space. Its only waterfront is along the banks of its murky Navigli canals.
But I grew up here. Milan was my companion as I befriended the voice in my head—the voice that was suddenly so loud when I left my parents’ nest and ventured overseas with a big red suitcase packed with ambition and anxiety. Milan taught me the art of being alone—really alone, before smartphones and social media strapped us into a permanent grid. Without Google Maps in my pocket, I’d rely on my hand-drawn scribbles of cross streets or, if I was feeling brave, my instinct. As we got to know one another, Milan grew smaller. Locals began asking me for directions. Dinner for one became comfortable, even romantic. I was unbothered by glances and poised for inspiration. I was free.
Milan raised me to believe I could do and be anything. To have had that and to have lost it might be worse than never having had it at all.
The story of city and self is often intertwined; where we loved, where we lost, where we came alive. When my nostalgia swells, I wonder what I’m missing: the back then of Milan, or of me?
When I step out, it feels as though I’m walking inside my mind, opening drawers and boxes I sift through often in my daydreams. I let my senses fill with all that used to be mine, and my chest might just burst open. I comb the streets that I knew better than those of my hometown. I didn’t expect such fuzzy memory traces. I know this once mattered, but I can’t tell why. I’ve forgotten the order of the subway stops. Left here, right there. Yes, now I remember. Milan is motor memory—a sequence of dance moves that primes the next, lyrics that form on my lips before my brain even wipes off their dust. I’ve tripped here, on this tram line, on this raised cobblestone. I’ve written in my journal here, laughed with friends there. I’ve photographed this angle, these shadows, that door. But I ached less then and my heart had fewer locked rooms.
Who knows how many times these shops and restaurants have changed before this iteration. I recognize the awnings and logos of the mainstays, but for all that’s new, only the structure of the space seems familiar—the bones, not the body. A whole new neighborhood has sprung tall with buildings that show no bruises or wrinkles. Milan is more vibrant than it was a decade ago. Am I?
I notice the uncertainty around my eyes in my selfies. I catch glimpses of my body in store windows—hunched, soft, off-kilter. I imagine the younger me reflected, slender and serene, maybe even sexy. I can feel traces of her lingering on these same street corners and in the routines I settle back into. I feel like I’m acting, playing her part.
The story of city and self is often intertwined; where we loved, where we lost, where we came alive. When my nostalgia swells, I wonder what I’m missing: the back then of Milan, or of me? I’m resistant to changing my rituals, to deviating from the script. I order the same gelato, take the same shortcut, sit in my same spot on the fountain and on my bench in the park. I want to stick to what I used to do and who I used to be.
My Italian is an atrophied muscle. I realize, when I meet my friends, that it has serious gaps: surgery, ovaries, miscarriage, egg donor, surrogate. These words were not in my dreamer’s vocabulary at 22. I also don’t pass as Italian anymore. I used to shock locals by revealing that Italian was not part of my mixed lineage. Here, I was a chameleon with my dark features and my accent, my otherness strangely more visible at home, in Québec, a province obsessed with monolingualism.
Sadly, though, French has changed my vowels and endo has changed my bowels. I can no longer repeatedly eat bread or pasta without consequences. I need more bathroom breaks and more downtime. I travel with my hot water bottle. My clothing is looser, longer. I’ve traded my heeled suede boots for sneakers that fare better with Milanese puddles and my tingling feet. On days where rain is imminent, I take pleasure in leaning on my umbrella for extra support. Before I unpacked, I moved a dining room chair into the entrance so I can sit while I tie and untie my shoes. When I go to the market to buy myself flowers, they call me signora instead of signorina.
I’ve aged before having aged.
But my Italian friends claim they don’t see it. “Ma non sei cambiata! Sei sempre la stessa!” They marvel at how I haven’t changed. I admit, that makes me happy. There’s a strange sense of pride in staying the same—consistent, unscathed. We are conditioned to grow, but not to age, to blossom, but not from wounds.
When I meet my friend Stella for lunch, we share our shortcomings over orecchiette. Stella has her own invisible disability to accommodate—a crippling fatigue that has been her shadow for years, wedging itself between her wants and her cans. With the Italian lunch hour whirling around us, we are cradled in a confessional safe haven. We talk about how foreign our bodies feel sometimes and how our truth inconveniences others. The need to draw boundaries to nurture ourselves is often isolating. Stella is more practical with her grief than I am, at least today. “When people ask, ‘how are you?’ I say, ‘I can tell you, but you won’t like the answer!’” We laugh, though we are both unsure how to navigate a society that conflates being real and being negative. Fifteen years ago, we had academia in common. Now, this.
I’ve tripped here, on this tram line, on this raised cobblestone. I’ve written in my journal here, laughed with friends there. I’ve photographed this angle, these shadows, that door. But I ached less then and my heart had fewer locked rooms.
The way I dreamed up this quest was fueled by my internalized ableism—to check if I can, to be disappointed if I can’t. My grandmother’s resilience is entrenched in my concept of self-worth. That life is meant to be endured with a brave face, and that rest—much like praise—is earned by plowing through pain. “Look what I managed to do at 92” is the underlying message of our evening chats when she tells me about her windows, floors, and thriving plants. “That’s more than I can manage in a day at 38,” I chuckle, secretly worried about getting to 92. My own look-what-I-managed-to-dos are photos texted to Ethan. I get a thrill when he’s proud of me, when he sees me on my own two feet, doing what I love. The snapshots don’t show the abandoned climbs, the turn-backs, the breathlessness.
Milan is my timepiece, my meter of selves past. I was prepared for my return to sting.
But I remind myself of what it is taking me a decade to unlearn: it’s not all or nothing. There’s triumph in staying in, in saying no, in resting before feeling floored, in getting groceries in three trips, in choosing the later train or no train at all. My limits make me more intentional. I start to send Ethan pictures not only of the things I did do, but also those I deliberately didn’t do and felt at peace not doing. I shift my attention to being instead. I can’t shake my limitations, but I can shake the shame and the inner turmoil. I can let my joy take the edge off the grief. It’s not about testing my wings, but about recalibrating them. I was and still am free.
I swing by the pasticceria for my usual brioche oozing with custard cream. I stand at the bar, face-to-face with a large mirror. I don’t like what I see, so I look down. No, that feels cowardly; I force myself to meet my gaze. I’m on this trip to spend time with myself, after all. Between sips of my cappuccino, I study the lines, the signs of swelling, the double chin that belongs to my mother. And when I least expect it, my insecurity melts into a smile.
I lean into Milan. I feel my posture lengthen and my jaw muscles soften. I was afraid the now would override the then. But her Milan coexists with my current Milan; my new rituals won’t erase hers. We are two selves, threaded close.
It was never supposed to be the same; I’ve become too much to go backward. Though I’m still reluctant to pick a new favorite gelato, on my next train ride, I make sure to choose a forward-facing seat.
Kristina Kasparian (@alba.a.new.dawn) is an emerging writer, neurolinguist, and health activist advocating for social justice in health care, especially for disabling conditions like endometriosis. Her writing on identity has been published by Roxane Gay (Emerging Writer Series), Catapult, Newsweek, Fodor’s, the Globe and Mail, and a number of travel and literary magazines. Visit her website atkristinakasparian.com.
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The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen. Kyra Dempsey, aka Admiral Cloudberg, explains the governing norms of post-accident investigations:
It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition. In the mid-20th century, when technical investigations of aircraft accidents were first being standardized, an understanding emerged that many crashes were not the result of any particular person’s actions. Most famously, in 1956, the Civil Aeronautics Board’s Bureau of Aviation Safety, the predecessor to today’s NTSB, concluded that no one was at fault in a collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon because the two crews likely could not have seen each other coming until it was too late. The cause of the accident, they determined, was the lack of any positive means to prevent midair collisions.
The exact origins of this norm are debatable, but we might speculate that it arose from several factors, including the lack of survivors or witnesses in many early aircraft accidents, which left scant evidence with which to assign fault; the fact that pilots held high status in society and many were reluctant to blame them in the absence of such evidence; and the presumption that flying was dangerous and that disaster was not always an aberration of nature. These realities likely predisposed aeronautical experts to think in terms other than blame.
The end result was that the aviation industry became one of the first to embrace the concept of a “blameless postmortem” as a legally codified principle underpinning all investigations. In 1951, compelled by the reality that their industry was not widely regarded as safe, aviation experts from around the world gathered to compose Annex 13 to the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation. This seminal document aimed to standardize the conduct of air accident investigations among all member states of the International Civil Aviation Organization.
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The horrific trafficking of intimate partners. An homage to Pitchfork. Memories of a childhood spent in a Kentucky kitchen. Risking lives for extreme skiing. And why we need to calm down about UFOs.
Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan | Cosmopolitan | January 30, 2024 | 3,899 words
When someone first suggested that her boyfriend might be trafficking her, Kayla Goedinghaus was incredulous. She was being abused—beaten, drugged, denied money—but trafficked? In time, as Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan detail in this gripping story, Goedinghaus came to understand the truth about her situation, which was far from unusual. “As of 2020, an estimated 39 percent of sex-trafficking victims in this country were brought into it by intimate partners,” Johnston and Quinlan write. “Through physical force, manipulation, or fraud, those victims are compelled to engage in sex acts for the trafficker’s benefit. That could mean posing for nudes he secretly sells to cover his gambling debts or sleeping with random men off the street so he can score drugs or letting the landlord watch sex acts through the bedroom window as a form of rent payment.” In Goedinghaus’s case, her boyfriend, Rick, was peddling her as a commodity among his friends, who allegedly included powerful men such as Trammell Crow Jr., an heir to a massive real-estate fortune (and brother to Harlan Crow, the conservative donor who’s been bankrolling Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s lifestyle for years). This piece, then, serves as a corrective to widespread assumptions about trafficking, including who perpetrates it and who is hurt by it. Narratively speaking, the story’s crux is an unlikely friendship. Before Goedinghaus, Rick trafficked his ex-wife, Julia Hubbard, and the two women encountering each other changed everything—indeed, it made this feature possible. “Setting eyes on each other for the first time,” Johnston and Quinlan write, “Julia and Kayla were zapped with an eerie sense of mutual recognition, as though they were standing on opposite sides of a looking glass: Kayla as the new Julia and Julia as the former Kayla. They even looked alike.” —SD
Dan McQuade | Defector | January 31, 2024 | 2,944 words
I’ve always loved music. I grew up recording music videos set to New Edition, Salt-N-Pepa, and Bel Biv Devoe on VHS with my cousins, and listening to ’80s hip-hop in the tiny back seat of my older brother’s Porsche 914 convertible while he and a friend “cruised for babes.” Bay Area radio stations LIVE 105 and KOME taught me about grunge and alternative rock, and my first underground rave opened the door to a whole new world. In the ’90s, I wasn’t yet reading about music online, still relying on my local Tower Records to discover it: as a customer, combing through new releases and reading issues of Urb and NME, and later as an employee, obsessively organizing its modest “Dance/Electronica” selection and getting recommendations from my coworkers. But I don’t know much about music; I have no formal music education (except for a brief dalliance with the violin) and have certainly never felt confident enough to write about it. So I was drawn to Dan McQuade’s thoughts on Pitchfork, the music publication Condé Nast announced would be folded into GQ. Right at the start, McQuade states that he, too, doesn’t know much about music. But Pitchfork, especially in its early years, helped to fill in the gaps. His writing resonates with me: it’s personal, funny but not snarky, and comes from the heart. He reflects on howPitchfork’s reviews had influenced him, particularly those of music critic James P. Wisdom. How the site had been a champion of electronic music since the ’90s. And how, in a very ’00s bloggy way, it was an outlet for people to review music but also to express themselves in the process, freely and irreverently, about things they cared about. “Pitchfork not only gave me bands to listen to, but told me how I might think about them,” he writes. Wisdom also puts it nicely, saying that “contextualizing and humanizing how we find and explore music is valuable.” A lovely essay and stroll down memory lane, with links to fun archived reviews. (And +1 for the playlist inspiration: I now have Moby on rotation nonstop.) —CLR
Crystal Wilkinson | Oxford American | January 23, 2024 | 3,409 words
In this wonderful book excerpt from Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, Crystal Wilkinson serves up memories of her childhood in Black Appalachia, spent with Granny Christine in their Kentucky kitchen. This piece is more than mere memoir; Wilkinson reflects on roots that run deep and close, the hefty domestic contribution women make, and preservation as a labor of love. For Wilkinson, recipes transcend ingredients and instructions to prepare a dish. They’re stories imbued with wisdom and experience handed down and across generations from ancestors that remain present in spirit, supervising each new iteration of Granny’s jam cake. “In the corner of my grandmother’s kitchen, spirits shimmered near the bucket of well water, hovered over the olive refrigerator, floated above the flour sifter, and glided around the coal-burning stove,” she writes. Granny Christine’s cake recipe—written in “her perfect cursive” and reproduced in full in the piece—is an incantation that conjures home for Wilkinson: “3 sticks of butter, 2 cups sugar, 2 cups flour, 6 eggs …” Take the time to whisper that recipe to yourself and feel full, emotionally. Needless to say this piece was deeply satisfying; I savored it from beginning to end. —KS
The Guardian | Simon Akam | January 30, 2024 | 5,932 words
I love to ski. Well, I love to ski on a nice clear day, on a nice clear run. Anything too steep or too icy, and I am edging down that slope inch by inch, brow deeply furrowed, sweat beading, pole dragging behind me (as if that would stop me). I am in awe of people like Jérémie Heitz, who can sweep down an impossible cliff face with such grace it becomes poetry, poles firmly up front and part of a fluid, gliding movement. Heitz’s specialty is at the extreme end of professional freeriding—his descents are so steep the gradient is twice that of some “expert” ski resort terrain. Simon Akam describes these icy peaks so vividly I could feel my heart pounding in my mouth as “Heitz slid sideways down the first few meters, made a turn, and then cut down onto the highest grey smear of ice.” He is committed to his reporting—even skiing with Heitz and completing some terrifying runs himself. But this piece is more than a litany of daredevil feats: it’s a reflection on the nature of extreme sports and the sponsors who support them. Heitz has lost 20 friends—normal in this world. Can that ever be worth it? —CW
Nicholson Baker | New York | January 31, 2024 | 6,751 words
Close Encounters of the Third Kind filled me with wonder as a kid, and an ’80s childhood provided no shortage of material to keep that wonder alive: Flight of the Navigator; The Last Starfighter; E.T. But despite being primed to believe, I’ve never been able to fully accept any of the countless UFO sightings and reports that have emerged over the decades. I never knew why, only that it all felt … vague. And then I read Nicholson Baker’s lively, informed takedown in New York. Oh, I thought. Duh. Regardless of where you land on the believer spectrum, there’s a lot to like here. (Well, maybe not for the full-throated evangelists like Avi Loeb, who claims skeptics and critics “behave like terrorists.”) Baker’s stance is clear from the get go, but his fiction career serves him well, leavening his skepticism with crackling phrases like “wiggy-sounding.” He’s dismissing, but not dismissive, which can be a tough needle to thread. He reports generously, not simply combing through archives but connecting with many of today’s ufology luminaries. None of that, though, shakes his well-grounded thesis: our entire flying-saucer mythology is derived from Cold War weapons research, carried out via high-tech balloons. Sure, I’ll still wonder about what might be out there—hell, it’s logically impossible to think we’re the only sentient lifeforms around—but until there’s something a little more undeniable, I’ll be living on Baker Street. —PR
Audience Award
The piece our readers loved the most this week is …
Leslie Jamison | The New Yorker | January 15, 2024 | 7,126 words
In this excerpt of her forthcoming book, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison recounts the early months of her daughter’s life. During that period, Jamison juggled a book tour, a teaching career, and the demands of a newborn—amid the growing realization that she wanted to leave her marriage. —KS
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