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Equally remarkable, this timescale will also be pivotal to answering a different set of questions about life and our planet. After so many generations as mere passengers on Earth, humanity has now fundamentally altered the world and its function. Our project of civilization has pushed the planet into the Anthropocene — a human-dominated epoch of dangerous unintended consequences and vast inequalities. As the planet’s evolutionary trajectory has changed, our collective project of living together on it is changing as well. The future of our project is up for grabs.
The simultaneous rise of the Anthropocene and astrobiology is, however, no accident. Both are manifestations of humanity’s first encounter with the true connection between planets and life. The urgency of the Anthropocene and the promise of astrobiology reveal that planets and life — the Earth and its biosphere — are always co-evolving. Anywhere it occurs, life and its host planet must be seen as a dynamic, inseparable whole.
From that perspective, something fundamentally new is rising, offering an alternative to our current stumbling toward disaster. A different kind of human future is now possible, driven by a new kind of human self-conception and self-organization. It’s called “the planetary.”
Equally remarkable, this timescale will also be pivotal to answering a different set of questions about life and our planet. After so many generations as mere passengers on Earth, humanity has now fundamentally altered the world and its function. Our project of civilization has pushed the planet into the Anthropocene — a human-dominated epoch of dangerous unintended consequences and vast inequalities. As the planet’s evolutionary trajectory has changed, our collective project of living together on it is changing as well. The future of our project is up for grabs.
The simultaneous rise of the Anthropocene and astrobiology is, however, no accident. Both are manifestations of humanity’s first encounter with the true connection between planets and life. The urgency of the Anthropocene and the promise of astrobiology reveal that planets and life — the Earth and its biosphere — are always co-evolving. Anywhere it occurs, life and its host planet must be seen as a dynamic, inseparable whole.
From that perspective, something fundamentally new is rising, offering an alternative to our current stumbling toward disaster. A different kind of human future is now possible, driven by a new kind of human self-conception and self-organization. It’s called “the planetary.”
Read the rest of this article at: Noema
Dwight Burdick, a private physician to the Saudi royal family, was on a rotation at the King’s palace, in Jeddah, when he got an urgent summons. Princess Hala, a daughter of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, had gone wild with a knife. Burdick was asked to enter her quarters and forcibly sedate her.
Burdick, a lifelong peacenik with a neat white beard, had moved to Saudi Arabia from Texas in the mid-nineties. He had served for years on the King’s personal medical detail, but had never before encountered Princess Hala. The request to drug her alarmed him—forced sedation was a “violation of my professional ethics,” he said—but he was curious. Though he admired Abdullah, who styled himself a champion of women’s rights, he knew little about the lives of the ruler’s daughters.
Burdick drove to a walled compound on the palace grounds. Soldiers unlocked imposing gates to reveal a large villa set in landscaped gardens, facing the Red Sea, and Burdick instructed the guards to stay back as he entered the house. Italian pop music was blaring from a second-floor landing, and he followed the sound. “At the top of the stair, I could see a young female with a large kitchen knife in hand,” he wrote, in a detailed account of the incident.
The princess was slender, dressed in a loose T-shirt and joggers, and her dark curls were cut short. When Burdick approached, he recalled, “she responded with a demand that I not touch her. She said she was the daughter of the King and I was nobody.” He promised not to come closer, but asked for permission to rest a moment.
Hala gestured at a sofa and Burdick sat. As she stood over him, he spoke softly. “I explained to her that I didn’t intend to provide her with medication that I thought was inappropriate, that I was there to listen,” he said. Eventually, she perched on the far end of the sofa, still gripping the knife, and began to talk.
Hala said that she and three of her sisters—Sahar, Maha, and Jawaher—were being held captive in the villa. They had been there since their mother, one of the King’s wives, absconded to London to escape his control years earlier. Burdick offered to try to find a way to help, and the princess agreed to return the knife to the kitchen. “I did my method of sedating a patient, which is to talk with them,” he said.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
“What a great day for Korea!” my mom wrote to me on Thursday. “Nobel for Han Kang!”
For the past few decades, several South Korean authors have been bruited about as contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature, notably the poet Ko Un and the novelist Hwang Sok-yong, elder statesmen who were both previously jailed for political activism. As an American-born writer of Korean ancestry, I liked these authors in theory, but their actual work didn’t jump off the page for me, an English-only reader. If I wasn’t “getting” it, what chance did it have for others who would be reading their work in translation?
When I started writing my novel Same Bed Different Dreams in 2014, the thought of a South Korean Nobel laureate was very much on my mind. As in: It will never happen. I remembered attending a publisher’s lunch in 2008 for Hwang, whose gravitas and gentleness impressed me greatly; unfortunately, I was the only member of the media there. Nobody cares about Korea, I thought. For Same Bed, I dreamt up a genius Korean novelist I called Echo, a former enfant terrible loosely inspired by Hwang and Ko. (Sexual-misconduct allegations have since tarnished the latter’s reputation. Ko has denied the accusations.)
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
On the morning of November 25, 2021, Liya Khaimova toasted two crumpets, brewed a mug of coffee, and sat down in the kitchen of the home she shared with her boyfriend in St. Louis. “I remember waking up and being in a somewhat okay mood,” she says. “But as I was eating breakfast, a wave of sadness hit me. I was sitting there by myself on Thanksgiving morning, which I don’t think I’ve ever done in my life.”
Khaimova’s boyfriend, a musician, was on tour. Her family was in Atlanta, where she grew up. Her friends were scattered; after getting her master’s in music from the University of Southern California, Khaimova moved to the Midwest.
“In St. Louis I now have maybe two solid friends, and family who I see pretty frequently,” she says. Her then boyfriend, now her husband, is often touring. “I am physically alone a lot of the time,” she says. “When he’s home, I have one life. When he’s gone, I have another. And sometimes it’s hard to bring them together.” She pauses. “I still struggle with trying to figure out if I’m feeling lonely or not.”
There is surprisingly little quantitative data on who feels lonely during the holidays and what that loneliness means. Much of it, confoundingly, comes from a personal finance company, which for several years commissioned a survey of Americans 18 and over on the topic. In 2021, 55 percent reported experiencing loneliness during the holidays. In 2017, when the AARP Foundation asked the same age group to reflect on the previous five holiday seasons, 31 percent said they had felt lonely sometime. But these numbers lack context. How many of these people were also lonely in October, or January, or July?
“We know that people who feel isolated and lonely around the holidays don’t feel that way only around the holidays,” says Jennifer Raymond, chief strategy officer at AgeSpan, a nonprofit that works to build social connection and food security among residents of northeast Massachusetts.
Maybe someone is feeling lonely in November or December “because they’ve lost a loved one or they have some struggles with their family members,” says Jillian Racoosin Kornmeier, executive director of the Foundation for Social Connection, a Washington, DC, nonprofit. Grief or family conflict don’t necessarily stop when the holidays end. Neither does the sense that some form of social connection is missing from our days.
Read the rest of this article at: bon appétit
I’M NO ARTIST, but, if you had asked me when I was a child to draw the shape of a life, I might have drawn a horizontal line.
A few years after that, I would have drawn life as a mountain. The upward climb would be learning, acquiring, becoming; the trip back down would be a sloughing off.
What was the peak? When I was very young, I assumed it would be a distant age, like maybe eighteen, or some rite of passage like marriage or childbirth.
As I got older, I pushed the imagined pinnacle further into the future. Because I still had trouble admitting that what I was living was my life, I also believed that the peak could not possibly have arrived.
At some point I decided that life is shaped like a circle.
By then I saw myself as part of the growth and falling back that I had seen in my mother’s garden. My grandparents withered; we buried them in the earth; they turned into oak trees.
Wrinkles appeared around my eyes, and my parents began to shuffle and stoop. All around us, children sprang into being like tulips.
But the idea of life as circle became complicated. Around the age of fifty, my mother befriended Irene, a gravelly-voiced therapist and painter. My mother, who had never before shown any interest in art shows, began to attend them with Irene. She began to pronounce Van Gogh’s name in the guttural way of the Dutch. They visited Paris, Amsterdam, Venice for the museums and art supplies and pastries.
The following spring, they hauled bags of peat moss and new varieties of plants from far-flung garden centers back to their yards, digging ever bigger and splashier gardens. My mother planted daylilies, hollyhocks, and poppies; she planted zinnias and roses. At her instruction, my father dug and raked. To the backyard he added a small pond with a water lily plant from the nursery, and the tiny pool soon became home to a couple of frogs.
So how would I draw it, the way life also includes this strange burst of creative energy that my mother and Irene experienced in their fifties, around the time they entered menopause? In the terms used in traditional Chinese medicine, the women were experiencing their second spring, a reversal, a second greening of sorts—a season of wisdom coupled with new shoots of growth triggered when a woman’s qi shifts from her reproductive organs to her heart. Their experience is so common that a culture gave it a name, thousands of years ago. Though, of course, Mom and Irene didn’t call their gardens and art and travel second spring. I think they called it I’m so glad the kids are out of the house.
MONET WOULD HAVE DRAWN the shape of a lifetime as two side-by-side ovals, a bit like the eternity symbol. I believe this because he designed the space in the Musée de l’Orangerie, where his eight gigantic water lily murals are permanently mounted, in that shape: two connected and asymmetrical oval rooms. The rooms have skylights in their ceilings that, over the course of the day, illuminate the murals first in one room, then in the other, immersing viewers in the water of the pond, the world reflected on it, and the ever moving light.
The murals are taller than any person. To walk the span of all eight is to walk nearly the length of a football field. They have names like Clear Morning with Willows, Green Reflections, The Clouds, Setting Sun. The paint itself is tactile, almost sculpturelike, and as many as fifteen layers thick, layered on coarsely woven canvases. To witness them is to be both disquieted and comforted, hypnotized and overwhelmed by Monet’s sole subject in his later career. After traveling to paint the light in places like Venice and the Low Countries, his observations of the pond in his own yard became the project that consumed the second half of his life.
Read the rest of this article at: Orion
