A Drop Fell on the Umbrella Magnolias
On rare occasions, the townsfolk of Amherst, Massachusetts, would catch a glimpse of a ghostly figure dressed in white, leaning over to tend her flowers by flickering lantern light.
Read MoreMark Hudson: The Fires Will Come
Bitteroot National Forest, Montana, 2000 by Mark Hudson Readers may have noticed, either from perusing the newspaper or having their house burn down, that wildland fires seem to have been getting worse lately. The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), which tracks the number of acres burned in wildfires every year,...
Read MoreDoes George Monbiot live in Sector 7G, Fantasy Island?
In Fukushima's Wake | by Alexander Cockburn
New Left Review
The reactions to Fukushima from the nuclear industry’s shills have been predictable—if still scarcely believable—sallies into cognitive dissonance. Thus Paddy Reagan, professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Surrey: ‘We had...
Read MoreEnergy Infatuations
Illustration by Milo Winter, from Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1930 edition From American Scientist: To follow global energy affairs is to have a never-ending encounter with new infatuations. Fifty years ago media ignored crude oil (a barrel went for little more than a dollar). Instead the western utilities were preoccupied...
Read More‘It’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be’
Henry J. Fair, December 2005 From Environment 360: Human population will approach ten billion within the century. We spread our man-made ecosystems, including “mega-regions” with more than 100 million inhabitants, as landscapes characterized by heavy human use — degraded agricultural lands, industrial wastelands, and recreational landscapes — become characteristic...
Read MoreToads in the Gorge
From Guernica: Kim Howell is a white-haired giant who wears Kissinger glasses that magnify his eyes. He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and paid for a degree in vertebrate zoology at Cornell University by working at the school’s Library of Natural Sound. Howell preserved archival recordings of birdcalls collected...
Read MoreHow can it be that a tree blooms in winter?
Strip Show: In defense of bare trees | by Miriam N. Kotzin
The Smart Set
Driving alone on a highway through the desert of the Southwest, I passed a sign announcing the “Last Services for 100 Miles.” I asked myself, “How...
Read MoreHow could someone as smart as Freeman Dyson be so wrong about the environment?
Kenneth Brower has a number of theories: 1. Contrariness 2. He doesn’t really mean it 3. Educated fool 4. Old age 5. Collision of faiths From The Atlantic: In August 2009, Dyson appeared on the Charlie Rose show. His inimitable voice—somehow both diffident and firm, its original British...
Read More
I navigate an illness that makes me a protagonist of clichés. Sometimes, the thought of release is a dream of falling through clouds. My friend excitedly speaks about watching the northern lights from the cockpit of a plane — the whole kaleidoscopic spectacle, every inch of that cursive diffusion.
Read More
I will try to clarify, in eight points, why it is important—today—to look at images of destroyed human bodies like those I have used and integrated in different works.
Read More
This afternoon I’m nested in a striped comforter, looking out the window at four snowy oaks. In the foreground, the shrivelled leaves of the hydrangea, mostly buried in drifts. The television screen is static, paused on a scene in the game I honor before every other, Metroid.
Read More
Long ago, when the Universality of a ‘Western Empire’ was both the premise and the purpose of political strategy the West’s identity was born.
Read More
In a 60-page essay I wrote on the nature of a “morbid curiosity,” I struggled not only with the ethics of viewing actualities of death found on shock sites—usually, the premature deaths of non-white victims of car crashes, industrial accidents, drug cartel violence.
Read More
Today because I am sufficiently connected here in my book-glutted home in Boston I have decided to make my little room an everywhere. As it so happens, I am hovering now above an area of greater London known as Mitcham that four-hundred years ago was an outlying village backwater away from the teeming intrigue and bustle of King James’ city and his court.
Read More
A poem by Jennifer L. Knox: against my will/I believed I was/ the train brake, the electric fence
Read More
I navigate an illness that makes me a protagonist of clichés. Sometimes, the thought of release is a dream of falling through clouds. My friend excitedly speaks about watching the northern lights from the cockpit of a plane — the whole kaleidoscopic spectacle, every inch of that cursive diffusion.
Read More
I will try to clarify, in eight points, why it is important—today—to look at images of destroyed human bodies like those I have used and integrated in different works.
Read More
This afternoon I’m nested in a striped comforter, looking out the window at four snowy oaks. In the foreground, the shrivelled leaves of the hydrangea, mostly buried in drifts. The television screen is static, paused on a scene in the game I honor before every other, Metroid.
Read More
Long ago, when the Universality of a ‘Western Empire’ was both the premise and the purpose of political strategy the West’s identity was born.
Read More
In a 60-page essay I wrote on the nature of a “morbid curiosity,” I struggled not only with the ethics of viewing actualities of death found on shock sites—usually, the premature deaths of non-white victims of car crashes, industrial accidents, drug cartel violence.
Read More
Today because I am sufficiently connected here in my book-glutted home in Boston I have decided to make my little room an everywhere. As it so happens, I am hovering now above an area of greater London known as Mitcham that four-hundred years ago was an outlying village backwater away from the teeming intrigue and bustle of King James’ city and his court.
Read More
A poem by Jennifer L. Knox: against my will/I believed I was/ the train brake, the electric fence
Read More