(On Saturday night, Venus will be in the Pleiades. It’ll be gorgeous.)

something not known to anyone at all

Anna Akhmatova, “Everything is Plundered, Betrayed, Sold” (1921):

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses –
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

“only sick music makes money these days”

Pentangle, “Light Flight.” The whole song is sprung, like a beautifully made ballroom floor, tensed and sprightly and ready for dancing.

and finally

Recommended reading: Marko Pećarević, James Danoff-Burg, and Robert R. Dunn, “Biodiversity on Broadway – Enigmatic Diversity of the Societies of Ants (Formicidae) on the Streets of New York City”. A thriving universe right alongside our own, with yellow-footed ants milking aphids for sugar on the Park Avenue median.

(On a personal note: I have a chapter in the just-released MoneyLab Reader, and a very brief review of Brian Krebs’s excellent book Spam Nation in the latest Le Monde Diplomatique. I’ll be moderating at a wonderful event, Mistakes Were Made: Computer History Decompiled, next Friday, April 17. The participants are amazing. You should come!)

(Thanks for reading, as ever.)