Not as much reading done this week mainly because I had covid (still out there, friends). It was mild in the sense that my only symptoms were shortness of breath and heart palpitations, but it turns out those two symptoms make doing a lot of work pretty fucking difficult.

Updates on my dog, for those who have expressed concern: what I assumed was renal failure may not be renal failure but we're still not sure what it is; after exhausting various channels of less-invasive testing she is undergoing exploratory surgery this week to get biopsies done. After that we should have more clarity on what the treatment options are for her. She is in good spirits despite all this, but please keep her in your thoughts. I love her so much. Here is a picture of her telling me to get off the computer and play with her.

What interests me now is the transformation undergone by the soil, now bound up in words.

Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Bruno Latour

As our transport reentered the Habitat, the first fresh view of that great empty space was enough to reintroduce me to the digestive effects of soul-searing vertigo.

I don't love that numbering this newsletter means I now know there are 12 weeks left in the year, but it's nice to have stuck with it this long. (Sorry I reminded you there are 12 weeks left in the year.)

Skepticism has an ancient pedigree; it corrodes complacency and convention, and for that reason alone the skeptic who makes life so awkward for the securely institutionalized practitioner should be cherished like the most maddening of mad uncles in a well-knit family.

"Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge", Steven Shapin

He had no time for town council pragmatism, but instead entered with a progressivist, imperial swagger, and a tincture of injured colonial pride.

Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, Peter Galison

Some people think that science communication is about simple explanation of complex abstract concepts. I think it's about using phrases like "tincture of injured colonial pride." Another banger from this book:

Twelve inches in a foot, three feet in a yard—neither plumber nor physicist could cherish such a hodgepodge.

Thank you so, so much to everyone who sent words of encouragement, potential gigs, and straight up cash following last week's highly embarrassing plea. That being said, amazingly it ended up being a bit of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation: I started the week with, I am serious, my 70-something year old lived-in-the-building 43 years landlords informing us they are selling the building and unrelatedly my phone getting bricked. Facing both these events with a negative bank balance would have been far more miserable, so you all helped a lot!

The phone thing has been resolved; the building thing has enough variables in the air (our lease ends in August, sales take time, NYC real estate is a chaos vortex anyway) that in the immediate present I'm just trying to take time each day to appreciate everything I've loved about my home and neighborhood for the last six years. I'm very lucky to have friends and family and neighbors and yes, newsletter readers who have been super kind and supportive. (Also: uh, any leads on apartments that will take giant old dogs welcomed.)

You are ashamed of not grasping what it is to speak of millions of light years?

I hate opening a newsletter that's mostly just for fun with an ask for help, and yet: this year has been, and probably will continue to be, a unique financial low. I get paid this Friday, but am starting the week with a negative bank balance and would really prefer to be back at zero just to avoid more overdraft fees and also there's a medium-high possibility that I'm going to have to take my dog to the emergency room this week (we're waiting on some test results but it's either early stage renal failure or some other unspecified gastrointestinal crisis). Short-term help, medium-term help (freelance assignments, maybe you would like to buy some art, angry phone calls to the Fordham HR office which for bureaucratic error reasons has kept me locked out of the timesheet submission system for three months which means a part-time supplemental hustle has been effectively in limbo), long-term help (I don't know, advice? Talk me through this??) are all deeply appreciated but absolutely not required. God, this is embarrassing. Let's move on.

They are not commonly seen, but leave ample evidence of their passage, treating fences as minor inconveniences to be gone through or under.

The Wikipedia entry for wombat

Why, we must ask ourselves, have individuals of unquestionably great powers chosen to play with their minds like captive monkeys with their genitalia?

Rats, Lice and History, Hans Zinsser

A professor in my department had a nervous breakdown of some kind and abruptly left last year; he did not clear out his office. This was among the books he left that were otherwise probably just going to be tossed. I picked it up because of the title and because of the incredible author bio included in the front which featured this perfection-adjacent sentence:

Behind the history-making accomplishments was what Time described as an "affectionate, voluble, energetic, terrier-like man," a man who made friends all over the world with his chronic courage and unfailing wit.

I can't remember if I mentioned in previous newsletters that for most of the summer I have been waiting to find out if I would have funding to actually go to my PhD this fall. I did find out I got the funding two and a half weeks ago (thanks, the Sloan Foundation); school starts this week. Mixed feelings, generally. It will probably mean more weird academic sentences and weird primary source research sentences, which could be fun at least.

I have already mentioned that Aristotelian dynamics, in spite—or perhaps because—of its theoretical perfection, was burdened with an important draw-back; that of being utterly implausible and completely unbelievable and unacceptable to plain sound common sense, and obviously contradictory to the commonest everyday experience.

"Galileo and Plato", Alexandre Koryé

In the deep sea, it is always night and it is always snowing.

"The Wonders that Live at the Bottom of the Sea", Robert Moor for the New York Times Book Review

I felt like she had taken my ideas, fed them into a bonkers blender, and then shared the thought purée with Carlson, who nodded vehemently.

I think every stone dreams about the kind of ripples it could make when it hits the lake.

"The Poet Laureate of Fan Fiction", Adam Carlson for The Awl

Submitted by v.

Believe me, when I’m making diets, I get blood all over my arms.

"It's Bloodsicle Time", Maggie Kloza as told to Dan Kois for Slate

Submitted by Jason.

They are missing a key ingredient: the conceptual dementedness of average internet users.

"Is A.I. the Greatest Technology Ever for Making Dumb Jokes?", Max Read for the New York Times

Shitposting is the bouncer at the edge of oblivion.

In certain uptown literati circles, this is like watching a Borzoi be fed to a wood chipper.

"The Old Guard Is Out at Penguin Random House", Shawn McCreech for New York Magazine

Just a wildly evocative alien sentence amidst a story that is otherwise mostly alien in a bygone-era, imagine-having-that-kind-of-financial-stability sort of way. Do people who live uptown disproportionately own Borzois? Are wood chippers a standard amenity of Upper West Side co-ops? Mysteries abound.

No one wants to be food, but it feels somehow more demeaning to be gum.

"They Don't Want Us and We Don't Need Them", David Roth for Defector

Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret opinion about them.

From above, it looked like a monster had chewed off chunks of flesh, gaping wounds in the body of the forest.

"Are Multi-Sensory Maps Possible?", Madhuri Kurak for Container

Submitted by Kelsey with the following comment: "The piece itself offers dense information, easily digestible, about mapping indigenous places in the face of encroachment by capital and Palm Oil plantations. Forests are instrumental to 'seeing like a state,' and what I like best about this quote is that it offers an alternative, that aerial views can reveal to people what remains of a world beset by the machine of capital."

This week I learned that "walking pneumonia" is a real diagnosis that you can get at an urgent care facility! I'm actually not sure if it's the correct diagnosis for what I have (or if it is less a formal viral/bacterial infection type and more just a shorthand for "hella sick but not as sick as you could be"), but I can say whatever I've got is a pretty shitty thing to have in the summer. Apologies if the selections this week have been diluted as a result.

The words they used were strange, odd souvenirs, tiny fragments that had been chipped off an alien business meteorite.

Apex Hides the Hurt, Colson Whitehead

We’re halfway through 2023 and I’ve managed to actually maintain doing this newsletter every week! This is not an impressive achievement for most people but for me it’s pretty good. Thanks for reading it!

I want to be able to know precisely how cruelly we have robbed ourselves.

“I don’t know how to write about all that hasn’t happened since the fall of Roe”, Alexandra Petri for The Washington Post

Trees are plants that people call trees—a term of dignity, not botany.

Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees, Jared Farmer

Submitted by Charlie via Liat.

What the machine has is the exotic, uncanny allure of its authorship.

“AI Writing Proves the Author is Very Much Alive”, Connor Wroe Southard for Blood Knife

Submitted last week by Kelsey but I have been very bad at email the last few weeks and I missed it.

he’s like a saltwater taffy store where the girls are all named kimberly

Tricia Lockwood posting on Bluesky

Sometimes I think about what kind of world we lived in if only poets were allowed to post. Also, this sentence is about reading Don DeLillo.