Good news everyone, I submitted my thesis to my committee last Friday. Hope they let me get my stupid master's degree so I can get my stupid doctorate. I'm so tired.

Powder metallurgy, though in its infancy, is a lusty and promising babe.

"Metal Sinews of Strength: This Is a War of Many Metals, for We Live in an Age of Alloys", Frederick G. Vosburgh for National Geographic (April 1942)

I read this Thursday morning as I was frantically hunting down more examples of media coverage of tantalum during World War II to add to my thesis. I imagine it read out loud in a transatlantic accent.

Some are secret and as new as tomorrow.

"Brazil's Potent Weapons", W. Robert Moore for National Geographic (January 1944)

From a story about how mining in Brazil supported the war effort, in a section about novel metals like tantalite. Fun fact, I originally ran into this article in a folder of Army Signal Corps records about quartz procurement. Generally I like to keep this newsletter sentences-centric but here's a picture of a man tenderly holding a crystal from the article that haunts me.

In psycho-social terms, this means that Americans have lived for more than half a century in the temporal space in which the missiles may have always already been launched -- that is, within the 15-minute window offered by early warning systems.

"Catastrophe's Apocalypse",Joseph Masco in The Time of Catastrophe: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Age of Catastrophe

Submitted by Kelsey, found via this tweet. From Kelsey: "I think, often, about what the normal amount of nuclear dread is, given my particular beat and interests, and this sentence puts it well: knowledge that all of life is being lived with the chance that a nuclear end has already been written, and we are perhaps just minutes away from realizing that." In those minutes at least we can appreciate that lusty and promising babe of powder metallurgy, I suppose.

The final insult came when Bosnian-Croat officials said they would build another bridge, more beautiful and more ancient.

Silvia Poggioli reporting from Bosnia in 1994, as heard in a story about her recent retirement from NPR

A jittery, uninitiated person without an engineering degree could be a menace in the fabs, where she could sneeze like a putz and scatter a heap of glittering electrons like cocaine in Annie Hall.

"I Saw the Face of God in a TSMC Semiconductor Factory", Virginia Heffernan for Wired

Heffernan's essay is in may ways a callback to Neal Stephenson's "Mother Earth Motherboard", a Wired longread from 1996 that turned a journey across the planet documenting a subsea cable into a Jules Verne-ian adventure story, though Heffernan also comes at it by way of Annie Dillard. Heffernan is not a gonzo hacker tourist but a disheveled and earnest pilgrim; she threads the existential poetry of chip manufacture's complex atom-level manipulation of matter into geopolitics and history with genuine curiosity and fervor. It's a rapt, thorough read. There's maybe more willingness to assume her various handlers and experts are engaging in good faith than I might have assumed in that situation, but that's possibly one reason I don't end up in the situation of touring a TSMC fab.

I was, however, disappointed by how little labor or environmental hazards of chip manufacture came up; while she does mention how semiconductor offshoring to east Asia often used women workers because of their perceived greater dexterity, she doesn't mention how many of those workers got cancer and had miscarriages as a result of exposure to toxic chemicals. Last year the Taiwanese Supreme Court ruled in favor of sick and disabled former RCA workers in a large, long-running class action lawsuit. It's not like this stuff is secret. I can imagine that sort of detail might have been cut by an editor ("Mother Earth Motherboard" doesn't exactly have a rich assessment of class war or ecological costs either; that's not really Wired's bag). Heffernan may also have sought to maintain key source relationships at TSMC (who, for what it's worth, have a pretty decent track record on occupational health and safety—but some of their suppliers and contractors don't). Including more of that context might have also made Heffernan's overtly spiritual wonder at atomic transformation a bit more ambivalent, which maybe wasn't what she wanted.