With bio communication, it's monkey flowers all the way down.

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, Zoë Schlanger

Submitted by Winston.

Winston is currently doing a GoFundMe to raise money that can help him move his family to a trans-affirming state for the sake of his oldest daughter's health and well-being. If you can spare it, please consider contributing. (I asked Winston for permission to share this; while the subscriber base of this newsletter isn't huge or as far as I know especially wealthy, it is an audience that I hope is largely sympathetic and inclined to help.)

A free-thinking 2020s-era teenager who happens to love the same music as the presumably adult screenwriter who constructed him encapsulates everything appealing and irritating about Winter Spring Summer or Fall, a movie full of heartfelt contrivances.

Review of Winter Spring Summer or Fall, Jesse Hassenger for Paste

"Presumably adult screenwriter" is a good little zinger.

Ihor Bezkaravainyi, a deputy minister at Ukraine's Ministry of Economy, is leading the team, and he likens the task of de-mining during an ongoing war to designing and building a submarine entirely underwater, except that the water is on fire.

"Ukraine is Using AI to Manage the Removal of Russian Landmines", Matthew Sparkes for New Scientist

Submitted by Hugh.

The wizard's role in the village was ambient, more like weather than government.

Moonbound, Robin Sloan

There are quite a few perfect sentences in this novel—here is a picture of all the stickies I added to note them:

I'm not including all the sentences here partly because of spoilers, but:

It became seriously embarrassing to the dragons' deeply pragmatic architects that once of their creations had turned out sexy.

A mutant chivalry leapt in his heart—a trap I had not anticipated.

It was the California feeling, all throughout history, before and after California.

(Snakes had learned to build fortresses.)

The night market danced to the music of dishes destroyed.

(the music of dishes destroyed!!)

Robin Sloan in general is an optimist with a real zeal for living, which is something I respect but probably due to being fundamentally damaged isn't a way of existing that I'm fully able to get behind. Ironically I think some of this damage comes from having been born and raised in California, a place where Sloan (originally from Michigan) comfortably lives and I, when visiting, mostly dissociate.

I found it easier to get behind the zeal of Moonbound than his first two novels, partly I think because of the vast time jump and partly because there's more space for grief and challenge in this one, even if it's undeniably a more fantastical setting. Imagine if the characters of Adventure Time were cast in an adaptation of the Earthsea novels, or if Ursula K. Le Guin wrote an episode of Adventure Time. Did you cry watching the last episode of Adventure Time? Yeah. This is the vibe of Moonbound and it feels like a big creative leap forward for Sloan.

Also, there's a character named Ingrid and while she is not named for me, my vanity appreciated it regardless.

Send me your address so I can visit you and explain my passions

Russell Crowe on Twitter, way back in the day

Routed through women, geology could help secure and improve the future, but only if it was properly controlled, purged of fancy and caprice.

How the Earth Feels, Dana Luciano

The sound filled the room; it seemed to draw vibrations from the engraving of the skull hung over the mantelpiece, it made the candle-flames curl slowly; but there was no reply.

He Who Whispers, John Dickson Carr

Submitted by Robin.

Button pushers push buttons and the walls of ancient Babylonia crumble.

A translated 1940 text by Sergey Kalmykov as read at a performance by the Orta Collective

I went to this performance with Lou on Friday, kind of on a whim. We didn't learn that much more about the history of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan (ostensibly the central topic of the work) at the performance and I still don't really understand why they made us wrap ourselves in butcher paper capes, lined the walls of the space with aluminum foil, and littered the floor with crumpled up fistfuls of foil (except that it did contribute to some amazing sound effects in the space, including making me as an audience member painfully aware of my own body because if I adjusted my seat even a little the crinkly noises were so loud).

Nevertheless, I respected the collective's willingness to really swing for the fences and be weird and insist that sci-fi and theater combined are two of the most powerful forces on the planet. I've been feeling very estranged from (creative and intellectual) work lately, just generally worrying that most of it does not actually matter. It's good to encounter art that isn't really fully baked and, while fully honest about its under-bakedness, is still shared with conviction and generosity because it serves as a reminder that actually the conviction and generosity are where the mattering comes from.