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A fascinating paradox is that most transcendent experiences are completely ego-free. In the moment, we lose track of time and space, we lose track

A fascinating paradox is that most transcendent experiences are completely ego-free. In the moment, we lose track of time and space, we lose track of our bodies, we lose track of our selves. We dissolve. And yet, as I suggest, spirituality emerges from consciousness and the material brain. And the paramount signature of consciousness is a sense of self, an “I-ness� distinct from the rest of the cosmos. Thus, curiously, a thing centered on self creates a thing absent of self.

The driving forces for the emergence of spirituality are both biological and psychological: a primal affinity for nature, a fundamental need for cooperation, and a means of coping with the knowledge of our impending death. Some of these forces can be found in nonhuman animals, of course, but the full experience of spirituality may require the higher intelligence of Homo sapiens.

Practitioners and philosophers disagree on whether mathematical truth exists out there in the world, independent of the human mind � in which case mathematicians discover what is already there, like coming upon a new ocean � or whether mathematical ideas, theorems, and functions are invented out of the mind of the mathematician.

Science can never disprove the existence of God, since God might exist outside the physical universe. Nor can religion prove the existence of God, since any phenomenon or experience attributed to God might, in principle, find explanation in some nontheist cause. What I suggest here is that we can accept a scientific view of the world while at the same time embracing certain experiences that cannot be fully captured or understood by the material underpinnings of the world.

So many cars parked along the gravel driveway. So many guests, already here. It was all happening. Alex made her way to the entrance of the walled

So many cars parked along the gravel driveway. So many guests, already here. It was all happening. Alex made her way to the entrance of the walled property. Her body carrying her along with the fluid quality of a dream. Did she expect some resistance? There was none. The big wooden door was wide open. As if everything was working in concert to allow for Alex’s arrival. To urge her forward. Already she had forgotten the walk there: couldn’t say how long it had taken, what roads she’d passed. The slate was wiped clean.

This thing with Simon. She leaned into Simon and he kept talking but dropped a hand to her low back. On the ride home, he’d tell her about his friends. Their private lives, their hidden problems. And Alex would ask questions and egg him on and he’d flash her a smile, his pleasure suddenly so boyish. This was real, her and Simon. Or it could be.

So many nights she remembered only as a sour feeling, a bartender’s cold look, strangers trying not to stare as a man squeezed her knee. The men always wanted people to be aware that they were with Alex, wanted eyes to follow them as they headed toward the elevators. Did they imagine that they looked like anything other than what they were? As if anyone would have done the math and come up with a different explanation.

I’d been trying to figure out what was missing from my life, and that unforgettable walk home from the eye doctor revealed the answer: I needed to con

I’d been trying to figure out what was missing from my life, and that unforgettable walk home from the eye doctor revealed the answer: I needed to connect with my five senses. I’d been treating my body like the car my brain was driving around town, but my body wasn’t some vehicle of my soul, to be overlooked when it wasn’t breaking down. My body � through my senses � was my essential connection to the world and to other people.

It was strange to realize that I make the world. In darkness and silence, my brain receives countless messages as my five senses probe my surroundings. In that outer world, there’s no color, no music, no scent until those messages return to my brain � and then the world bursts into life inside my body.

According to Roman statesman and writer Cicero, King Xerxes the Great “offered a prize for the man who could invent a new pleasure.� Inventing a new pleasure seems like an impossible task, yet this explains the extraordinary attraction of YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and, of course, Facebook. They give us entirely fresh ways to gratify our desire to look at faces. We can view more faces in a single scroll through social media than during a lifetime in a medieval village.

Because our expectations shape our experience, we respond differently to the same scent if we’re in a context that tells us “Parmesan cheese� vs. “vomit,� or “pine tree� vs. “disinfectant cleaner.� Does gasoline smell good or bad? People disagree. What’s the smell of “fresh� � is it pine, flowers, the ocean? Claims that “citrus is cheering� and � peppermint is energizing� are based purely on learned associations. Americans find the smell of lavender “relaxing ,� but people from Brazil consider it “invigorating.�

Even though I was celebrating my senses as never before, I kept dreaming up new ways to explore them. I knew that by going through my body, I could reach my spirit, and through my spirit, I could reach my body.

I think of the conversation I had with Rachel about the space station and the zoos. Maybe some of the animals might have got out, but I know that m

I think of the conversation I had with Rachel about the space station and the zoos. Maybe some of the animals might have got out, but I know that most, if not all of the lab octopuses won’t have been so lucky. And I begin to list the animals I can think of that live in aquariums: the sea urchins, and rays, and the starfish, and on and on until I make myself stop, and I think instead about what Rachel asked me. I can’t take her with me if I do decide to go. I can’t save her; I can barely save myself.

How will they keep us in, I wonder, if we threaten to leave? Will they lock us in, and how ethical would that be? I will have both the vaccine and the virus, and I will stay. I could kid myself that I’m doing it to save the human race, but honestly? I’m doing it for the money.

“But don’t you think we can learn from the past? See things differently, or let it help us decide what we do in the future?�
“Humans are useless at learning from their mistakes. We just have to keep making new plans,� Piper says.

Morning. A newly birthing sun cracks through the trees and lances straight into his blazing red eyes. Baxter is a sleeping car porter. A sleepy car

Morning. A newly birthing sun cracks through the trees and lances straight into his blazing red eyes. Baxter is a sleeping car porter. A sleepy car porter. A sleepy porter he is car. Car sleepy. Porter. Sleeping. He giggles.

Hands reach toward him, grab at him for a lift up, grab his coat pocket, wave in his face. A sea swell of passengers, spilling toward his car; a maelstrom of departure-time panic. R. T. Baxter, a dentist-to-be, man who longs to lance gums and extract pathological third molars, standing, here, next to this train, caught in this hurricane. Drowsy already.

Baxter read and reread his books and magazines about the deep sea and Martians and outer space and time travel and immortal beings and phantoms. He ate alone. He ironed his shirts. He shined his shoes so that they glittered like stars when he walked. He circled the planet Earth in his spaceship, he flew up high on the back of giant scarabs from Jupiter, he travelled the oceans in submarines. He rested in the cellar of his castle in his box of dirt, friends with vermin. He sat on his chair in the speeding train, his back perfectly straight, and he slept with his eyes open, hallucinations draping his face, a tittering insect instead of a heart.

� My aunt Arimenta, says Baxter, carefully � always used to say, Baxter, she’d say, hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.

What happens when we feel that something � or someone � is present to us, and yet we can’t say how? A silent figure. A visitor. An indefinable chan

What happens when we feel that something � or someone � is present to us, and yet we can’t say how? A silent figure. A visitor. An indefinable change in feeling of a room. Something is there, unmistakably so. And try as we might, if someone asks how we know, we cannot explain it. We just know it. We just feel it. This is a felt presence.

If you go looking for feelings of presence, the first stories you come across almost always involve snow. Lots and lots of snow. Blank expanses, extreme conditions, the enormity of nature � all seem to combine to conjure silent figures, as if some spaces appear tailor made for feelings of presence.

At Durham, we have worked with a wide range of remarkable people, reporting some of the most unusual experiences you could put into words. Voices, visions, presences; psychosis, dissociation, trauma; spirits, telepathy, and demons. But we have never had to try to work with data as slippery as what we got from the Edinburgh writers. Appropriately enough, it wasn’t hard to feel like you were being spun a yarn sometimes.

In trying to understand felt presence, I have heard about the visceral visitors of psychosis, the harbinger of ill health among Parkinson’s sufferers, the doppelgänger of an intoxicated playwright, and a robot that can conjure a ghost. I have listened to stories of saviors but also pursuers, a stormy voice that only visited in the calm, and fellow travelers who aren’t always expected. I have been told about evil personified, heard of animal confidantes, and even been offered a theory on how to create such presences myself.

The words in this book are embers from the tribal fires that used to burn in our villages. They are embers from the spiritual fires burning in the

The words in this book are embers from the tribal fires that used to burn in our villages. They are embers from the spiritual fires burning in the hearts, minds and souls of great writers on healing and love. They are embers from every story I have ever heard. They are embers from all the relationships that have sustained and defined me. They are heart songs. They are spirit songs. And, shared with you, they become honour songs for the ritual ways that spawned them. Bring these words into your life. Feel them. Sit with them. Use them. For this is the morning, excellent and fair�

In this waking world, I am awakened. In this easing of shadow, I reclaim the light. I am not alone here. I sit with my ancestors, singing this day into being � and I am made more.

It is love that brings us all together. This human family we are part of, this singular voice that is the accumulation of all voices raised together in praise of all Creation, this one heartbeat, this one drum, this one immaculate love that put us here together so that we could learn its primary teaching � that love is the energy of Creation, that it takes love to create love.

There are times in your life you are flung into an undiscovered country of being, a place beyond time and tide and detail, the full magical breath of you heaving with the indescribable joy of being, and you realize then that parts of you exist in exile and completeness is journeying to bring them home.

I’m not here in this life to be well balanced or admired. I’m here to be an oddball, eccentric, different, wildly imaginative, creative, daring, curious, inventive and even a tad strange at times. I’m here to pray and chant and meditate and sing and find Creator in a blues riff, a sunrise, a touch or the laughter of children. I’m here to discover ME in all of that. I’m here to add clunky, chunky and funky bits of me to the swirls and swagger and churn of life and living. It demands I be authentic. So when you look out at the world, that’s me dancing in the fields�

The North doesn’t play favourites.
Welcome back to the North.

The North doesn’t play favourites.
Welcome back to the North.

When the trapper was young he was told a story of a mythical arrow shot from a mythical bow. For that arrow to reach its target, it had to cross half the distance. Then it had to halve that distance again. Then again, and so on. Of course that particular arrow never reaches its target because it never crosses all those infinite halves. How could it? That still made some sense to him. Turns out this arrow is not that arrow. A part of him was surprised.

Love was in the air and couples danced within it. Her thin hand in his. And from that clasp would come other life. Unbeknownst to them, where their palms met, roots sprouted. Small vines already curling out between their fingers.

� His eyes on the curled grey ashes in the stove, like the fire had eaten the bones but left the feathers.

� The legend of the trapper grew � people like to talk and they poured those truths some drinks.

� He had always been a slow reader and now he was a slower reader and he considered that progress.

And he was nine-tenths pain, and one-tenth pain, and some impossible fraction of hysterical love, ‘cause for the smallest wild part of him, some piece at once defiant to and accepting of the misery and cruelty of life, and any circumstance or force that would impose on him great suffering which might break his will and then break the man � this felt raw and that felt good. See his resolve in a tiny smile.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12

As food is taken in softly at the lips, and then brought under the teeth, as the tip of the little finger caught in a mill crank will draw in the hand, and the arm, and the whole body, so the miserable mortal who has once been caught firmly by the end of the finest fibre of his nerve, is drawn in and in, by the enormous machinery of hell, until he is as I am.~ Green Tea

"Well, then, Doctor, here is the last of my questions. You will, probably, laugh at it; but it must out nevertheless. Is there any disease, in all the range of human maladies, which would have the effect of perceptibly contracting the stature and the whole frame � causing the man to shrink in all his proportions, and yet to preserve his exact resemblance to himself in every particular � with the one exception, his height and bulk; any disease, mark � no matter how rare � how little believed in, generally � which could possibly result in producing such an effect?" ~The Familiar

This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up, and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering over a gibbet, "A rope for Judge Harbottle!" ~Mr. Justice Harbottle

It seemed on a sudden, as it came, that the darkness deepened, and a chill stole into the air around me. Suppose I were to disappear finally, like those other men whose stories I had listened to! Had I not been at all the pains that mortal could to obliterate every trace of my real proceedings, and to mislead everyone to whom I spoke as to the direction in which I had gone? This icy, snake-like thought stole through my mind, and was gone. ~The Room in the Dragon Volant

If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially, before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all chosen for integrity and intelligence, and constituting reports more voluminous perhaps than exist upon any one other class of cases, is worth anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence of such a phenomenon as the Vampire. ~Carmilla

Your moshom never lied to me, but there were Cree legends he told me that I knew weren’t true, that represented something else. Like I know that Ca

Your moshom never lied to me, but there were Cree legends he told me that I knew weren’t true, that represented something else. Like I know that Canada isn’t actually on the back of a turtle. I know that Wisakedjak didn’t create humans. He didn’t make mud out of dirt and water, mould that mud into a humanoid figure, dry it over fire, and breathe life into it. The theory of crows seemed equally tenuous, but provable, if you were to go to the place where you would be remembered.

Your grandfather used to say that you could remember the land, even if you’d never been on the land before. Your grandfather used to say that the land could remember you. It works the same way with crows, Hallelujah. They remembered him, they would remember me, and they remember you. They pass these things down through the generations.

Regret covers everything. It’s like thick fog. It’s hard to see through. Your grandfather says that he doesn’t regret anything because you can’t change what happened. I don’t know if I believe him. I think we all wish that we could go back and do at least one thing over again…We can drown in regret.

When the Greek lesson is over, she walks the dark streets as she has always done. The vehicles on the road speed past daringly as they always do. M

When the Greek lesson is over, she walks the dark streets as she has always done. The vehicles on the road speed past daringly as they always do. Motorbikes carrying midnight snacks in red metal boxes weave in and out of the traffic, ignoring both lanes and lights. Past drunks young or old, weary workers in skirt suits or short-sleeved shirts, elderly women staring blankly from the entrance of empty restaurants, she carries on walking.

“Are you okay, seonsaengnim?� asked the young woman with the curly hair and sweet eyes who sat at the very front of the class. The woman had tried to force a smile, but all that happened was that her eyelids spasmed for a while. Trembling lips pressed firmly together, she muttered to herself from somewhere deeper than her tongue and throat: It’s come back.

There are times when my eyes burn and suddenly start to water; when these tears, which are but physiological, fail to stop for some reason, I quietly turn away from the road and wait for the moment to pass.

She wipes her cheeks, dry as ever, with the back of her hand. If only she’d made a map of the route her tears used to take. If only she’d used a needle to engrave pinpricks, or even just traces of blood, over the route where the words used to flow. But, she mutters, from a place deeper than tongue and throat, that was too terrible a route.

In "Greek Lessons," we are introduced to a man gradually losing his sight and a woman who suddenly loses her voice. In the man’s case, it feels as if he is a portrait of the universal everyman. Slowly losing the world of sight and enduring the human condition of the inevitable yet gradual approach of death are one and the same. During the process of mortality, we struggle against death even as our lives are being consumed. This is akin to speech and silence occurring simultaneously. Human consciousness always coexists with darkness, but our voices are heard most clearly in the blackest darkness. During this battle against mortality, our power of speech becomes ragged, and ultimately the female protagonist loses her voice entirely. I think that she could also be a portrait of us all. This opinion reflects my experience of working on Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing for over four years. At that time I became extremely sensitive to language. Rather than conceptual concerns about language, the sensual act of writing itself became unbearable to me. All the words I was using felt like they had become ragged, which pained me. I overcame most of that torment while writing "Greek Lessons."

Please do not get lost. If you haven’t had an Ear Check, don’t come here. Level Forty-Two will be open tomorrow. Come back then. Remember you have

Please do not get lost. If you haven’t had an Ear Check, don’t come here. Level Forty-Two will be open tomorrow. Come back then. Remember you have seven moons. You must reach The Light before the last one rises.

Lankans can’t queue. Unless you define a queue as an amorphous curve with multiple entry points. This appears to be a gathering point for those with questions about their death. There are multiple counters and irate customers clamour over grills to shout abuse at the few behind the bars. The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate.

� The Afterlife is as confusing as the Before Death, the In Between is as arbitrary as the Down There. So we make up stories because we’re afraid of the dark.

� You hover above him, more like a mosquito than angel. The mosquitoes are said to have killed half of everyone who has ever lived. A lot more than angels have saved.

� You used to make cracks about death when you considered it an unlikely event, as we all do, until we don’t.

� Magic isn’t evil or good. Or black or white. It is like the universe, like every missing God. Powerful and supremely indifferent.

� All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.

You think of dead lakes overflowing with corpses, of police stations where the rich lock up the poor, of palaces where those who follow orders torture those who refuse to. You think of distraught lovers, abandoned friends and absent parents. Of lapsed treaties and photographs that are seen and forgotten, regardless of the walls they hang on. How the world will go on without you and will forget you were even here. You think of the mother, the old man and the dog, of the things you did, or failed to do, for the ones you loved. You think about evil causes and about worthy ones. That the chances of violence ending violence are one in nothing, one in nada, one in squat.

This I have come to believe: when a boat goes down, it’s only the shell of things � the hull and the bodies � that vanish. When there are no surviv

This I have come to believe: when a boat goes down, it’s only the shell of things � the hull and the bodies � that vanish. When there are no survivors and no meaningful recovery of wreckage, there’s only speculation, the barest possibility of ever knowing what happened, and the legacies of unresolved grief. The absence of the dead shapes the story of the living.

For years, I blithely summarized the accident and its aftermath in careless shorthand to others: My parents, Lori and Larry Conover, grandparents, Harvey and Dorothy Conover, as well as family friend Bill Fluegelman, drowned during a freak storm in the Bermuda Triangle. My parents left behind two young orphans � my sister Aileen, almost three at the time, and me, eighteen months old. People would look to me for some clue as to how I felt but would find little in my affect to guide them. I’d been schooled in dissociation and numbness: no Conover ever spoke of the perishing. None of my parents� generation could bear this cataclysmic break in their lives.

What is an orphan’s story if she has no memory of her origins? Say the word aloud: or-phan. The mouth warms and wombs the first syllable, or, possessing it momentarily. Then, teeth against the bottom lip while squeezing the diaphragm hard. Phan. The word pushes into the surrounding emptiness, landing nowhere.

We become the people we think we are � that’s why stories can be dangerous and even self-defeating. Other people can also become who we think they are and that’s why stories can be disastrous. We can’t help but use stories to connect, but beware, stories will use us. They did me, that is, until they didn’t.

Shortly before midnight Bruno Perzenowski and Heinrich Busch climbed up the thirteen steps. Once there, Branchaud led each man, his final stride pl

Shortly before midnight Bruno Perzenowski and Heinrich Busch climbed up the thirteen steps. Once there, Branchaud led each man, his final stride placing him above one of the two steel trapdoors. As December 17 ended and the new day began, the hangman still waited, but no telegram arrived with a reprieve. At 12:10 a.m., the hangman with practiced hand “pinion[ed] their legs, dropped the hoods [over their faces], adjusted the ropes and pulled the lever.� Twenty minutes later, Perzenowski’s and Busch’s bodies were cut down, examined by the coroner, pronounced dead, and carried directly to the common grave they had been forced to dig the previous day. At 12:45, Walter Wolf and Willy Müeller were executed. Their bodies too were brought to the common grave. The child murderer, Donald Sherman Staley, was hanged at 1: 30 p.m., bringing an end to what would be the last mass hanging in Canadian history.

Opened early in 1943 and representing a sizeable increase in employment and economic activity for the city, Camp 132 was welcomed by Hatters. That the prisoners were available for farm labour and the occasional hockey game only made their presence more welcome. The locals treated the captives with courtesy, and their manners were reciprocated. The existence of Camp 132 was as positive an experience as could be expected for both sides, except for the shocking killings of Private August Plaszek in 1943 and Sergeant Dr. Karl Lehmann a year later.

The government’s intention and the appeals court’s decisions may have settled the matter in 1946 but they do not do so today. The violation of the Geneva Convention and the War Measures Act may seem to be technical legal points. They are not. For, by trying the POWs in civilian court, Canadian authorities deprived them of something vitally important: jurors of their peers, that is jurors who understood military ethos.

Everyone knows this is a dangerous business, but, between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwis

Everyone knows this is a dangerous business, but, between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Oh, those men would talk about how they fight Indians and wrestle cattle and climb the masts and look for justice, and indeed they do, but they do it for themselves, if you ask me. And what they want of women, they want for themselves, too.

When the first of “the girls� disappeared, no one thought a thing of it. Folks disappeared from Monterey all the time, mostly because there was more going on in San Francisco, or even San Jose. Or people took their families and moved down the coast because they thought they would find better hunting there, or some land with more rain. If they were lucky, they came back, gave up on the idea of owning their own farms or ranches, and went to work the way everyone else worked. In fact, Eliza knew that her mother would say that she had disappeared, and that thought was a bit of a prickle to her conscience, but not enough to get her to answer those letters her mother had sent. She thought there was a lot to be said for disappearing, and so she didn’t think much of the disappearance of that girl, except to note the day, May 14, her very own birthday. Twenty-one now, and wasn’t that strange?

Brutes! As soon as a man sees a rule, he strives to flout it, whether he sees it in the Bible or a constitution. That prohibition runs around in his head, and he can’t stop it. Then there he is, transgressing, and you ask him why, and he says that something was unfair or he was provoked, but what he really means is that he kept having thoughts, and then those had to turn into action, and he could not stop them.

You committed yourself here.

At Stella Maris.

Yes.

If you get committed you get certified but if you commit yourself you don’t. They figure you must b

You committed yourself here.

At Stella Maris.

Yes.

If you get committed you get certified but if you commit yourself you don’t. They figure you must be reasonably sane or you wouldnt have shown up. On your own. So you get a pass as far as the records are concerned. If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.

The problem with the unknowable absolute is that if you could actually say something about it it wouldn’t be the unknowable absolute anymore. You can get from the noumenal to the phenomenal without stirring from your chair. In other words, nothing can be excerpted from the absolute without being rendered perceptual. Bearing in mind that to claim reality for what is unknowable is already to speak in tongues. The trouble with the perfect and objective world � Kant’s or anybody’s � is that it is unknowable by definition. I love physics but I don’t confuse it with absolute reality. It is our reality. Mathematical ideas have a considerable shelflife. Do they exist in the absolute? How is that possible? I said to myself. But then myself became another self. No more than right. It took the math with it. The idea. A long period of uncertainty. When I recohered I was someplace else. As if I had escaped my own lightcone. Into what used to be called the absolute elsewhere.

I dont understand.

I know. Me either. It’s just my view that you cant fetch something out of the absolute without fetching it out of the absolute. Without converting it into the phenomenological. By which it then becomes our property with our fingerprints all over it and the absolute is nowhere to be found. Now I’m not so sure.

I look unhappy? Tougher mettle is called for I suppose. I’m all right. For a long time I’ve suspected that we might be simply incapable of imagining the epochal evils of which we stand rightly accused and I thought it at least a possibility that the structure of reality itself harbors something like the forms of which our sordid history is only a pale reflection. I thought that it was something Plato might have considered but could in no way bring himself to express. I see by your look that you have at last beheld the very incubation of lunacy.

I am not a pessimist or an optimist, I am a scientist. There is no agenda in understanding how the world really works.

I am not a pessimist or an optimist, I am a scientist. There is no agenda in understanding how the world really works.

Inevitably, this book � the product of my life’s work, and written for the layperson � is a continuation of my long-lasting quest to understand the basic realities of the biosphere, history, and the world we have created. And it also does, yet again, what I have been steadfastly doing for decades: it strongly advocates for moving away from extreme views. Recent (and increasingly strident or increasingly giddy) advocates of such positions will be disappointed: this is not the place to find either laments about the world ending in 2030 or an infatuation with astonishingly transformative powers of artificial intelligence arriving sooner than we think. Instead, this book tries to provide a foundation for a more measured and necessarily agnostic perspective. I hope that my rational, matter-of-fact approach will help readers to understand how the world really works, and what our chances are of seeing it offer better prospects to the coming generations.

Global production of these four indispensable materials claims about 17 percent of the world’s primary energy supply, and 25 percent of all CO� emissions originating in the combustion of fossil fuels � and currently there are no commercially available and readily deployable mass-scale alternatives to displace these established processes.

Some prophecies claim that we might only have about a decade left to avert a global catastrophe, and in January 2020 Greta Thunberg went as far as to specify just eight years. Just a few months later, the president of the UN’s General Assembly gave us 11 years to avert a complete social collapse whereupon the planet will be simultaneously burning (suffering unquenchable summer-long fires) and inundated with water (via a rapid sea-level rise). But, nihil novi sub sole: in 1989, another high UN official said that “government have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control,� which means that by now we must be quite beyond the beyond, and that our very existence might be only a matter of Borgesian imagination. I am convinced that we could do without this continuing flood of never-less-than-worrisome and too-often-quite-frightening predictions. How helpful is it to be told every day that the world is coming to an end in 2050 or even 2030?

Crises expose realities and strip away obfuscation and misdirection. The response of the affluent world to COVID-19 deserves a single ironic comment: Homo deus indeed!

In the past, this tendency toward dichotomy was often described as the clash of catastrophists and cornucopians, but these labels appear to be too timid to reflect the recent extreme polarization of sentiments. And this polarization has been accompanied by a greater propensity for dated quantitative forecasts. You see them everywhere, from cars (worldwide sales of electric passenger vehicles will reach 65 million by 2040) and carbon (the EU will have net-zero carbon emissions by 2037). Or so we’re told. In reality, most of these forecasts are no better than simple guesses: any number for 2050 obtained by a computer model primed with dubious assumptions � or, even worse, by a politically expedient decision � has a very brief shelf life. My advice: if you would like a better understanding of what the future may look like, avoid these new-age dated prophecies entirely, or use them primarily as evidence of prevailing expectations and biases.

Being agnostic about the distant future means being honest: we have to admit the limits of our understanding, approach all planetary challenges with humility, and recognize that advances, setbacks, and failures will all continue to be a part of our evolution and that there can be no assurance of (however defined) ultimate success, no arrival at any singularity � but, as long as we use our accumulated understanding with determination and perseverance, there will also not be an early end of days. The future will emerge from our accomplishments and failures, and while we might be clever (and lucky) enough to foresee some of its forms and features, the whole remains elusive even when looking just a generation ahead.

I’m in the ICU with my dying mother and the thing that I’m sure will get her to wake up is the fact that in the days since Mom’s been hospitalized,

I’m in the ICU with my dying mother and the thing that I’m sure will get her to wake up is the fact that in the days since Mom’s been hospitalized, my fear and sadness have morphed into the perfect anorexia-motivation cocktail and, finally, I have achieved Mom’s current goal weight for me. Eighty-nine pounds. I’m so sure this fact will work that I lean all the way back in my chair and pompously cross my legs. I wait for her to come to. And wait. And wait.

I’m more convinced than ever that I need to quit acting. That it doesn’t serve my mental or emotional health. That it’s been destructive to both. I think about what else has been destructive to my mental and emotional health…the eating disorders, of course, and the alcohol issues. And then I realize that, as much as I’m convinced that I need to quit these things � acting, bulimia, alcohol � I don’t think that I can. As much as I resent them, in a strange way they define me. They are my identity. Maybe that’s why I resent them.

I had put her up on a pedestal, and I know how detrimental that pedestal was to my well-being and life. That pedestal kept me stuck, emotionally stunted, living in fear, dependent, in a near constant state of emotional pain and without the tools to even identify that pain let alone deal with it. My mom didn’t deserve her pedestal. She was a narcissist. She refused to admit she had any problems, despite how destructive those problems were to our entire family. My mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.

My mom didn't get better. But I will.

He took Gaspar’s face in his hands, leaned down to look him in the eyes, and caressed his hair, the box on the ground between them, and he said, yo

He took Gaspar’s face in his hands, leaned down to look him in the eyes, and caressed his hair, the box on the ground between them, and he said, you have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn’t cursed, I don’t know if I can leave you something that isn’t dirty, that isn’t dark, our share of night.

It was easy to get out of the city on a Sunday morning in January. Before he knew it the tall buildings were behind them, and then so were the low houses and tin lean-tos of the shantytowns on the city’s outskirts. And suddenly the trees of the countryside appeared. Gaspar was asleep by then, and Juan’s arm burned in the sun just like any regular father’s on a weekend of pools and picnics. But he wasn’t a regular father, and people could tell just by looking into his eyes or by talking to him for a while. Somehow, they recognized the danger: he couldn’t hide what he was. It wasn’t possible to hide something like that, at least not for long.

Florence didn’t tolerate that kind of rebellion. She had rocks tied to the woman’s feet, and she was thrown into the Paraná River. Let her join the many dead hidden along Argentine river bottoms. The dictatorship’s crimes were very useful to the Order, providing it with bodies, alibis, and currents of pain and fear � emotions that were easily manipulated.

Ghosts are real. And the ones who come aren’t always the one you’ve called.

On its surface the constancy of women’s place in society is depressing, but the thing about social constructs is that they are just that � construc

On its surface the constancy of women’s place in society is depressing, but the thing about social constructs is that they are just that � constructs. Fundamentally if we have created these strictures, then we can deconstruct them and make new ones. Seeing the past and rejecting it allows us to imagine new futures and make the changes that are necessary to create a more equitable world. It’s time to start constructing that different future.

One way or another, though, when we consider the way women are conceptualized in the global north, we can ultimately start laying the blame back to the ancient Athenians. They have a lot to answer for.

All in all, medieval society spent a long time concocting a beauty ideal for women that was possible only for wealthy women to live up to, and then furiously policing it when commoners tried to emulate it. At every opportunity women were told that they must be beautiful, and that that made them desirable, lovable, and holy. However, attempting to live up to this rigid standard, especially if one was poor, was called sinful and at times was illegal. The Church thrust women into an impossible quandary: If they were not born with looks that accorded with the beauty standard, should they lose status and perhaps remain single? Or should they use subterfuge to get closer to that exacting standard, even if it meant they might face an eternity in Hell?

To be honest, the likelihood that medieval women inserted live fish into their vaginas and then fed them to their husbands was probably low. It cannot be ruled out, but all in all it seems unlikely, no matter how lacking their sex lives might have been. However, actual practice mattered less than the fact that Burchard found such behavior plausible and enough of a worry that he advised clergy members to interrogate female parishioners about it. The idea that women were horny enough to suffocate a fish in their genitals if it meant more and better sex was one thing. It was another that they were willing to do occult magic and endanger their soul.

Women have always been a part of the world’s economy writ large. In fact, women’s work in the premodern world is generally ubiquitous. The idea that women largely existed in a domestic bubble wholly removed from the realities of labor and work would have seemed laughable to medieval people. In all classes of society, women worked and were expected to do so.