Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonless sea of pure spacetime, black and lifeless as the inside of a skull. But, in a whisper that soon became a symphony, life arose to give us such ceaseless wonders as the ghost pipe and the ginkgo, the bowerbird and the eye of the scallop.
Neuroscientist Brian Isett and artist Claudia Biçen celebrate the wonder of how we went from mitochondria to minds in The Forgotten Teachers: How Nature Wrote the Story of Life (public library) — a love letter to that place between knowledge and mystery, where science illuminates the spirituality of nature.
Beginning the story where nature began it, Isett writes in the opening chapter, “Ocean”:
Once upon a time, Ocean taught life how to begin. The lesson began somewhere warm, like the shallow waters of a calm bay, or the billowing broth of a hydrothermal vent. In these places, warm water provided enough energy to link up chemicals that normally stayed apart. Rings of carbon, called “nucleotides,” clumped together just the way letters do to make words. And while most of the clumps formed nonsensical tangles, some formed babbling threads of an early genetic text called “RNA.” With Ocean’s encouragement, a chain reaction began: instead of dissolving back into the sea, chemicals began to fold into delicate structures that enabled even more chemical reactions to take place. These early molecules, many now called “ribozymes,” are thought to have sustained the first whispers of life. Our story had begun.
The story unfolds like an Eames powers-of-ten shot, moving up the orders of complexity until the first grainy pixels begin to form a recognizable picture of the living world — the first cells, inside which “our earliest ancestors drafted and composed”; the skeleton, the lung, the fin that became a foot; and, along the way, the emergence of photosynthesis and fungi, of symbionts and sleep.
Carrying the wonder of it all are Biçen’s vibrant illustrations, part fairy tale and part psychedelic dream.
Pulsating beneath it all is an insistence that it is not too late to change the catastrophic course of ecology, that it can only be done by listening closely and creatively to nature’s own silent lessons, intimating that our mightiest instrument of resilience is rapturous wonder.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; page photographs by Maria Popova
“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
~ Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer who is known for her confessional style of writing. Her work often explores themes of mental illness, female identity, and the struggles of women. Plath’s poems are known for their technical brilliance, fierce honesty, and striking imagery. Her most famous poems include “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy”. (Wikipedia.org)
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jul 27, 2026 Mitch Horowitz is the author of many books on esoterica, spirituality, mysticism and the occult. Among his titles are The Seeker’s Guide to the Secret Teachings of All Ages, The Miracle Club, One Simple Idea, Magician of the Beautiful: An Introduction to Neville Goddard, and Occult America. He has edited a selection of writings and lectures by Neville Goddard titled, The Ideal Realized. His website is https://mitchhorowitz.com/. In this video, rebooted from 2021, he describes a very personal journey that has led him to explore and endorse theological Satanism. He makes a point of distinguishing the biblical tradition in Genesis 3, and the writings of John Milton, William Blake, and Percy Bysshe Shelley from the popular accounts of Satanism as depicted in fiction, film, and mass media. He suggests that the contemporary theological writings of Michael Aquino and Anton LaVey belong to the former tradition that portrays the Satanic impulse as rebellious and heroic, rather than evil. He explains his own personal code of ethics. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on January 11, 2021)
Sam Altman is the CEO at OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial-intelligence giant that acknowledged this week that a pair of its models escaped a training environment intended to contain them.Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press
A recent hacking incident involving a pair of OpenAI’s artificial-intelligence models highlights the cybersecurity risks of the technology — and a serious security lapse by the San Francisco company, computer-security experts say.
The San Francisco AI giant acknowledged this week that a pair of its models escaped the training environment meant to contain them. Although they weren’t supposed to be able to so, they devised a way to access the internet to get into the systems of Hugging Face, a New York company that offers a repository of open-source AI models and code.
OpenAI called the incident “unprecedented,” one that involved “state-of-the-art cyber capabilities.”
The cybersecurity experts who spoke with The Examiner said that reaction by the company sounded more like marketing hype than a grounded assessment. The fact is that models available from other developers are just as capable of such hacking attacks as OpenAI’s, they said — and others soon will be.
Still, the incident does illustrate what the latest models can do and the dangers they pose to the computer systems run by governments, companies and organizations, the experts said.
“This is something I think we will look back on as a watershed moment,” said John Dickson, CEO of Bytewhisper Security, a cybersecurity consulting firm that works with Fortune 1000 companies.
After using an open-weight AI model to analyze what happened, Hugging Face closed the vulnerability and strengthened its security protections, it said.
Five days later, OpenAI acknowledged its technology was behind the attack. In a blog post, the San Francisco AI giant said it had been testing the cyberattack capabilities of a pair of its models, including one it hasn’t released yet.
To evaluate the models, OpenAI used ExploitGym, a system that tests the ability of AI agents to create ways of exploiting security vulnerabilities, the company said. Instead of coming up with a solution on their own to the problem posed by ExploitGym, the OpenAI models instead found a way out of their testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face, figuring they could find a ready-made solution there.
What happened is an example of what renowned cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier calls the “genie” problem. In stories about genies, there are often unforeseen or unintended consequences of the wishes they grant, especially when the wishes aren’t incredibly specific or well-formulated.
Cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier: “This requires our species to figure it out. And what is our species terrible at? Working together.”Martin Gundersen/Courtesy photo
Schneier, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told The Examiner that the same is true when people ask things of AI systems — in attempting to accomplish the stated task, the systems will take steps their users didn’t foresee, intend or want.
AI researchers have known about the problem for years, he said in a recent article for IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the IEEE, a professional association of computer and electrical engineers.
The genie problem is not unique to OpenAI, Schneier said — and the fact that the company’s models demonstrated the problem in such a public way isn’t an indication that they have extraordinary capabilities.
“There’s nothing magical about OpenAI’s model,” he said. “All the models could have done this.”
But the incident does show just how capable AI models have become at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities — and their potential for going off the rails when asked to perform a task, Schneier and other security experts said.
Thanks at least in part to the latest AI models, the sheer number of vulnerabilities that are being discovered has ramped up considerably in recent years, the experts said. Meanwhile, the time between a vulnerability being discovered and when it’s exploited has shrunk to almost nothing, they said.
In the past, it might have taken a week before malicious actors would have started taking advantage of that vulnerability, he said — but in this case, it was already being exploited the day it was identified.
“There’s definitely been an acceleration,” Riggle said.
That’s put people working on cybersecurity defense in a tough spot, the experts said. While many organizations have become adept at patching their software, it’s difficult to keep up with the pace at which new vulnerabilities are being found and exploited.
“We’re backpedaling,” Dickson said.
Some software either can’t be patched or is being employed by organizations that are underfunded. Utilities — particularly public water systems — represent critical infrastructure that is often difficult to secure from a cyber-risk standpoint, Riggle said.
“Our society isn’t ready for AI hacking at scale,” Schneier said.
It’s not clear how policymakers should respond, the experts said. Some politicians are talking about requiring AI models to have kill switches or mandating better safety testing of them. There’s previously been talk of imposing legal liability on AI-model developers for any harm their models cause, and some AI-safety advocates have called for a pause in model development.
But none of those solutions is likely to work, the experts said. The open-weight models being freely distributed by Chinese developers are every bit as capable as the closed-weight ones Anthropic and OpenAI are charging for, Schneier said. What’s more, people can download and run those models on their computers without any of the guardrails that the American AI companies put in place.
It would be impossible or infeasible to enforce regulations on Chinese or other open-source models, much less hold their developers liable for damages the models might cause, Schneier said. Banning such models, which some policymakers have also discussed, might do more harm than good; Hugging Face used a Chinese model to figure out how its system had been hacked, he noted.
Schneier said he didn’t know what the answer is, but that it’s going to take a “whole-of-planet response.”
“This requires our species to figure it out,” he said. “And what is our species terrible at? Working together.”
Given the dangers involved, the Hugging Face incident also indicates that OpenAI in particular isn’t paying enough attention to safety, the experts said.
OpenAI has known that its models, in trying to achieve goals, will sometimes ignore instructions, said Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-civil-liberties advocacy group.
And the AI community has known for years that there’s a danger the models could launch hacking attacks across the internet, Riggle said.
The recent OpenAI hacking incident was “both notable and alarming,” said Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Not because ‘ooh, the model’s so powerful,’ but because it demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of OpenAI to secure the sandbox in which it was testing its model,” she said.Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
That makes it important when testing the models for cyberrisks, he said, to “air gap” them — disconnect them from the internet, often by physical means, the experts said. Yet, it’s clear that’s not what OpenAI did.
The hacking incident with Hugging Face was “both notable and alarming,” Galperin said. “Not because ‘ooh, the model’s so powerful,’ but because it demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of OpenAI to secure the sandbox in which it was testing its model.”
In an article published Friday, an anonymous OpenAI employee told Time magazine that its models had escaped their sandboxes before. The company was attempting to isolate them from the internet digitally, not physically, Time reported.
What OpenAI was doing is “just jaw-droppingly irresponsible,” Riggle, the founder and principal of cybersecurity consulting firm Complex Systems Group, said in an email.
If you have a tip about tech, startups or the venture industry, contact Troy Wolverton at twolverton@sfexaminer.com or via text or Signal at (415) 515-5594.
Lindsey Graham knew, and what did he do about it? The legacy media knew, and what did they do about it?
Some weeks ago, I wrote a column addressing what I am convinced is the single thing that keeps the entire Trump enterprise from unraveling: Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election.
I believe that, notwithstanding his narcissism and megalomania, Trump actually knows he lost, but also understands that, as with any cult, he has to demand that his followers agree to some core principle proving their loyalty. And that the ultimate test of whether someone will blindly follow is to ask them to profess belief in something ridiculous. As I’d written:
When dangerously incompetent people pretend to believe the lie (or actually believe it), they obtain positions of extraordinary power — power they abuse in all sorts of ways, resulting in damage, some of which is tragically irreversible.
I think it is one of the legacy media’s greatest failings that, although it routinely dismisses Trump’s stolen election claim as untrue, it does not consistently put front and center the basic fraud underlying the worst administration in history.
A recent example of such failure is this, which I read on CNN’s website some time after my column appeared:
The sweeping DOJ campaign for nearly every state’s unredacted voter roll is one of several examples of how the administration — fueled by President Donald Trump’s longstanding beliefs that the 2020 election was rigged against him — has sought to assert more federal control in elections.
Oh really? Trump’s “longstanding beliefs” that the election was rigged? Outlets like CNN are doing the public a huge disservice by not focusing on the centrality of the lie in his strategy to keep power.
Anyway, after my Big Lie column appeared, I heard from Anthony Essaye, a retired attorney who, among other things, had worked as a lawyer for The Washington Post in the Pentagon Papers case. He had read and very much agreed with what I said. And he told me that he and a team of retired Washington lawyers (their names appear below) have put together a document that makes the further case that Trump’s claims should be much more aggressively challenged.
With the permission of Anthony and his team, I publish a condensed version of his document here:
Setting the Record Straight: 10 Reasons Why the 2020 Election Was Fair and Accurately Decided
For the past five and a half years, President Donald Trump has contended that the 2020 election was stolen from him by massive fraud. And he is now using this contention as an excuse to continually pursue highly restrictive voting policies in order to maintain Republican control of the Congress in the 2026 midterm elections.
As memories may understandably be fading about the magnitude of the evidence disproving that claim, here, among many, are 10 reasons why Trump’s claim is entirely untrue.
Postelection recounts confirmed results.
Shortly after the election, in each of the six states where Donald Trump was claiming massive fraud (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), election officials conducted recounts and other electoral reviews. In every instance, the state election officials and governors, Republican and Democrats alike, concluded that the results were accurate.
Courts rejected all cases alleging fraud.
Also shortly after the election, Donald Trump’s legal team and other Trump supporters brought 62 lawsuits seeking judicial intervention to overturn the election, based primarily on allegations of fraud. Sixty-one of these failed, and the lone success was a legal interpretation that did not involve fraud. Even judges who had been nominated by Trump were highly critical of the paucity of evidence presented.
Senior Trump administration officials rejected Trump’s allegations of fraud.
Not long after the election, top officials at Trump’s Department of Justice reviewed the various fraud allegations being made and informed the president that none of them were supportable. Moreover, Trump’s own White House legal counsel agreed with this determination.
Top government security agency found no evidence of tampering.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is charged with protection of the election processes. After the election, it announced that it had found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” The then-head of the agency, a Republican, has since staunchly maintained this position.
Trump’s own campaign committee failed to find fraud.
After the election, the Trump campaign committee contracted, at the cost of $1,350,000, with two investigative organizations to review the allegations of fraud so as to provide the committee with the ability to support and publicize those that appeared merited. But after their investigations, both organizations reported that none of the allegations could be substantiated. These investigative reports were quietly buried by the Trump campaign committee and only came to light in 2023.
“Forensic audits” also failed to find fraud.
After completely failing in their lawsuits, Donald Trump and his supporters turned to having so-called “election audits” initiated by Republican-controlled legislatures in states such as Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even though their purpose was to use every means possible to find meaningful fraud, they completely failed to do so.
Review by prominent conservatives confirmed the integrity of the election.
Moreover, in July 2022, a group of prominent conservative former judges and election law experts issued a thorough and detailed review of the fraud allegations. They concluded: “There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct.”
Even Fox newscasters and executives did not believe the election was stolen.
As a result of a defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by an election equipment manufacturer, it came to light that top Fox TV personalities who after the election were hyping Trump’s claims of fraud did not in fact believe them. Rather, they were endorsing them in order to retain their audience. Moreover, in April 2023, Fox paid a $787.5 million settlement to the manufacturer in order to avoid a trial which would likely have required some of its executives to testify that the network’s claims of fraud regarding the 2020 election were false.
Some of Trump’s claims were bizarre.
Some of the fraud claims promoted by Donald Trump and his supporters are bizarre. Three examples:
That a long-deceased Venezuelan dictator oversaw the development of election equipment that was later used in the US election to enable the fraudulent miscounting of votes.
That some 40,000 fake Biden ballots were secretly shipped into Arizona from an Asian country and could be identified by the bamboo content of the paper.
That voting machines were remotely compromised using military technology and satellites via the US Embassy in Rome.
Despite the evidence, Trump refuses to accept reality.
Along the same lines, in January 2026, grand jury testimony was made public in which Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a friend and staunch ally of Donald Trump, had this to say about Trump’s claim of electoral fraud in 2020: “I have told him more times than we can count that he fell short,” and that “if you told him Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it.”
See this document for more information on these and other points reflecting that the results of the 2020 election are indisputable.
Anthony Essaye is a retired attorney. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Harvard Law School and a longtime partner in an international law firm.
Nina Bang-Jensen is a lawyer, volunteer election monitor, former executive director of a nongovernmental organization, and former Senate staff member.
Thessalia (Lia) Merivaki is an associate professor at Georgetown University and an election science researcher specializing in voter confidence and election integrity.
C.J. Larkin is a recent graduate of Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
***
The evidence above speaks for itself. The late Lindsey Graham himself knew perfectly well that Trump lost in 2020. He told him so at the time. Then he no longer said it. Graham and virtually all of his GOP colleagues swallowed the Kool-Aid — for their own survival.
That’s the larger story here. Unfortunately, to date, the narrative of Trump as cult leader has not gotten the front and center attention it deserves from legacy media. In my opinion, traditional news organizations, for various reasons, cannot be expected to lead with a powerful narrative that will “explain it all.”
It is up to independent media — partnering with the public — to do that. And in the meantime, this country, and others around the world, are suffering from irreversible damage thanks to a Congress that caters to the will of a mad man, a Congress whose greatest qualification is to pretend to believe the Big Lie.
Russ Baker Russ Baker is Editor-in-Chief of WhoWhatWhy. He is an award-winning investigative journalist who specializes in exploring power dynamics behind major events.
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images); Shutterstock
The “singularity” is here — according to Sam Altman, who we’d wager has an ulterior motive behind promoting this claim.
The OpenAI CEO harbingered this sea-changing paradigm shift on a podcast over the weekend.
“We are now, like, in the singularity,” Altman said on the latest episode of “Relentless,” as spotted by Business Insider.
Definitions vary, but the singularity is generally defined as the moment that the capabilities of thinking machines might start to accelerate at a pace beyond humankind’s control, possibly leading to the creation of a powerful superintelligence.
Whether that’s actually happening right now is dubious. But Altman has a lot tied up in hyping the idea, and he’s been doing it for a long time. In a blog post titled “The Gentle Singularity” published almost exactly a year ago, he claimed humankind is “past the event horizon; the takeoff has started,” saying we were close to building the much-vaunted superintelligence.
“Now we’re actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way,” Altman said on the podcast. “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”
Altman’s comments come days after OpenAI claimed that several of its AI models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and, mysteriously, an “even more capable pre-release model,” broke out of their research environment, gained access to the internet, and hacked their way into a database to find the answers for cybersecurity tests.
Hugging Face, the open source AI platform whose database the AIs raided, confirmed it had been hit with an intrusion “run by an autonomous agent framework executing many thousands of individual actions.”
Ostensibly, this was an urgent warning shot of how powerful AI systems have become. It was widely hailed as OpenAI’s “Mythos moment,” a reference to how its competitor Anthropic made headlines several months ago, when its Mythos model apparently broke out of containment in similar fashion. That comparison isn’t necessarily a compliment: Anthropic was heavily criticized for using the incident as a form of fear-based marketing, and some have speculated that OpenAI is treating the event like a similar publicity stunt.
In any case, the incidents do feed into Altman’s claims that we’re living in a moment when advancements in AI may soon spiral beyond human control. If their models are as powerful as their creators say they are, they’re capable of making mincemeat out of our feeble human cybersecurity measures. Anthropic has been beating this drum, too: last month, it called for a global “pause” on AI development, claiming that the tech was on a path to achieving recursive self-improvement, or the ability to constantly improve themselves on their own.
Of course, Altman says what he’s doing isn’t fearmongering.
Taking a thinly veiled snipe at Anthropic: “I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying,” he said on the podcast, per BI. “I’m going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens.”
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
News that male, Christian influencers are opening men-only gyms to avoid having to gaze at women in figure-hugging Lycra has prompted widespread mockery online.
Last week, Baptist News Global ran an opinion piece on the development. It reported on a new, Christian-owned men-only gym in Oklahoma and another planned in Denver.
Jeff Hambrecht, founder of Proverbs 27:17 Fitness in Oklahoma City, says his gym avoids the dangers of men and women mixing in the gym. He speaks from experience.
“In a nutshell, one of the No. 1 places affairs and infidelity occur, cheating, is the gym,” he says. “Byproduct is someone who had an affair in my previous marriage. Doesn’t work out well for you fellas.”
In case you were wondering, Proverbs 27:17 states, “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” Hambrecht’s gym offers a place “where men step back into brotherhood — where friction is welcomed, accountability is normal and growth is expected.”
Um, OK!
Reaction to men-only gyms for the bros
Despite appearing in Baptist News, the opinion piece was actually wary of such gyms. Writer Rick Pidcock suggests such establishments promote the idea that women are dangerous and need to be separated from men.
When shared online, the internet predictably had its own thoughts. Many said it all sounded very reminiscent of the gyms at the Y.M.C.A (Young Men’s Christian Association). And we all know nothing lustful ever went on there, right?
On an unrelated, far-more-inspiring note, a post on Threads over the weekend also addressed the topic of going to the gym. However, in this instance, it asked people to share what motivated them to keep working consistently at the gym.
Funnily enough, no one said they went to stare at other gym goers. Most people were motivated by genuine health concerns related to aging, or simply because they enjoyed seeing their body change through hard work.
“All the straight guys are wearing short shorts now.”
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David Hudson is a contributing editor to Queerty who specializes in film, music, health, travel and queer culture. Connect with him on X and Bluesky and DM him with potential story ideas.
One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course, never breaks.) The moment I stepped out of the airplane, the Andes towered over me like the stone thrones of gods, snow-capped over the oracle eye of the glacial lake, blue as Uranus, their scale so incomprehensible you are no longer a person but a particle, a mote of dust in the eye of eternity; the trees are no longer trees but moss carpeting the slopes all the way down to the water’s edge, as if to test the limits of their world. I had come to test the limits of mine.
As soon as I settled into the house where I was going to be living, I headed out for a walk along the dirt road so dry it felt like a lunar landscape. Cars swarmed me in cloud after cloud of gas and dust. I closed my eyes to let them pass, picturing the Pillars of Creation — that famous Hubble photograph of the Eagle Nebula, whose gas and dust are always in the process of creating new stars while at the same time being consumed by the light of nearby newborn stars.
Pillars of Creation (Hubble Space Telescope / NASA)
I hadn’t been walking an hour when the sky turned to steel. Without a flash of warning, the clouds opened their mute mouths and out poured rain so cold that time seemed to have reversed course, hurling the hemisphere back into winter.
It rained all night and all through the next day. Eventually, unable to stand my indoor captivity, I donned all the clothes I had packed on top of each other, squeezed myself into the raincoat now two sizes too small, and ventured out again. But when I stepped onto the street, I found it completely transformed, all the dust washed away to reveal a carpet of stones so shiny they were almost luminous.
Suddenly, my eye fell upon a striking stone unlike all the rest — swirling shades of green, resembling the skin of some exotic serpent.
That the Earth decided to make something this beautiful, when it could have just gone on making granite, felt like a miracle — the miracle of all those things unnecessary to survival, like music, like love, that give meaning to being alive.
As soon as I returned to the house, I turned to the geological database to learn that it is a type of stone called serpentine, special not only in its aesthetics but in its origin: Serpentine forms at the bottom of the ocean, in the hydrothermal vents along mid-oceanic ridges, where life on Earth most probably began. Under the the extreme temperature and pressure, water compacts four minerals into metamorphic rock that combine to give it this striking green color.
There I was, atop this massive mountain, holding a tiny fragment from the bottom of the world — a beautiful souvenir from the beginning of life, a bright reminder that time makes and remakes worlds.
I started seeing serpentine everywhere.
About a week in, I came home to astonishing news: For about a decade, NASA had been studying the asteroid Bennu, which orbits the Sun a hundred million miles away from it, between Jupiter and Mars, and passes close to Earth every six years. One of the first asteroids to have dust and rock samples collected and returned to Earth, Bennu’s mineral composition turned out to be dominated by serpentine, containing not only all amino acids essential for DNA and RNA but water-soluble phosphates — fundaments of biochemistry for all known life on Earth.
Bennu sample return capsule (NASA)
The most astonishing part is that because an asteroid has no atmosphere, no liquid water can cling to its surface, but serpentine requires water to form — Bennu must be a fragment of a water world that formed in the outer reaches of the Solar System in the infant universe, when the building blocks of life as we know it were being forged. A giant piece of serpentine encoding the entire evolutionary history of the universe.
Suddenly, against this immense backdrop of the majesty and mystery of the universe, I was no longer in the wound — I was in wonder. It is the self that suffers by the story that cinches the moment. Every act of unselfing — of contacting the interconnectedness of everything that ever was and ever will be, the wondrous totality held in time — is a salve for suffering, a way of being reborn.
Somehow, I found myself thinking about the cosmic egg concept present in many indigenous origin myths — the idea that the universe was hatched into being by a giant bird — and pictured the egg made of serpentine, a newborn world made of time and trust in life.
And so, enlisting a rock tumbler and my ceramics practice, I made it — a translucent sphere of serpentine with a small yellow ceramic bird perched atop it, winged with the words TRUST and TIME.
Because a daily creative practice is a consecration of the indestructible in us and a technology for trusting time, I began making one serpentine birdworld each day for forty-two days, with the intention of giving them away on my forty-second birthday (which is today) by the same impartial hand of chance that made this world, to people who have made my life more livable — some to pillars of my private world, and the rest to you: Support from readers makes my life literally livable by putting food on my table and books on my shelves, yes, but also contributes to what makes it worth living — that lifeline of connection that punctures the isolation of our personal suffering.
To enter the raffle, make a donation by the astronomical end of summer in any amount that is right for you, but end it with the decimal .42, whether it is $1.42 or $1,000.42. (This will help me separate the serpentine raffle from the regular donations.) Let us favor morality over mathematics — no manipulation of probability by making multiple entries: just one per person, so we may remember that we are all equals as children of chance.
As to my daily practice of learning to trust time, somewhere along the way of making these serpentine birdworlds, I crossed the threshold between wound and wonder, and my heart began healing. We don’t choose our wounds. But we can choose to wing ourselves with wonder. It is what makes this rocky planet a world and this existence a life.
The St. Louis Commune of 1877 was a brief worker-led uprising, marked by the first general strike in U.S. history and the temporary control of a major American city by socialist and communist organizers. [1, 2]
Key Events of the Uprising
The Great Railroad Strike: Grew out of national wage cuts in July 1877, spreading quickly to St. Louis, Missouri, where thousands of multiracial industrial and transport workers shut down local commerce. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Workers’ Leadership: The Marxist Workingmen’s Party helped direct the movement, setting up an executive committee that functioned as a temporary municipal authority. [1, 2, 3]
City Control: For about a week, the coalition maintained public order, negotiated work terms, and paralyzed standard capitalist operations before federal troops and local militias suppressed the movement. [1, 2, 3]
Every mind, even the greatest, is a product of its time and place. The true visionaries are those unwilling to mistake the figments of their culture for facts; those daring enough to look at the world not through the microscope that magnifies the concerns of the present, not through the telescope that squints at the distant reaches of the future, but through a periscope that rises above the surface of the mainstream to see past the horizon of the era’s givens, into the possibilities of times to come.
As a young man raised in a deeply religious era, homeschooled by his strict pastor father, George Forster (November 27, 1754–January 10, 1794) would write to his youngest sister that happiness is only to be found through proximity with God, that God is “boundless love that transcends all other love.” Over the course of his short and periscopic life, he would come to see that God is just another word for nature; he would come to see that nature in all its “active living power” as a “magic net of countless threads joined by countless knots, where each thing is connected to all and all to each” — the ultimate “system of divine concordance.”
Left: barnacles on a crab shell. Right: Trifid and Lagoon nebulae (Vera Rubin Observatory).
By seeing the profound interleaving of life, he would also see the dangerous delusion of our artificial divisions — between the races and the sexes, between the body and the mind, between the observer and the observed. He would incubate these ideas — radical now, nothing less than revolutionary then — as a young unknown naturalist on James Cook’s voyages into the South Seas and would go on to seed them in the most fertile scientific mind of his epoch. “I have spent half a century, wherever a restless, eventful life has taken me,” Alexander von Humboldt would reflect at the end of his long and far-reaching life, ” telling myself and others what I owe to my teacher and friend Georg Forster.”
Andrea Wulf animates the life of this forgotten visionary in The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris (public library) — one of those rare books in which a single life, rendered with rigor and compassion in all its delicate particularity, becomes a lens for the best in human nature: our passion for the possible, our stubborn refusal to resign ourselves to the system, our bottomless capacity for kindness.
George Forster
Nowhere was Forster more visionary, more ahead of his time and still ahead of ours, than in his defiance of Descartes, refusing to reduce intelligence to the workings of the rational mind, refusing to reduce wonder to a calculation. His long-ago lamentation rattles the bones of the modern mind still haunted by the Cartesian delusion that intelligence is a thing only of the mind:
Never before has there been a greater danger of elevating cold reason into a universally worshipped idol at the expense of feeling.
Wulf shades in the subtleties of his radicalism:
George Forster observed with both his mind and his heart, determined to “banish all rash hypotheses back into their small closet.” The emphasis he placed on feeling rather than reason and objectivity stood in contrast to many (but not all) Enlightenment thinkers who valued rational enquiry, repeatable experiments and empirical observation over emotions and subjectivity… He dismissed what he called the reliance on reason alone — these “aberrations of the mind.” He believed that “in the sharply defined forms of abstraction, all that is good, noble and great… is irretrievably lost.”
Forster yearned to know the inner life of nature, which is the crux of all science, but he came to know it with more than the mind. He moved through the world with the virtuosic noticing of a poet, opening his full creaturely sensorium to the breadth of wonder between the wildflowers and the stars. An epoch before quantum mechanics implicated the observer in the observed, bending the central dogma of science and its dream of objectivity, before philosopher Martha Nussbaum insisted that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature [but] parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself,” George Forster implicated himself, a reasoning creature of feeling, in the discoveries he recounted in A Voyage Round the World — his unprecedented rendering of nature not as a series of discreet portraits of particular features framed by particular disciplines but as a vast panorama of processes and phenomena inseparable from one another and from our participancy in them: humus and history, climate and culture.
Wulf writes:
George believed that you had to see the world in order to understand it. There was no point in trying to make sense of everything in your study, he explained, “because in the end, one has nothing else than what comes through these two small openings in your eyes and sets the vibrations of the brain in motion!” Individual experience was indispensable. “Two travellers,” he wrote, “seldom saw the same object in the same manner, and each reported the fact differently, according to his sensations, and his peculiar mode of thinking.” … Unlike most of his contemporaries, George believed that reason alone was not enough to understand the world. That didn’t mean that he diminished the value of observation, but he had no interest in simply collecting data — being “a mere compiler… that I cannot do.” Those thinkers who worshipped cold evidence alone “had their wish; facts were collected in all parts of the world, and yet knowledge was not increased.” Years later he would explain that “the first point from which all knowledge is gained is based on Empfindung” — a German term that can be translated as “sensations,” though it is more nuanced as it not only refers to the physical senses but also implies a capacity to feel and an awareness of a subjective experience of the world.
Emanating from his visionary book was the fundamental feature of his visionary life: his love of nature and his love of humanity, entwined beyond separation — a living testament to the single answer pulsating beneath all of our questions. Forster’s own exuberant words reveal a thinker unafraid to feel, a mind lucid enough to know that love is our highest form of knowledge:
I thank God that there is such a delicious thing as human love in this world; it lifts us up; it chains us to each other, no matter how distant we are; it is the most comforting, happiest feeling in the world!
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Once upon a time, Ocean taught life how to begin. The lesson began somewhere warm, like the shallow waters of a calm bay, or the billowing broth of a hydrothermal vent. In these places, warm water provided enough energy to link up chemicals that normally stayed apart. Rings of carbon, called “nucleotides,” clumped together just the way letters do to make words. And while most of the clumps formed nonsensical tangles, some formed babbling threads of an early genetic text called “RNA.” With Ocean’s encouragement, a chain reaction began: instead of dissolving back into the sea, chemicals began to fold into delicate structures that enabled even more chemical reactions to take place. These early molecules, many now called “ribozymes,” are thought to have sustained the first whispers of life. Our story had begun.
Never before has there been a greater danger of elevating cold reason into a universally worshipped idol at the expense of feeling.