The protagonist of K. Patrick’s “Mrs. S,” a boarding school worker questioning her gender expression, falls into a torrid affair with the headmaster’s wife.
By Kristen Arnett
June 20, 2023BUY BOOK ▾
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MRS. S, by K. Patrick
When we think of bodies in fiction, we generally consider them in relation to other objects or other people. Characters glance in a mirror to examine their features and we’re allowed a brief glimpse of cheekbone, jawline or eye color. Are they tall or short? Nondescript or peculiar? Lanky-limbed or compact and muscular, like a stout pony? We understand how a body moves through a narrative because we’ve received a set of keys and instructions for how to operate the vehicle.
In “Mrs. S,” the debut novel by the Glasgow author K. Patrick, bodies exist as a site of ongoing construction. Perhaps this is because our protagonist does not know how she feels about the particular body that she inhabits. And the questions that crop up because of that unknowing make for an entirely captivating read.
Our narrator works at an all-girls English boarding school. The girls call her “Miss” instead of “Matron,” a term she thinks she’d prefer because “at least I could taste a little butch in it.” Here is one of the book’s chief themes: what it means for a woman to exist outside the bounds of socially approved femininity. It’s not that the narrator’s body marks her as butch, necessarily; instead, we are asked to consider how the term might be something she could ingest — “taste a little butch” — and therefore embody. It’s a lick of feeling, that taste of butch; she wants to be seen as strong and capable.
That the girls call her “Miss” in lieu of “Matron” is significant in another sense as well: To the extent that she’s exploring her sexual identity, she’s going through a re-adolescence of sorts. Though the narrator is older than the girls she’s charged with watching, she fumbles through interactions with other butches and femmes with the blushing naïveté of a schoolgirl herself.
In due course the novel offers a steamy love story, and Patrick proves to be a deft hand at the erotic. I do mean “hand” — an important word when it comes to queer sex, for obvious reasons. Hands in the book are looked after, hawkishly spied on, stared at with lust. They’re licked and kissed and smelled. Knuckles abound: rapping on doors, entering a body, bulging perversely from a fist. The book is inundated with female bodies, ones that must be looked after (the young charges, collectively called The Girls), and the bodies of the queer women who do the looking after. No one is named, and this is with good purpose. We are supposed to view these bodies through their roles.
There’s a voyeurism present that has to do with the protagonist and her own destabilizing emotions — wildly in love with the headmaster’s wife, the significantly older Mrs. S, she views her from safe distances, then from unsafe distances — but the voyeurism has just as much to do with the audience that watches the narrator. How they look at her informs her relationship to her butch body. There are The Girls, who recognize her otherness and call her out on it in ways that are sometimes meant to be precocious and other times meant to be insulting.
The narrator’s butchness becomes a fumbling, embarrassing part of a second puberty. It makes her transparent to the headmaster, who cannot recognize her as a sexual rival for his femme wife’s affections. Then there’s “the Housemistress,” the other butch working at the school, who becomes a kind of talisman. The narrator emulates her clothes, posture, voice, learning butchness through mimicry as a child might copy its mother.
“The Housemistress I like enough,” the narrator says. “Like me, not often seen in the staffroom, her body stiffening whenever required to meet with another teacher. She creates a tension she does not want. The other teachers wary, unable to place her.”
Patrick’s staccato sentences add a layer of choppy, additional drama to the text. It becomes a secondary language for butchness, powerful and confident; flowery description unnecessary. In this way, questions about sex and love and gender are layered on top of one another. Our protagonist starts out fearful of these queries but eventually revels in the unknowing, fine with wandering at the crossroads of sexuality and gender.
I could wax on about the sensuality of Patrick’s narrative, how sometimes loneliness means gazing deeply into the well of your own self, wondering at the stranger who’s reflected back. But I’d rather leave it with the unanswered question. Change comes for us all, and that’s a beautiful, awesome thing. Save the knowledge for later.
Kristen Arnett is the author, most recently, of the novel “With Teeth.”
August 9th marked 15 years since my dad died. I could tell you that it was a difficult, or sobering day, but that would be a lie. It was instead a rather uneventful day. I didn’t even realize it was the anniversary until I looked at the calendar. I would not have believed you if you’d told me 15 years ago that would happen. In fact, I would have most likely told you that I would never feel good on that day ever again. Today, August 30th is National Grief Awareness Day. As I reflect on my journey through grief, I am thankful to be on this side of it. I also think about those who are still in the throes of their grief. I know there’s so much that we don’t talk about when it comes to grief, and there are some things I wish we did. We would help ourselves through some of our most difficult moments if we did. I wish someone had told me more about grief so that I didn’t suffer as much as I had.
I wish someone had told me it was ok to grieve. Lots of people told me they were sorry for my loss. Lots of people told me to be strong and to let them know if I needed anything. But no one told me that it was ok to grieve. So many people showed up when my dad died. There were over 7,000 people at his memorial service. There were so many people in my parents’ home afterward that there was hardly any place to hear my own thoughts. But once the day ended, people retreated to their own corners of the world. It was treated as if the customary time to acknowledge his death and allow for sadness and tears had been given, but it was now time to return to normal. The problem was that my normal was forever gone and I had no idea how to get back to it. It felt like people were disappointed when I failed to return to the expected homeostasis. It wasn’t until I went to therapy a year later and told the therapist what I was feeling and experiencing did someone kindly said to me, That’s grief. And it’s OK.
I wish someone had told me that there isn’t necessarily an endpoint to grief. I woke up every day after my dad died fighting to get to the moment when I would be over it. I felt like a failure each time I awoke to find that I wasn’t over it. To be honest, I thought it was a fool’s mission. But once I set my mind to something, I set out to accomplish it. I repeatedly broke my own heart on this impossible quest. It was once again in therapy when someone told me that isn’t how it works. During one session, my therapist said to me, He was your father for 30 years. So why do you think you would, or even should, be over his death in such a short amount of time? No one had ever said that to me and I remember breathing a sigh of relief upon realizing that I could give up my ridiculous quest.
I wish someone had told me that grief is not linear. We hear a lot about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief. We talk about them as if they are a blueprint for what happens when we grieve. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — in that order. Except, that’s not how it works. Grief is incredibly complex and while there are threads of similarity woven throughout the collective, we each experience things in our own unique ways. Furthermore, those 5 stages weren’t meant to be applied to those grieving loved ones, job losses, missed opportunities, etc. They were applicable to terminal patients who were coming to terms with their imminent deaths. I would have moments where I felt like I made progress in my grief, only to stumble backward when I’d find myself breaking down over a memory or triggered event.
I wish someone had told me that grief isn’t just tears and sadness. As Imentioned, grief is complex. The Five Stages of Grief model doesn’t even encompass the full experience of grief. While I was sad, depressed, and cried a lot after my dad died, I also experienced anger. I was angry at old men for being able to become old men when my dad didn’t get to see his 51st birthday. I was even angry at some of the people in my life because surely, they shouldn’t have gotten to live when my dad didn’t. It wasn’t fair and I hated it. I also experienced guilt. I would replay this one moment in my mind when my dad unexpectedly showed up at my house when my daughter was a baby. I was ashamed because I was struggling with postpartum depression and didn’t want him to see me like that. He rang my doorbell for about 5 minutes until he reluctantly left. I couldn’t let that moment go after he died. My shame stemmed from the guilt I felt for not opening the door, and so the loop of emotions commenced. And yet, even amid those emotions, I found myself experiencing brief moments of gratitude for the 30 years I had with him, for the time he got to spend with my daughter, and for all that he instilled in me. And as quickly as the gratitude would surface, a lingering ache would appear because the things I was grateful for served as painful reminders of what I would now miss.
I wish someone had told me that my grief was valid whether others understood it or not and there was no proper way to grieve. I found myself feeling alone for the first time in my life after my dad died. All the people who I thought loved me were either unwilling or incapable of supporting me. Some of those closest to me turned on me in a most hurtful way. They talked about me behind my back. There were even some people who said my father would be so disappointed in me. I believed them for a time because I didn’t know any better. I thought something was wrong with me for grieving. Once again, therapy helped me. My therapist helped me to understand that no one else could understand what I was experiencing because no one else was my father’s daughter. She also helped me understand that their understanding wasn’t what I needed. Instead, I needed their compassion and support. My grief was valid, with or without those. We have a lot of ideas about hypothetical scenarios. We think we know how we’ll feel and what we’ll do when we encounter situations. Truthfully, we have no idea and we won’t know until that hypothetical situation becomes an actual experience for us. Oftentimes, we find ourselves surprised because our responses are far different than what we imagined. Grief is no exception. We think we know how we’ll react when that time comes, but we really don’t. And because we don’t, we can’t tell anyone else how they should grieve. Instead of being quick to shame or judge others for how they grieve, we should be more quick to support them in the ways they need.
It’s been a long road to get to this side of grief. I understand now that I will never “get over” my dad’s death. I’ll never not miss him or wish that he were here. I accept that he’s not here despite my dislike of that fact. And while I’m grateful to be on this side of grief, I still wish people had told me these things. Since no one told me, I guess that’s why I’m telling you.
BY BROOKE MIGDON – 08/29/23 7:26 PM ET (TheHill.com)
Canada is warning LGBTQ travelers visiting the U.S. that they may face discrimination and possible harassment because of dozens of recently passed state laws that target LGBTQ people.
The Canadian government in an update posted Tuesday said LGBTQ Canadians considering a trip to the U.S. should “check relevant state and local laws” before visiting, warning that “some states have enacted laws and policies that may affect 2SLGBTQI+ persons.”
The updated travel advisory does not specify which states LGBTQ travelers should avoid, and the risk associated with travel to the U.S. is still the lowest possible. Visitors are advised to “take similar precautions to those you would take in Canada” when traveling to the U.S.
Canada’s warning comes amid a historic year for anti-LGBTQ state legislation in the U.S., with nearly 500 bills introduced by lawmakers in 46 states, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. At least 83 have become law, more than doubling last year’s total.
In April, the St. Petersburg-based LGBTQ rights group Equality Florida issued a travel advisory of its own, warning both domestic and international travelers to Florida that the state “may not be a safe place to visit or take up residence” because of new laws that target LGBTQ people, restrict access to reproductive health care and relax firearms restrictions.
The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights group, the following month also cautioned against travel to Florida and in June declared a national state of emergency for LGBTQ people in the U.S., citing the passage of laws in states across the country that target LGBTQ people, particularly transgender youths.
Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters during a press conference Tuesday that the nation’s updated travel advisory is not politically motivated and is meant to keep Canadian citizens as safe as possible abroad.
“As someone who has had the real privilege of serving as Canada’s foreign minister, I know that our travel advisories are done very professionally,” she said.
“We have professionals in the government whose job is to look carefully around the world and to monitor whether there are particular dangers to particular groups of Canadians,” Freeland added. “That’s their job and it’s the right thing to do.”TAGS CHRYSTIA FREELAND
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
“Genius is no guarantee of wisdom,” says government official Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It could be the blockbuster’s banner statement. Since the release of Nolan’s thrilling, bombastic film, the culture has been caught in the firestorm about how to explain the personality of the eloquent, esoteric J. Robert Oppenheimer and his creation of the first and only people-destroying atomic weapon to be used against civilians. Where Hollywood traffics in Oppenheimer’s ambiguity as a historical character, two small but potent nonfiction forebears ask a more pointed question: what is the responsibility of scientists to their societies?
The Day After Trinity (1981) and The Strangest Dream (2008) evacuate the mythical tropes of the tortured genius biopic that Hollywood loves to rehearse in films like The Imitation Game, Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind. Now enjoying a renaissance, the films are neither unforgiving nor hardline, but offer sharper moral clarity to the Oppenheimer dilemma, presenting a more complex (and condemning) portrait of the father of the atomic bomb: a patriot, philosopher-king, skilled public administrator, scientific collaborator with military and government, emotional naif, egotist, and polyglot.
Nolan’s story arcs towards Oppenheimer losing his naivete upon realizing that he has given humanity the power to destroy itself. Designed to wrap around each filmgoer’s own worldview and politics, the film is as politically open-ended as you might expect from a major blockbuster. In his press tour, Nolan articulated a more explicitly conservative stance that chimes both with the Great Man theory of history (another biopic favorite) and the Cold War military doctrine that justified the development and use of atomic arsenals against civilians.
“Is there a parallel universe in which it wasn’t him, but it was somebody else and that would’ve happened?” Nolan said in the New York Times. “Quite possibly. That’s the argument for diminishing his importance in history. But that’s an assumption that history is made simply by movements of society and not by individuals. It’s a very philosophical debate…. he’s still the most important man because the bomb would’ve stopped war forever. We haven’t had a world war since 1945 based on the threat of mutual assured destruction.”
That’s also the idea behind the official policy of the nuclear superpowers: deterrence. Horror, in other words, was necessary to prevent even greater horror. The very same doublethink led to Harry Truman’s honorary degree, conferred for ending the war.
How reluctant was Oppie? In Jon Else’s The Day After Trinity, a documentary originally made for public television in 1980, Oppenheimer’s collaborators deliver ambivalent, guilty testimony to a static, non-judgmental camera. Screening on the Criterion Channel, Else’s doc points to the great pleasure its subject took in being appointed the leader of the grandiose bomb project, with the cosmic job title of “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.” The lens pans patiently across grainy, grayscale photographs that have the natural air of science fiction; the film feels more of a piece with Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) than a typical historical documentary. After all, Oppenheimer was not just the enabler of the weapons that could annihilate us all, but of the high-stakes hallmarks of modern spectacle itself. The awe-inspiring images of mushroom clouds over Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are now instantly recognizable in the core visual grammar of contemporary entertainment and media. It’s hard to imagine an idea better suited to Nolan’s exalted, maximalist esthetic and his stories of obsessive male protagonists pressurized within towering patriarchal systems of power.
Oppenheimer positions the atomic bomb as the creation of a brilliant, creative personality. But The Day After Trinity revels in the administrative scale of the Los Alamos project necessary to make a mechanism to trigger, in a millionth of a second, a violent chain reaction with a flare brighter than a hundred suns. A walled city of six thousand staff, at a cost of $56 million. Seven scientific divisions: theoretical physics, experimental physics, ordinance, explosives, bomb physics, chemistry, and metallurgy. All of America’s industrial might and scientific innovation connected in this secret lab with its billions of dollars of military investment.
The Day After Trinity and The Strangest Dream evacuate the mythical tropes of the tortured genius biopic that Hollywood loves to rehearse.
“Somehow Oppenheimer put this thing together. He was the conductor of this orchestra. Somehow he created this fantastic esprit. It was just the most marvelous time of their lives,” says Freeman Dyson, a rather eccentric theoretical physicist who became Oppie’s colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “That was the time when the big change in his life occurred. It must have been during that time that the dream somehow got hold of him, of really producing a nuclear weapon.”
In this vision of the A-bomb narrative, Dyson posits that Oppie’s aims switched from finding out “the deep secrets of nature” to producing “a mechanism that works. It was a different problem, and he completely changed to fit the new role.” We begin to see more clearly a portrait of an outsider with a wild desire to be at the center. All the work the whiz kids were doing over the years was always designed to contribute to the war. (All the films remove Oppie’s more demonstrably radical tendencies, his belief in a world government, for instance, which he mentioned offhandedly in the New York Review of Books in 1966.)
The closest we get to Oppenheimer himself is his pale-eyed, doppelganger brother, Frank, who gives the impression of a visionary living in a purely abstract realm. He stammers a little when he speaks of the moment when he and Oppie heard on the radio of their great bomb in action. “Thank God it wasn’t a dud… thank God it worked… Up to then, I don’t think we’d really, I’d really, thought about all those flattened people.” He still seems stunned. If nothing else, Frank gives weight to the storytelling trope of scientists as hyperintelligent but flakey space cadets at a remove from the humanity of it all. “Treating humans as matter,” as Los Alamos collaborator Hans Bethe puts it appallingly. Another contributing scientist says he vomited and lay down in depression. “I remember being just ill,” he says. “Just sick.”
The doc swirls with clips accumulated from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, National Atomic Museum, American Institute of Physics, and Fox and NBC newsreels, while Paul Free’s authoritative narration hovers like an omniscient voice from the depths of the Cold War itself. Then, there is Oppie: a figure of stricken elegance in his rakish pork pie hat. Typical of documentaries constructed in a postmodern style, what it all means is never explicated. Ambiguity presides over clarity.
Most directive is Dyson’s testimony. “He made this alliance with the United States Army and the person of General Groves who gave him undreamed-of resources, huge armies of people, and as much money as he could possibly spend in order to do physics on the grand scale,” Dyson says with his flashlight perceptiveness. “We are still living with it. Once you sell your soul to the devil, there’s no going back on it.” Los Alamos, in this counternarrative, was not just an ivory tower but an irresistible paradise for genius-level scientists simply interested in new discoveries and mega-gadgets.Oppenheimer was not just the enabler of the weapons that could annihilate us all, but of the high-stakes hallmarks of modern spectacle itself.
Dyson is a dubious fellow to emerge as the truthteller, given the inconsistency of his own legacy. His unorthodox theories are worthy of their own Nolan-esque treatment. He advocated growing genetically modified trees on comets, so that they might land on other planets and create human-supporting atmospheres, and eventually became a climate change denier based on his distrust of mathematical models. But his intelligence is irrefutable, and his distance from the Manhattan Project gives him a guiltless perspective and authority absent in Oppie’s other colleagues. Dyson, a greater antagonist than can be found in any mere Marvel movie, diagnoses Oppie as the self-induced victim of a “Faustian bargain.”
“Why did the bomb get dropped?” Dyson asks, his tie a little too big, his combover a little too combed over. “It was almost inevitable. Simply because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed at that time to do it. The Air Force was ready and waiting… The whole machinery was ready.”
Dyson also refutes the refrain of Oppenheimer’s responsibility for the catastrophe. “It was no one’s fault that the bomb was dropped. As usual, the reason it was dropped was that nobody had the courage or the foresight to say no.” Dyson pauses to let this sink in, then looks down and wobbles his head tragically. “Certainly not Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer gave his consent in a certain sense. He was on a committee that advised the Secretary of War, and that committee did not take any kind of a stand against dropping the bomb.” This measured oral history is fatal to the view of Oppie as a gentle humanist.
Dorothy McKibben, who ran the Manhattan Project’s office, chimes in with crystal clarity: “I don’t think they would have developed that [bomb] to show at a garden party. I think they were going to do it.” In archival footage, General Leslie Groves plays the role of plainspoken pragmatist: “It would have come out, sooner or later, at a Congressional hearing, if nowhere else, just when we could’ve dropped the bomb if we didn’t use it. And then knowing American politics, you know as well as I do, if there had been an election fought on the basis of every mother whose son was killed after such-and-such a date, the blood is on the hands of the President.”
Through these testimonies, the convention of the conflicted scientist and the myth of an A-bomb created in self-defense give way to a mantra of winning the war, and winning quickly. Valuing American lives over other lives. Avoiding a bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland. Months before Hiroshima, orders had been given to leave several Japanese cities untouched, to provide virgin targets where the impact of the new bomb could be clearly seen. Afterwards, a scientific team from the US was sent to Japan to study the effects. Footage rolls, in The Day After Trinity, of news clips of hospitalized burn victims.This measured oral history is fatal to the view of Oppie as a gentle humanist.
In films on the Manhattan Project, questions of conscience are commonly seen through the assenting viewpoint—that of the scientists who continued to work on the bomb, even after Hitler’s defeat. One essential perspective is obscured, black-holed in subterfuge, even. Physicist and European refugee Joseph Rotblat made crucial discoveries in the fission process, and went on to specialize in nuclear fallout. He moved to Los Alamos in 1944 but defected from the project on grounds of conscience upon learning that the Nazis could not build such a bomb. He was the only scientist to turn his back.
“If my work is going to be applied, I would like myself to decide how it is applied,” Rotblat says in the 2008 Canadian documentary The Strangest Dream. Streaming on the National Film Board of Canada’s platform, the film traces his renunciation of A-bomb development and his role in the Pugwash Conferences, where scientists and statesmen gathered to discuss the reversal of nuclear proliferation. The film renders a fairly straight treatment of its quiet subject, with the visually rich backing of a vertiginous collage of disparate forms, including spooky Cold-War era footage and clips of the Trinity mushroom cloud. Oppie is not in the film, but the narrative takes place in the fissures he helped wrench open; he lurks like an ever-present ghost behind the character of Rotblat, who stands as his angelic nemesis as he tries to transform physics into a humanitarian project. Like Oppenheimer, Rotblat was also accused of espionage, but he was eventually awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the disarmament campaign.
Notably, Rotblat is entirely absent from Oppenheimer, despite being described as a brilliantly offbeat individual—a “mad Polish scientist”—by a former student in The Strangest Dream. It’s a curious historical erasure and a missed chance for a dramatic clash. Then again, perhaps Rotblat is too steady and untragic, incorruptible and unmemeable for his own big moment, let alone the blockbuster treatment. Oppie’s genius wasn’t just in his Faustian bargain but in the way that he spoke and the way he held himself, quoting Hindu philosophy and smoking till the end of time. I suppose film culture is more interested in the flawed, tortured luminary than the staunch, principled dissenter or the morally engaged scientist.
Prosecuting the melancholic drama of the ingenuous mastermind requires substantial historical selectivity. Most cinema narratives hew to the oft-cited rationale for the A-bomb’s development: its function as a deterrent to a Nazi explosive. But in his essay “Leaving the Bomb Project,” Rotblat wrote, “Groves said that, of course, the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets… Until then I had thought that our work was to prevent a Nazi victory, and now I was told that the weapon we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim.” With more than a dash of elegiac melancholy, the working thesis of The Strangest Dream is that Rotblat’s moral strength insulated him against Oppie-style tragedy.
Insofar as the The Strangest Dream and The Day After Trinity position the Manhattan Project as an unholy alliance of physics and the openly violent arm of the state, they do so via the absent presence of Oppenheimer, who, flush with government cash, personifies the uneasy collision of science and military. Today’s ventures in AI offer the same science-ethics conundrum, and we don’t seem to be any closer to resolving it than at the moment of Oppenheimer’s mythic quandary. Looking at the images of the Los Alamos exertions, you can almost faintly hear the words of today’s STEM bros: disruption, innovation, brilliance. Wondrous and diabolical, the A-bomb is presented in these documentaries as the freakish outcome of public-bureaucratic entrepreneurialism. (They are weaker on the tangled history of superpower competition and atomic technology.) It all depends, of course, on what humans do with the technology we develop.
If there’s such a thing as sober, mournful spectacle, these films manifest it.
Given what we know about capitalist society at present, things aren’t exactly looking up. Just a decade after The Day After Trinity, the Cold War victory lap was being run at the box office. A new, end-of-history generation of studio filmmakers was writing a euphoric, Fukuyama-esque version of reality into pop-culture lore: in blockbusters like Independence Day (1996), The Core (2003), and Armageddon (1998), American pluck saves humanity from wholesale destruction; anxiety surrounding US dominance over the international order is undetectable, and the US military is either prominent or necessary. Before them all, The Day After Trinity suggested that technology’s triumph is the very crux of the problem.
Today, Oppenheimer reifies a political crisis—superpower competition for atomic arsenal—as a conundrum of personality, tech, and naive genius, even as it centers the wild fraternity of science, military, and government vital to create the A-bomb. But the political arrangement of power and resources seems like more of an objective, inevitable fact about the world in The Day After Trinity and The Strangest Dream. If there’s such a thing as sober, mournful spectacle, these films manifest it.
Oppenheimer is long gone, but his legacy—the capacity of a self-destroying humanity, and the late-capitalist spectacle of that mushroom cloud’s bright flash of light—lingers. He did not sign the Einstein-Russell Manifesto against nuclear war. He never apologized for his role in bringing the bomb to life. Atomic technology is now standard. The world’s nuclear powers currently possess an estimated 12,512 active warheads. More than enough to wipe out the planet.
Lauren Carroll Harris has been published in LA Review of Books, Sydney Review of Books, Lit Hub, The Baffler, Mubi Notebook, Cineaste, and the Open Secrets book anthology (Giramondo) among others. She is the founding curator of the Prototype experimental film platform and has programmed moving image for the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial and Carriageworks. She has a PhD in film studies.
The Tapping Solution Jun 14, 2022 The Tapping Solution explores EFT(also known as Tapping) in a way that’s never been seen before. REAL LIFE CASES, unfolding before your eyes. Ten people spend four days working with EFT practitioners to see if they can turn their lives around. The results are fully documented and the ride is one that you’ll never forget. Featured in this video are experts such as Jack Canfield, Bruce Lipton, Bob Proctor, Rick Wilkes, Joe Vitale, Nick Ortner, Carol Look, Norm Shealy, Fred Gallo, Cheryl Richardson, Carol Tuttle, Dawson Church, Patricia Carrington, and Brad Yates. Chapters: 0:00 Opening Credits 1:25 Participant Introductions 7:20 What is Tapping? 9:07 Traveling to Connecticut 11:23 Day One Intro 15:50 The Tapping Points 19:35 The 0-10 Scale 22:40 Developing the Setup Statement 33:43 Struggling to Release Trauma 40:45 Childhood Experiences 56:20 Money Problems 59:00 Fears & Phobias 1:02:12 Does Tapping Work? 1:16:40 6 Months Later – The Results 1:21:50 End Credits
Proving that change is possible if the will to create it is present, Chinese megacities like Beijing that were once famous for their apocalyptic grey skies are enjoying the lowest levels of air pollution they’ve experienced in the 21st century.
Falling 42% from an average high in 2013 when Chinese air pollution was higher than 50 particles per cubic centimeters of city air, the change has increased the lifespan of Chinese urbanites by 2.2 years.
The news comes from a report published by the University of Chicago called the Air Quality Life Index which listed some of the actions taken by the Chinese government to reduce air pollution, described by the CCP as a “war on pollution.”
This has included reducing the presence of heavy industry like steel production in city centers, as well as restricting coal power plants from being built inside cities while shuttering those that were already there.
Some cities like Beijing have reduced the number of cars allowed on the roads during peak hours, similar to London’s congestion charge. Lastly, China’s mass urban tree-planting campaigns have been well documented.
While the life expectancy has risen on average 2.2 years, some cities have seen far more drastic increases. Citizens living under the new “Beijing Blue,” are predicted to live 4 additional years, while those 11 million in the north-central city of Baoding are predicted to gain 6.
“At the foundation of those actions were common elements: political will and resources, both human and financial, that reinforced each other,” the report said. “When the public and policymakers have these tools, action becomes much more likely.”
In fact, the decline in China’s pollution levels has been so drastic that it lowered the world average, which the report says would have increased if not for the Middle Kingdom’s war on pollution.
Although Chinese city air is still several times higher than the WHO’s recommended minimum, it shows what’s accomplishable with political and civic effort—particularly to its neighbors in South Asia where the report warns air quality is worsening.
September brings our third and last harvest, the harvest of grapes. Grapes symbolize the emotional function by which we experience emotions towards people, places, objects or events. This function empowers us with the ability to feel people’s moods, perceive the motive behind their actions, and in general blend into social situations. The complete spectrum of our emotions extends even wider than this, reaching to potentially transformative emotions that alter the way we see ourselves and the world around us, such as empathy, compassion, and remorse of conscience. This broad spectrum is reflected in the journey a grape undergoes to become wine. It is a journey of many stages that ultimately transforms the grape’s nature into an altogether superior end product. As we shall see, the highest reach of our emotional function is likewise superhuman.
Since the development of our Essence is typically arrested early in life, the emotional function—the function of Essence—is usually atrophied. We only take advantage of its basic emotional output of comradery, humor, and gossip, and rarely benefit from its higher and transformative range. In effect, we have in our possession an instrument of great force yet spend our days fiddling only with its most basic parts. It is as if we used our smartphone only to check the time and our car only to store our belongings. This is a serious waste of potential as well as an objective limitation to inner farming, because the only power that can overrule the instinctive inertia discussed in May and the mechanical momentum discussed in June is emotion.
When we try to study the different qualities of our emotions we stumble upon an underlying attitude that makes their observation particularly difficult. Their very arising sweeps us away. They come with a deep conviction that glues us to them and blinds us to their manifestations. This abandonment of our sense of self in the face of our emotions is called identification and it is here that our labor of September must begin. To be clear, the tendency to identify with any of our functions—whether physical, mental, or emotional—makes self-observation challenging. We are accustomed to calling all our impulses ‘I’ and associate their manifestation with our entirety. Nevertheless, identification exacts its strongest force on our emotional world, particularly in our dealings with others.
As a rule, our undeveloped emotional function distorts our perception of the world by placing ourselves at its center. Everything is about us, everyone is ignoring or conspiring against us, everyone should be considering or acknowledging us. Misled by this bias, we take everything personally and experience difficult emotions about things that need not stimulate any emotions in us whatsoever. “Why did they not think about me? Why did they look at me that way? What will happen if I am proven wrong? If I make a fool of myself? What if I am considered irresponsible?” Our struggle with identification reveals that these habitual considerations are the default state of our emotional function. We cycle through them endlessly. When we do succeed in obtaining this supposedly important validation from our environment, our emotional function quickly works itself into new doubts and concerns. It proves to be a state in search of an object, which means that we can only break free from these emotional considerations by severing the state of identification.
Any action that goes against the need for social validation achieves this: making a public comment we know to be incorrect; restraining our smartness and letting others take credit for coming up with a helpful solution; staying put when a traffic light turns green until the driver behind us honks; dropping our cup at the cafe to make us seem clumsy or careless. Or in short, any deliberate action that paints us as fools and sabotages our need for social validation.
If executed correctly, the effect is instantaneous. A space between ‘I’ and ‘my emotions’ opens up all of a sudden, sparking a brief out-of-body experience. All of a sudden we can observe in real time what was previously invisible to us. But this successful execution depends on the attitude behind our effort. We are playing the fool to sever identification. We are aiming to wedge a crack between our emotions and our budding ability to observe. The moment we lose sight of this, our vanity takes credit for having gone against our habitual reactions, and distorts our original aim. We break free of identification only to rebuild it elsewhere. The practitioner will have to bear this in mind and understand that some of their experiments will succeed, and others will fail. Moreover, the somewhat dramatic examples given above will not always be necessary. We will not always have to employ these extreme measures to sever identification with our emotions. As we gain expertise in inner farming, we will gradually learn more subtle ways of harvesting the same yield.
Harvest involves discrimination. Not all crops are of equal value. Some grape clusters may make fine wine while others need to be discarded lest they detract from our final product. The same applies to our emotions. We must study their different qualities and flavors, and ultimately choose some over others. For this, we must learn to struggle with identification. The farmer who can observe their feelings as they arise in real time—who can see ‘joy,’ ‘expectation,’ ‘disappointment,’ or ‘apprehension’ and resist the urge to call them ‘I’—is positioned favorably before the September harvest. Now can they attempt to fulfill the transformative potential of their emotional function.
An unknown species of early human nearly died out around 900,000 years ago, according to genetic analysis. It might have been both the ancestor of Homo heidelbergensis and a species ancestral to our own.Credit: S. Entressangle/E. Daynes/Science Photo Library
Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction around 900,000 years ago, a study shows. The work1, published in Science, suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to just 1,280 and didn’t expand again for another 117,000 years.
“About 98.7% of human ancestors were lost,” says Haipeng Li, a population geneticist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who co-led the study. He says that the fossil record in Africa and Eurasia between 950,000 and 650,000 years ago is patchy and that “the discovery of this bottleneck may explain the chronological gap”.
Nick Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum in London, who wrote a related perspective2, says he was intrigued by the tiny size of the population. “This would imply that it occupied a very localized area with good social cohesion for it to survive,” he says. “Of greater surprise is the estimated length of time that this small group survived. If this is correct, then one imagines that it would require a stable environment with sufficient resources and few stresses to the system.”
Clues from modern DNA
To make their discovery, the researchers needed to invent new tools. Advances in genome sequencing have improved scientists’ understanding of population sizes for the period after modern humans emerged, but the researchers developed a methodology that enabled them to fill in details about earlier human ancestors. Serena Tucci, an anthropologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, says that such work was sorely needed. “We still know very little about the population dynamics of early human ancestors for several reasons, including methodological limitations and difficulties in obtaining ancient DNA data from old Homo specimens,” she says.
The researchers’ method allowed them to reconstruct ancient population dynamics on the basis of genetic data from present-day humans. By constructing a complex family tree of genes, the team was able to examine the finer branches of the tree with greater precision, identifying significant evolutionary events.
The technique “put the spotlight on the period 800,000 to one million years ago — for which there is much unknown — in a way that hasn’t been done before,” says Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
This period was part of the Early-Middle Pleistocene transition — a time of drastic climate change, when glacial cycles became longer and more intense. In Africa, this led to long periods of drought. Li says that the changing climate might have wiped out human ancestors and forced new human species to emerge. Eventually, these might have evolved into the last common ancestor of modern humans and our extinct relatives, the Denisovans and Neanderthals.
Around 813,000 years ago, the population of pre-humans began to swell again. How our ancestors managed to survive, and what allowed them to flourish once more, remains unclear, says Ziqian Hao, a population geneticist at the Shandong First Medical University and Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences in Jinan, and a co-author of the paper. However, he says that the bottleneck is likely to have had a crucial impact on human genetic diversity, driving many important features of modern humans, such as brain size. He estimates that up to two-thirds of genetic diversity was lost. “It represents a key period of time during the evolution of humans. So there are many important questions to be answered,” he says.
Ashton would like to see the researchers’ findings backed by more archaeological and fossil evidence. The authors “suggest that the bottleneck was a global crash in population”, he says, “but the number of archaeological sites outside Africa suggests that this is not the case. A regional bottleneck might be more likely.”
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Dr. Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. Dr. Gleiser is a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College.
Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back from outer space its stunning images of planets and nebulae last year, astronomers, though dazzled, had to admit that something was amiss. Eight months later, based in part on what the telescope has revealed, it’s beginning to look as if we may need to rethink key features of the origin and development of the universe.
Launched at the end of 2021 as a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the Webb, a tool with unmatched powers of observation, is on an exciting mission to look back in time, in effect, at the first stars and galaxies. But one of the Webb’s first major findings was exciting in an uncomfortable sense: It discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.
According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.
The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.
It was not, unfortunately, an isolated incident. There have been other recent occasions in which the evidence behind science’s basic understanding of the universe has been found to be alarmingly inconsistent.
Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.
At first, scientists expected this discrepancy to resolve as the data got better. But the problem has stubbornly persisted even as the data have gotten far more precise. And now new data from the Webb have exacerbated the problem. This trend suggests a flaw in the model, not in the data.
Two serious issues with the standard model of cosmology would be concerning enough. But the model has already been patched up numerous times over the past half century to better conform with the best available data — alterations that may well be necessary and correct, but which, in light of the problems we are now confronting, could strike a skeptic as a bit too convenient.
Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.
A potent mix of hard-won data and rarefied abstract mathematical physics, the standard model of cosmology is rightfully understood as a triumph of human ingenuity. It has its origins in Edwin Hubble’s discovery in the 1920s that the universe was expanding — the first piece of evidence for the Big Bang. Then, in 1964, radio astronomers discovered the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background, the “fossil” radiation reaching us from shortly after the universe began expanding. That finding told us that the early universe was a hot, dense soup of subatomic particles that has been continually cooling and becoming less dense ever since.
Over the past 60 years, cosmology has become ever more precise in its ability to account for the best available data about the universe. But along the way, to gain such a high degree of precision, astrophysicists have had to postulate the existence of components of the universe for which we have no direct evidence. The standard model today holds that “normal” matter — the stuff that makes up people and planets and everything else we can see — constitutes only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest is invisible stuff called dark matter and dark energy (roughly 27 percent and 68 percent).
Cosmic inflation is an example of yet another exotic adjustment made to the standard model. Devised in 1981 to resolve paradoxes arising from an older version of the Big Bang, the theory holds that the early universe expanded exponentially fast for a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This theory solves certain problems but creates others. Notably, according to most versions of the theory, rather than there being one universe, ours is just one universe in a multiverse — an infinite number of universes, the others of which may be forever unobservable to us not just in practice but also in principle.
There is nothing inherently fishy about these features of the standard model. Scientists often discover good indirect evidence for things that we cannot see, such as the hyperdense singularities inside a black hole. But in the wake of the Webb’s confounding data about galaxy formation, and the worsening problem with the Hubble constant, you can’t be blamed for starting to wonder if the model is out of joint.
A familiar narrative about how science works is often trotted out at this point to assuage anxieties. It goes like this: Researchers think they have a successful theory, but new data show it is flawed. Courageously rolling up their sleeves, the scientists go back to their blackboards and come up with new ideas that allow them to improve their theory by better matching the evidence.
It’s a story of both humility and triumph, and we scientists love to tell it. And it may be what happens in this case, too. Perhaps the solution to the problems the Webb is forcing us to confront will require only that cosmologists come up with a new “dark” something or other that will allow our picture of the universe to continue to match the best cosmological data.
There is, however, another possibility. We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.
Cosmology is not like other sciences. It’s not like studying mice in a maze or watching chemicals boil in a beaker in a lab. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.
These rarefied issues don’t come up in most “regular” science (though one encounters similarly shadowy issues in the science of consciousness and in quantum physics). Working so close to the boundary between science and philosophy, cosmologists are continually haunted by the ghosts of basic assumptions hiding unseen in the tools we use — such as the assumption that scientific laws don’t change over time.
But that’s precisely the sort of assumption we might have to start questioning in order to figure out what’s wrong with the standard model. One possibility, raised by the physicist Lee Smolin and the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is that the laws of physics can evolve and change over time. Different laws might even compete for effectiveness. An even more radical possibility, discussed by the physicist John Wheeler, is that every act of observation influences the future and even the past history of the universe. (Dr. Wheeler, working to understand the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, conceived of a “participatory universe” in which every act of observation was in some sense a new act of creation.)
It is not obvious, to say the least, how such revolutionary reconsiderations of our science might help us better understand the cosmological data that is flummoxing us. (Part of the difficulty is that the data themselves are shaped by the theoretical assumptions of those who collect them.) It would necessarily be a leap of faith to step back and rethink such fundamentals about our science.
But a revolution may end up being the best path to progress. That has certainly been the case in the past with scientific breakthroughs like Copernicus’s heliocentrism, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s relativity. All three of those theories also ended up having enormous cultural influence — threatening our sense of our special place in the cosmos, challenging our intuition that we were fundamentally different than other animals, upending our faith in common sense ideas about the flow of time. Any scientific revolution of the sort we’re imagining would presumably have comparable reverberations in our understanding of ourselves.
The philosopher Robert Crease has written that philosophy is what’s required when doing more science may not answer a scientific question. It’s not clear yet if that’s what’s needed to overcome the crisis in cosmology. But if more tweaks and adjustments don’t do the trick, we may need not just a new story of the universe but also a new way to tell stories about it.
Adam Frank (@AdamFrank4) is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and the author of the forthcoming book “The Little Book of Aliens.” Marcelo Gleiser (@MGleiser) is a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College and the author of “The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future.”
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