End Times & The Moon

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The end is nigh and here's why

Experimental History • 18 Dec 2024 • ~3700 words

Adam Mastroianni writes about the end times, and why we believe that the world is ending soon throughout history.

If I’m right, people’s colorful theories of the End Times come second. What comes first is the conviction that the world’s problems are brand-spanking-new. And that conviction is stunningly consistent across time. “Happiness is all gone,” says the Prophecy of Neferty, an Egyptian papyrus from roughly 4000 years ago. “Kindness has vanished and rudeness has descended upon everyone,” agrees Dialogue of a Man with His Spirit, written at around the same time. “It is not like last year […] There is no person free from wrong, and everyone alike is doing it,” says the appropriately-named Complaints of Khakheperraseneb from several hundred years later. And some unknown amount of time after that, the Admonitions of Ipuwer reports that actually things just started going to hell. “All is ruin! Indeed, laughter is perished and no longer made.” Worst of all: “Everyone’s hair has fallen out.”

Moon – Bartosz Ciechanowski

Bartosz Ciechanowski • 15 Dec 2024 • ~16250 words

Bartosz Ciechanowski writes an impressive deep-dive on the moon. I highly recommend reading it on a desktop browser, and utilizing the visual aids provided.

The Moon may be just an unassuming neighbor in the sky, but its presence affects our lives in many subtle ways. When it reflects sunlight off its scarred surface to guide the way in the darkness of night, or as it breathes life into oceans by rhythmically raising tides, or when it cloaks the Sun in a rare and awe-inspiring total solar eclipse, the Moon reminds us of the celestial world right outside of the safe confines of our planet. Traveling through the cold and empty space by Earth’s side, the Moon is always just there. It may be barren and dull, but, undeterred by its own lifelessness, it never leaves us completely alone.

Recommended Articles

Humphrey’s world: how the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain’s strangest pub chain

The Guardian • 19 Dec 2024 • ~5900 words

Since the 1970s, Humphrey Smith has acquired scores of pubs and historic properties around the UK. But time after time, he has left the buildings empty. Why has he allowed his empire to moulder?

To say that Samuel Smith Old Brewery prides itself on tradition is to wildly understate the intensity of its chairman’s longing for a different era. His aim seems to be to build an entire world in which the past – or at least, his idealised picture of the past – is preserved just as it was. For decades, Smith has used his considerable personal means to pursue this vision. He seems to regard his properties as stage-sets, on which people – pubgoers, managers, local residents – must perform the roles he assigns to them, exactly as he directs. Where this is not possible, the curtain instantly falls. (Think of it as something like Synecdoche, North Yorkshire.)

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: On the Road With the Most Audacious Band In Rock

GQ • 19 Dec 2024 • ~7100 words • Archive Link

How do you make it in the music business in 2024? For starters: Don’t put out more albums every year than even your hardcore fans can keep track of. Don’t chase every new idea you have (psychedelic rock, electronics, symphony orchestras!) and make every album sound nothing like the last one. Don’t encourage fan bootlegging. And above all, don’t call your band something like “King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.” GQ hitches a ride with the Australian sextet who’ve become a worldwide sensation by doing just about everything except what you’re supposed to do.

What’s more, they’ve become rising stars in part by rejecting music-industry convention, whether streaming every show for free, releasing five records in a single year (twice now), or giving their recordings away to fans and letting them manufacture and sell the music themselves. King Gizz have officially issued 26 studio albums in a dozen years, but the number of variants and fan-made releases is either a completist’s dream or nightmare. They have built their own label and merchandising behemoth, all while encouraging a hyperactive bootleg culture online and in parking lots. King Gizz have never spent money on advertising, either; they are, after all, a marketing team’s idea of hell, rarely sticking with a sound for more than a few albums at a time.

I Am the “Other” in “Mother”

Electric Literature • 19 Dec 2024 • ~6250 words

By choosing surrogacy, I felt I outsourced the very essence of what makes a woman worthy.

The trouble is that spectating is hard work when a history of medical neglect and grief have wired you to be protectively proactive. Spectating feels next to impossible when you are bursting with gratitude and guilt for having asked someone to be pregnant for you, to risk their health while you safeguard yours. Spectating seems absurd when you’ve displaced entire universes and gambled fortunes to create this reality where the stakes are unbearably high. Still, I’ve been trying hard to spectate, to make myself patient and compliant and calm, even though I’m yearning to be all in, to savor this unusual pregnancy in my own way.

Laboratories of the impossible

Aeon • 19 Dec 2024 • ~5300 words

By testing the boundaries of reality, Spanish-language authors have created a sublime counterpart to experimental physics.

Physics is often called a natural science, but that descriptor owes more to the discipline’s history than to current practice. Modern physicists often require as much artifice as fiction writers do. Just as novelists describe artificial worlds that help us understand the real, physicists also require artificial settings – their accelerators, detectors and models – to reveal scientific ‘truth’. When a physicist performs experiments with a cloud chamber, in which the tracks of invisible particles are revealed through a mist, they are using atmospheric conditions that have never been met under our skies. Physicists do not study the world as they experience it. They do not seek to model what they might observe on a hike. Rather, they fashion simulacra then twist them in a lab. They try to exceed the natural, building clouds from possibilities rather than actualities, rendering wisps of the unseen. They, too, are novelists, crafting narratives of the real from their experiments.

The Canoe in the Forest

Hakai Magazine • 19 Dec 2024 • ~3500 words

An unfinished boat hidden on a remote island in Alaska illuminates a missing chapter in the history of traditional Haida and Tlingit canoe building.

Covered in moss and ravaged by decades of slow rot, the narrow boat lay in the same spot where Indigenous Alaskans had carved it from the trunk of a western red cedar. They did this in the place where the tree fell—first by cutting it into two pieces, then by fashioning the canoe from the lower portion of the tree so that it sits between the stump and the abandoned upper part of the trunk like a philosophical question made real: excised and reshaped but never moved from where it fell, is it not still part of the tree? Seaworthy but destined never to touch the sea, is it not still a boat?

Ghost forests

Eurozine • 18 Dec 2024 • ~2700 words

From carbon absorber to emitter: monoculture, fires, disease and storms are reversing the European forest’s natural role as a Co2 sink. Read about the forests that threaten climate neutrality.

The Portuguese have become accustomed to the mathematics of death and destruction: how many hectares burned, how many houses destroyed, how many livelihoods shattered, how many people injured, how many lives lost. For them, it is a fact that the forest burns in Summer. In addition to all the human, social and economic impacts, fires also have serious environmental consequences, as they affect one of the forest’s most basic functions: carbon sequestration. (View Highlight)****

Fleeing Xi’s China: following the trail of migrants trying to reach Australia through Indonesia

The Guardian • 18 Dec 2024 • ~3000 words

A new and high-stakes escape route has been revealed, through the Indonesian archipelago to a smuggler’s boat.

For many embarking on zouxian, their journey starts on the Chinese social media platform, Douyin. Douyin has become a common channel to recruit fellow migrants, with people openly stating that they want to smuggle themselves into Australia. Dozens of comments on these videos use cryptic terms to express their interest in joining. Ten months ago, a 29-year-old man from Heilongjiang with the username “Tian Ci”, posted that he’d found a boat, and was looking for “sincere people to go with”. Four months ago, he commented under a Douyin ad for an Australian immigration consultant that he was ready. “Anyone coming with us?” he said.

Inside the Japanese-American Farm Preserving Endangered Fruit

Atlas Obscura • 18 Dec 2024 • ~3700 words

How one family turned their peach orchard into a rallying cry for saving heirloom flavors and building community.

I wish I could share the taste of that peach in the field with you, freshly freed from its tree, sun-warmed and scented by the grass, dirt, and the thousands of ripening peaches around it. There is no peach that can taste like that one, even if it were the same peach eaten over the kitchen sink—although that one would be delicious, too. The deep orange of the peach’s interior was tart and sweet with a bit of bitterness from the peel. I had to suck the juice from the fruit as I pulled away and it still ran down my chin. The flavor was honey on my tongue. These are peaches that make you feel alive.

There Are Many Programs Trying to Reduce Recidivism. This One Works.

Mother Jones • 17 Dec 2024 • ~6150 words

Adam Hochschild explores a transformative program called Guiding Rage Into Power (GRIP) and how its success is changing the narrative around recidivism.

“When I was new at San Quentin,” says Ronald Broomfield, the former warden there who is now chief of the state prison system’s Division of Adult Institutions, “I would tour the yard and ask, ‘What’s working for you? What has helped you change?’ And I kept hearing: GRIP.” A week before I spoke to him, Broomfield had spent two hours with a GRIP tribe at a maximum-security prison. “They’re living in a yard where there’s active criminal activity. And they’re choosing to pull themselves away and form a supportive community. That takes real courage.”

The Search for van Gogh’s Lost Masterpiece

New York Times • 15 Dec 2024 • ~3050 words • Archive Link

Cast off by the Nazis, but heralded by curators, the artist’s painting of his doctor, made just before van Gogh’s suicide, has not been seen in 34 years.

A German art reporter, Stefan Koldehoff, in 2019 wrote that at Sotheby’s the current owner was known as “The Lugano Man.” It’s no surprise that people at Sotheby’s would know, or think they know, who holds the Gachet. For one thing, the auction house sold the work. For another, it’s in a business that relies on tracking, and keeping secret, the identity of owners so that when death, divorce or other events lead to a sale, your company has the inside track.