January 23, 2020 Conspiracy The Silurian Hypothesis By Rich Cohen In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. When I was eleven, we lived in an English Tudor on Bluff Road in Glencoe, Illinois. One day, three strange men (two young, one old) knocked on the door. Their last name was Frank. They said they’d lived in this house before us, not for weeks but decades. For twenty years, this had been their house. They’d grown up here. Though I knew the house was old, it never occurred to me until then that someone else had lived in these rooms, that even my own room was not entirely my own. The youngest of the men, whose room would become mine, showed me the place on a brick wall hidden by ivy where he’d carved his name. “Bobby Frank, 1972.” It had been there all along. And I never even knew it. That is the condition of the human race: we have woken to life with no idea how we got here, where that is or what happened before. Nor do we think much about it. Not because we are incurious, but because we do not know how much we don’t know. What is a conspiracy? It’s a truth that’s been kept from us. It can be a secret but it can also be the answer to a question we’ve not yet asked. Modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years, but life has existed on this planet for 3.5 billion. That leaves 3,495,888,000 pre-human years unaccounted for—more than enough time for the rise and fall of not one but several pre-human industrial civilizations. Same screen, different show. Same field, different team. An alien race with alien technology, alien vehicles, alien folklore, and alien fears, beneath the familiar sky. There’d be no evidence of such bygone civilizations, built objects and industry lasting no more than a few hundred thousand years. After a few million, with plate tectonics at work, what is on the surface, including the earth itself, will be at the bottom of the sea and the bottom will have become the mountain peaks. The oldest place on the earth’s surface—a stretch of Israel’s Negev Desert—is just over a million years old, nothing on a geological clock. The result of this is one of my favorite conspiracy theories, though it’s not a conspiracy in the conventional sense, a conspiracy usually being a secret kept by a nefarious elite. In this case, the secret, which belongs to the earth itself, has been kept from all of humanity, which believes it has done the only real thinking and the only real building on this planet, as it once believed the earth was at the center of the universe. Called the Silurian Hypothesis, the theory was written in 2018 by Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute, and Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. Schmidt had been studying distant planets for hints of climate change, “hyperthermals,” the sort of quick temperature rises that might indicate the moment a civilization industrialized. It would suggest the presence of a species advanced enough to turn on the lights. Such a jump, perhaps resulting from a release of carbon, might be the only evidence that any race, including our own, will leave behind. Not the pyramids, not the skyscrapers, not Styrofoam, not Shakespeare—in the end, we will be known only by a change in the rock that marked the start of the Anthropocene. Read More
January 17, 2020 The Last Year First Snow By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It ran every Friday in November, and returns this winter month, then will return again in the spring and summer. A silver mixing bowl, that’s what I remember my mother handing me. I was five. My first snow ice cream. For five years, my daughter and I have lived in this Texas town. For five years, no snow. But this morning, snow rushed down as my daughter slept. I snuck outside and cupped enough from the hood of her car. Milk, vanilla, sugar, and a pinch of salt. My mother’s bowl. This is not missing. This is us, living. Read earlier installments of The Last Year here. Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction. Her writing has been recognized by the Best American Essays and appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Longreads, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine.
January 16, 2020 Happily Bah, Humbug By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. It is December in Georgia, and we are driving past twinkling lights, and wreaths, and mildly poisonous winterberries, and a wire reindeer whose red nose softly glows on and off, on and off. My six year old, Eli, looks out the window. “Can we have a Christmas tree, Mama?” “No.” Silence. “What if we paint it black?” I consider this. The holiday season does not bring out the best in me. I go sour and frantic. Mandatory cheer sinks my spirit. For my sons, I pile up presents for the eight days of Chanukah. The house grows small and dizzy as toys and more toys are torn from their boxes. The menorahs flicker and, yes, they’re beautiful, but if there is a miracle here, who could find it under all this pleasure? “It is possible I am doing everything wrong.” I say this to my husband three times a day, like I’m praying, until December is over. I’m awful at holidays, I know. Years ago, watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan, I was so nervous my whole family would fall off the roof that I was told to sit in the stairwell because I was ruining it for everybody. Where’s my December stairwell? I’ll go sit in it until everybody comes back down. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1817 “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” opens with Marie and Fritz “huddled together in a corner of a little back room.” They hear a “distant hammering,” and shuffling and murmuring, and Fritz tells his sister a small, dark man has crept down the hallway with a big box under his arm. The small man is Drosselmeier. The children call him their godpapa. He wears a black eyepatch, and a wig made from strands of glass. He is as much toy as he is toymaker. “You’re just like my old Jumping Jack,” says Marie, “that I threw away last month.” “Dross” is waste, and “drossel” is to stir things up. And Drosselmeir is both. He is December. He is the month that makes waste inseparable from delight. “Drossel” also means to choke. And it also means “a thrush,” a speckled songbird. The bird that sounds like a flute in the woods. Over and over again, Drosselmeir is exactly what he isn’t. Around the time I was trying to get pregnant, and my step-daughter was eight, my husband bought her two goldfish. Over the years the tank darkened, and smelled like old garlic, but the fish thrived. One of the fish (I don’t remember if she had a name) was always pregnant, or having babies, or eating her babies. This is how December makes me feel. Like I am the most un-pregnant person on earth watching a goldfish that is endlessly fertile eat her babies. “I am nothing,” writes Karl Marx, “but I must be everything.” Read More
January 10, 2020 The Last Year Turtle, Turtle By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It ran every Friday in November, and returns this winter month, then will again in the spring and summer. Childhood is full of fictions, at least it should be. When my daughter, Indie, was little, her favorite game to play in the pool was Turtle, Turtle. She’d climb on my back, and I’d swim around saying “Turtle, Turtle,” the way you’d say “Ribbit, Ribbit” for a frog. We found him in my parents’ backyard pool, all four of his legs flipping. Indie was seven that summer. She and I had been taking one last swim before heading back to Oklahoma, four hours north. While I dove down, Indie stood on the steps of the pool. The turtle, a red-eared slider, was tiny, about the size of my palm. Indie named him Flipper. We lived in a duplex those four years in Oklahoma. We had a little garden patch beneath our front window. There were four units in all, so we shared a sidewalk with an opera singer who worked at the grocery store, a large, loping Marine who had done two tours in Afghanistan, and a frumpy student who mostly wore brown and sat outside to study in a chair from his kitchen. I had a visiting professor’s salary, and there wasn’t a month when we made it to the thirtieth or thirty-first before we ran out of money. Read More
January 9, 2020 Écuyères The Horsewomen of the Belle Époque By Susanna Forrest In Susanna Forrest’s Écuryères series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris. Blanche Allarty (source Rosine Lagier) In Berlin, the old patches of wasteland left by the bombings of World War Two are vanishing, replaced by shiny glass and granite luxury apartments. But sometimes, the remaining squares of grass and cracked concrete will throw up white tents, brightly painted caravans, and swirls of colored light bulbs, moth-eaten camels grinding hay in their teeth—the unmistakable children’s-book shorthand for the circus. Scarlet and yellow posters sprout on neighborhood lamp posts offering matinee performances and promising that the animals are well kept (“Doesn’t your dog like driving in a car?” asked one poster I saw. “Our dogs are no different.”) At least once a Christmas season, a zebra escapes and gallops through a German town. Despite the animal-welfare restrictions and Netflix, the circus endures. I wasn’t a child who liked clowns, and, barring a large and sticky red lollipop, I barely remember being taken to the Moscow State Circus when it visited my British hometown, but for the last nine years I’ve been scratching up the time and funds to immerse myself in another circus—that of nineteenth-century Paris—for days at a time. I’m looking for fragments of lives, for women who lived at the center of public attention while simultaneously being marginal. They dealt with racism, misogyny, abuse, and great physical danger but, like the circus, they endured. Read More
January 8, 2020 The Big Picture The Myth of the Artistic Genius By Cody Delistraty On two forgotten portraitists and how to actually alter the art historical canon. Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait at the Easel, ca. 1556−57 Ernst Gombrich, likely the most influential art historian of the twentieth century, is ripe for revisiting. His outlook on what constituted important art was white, elite, male, and Eurocentric. In his seminal The Story of Art (1950), which set out to track the entirety of art history, from ancient times to modernity, he included not a single female artist. In one of his final interviews, before he died in 2001, he defended his assessments, implying that, for better or for worse, white, European men with means, from Watteau to Picasso, had been the artistic geniuses throughout history. “Not everyone can do what a genius can,” Gombrich told the Independent, “and not everyone can produce a masterpiece even after long training.” In a perverse way, Gombrich was right, because the problem has always been in the way we define genius. The Artistic Genius is certain of his talents; he is certain of his project. These men were emotionally brutal, sure in their vision, often blustering and quick to anger. When Gauguin abandons his family for Tahiti, he does so with confidence that his wife and children will understand that their lives are of minimal importance compared with the vast number of lives he and his art will touch. Because the understanding of artistic genius has been so closely linked to privileges and traits associated with masculinity, women have forever been locked out of the conversation. “Why have there been no great women artists?” asked Linda Nochlin in her 1971 essay. “But like so many other so-called questions involved in the feminist ‘controversy,’ it falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: ‘There have been no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness.’ ” The very notion of genius is gendered, and thus defining it becomes a tautology: The Artistic Genius is male because men are most fit to be Artistic Geniuses. The goalposts of greatness are hyper-specific, socially manipulated, and ultimately less interested in the aesthetics of the work produced. And they are seldom scrutinized. Read More