July 23, 2026 On Nature What We Talk About When We Talk About the Interstitium By Laura Kolbe Anatomical drawing of a human figure with dissected torso, 1927. Exposition d’art Medico-Historique, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Like many doctors I know, I found myself being peppered with questions from friends and patients—some genuinely curious, others more finger-wagging—after The New York Times Magazine published a long piece in the spring about the “discovery of a third circulatory system.” Recent experiments had shown that foreign materials such as tattoo ink or chemical tracers could migrate into what the magazine described as “hidden pathways” throughout the body—routes that did not correspond with either of the conventionally accepted networks that Western medicine has mapped and taught for centuries. “The implications of a new circulatory system,” the writer claimed, “are potentially enormous.” The article was referring to the interstitium, a catchall term for the mostly cell-less, latticed network of proteins and fluids that surrounds our organs and tissues. This system was already known to the sixteenth-century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, whose illustration collections number among the first mass-produced medical textbooks, and to anyone who has ever looked at the iridescent cobwebs that split as one carves a cooked turkey. But unlike the other two kinds of classically recognized circulation—the vasculature and lymphatic systems—the interstitium and its fluid dynamics go minimally discussed in Western medicine, whether in the formal training of physicians or at the level of popular science. (Think of an anatomical dummy in a grade-school classroom, its extractable eyes, heart, liver all fitting neatly on their hooks and pegs like chocolates inside an Advent calendar.) Read More
July 7, 2025 On Nature The Language of Stones By André Breton “The Large Tortoiseshell and the Chieftan … discuss the mystery of beginnings and ends.” Photograph by D. Stanimirovitch. “Infinitely far from the world of flowers,” sighs Novalis. What about the world of stones! And where along the way do we pick up the idea that we know what we’re talking about? Of course, the question only makes sense to those who believe that nothing around them can be in vain, that everything must somehow concern them; that a perception recurring infinitely from the morning to the night of life, like that of the object generically called stone, could not be purely self-contained and remain a dead letter. The learned classifications of mineralogists leave them entirely unsatisfied. Indeed, these scientists are to them only a category of those “eloquent naturalists” who cling to the visible and tangible and of whom Claude de Saint-Martin could say that “they disappoint our expectation by not satisfying in us this ardent and pressing need, which drives us less toward what we see in sensible objects, than toward what we do not see in them.”1 Read More
February 5, 2024 On Nature Essay on the Sky By Vincent Katz Praia Brava, 2015. Photograph by Isaac Katz. Billows and soft extensions, the cream lapping through there, between solid graymass and float down to sea, and above that gray, more light, and off to the left, white light, then ruffles, and above, more and more gray. In another direction, blue with acrobatic twists, spreadings. Is that the aither high above that the Greeks thought divine? Mountains uplift, spray down to water, cream’s reddening, blocks it off to the right. Bastions, mirth, huge extensions, structures of no hand, silver too is penetrant. [Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 4, 2004] At this time of day (the day has experienced enough and gone through transformations, travels even), a glow from the sky embraces the neighborhood, and as it goes from neighborhood to neighborhood, takes in the whole city in its look, and that glow is comforting. One realizes it is raining lightly, and the rain too takes part in the glow that several angled clouds have hooked into lower down. [São Paulo, Brazil, February 24, 2005] All day not really a cloud in sight—a still blue sky one could see and not feel threatened by. The day would not go very far, not splinter into challenges and excitement. Then, suddenly, they move in and begin to change the sky’s outlook. One large, potato-shaped cloud hovered over the tree line. Much later, at dusk, an out-of-focus cloud echoed the land’s bared curve. [Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 2, 2006] A bit of sunlight touched the sky’s lining, and there was sun setting in the sky, but mainly it was a sky full of clouds. Their textures could be made out overhead and extending far into the distance, over the water and other islands’ darkening outlines. Much farther out, the sky lightened. Out there, white clouds instead of gray, and the mind’s imagination of a clearing for travelers by boat. The full moon half appeared through banks, a lemon sherbet over mountains along ocean edge. Then it disappeared from view. Later, while the moon itself remained hidden, its light could be seen projecting high into the sky against cloud shapes, stage-lighting a place known as heaven. [Praia Brava, Ubatuba, Brazil, April 2, 2007] Read More
November 9, 2023 On Nature Teetering Canaries By Judith Schalansky Illustration by Na Kim. Translated by Imogen Taylor One stifling hot night in early August, I dreamed, as I always do when I have a fever, the old, familiar dream: the earth opens up before my feet, a gaping pit appears, and into this pit I fall, then clamber straight back out, as eager as a cartoon character, only to fall into the next pit that suddenly yawns before me. An endless obstacle course engineered by some higher power, an experiment going nowhere, the opposite of a story. This dream has followed me since childhood and is probably as old as the realization that I will, one day, end up in a pit forever. As a piece of drama, it is extremely simple, and yet it’s an effective dream and no more unoriginal than that of my friend Sibylle, who told me over breakfast a few days later that she has regular nightmares of being swept away by a vast, tsunami-like wave. I was reminded that of all the arts I would like to master, lucid dreaming is at the top of the list: you sleep and dream, fully aware that you are asleep and dreaming, but the real skill lies in being able to intervene in the events of your dream and steer the plot in your favor. As a lucid dreamer, I could, with no trouble at all, see to it that the steam train hurtling toward me was brought to a halt by, say, a lady-chimp passenger with the presence of mind to interrupt her grooming and pull the emergency brake. I could arrange for my missing child, lost in the fairground throng, to reappear, bright and chirpy, on the broad shoulders of a gently smiling nurse. I could even have a burned jungle returned in dizzying time-lapse to its former chlorophyll-drenched glory and commandeered by a raucous and triumphant menagerie. I could rewrite my nightmares with every narrative device available to me, draining them of the horror that resonates deep into waking life. All the signs, all experience, all probability notwithstanding, I could make everything end happily. I could transform leaden impotence into mercurial superpower with daring and ingenuity, unafraid of even the most implausible twist. Read More
May 3, 2023 On Nature On Butterflies By Hermann Hesse Jakob Hübner. Mancipium Fugacia argante, 1806. Everything we see is expression, all of nature an image, a language and vibrant hieroglyphic script. Despite our advanced natural sciences, we are neither prepared nor trained to really look at things, being rather at loggerheads with nature. Other eras, indeed, perhaps all other eras, all earlier periods before the earth fell to technology and industry, were attuned to nature’s symbolic sorcery, reading its signs with greater simplicity, greater innocence than is our wont. This was by no means sentimental; the sentimental relationship people have with the natural world is a more recent development that may well arise from our troubled conscience with regard to that world. A sense of nature’s language, a sense of joy in the diversity displayed at every turn by life that begets life, and the drive to divine this varied language—or, rather, the drive to find answers—are as old as humankind itself. The wonderful instinct drawing us back to the dawn of time and the secret of our beginnings, instinct born of a sense of a concealed, sacred unity behind this extraordinary diversity, of a primeval mother behind all births, a creator behind all creatures, is the root of art, and always has been. Today it would seem we balk at revering nature in the pious sense of seeking oneness in manyness; we are reluctant to acknowledge this childlike drive and make jokes whenever reminded of it, yet we are likely wrong to think ourselves and contemporary humankind irreverent and incapable of piety in experiencing nature. It is just so difficult these days—really, it’s become impossible—to do what was done in the past, innocently recasting nature as some mythical force or personifying and worshipping the Creator as a father. We may also be right in occasionally deeming old forms of piety somewhat silly or shallow, believing instead that the formidable, fateful drift toward philosophy we see happening in modern physics is ultimately a pious process. Read More
June 23, 2022 On Nature The Plants Are Watching By Elvia Wilk Venus Fly Trap. Photograph by Bjorn S. Licensed under C.C.O 3.0. Tell Us What You Know One day in 1966, the CIA interrogation specialist Cleve Backster was feeling silly. On a whim, he tried clipping a polygraph wire to the leaf of a common houseplant. A polygraph, or lie detector, is typically hooked up to a person to measure factors like increased heart rate and skin moisture, in order to determine whether the subject is truthfully responding to questions. A needle corresponding to physiological changes registers a line on paper; the line will supposedly spike if a person lies. Polygraphs are finicky instruments and their reliability has been repeatedly debunked (simply being attached to one can be enough to make your heart rate jump), but they do successfully measure fluctuations in an organism’s physical state. Backster thought he might be able to incite a spike in the line of the lie detector if he somehow excited or injured the plant. He decided he might set one of its leaves on fire. But as he sat there, contemplating burning the plant, the polygraph needle jumped. Backster—who in his free time was also an acid-dropping astrologist—noted that the spike was identical to the kind elicited by a human fright response. He quickly jumped to the conclusion that the plant could experience emotions like a sentient being. And since he had only contemplated hurting the plant, he also concluded that the plant could sense his thoughts. The plant was a mind reader. Over the following decades Backster cleaved ever tighter to a theory he developed called “primary perception,” which he believed to be a form of consciousness embedded in the cells of all living beings that, at least in the case of plants, gave them a profound sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. If it had not been the sixties, perhaps his work would have been relegated to the shelves of pseudoscience, but he hit a nerve of the Whole Earth generation with its burgeoning environmental movement. Like Backster, a certain set was already primed to believe in communion with plants in the form of, say, ingesting psilocybin or peyote. Backster became a figurehead for a cultural fascination with plant consciousness. His findings about the ability of plants to sense danger, read emotion, and communicate were publicized widely, notably in the still-popular book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, but also on TV shows. His ideas were adopted by the Church of Scientology, and eventually even made it back to the CIA, which invested in its own research about plant sentience. Read More