A Dive into Friendships and Earth's Wild Heart
And I pulled an oracle card for the upcoming week.
Good morning from my little patch of earth to yours. We’re in the homestretch of Mercury retrograde! How has everyone been feeling? I’m not someone who is typically abraded by this recurring cosmic event but I’ve really been jostled around by this one, and a lot of my friends have too. Only a few more days, though, then we can exhale deeply. I’m going to a sound bath with one of my best friends tonight, then next week I’m heading to the spa with two of my best buds, and I keep thanking my lucky stars that we had the foresight to schedule these little pockets of nourishment for ourselves. Hopefully you’re able to provide yourself some small kindnesses too.
If we had a moment, this is a little something I’d pass along…
“Some families are spending more than they can afford on Disney vacations. They say it’s because they know their children won’t stay young forever.”
“Zingman is not a featured speaker at this year’s event. She will not be appearing on any panels or conducting any book signings or meet and greets. Therein lies the problem. Despite her best efforts, the slaughter of Brittany Phillips has never achieved nearly the same resonance as other American tragedies. This fact has left Zingman alone with the most horrible of mortal sensations: a twinge of envy as she watches the zeitgeist wash over the bereaved mothers who happen to have a more famous dead daughter.”
Xinhau Fu, a firefly researcher at Huazhong Agricultural University in China, recently published a study in Current Biology suggesting orb-weaver spiders have learned to lure male fireflies into their webs by manipulating the flashing signals of the trapped insects to mimic those of female fireflies. This tactic attracts more males to their webs “like a siren song attracts sailors to death,” creating a buffet of fine dining for the cunning arachnids.
At its core, life is all about play - just look at the animal kingdom
Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue, studies show: ‘There’s nowhere left untouched’
Investigations by The Washington Post have revealed that the NFL’s settlement evaluation, which promised early detection and treatment for dementia, has repeatedly denied claims from players who are suffering from, or were posthumously discovered to have, CTE.
“Of course the vast majority of us will never inherit the position we seek. Every week I meet young writers working on their first book. Often they’ve been in McSweeney’s or The Missouri Review or Best American, they’ve won the Stegner or Steinbeck, they’ve gone to Iowa or McDowell. They think they’re anointed. They think agents will fight over their manuscript. Most of them are wrong, and I think increasingly they’re coming to realize that.”
And if we were catching up, I’d share with you…
The Cut is talking all about friendship and the first story I read from their new vertical was about Snapchat being a “minefield for teen friendships.” The amount of space Snapchat takes up in the lives of teenagers astounds me. It would be insincere to suggest that I think it’s somehow worse than any other app available to download, because that’s not what drives my dismay, but I think it would also be reductive to hand wave it away as being like any other app. I, much like the teenagers interviewed for this story, was a product of my generation: I never used Facebook, but I lived on Tumblr. I didn’t begin using Twitter until 2020, but dabbled here and there with Instagram. I was even embedded in a few communities on LiveJournal and pored over my close friends list on Myspace back in those early days, which is to say that the bear trap of social media is not new to me. And yet, every piece of news I read about how the developers behind Snapchat are increasingly gamifying the app, thereby weaving themselves more deftly and deeply into the lives of adolescents and convincing them that Snapchat is a constant companion of necessity, leaves me feeling kind of uneasy.
Tumblr, when I was younger, was important to me because it was a vehicle into a community of likeminded individuals. I gained followers and made and lost friends. I learned and discovered new ideas and uncovered other parts of myself in the process. I honed my interests and shed several selves. I became smarter in some ways and dumber in others. It was a square on the tapestry of my life, if you will, but it was not the whole of my life; it also did not intersect with much of my actual, realized life, unlike Snapchat’s looming figure in the hallways of high schools. I never posted pictures of my face and only shared my actual name and whereabouts with people who became trusted friends. I took internet security seriously, even when I was young, and I’m sure this helped shield me somewhat. I know none of this is the case for everyone who shares a generation with me, but I do think our experiences were less sensitive to the volatility of social media, that something like Tumblr didn’t silo our worlds in the way Snapchat does today. Because the landscape we were playing in was largely and inherently different. Maybe it’s because I’m older and feel sure about settling into the life I am creating for myself, and though the world is still confusing to and for me, it is admittedly clearer and easier to navigate from here in adulthood than it ever was in adolescence, and so the knowledge and confidence time has afforded me also allows me to see Snapchat less as a tool teenagers can use to broaden the horizons of their burgeoning lives and more as something nefarious that is loosening their instincts and discouraging their tenacity and disrupting their interpersonal skills. I just find it all rapacious and concerning, and worry about how these kids will grow not just into themselves but beyond who they are today.
I thought what Leah, a 16-year-old who was interviewed for the story, said about the app’s presence in the lives of herself and her peers was astute: “Snapchat is really good at making everyone involved think that they care about you,” which I think best summarizes how social media as a whole functions, regardless of how casually you use it. “You send streaks to people or you snap them, then you have this idea in your head that you’re friends now. It’s like, No, you’re freaking not, man. They’re just on this app, and you are, too.”
Initially, I wanted to share with you this fascinating LIFE magazine piece about the evolution of bears, and because I know not everyone peruses Apple News (a habit that makes me feel oddly provincial) like me, while scrolling fruitlessly through LIFE’s website trying to find a copy of the story online, I instead came across this article about the cessation of abalone diving in California that references a 1944 story “about the joys of abalone diving” in Malibu; it includes really lively, nostalgia-tinged photos of actors Peter Coe, Martha O’Driscoll, and Ramsay Ames that John Florea shot for the original article during their abalone excursion at Point Dume. I also scrolled through this collection of images that LIFE photographers took of and on Catalina Island throughout the 20th century that is a delightful little treasure trove.
Scientists have collected their first high-resolution images of the North Star’s surface, and Monisha Ravisetti’s writing for space.com about this very special occurrence is sweet and poetic. I was particularly moved by this sentence: “Unlike our lonely sun, Polaris doesn't roam the universe by itself."
The New Yorker also dipped a toe into the pool of friendship discourse that’s been increasingly gathering online and published this essay about “the trouble with friends.” Throughout the recently growing arena of discussion surrounding platonic relationships, particularly among women, I’m not sure I’d yet read anything that carries a tone similar to the one used here. As a reader, the piece seemed a little jilted to me, maybe even mildly rancorous — which I mostly appreciated. It is vulnerable without a veil of sentimentalization; there’s both the causing and experiencing of pain, although without much scrutiny. To me, there was a palpable sense of exasperation and wistfulness, though halting it may be. Not everyone prioritizes friendship. Some are unmotivated to truly know the constellation of people around them; others might not even be afforded the opportunity to deepen their connections with people. Some people simply flit in and out of these dynamics. It’s all very complex, is what I’m saying here, and these particular feelings toward — these avenues in and out of — friendship are, I think, not spoken about all that often. This story didn’t speak to or for me, which it — or any piece of writing, for that matter — doesn’t have to do, but I found its candor refreshing and curious, and an undercurrent of pain that appeared to be fairly evident. What did you think?
Due to concerns about helium leaks and degraded thrusters, NASA has decided not to bring Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore back to Earth on Boeing’s Starliner. Instead, the capsule will return uncrewed after being “commanded to undock from the space station's forward port as early as Sept. 6 and [carrying] out an unpiloted re-entry and touchdown at White Sands, New Mexico, to bring the long-awaited test flight to a disappointing conclusion.” Williams and Wilmore will remain in orbit until February 2025, when they will finally be able to board SpaceX’s Crew Dragon flight. I wonder what will happen to their bodies over the next six months.
New titles I'd be drawn to at the bookstore this week
✴ Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu and published by Scribner Book Company. “Laozi's Dao De Jing was written around 400 BC by a compassionate soul in a world torn by hatred and ambition, dominated by those that yearned for apocalyptic confrontations and prized ideology over experience. By speaking out against the cleverness of elites and the arrogance of the learned, Laozi upheld the wisdom of the concrete, the humble, the quotidian, the everyday individual dismissed by the great powers of the world. Earthy, playful, and defiant, Laozi's words gave solace to souls back then, and offer comfort today. Now, this beautifully designed new edition serves as both an accessible new translation of an ancient Chinese classic and a fascinating account of renowned novelist Ken Liu's transformative experience while wrestling with the classic text.”
✴ Planes Flying Over a Monster: Essays by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman, and published by Catapult. “In ten intimate essays, Daniel Saldaña París explores the cities he has lived in, each one home to a new iteration of himself. In Mexico City he's a young poet eager to prove himself. In Montreal--an opioid addict desperate for relief. In Madrid--a lonely student seeking pleasure in grotesque extremes. These now diverging, now coalescing selves raise questions: Where can we find authenticity? How do we construct the stories that define us? What if our formative memories are closer to fiction than truth?”
✴ Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen, published by Tin House Books. “Kenzie Allen's Cloud Missives renders an unchartable landscape, ‘wide as a child's face,’ in poems that enact Indigenous autoethnography and a profoundly embodied recovery operation. These are poems of revelation and repair, twenty-first-century poems that extend the work of the lyric into the territory of 'elegy against elegy, ' love songs written to drive out violence and exoticization masked as love, and poems that wake to the desire to awaken.” — Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
✴ Sacrificial Animals by Kailee Pedersen, published by St. Martin’s Press. “Inspired by Kailee Pedersen's own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up alongside her family's farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores an ancient Chinese mythology.”
✴ The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country by Rosie Schaap, published by Mariner Books. "The Slow Road North is for anyone who has ever felt like a fossil preserved in amber after losing a loved one, stuck and isolated. Rosie Schaap's exquisite memoir about uprooting her life in Brooklyn and finding another home in Northern Ireland is written with her signature sagacious warmth. As the author immerses herself in her newfound community, she captures the nuances of life in a small village and discovers that grief isn't something to be moved through alone." — Michele Filgate, editor of What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About
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Here’s some of what I’ve been grazing on
This playing with my bedrooms lights turned to a soft amber setting, eyes closed, curtains drawn, belly full of peppermint cacao. ꩜ And Alice Coltrane’s Kirtan: Turiya Sings when I want to be listening to something potent and unfettered. 𑁍 I wish I could remember where I learned of this digital copy of a book of Palestinian wildflowers, but it is really beautiful, and you will be better off for scrolling through it, I promise. ꩜ Remina Two by BEA1991 has been roaming through the frenetic spaces of my mind, leaving in its wake a relaxed atmosphere. The first time I heard it, I thought it sounded as if a balmy night off the coast of some ancient city had been bottled and distilled into an airy, bewitching song. Then I watched the music video, read the sort of history behind it, and discovered that I wasn’t too far off. 𑁍 On Saturday my friend and I watched Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie for the first time in a while for both of us, and it was a forgotten treasure rediscovered (no pun intended). I hadn’t remembered how good it is! I’m not sure that as a tween — when I think was the last time I saw it — I actually realized it is for me a truly affecting movie and not just something that is pretty to look at and tender on the cinematic bone. We both felt activated by our viewing experience and I’m really glad to have shared in that sort of rejuvenation alongside my friend.
Sour Reflections
Forgive me my sins, for I have decided to push our more formal book club discussion to next Sunday, September 1. This period in my life has been pretty emotionally and physically taxing, and I have been unable to finish Hangman or give it the proper attention that I feel it deserves. So, this is where I share that fact with you and allow for a bit more time to stretch out ahead of us. I will also be taking next week off, so there will be no letter next Sunday. I’ll see anyone who’s participating in August’s book club in our dedicated chat on the 1st, and the rest of you on September 8! I’ll miss you while I’m away.
I know today’s letter was a little short and sweet but here’s a plant oracle card I pulled for the week ahead:
First off, that Jean-Luc Ponty song simultaneously woke me up more and also made me feel like I was walking through the hazy atmosphere of a dream🕯️. The microplastics article really depressed me and it's scary how much so many people have embraced it as their reality with no hope for the future.. :(. I did love the articles/pieces on friendship (the way this retrograde got all of us feeling some type of way about friendship!) from various perspectives, and seeing the pictures taken in Catalina Island (she's been on my mind an awful lot lately). Also, how funny, on my drive to work last week I was listening to the Amelie soundtrack and thinking how it's a movie that must be watched with friends rather than alone. What a sweet experience you got to share with your friend in watching it together :') 🪷. Thank you for an intriguing and interesting post as always, Mars!🐇💭