Last month, a retired UFC fighter began claiming, in a series of images posted to Instagram, that his family had been murdered and replaced with actors. Going as far as requesting assistance from the local police department, he displayed side-by-side photos of his relatives, claiming that the image on the left depicted a real, now-missing brother, while the image on the right showed an impostor, he wrote, an uninvited stand-in.

While there are various explanations for why he might make such claims, one convincing possibility is that the aging combat-sports veteran has developed Capgras syndrome, an unusual disorder in which someone becomes convinced that their friends and loved ones have been surreptitiously replaced by imitators or duplicates. Capgras has been described as a “delusion of doubles,” and it can extend even to non-human creatures—pets, wildlife—as well as to objects, such as the belief that your favorite possession has been replaced by a knock-off or forgery. Because it operates in an anxious haze of counterfeits and replicas, Capgras syndrome suggests an “existential conundrum—the question of what makes an original different from a copy,” as Liesl Schillinger wrote in a review of Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances, about a man with Capgras. In literary or even scriptural terms, we might say that Capgras syndrome is when the Friend or the Beloved becomes the Adversary: a sinister replacement, tricking you with demonic ingenuity.

Capgras syndrome, or the belief that something previously real is now fake, seems increasingly useful as an interpretive lens for much of what is happening today on technical, religious, and even climatological fronts. The Anthropocene, for example, is an alleged new era in the Earth’s planetary history in which human beings have become so widespread and so powerful an influence that they have achieved the status of a geological force. Seen abstractly, the Anthropocene represents a transition point after which “nature,” as such, becomes fundamentally contaminated by the artificial or synthetic. It becomes, as it were, Capgrasian. Humanity now looks out upon the world, only to see that world’s anemic replacement: not real but counterfeit. Not original but a forgery. A surreptitious double.

To explore this from a theological angle, when I first heard that Pope Francis had written an encyclical on climate change—Laudato si’—I tried to imagine, before reading it, what a specifically Christian message about climate change might entail. The most likely approach, I assumed, would be that humanity has become lost in an idolatry so extreme that the effects have taken on literally planetary significance—that the world has been replaced by the artificial and unholy, and that this has happened because we allowed ourselves to become hypnotized by our own creations. Enraptured by adversarial synthetics, we lost sight of the divinely real. All of the things we now covet have mesmerized us, locking us in a state of sinful distraction so complete that, through climate change, the world is becoming hostile to our presence. Worship false idols long enough—consume too much, want too much, hoard too much—and the world becomes deadened, identical in outward appearance but fundamentally emptied of life and spirit. The absolute limit of idolatry: total world-replacement. The Earth, become unearthly.

No longer just a question of atmospheric carbon, ocean acidification, or degrees celsius, climate change and the greater Anthropocene it occurs within become symbolic of the Fall—a world definitionally limited to Man, an uncanny valley stripped of any presence of divinity. (Perhaps I was reading the encyclical impatiently, but I recall being disappointed by its almost Thunbergian focus on scientific talking points, as well as what I perceived to be an absence of more powerful metaphoric takeaways—maybe it’s time for a re-read.)

In any case, it strikes me that one way to describe the current, strange planetary moment we are in would be to say that we are willingly stumbling forward into a kind of climatological Capgras syndrome. The atmosphere is now semi-artificial; even rock itself, the very geology of the planet, is being marked by new synthetic compounds and anthropogenic minerals, such as plastiglomerate. Seen this way, what is climate change—metaphorically speaking—if not the Capgrasian replacement of the real with the inimicably artificial? What is the Anthropocene—again, metaphorically speaking—if not an encounter with a kind of psychotic double or sinister twin, a planet coextensive with and identical to the Earth but that no longer offers earthly solace?

I’m reminded of a trip last spring, when I had the pleasure of hiking the length of Loch Ness with my wife and a small group of friends. It was a four-night journey along a network of forest roads, past waterfalls and ravines, beneath grey skies and plentiful Scottish rain. What I had not known before we began, however, was that the forest we’d be hiking through was actually a timber plantation. Regularly spaced, eerily identical trees surrounded us, bearing almost no signs of animal life. No deer, very little birdsong, not even squirrels. It looked like a forest and smelled like a forest, but somehow was not a forest. It was, we might say, a Capgras ecosystem. A replicant landscape.

Although these comparisons falter when taken too literally, it is nevertheless possible to see Capgras syndrome everywhere today, to the extent that Capgras seems to be the guiding logic of the Anthropocene. Consider the rise of artificial mega-constellations, whereby “the stars of the sky compete with thousands of satellites… with companies planning to launch orbiters by the tens of thousands to transmit internet and other communications signals back to Earth.” Even the heavens are now unnatural, so to speak, false stars misleading us with their ersatz zodiac. Capgras constellations. Or consider the rise of chatbots, AI assistants, and smart appliances, all masquerading as others with whom we can engage. And, of course, many people now prefer responsive objects over human interlocutors.

The logic of Capgras is that an adversarial double has arrived—a changeling, a malevolent twin—a contagious replacement that spreads through and consumes the world, while nevertheless appearing identical to what it’s chased away. An insurgent imitation, confronting the world it seeks to replace. This fear, that we have been taken in by an impostor, animates so many of today’s concerns, from how our ecosystems are changing or whether the stars themselves are now something other than they purport to be, to whether our online connections—the acquaintances we follow, the journalists we read, the strangers we hope to date—are actual human beings or merely bots. It is the logic of the surrogate, the replacement, the double, the counterfeit, the simulated, and the faux. It is the logic of Capgras.

Briefly, I want to loop back to the theological. Two quick stories come to mind. The first is something that the writer and theologian Duncan Reyburn posted on social media last year, a remarkable quotation by Scottish poet and minister George MacDonald: “If the Father says, ‘My child, that is a stone; it is no bread;’ and the child answer, ‘I am sure it is bread; I want it,’ may it not be well that he should try his ‘bread’?”

There is something chilling in this—allowing a person to try something, even if, or precisely because, they are lost in delusion, watching someone learn the lesson of first-hand consequence—but it is an image deeply relevant to the present discussion. In our intensifying Anthropocene, our denuding of the world of life and biological richness, our replacement of the wild with the produced, of the different with the same, of the chaotic with the controllable, we are in the process of learning that the stone we wanted to try is not the bread we hungered for. A Capgrasian moment appears to be approaching, in which the entirety of the world beyond ourselves—from the Earth’s atmosphere to engineered species haunting managed landscapes we ourselves have planted—has been demented from within by artificiality. We will interact only with a psychotic imitation of the world; we will eat only stone masquerading as bread.

Finally, something perhaps more hopeful. In a 1978 essay called “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” science fiction novelist and Gnostic paranoiac Philip K. Dick described what he called “fake fakes.” In Disneyland, he wrote, “there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions… The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces… What if the entire place, by a miracle of God’s power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible?” It is the reverse-Capgrasification of the world, in the service of restoring life and divinity. Real birds set loose in a demonic simulation.

This re-eruption of the real amidst its simulations and copies—a cure for Capgras, so to speak—has extraordinary revelatory promise, even if it remains tactically opaque. After all, how does one actually do this? Releasing songbirds in Disneyland is a prank, not a philosophy. Is it possible to out-fake fakery, to preempt the rise of the limitless copy, and to rediscover not the simulant but what the simulant replaced?

AUDIOGRAPHY

As with previous newsletters, I thought I’d end with a couple musical recommendations.

Both because of its heaving, melancholic power and because of its thematic relevance to the discussion above, consider spending some time with the soaring buzzsaw ambience of “that had from eternity been the same and could not be separated or cut into two” by Adam Badí Donoval, taken from his forthcoming album, a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided. It’s abrasive, to be sure, and certainly not for everyone, this short track sizzling with a raw, electric darkness, limping forward in frustrated loops.

Changing genres, I linked to the music of Hieroglyphic Being in a previous newsletter, but a recent track called “U Done Lost Yo Got Dam Mind” is so good, so relentless, and so rewarding of repeated listens that I feel compelled to include it here. Take the growling menace of the Donoval track, soldered onto a bleak and wild switchboard of techno, then play it loud and often.

There will be no end to the amount of things written about the Los Angeles fires, which started 48 hours ago and are still burning, but I have been fighting back the urge to text, email, and call so many people that I thought I might as well gather my thoughts in one place.

The fires began two days ago, first in Pacific Palisades, in the coastal foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, just west of Los Angeles, then another fire further east, in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Pasadena, where the flames rapidly spread down into a city called Altadena. Several others broke out not long after, including, as I write this, a growing fire north of L.A., near a city called Sylmar. In all cases, the fires were driven by extreme seasonal winds that allegedly reached 100mph at times, which, if sustained, would have qualified as a Category 2 hurricane.

My wife and I live very close to Pasadena, technically within walking distance, which means that we are just outside the evacuation warning zone for one of the fires. The main barrier protecting our neighborhood is, of all things, a freeway—this is as Los Angeles a thing as I could imagine, in this city where automotive infrastructure can act as a shield, a medieval fortress wall, against the unfamiliar or unwanted. The winds that night shook our house, whistling through even small gaps in the carpentry, our chimney moaning for hours. Debris began landing on the hillside behind us—other people’s trash and plastic bags, empty soda cans, burned leaves and branches, and, eventually, snowfalls of ash. Then the smell of smoke finally hit—first quite subtly, but growing worse and worse, an atmospheric effect powered simply by prevailing winds but that gave the illusion the fires were getting closer, evoking something almost primal in terms of panic and alarm.

Somehow we slept, with our emergency bags packed and bottles of water everywhere, my brain addled from constantly refreshing social media feeds to see if the fire near us was spreading. That one is called the Eaton Fire, as it ignited in a place called Eaton Canyon, the same canyon where my wife took me birdwatching two years ago as a birthday present, a gorgeous river valley that flows down out of the San Gabriels, filled with wild quail and towhees and kinglets and jays, many of whom must surely have burned to death in confusion and terror while flames consumed everything around them. We woke up to a text from a neighbor in our street’s group chat asking if we should now go ahead and begin evacuating or if we were still waiting for the official order, which we took to mean, holy fuck, the fires spread further than we thought last night, everyone’s about to flee, and we nearly missed it due to sleeping. I threw the bedroom curtains open to see dark orange clouds so low they looked like fog, with heavy smoke and ash passing overhead, and my hands began shaking. But, at least for now, we remain both at home and safe.

The smell outside is overpowering and inescapable; the thing with air, you realize when you can’t breathe it, is that it is coextensive with everything around you and that suffocation is as much a spatial phenomenon as a respiratory one, because you can’t get out of it. There is nowhere else to go. Ash is now literally everywhere, nearly a centimeter deep on our car windshield alone. When we step outside, our shoes leave black footprints.

And we are the lucky ones. Both blessed and fortunate, we have only ash, fear, and inconvenience as our complaints. But thousands of homes are gone, churches and synagogues have burned, schools and assisted-living facilities were destroyed. Elderly people in wheelchairs were rushed across smoke-filled intersections in the darkness as embers blew past on hurricane-force winds. A woman was rescued running alone through an empty neighborhood while the trees and houses around her burned, filmed by the driver who saved her. And the animals—ground creatures that can’t run fast enough or fly away, that don’t know where to go or how to find safety, all paths blocked by embers and toxic debris, even the mourning doves and sparrows outside our own house here rustling through what looks like charcoal, a few squirrels nearly blackened as if they slept inside chimneys—not yet realizing perhaps that the landscape that so recently fed and protected them is gone. So many will starve to death or die in fear, hiding inside the burnt ruins of houses and trees, looking for clean water but licking firefighting foam, their tongues coated with ash.

Worse, the fires are still growing—even if, as with the Eaton Fire, at a slowed pace—but the thing that really frightens me is that, until there is substantial rain, which we have not had since last spring, even if these particular fires are extinguished, all the mountains surrounding Los Angeles will remain bone-dry, all the plants growing up their slopes so desiccated they crack like peanut shells, which means that the risk will still be waiting. Some asshole with a cigarette butt, or a teenager who thinks it’s funny to light a firecracker outside, could start this up all over again. There’s an entire mountain range in the middle of town where my wife and I hike several times a month that, so far, remains unscathed, but all its hills are covered in oak trees and ceanothus and sage, dry as chalk. Even with total fire containment, without rain it’s difficult to believe these fires will really be “over.” We’ll just be waiting for the next flare-up.

And the damage is absolutely mind-boggling. Huge swaths of Altadena are in ruins, as is an estimated 75% of Pacific Palisades. A colleague of mine had to flee her house in Santa Monica, where a fire such as this would have been science fiction just five years ago, and my wife and I are hearing more and more stories, countless stories, of people who lost everything. Drone shots—which have their own downsides, as drones interfere with firefighting aircraft, yet the aesthetic power of the aerial shot is such that every dickhead with a new toy now wants to go out and shoot things for their Instagram fans—show whole neighborhoods scrubbed down to chimneys and foundation walls. Entire shopping malls and high schools are gone. The word “rebuilding” is used, but it seems meaningless to me right now, not to mention logistically impossible. Many people have already said that there will be a Los Angeles before and after these fires, but I think that might understate the changes coming and the effects of what’s occurred. I don’t know.

There wasn’t water in the hydrants for fire crews to use. Viral footage showed one firefighter reduced to using what appeared to be a luxury handbag filled with water to douse the flames as, for whatever reason, his equipment was inadequate or simply did not work. There are obviously political reasons for this, as well as technical ones and, in particular, environmental ones—the landscape is as dry as paper—and all of this will, and needs to, be parsed in detail later. Whether the heads of municipal departments or the state’s Governor or all of the above simply prioritized the wrong things or looked the other way, or, of course, whether they did everything exactly right but the conditions of apocalypse simply overwhelmed the human capacity to plan ahead, we don’t know yet. I have to assume it’s a little bit of everything. But you can’t call it “rebuilding” if you don’t know what went wrong in the first place; you’re just temporarily huddling up again and pretending to be a city until the next disaster strikes.

I think one of the casualties of the fires will be the feeling that Los Angeles exists in a time of abundance, one where residents have leeway not to worry about existential risk, where we can confidently assume a disaster like this won’t break out again while we’re sleeping. Maybe that sounds like everyday trauma to you, or like I’m describing overly-coddled Americans so sheltered in a state of numbness and comfort that many have only now awoken to a world of hostility and pain brutally indifferent to their expectations. Maybe. Or maybe you’ve already been through disasters like this yourself and it just sounds like I’m whining. But encountering a world that has been instantly, catastrophically reformatted to have no place for you is not something people universally experience, even if it’s something you yourself once lived through, and, when this occurs to millions of people at once over an entire geographic area—Los Angeles County alone is four times the size of Rhode Island—the coming effects on morale, political affiliation, and personal stability seem extraordinary to me.

But, then, I’m writing this in the midst of something that has no real end in sight, inside a house filled with red sunlight, our clothes reeking of smoke, looking outside at thirsty, baffled animals discolored by ash. People are cooped up in airport hotels watching their own homes burn down on live webcams. Los Angeles Fire Department bulldozers are pushing luxury cars out of the way on mountain roads, abandoned there by drivers who fled on foot, in the process trapping their neighbors behind them. Lost pets whose owners evacuated without them have been found wandering through ruined neighborhoods in confusion, their homes nowhere to be seen, all visual landmarks gone. In many areas, the water is not just unsafe to drink, it’s unsafe to boil and drink, contaminated by heavy chemicals.

If I’ve already emailed you some variation of all this, thank you again for reaching out and listening; and, to everyone affected by this or other tragedies, stay strong and stay safe.

A DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA

For those of you in Los Angeles—assuming the timing of this isn’t affected by the wildfires [NOTE: This event has been postponed, most likely until March 2025; stay tuned for updates]—I’ll be moderating a Q&A with author Deb Miller Landau at Vroman’s in Pasadena next week. Her recent book, A Devil Went Down to Georgia, is about the 1987 murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan. In what Oprah selected as one of the Best True Crime Books of 2024, Landau explores “the shocking events that followed Lita’s murder in 1987, including the surprising lack of evidence, racial bias in the justice system, and the international manhunt for Lita’s killer.”

Join us at 7pm on Friday, January 17th, at Vroman’s—but please check the Vroman’s website nearer to the date to ensure that nothing has changed due to the ongoing disasters here.

WIRELESS PUPPETRY, OR ROBOTICS FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

A somewhat random topic I’ve been following for a while now is the creation of robots not by assembling inert parts into a coherent machine that is then powered by an internal motor, but by altering a collection of objects such that they become responsive to an external force, such as a magnetic field. The latter could be compared to a marionette, but without strings—wireless puppetry, perhaps.

Examples would be this “glue-like magnetic spray” that “can turn objects, such as pills, into mini robots that can be controlled by magnets and navigated through the body,” or these “robots made from sticky tape and dust” that “can morph into various shapes under the direction of a magnetic field. They may one day be able to crawl into computers to fix broken circuits or even inside the human stomach to apply therapeutic patches to gastric ulcers.”

There’s a strange, even delightful magic to this that captivates me: the idea that you might be able to sprinkle magnetic particles onto otherwise unrelated physical objects, then drive or control those objects using an external force. They become temporarily united—a constellation, not a machine—until you turn the external force off, at which point they return to dormant matter. When needed again, however, you switch the magnetic field back on and the “robot” reassembles.

At its most basic, this sounds very likely to be the basis for future children’s toys; more dramatically, this could be the premise of an interesting heist film, in which the target of a sophisticated theft is carried away by an externally-driven collection of nearby objects; at its most nefarious, this will very likely end up weaponized in some terrible but clever way by a high-tech military group. Unbeknownst to you, for example, the seemingly passive objects in the room around you are ready to be triggered into malevolent action by the appearance of an externally-controlled magnetic field, at which point they rise up against you in a moment of horror. Imagine the locked-door mysteries of the near-future: a murder weapon that disappears simply because its constituent parts deconstellate. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by way of DARPA.

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM

Finally, in my previous newsletters, I ended with ambient music recommendations. Maybe it’s the fires, but I thought I’d recommend a couple tracks in a different mode.

First is the superb and melancholy “Life Is But A Dream,” from 2013, by the Canadian singer-songwriter Tess Parks. Continuing that atmosphere is “Feel Alright,” released in 2024 by Eazyhead, from the Philippines.

Enjoy, play them loud, and take care.

A RICH INTERIOR LIFE, OR: MEN LOOKING AT MAPS

I can no longer find the original image, as either my Googling skills have degraded over time or it’s just impossible to find older content on the internet now, but several years ago someone posted a photo on social media of a bus filled with passengers where every single person is looking down at a phone or tablet computer. They aren’t talking amongst themselves or taking in the scenery or doing anything other than staring at a screen.

There is one other passenger, however—a Golden Retriever, if memory serves—sitting alone in a window seat, looking outside with a dopey grin on its face, fur ruffling in the breeze. The caption said something like, “No one understands my rich interior life.”

This Retriever with a rich interior life came to mind last week when an absolutely idiotic series of articles began appearing online, starting with a piece in GQ about men “raw-dogging”—or “barebacking”—long-haul flights by watching nothing but the in-flight map the whole time. No films, no TV shows, no headphones or books, seemingly no distractions at all. Just geography. This was presented as so alien, so psychologically mystifying, that half a dozen other writers, including CNN’s Lilit Marcus, picked up the story as a supposedly newsworthy trend (and, of course, I am adding to the slop by posting about it here).

According to GQ’s Kate Lindsay, looking at maps while traveling by air is hyper-masculine—something only a Man’s Man could do—and if you don’t know what men are, by the way, she reminds us that we’re “the gender that brought you frat hazing and Logan Paul.” According to Gabi Conti, covering the story for a site called Betches, if a man seems interested in cartography on a plane, this should raise a “new red flag” for women. She asks tough questions about those of us who are into maps, such as, “What are you trying to prove by doing this? That you have nothing going on in your brain?” Elle’s Rebecca Mitchell followed up on the alleged trend, writing about this behavior as a “mysterious thing” men now do, something clearly intended, in her eyes, as a “heroic display” for other passengers.

It’s worth noting that these articles do not criticize fellow frequent flyers who might spend a journey reading a single long novel or listening to music on headphones; these articles specifically and only take issue with men looking at maps. Appreciating aerial views of the Earth’s surface while flying over that surface is apparently a sign of cognitive decline, if not outright psychosis, they imply, whereas rewatching a corny syrup of bad Marvel movies, or reading Elin Hilderbrand, is proof of elite-tier consciousness.

I am genuinely curious what these writers would make of the sight of silent men looking at maps for long periods of time in different architectural settings, such as a library or home office, with no music playing and no TV on in the background, just raw-dogging it, really barebacking things, maybe spinning a globe for a couple hours to see where it lands or flipping through a world atlas to get a better sense of the planet, learning about foreign borders and where obscure archipelagoes really are. “Seriously, are men okay?” Elle asks in the universally affected tone of today’s worst online writing. Looking at maps is “super creepy,” Betches agrees.

In any case, even the most basic activities associated, rightly or wrongly, with men are being exoticized as alien behaviors that allegedly no one—especially women—can understand. This has come to the point that quietly minding your own business on an airplane, exploring an interest in cartography, is considered a “red flag.” “I find this concept terrifying,” Conti writes. “What are they plotting?!”

IMAGE: Ladies, look away—here is a man raw-dogging a map. “Cartographer consults key maps filed for reference in making maps for paper,” according to the U.S. Library of Congress. Major red flags.

ELEVATORS GONE WILD

In an example of quiet focus and sustained curiosity that will likely shock the previously mentioned authors, Stephen Jacob Smith wrote an op-ed for the New York Times last week about his “mission to understand the American elevator.”

Smith, who posts on X under the handle @marketurbanism, suggests that elevators are behind the soaring costs and slowing pace of U.S. construction. “Elevators in North America,” he writes, “have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system.”

He points out how few elevators the U.S. actually has, compared to Europe—“the United States is tied for total installed devices with Italy and Spain,” nations that are orders of magnitude smaller than the United States—as well as what it costs to build and maintain elevators here. “A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City,” Smith explains, “compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. A six-stop model will set you back more than three times as much in Pennsylvania as in Belgium.”

The rest of Smith’s piece explains why. He touches on immigration and visa reform, the uniquely combative U.S. legal landscape, and other aspects of urban regulation that he convincingly argues are holding back the country’s construction market. For example:

The United States and Canada have also marooned themselves on a regulatory island for elevator parts and designs. Much of the rest of the world has settled on following European elevator standards, which have been harmonized and refined over generations. Some of these differences between American and global standards result in only minor physical differences, while others add the hassle of a separate certification process without changing the final product.

If physics is the same everywhere and there are no measurable differences in safety outcomes, why reinvent the wheel (or elevator)? America’s reputation for unbridled capitalism and a stereotype of Europe as a backwater of overregulation are often turned on their head in the construction sector.

The piece is worth reading in full. Note of caution: don’t sit there for several minutes afterward, thinking about Smith’s op-ed, if you read this on an airplane with nothing but a map on your screen. That would be super creepy.

CONTACT BURN

Asphalt-centric cities are becoming so hot that “more people are suffering serious burns from contact with hot outdoor surfaces,” the New York Times write. “For some, the burns are so extensive that they prove fatal, according to burn experts.” If you pass out from heat-stroke and fall down in a city such as Phoenix in high summer, “‘Your body just literally sits there and cooks,’ [Dr. Clifford C. Sheckter of Stanford] added. ‘When somebody finally finds you, you’re already in multisystem organ failure.’”

In an earlier post, I wrote about—and recommended—a book called Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush. Although another recent book comes to mind, one that I have not yet read—The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell, which could very well do exactly what I’m about to describe—I’d imagine that Rush’s journalistic approach would be incredibly successful in the context of writing about urban contact burns. More specifically, Rush’s methodology for her book Rising was to ask people “to tell me their flood stories,” without getting into larger, instantly partisan arguments about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Tell me your burn stories, you could say to people living in increasingly sunburnt cities.

“‘You pass out on a surface that is burning you, and you don’t wake up,’ Mr. Steinbeck [fire chief of Clark County, Nevada] said. ‘It just keeps burning you.’ (…) Some [people burned by pavement] are diabetic and have limited sensation in their lower legs, and don’t realize their feet are burning as they walk barefoot,” the New York Times writes. It’s easy to dread what this is also doing to wild and domesticated animals, alike.

“I think to myself, ‘These patients are going to require a lot more work and a lot more extensive care than the other types of burn injuries,’ said Dr. Saquib, whose hospital has also seen admissions rise in recent years [Saquib recently moved to Las Vegas from Florida to practice medicine]. Last Thursday, about half of the 31 patients hospitalized with burns had suffered pavement burns.”

Contact burns like this are a story of infrastructure, transportation, municipal policies toward homelessness, and, in the end, atmospheric carbon, all feeding into the realization that badly-designed urban landscapes can fatally burn the creatures living there. This also reveals that, through the materials we’ve chosen and the kinds of spaces we’ve created, we unknowingly spent several generations constructing ovens in waiting, disguised as cities—and that, most likely, burn liability will become a design parameter for urban planners in the near future.

LIGHT WITHOUT, SHADOWS WITHIN

Some of the most interesting interior-mapping techniques today involve incidental views, often obtained indirectly. A few years back, I wrote about how light reflecting off of “shiny” objects can be mathematically unfolded, so to speak, to reveal what was in the room around that object at the time the photo was taken. A foil potato-chip bag, for example, a faceted champagne flute, a birthday balloon, or a round Christmas-tree ornament: place this sort of object in a room, hit it with light, record the reflections, and, after some toggling, you can “construct a rough picture of the room around it,” as Scientific American reported at the time.

Or consider “computational keyhole imaging.” “Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging and tracking is an emerging technology that allows the shape or position of objects around corners or behind diffusers to be recovered from transient, time-of-flight measurements,” we read, courtesy of Stanford Computational Imaging Lab researchers. However, they add, those techniques have limits. “Here, we propose a new approach, dubbed keyhole imaging, that captures a sequence of transient measurements along a single optical path, for example, through a keyhole. Assuming that the hidden object of interest moves during the acquisition time, we effectively capture a series of time-resolved projections of the object’s shape from unknown viewpoints.”

The metaphoric—even Platonic—aspects of this are simply too good not to highlight: something we cannot approach exists in a space we cannot enter, but now this invisible, hidden, and unknowable presence can at least be glimpsed, if not modeled in its resolute entirety.

More prosaically, this technology seems to fall somewhere between avant-garde cinematography, espionage, and advanced mathematical modeling—and, from what I’ve read, it sounds like these techniques are in their Eadweard Muybridge phase. It is still very early, in other words, and we have not yet seen their full technical potential.

The indirect observation of hidden objects in distant interiors fascinates me, so I was interested to see last winter that WiFi signals bouncing around a room can also be analyzed to find and map 3D objects in that room. WiFi, of course, has been used as a burglar alarm for nearly a decade, but, with sufficient resolution, has since become a sort of remote-sensing tool for accurate 3D mapping of closed spaces—or, in the words of New Scientist, WiFi can now be used to “decode the shape of even motionless objects from the other side of walls by looking at the unique shape of their Wi-Fi reflections.”

The technique relies on the fact that when radio waves hit a sharp or tightly curved edge, they are diffracted into a very specific shape of outgoing rays known as a Keller cone. This shape can be measured and mathematically traced back to its origin, revealing the location of the point that created it.

[Yasamin Mostofi at the University of California, Santa Barbara] says that with enough Keller cones, it is possible to build up a 3D map of points along the edges of objects within a room. In tests, the team used three off-the-shelf Wi-Fitransmitters to send wireless signals into the area and recorded them using a tower of Wi-Fi receivers mounted on a remote-controlled car. The researchers used the car to move the receivers backwards and forwards, allowing them to measure reflected signals as if they had a large 2D grid receiver.

This description of the “2D grid receiver” implies to me that these sorts of tools will soon be both portable and easily deployed outside of a laboratory, useful even in unusual circumstances to “scan” inside an architectural space and to determine what exists inside. It will likely also have police uses—scanning residential homes, using those homes’ own WiFi networks, to locate a barricaded suspect or a kidnapping victim—as well as criminal implications. Roll up to a house, assess its WiFi network, then set to work analyzing shadows and reflections to find particular objects throughout the locked interior.

But I wanted to end with an example on a very different scale. There was an article in the excellent Quanta Magazine last year about “invisible cosmic structures” that are being revealed, hidden in what’s known as cosmic microwave background radiation (or CMB). CMB “continues to stream through the sky in all directions,” we read, “broadcasting a snapshot of the early universe that’s picked up by dedicated telescopes and even revealed in the static on old cathode-ray televisions.” Recall the WiFi signals we were talking about, above, that themselves stream through a particular room in all directions, and the fact that these signals can reveal objects or structures in that room.

Over the course of its nearly 14-billion-year journey, the light from the CMB has been stretched, squeezed and warped by all the matter in its way. Cosmologists are beginning to look beyond the primary fluctuations in the CMB light to the secondary imprints left by interactions with galaxies and other cosmic structures.

Now recall that reflections—or “secondary imprints”—bouncing back to us from shiny objects in a distant space, such as a Christmas-tree ornament, a silver balloon, or a foil potato-chip bag, can be pieced together again to reveal what was inside the room at the time the image was taken. Imagine this on the scale of the cosmos, and you begin to find at least conceptual overlaps between these two technologies.

“The universe is really a shadow theater in which the galaxies are the protagonists, and the CMB is the backlight,” a cosmologist named Emmanuel Schaan explains to Quanta, describing a type of research known as “backlight science.” (Quanta also links to a “Backlight Mission” spacecraft initiative, dedicated to “backlight astronomy,” which, as per all of the above, sounds cinematographic in nature: imaging distant objects indirectly through their shadows and reflections.)

AUDIOGRAPHY

Continuing the ambient music theme of the last few posts, I thought I’d link a few tracks by “investigative sound artist” Jeff Surak. Much of his output can be abrasive—in the vein of what I might call proof-of-concept ambient, i.e. ambient music the technical creation of which is often more interesting than the final aesthetic results—but quieter tracks, such as the modular, staircase rhythms of “spaces that are filled” or the silvery luminescence of “love and production” (which, to my mind, is what a “backlight” cosmic mapping survey might sound like), or the dawn chorus collage of horns in “slaughter on 10th street,” are great places to start.

As a bonus track, I recently rediscovered the eerie darkness of “Gold Painted House” by David Tagg, and recommend giving it a few plays.

Till next time!

Thanks to Nicola Twilley for pointing out the likelihood of urban “burn liability.” Buy her book, Frostbite, today! This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links, meaning I might receive a small percentage of any ensuing sales.

IMAGE: An “unsurveyed area,” as seen on a 1929 USGS map of the Hunter, Texas, region.

LOOPHOLES, ENCLAVES, ZONES

I’m a sucker for stories of territorial loopholes, where, for whatever reason, a piece of land is left outside a given legal regime or otherwise skipped over by the powers that be. A canonical example of this would be the strangely self-overlapping villages of Baarle-Hartog—about which I’ve written elsewhere—where tiny splotches of the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively, are marbled through and around one another, such that certain buildings have an international border passing straight through them, where a door on one side of a building is in one country while its back windows are in another, and so on.

Another example comes from where New York State meets Québec. Some houses there all but straddle the border, meaning that, at least theoretically, the people who live there can smuggle goods internationally without leaving home. (Indeed, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police apparently now “keeps an eye on real estate transactions and activities in the area,” for that very reason.)

An arguably even more fantastic example of a territorial loophole comes to us from the American West. (I first saw this one back in 2012, I believe by way of Bruce Schneier’s blog) According to legal theorist Brian C. Kalt, “there is a 50-square-mile swath of Idaho in which one might be able to commit felonies with impunity.”

This particular zone of legal exception, Kalt writes, “sits at the perimeter of Yellowstone National Park. The problem with Yellowstone is that it does not quite fit in Wyoming: Nine percent of the park overflows into Montana (about 260 square miles’ worth) and Idaho (about 50 square miles). The park was established in 1872, well before the three states were added to the Union in 1889 and 1890. When the states were admitted, each ceded exclusive jurisdiction of its portion of Yellowstone to the federal government. Yellowstone is a federal enclave, in other words, and the states cannot enforce state law there.” Further, although Yellowstone technically straddles three states, the entire park is considered part of the jurisdiction of Wyoming, which “makes the District of Wyoming the only district court that includes land in multiple states.”

Kalt’s hypothetical perfect crime proceeds from what I might call spatio-Constitutional reasoning: “Say that you are in the Idaho portion of Yellowstone, and you decide to spice up your vacation by going on a crime spree. You make some moonshine, you poach some wildlife, you strangle some people and steal their picnic baskets. You are arrested, arraigned in the park, and bound over for trial in Cheyenne, Wyoming before a jury drawn from the Cheyenne area. But Article III, Section 2 plainly requires that the trial be held in Idaho, the state in which the crime was committed. Perhaps if you fuss convincingly enough about it, the case would be sent to Idaho. But the Sixth Amendment then requires that the jury be from the state (Idaho) and the district (Wyoming) in which the crime was committed. In other words, the jury would have to be drawn from the Idaho portion of Yellowstone National Park, which, according to the 2000 Census, has a population of precisely zero.”

Unable to face a jury of peers, in other words, you would find yourself in the midst of a kind of a combined spatial and legal crisis. (The complete Kalt essay goes into much greater detail—apologies for the ultra-short summary.)

This “Yellowstone loophole,” as Kalt calls it, itself came to mind recently due to another legal paper called, “Is West Virginia Constitutional?” (Huge thanks to Tim Hwang for the heads up.) That paper does, indeed, ask if the very existence of West Virginia is a violation of the U.S. Constitution: “When the Commonwealth of Virginia announced it was seceding from the Union, the northwestern corner of Virginia formed a rump government-in-exile, declared itself the lawful government of Virginia, and gave ‘Virginia’s’ consent to the creation of a new State of West Virginia consisting of essentially the same northwestern corner of old Virginia. Congress and the Lincoln administration recognized the northwestern rump as the legitimate government of Virginia, and voted to admit West Virginia as a State.” The question, then, is “whether West Virginia is legitimately a State of the Union or is instead an illegal, breakaway province of Virginia.” (If, like me, you do not have academic library access, you can read the whole paper here.)

One more example crossed my desk a while back, this time on a much smaller-scale. (Originally spotted via Rachel Monroe.) “There was a man,” we read, “Ernest Lewis, on the borderland between Kansas and the Indian Territory who claimed that he had discovered a strip of land that belonged to neither State nor Territory. On it he put up a great gambling establishment, sixty feet long and ten feet nine inches wide… Lewis insists that he will go on forever, unmolested by the law.” Sadly for Lewis, things did not end well for his liminal casino.

But these examples, creatively combined, deliberately mismatched, or literarily remixed, suggest some very interesting ideas, and not just for hypothetical real-world crimes that, due to their spatial nature, might escape prosecution. These examples are also amazingly suggestive for fictional storylines—murder mysteries, heist films, smuggling stories, and more—where location plays an outsize role in the unfolding of the narrative. A house whose long-forgotten storm cellar crosses a state or county line; a piece of land whose legal recognition or current ownership is in violation of the Constitution; and, of course, the team of criminals aware of these specific spatial details, plotting their actions accordingly.

PHANTOM LANDS

It seems at least tangentially relevant here to link to a recent Substack essay about a land-sale scheme in a non-existent country allegedly carved out of Honduras. A man named Gregor MacGregor began selling land to British investors in a fake country he called Poyais. “The problem with selling thousands of acres of a country’s prime colonial land and selling commissions in its army,” Ned Donovan writes, “is eventually they will want to see it.”

But overseas visits by curious investors soon revealed MacGregor’s deception: “As the truth emerged and it became clear the Poyais bonds would never be redeemed, the London market went into chaos, now known as the Panic of 1825. 12 major banks in Britain closed and in total 70 collapsed thanks to MacGregor’s fantasy and a general over eagerness for South American government bonds.” Could the entire world economy by brought to its knees by phantom real-estate transactions? (Investors tied to China’s Evergrande might like to know…)

BANKRUPT THE WORLD

Back in 2011, meanwhile, Lapham’s Quarterly told the story of “an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s” who came up with a financial instrument that could yet “bankrupt the world” through nothing more than compound interest.

As Paul Collins writes, “in the 1930s, [Hartwicke College] in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, ‘could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure,’” were the trust ever to be paid out. (Originally spotted via Josh Calder.)

I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about here, but I would love to see a financial scheme that somehow takes advantage of time zone differences between U.S. states and counties, or even the International Date Line between sovereign nations, where an incipient time change or a temporarily rogue location—like a small town in Indiana stuck voting on which timezone to join, or a tiny Pacific island with its temporal alignment as of yet undecided—gives investors one magical hour, or one magical day, in which interest rates and/or other transactions can have explosive financial effects.

The basic premise has already happened. The next step would be to design legally dubious financial instruments for use in temporally undefined locations—a kind of trust for the island of the day before, so to speak, paraphrasing Umberto Eco, in a financial thriller set along the international date line. (Perhaps recall Tobias Hill’s 2003 novel The Cryptographer, with its so-called “Dateline Virus,” a time-triggered computer infection: “The first to fall victim are those on the international dateline, before the contamination spreads steadily westward as the earth spins into it,” as the London Review of Books explains.)

FRIGO-FORENSICS

Over on his newsletter, This Week In Sound, Marc Weidenbaum highlights one of my own favorite details from my wife’s superb new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (previously discussed here). In Frostbite, author Nicola Twilley explains that the constant electrical hum of domestic refrigerators is now sometimes used in the UK to help solve crimes, as variations in the humming sound can be correlated to specific times of day and even particular parts of the country.

To quote the same part of the book as Marc’s excellent newsletter: “This low hum actually vibrates around sixty hertz, due to minute fluctuations in the grid as utility companies respond to changes in demand. The result is an ever-shifting symphony of frequency vibrations that London's Metropolitan Police began to record in 2005 for use in audio forensics. Because the hum is so omnipresent, inserting itself into most recordings, law enforcement can match the particular sixty-hertz fingerprint of UK-made recordings to its archive to arrive at an exact time stamp. Every time you open the fridge door (which the average household does 107 times per day, according to research conducted by LG), triggering its compressor to kick on, you're helping create that particular second's unique audio fingerprint.” Refrigeration sounds heard in the back of a recorded phone call, for example, can be used to locate when and where that call was originally made.

LORD HAVE MERCY

For this week’s music links, as with the previous two posts, I’ll keep things in an ambient register. This time, check out the gorgeous, profound melancholy of “Lord Have Mercy” by Prime Vertical (2022) or the quietly devastating neo-Classical notes of “Portrait IV” by Primitive Motion (2023).

If you’re still looking for more, why not check out a couple of my own tracks, such as “Aurora” or “Mass,” both released under the name Monarchs and taken from my 2021 EP, “A Loop in Space is Structure.”

Thanks for reading/listening!

NOTE: This post includes Bookshop.org affiliate links, meaning that I might receive a small percentage of any resulting sales.

In an interview published yesterday morning, director Steven Soderbergh revealed that he recently burned 44 years’ worth of hand-written journals.

“I burned, a couple of months ago, 44 years [sic] worth of notebooks and journals,” he explained to Georg Szalai of The Hollywood Reporter. “I just felt I needed to dispense with the past. It was very cathartic. I would pick each one up and flip through it for a second to get a sense of when that was and would pick out a sentence or something, and then throw it into the fire. And it felt really good.”

Image: With the exception of the yellow book, which I abandoned midway through, these are notebooks I have filled since the start of COVID, in 2020. These are a mix of Moleskines and Leuchtturms. The adhesive tags are for things I still want to type out, to use either in short fiction, in my newest book project, or in future posts. Leuchtturms are my current go-to notebooks; I prefer hardcover binding with lined paper. I used to prefer paperback binding and blank paper; before that, I preferred very small notebooks with 5x5 gridded paper. I could go on and on about pens, meanwhile, but will save that for another day…

Having purposefully destroyed dozens of notebooks over the course of my own life—not by fire, but with patience and a home shredder—I am, perhaps ominously, now sitting next to a growing stack of notebooks I started filling around the beginning of the pandemic, in 2020. At the time, I still maintained a (somewhat) regular blog—a site called BLDGBLOG, about architecture in various contexts—but, for a variety of reasons, I almost entirely abandoned writing online and returned instead to keeping private notebooks. A lot of notebooks.

Ironically, I gave up regular handwriting like this two decades ago, when I first launched BLDGBLOG. That decision was made precisely in favor of writing publicly—that is, sharing and posting my thoughts online—following the realization that carrying all this paper around with me, full of notes no one else will ever read, was a fool’s errand.

But here we are. After four years of voluminous daily notebooks, I’ve come around again to the realization that writing for an audience larger than myself—even if it’s just one other person—is more worthwhile than filling up yet another Leuchtturm, my current notebook of choice, or yet another Moleskine, yet another Shinola, the notebooks I previously favored.

For me, then, the main question posed by that Soderbergh interview was: will I shred all of these notebooks in the next ten or twenty years? Probably, yes; in fact, I’m almost certain of it.

Nevertheless, I’ve now spent four years depressurizing from endless social media bullshit and I don’t regret it—even if I do now have a stack of paper no one else will read, nearly a foot high, that I’ll be hauling around until such time as an office shredder, once again, beckons.

ANALOG HORROR, MISTRANSCRIPTION, AND ERRANT RECORDINGS

In an essay posted back in May, a writer named Kerwin Fjøl wrote about where the “horror” in analog horror really comes from.

The term itself generally refers to a sub-genre in which a mechanism of analog recording or broadcast—say, a reel-to-reel tape machine, a vinyl record player, a VHS camera, a terrestrial TV set, an AM/FM radio, a dial-up computer modem, sometimes a simple children’s toy, like a Ouija Board, a music box, or a Speak & Spell—is discovered to contain, or has been used to reveal, a horrifying secret. Unsettling moments of vocalization, noise, and visual interference often begin, suggesting that something inhuman has been accidentally captured, if not actively conjured, by that tool or technology.

In all cases, analog horror is about a technology of inscription—a recording device in and of itself—that acts a bit like a haunted portal, opening our senses to something horrifying, here, present, often in the very room with us, but of which we were previously unaware.

IMAGES: From Evil Dead 2 (1987), directed by Sam Raimi.

Fjøl’s central point seems to be that it has become de rigueur today for critics to claim that analog technologies invoke horror because of nostalgia: that Super 8 film-stock or VHS tapes are inherently creepy because they are obsolete artifacts from another era.

A “big problem with this argument,” Fjøl responds, “is that analog distortion has been used for horror long before analog media became outdated. One of the first movies I can think of in which TV static was used to unsettling effect was Poltergeist (1983), in the scene where the static comes on as the TV stations have gone off the air, some ghosts come out of it, and the little girl says, ‘They’re here.’ No one was nostalgic for TV static then, because it was a regular part of people’s everyday viewing experience. Additionally, The Ring and The Blair Witch Project both came out at a time in which people were still regularly renting and purchasing VHS tapes. So it clearly isn’t the ‘pastness’ of analog media that matters here, as much as people may want to insist upon it.”

IMAGES: From Sinister (2012), directed by Scott Derrickson.

The horror in analog horror, Fjøl writes, does not require nostalgia at all: “old records, VHS tapes, and other antiquated media instead function as a reminder of something more basic and more important: namely, that despite our best attempts to create a world of absolute certainty and clarity, and our overwhelming faith in digital technology as the means with which to do it, there’s still an inalienable primordial chthonic force lurking underneath the surface, underneath every piece of information we take in.” It’s the insurgency of the material: a radically inhuman presence has crept into our picture of the world, contaminating our representations from below.

This statement overlaps with media critic Douglas Kahn’s book Earth Sound Earth Signal. Kahn argues that previously unknown sources of noise—including radio waves from space, resembling voices from nowhere—have always supplied an eerie sheen to modern communication technologies. The radio, the telegraph, the telephone: these now-everyday tools all once had the air of liminal devices or supernatural tools, invisibly tapping into telluric and cosmic energies. As Kahn memorably writes, “receiving radio may mean that someone is listening but not always that anyone is sending.” You are mistaking noise for signal. What you think are deliberate transmissions might, instead, be phantom radio waves from distant stars or the hiss and flash of a nearby lightning storm. No one is “sending.”

For both Kahn and Fjøl, then, inscription technologies have inherent, uncanny implications, and these are foundational to what we call analog horror: our tools, suspiciously over-sensitive and operating beyond our control, have revealed the maddening presence of inhuman things. Something beyond representation—beyond our powers of technical inscription—has made its uncanny presence known.

But it’s this notion of horror that still gets to me. Why horror at all? Why not ecstasy, revelation, or awe?

Consider a scenario in which someone sets out to record an event—a backyard party or a camping trip, or perhaps just a decluttering session in a badly-lit basement—only to see something else in the subsequent documentation. Something else had been going on that entire time and it was only through this recording that they were able to discover it.

While this scenario is often played for horror—a pale face seen staring back at us from the shadows—there is no reason it needs to be. Indeed, this specific trope is often used as the central hermeneutic premise of popular crime fiction, not to mention of much sci-fi and of many spy/espionage thrillers. Think of Blow Up, for example, or its later homage, Blow Out, or The Conversation—or even the parade photos from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—canonical examples of recording technologies assuming a key role in the revelation of unseen conspiracies. Somewhere in this depiction of an event is evidence of forces that exceed that event. This is as much gnosticism as it is horror.

This is the premise of spy fiction and analog horror—but also of any belief in a sanctified world manipulated from behind the scenes by theological powers. In all of these, revelation relies on accidental hermeneutics: a tool of inscription or recording has captured more than we thought present in a particular scene or event, and now we have to interpret that event’s deeper meaning.

It seems reasonable to suggest, then, that the horror in analog horror is an epistemological one: it is an uneasiness some might feel, or uncanny discomfort, with the idea that we cannot represent the world in its totality. There will always be more—there will always be a surplus, a remainder, an outside, an excess—creeping into scenes we thought we had fully captured or controlled.

Analog horror, then, is when a model we have built for ourselves frighteningly deviates from—or outright betrays, mocks, inverts, humiliates, or, to put this in Biblical terms, becomes adversarial to—its source material. It is when we recoil from a revelation that our world cannot be captured accurately, that our representations of that world—think of so-called “voodoo dolls” or “The Picture of Dorian Gray”—have awoken or obtained adversarial agency.

THE PATTERN WINS BY LOSING YOU

In my previous post, I wrote about the ambient music of Huerco S, including a side-project of his known as Loidis.

This week, I thought I’d highlight the modular, shifting, off-kilter rhythms of Bill Converse, where the beat stumbles around, shuffling through wounded time-signatures, accumulating density and pattern along the way. “Since moving to Texas in 1998,” his Bandcamp page explains, “he has experimented with analog techniques in varied studio bunkers. Early techno, noise, ambient, tape, and paranormal processing are all part of his uncanny sound palette.”

Tracks like “Beneath the Ice,” for example, are oddly punctuated loops that pirouette, stagger, and twirl. Or consider “30​.​26367, -97​.​77082,” “Between Electrons,” “Meditations/Industry,” or “Phantom Pain.” If you start listening at the wrong moment, or if you momentarily lose focus, it can be difficult to relocate where the loops were meant to begin.

Converse’s music makes an interesting companion to tracks by Hieroglyphic Being—an “ex-gigolo healing the world with house music,” as the Guardian wrote back in 2016—where acid-blurred strings and distorted steel-drum sounds squeal, warp, and overwhelm atop a fuzzy, insistent, lo-fi beat. See, for example, “The Way of the Tree of Life,” “Flexin 4 the Dome,” and “21 Ways,” or give a listen to the tracks featured on The Language of Strings Vol. 6 (such as track two).

NOTE: This post includes Bookshop.org affiliate links, meaning that I might receive a small percentage of any resulting sales.

These “subversive scientists,” Woods wrote in his description of the unmade film, “believed—rather mystically—that only by a mastery of primordial earth forces could the barbarism of the surface culture above be overcome. Over the years, as history played itself out above, they developed structures, instruments and machines tuned to seismic, magnetic and gravitational forces that became their houses and laboratories, the better to come into harmony with, then gain mastery over the immense earth forces.” The underground system becomes both host and instrument, setting and tool. Woods’s treatment is worth reading in full.

While not quite an example of alt-seismic planetary mysticism, the Guardian reported last week that physicists in London have been using the city’s Underground trains as a venue for testing quantum navigational devices. These are extremely powerful tools of spatial orientation that do not require external signals to mark and record their location. “Tube train tunnels are ideal for this task,” we read, “and London Underground stands to gain from new quantum sensors that would remove the need for the hundreds of miles of cabling that is currently installed to track the location of the 540 trains that zip below the capital at peak times.”

I would love to see cartographic visualizations of the subsequent experiment, not just in traditional plan view, but volumetrically, as the devices rise, sink, and turn below the city, like quantum machine-whales migrating beneath people’s homes and offices. (Thanks to Wayne C. for the tip!)

NIGHTSTAND | WHAT WE’RE READING

I’m heading into the summer with a major backlog of books piled up on my nightstand (and office desk and bedroom shelves and kitchen table…), so I thought I’d call out a handful of titles here. Many more to come!

Silt Sand Slurry: Dredging, Sediment, and the Worlds We Are Making by Rob Holmes, Brett Milligan, and Gena Wirth (Applied Research & Design) — The folks behind Dredgefest have documented their decade-long research expedition into all things muddy and dredgeful with Silt Sand Slurry. Dredging exhumes the sodden remains of broken landscapes by scraping river bottoms, ocean floors, and lakebeds of their sediment, which is then often dumped elsewhere to shape harbors, levees, artificial islands, silt-containment cells, and more. With Silt Sand Slurry, dredge—a form of terrestrial-scale 3D-printing, or what the authors also call “designing with sediment”—finally receives the attention it deserves in the context of landscape engineering, infrastructural speculation, and ecosystem repair. Congrats to the whole crew for putting this together!

Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush (Milkweed Editions) — I really enjoyed this journalistic account of American flooding and the specificity with which author Elizabeth Rush assembled it. She says quite clearly that Rising was not intended as an all-encompassing book about the effects of climate change, but was instead shaped around a simple request: to “ask residents to tell me their flood stories.” Grounding the planetary-scale experience of rising sea levels through first-person interviews with flood survivors, filled with stories of emergency phone calls, missing family members, pets trapped in flooding neighborhoods, entire streets becoming rivers, and vast swaths of Louisiana—even, as Rush shows, parts of Staten Island—turning into seabed gives an urgency to subject matter that might otherwise seem too large-scale and abstract to elicit a response. The catastrophes of climate change, while globally ubiquitous, will all be experienced locally. (Rush’s new book, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth is also on my list for 2024.)

Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire by Paul J. Kosmin (Belknap Press) — I’ve enjoyed following Paul J. Kosmin’s research agenda from afar, including his forthcoming book The Ancient Shore, which explores “the influence of the coast on the inner lives of the ancients: their political thought, scientific notions, artistic endeavors, and myths; their sense of wonder and of self.” Until that book’s release, in October 2024, check out Kosmin’s Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire—the description alone is incredible. “In the aftermath of Alexander the Great's conquests, his successors, the Seleucid kings, ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia and Anatolia to the Persian Gulf. In 305 BCE, in a radical move to impose unity and regulate behavior, Seleucus I introduced a linear conception of time. Time would no longer restart with each new monarch. Instead, progressively numbered years—continuous and irreversible—became the de facto measure of historical duration.” But there’s a twist: “Some rebellious subjects, eager to resurrect their pre-Hellenic past, rejected this new approach and created apocalyptic time frames, predicting the total end of history.” Calendrical insurrectionaries!

English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan (Paul Mellon Centre) — The title alone here was irresistible for me, and the book itself is a satisfying look at British eccentricity, cultural landscape practices, and botanically-inspired architectural design. Note that Longstaffe-Gowan has a new book coming out later this year that’s already on my radar, called Lost Gardens of London. Looking forward to it.

The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture by Jason König (Princeton University Press) and Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition by Bart D. Ehrman (Yale University Press). Otherwise unrelated, these books both survey extreme landscapes and their symbolic/religious meanings throughout human history—or what König calls “human engagement with the earth’s surface” and its role in shaping theological beliefs and practices. Expect remote mountain peaks, deep forest caves, and pristine meadows alike, with immense poetic resonance in myth and folklore.

Faux Mountains by Michael Jakob (ORO Editions) — Jakob’s slender book catalogs an exhibition he curated at Harvard several years ago, exploring examples of landforms that are actually works of architecture, or architecture disguised as geology. Imperial tombs, folk festivals, garden follies, zoo habitats, Disneyland, and more. (Thanks again to Wayne C. for the tip!)

The Ascent by Stefan Hertmans (Pantheon) — I’ve come to admire Stefan Hertmans’s fiction over the past few years, including two earlier novels translated into English, War & Turpentine and The Convert. They are novels in a fairly specific sense: Hertmans is, indeed, telling the stories of historical figures, whose full lives and existence he did not himself experience, and he is thus describing things he did not witness first-hand, which is, almost by definition, fiction. But, for me, his books read less like novels than as exceptionally engaging, long-form articles describing Hertmans’s personal attempt as a writer to shape and resolve a complicated research agenda. The Ascent has the benefit of a strong architectural frame for its narrative. The book is structured around Hertmans’s initial real-estate tour and subsequent purchase of an old building in Ghent, Belgium; throughout the ensuing story, the building’s rooms, halls, doors, and stairs all lead to new historical scenes in the lives of the people who previously lived there, opening onto a world of Nazi collaborators, youthful political naïveté, marital betrayal, European darkness, and more.

Liquid Snakes by Stephen Kearse (Soft Skull) — Liquid Snakes, a novel I had the pleasure of blurbing back in 2023, is soon out in paperback! Author Stephen Kearse—an unusually perceptive critic of everything from hip-hop and heist films to noir fiction—has written a novel that is part epidemiological whodunnit, part sci-fi, part bizarro-internet-coffee-biochemical-future-terrorist thriller that rides on equal tides of humor and outrage. Black students begin disappearing in sinkhole-like events; a radicalized social media account and a local coffeeshop owner reveal unsettling overlaps; and CDC investigators are left struggling to connect impulses toward self-destruction with black-market compounds, no pun intended—drugs that promise self-renewal (and erasure and martyrdom and revenge). The humor is as acidic as the book’s central, fictional substance: “Vincent swiveled away from his computer and examined the massive artwork. For every Atlanta voter his advisors told him mattered, there was at least one head from their personal Mount Rushmore: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Samuel Cathy, Monica Kaufman, André Benjamin, Ciara Wilson, Steve Harvey, Mike Lazzo, Stacey Abrams, Tayari Jones, Radric Davis, Stan Kasten, Michael Vick. It was the tackiest, most incomprehensible mural he’d ever seen...” (I also had the pleasure of publishing Kearse’s fantastic short story, “Retriever,” about the end of the 2nd Amendment, which was promptly optioned for TV.) Preorder a copy for its release on August 13th.

Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion by Harry Sword (Third Man Books) — Sword’s book is a history and aesthetic of drones in music, from ragas to black metal to ’90s rave to Godflesh (here’s their immense 1989 grindcore track “Streetcleaner”) and Coil. The book covers black holes, Dionysian rituals, sonic weaponry, neolithic burial cairns, mysterious atmospheric whispers, prog rock, and “the power of sound to induce feelings of terror, raw or unease.” Describing the impulse behind the book, Sword writes that, “while velocity in music is readily associated with unrest, the left-hand path—slowly-moving hypnotic sound—is a road far less traveled, at least critically.” Speaking of Godflesh, I’m reminded of their old t-shirt, describing their music as an “avalanche on pause,” as good a description of a drone as any.

Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains by Alexa Hagerty (Crown) — Alexa Hagerty is an anthropologist who, in Still Life with Bones, has documented her time working in post-conflict Guatemala and Argentina, examining the dead, locating the disappeared, and exhuming the victims of state violence. In Hagerty’s own words, the book “explores the matter and meaning of bones: how they are marked by violence and tested in genetic labs. It is also about how bones are always joined to grief, memory, and ritual.” Wonderfully written, somber, and filled with scenes of cinematic clarity, the book visits morgues, private homes, and unmarked graves to tell the story of families torn apart by political oppression. In a book of memorable take-aways, one stood out: “Exhumation never brings back the beloved,” Hagerty writes—though it does bring back a modicum of emotional agency for the affected, as well as a long-shot opportunity for political justice in a wounded society. (This might be a somewhat strange recommendation, I admit—or one that risks sounding flippant or dismissive of the real-world stakes of Hagerty’s book—but the recent novel Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez makes an eerie companion to Still Life with Bones. Enriquez’s supernatural horror story is a surprisingly beautiful novel of black magic, demonic self-sacrifice, Argentine aristocrats, and family obligations set against a backdrop of militarized political oppression.)

Finally, I am unusually excited about this next book, as I’ve watched from behind the scenes for several years now as the research and reporting have come together. Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by my wife, Nicola Twilley (Penguin Press), comes out Tuesday, June 25th, and is absolutely vital for any conversation today about food, energy, health, and urban development. In it, Nicky shows that using artificially-generated cold to preserve our food supply has changed our cities, our bodies, our planet’s atmosphere, the flavors of our fruits and vegetables, our financial markets, and even the lyrics of the song “America the Beautiful.”

The New York Times lauds the book as “engrossing” and “hard to put down.” In a starred review, Kirkus says that Frostbite is “oddly fascinating… a literate treat.” In another starred review, Publishers Weekly calls the book “a revelatory deep dive into refrigeration’s past and present… a brilliant synthesis.”

Nicky has dominated the refrigeration beat for more than a decade and her book has the receipts, from first-person visits to cheese caves in Missouri, banana-ripening rooms in the Bronx, and farms in Rwanda, to original reporting on the African-American inventor behind refrigerated trucks, the woman who lived inside a cargo container for nearly ten years to study the cold chain from the inside, a Chinese frozen-dumpling billionaire, and the entrepreneurs and innovators around the world today looking to disrupt, redirect, and climate-proof the future of food preservation. One amazing line strikes me every time I read it: as refrigerated foods were first hitting the American market, arriving on the plates of suspicious diners, a newspaper in Buffalo ran the headline, THERE IS NO DEATH, ONLY COLD STORAGE.

Because I got to tag along on some of the reporting trips, I have personally experienced the strange architectural interiors of the global cold chain, including metal vats the size of missile silos, inside of which swirled vortices of discolored orange-juice concentrate, and limestone mines that have since been converted into underground vaults filled with frozen pizza.

The fact that Frostbite ends with Ragnarök is a sign that the book is about far more than just fresh eggs, fad diets, and cold beer. It’s a thrill to see this finally out in the world and I encourage everyone to take a look!

AUDIOLOGY | WHAT WE’RE LISTENING TO

I’m a longtime fan of Huerco S’s ambient tracks—even if others might not necessarily use that term. Strange, shimmering, crystalline-metallic soundscapes made from loops and drum tracks, blurred and stretched, loosely layered, framed, and ticking overtop one another, his music is like watching faded-color filmloops through a lens of Scotch tape. Check out early tracks like the chiseled rhythms of “Quivira,” for example, a personal favorite of mine; the oddly sinister, mineralogical repetitions of “Marked for Life”; or the off-kilter, nursery-rhyme melodies of “Promises of Fertility.”

Huerco S also has some side-projects. Loidis, a pseudonym he has been using since roughly 2018, has a debut album coming out later this summer. Will it be good? I hope! But cue up a couple of dub-techno/ambient-house tracks from Loidis’s 2018 EP, such as “A Parade” or the epic, hypnotic, calming, awesome “The Floating World (& All Its Pleasures)” for a glimpse of what might be to come.

PS: If you like that, here’s a bonus ambient track: “Doggerland” by Ekolali, a rain-washed atmosphere of slowly-churning drums and ritualistic whorls of sound, like picking up a prehistoric AM radio signal broadcast from the depths of the North Sea.

OPTOMETRY | WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT

To close out this post, I could link to any number of U.S. Library of Congress image sets, which are seemingly innumerable, but I’ll instead choose two.

First up are early-20th-century photos by Sergeĭ Mikhaĭlovich Prokudin-Gorskiĭ, taken at various sites around the Russian empire. The images are strangely layered digital composites, produced from glass negatives—some of which are shattered—almost all of which resemble avant-garde album art. See, for example, the Novyi Afon monastery (larger); “details of Milan cathedral” (larger); a whirl of swords in a weapons cabinet (larger); a simple haystack (larger); extraordinary “cornflowers in a sea of rye” (larger); or this related shot of an agricultural out-building amidst cornflowers (larger). There are hundreds more. (Interestingly, those particular images were all composited for the Library of Congress by none other than Blaise Agüera y Arcas, whose fantastic 2007 presentation of “PhotoSynth” technology showed that advanced computational photo-editing tools can achieve internet virality.)

Second, for design-history nerds, here are 300+ digital pages’ worth of advertising labels from the 1870-1880s, an incredible archive of early trademarks, logotypes, and brand identities for everything from chemical paints to condensed milk, from pine shingles and lubricating oils to cement, by way of bourbon, fountain pens, chewing tobacco, cigars, and much, much more (mustard, pickles, “jubilee twists”…). An early inventory of Americana and the American design imagination as told through popular products.

NOTE: This post includes Bookshop.org affiliate links, meaning that I might receive a small percentage of any resulting sales.