Art Culture Politics
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Twas the Night Before The Argument
Rock Doves in the rain, through a dirty window and screen. Ready to do combat with pig-headed or worse (oh, much worse) relatives for the holiday? Here's some social science to mull over: A brief explanation of why facts — like, say, about global warming — do nothing to convince people. (It was a religious…
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The Tall One
The tallest trees here in the east are usually Tuliptrees (Liriodendron tulipifera), sometimes also called Yellow Populars. The tallest tree in Green-Wood Cemetery is one. According to their new map, “Alive at Green-Wood,” it’s 110 feet tall. This is the “toy camera” setting of my camera, for a change of pace. Samuel Morse’s remains are…
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Timber!
We caught Ted Levin talking about his book, America’s Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake this week at the Linnaean Society. It’s a damn good book and deserves to be read far and wide. Too many people fear and loath snakes, an irrationality that leads directly to massacre. There are still bloody snake-killing…
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Red Star
Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) amid oaks and others. * Hannah Arendt, who died on November 4th, 1975 wrote this: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” (Alabama Republicans the latest marks of…
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For the Pollinators
I recently attended a pollinator working group meeting here in Brooklyn sponsored by the City Parks Foundation and the National Wildlife Federation.* I’d like to share some of the things I came away with. Honeybees are ever in the news, but there are over two hundred other species of bees found in New York City.…
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On The Shoulders of Giants
You probably know Isaac Newton’s famed homage to his predecessors and rivals, especially the last line here, addressed to Robert Hooke: “What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is…
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What’s the opposite of anthropomorphism?
I used to follow the rules forbidding anthropomorphism. But this old thought, allegedly “scientific,” has fallen to the wayside the more I observe animals, and the more I learn about them. This, then, jumped out at me in Lynda Lynn Haupt’s Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: “In his observations of seals and caracaras and…
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The Canary on the Windshield
Or rather, the lack of one. The canary in this case is all the dead bugs people used to have to wipe off their windshields. Michael McCarthy, who titled his book on the great decline of life on earth during our watch The Moth Snowstorm, writes about being old enough to remember all those dead…
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Raptor Wednesday at the Movies
The first sight of a church yard in Copenhagen triggered a memory that bloomed in Sweden. I’d seen such graveyards before: the gravel plots fenced in by foot-high hedges rigorously trimmed, the raked patterns in the somber gray sand. Very orderly, compact, clean. It was all in the 1999 Swedish film Falkens öga/Kestrel’s Eye, about…
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Counter Friction
“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine,” H.D. Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience.” Or at least gum it up a bit with your sabots, right? Of course, we’re all deeply imbedded, imbricated, enveloped in a befouling system. But we do have some choices, don’t we? Nobody makes you order from Amazon.…
Backyard and Beyond 