Our third print issue features Catherine Lacey on worthless pictures; Elif Batuman on Miranda July; Chris Kraus on girlhood; the drawings of Daniel Johnston; poems by Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles; and dispatches on undersea rifts, baby-making on Mars, and climbing Stone Mountain. 

All the Great Men of Science said so, if this rash young man went to live with the real King Kong, Africa’s monstrous mountain gorilla. Known the world over for its crazed chest‑beating and hooting, slavering scream, this ape was savagery incarnate, or worse: a creature—as the first Westerner to ever see one had warned—of that “hideous order, half man, half beast.” Fearing that not even bullets would stop the demon, Paul du Chaillu had ordered his men to load their flintlocks with ragged hunks of cast iron. None ever forgot the goliath’s dying groans, “full of brutishness” yet “terribly human.”

George Beals Schaller had read Du Chaillu’s account when he set off for the Belgian Congo in 1959. He knew that Carl Akeley, who had killed five gorillas to stuff for the American Museum of Natural History—pausing along the way to strangle an attacking leopard with his bare hands—had called any white man who got close to one without shooting “a plain darn fool.” He had listened to famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey argue with other “old Africa hands” over whether Schaller should wear armor or a disguise, what weapons he should carry, whether he would survive at all.

And then, without retinue or pith helmet, George went to the gorillas. Alone. When charged by a roaring silverback, he stood his ground. He couldn’t have shot the brute if he’d wanted to. Certain that it would change his bearing in ways the apes would sense, he had refused—then and forever after—to carry a gun.

What emboldened a 26‑year‑old graduate student to defy the scientific magi, in these jungles and for the rest of his life? How did he step free of the fear that has driven so much of human history, and into relationships no scientist had yet ventured, including with Earth’s most reviled creatures?

History offered scant precedent for approaching wild animals in Schaller’s utterly unguarded way. Most zoologists had until then studied only specimens on cold tables, or broken creatures in shackles or cages. C. R. Carpenter had observed free‑living howler monkeys in Panama and gibbons in Thailand, but even he soon retreated to the controlled environment of his rhesus macaque compound in Puerto Rico. Konrad Lorenz’s studies of animal behavior would win him the Nobel Prize, but he had met his feather-weight geese and jackdaws as near pets within the menagerie he made of his own home.

The animals Schaller would spend his life with were far bigger than any of those, and sometimes truly dangerous. But they could be known, he believed, only by entering their world. So he transformed scientific practice: committing months or years to winning the trust and acceptance of lions and tigers and bears, assimilating to their rhythms and rules, endeavoring to see the universe through their eyes.

Though risky for a young scientist, that meant breaking all prevailing norms. For much of the twentieth century, the natural sciences, extending a lineage that ran from Descartes to B. F. Skinner, had insisted on a “disinterested” stance toward creatures seen to be of a distinctly lower order: insensate automatons, animated only by reflex. For the serious scientist, they were data; by “twisting the lion’s tail” (in Bacon’s apocryphal phrase) the “objective” investigator could answer a question, test a hypothesis, advance his own grand theories.

Nature held out a path not to cold mastery but to communion, a stepping free of the self into something far larger and more powerful.

Schaller stood nearly alone in claiming a radically different conception of nature and science, this one descended from the nineteenth‑century Romantic understanding that the “expression of the emotions in man and animals,” as Darwin titled his final book, were variations on an evolutionary theme. If animals’ interior lives were closely akin to our own, empathy and intuition became critical instruments for understanding them, and lyricism for expressing their complexity. Nature held out a path not to cold mastery but to communion, a stepping free of the self into something far larger and more powerful.

Schaller’s quest to know these others would take him into six continents and a life of high drama and romance. Unmoored from his earliest days, he never quit moving, crashing into all the darkness and light the century had to offer, piling up enough brushes with death, transcendent encounters, and grand adventures to fill a dozen lives. Born in Berlin in 1933 to an ambitious young American socialite and a pliant diplomat working for Hitler, he survived aerial bombings, American soldiers’ rough searches, and a narrow escape from the Russian zone—fending for himself much of the time, evacuated again and again as the front closed in. Completing high school in Missouri as an enemy alien, then college in the territory of Alaska, he joined the expedition that gave birth to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, writing the trip report that ultimately helped sway Eisenhower. He stayed through the violence that erupted when Belgium abruptly left Congo, witnessing the tragedy that unfolds when desperate animals and desperate people collide, and taking mad risks to protect the gorillas. Again and again, for the sake of the giant panda or Marco Polo sheep, he navigated historic upheavals—from the aftermath of China’s Cultural Revolution to the flood of Kalashnikovs, Apache helicopters, and opium dealers unleashed in Afghanistan by its series of imperial wars.

Despite all the wrecked countries and tense borders, the informants, corrupt officials, and opportunistic expats, Schaller completed an astonishing run of first‑ever studies—of Indian tigers, Serengeti lions, Himalayan snow leopards, Brazilian jaguars, Chinese pandas, Gobi Desert wild camels, and the grand mountain goats, sheep, antelope, cats, and bears of the Tibetan Plateau, to which over 40 years he was granted a near‑unfettered access no other Westerner has ever had. As David Attenborough, one of his myriad acolytes, once said, “I thought he must sit back and think: What other impossible creature can I imagine that nobody else could get near?”

Coming of age just as air travel became commonplace, Schaller reached far more of the planet than Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, or any of the earlier generations of adventurer‑naturalists. And, in this age of specialization, likely more than any since. Focused by his thirties on the unprotected and unstudied expanses where most life on Earth remained, he walked thousands of miles alone or with local companions, often traversing landscapes outsiders had never seen.

In many of those places—Pakistan’s scorched deserts, Sichuan’s iced bamboo forests, Brazil’s sultry wetlands—he stayed, sometimes for years. Settling into leopard or panda time, he endured alongside them the shrapnel of sandstorms, freezing blizzards and blistering heat, hunger, thirst, leeches, and larvae that burrow under the skin—and also their wild freedom, griefs, and loves. On occasion, he traveled even across time. Driven to know what life was like when we ourselves were still wildlife, he once spent a week living as a hominid near the site of our African origins, reliant on tools of his own making and scavenging what he couldn’t kill.

Like devotees across centuries, Schaller embraced the mortifications of the flesh and extreme tests inflicted by these pilgrimages—from abandonment in a whiteout at 17,000 feet to venomous snakes in malarial jungles. He came to know many kinds of emptiness and aloneness.

All was made bearable by his love, from age 19 to the end of his life, for the slight, acerbic, ever‑undaunted Kay Morgan. It was she who kept their sons from toddling into the tiger ravine, she who ran after the pet baby warthog and bottle‑fed their rescued lion cub, searched out vegetables to stave off the boys’ rickets, shepherded them through middle school in Lahore while their father vanished for months into Asia’s highest mountains. Though she loved wildness as much as he, she paid her own high price for his commitment, superseding all others, to the largest idea of family.

Like the Horatii swearing their oath to Rome as wives and children wept, Schaller’s code of honor seemed of another age. Those asked to describe him often reached for archaic phrases. He was a “pillar” in the world, a man of “sterling character” and deep humility, a companion one would entrust with one’s life. He was not without powerful internal drives—the explorer’s to be first, the scientist’s to know and name, the artist’s to faithfully convey, the missionary’s to save. But his own psychology never much interested him, far less, certainly, than the mystery of these other beings. Much of his power lay in all he didn’t need: not wealth, nor fame, nor even adulation—at least from humans. Lacking (as his younger son put it) the “selfie emotions,” he steadfastly refused whatever might steal his time or dispirit him, including solipsism.

Instead, it was to the world that he brought his attention, as intense and devout as prayer. His patience and openness were the very opposite of the shallow, inflamed voyeurism we call our attention economy, so bent on searching out all the ways we are not “them.” What kept Schaller going through decades of acute danger and misery, political chaos and heartbreak, was an urge few beyond children or poets remember: to climb inside the other’s skin, to live unalienated in the manner of a bird or caribou. To be recognized as someone others needn’t fear.

If ultimately on a spiritual quest, Schaller had an immeasurable impact on the world. It’s hard to find a wildlife biologist on any continent untouched by “the most important animal researcher in the twentieth century,” as admirers from Attenborough to Michael Crichton have called him. It was Schaller who guided Jane Goodall in the first months of her chimp study. It was his work that Dian Fossey took up a decade later: She learned from him how to use noseprints to identify individuals and even worked with his tracker Sanwekwe, though she never forgot Mary Leakey’s withering dismissal: “‘So you’re the girl who’s going to out‑Schaller Schaller.’ It was an intimidating thought to carry with me.” The first chapter of her memoir, 

, is titled “In the Mountain Meadow of Carl Akeley and George Schaller”; in the film version, after Fossey (Sigourney Weaver) has fled headlong down the mountain pursued by a roaring male, the character based on Sanwekwe (John Omirah Miluwi) asks her, “What does Schaller’s book say when a gorilla charges?” It says, she answers, “Never run.”

Schaller’s nearly two dozen books, the finest of which zoologist Desmond Morris, author of 

, ranked with the works of Darwin, Lorenz, and W. H. Auden, inspired many: Robert Sapolsky became a primatologist after reading 

; E. O. Wilson drew heavily on Schaller’s gorilla and lion studies in Sociobiology. His exacting methods—which included a “micro‑documentation [of the] frequency, weight, section count and position excreted of the creature’s faeces” that one admirer called “astonishing”—set the standard for all who followed, and cemented the enduring value of his studies. Half a century later, his monographs on gorillas, tigers, and lions are still relied upon by scientists and conservationists as their bible.

Most fundamental was his remaking, or recovery, of our understanding of animal consciousness. In the way that tunnels now give wild animals safe passage under highways, Schaller carried older, even ancient, values safely through the arid wastelands of modern science. His vivid rendering of these creatures—their singular personalities, memories, aspirations, friendships, and rivalries—laid the ground for generations of scientists who followed. Emulating his methods, they have reached across to elephants, octopuses, owls, hawks, crows, wolves, and myriad others, taking as given his insights on those beings’ complex societies, communication, and minds. His influence reverberated far beyond science, marking some of the most important cultural artifacts of the past half century. Schaller is the “GS” who led Peter Matthiessen in search of the snow leopard. Director Stanley Kubrick based the Dawn of Man sequence that opens 

 on his gorilla work, and Crichton wrote him into the sequel to 

, offered to a diffident young scientist as an exemplar, a renegade who proved expert after expert to be “wrong . . . just wrong.”

His impact on the global political landscape was just as profound. From his walks across continents, he grasped before others, and more comprehensively, the radical changes unfolding in even the remotest places. Over seven decades he saw the before and after, crossing terrain largely unaltered since the Pleistocene, but also lands once vibrating with millions of animals now emptied of life. Witnessing firsthand our modern Great Dying, he led his peers in turning from pure science to learning what animals need to survive, setting in motion what in the 1970s would become the new field of conservation biology. And despite a reserve that borders on the hermetic, he proved masterful at diplomacy—persuading governments to protect parks in China, Afghanistan, and a half dozen other countries that together span more than 200,000 square miles, an area bigger than France. Were it not for Schaller, we would likely have no mountain gorillas, no wild pandas. As 

 author Eric W. Sanderson put it: “George saved more nature than anyone, ever.”

That accomplishment depended on yet another, if far slower, transformation. When Schaller began his work in the Belgian Congo, conservation was still infected with ideas of the white man’s burden. The men in London and Brussels who ruled the fate of most of the world’s wild animals asserted the same authority over the people who lived alongside those animals. They were “Naturvölker” to be managed, or intrusions on Eden to be cleared away.

Perhaps opened up by his rebellion against the scientific establishment to other kinds of knowledge, Schaller was able, stepwise, to see more. From the Gwich’in in Alaska and Batwa in Congo he learned how deeply people with millennia of tenure know the animals and land. In India he saw that tigers would be safe only if their human neighbors were too; in Nepal, that villagers and wild sheep depended on the same forests and grasslands, and were equally doomed if the trees and grasses were stripped by loggers or overgrazing. Though it would take decades, he would come to see in China and Afghanistan that it had to be the local communities who shaped and enforced protections, because it was right, and because it was the only way they’d endure.

As George grew into these insights, he helped pull the world along with him, leading a process still underway of decolonizing conservation. As head for many decades of global field science at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the nation’s longest‑running wildlife conservation organization and the first to hire field scientists, he advanced community‑led conservation and nourished what he counts as his most important legacy: three generations of Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Rwandan, and Afghani scientists, many of them women, creating new possibilities in their home countries for animals and humans together.

Though he is a magnificent writer, winning many honors including a National Book Award, Schaller always counted himself a “biographer of animals.” Far from the “awful lot of ‘I’” that characterizes much nature writing, he offered only sparing glimpses of himself. Subsumed in these other beings’ lives, the existential crises he wrestled with were theirs. He had practical reasons, too, for his self‑effacement: In places like China, he was often most effective when least visible.

Having turned down many biographers, he submitted to my scrutiny only late in life, hoping (it seems) to leave one more useful bit of himself behind. Because I had spent half my life working in conservation, for the U.S. Forest Service and Environmental Defense Fund, and written in previous books about the challenges and synergies in reconciling human and nonhuman lives, he thought I could be trusted, he later told me, to be true to the complexities.

Over the course of nearly six years, George and Kay allowed me to spend many days in their New Hampshire home, interviewing them individually and together and wading through family albums, letters, diaries, and crates of slides, fossils, horns, and other treasures. George often loomed about as I worked, answering any scientific questions precisely, even ones he’d not considered for half a century. Twice, we traveled together. In early 2020 we went to India where, more than 50 years after his landmark study of tigers, acolytes traveled many days and nights to meet him, and locals still sought his guidance on how to resolve life‑or‑death conflicts between humans and wildlife—pressed into closer proximity there than anywhere else on Earth. Though I saw how ill at ease he was in the throngs jamming India’s streets and airports, he clearly loved animal teemings, content to watch for hours as sambar, wild pigs, chital, and finally a tiger wandered through the maidan. A second trip to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands in summer 2024 found him still intent at 91 to understand how the border wall had doomed Arizona’s historic population of jaguars, and how Mexican and American scientists were working together to recover them.

Much of his power lay in all he didn’t need: not wealth, nor fame, nor even adulation—at least from humans.

Like all who spend time with him, I crashed into his world‑class taciturnity. Most people, when invited to talk about themselves, go on and on. George answered as tersely as possible, then stopped; there was no warming to the attention nor pleasure at the sound of his own voice. “Not easy to know,” Peter Matthiessen once said of him.

Silence is an obligatory habit for those who watch animals. But Schaller’s went further. Dropping again and again into new countries—32 in all—each infinitely complex in its history, social structures, and politics, he learned to listen, speaking on what he knew (ecology), quiet on all he recognized that even years in a country would not suffice to understand. Running deeper still was an awkwardness born of his perennially exiled and perilous childhood. Cat biologist Alan Rabinowitz, who overcame the isolation imposed by a childhood stutter by visiting the jaguars in the Bronx Zoo, saw in his mentor a familiar hesitancy. George himself saw that “animals tend to be shy because people have made them afraid” with our noise and menace, because he had been made shy that way too.

My task, in short, often mimicked Schaller’s: to peer into an opaque creature. I stumbled into a second, stranger parallel when George and his siblings put 70‑year‑old Bundesarchiv documents into my hands. Like my father, who had escaped from Germany in 1939 but returned in 1941 as an American spy, Schaller’s father spent the last years of the war in Bavaria, interrogating high‑ranking prisoners of war. Our fathers had the same job, that is, on opposite sides.

It was the Schallers’ openness, matched by their gift across generations for preserving artifacts, that ultimately made my biography possible. I was permitted to read a century of letters saved through war, exile, and many transcontinental moves; journals kept by Kay and the boys; “lost” materials including Schaller’s proposal to Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for a national park; talismans saved by others, like his 1973 packing list for Peter Matthiessen. Colleagues and friends across 16 countries were just as generous with their vivid memories, dating as far back as the early 1960s.

Richest of all were the two daily field journals Schaller kept for 70 years—one for data, one narrative—recording in real time everything seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt by one of history’s most acute sensoria. It was through this writing, said colleague David Western (called Jonah, as he will be here), that “George thinks and reveals himself.” As the first to read the more than 20,000 pages, now archived at the Yale Peabody Museum, I found “that real poetry,” as Nabokov called it, “with which the live experience of these receptive, knowledgeable and chaste naturalists endowed their research.”

Yet even in these stunningly precise accounts, the intensity cannot be felt vicariously. It is only through presence, our own animal body, that one can know the peace of being allowed near a wild creature or of having it meet your gaze; the primal anxiety of standing alone in a boundless landscape, ill‑equipped with a human’s weak senses to know who else is alive nearby. That I share with Schaller a call to these other beings posed a paradoxical obstacle. It is hard to explain a love one can’t imagine being without, to describe this deepest antidote to loneliness offered by the more-than‑human world. ♦

Excerpted from HOMESICK FOR A WORLD UNKNOWN: THE LIFE OF GEORGE B. SCHALLER by Miriam Horn. Copyright © 2026 by Miriam Horn. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Miriam Horn is an author, environmental advocate, journalist and filmmaker. Her fourth book—

, from which the excerpt below is drawn—is the first full biography of wildlife biologist George Schaller.

mus-french-typewriter

The High Romance of George Schaller

Over the Quantum Cliff

Lucy Sante's Knots

This poem was composed entirely from text found on garments mostly produced in China and distributed globally. The words move across bodies and landscapes, often ending up in landfills. An infinite scroll. An endless garment.

Shanzhai is the Chinese word for counterfeit or copy. The term translates literally to “mountain hamlet,” and is said to derive from the Song Dynasty tale 

, in which rebel-bandits stockpile goods stolen from the imperial center to redistribute among people living on the margins. Beyond the reach of authorities, at the edges of empire, property and authorship are redefined. Alternate forms of relation emerge.

Traditional lyric poetry expresses the feelings of a singular “I” in song-like fragments. Shanzhai lyrics, by contrast, are collectively generated, blurring individual authorship through copy, collaboration, theft, creative mistranslation, and errata. Their designs embody the tensions within globalized supply chains. With irreverent disregard for standard English, shanzhai lyrics offer a fractured language that reflects and refracts the absurdity of consumption.

The stanzas here draw from several sources: our roving physical archive of over 500 shanzhai poetry-garments, images of found t-shirts sent by readers worldwide, and poems transcribed from clothing seen in Beijing, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and in Chinatowns from Sunset Park, Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens to Barcelona, Panama City and Luang Prabang. Many of these sequences are transcriptions of live poetry readings composed and performed from heaps of shirts, often coalescing around subjects such as empire, time, fashion, mountain, and Hamlet—itself a bootleg text composed of stolen and collaged fragments. We are not the writers of 

, but its custodians. In the poem below, excerpted from 

, we hope to slow down the pace of fast fashion enough for you to read it.

for $22. A limited edition shirt made in the spirit of the book is also

Shanzhai Lyric is a New York-based “poetic research unit” whose work is

, on view at Pioneer Works through April 12. The excerpt below is drawn from 

and which we'll launch on March 8th with a fashion show

ser-martin

Shanzhai Lyric's Endless Garment

Change the frequency. Subscribe to Broadcast.

Not long after my first encounter with Agnes Martin's 

, I boarded a plane to Berlin with a laptop and a suitcase filled with books. I had sublet an apartment on a high floor of an ungentrified neighborhood—a new city, a new perspective—only to discover that the view out my window, where I sat much of the day at my desk, basking as I worked in the electric glow of my seasonal affective disorder lamp, overlooked a cemetery. The grid of gray cement tombs below, running all the way to a vanishing point at the low gray horizon, seemed to make concrete the tally of my failures, a brute final accounting of my twenties. (I was, by then, in my early thirties.) When my sublet ended, I changed apartments, a friend of a friend’s place: high floor, southern exposure, I was told. But this one, too, overlooked a cemetery.

The pathetic fallacy ran strong in Berlin. The mayor, Klaus Wowereit, had called the city “poor but sexy,” and artists and wayward citizens of the world were flocking there, drawn to its dark vitality. It was comforting to live in a place where no one knew me, where I didn’t yet speak the language or know the names of the streets, where anything could happen and no one would ever know. Berlin was not a grid, and I was always a little lost: this was part of its appeal. I felt a bit like a ghost those first few months—or maybe something closer to one of the angels in Wim Wenders’s sentimental 1987 film, 

. Wenders’s trenchcoated seraphs flit about the riven city unseen and unhindered by the Berlin Wall, alighting here and there—on the broken-off spire of the Memory Church; on the gilded shoulder of the Victory Column. Only children can see the angels, and they are a bit like children themselves, all innocence and no experience.

A publisher had sent me a new English edition of 

in which Walter Benjamin laments the rarity, in modern life, of “threshold experiences”—using the German word for threshold, 

, to mean an indeterminate space or time of transition, a place in which the divisions between one stage of life and another, or between the inner life and the public life, meet. “The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary,” Benjamin writes. “A Schwelle is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen.”

It seemed to me that in my own life there had been, in fact, many threshold moments, but that they were often less clearly defined than the milestone events marked with formalized rituals like births, weddings, and funerals.

Berlin in the 2010s often seemed to me all threshold, a city as transitional space. More than a century after the art critic Karl Scheffler described the German capital as “condemned to forever become and never be,” Berlin was still in flux. The imposed structures of fascism, then socialism, had blown apart, and it was now global capitalism’s turn; the city was flush with foreign investment and start-ups. “I was poor in love / I was poor in wealth / I was okay in everything else there was,” began a song on all my playlists at the time.

But Berlin’s air of scruffy dissipation was turning over to something shiny and upwardly mobile, filled with organic shops and cafés serving almond milk lattes; famous artists were moving to Berlin, and galleries were springing up in my neighborhood, previously best known for a sex club and a Thai restaurant that served as a late-night artist hangout. Occasionally an unexploded armament from the Second World War would be unearthed during a construction project, but the city was resolutely forward-facing. A high-end clothing boutique opened in the empty 

 newspaper printworks, a rack of gorgeously spare chiffon dresses, each a different hue in the spectrum, in the window.

Beneath the new gloss, though, the city was full of monuments to the titanic failures of its past, full of thresholds between old and new orders, some very prominent, others requiring a different kind of attention: the subtle vibration of my bicycle tires bumping over the double line of cobblestones inlaid in the places where the Berlin Wall once stood; the glint of a pair of brass 

, or stumbling blocks, embedded in the grid of cobblestones in front of my building like glinting gold teeth in the pavement. Initiated by artist Gunter Demnig in the wake of the fall of the Wall, the project commemorates people killed by the Nazis at the last place they had a home. The names on the 

 at my door belonged to a seamstress and her daughter, I discovered after a quick internet search; I could find nothing more about them, other than the fact that they had been forced into smaller quarters in the building before being deported to Auschwitz. Still, I persisted in googling them every week or so, mostly late at night, as though there could be new developments.

Berliners had understandably grown a bit inured to the effects of 

, the culture of remembrance that had preoccupied the country in the decades that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but I was undone by such knowledge, often finding it impossible to put their names out of my mind and go about my business. The city’s past seemed to run alongside its present, an afterimage that never faded.

I had no personal attachment to Berlin, and this innocence—ignorance, really, the language sliding past me on the street, unable to harm—was a relief.

Not unlike Benjamin’s “angel of history,” inspired by a monoprint from his friend Paul Klee, Wenders’s angels are impartial observers of human calamity. As immortals, they lack a sense of the temporalities that give shape and meaning to life; they perceive history without any thresholds, without any who-won-what or what year events ended, as simply a continuous accrual of disaster. Yet they are, in a way, threshold figures, neither dead nor among the living. They have compassion for the self-destructive humans. In one of the most affecting scenes, they watch as an older man searches, in a grassy no-man’s-land next to the Berlin Wall, for the café where he once met his friends for coffee. (It must be here somewhere, he thinks to himself. Where could it have gone?) 

was released two years before the Berlin Wall fell. A complex of steel and glass towers known as the Sony Center now occupies the place where the scene was shot. Inside it is the cinema where I saw the film, at an anniversary screening commemorating the fall of the Wall.

Before I left for Berlin, my friend Victor had told me about his impressions of the city of his birth, which he visited in the late 1990s. It was the first time he’d seen the city since he left with his family in 1938, when he was 10. He was standing at the door of a building in front of his childhood address—on Leibnizstrasse, in Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood—when a woman stopped to talk to him. “Sind sie von hier?” she asked. Are you from here? For the briefest moment, time collapsed; he was home. But it was only a tourist seeking directions.

I had no personal attachment to Berlin, and this innocence—ignorance, really, the language sliding past me on the street, unable to harm—was a relief. How blithely I treated the city as the backdrop for my self-improvement campaign. I acquired a cabinet full of teas that promised very specific things: a clear head, relaxation, energetic balance, open bronchial tubes. I saw an English-speaking Gestalt therapist, paid for by my new German insurance, who, in our weekly sessions, had me address her floor lamp. “Tell him you are angry with him,” the therapist prompted. I did yoga with a raven-haired instructor, Schöne Ulrike, as I dubbed her in my head. “Let go of the stories you are telling yourself,” Schöne Ulrike would often say, her perorations becoming intelligible by my second year in Berlin as my German improved. “Let the detour be the journey.” I took up jogging in the Tiergarten, much to the amusement of the sex workers who lined my street, who mocked me by running in place en masse as I passed by. In a high-end sauna in Mitte one evening, I paid extra for an exfoliating massage, then invited the masseur home.

I didn’t miss my ex—it was shocking, the extent to which I did not miss the person with whom I’d spent a decade of my life. Occasionally something absurd but sort of accurate that he’d once said would come back to me, about how I would be more fun if I drank more often or learned to kite-surf, or, when it became clear that I was leaving him, about how he couldn’t bear to be alone, because to experience something without another person there to witness it made it feel as though his life didn’t count. It seemed unfathomable that we’d spent so much time together doing this mutual witnessing, and it finally dawned on me that what I was grieving wasn’t the deletion of him from my life but rather the outgrown version of myself who had participated in all those shared experiences, confident in their assured continuity.

What to do with the accumulation of past lives, with the rubble of memories and guilt and stories that have ended? Before coming to Berlin, I had sold or given away most of my belongings. My ex had taken one of my moving boxes by mistake, noticing it only after his storage unit flooded. I took one look inside, at the molded-over stacks of prints and diplomas, and threw it into a dumpster. “He destroyed your past,” said a friend, expressing hyperbolic solidarity, but I felt relieved.

Always becoming, never being. One low day I sought beauty and solace at the Hamburger Bahnhof, the former train station–turned–contemporary art venue, only to find the word 

 greeting me in enormous letters, the English translation in a smaller font below: pain. I wandered through the exhibition, with its Anselm Kiefer erosions in browns and grays, Berlinde De Bruyckere’s butchered horse, the squashed pale carcasses of Francis Bacon’s 

 triptych, objects like Nietzsche’s death mask, a gouty hand, and a biting stick once used in operations without anesthesia. Whatever these things kindled inside me didn’t feel like pain but more like a numbed-over rawness.

The second winter I spent in Berlin, my floating, amniotic detachment from reality began to wear off, maybe right around the time I hit a tree root on the rickety old bike I’d purchased for €20, and the entire mechanism—gears, brakes, shocks—sprang apart, like one of Wile E. Coyote’s rabbit traps, leaving me sprawled on the bank of the canal. Or the morning a wild-eyed stranger shoved me to the ground at Zoo Station, standing over me, ranting and spitting, the surrounding commuters averting their gazes. For a moment, I thought he was going to kick me in the face. Maybe part of me felt like I deserved to be the object of a random stranger’s rage.

Everyday life became uncanny, sometimes malevolently strange. Another morning, heading out for my jog, I passed one of the sex workers on her knees on the sidewalk, hands covering her face, a man standing over her, red-faced and screaming. I went back inside the building and phoned the police. “A woman on the street is in danger,” I began, and immediately ran out of German. I gave the address and hung up. For weeks, I could hear the keening sound she made as he berated her. A month or so later the sex club on the street was shuttered, and I never saw the women who had gathered there again. Where had they gone?

One afternoon a card arrived in the post: a thank-you note from a friend who had visited me in Berlin, a blue-green Agnes Martin painting on the front, 

 was its less flashy echo, the gold leaf glinting from beneath, rather than on top of, the paint. The mythology of the night sea usually involved the hero (the ego) being swallowed by a monster in the night sea (the unconscious), emerging transformed after lighting a fire in the creature’s belly.

Martin had emerged from the darker parts of herself to make one blazingly brilliant painting after another. But it had never been easy, and the monstrous voices still, at times, grew loud. “I have tried existing, and I do not like it. I have decided to give it up,” Martin wrote to her old friend and lover Kristina Wilson from Galisteo, the village near Santa Fe where she lived throughout the 1980s, on one of the days in which the solitary life was full of terrors. She was in her early seventies at the time. In fact, she didn’t give it up but lived on, productively, to the age of 92.

In the brief meditation at the end of class, Schöne Ulrike sometimes asked us to close our eyes and imagine our bodies to be cathedrals filled with

—silence and peace. But hovering in my mind’s eye was not a cathedral or a desert mesa but something more like an apartment building following an earthquake, the facade stripped off, furnishings spilling out of the exposed grid of rooms.

I was on my way somewhere else when a sudden downpour led to an impromptu visit to the Gemäldegalerie, home to the unfashionable old masters. There I was, damply contemplating a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting from 1562, 

: a duo of red-capped mangabeys from Africa in manacles, a wide view of the Antwerp harbor visible in the background. One of the monkeys looked directly out of the scene at me, as if curious at my appearance, the other was huddled in on himself, resigned to his fate.

I felt their pain. They imprinted themselves on me, along with one of Holbein’s officious burghers, a weary-faced Mantegna Madonna, and two exquisite Vermeers. In one of them, 

(c. 1664), a young woman in a yellow fur-trimmed jacket stands resplendently at her open window, holding the pearls up to the light. Some art historians speculate that Vermeer used visual aids to achieve his flawless perspectives that give his paintings such depth and intimacy: a camera obscura, perhaps, and/or a drawing square, a lattice of thread in a frame, a grid that would allow him to accurately render reality. The only evidence of this is the geometric perfection itself, the flawlessly rendered perspectives that Impressionists began to distrust and that modernists did away with entirely.

In life, of course, the lines of perspective rarely meet so perfectly.

I returned a few days later. Again, the museum was empty of people. In a city filled with cutting-edge art—New York gallerists were swooping in to poach artists from the smaller Berlin galleries—no one had time for old masters. It was here that I found 

; the museum was like a chapel, and off some of the galleries, there were even small anterooms for contemplation. On subsequent visits, it seemed like I could really hear something of the people in these portraits, who became familiar over time—the impassive mothers and infants, the satin-sleeved merchants, the young women on thresholds of their own, who also seemed to be seeking a new view.

I thought of something the Polish poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert wrote about the Dutch masters in 

: how unlike contemporary artists, they never questioned the value of what they did. Could that really be right? Later I looked up the passage. “They can only be envied,” wrote Herbert. “Whatever their greatness and miseries, the disillusionments and failures of their careers, their role in society and place on earth were not questioned, their profession universally recognized and as evident as the profession of butcher, tailor, or baker. The question of why art exists did not occur to anyone, because a world without paintings was simply inconceivable.” For the seventeenth-century Dutch, art was integral to the web of microintersections that held things together.

I doubt we still have this kind of faith in art making, which isn’t generally thought of now as a professionalized trade. Nor do the many people who are indifferent to it consider it to be essential. But sometimes while I was in the Gemäldegalerie, aware of each painting as representative of a moment in the life of the artist and of the effort in making it, the centuries melted. I felt myself held there, poised between their time and mine, through the canvases on which the artists had amplified their sensations of the world. I returned many times to share their conviction—and to be reminded that they were gone, but I was still here.

I wanted to see the world as he did—not detached from it, but with an openness to the wild rave of life.

It’s strange to think of Berlin as the place I recovered my innocence, though I did, with the help of new friends, people who were passing through indeterminate zones of their own. Their innocence was the kind found at dinners that ran late, in meetups at a particular bookstore or coffee shop located in a Hinterhof, or back courtyard, in which so many of Berlin’s best features were hidden. One night, cycling tipsily back to my apartment in the early hours of the morning in a party dress and sneakers, I spotted the fox family who lived on my street—even the kits had that slightly hard-boiled look of an authentic Berliner—and I found myself laughing, thinking of something someone had said. The city, with its ever-present past, humbled us, put all our personal catastrophes into perspective. It afforded a liberality and ease hard to come by in our own county. Berlin abided.

On a work trip to New York, I briefly stopped at MoMA, after a meeting, to see 

. Whatever affinities might have prompted Martin to make it, I felt its warmth and imperfection, how each of its careful lines was a revelation, like the waves, over and over again.

Back in Berlin, I went with my friend Emily to see a retrospective of the work of the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, whose work I’d first seen at Panorama Bar. He was a Gen Xer a decade or so older than me, and his photographs, stuck to the museum walls with pins or tape, featured incidental forms of wonderment. There were the euphoric club scenes he was known for, and splendid images of celestial bodies, but more compelling to me were the intimate still lifes of everyday things like morning-after beer bottles and sunlit tomatoes at a kitchen window, a penis in a hand, a tangle of socks and sheets: an affable immanence, all natural light and visual curiosity. Ordinary life could be sublime when someone—an artist, a friend—cared enough to take the world you knew so well and hand it back to you remade.

His portraits were astounding. One of them, 

 magazine from the early 1990s. It is a pastoral of sorts: a young man and woman are perched on lush-leafed tree branches, naked as angels or monkeys, save for their long jackets. Edenic, but in a different corner of paradise than Martin’s towheaded child wandering in nature. Lutz looks down, perhaps a bit self-conscious of his hairy body on display, but Alex looks directly at us, a gaze that pierces me with its intimacy, shaded with a long history of shared memories, wry humor, and all the concessions of being known. Of course, she’s really looking at her friend—that is, the photographer, a neat bit of transference. Alex and Lutz don’t present as innocents, exactly—the punk edge to their outerwear gives them away—but for the moment, they’ve recaptured a lightness as pure as the trees they sit in.

Emily took a picture of me in front of a photograph of a window, a view overlooking more of Tillmans’s trees. The 

effect of Tillmans’s image made me appear to be looking out the window at a great verdant beyond.

Tillmans had lost his partner, the painter Jochen Klein, to AIDS and himself lives with HIV—or so I had read; there was something valiant in his unpadded, take-life-as-it-comes way of looking. I wanted to see the world as he did—not detached from it, but with an openness to the wild rave of life.

Looking at Tillmans’s friends reminded me of Nan Goldin’s, with their fierce love for each other that animated their days. I believe he too wants to show the people he photographs how beautiful they are, and how much joy there is to be found, in a time and place in which they can love openly (if not entirely, perhaps, without fear). Life is something to be celebrated with friends.

Afterward Emily insisted that I accompany her to a party nearby, and though I was tired, and it was snowing heavily, and I knew that I wouldn’t know any of the people there, I gave myself over to her more expansive sense of the way our evening together should go. Inside, at a table crowded with dripping candles and wine bottles, I was introduced to a man with very large sad eyes. When he turned to talk to me, I wanted to duck under the table, I felt so thoroughly seen.

Perhaps there are, after all, things we feel before we really know them. Later, as I left the party, the sad-eyed man was coming back in from having a cigarette. As we crossed paths in the doorway, my hand reached out to touch his arm, startling us both. He said goodnight, and I said goodnight, and we both said goodnight again, and then I walked home in deep, fresh snow, replaying the moment when I had passed the threshold. ♦ 

 How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves

Megan O’Grady is a critic and an essayist. She was a writer at large for 

, and her reviews and essays about art and life also appear in 

, from which this excerpt is drawn, is out this week from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

How It Feels to Be Alive

Alexandra Schwartz

Ben Lerner

A lot of my life is organized around the idea that there’s something really important about imagination’s capacity to redescribe reality. It’s also a horrifying capacity, because it shares a wall with psychosis.

It doesn't really matter if there's a future, but you have to produce the fiction of one to live because it textures the present.

Ben Lerner Speaks to the Dead

It is a cliched dream, she said, a common
I used to think libraries were quiet because
the way they ban flash photography
books were corroded by speech, the pigments
The one where it's night in the institution
A corduroy bear hides from the watchman
The animals speak at the zoo and sculptures
Relax, stretch, walk around the atrium
low voices to protect the blue glass in the
Supply chain problems, how the mica sparkles
in Jay DaFeo’s 

, which I saw first
with Margaux when the new Whitney opened, then
When I was sleeping, the mica sparkling in red
security light, and in my dreams all light is
The way you are everyone in the dream
heat, she lit a cigarette off the screen
blue embers. Like those Magritte paintings where
the house is illuminated by a streetlamp but
a daytime sky, I mean it’s like that to be alive
and made of cloth, and writing this down

In the notebook she keeps by the bed, there are
There is a small light coming up the escalator
I like the poem your son wrote about the wolf
that it has needs, that its first need is meat
spelled “met,” and the second the moon
That the moon is a need that can be met
in the city, whereas the stars are obscured
is cliche, a commons, because they also dream
the institutions, that’s why I like teaching at night
how The Rose, too expensive to restore
too heavy to move, was for years behind a false
wall in San Francisco, and the seminars
on art took place in its presence, invisible
Walls have an unconscious, needs
sleep and oxygen, a pack and large silver fish
spelled “pac,” and my friends and I walk through it
at night, to see what has shifted beneath
the sawtooth skylights, on the soft grass
the little stars, we are tucked in
to the walls around the fire. I’d like to begin

For the next seven years she applied thick paint
chiseled it away, inserting wooden dowels
of the gaze to support the thick impasto
which shifted overnight, transferring it with friends
The way they warn you that articles
may have shifted during flight, it applies to sleep
Wedged out of a bay window on Fillmore Street
after we sawed through the frame, it reminds me of
All my favorite books were about built spaces
shading into wilds, worlds, Narnia through the wardrobe
The prince they tied to a chair, who said
No matter what I say, don’t untie me, stop your ears
Max’s bedroom becoming jungle, Harold drawing the moon
into existence, inadvertently making the sea
when his hand trembled, and the number seven
I read them to my girls, Marcela puts a book
under the pillow to “help me dream,” the door opens onto
forest, because you know the people who built it
are in your walls, that your needs have been met
at the expense of other wolves

is part of Margaux’s work. We saw it get restored
restore itself before our eyes, and like a star collapse
inward continuously before us, saw
through the frame, and I said the rose is obsolete
quoting, renews itself in metal or porcelain so that
I was splicing lines, to engage roses
becomes a geometry, end quote, and the guard
said to her, No flashes, when she didn’t have
She wasn’t holding anything, is the nicest
thing anyone has ever said to me
In a dream, you are everyone, even the walls
You sleepwalk through your seminar on modernist
low voices, you aren’t supposed to wake them
your parents, just gently suggest that they return
So I can relax about influence in her presence
I make a list of my needs: light and heat
“met” and fish, a pact to hold the dome
up above the world so high, like a diamond
and a notebook, a supply chain of our own making
Oxygen, clean water, libraries, caves

Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and Advisor to 

, from which this poem is drawn, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September.

The Rose

Ben Lerner: The Rose

This essay was originally written to be released with Meshell Ndegeocello’s acclaimed 2024 LP, 

No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin

(Blue Note). Ndegeocello has now moved on from performing Baldwin material. But we’re honored to publish this piece in homage to her work—and in anticipation of the great bassist’s 

concert at Pioneer Works on March 29, 2026

In the old days—in the way back times, way back in what the American author, James Baldwin, called "the old country," or the American South—folks carried their dead with them. Took those shadows and memories down roads and into attics, let them romp and breathe by riverbanks in Georgia, told them stories in Maryland, gossiped with them for a spell in Pensacola, and Washington, D.C. The point was you didn't let the dead stay dead: they were your legacy, and your voice, and in talking to, about, and through them, you learned how you sounded as well, where those multitude of voices sat in your own throat.

You can hear the voices the gone but not gone leave us with in Meshell Ndegeocello's altogether brilliant sonic theatre piece, 

, a work that contains a cavalcade of voices, sounds, and unique utterances around one subject: James Baldwin, whose centenary we celebrated in 2024. But is celebration really the word? In Ndegeocello's hands and hearing, Baldwin was always there, an astonishing presence whose voice—whose multitude of voices as novelist, playwright, poet, screenplay writer, and especially essayist—always talked to us, if we only listened.

Born and raised in Harlem, Baldwin's writing created a universe rooted in the real: the reality of his queerness, his race, the fecundity of his ever expanding mind and heart, and the reality of his ancestors, all the voices that came before and helped make his voice. These included Henry James, his mother Berdis Baldwin's comforting sound, the wrath, piety, and drama, in the King James Bible, gospel music, the critic Edmund Wilson —and, too, the songwriter Charles Albert Tindley. Tindley may not have been a direct influence on Baldwin. But you can hear his retroactive influence on the writer in Tindley's hymn, "Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave it There," a hymn Baldwin, the boy preacher—he preached from the time he was 14; when he was 17, he stopped—might very well have sung on one of those Harlem Sundays, his white shirt stiff with starch and his heart beating out the rhythm as he clapped his hands, flashed a tambourine:

Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.
If you trust and never doubt, He will surely bring you out.
Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

But where could Baldwin leave his burden? Raised in the Christian church by a preacher father who embraced Jesus but who could not love his adopted son, Baldwin competed for his father's attention by becoming a preacher, too, an authoritative role he used, in the end, to distance himself from the terrifying complications of his own blackness and maleness in a country that did not love either. One place he could hear his complexity—the complexity of his mind and heart—was in music. "It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a proactive sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story," Baldwin wrote in his 1951 essay, "Many Thousands Gone." He goes on:

It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in hieroglyphics; it is revealed in Negro speech and in that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference. The ways in which the Negro has affected the American psychology are betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our estrangement from him is the depth of our estrangement from ourselves. We cannot ask: what do we really feel about him—such a question merely opens the gates on chaos. What we really feel about him is involved with all that we feel about everything, about everyone, about ourselves.

If music is unadulterated storytelling—the story that tells the truest story of us, and you, too—how do we make that music? What is the story we mean to tell through sound? In 

, which Ndegeocello and her magnificent colleagues Justin Hicks, Abe Rounds, Chris Bruce, Jebin Bruni, Julius Rodriguez, Jake Sherman, Kenita Miller, and Staceyann Chin worked on for eight years, we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a kind of inheritance: not only the words Baldwin left us, particularly when he published 

, his devastating report on the ways in which ideals of beauty and masculinity destroy as many lives as they hope to make, but how we, his audience, remade Baldwin, while taking some things away. Such as his queer body. His right to his sexuality and thus love. The intimacy that affects being. Did he sacrifice all that to be a voice—our voice? 

Baldwin left the U.S. to get away from racism and I believe homophobia in 1948. He had $40 and no French. The point was to learn how to write, he said once, without all those hang-ups. And to maybe learn how to love. Music helped him become the writer he meant to be. Listening to Bessie Smith records in a Swiss chalet carried him back to who he used to be, and with that he was able to finish his first novel, 

, a book about a Black church and the guilty queer boy Baldwin was in it. That book is filled with singing, with images of the "vertical saints" praying for a salvation that may never come. No God can wash them clean of their blackness, their history. Living abroad allowed Baldwin the distance to see the world he had come from. And music helped get him there. But he knew when it was time to go home. It was 1956, and he was in France. He picked up a newspaper; there was a photograph of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. She was one of the first black students admitted to Harry Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, under the Pearsall Plan to Save Our Schools. Instituted in 1956, the Pearsall Plan was North Carolina's attempt to integrate their public schools following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. For many blacks, North Carolina's "moderate" approach was just more of that Faulkner jazz about "going slow,” which Baldwin analyzes in his 1956 essay, "Faulkner and Desegregation":

The Southern tradition, which is, after all, all that Faulkner is talking about, is not a tradition at all: when Faulkner evokes it, he is simply evoking a legend which contains an accusation. And that accusation, stated far more simply than it should be, is that the North, in winning the war, left the South only one means of asserting its identity and that means was the Negro.

Degradation, violence, spit. "Spit was hanging from the hem of Dorothy's dress," Baldwin reports a witness saying to him; Baldwin: "One of us should have been with her." Returning to the U.S. led, of course, to his deepening friendships with Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, and it also led to him becoming a significant voice in the Civil Rights movement. But where was his voice? That interior voice all writers must draw on in order to become a self?

When James Baldwin published "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in the 

in 1962, the response was immediate. In the essay, the public self merges with the personal in order to produce a polemic that was a sermon born partly out of the heartache of leaving the church a marginalized queer boy and returning to the memory of the church as a queer man. Baldwin's essay deals, in part, with how the the faithless become just that, and how European ideals of religion and beauty crippled and then made whole and fierce, at least momentarily, the black body that ultimately rejected such specious, evil claims.

Writing "Down at the Cross" allowed Baldwin to vomit the church up, and to expose its smoke and mirrors, all designed to keep black people on their knees, sunk deep in piousness and ghetto-think. Despite its wrath, though, Baldwin's longest early piece is shot through with a kind of gay slyness and humor—he reads other people as much as he reads himself. Still, he doesn't forego the galvanizing power of black organization: What if the Nation of Islam, which he reports on and analyzes in the second half of the story, indeed has their revenge on all those white devils who wanted to (at best) keep a black man down? The once white world would be white no longer, and there would be no forgiveness for having equated one's race with power while treating all those others accordingly. Still, in all the controversy that followed his most famous work—it landed Baldwin on the cover of another magazine,

, and required him to display his oratory gifts in any number of non-literary venues—what got lost, at times, was the sheer talent and imagination that went into the thing, and how a changing universe always begins with the word.

Those words are music to Ndegeocello. Inspired by Baldwin’s most well-known essay, Ndegeocello’s piece, first staged as a church service, employed music, sermon, text, images, and movement, all of which entered into conversation with Baldwin’s monumental and delicate essay about how black bodies were perceived not only by white Americans but by blacks themselves. In the first part of the work, Baldwin wrestles with—without naming it—his homosexuality, and with the strain of being “saved,” when he knew, by virtue of his preference, that he was among the so-called “dispossessed.” And in going back to the sounds Baldwin made on the page, Ndegeocello mined those words that return Baldwin to his own body, his own voice, while creating music in her own name, too.

When I first saw the piece in 2016 at Harlem Stage, Ndegeocello’s performance put my heart in my throat. Because this was opera as a form of resistance. And music without rhetoric. “Eyes,” a song written and performed by Hicks, seemed to have been written from inside Baldwin’s body—the very body we had denied him in our veneration of him. But as Hicks sang, he gave Baldwin back to us, and oh, how we had missed him. It was not lost on many of us that afternoon that 

 was being performed not too far from where Baldwin was born and raised, those Harlem streets that made him, even as they threatened to unmake him. Some folks never left the avenue. But when he died in 1984, they gathered, remembering Jimmy, with all those sounds and words that bring him right back to us, with his poppy-sized eyes, and his head in stories. What those folks on the avenue saw in him was hope, his queer Black body shot through with rainbows. 

, too. That Jimmy body dug up; the bones wrapped in rainbow flags and stars: an honoring of the dead that do not stay dead. A legacy. Dig. The music Ndegeocello’s made here lets us hear how the dreams creeping out of his head got into her head and her various musicians, all those voices raised to give Jimmy back his body, that body he was always playing hide and seek with because who wanted to really see it when he was here, see it whole, and the language that went along with it? Language is music. And the music you hear in 

 is Jimmy talking to Meshell and his words meeting the language of her sounds and then coming out again through a multitude of voices, a multitude of sounds and thoughts that bring Jimmy back and give him—finally—his whole and true self, that which he offered up, time and again, if only we knew then how to listen. ♦

since 1994, and won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017. He is

gen-brody

How You Sound?

What is consciousness, who has it, and why? How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? 

, Michael Pollan joined Janna Levin for a special conversation on the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life. ♦

For the launch of his new book, A World Appears, Michael Pollan joined Janna Levin for a special conversation on the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.

Michael Pollan on Feelings, Psychedelics, and AI

In the 1990s, astronomy professor Joe Patterson wrote and illustrated a seasonal newsletter, in the style of an old-fashioned paper zine, of astronomical highlights visible from New York City. His affable style mixed wit and history with astronomy for a completely charming, largely undiscovered cult classic: Big Apple Astronomy. For 

, Joe shares current issues of Big Apple Sky Calendar, the guide to sky viewing that used to conclude his seasonal newsletter. Steal a few moments of reprieve from the city’s mayhem to take in these sights. As Oscar Wilde said, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

April

Full Moon at 10:11 pm EDT. The bright star next to the Moon tonight is Spica.

Until the year 1582, when Pope Gregory reformed all the calendars of Catholic Europe, April 1 was considered the beginning of the year. Or purists might say it was March 25—the traditional date for the vernal equinox.

, a film by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. Usually ranked as the greatest science fiction film of all time, and often as one of the 10 best films of all time. I think I've seen it 10 times, including the opening night in Boston, and couldn't count the number of hours I’ve spent discussing it with friends. Clarke's imagination and knowledge, coupled with Kubrick's subtlety and use of imagery, produced an absolute masterpiece.

Mercury is now at “maximum western elongation” from the Sun—as far west from the star as it ever gets (27 degrees), and therefore visible in the morning sky. However, it’ll have to compete with Venus for visibility... and that’s never a fair fight. Any bright planetary object you see these mornings, low in the eastern sky, will likely be Venus.

Easter Sunday. Easter is a “moveable feast” holiday, because it is pegged to the full Moon, rather than a calendar date. It’s always the first Sunday after the first full Moon on or after the vernal equinox.

On this day in 2001, the Mars Odyssey mission was launched to search for water on Mars. This and other missions have now shown some evidence for the existence of subsurface water on Mars, and simple photography appears to show dried-up river canyons. As the Planetary Society puts it: “Mars isn't the greatest place to quench your thirst, although it may have been a few billion years ago.”

On this day in 2019, NASA and NSF revealed the first image of a black hole—specifically, the supermassive black hole at the core of the massive galaxy M87. This was accomplished by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a worldwide collaboration of radio telescopes—which agree in advance to observe the same targets at exactly the same time (and thereby simulate a telescope thousands of miles in diameter). The principle is similar, but not identical, to that which we all know as 

(NEAF) will be held at Rockland Community College. Imagine a large gymnasium full of the latest stuff from just about every vendor roughly connected to astronomy (telescopes, toys, clothing, books, et cetera) and dozens of talks. Every imaginable price range, for every imaginable taste. I recommend bringing more $$ than you think you’d spend.

In 1961, the first human (Yuri Gagarin) orbited the Earth on this date. He came down safely, to a hero’s welcome, but died a few years later in a plane crash. Those were dangerous years for astronauts, and even more so for their dog and chimpanzee cousins.

Last-quarter Moon, rising around midnight.

In the year 1006, one of the great supernovae occurred—the oldest in European history—in the constellation Lupus (the Wolf). Observations were reported from Europe, Africa, and China. The star was many times brighter than Venus, and remained visible throughout the year. Today it is known as SN 1006, and the ejected shell is extensively studied at radio, optical, and x-ray wavelengths. Despite the prominent shell, no central object (a compact remnant of the supernova) has ever been detected.

makes two favorable (well-timed for observing) overpasses of NYC during April. These are on April 19 from 5:39–5:46 am EDT (traveling from southwestern sky towards the northeast), and on April 21 from 4:56–5:01 am EDT (from west to northeast).

These only last ~six minutes, so don’t sleep late… and don’t mistake the ISS for a plane! It moves at 18000 mph, but is 100 miles higher up—hence whywhy its rate of motion across the sky looks pretty similar.

pile-up of bright objects in the evening sky. Venus is the brilliant object you’ll see in the west throughout April (and May). The thin-crescent Moon zips past Venus on the evenings of April 18 and 19—look low for “the old Moon in the New Moon’s arms.” By the 20th and 21st, the Moon starts to menace Jupiter, higher in the western sky.

For people new to stargazing, here’s a puzzle: how can a portion of the Moon NOT get illuminated by sunlight? If you look at it, you might guess right. No, it’s not that the lunar atmosphere is thin (the Moon has no atmosphere at all).

Immanuel Kant's birthday in 1724. Before wandering off to become the greatest philosopher since Aristotle, the young Immanuel was fascinated by astronomy, and wrote a very insightful book about galaxies (or "nebulae", as they were then called). He thought they were each vast collections of stars—much like the Milky Way, but at great distances. A century later, astronomers would vehemently argue over this; indeed, it was the most vexing issue of their time (see the Shapley-Curtis debate, discussed below). New telescopes in the 1910s–20s proved that young Immanuel had it right all along.

First-quarter Moon, high in the evening sky and just north of Jupiter.

 
On this day in 1990, amid much hoopla, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched. To NASA's great embarrassment, the first images showed that the optics of the mirror were flawed—the images were fuzzy! Good for cartoonists, but bad for astronomy. Fortunately, the telescope was actually designed to be visited by astronauts... and an early visit managed to fix the flaw. For the next 36 years (and counting), the telescope has been a workhorse instrument for astronomers of all nations.

From 5–9 pm, AAA (Amateur Astronomers Association) will host their Star Party on board the U.S.S. Intrepid at Pier 86. See 

 for details. Come early if your main interest is the aircraft carrier, or late if it’s the party. Remember, the Sun sets late in late April.

On this day in 1803, thousands of stones fell on the small French village of L'Agile. For the preceding few decades, there had been an active debate: Do “meteorites” come from the heavens (beyond the Earth), or are they some kind of terrestrial (“meteorological”) phenomenon? The young scientist Jean-Baptiste Biot traveled to the region, collected samples, interviewed eyewitnesses, and presented a convincing case: They come from space, presumably the solar system. 

Individual humans and small human artifacts are mighty unlikely targets for incoming meteorites. But there are recent and well-proven cases of a human (just one) and a car (just one) being hit. They make for fun reading. Just for jollies, look them up! Very few meteorites (714, the same number of home runs hit by Babe Ruth) seem to come from the Moon, rather than interplanetary space. You can actually

buy one, but they might cost as much as home runs hit by Babe Ruth.

On this date in 1920, the famous Shapley-Curtis Debate occurred before the National Academy of Sciences. Heber Curtis of the University of California said: They're large systems of stars, very much like the Milky Way but at great distances. Harlow Shapley or Harvard argued: Nope, they're just what they look like. They’re little smudges of gas and stars in the only real Galaxy that exists, the Milky Way. The new observations of the 1920s proved emphatically that Curtis was correct, and that many of the little smudges are "island universes" at great distances. (Side note: neither seem to have referenced Kant. Broaden your reading, guys.)

Full Moon 1:23 pm EDT. The first of two in May! Quiz: How often does that

The High Romance of George Schaller

Shanzhai Lyric's Endless Garment

How It Feels to Be Alive

How It Feels to Be Alive

Ben Lerner: The Rose

Ben Lerner: The Rose

How You Sound?

Michael Pollan on Feelings, Psychedelics, and AI

Big Apple Sky Calendar: April, May, June 2026

Issue 03, Available Now