In the age of GPS, we forget how easy it can be to get disorientated, and we are often fooled into thinking we know the world around us. Common cognitive errors, such as the assumption that ridges, coastlines, and other geographical features run parallel to each other, are easily corrected by a compass or mapping app. But technology, just like our brains, can also lead us astray when we are unsure how to use it or are unaware of its fallibilities. When the aviator Francis Chichester was teaching navigation to RAF pilots during the Second World War, two of his students went missing during an exercise. Chichester searched for them for days in his light aircraft in the Welsh hills, without success. Three months later, he heard that they were prisoners of war: They had misread their compass and flown 180 degrees in the wrong direction, traveling southeast instead of northwest, and had crossed the English Channel thinking it was the Bristol Channel. "They were grateful when an airfield put up a cone of searchlights for them," Chichester recounted in his autobiography, "and it was not until they had finished their landing run on the airstrip and a German soldier poked a tommy-gun into the cockpit that they realised that they were not on an English airfield." This was the wartime equivalent of following a satnav into a river.
It is hard to predict how someone who is lost will behave, though it’s safe to assume—as search and rescue leaders always do—that they won’t do much to help themselves. Few people manage to do what is often the most sensible thing and stay put. Most feel compelled to keep moving, and so throw themselves into the unknown in the hope that an escape route will appear. Accounts by people who have been lost show that this urge to move is extremely hard to resist, even among skilled navigators. Ralph Bagnold, a pioneer of desert exploration in North Africa during the 1930s and 1940s and founder of the British Army’s Long Range Desert Group, recalled being seized by "an extraordinarily powerful impulse" to carry on driving, in any direction, after losing his way in the Western Desert in Egypt. He considered it a kind of madness. "This psychological effect … has been the cause of nearly every desert disaster of recent years," he wrote. "If one can stay still even for half an hour and have a meal or smoke a pipe, reason returns to work out the problem of location." When you’re lost, fight (or rather, freeze) is better than flight, at least until you’ve made a plan. Does knowing this help you drop anchor? Up to a point. Hugo Spiers, who studies how animals and humans navigate space, inadvertently became his own test subject during an expedition to the Amazon basin in Peru.
I point out that perhaps this, now, is that confession. That he's cataloged his deeds and misdeeds over more than 12 hours of interviews; when the results are published—and people reach the end of this article—that account will finally be out in the open. Hutchins' fans and critics alike will see his life laid bare and, like Stadtmueller in his courtroom, they will come to a verdict. Maybe they too will judge him worthy of redemption. And maybe it will give him some closure.
He seems to consider this. “I had hoped it would, but I don't really think so anymore,” he says, looking down at the sidewalk. He's come to believe, he explains, that the only way to earn redemption would be to go back and stop all those people from helping him—making sacrifices for him—under false pretenses. “The time when I could have prevented people from doing all that for me has passed.”
A few elements conspired to make Taco Friday a Swedish institution. In 1990, the country was emerging from a financial crisis, and Swedes were eager to spend again and try new things. Around the same time, government deregulation of television allowed advertising for the first time. Prior to that, Swedes had only seen on-screen ads in cinemas.
The Swedish chips company OLW popularized the slogan “Now it’s cozy Friday time” in its commercials. These days, most Swedes can still hum the catchy jingle by heart. This is widely believed to be the origin of the term Fredagsmys, and in 2007, it was even adopted into the Swedish dictionary.
I wasn’t allowed to eat in front of the TV growing up. Mine was one of those mythical families that gathered together around a table most nights and like, talked, over dinner. There were only a handful of occasions when eating and watching were allowed to happen simultaneously, and these most often involved somebody (usually me) being sick. But on those special days, my mother would bring out my bowl of Jell-O or stack of Saltines on one of a quartet of old metal TV trays we kept in the broom closet. And it was magic.
Now, these were not just any TV trays — these were Strawberry Shortcake TV trays, with a pair of metal legs that folded out to elevate the tray a few comfortable inches over your lap. Keep in mind that to a kid in the 1980s, Strawberry Shortcake had the hype equivalent of Frozen, Trolls, Timothée Chalamet, and Animal Crossing combined. But my love for the TV tray had less to do with its spot-on branding, and more with what it symbolized: an invitation for mindlessness.
Despite the depressingly bleak deficit in how we humans connect, the manifold ways we harm each other, knowingly and unknowingly, from birth, it continues. “[I]n the end it is almost impossible,” Zhang writes, “to say no to more life.”
We now live in a time of which Brodsky was an advance scout—a time in which many writers operate beyond their original borders and outside their mother tongues, often, like Brodsky, bearing witness to violence and disruption, often answering, through art, to those experiences, in language refracted, by necessity, through other language. In Brodsky’s time there was a cluster of poets, some from the margins of empire, some, like Brodsky, severed from their roots—Walcott, Heaney, Paz, Milosz, to name a few—who brought with them commanding traditions as well as the imprint of history’s dislocations. We would do well now to attend to their song, standing as they did in our doorway between a broken past and the language’s future.
Repulsive,
Enraging,
Makes me mad.