St. Matthew Island is said to be the most remote place in Alaska. Marooned in the Bering Sea halfway to Siberia, it is well over 300 kilometers and a 24-hour ship ride from the nearest human settlements. It looks fittingly forbidding, the way it emerges from its drape of fog like the dark spread of a wing. Curved, treeless mountains crowd its sliver of land, plunging in sudden cliffs where they meet the surf. To St. Matthew’s north lies the smaller, more precipitous island of Hall. A castle of stone called Pinnacle stands guard off St. Matthew’s southern flank. To set foot on this scatter of land surrounded by endless ocean is to feel yourself swallowed by the nowhere at the center of a drowned compass rose.
My head swims a little as I peer into a shallow pit on St. Matthew’s northwestern tip. It’s late July in 2019, and the air buzzes with the chitters of the island’s endemic singing voles. Wildflowers and cotton grass constellate the tundra that has grown over the depression at my feet, but around 400 years ago, it was a house, dug partway into the earth to keep out the elements. It’s the oldest human sign on the island, the only prehistoric house ever found here. A lichen-crusted whale jawbone points downhill toward the sea, the rose’s due-north needle.
Since black holes first captivated the public imagination decades ago, they have garnered a certain reputation. They are labeled monstrous, destructive, bent on devouring anything that dares approach their cosmic maw. But without them, the cosmos, and our own planet, would be less dense with wonder.
Wittgenstein wrote that “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” In her fierce debut novel, Australian Laura Jean McKay sets herself an extraordinary challenge: to represent animal communication in words. The book succeeds by walking a difficult and delicate line between understanding and incomprehension, creating something like dirty realism out of its fantastical premise.
Time is both taken from me, no longer my own, and yet abundant. Readers, writers, scholars, do we slow down our intellectual work to engage immediate, daily, practical, or political concerns — protesting racial violence, calling representative leaders? Do we dig more deeply into long-term endeavors — doing academic research and teaching about systemic racism and injustice as forms of resistance? This book raises such fruitful concerns, bringing multiple new perspectives to a rich field and reminding us how there have always been many questions of time.
Then again, “The Knowledge Machine” is ultimately a work of philosophy, and should be considered an ambitious thought experiment. Strevens builds on the work of philosophers like Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn to come up with his own original hypothesis about the advent of modern science and its formidable consequences. The machine in Strevens’s title has scientists pursuing their work relentlessly while also abiding by certain rules of the game, allowing even the most vehement partisans to talk with one another.
A creeping association might doldrum
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