Forests are foundational resources for humans. Fallen and felled wood is burned for heat and energy; trees are logged for construction material; sap or pitch is harvested for waterproofing boats; bark is stripped for use in clothing production; softwood is pulped to make paper--the list goes on. In games like Age of Empires, which recapitulate the history of humanity, the first thing the player does is turn forests of trees into wood. Before gold, before oil, there’s the accumulation of wood. It takes a bit more effort, and the consequences are greater outside, on the real planet earth. But, in the face of climate change, carbon sequestration and storage acquires new market value, and wood finds itself in competition with trees. Whether a given tree is worth more standing or chopped down, as a tree or as wood, depends on who’s doing the measuring, and how. What, then, is a tree worth?
Sometime around 1860, a man named Jacob Sharp stood at the intersection of Chambers Street and Broadway in Manhattan and counted the omnibuses. By his count, there was one every 15 seconds, or more than 6,000 in a 13-hour stretch. Each omnibus — a horse-drawn coach that could carry about a dozen people — was fast, uncomfortable, and profitable. But Sharp knew he could do better. By counting the traffic he could make his case to the New York City Council that they should let him lay rails in the middle of the road. By replacing wooden wheels on cobblestone with steel wheels on steel rails the same horses could pull many more passengers in a train. That meant a more orderly street with less horse poop, more regular routes, and a smoother ride. He was right: The rails were laid, and eventually the horses were replaced by steam engines, and then electricity.
But even as the meteoric rise of streetcars continued into the early 20th century, there also came the automobile. It could not make its case on social efficiency and improved public safety — it brought on ruthless carnage that left thousands of people, mostly children, dead in the street as new motorists struggled to understand this new power that Henry Ford had given them. Nonetheless, it would surpass streetcars and become the dominant transportation technology, reshaping the built environment into a testament to its own seeming inevitability.
There have always been monuments to commemorate the loss of life from calamitous events, such as the thousands of memorials dedicated to world wars, the Sept. 11 attacks, the Holocaust.
But the Covid-19 pandemic, now in its third year, has presented a unique challenge for grieving families. It is not a singular event, in one location. As the death toll of more than six million worldwide continues to rise, communities and families are trying to keep up, building memorials at the same time that the tragedy is unfolding, its end not yet written.
Move over chimpanzees, dolphins, and even bonobos. Apes and cetaceans doing clever things is so mid-2000s. The new geniuses are birds, especially parrots and corvids, members of the crow family. An African Grey Parrot named Alex learned about 150 words, not merely repeating them but seeming to know what they meant, and could categorize objects by color and size. When he died at the age of 31, his obituary appeared in the New York Times. Even pigeons, which don’t seem especially thoughtful, can memorize more than 700 different patterns, and can classify objects as either “human-made” or “natural.”
In case that seems too studious, consider Snowball, the dancing Sulphur-crested Cockatoo. This bird rocketed to YouTube fame with his ability to move along to the beat of pop songs. Standing on the back of an armchair, Snowball produced 14 distinct dance moves. The authors of a paper examining his behavior note that these were spontaneously generated by the bird, rather than copied from his owner, “who does not make a wide range of movements when dancing with Snowball and tends only to engage in head bobbing and hand waving” (which is an accurate description of a lot of people’s dance moves, in my experience).
The worst part of having a Kierkegaard-related nervous breakdown, according to Selin’s best friend, Svetlana, in Elif Batuman’s second novel, Either/Or, is not being able to tell people about it, lest you appear self-important. We glean the second-worst part for ourselves: the sense of existential dread that turns even the most seemingly simple decisions into philosophical ones. Throughout this novel, the sequel to 2018’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Idiot, Selin – our narrator – is bewildered by the mundane and fixated on the profound. Strings of passing questions are imbued with Batuman’s wit and flair – “What good was a novelty candle?” “What good was the actual Hippocrates?” “What was a Swedish twin fetish?”. One, though, is present throughout: are some lives more real than others?