For someone who thinks of herself as a writer, I’m writing very little these days. It’s been months since I’ve liked anything I’ve made, or since I’ve felt much pleasure in making it. From where I sit, likely culprits include Twitter, television, and a growing sense of self-consciousness, but I’ve come to writing this here, and now, in part because I can’t quite tell why I’ve ground to such a halt. The exact reasons are murky, even if the timeline of my realizing what is happening is not. It started with a dog.
This line of inquiry might not have been productive just a few years ago. But several advances have made the search for technosignatures feasible. The first, thanks to new telescopes and astronomical techniques, is the identification of planets orbiting distant stars. As of August, NASA’s confirmed tally of such exoplanets was 5,084, and the number tends to grow by several hundred a year. “Pretty much every star you see in the night sky has a planet around it, if not a family of planets,” Frank says; he notes that this realization has only taken hold in the past decade or so. Because there are probably at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe, the potential candidates for life — as well as for civilizations that possess technology — may involve numbers almost too large to imagine. Perhaps more important, our tools keep getting better. This summer, the first pictures from the new James Webb Space Telescope were released. But several other powerful ground- and space-based instruments are being developed that will allow us to view exceedingly distant objects for the first time or view previously identified objects in novel ways. “With things like J.W.S.T. and some of the other telescopes, we’re beginning to be able to probe atmospheres looking for much smaller signals,” Michael New, a NASA research official who attended the 2018 Houston conference, told me. “And this is something we just couldn’t have done before.”
As Frank puts it, more bluntly: “The point is, after 2,500 years of people yelling at each other over life in the universe, in the next 10, 20 and 30 years we will actually get data.”
Dark energy can’t be ignored because to keep the expansion of the universe speeding up, it has to account for at least 68 percent of all of the matter and energy in the universe.
“The community is puzzled by the results. We can either claim the techniques could be further refined to get closer values for the Hubble constant, or we could improve the models we use to calibrate the observations,” García adds. “There is a third possibility that could be considered — a variable Hubble rate at different epochs of the universe, implying that the contribution of dark energy is not a constant, but it varies over time.”
And one way of looking back in time is by studying gravitational waves launched by distant events.
In a video clip posted to Instagram, a jelly shimmies. With fluted curves like a Bundt cake, it suggests a ball gown skirt gone rogue, the dancer within turned ghost or banished from the scene. Elsewhere online lurk ornate jellies, from 18th-century British molds, with high, gooey spires that dip wildly from side to side, to cheesecakes, ostensibly solid yet vibrating, as if in thrall to some erratic internal pulse. (These are Japanese cotton cheesecakes, so called because of their confounding lightness, achieved by folding in egg whites whipped into peaks and then baking the cakes in a hot-water bath.) Sometimes the oscillations are slowed down to a tidal ripple. Sometimes a human hand enters the frame, spanking a cheesecake to make it bounce or, in a curious trend that started in 2019, wielding a spoon to smack the bottom of a little gelatinous pig or bunny — reminding us that the food in question cannot move of its own power; that it is not, in fact, alive.
It is 9 a.m. on a Saturday, and I am sitting in a little wooden boat with my son. He is fidgety, restless with excitement, practically bouncing against the large metal bar on our laps. A bell rings, and we begin moving in a circle, slowly at first, following the swells and dips of the waves. Then we speed up. My son grabs the helm in front of us and turns it several times, swinging our boat around. We are moving backwards fast, and my stomach is turning. I take the wheel and right our boat, but now the light goes out. Before I know it, my son has spun us around again.
He is laughing. It is his first amusement park ride, and he’s keen to squeeze every last drop of thrill out of it. I have spent my life avoiding thrills. My son is ten and tall enough for roller coasters. I am forty-one, and I have only ever been on one. I always find a reason to stay away. Someone needs to take care of the smaller kids, I say. Or: I’m not interested. It’s not my idea of fun. Who knows what could go wrong? Do I really trust the technical know-how and safety expertise of seasonal carnival workers and distracted teenagers? Didn’t I read once about riders getting stuck midtrack and being left to hang upside down?
It’s silly, yes, but for me it feels like summer is a limited resource, one I want to optimize. I hold onto the season tightly: every single day feels precious. Soon, my time will not be my own. Soon, the sun will set earlier and the days will be cold. Soon, this all will end. I do this largely because I want to remember my summers vividly, and with no regret. I want every summer to be the best summer of my life: the most productive, the most full, the most relaxing, the most memorable. In some ways, I’m chasing the summers of my girlhood—the ones that felt wide open and endless, full of perfect days.
But nothing is just one thing in Ma's writing: Satire swirls into savagery; a gimmicky premise into poignancy. What does this story mean? Maybe something about the truth of most of us living with memories of people — old lovers and others — populating our headspace, except here the memories and the space are made literal. But beware: Another story, called "Peking Duck" explicitly warns against asking of any story, "What's the lesson here supposed to be?"
Ma’s new short story collection, “Bliss Montage,” shares some of the themes she explored in her debut, including identity and the immigrant experience, but most of these stories are uncanny and haunting.
In Ling Ma’s story collection Bliss Montage, Chinese American women hope for a similar Happy Interlude, if not a happy ending. Instead, much like in Ma’s celebrated debut novel Severance, life happens to them, and surreal events force them to face who they really are.
This idea — that solipsism is a lie, that we must remember that we are as humans all interconnected — undergirds all of Milch's transformative television, from the groundbreaking police procedurals Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, to the Shakespeare-meets-the-profane Western Deadwood, to the odd and awe-inspiring surfing drama John from Cincinnati, to the ill-fated horse racing series Luck. And it's something Milch urgently wants to get across in his memoir Life's Work. "We are organs of a larger organism which knows us although we do not know it," he writes, prefacing his commentary on Hickok's funeral.
Edward Enninful’s memoir gives the impression of someone in perpetual motion. He has, after all, made the journey from refugee to the hallowed offices of Condé Nast, becoming the editor-in-chief who brought true diversity to the pages of British Vogue. Make it past the preface, notable for the number of names dropped in one particularly glitzy passage, and you’ll find a text more intimate in tone and easier to relate to, emotionally at least.