Most people have never heard of vacuum decay, but if it happened it would be the biggest natural disaster in the universe. Sure, an asteroid could destroy a city or wipe out life on Earth. A supernova could fry the ozone layer. If a blast of energy from a spinning black hole hit our planet, it could rip apart the entire solar system. As dramatic as these disasters are, they’d still leave behind rocks, gas and dust. With time that matter could come together again, making new stars and planets and maybe life.
Vacuum decay is different. This cataclysm would result from a change in the Higgs field, a quantum field that pervades all of space. It would be triggered by pure chance, creating a bubble that would expand at almost the speed of light, transforming all in its path. Inside that bubble the laws of physics we take for granted would change, making matter as we know it (and, consequently, life) impossible.
As childhood friends growing up in Carpinteria, California, in the 1970s and ’80s, we saw avocados every day. They were just as much a part of the “Carp” landscape as the beach town’s famous surf break. We assumed it had always been that way. Orchards blanketed the hillsides behind town, and significant hours of our childhoods were spent exploring the Parsons’ avocado farm— crunching through the fallen leaves, playing beneath shady canopies, and climbing among smooth branches. It was only after leaving home and heading east for college that we recognized just how much we had taken for granted. Avocados were part of what we left behind.
There’s something undeniably magical about that moment at a restaurant when a basket of warm, complimentary bread arrives at your table. It’s a simple gesture, but it feels like a little celebration: a soft roll, a crisp heel of sourdough, maybe even a golden square of focaccia, all arriving before you’ve even ordered anything. And yet, believe it or not, there are people out there who eye that bread basket with deep suspicion. To them, “free” bread is anything but—they see it as a stealth charge, baked right into the price of everything else. And while their skepticism may sound a bit crusty, well… they’re not entirely wrong.
“It’s all basic math at the end of the day,” explains Chad Colby, the head chef and owner of Antico Nuovo, a rustic Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. “Whether it’s free bread in a French or Italian restaurant, or free chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant, there’s an expectation of certain things. And a lot of places are having to rethink that.”
No matter if whipped into an icing, deep-fried and served with a sticky dipping sauce or simply steamed, tofu is a shapeshifter. It’s not pretending to be anything it isn’t; it’s just doing its own thing — and brilliantly at that.
I used to think I could use old computers to break open time and get everything back; to fold the screen in two and make a tesseract. I wanted to know what would happen at the end of my dream with the car, the airplane, and the hill. I wanted to go inside the stereoscope and see my grandmother in three dimensions in a place that no longer exists.
But when I finally went back in time, what I found instead were screen savers. Radios on repeat. Places where you could look at time and watch things move around inside it, at the speed of a telephone, just slower than light.
At its best, Crumb’s version of the twentieth century feels as timeless and earthy as Brueghel, an artist to whom he’s been compared. Crumb’s comics offer a similar sense of fleshy commotion, a panorama of human vice and folly presented without apology and with a caustic moral: Men are doomed; life is punishing; feast your eyes.
Love is a universally uncharted terrain, like life itself. Each of us, Faye reminds, has a body, a beating heart, and “a future beyond.” That future is shared, and it will require a community fixed in love for survival.