Our third print issue features Catherine Lacey on worthless pictures; Elif Batuman on Miranda July; Chris Kraus on girlhood; the drawings of Daniel Johnston; poems by Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles; and dispatches on undersea rifts, baby-making on Mars, and climbing Stone Mountain. 

When I found myself questioning Virginia’s motives, I took consolation in the genius of our plan. It was brilliant enough to withstand a little mistrust between us, I told myself. The plan was good enough, even, to withstand betrayal. It had a freakish quality to it, really, belonging to that rare class of crime, like certain forms of blackmail, that led the perpetrator and the victim to conspire together, as a team.

Airlines don’t announce how long it has been since their last crash. Schools don’t tout their success at avoiding an active shooter. Were a data center to boast of its security record, it would only draw attention to its vulnerability. But one shouldn’t confuse secrecy with indifference. Data firms understood the need for security because they were ripped off all the time.

The few public reports of information heists came from tattletales: a police department’s press release, say, or an individual victim’s complaint. Even then, critical details tended to go missing. If a dollar amount was disclosed, for instance, it referred only to the value of the stolen hardware. When NBC News reported that a thief had dropped through the ceiling of a data center operated by American Insurance Group and seized a server containing the Social Security numbers and medical records of nearly a million people, the value of the theft was estimated as $10,000: the cost of the machinery. This was as revelatory as noting the value of the picture frames smashed in a museum heist.

The unspoken assumption, in such reports, was that information itself had no inherent economic value. After a Chicago data center owned by a website hosting service was robbed by men with tasers, its spokesman insisted that the only consequence was a brief slowdown in loading times. That center, which stored information for corporations from 200 countries, boasted of 24/7 armed guards, biometric authentication, and “a double-locking mantrap” at every door. In the next two years it was successfully burglarized four times.

When five men dressed as policemen, with a German shepherd posing as a patrol dog, bound the staff of a “state-of-the-art” Verizon data center in London, the Metropolitan Police claimed to suspect that the physical servers, valued at more than a million dollars, were the target. It was only noted in passing what those servers held: the private banking files of JPMorgan Chase, the world’s second largest bank.

Even G—, which then owned the world’s largest data center operation, seemed slow to grasp the value of its data. The company had outsourced its own storage until 2008, when a vast trove of employee information was stolen. In response, G— invested $13 billion to build its own centers. Other corporations, lazy or cheap, soon paid to rent G—’s excess storage space. By the time we settled on our scheme, in the winter of 2014, G— had accumulated the private information of many of the world’s wealthiest banks (JPMC, HSBC, GSG, PPH), and the world’s largest accounting firm (D—), newspaper (N—), cable news station (F— N—), financial news organization (B—), online marketplace (E—), and social networking services (F— and T—). G— housed the data of more than two million businesses—real estate brokerages, Hollywood studios, software firms, oil and gas giants. G— stored the data of the army, the navy, the U.S. Postal Service, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the federal agency that I knew most intimately from my own journalistic career: the national repository for climate change data). Incidentally, G— also operated the world’s largest email system. And the largest search engine—though search data occupied only 10 percent of its storage capacity.

It was impossible to predict how much money we could make from scouring the highest concentration of the world’s secrets. But we could arrive at some conservative estimates.

Professional data thieves, like bulk commodity traders, tended to deal in large quantities and low yields. Virginia had found various comps on the black market. User data for a dating website’s 30 million members sold for $500; a digital photo service with 15 million users went for $3,500; user data for the million subscribers to Minnesota’s largest newspaper yielded $1,100. But what would the sale of your uncle’s watch at a pawn market tell you about the value of a haul from the U.S. Treasury? The math didn’t scale. And the data center in Pryor was much larger than the U.S. Treasury. I know this because the U.S. Treasury, or at least its digital records, was stored 

If we could get inside that death star, if we could make off with those sleek black boxes, some fraction of the world’s secret information would be ours to examine, to explore, to exploit. How many corporate databases might a single server hold? Dozens? Thousands? The black-market sale of databases at regular intervals would provide a steady income. But that really represented the baseline, a worst-case scenario. Safe enough, but not especially profitable. A more lucrative outcome, we decided—Virginia decided—would carry even less risk. We would use confidential information found in those databases to make informed bets about the future: prediction markets, futures contracts, short selling, options trading. The best-case scenario, however, was hard to anticipate. We were open to the possibility that we would find something unexpected, grander, reality shifting . . .

There was no particular thing we were trying to steal, which is another way of saying that we were trying to steal everything.

Were a data center to boast of its security record, it would only draw attention to its vulnerability. But one shouldn’t confuse secrecy with indifference.

The next morning, our first day on the job, Virginia emerged from the motel bathroom in a wig of long brown curls.

“Are you speaking as Virginia or . . .” I gestured toward her new persona—jeans, mud boots, diamond ring, and a shapeless mustard-hued long-sleeved shirt under a fleece vest imprinted with the logo of a regional feed center.

“. . . It’s a pleasure to know you, Maura.”

“I am happy to make your acquaintance, Tim.”

“. . . Tim?” She nodded firmly, and it was decided. I was Tim.

We had chosen as our base of operations a no-tell in the town of Vinita. Safely ensconced within a Goldilocks zone of invisibility, Vinita was about 25 minutes from the data center, far enough that nobody would reasonably expect that we’d have business in Pryor. It was a mile east of the county line, so beyond the purview of the local police, and a 40-minute dash to the Missouri border. Vinita was just large enough to avoid scrutiny from locals, and small enough that no one outside the county gave a thought to its existence.

On the way to breakfast we turned on the radio. Virginia listened with great concentration. “It’s 

“Flattened diphthongs,” said Virginia. “They drop the terminal 

“I dunno. They sound pretty normal to me.”

There was only one place to eat in Vinita: the Cherokee, a pink-lit diner advertising a breakfast buffet for $4.99. Virginia, or rather Maura, settled into four pancakes, several slices of grease-popping bacon, and fried cubed potatoes herded through an unseemly clot of ketchup. I had a flashback to our first breakfast together at the Ritz. I wanted to think that everything had changed since then but I wasn’t sure anything had.

“Gotta fill out my clothes, by cracky,” said Maura.

“A localism,” she said under her breath. “It’s a gentler way to say Jesus.”

It was our first dress rehearsal. I wore a baggy sweatshirt and jeans and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At the other occupied tables, exhausted farmer types stared moonfaced at the television or hunched over paper plates. When the waitress poured hot coffee into our Styrofoam cups, Virginia worked on slowing her speech. “

The waitress gave her a long look but made no comment. When I went back for a second helping of pancakes, a different waitress interceded to remind me that I could not bring a soiled plate to the breakfast bar. I apologized sheepishly.

“That’s all right, darling,” she said. “You’re a long way from Broken Arrow.”

Virginia was thrilled when I repeated the exchange. We’d begun as foreigners—Australians or Israelites—but a wardrobe change and a few behavioral tweaks had promoted us to residents of a city only two counties away. Perhaps, from Vinita, Broken Arrow seemed as foreign as Wagga Wagga, but that didn’t matter: the data center ran a private commuting shuttle each day to Tulsa and its suburbs to pick up employees. To pass for Tulsans would have been good enough. To be taken for a Broken Arrowan felt like acing the test.

“We’re going to do this, aren’t we?” I heard my own voice breaking through my vigilance, speaking for the vulnerable part of me that I tried to disguise—the part of me that thought in terms of 

“Yes, Tim,” said Virginia. “We are.” And she smiled—a brief, glowing, carefree smile that seemed to confirm more than the success of our costuming.

That called for another packet of syrup. At the buffet I nodded to the waitress. “Actually,” I told her, cocky now, “we’re not from Broken Arrow. We’re from Tulsa.”

When I turned back to the table, a large bald man was looming vastly over Virginia. I recognized him by the goatee—the man we’d met in the costume shop 10 miles earlier, where we bought our wigs and regionally appropriate denim and . . . Virginia’s ring.

“You’re not wearing your ring,” said Vandyke, pointing at my finger.

I smiled politely, closing the distance between us.

“Where y’all lovebirds coming from, anyway? Or going to?”

“Me and Maura here are going south. Home to Louisiana.” Our waitress intervened with a steaming carafe of coffee.

“Coulda swore her name was Virginia,” said Vandyke.

“The hell?” The other customers had turned their attention from the television to us.

“Back then her hair was different too,” said Vandyke. “A ginger.”

“You don’t say,” said the waitress.

“You going to linger round Vinita?” asked Vandyke.

“Looks real good.” He turned to the waitress. “Could never tell it was a wig, could you?”

“Sure is. Say, Candace—you ever want to be a brunette again, come down to Party Shop.”

We left cash on the table and did not speak until the Cherokee was gone from the rearview.

As a black hole devoured photons, it also brought those photons closer to one another.

I didn’t like her tone. “We go back to New York?”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “No,” she said, snatching off her wig. “We split up.”

“Because of Vandyke in there? We’ll never see him again.”

“Because two strangers are more memorable than one. It’s a huge risk, traveling together.”

“When he spotted you, you were alone. I was at the buffet.”

“We’re not splitting up.” I intended it to sound definitive. It came out whiny. I whipped onto the two-lane highway. Vinita was already behind us. A series of flat brown fields were relieved of their monotony by a sporadic farmstead or rusted silo.

“Speed limit,” she said. I accelerated slightly, one of my feeble acts of rebellion—deferrals so weak that they only drew attention to my weakness.

Virginia stretched the scalp of a new wig—blond—over her head, checking the vanity mirror to make sure she did not neglect to tuck any wisp.

“You were planning to split from the get-go,” I said.

“Small towns are full of nosy people. That’s the big risk: not a security fence, but a costume store owner asking questions. We might be here weeks. We can’t be a subject of diner conversation.”

I accelerated. Weak, weak, weak. “Am I an inconvenience to you?”

“You can keep the Pacifica. And all my money, apart from the cost of a plane ticket.”

“Or a train ticket. I can pay in cash.”

I skidded into the dirt shoulder. A truck screamed past, the driver riding the horn.

“How much money do you have, anyway?”

Virginia glared at me from beneath her bobbing artificial bangs. “My savings are a pile of ash. You know that.”

A brown storm of kicked-up dirt settled over the Pacifica.

“So I need your money. Of course I do.”

“I need your money. Do you want me to keep saying it?” I can’t deny that the statement managed to lodge a slight erotic splinter into my anger.

“I’ve always been honest about that. We need your money. And after the job, when we’re able to start making bets, we’ll keep needing your money. But 

“Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, when you put it that way.”

“Then why are you saying it . . . like 

“That’s not fair.” Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing, anyway?”

“Hey. If we don’t trust each other, there’s no way this works.” I had already run the scenarios. There was nothing to gain from leaving—I knew that. I could only lose. I’d lose Virginia, I’d have to return my advance to the 

 and forfeit any possibility of reimbursement for the Pacifica and the other expenses. But would I gain from staying? Most likely the heist was a pretext, Virginia would leave me once she drained me of my last dollar, and I’d have to return empty-handed anyway.

“Let’s not get carried away,” said Virginia. “Let’s remember how we got here. Why we trusted each other.”

Nathaniel Rich is a novelist, essayist, and the author of

gen-spade-wound

Cloudthieves

Father and Son

Rachel Aviv: Mother and Daughter

Few writers of English prose have shaped our understanding of how language lives in landscape—of how earthly places shape human minds, and how our minds shape the planet—like Robert Macfarlane. The author now of over a dozen books, Macfarlane is a beloved professor at Cambridge whose learned and lyrical work is steeped in modern science and 

 but drawn inexorably to more ancient ways of knowing—to animist ideas, once prevalent in his native British isles and which nurture many indigenous cultures, about the complex power and role of non-human beings in our myths and in our lives.

His far-reaching intellect and trekker’s soul have brought him from Earth’s highest peaks (

, 2003); to the ancient paths we’ve etched onto its hills (

, 2012); to the caves and underground spaces where we’ve long sought to bury our fears and engage a deeper sense of time (

, 2019, now a film by Robert Petit, executively produced by 

 (2015) an ode to antique words from his native islands—from 

 (the name, in Devon, of the fine silver frost that coats all foliage when a freeze follows a thaw) to 

(as folks in Exmoor call bucket-sized islands in a bog)—by which people attuned to their ecologies’ rhythms describe them. The same impetus nourished 

, a cherished collaboration with the artist Jackie Morris, with whom Macfarlane also has a new book out: As I type, 

The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss

Wonder, for Rob, is about much more than whimsy: It’s a necessity for survival on a planet where our own well-being, and our fate as a species, is tied up in the flourishing of others. Wonder is also at the heart of his remarkable book, 

, which landed last year and which is out in paperback this spring. Like many of Rob’s books, 

 is a journey through an idea that becomes one through space, as he visits riverine landscapes and their stewards around the world. Braiding those journeys is a meditation on the ancient, imperiled chalk stream that courses near his house in Cambridge—and a venture into what amounts to novel territory, for this “nature writer” par excellence: the earthly realm of laws and jurisprudence by which a growing number of advocates and lawyers are arguing, before courts around the world, that forests and rivers be seen as rights-bearing subjects deserving of the same legal protections as people.

A year ago this week, I hosted Rob at Pioneer Works for the official U.S. launch of 

 It was an edifying joy to do so. Talking with him always is. And it’s a joy, now, to revisit our conversation about what’s really at stake when, as he puts it, we “deepen and widen the category of 'life.'"

JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO

In this remarkable book, you take three journeys. You go to Ecuador, to a cloud forest where a river begins. You go to Chennai, India, a city built on a riverine system that’s been deeply damaged—maybe beyond repair. And then finally, you go to northern Quebec, where many rivers have been dammed to make electricity, but where you locate one that hasn’t—and find a kind of fluvial euphoria. You've done mountains, you've done caves, you've done paths. Why rivers? Why rivers now?

ROBERT MACFARLANE

There's an old answer and there's a young answer. The old answer is that mountains are river-makers and rivers are mountain-makers, and if you grow up climbing and with mountains in your heart, then you grow up with rivers running through you as well, even if you don't realize it. So I spent a lot of time following rivers up mountains and swimming in them on the way down. The young answer is that rivers are dying. I live in England, on 99 million-year-old chalk, and the chalk stream ecology of southern England is one of the rarest riverine ecologies in the world. There are about 200 to 300 chalk rivers in the world, and 80 percent of those are in England. On current trajectories, that network will barely survive ecologically until 2050. This isn't an abstraction. This is a drought we’ve created. In England, only 14 percent of our rivers are in good health.

The spring that rises near my home and flows throughout this book is on a life support system, and I mean that very literally; there is an augmentation pump fitted to the spring that draws up groundwater from further down in the earth so the spring can keep flowing. It is as close to a ventilator or heart pump as a stream can get. A stream can die. A river can die. But they can surely live as well.

Early on in this book there’s a very charming but very deep moment where you're talking with your son Will, who’s nine or 10. You're talking about this new book you're writing. You tell him it’s called "Is a River Alive?" and he says, "Well, that's a short book dad. Duh. A river’s alive. You’re really going to write 300 pages about that?"

It was one of those times when a child is feigning interest in what their parent actually does. While the question—even the asking of it—is deceptively simple, the answer is immensely complex. It took me four to five years of following rivers—following river people, river ideas, and then something like unlearning—to answer that question in the affirmative.

It's hard to think of a city which is not a river city. 


In this book, you explore the ways in which various traditions around the world have regarded not just rivers but the landscape and the world that we live in as animate, as 

. This has profound legal, political, and ethical implications. Talk to us a little bit about this rights-of-nature movement, which draws on ancestral wisdom and indigenous tradition, but also the rubric of Western jurisprudence, of law. The argument that a river is a subject deserving of rights seems to be gaining steam.

The book is not called "Should a River Have Rights," nor is it called "A River Should Have Rights." It’s a book about life, and what Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.” He means that in the full French sense of 

—that which is alive, that which is lively, that to which life inheres. I’m interested in the 

 of the sensible, between what is allowed by power to be audible, to be visible, to be animate, and what is not allowed to be. Humans are pushed to the far side of that partition, to the alive side, while rivers have historically—certainly within Western philosophical traditions—been pushed to the dead side. In the hierarchy of Aristotle’s great chain of being, angels are at the top, followed by anima, which is in life, and at the bottom is water and rock, the dead stuff of the world.

Our entire water system [in England] was privatized in 1989, which has left us with a dying river system. It treats rivers as a resource, liquified and simplified into an asset. The assetization of everything is exactly what we're now seeing, here in the U.S., through the revisions of the EPA and the rollback of its regulations. How do we go about re-storying rivers and re-storying the law? With this book I’ve tried to revive old ideas about rivers being alive—being 

, rather than undrinkable, unswimmable, untouchable.

 is also through line in the book—you speak of rivers as companions. You relate these extraordinary experiences of being with living rivers, or defending them. You say they "remind me that we are companioned in the world." There’s a lot of human companionship in this book, too. Something I've always loved about your work is that it's full of rich and vivid human characters. Many of the people in this book are grieving in one way or another, but find solace and peace and nourishment in being 

, as you put it. But that’s not an experience available to all—in terms of the overall amount of water on this planet, rivers are not a vast amount.

Tiny. No more than 5 percent of all water on the planet flows through rivers as freshwater.

Despite—or alongside—that fact, these fragile waterways have been profoundly important to human civilization, to our cities, and to our lives. I think about New York. We ask, "Why is there a city here?" It’s here because of the harbor, and because of the Hudson River. It’s a city built on an estuarine landscape, crisscrossed with streams. Chennai, India, is another city that exists because of rivers. But you write about how the rivers there have been erased.

Yet we settle on rivers. Their health is profoundly important to our settlements and our culture.

They become historical agents—they’re actors, rather than a passive presence in the landscape. We know from recent archaeological work that the little spring that flows near my house was a place where Mesolithic hunter-gatherers stopped; they cooked, knapped flints, and left charred hearth stones. And then you move through the Neolithic causewayed enclosure here, a huge Iron Age ring fort, Bronze Age burial sites, the Romans, the Celts, the quote-unquote Dark Ages, and then all the way through to the building of [Cambridge]. Suddenly, you see history as told by a river. It's hard to think of a city which is not a river city. Thoreau has a beautiful line: "A river town is a winged town." A river gives it motion. Understanding this helps us start unlearning notions of a river’s passivity, of a river as pure resource. And as soon as you start talking about memory, emotion, grief—some of the remarkable people I met to write this book were drawn into the shadow of death, and then water drew them back. When we recognize river relations historiographically, emotionally, spiritually, and linguistically, they suddenly leap into our lives.

You’re fond of quoting that line from Emerson, as I am, about how the writer’s task is “to fasten words again to visible things.” All writers love language, but you've always been interested in the language we give and lend to landscape. The form that this book takes is part philosophical treatise, drawing on varied knowledge traditions, but it's also a work of reportage, of lived experience. It comprises three journeys: one to Ecuador, one to India, and one to Quebec. Let’s talk about these.

The forest in Ecuador is the Los Cedros Cloud Forest, in the country’s northwest. A cloud forest is a river maker. In a process known as continuous fog drop, the enormous, composite surface area of the forest’s epiphanic plant world—the plants that grow on other plants, feeding off moisture and air—condenses saturated mist and fog into droplets, which continuously fall and feed into rivers. Los Cedros was threatened with near total destruction by gold-mining interests, which still prowl the forest’s perimeter. In 2021, a remarkable, cussed man called Jose Duku brought a case against a mining company that drew on new articles in the Ecuadorian constitution, which was revised in 2008 after the election of [democratic socialist] Rafael Correa. The articles recognize the rights of nature to exist, to flourish and to persist, and made the state the guarantor of those rights. In the book, I call this a small country’s great act of moral imagination.

Duku was the rudest human I’ve ever met, but his cussedness was necessary—if you're gonna live in a tent in a remote cloud forest for 35 years and fight off all those who want to destroy it, being rude's fine. The case escalated in the court system until a remarkable judgment was handed down during COVID by head judge Agustin Grijalva Jimenez, who ruled in favor of the forest’s rights. It had such consequence and force that the mining companies were compelled to leave the area. The river still lives. After the ruling, Agustin, the judge, went with us to the forest as we searched for fungi with this remarkable mycologist Juliana Ferci.

She's this wonderful person who has a way of discovering new species of fungi wherever she goes. In the book and in the forest, she speaks of “hearing” fungi, she points to a glowing log of phosphorescent mycelium. She helps you talk about what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “two-eyed seeing”, by which she means tapping into animism, into indigenous knowledge about the ways in which the landscape and nature are alive, but also the ways in which the discourse of science can reinforce and shape these arguments so that you can believe in the magic of a glowing log but also can say, "Oh, this is fungi."

In the cloud forest, Juliana drops to the ground like she had just been hit by a big fruit dropped by a howler monkey. But no, she's just greeting this single, two-inch mushroom. It’s her way of recognizing the aliveness of the forest. And then you have Agustin, this dry, beautiful, reticent constitutional lawyer.

It could be easy for some to dismiss Agustin’s jurisprudence—to say that his decision reflects a radical, wild idea. But as you point out, in our legal system plenty of non-human entities have the rights of subjects—corporations, for example.

Yes, and this decision has gone right into the heart of European thinking. In fact today there was a big story in 

 about how Anne-Marie Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has demanded that the assembly pass a law recognizing the rights of the River Seine. The Goldman Prize, which is sometimes called the Nobel for nature, has for the last two years gone to water rights defenders using rights-of-nature frameworks. The Spanish lawyer and activist Teresa Vicente achieved recognition for the Mar Menor, the great saltwater lagoon in southern Spain, as a rights-bearing body. Of course, rights declarations are one thing, implementation is quite another.

Tell us about the next place that you traveled to, why you went and what you found. You speak, in Chennai, about ghosts, monsters, and angels.

Chennai is a river city that’s built on marsh where the Kosasthalaiyar, the Cooum, and the Adyar rivers meet. Water seeks a body. Sometimes that's a river, sometimes it's a human body. Sometimes it's marsh. [In that chapter,] the “ghosts” are these rivers, which have been spectralized in Chennai’s landscape as the city’s erupted—a process that began under British colonial planning and management, when Chennai was known as Madras. The “monsters” are the monstrous forms these disappeared rivers take when the monsoon returns, and especially when cyclones hit. Chennai lives in cycles of drought punctuated by calamitous floods. This region’s hydrological literacy has been lost very, very rapidly. So I went partly to understand more about this, and partly to spend time with one of the “angels’ of the chapter's title, a young man called Yuvan Avez, who I'd been friends with for years. He’s one of the many water guardians, one of the many people who are trying to reimagine how water and people might thrive together in the future.

At one point Yuvan says to you, "Cities grow along riversides, then slowly forget their ecological, hydrological genesis. They slowly collapse under their own weight—unless…there is a powerful reinvocation of what birthed a city in the first place: a river."

He's brilliant, and it's so true. The effects of Chennai’s extreme droughts and extreme floods are unevenly distributed—they afflict the poor most. The speed and the consequence of that oscillation has made it a very urgent place to be. When you look at the Buckingham Canal, which joins the three rivers, you can see the entanglement of poverty, waste, and the absence of infrastructure that people like Yuvan are dealing with there. And meanwhile, the state government of Tamil Nadu vanished an entire section of one of Chennai’s other rivers, the Ennore Creek, from the map. The national government was rezoning the relationship between fresh water and heavy industry. And that was going to cause all manner of problems, because heavy industry and the river were both in one place. They couldn’t move the heavy industry, so why don't they just erase the river?

So this map came out which is now known as the fraud map or hoax map. People started posting photographs of themselves up to their necks in a river, saying, "River, hi."

 I saw the most despair and the most hope there.

At one point Yuvan says to you, discussing the Indian government’s drive to build more dams, "A river's a fantastic form of development." There's so much that's loaded into that assertion.

In many parts of the world, to be a water defender is a perilous task. You act at the risk of your life. India is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. It's also one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be an environmental activist. The stakes are really high. They're high in Ecuador too. The night we arrived in the cloud forest, we got word that a young, pregnant female water defender who'd been shot dead the day before. In India under Modi, anyone who stands in the way of development is shouted down as an anti-national.

The last place you take us is Quebec, to this extraordinary river known in English as the Magpie, and in Innu as the Mutehekau Shipu. You have an incredible journey there.

 Language will always be late for its subject, especially when that subject is water or light or world. The question is how it fails. Does it fail interestingly? 

Yes, with my friend Wayne and three companions we nicknamed the Salmon, the Bus, and the Bear—with whom I ended up going down the river with for 10, 11 days. We were dropped by a float plane about 100 miles up the system at the head of a massive, long lake. We paddled that and then the river took us. The transition from flat to flow was something I'll never forget—a phase shift of astonishing power and consequence. But before that, I went to the small Innu community of Ekuanitshit to meet Rita Mast-Tohkooshoo, one of the great North American writers and an Innu poet who writes in Innu-aimun and French. In 2021, Rita was the co-author of a declaration recognizing the rights of the Mutehekau Shipu to flow and to reach the sea unimpeded and without pollution. It recognizes the river as a living entity. And so I was drawn there because this river was so spectacularly alive even though it was threatened by a multi-dam complex that would, in theory, drown it. Life, rights, activism all converged there. When I saw Rita, I asked her permission to go down the river. If she had said no, I would’ve turned around and left. She laughed and said, “You need to ask the river's permission." I was like, "Okay. Is that something I do on paper?” She looked at me and said, "You look too much with your eyes, you see too much with your head, and you don't feel enough with your heart. You're not taking your notebooks on the river." I was a little offended.

Yeah, we came to a negotiated settlement on those, which was that I wouldn't write on the water, only on land. She then gave Wayne and I a set of remarkable instructions and tasks. I realized later that what she was doing was readying me to think differently, to unlearn, and to meet the river and be opened by it. And that is emphatically what happened. I've traveled a lot in big mountains, but I don't think I've ever known anything quite like this.

It comes through in the prose. You write so exultantly of this experience and of being on this water. And you write even about the ways in which language starts to feel like it's failing. You write, "The river so long anticipated has already begun to dominate my attention, my perception, my waking thoughts, already begun to frustrate language's short reach." It becomes this occasion, again, for meditating on language.

I've always felt very at ease with language's failure. The question is not if language can meet its subject. Language will always be late for its subject, especially when that subject is water or light or world. The question is 

 it fails. Does it fail interestingly? Does it form a shatterbelt? What happens to language when it is rivered, and when thought is rivered? Abandoning that quest for perfect correspondence was thrown out of the kayak early.

The quest for perfect correspondence may have been tossed from the kayak, but in that tossing you achieve something else. Why don’t you read us from where this happens—it’s a passage I love, about how the Mutchekau Shipu’s mode is “purely flow”.

“...and its grammar of animacy is one of 

, aura not edge, of compounds and hyphens and fusings, silver-blues and gray-greens and mist-drifts and undersongs, process not substance, 

, always onrushing, always seeking the sea and here and there turning back upon itself, intervolving, eddying in counterflow to cause spirals and gyres that draw breath into water, life into mind, spin strange reciprocities, leave the whole world whirled, whorled.”

Gorgeous. And you know, all that puts me in mind of another sentence of yours I love, from an essay I often teach, in which you reflect on a recurrent question: “

” You answer by insisting, as we must, that 

-writing isn’t dead, and never will be, and by invoking one of your favorite books. You write, of Nan Shepherd’s 

"It vibrates dazzlingly between the specific and the universal, and between matter and metaphysics. Shepherd describes the ways in which human presence, creaturely life, elements and weather are co-extensive. She does so in prose that is deeply wise, avidly sensual, and we might say committed to uncertainty…Always, in Shepherd, movement across landscape has its corresponding inward journey, and place is somewhere we are in and not on."

The same, always, can be said of your work, too. ♦

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works and co-editor-in-chief of

sys-tnr-std-cond

Robert Macfarlane: Rivers Are Alive! 

Vaccines have saved more lives than almost any other human invention. They’re so effective that the diseases they prevented all but disappeared from collective memory. Now, childhood immunization rates are falling. Measles, declared eliminated in 2000, is back. Federal agencies are being reshaped by officials who have questioned whether vaccines work at all. And a growing movement of influencers, parents, and politicians is challenging not just individual shots but the very idea that public health is a shared obligation. 

So, where did this come from, what is actually going on, and what do we do about it? How did vaccines become one of the defining political fault lines of this moment—and how can trust in public health be repaired? To learn more, David Wallace-Wells, author of 

, hosted a conversation with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis—an infectious disease physician and former director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases—and Jessica Malaty, an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator whose research focuses on trust in public health. ♦


How did vaccines become one of the defining political fault lines of this moment—and how can trust in public health be repaired? To learn more, David Wallace-Wells hosted a conversation with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis—an infectious disease physician and former director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases—and Jessica Malaty, an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator whose research focuses on trust in public health. ♦

Vaccines, Viruses, and Us

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Ben Lerner on Parents, Ghosts, and Transcription

Ben Lerner’s new novel is filled with silences: factual and dramatic lacunae; conversations in which one participant seems to be all but missing; hinted-at mysteries that go unsolved. This is particularly striking because the premise of 

’s action is speech. As the book begins, Lerner’s unnamed, first-person protagonist—a familiar one for his readers, who are used to encountering the writer’s alter ego in his prose—is traveling to Providence, Rhode Island to conduct an interview with his mentor, a polymath professor at Brown University named Thomas. The narrator is in the middle of his life. Thomas is nearing the end of his. The premise of the interview is that it will be his last, an important record for future generations. Then, in his hotel room, the narrator drops his phone in a sink full of water, breaking it. He can’t record the conversation—and somehow can’t admit this to his interlocutor, even as he sits in Thomas’s living room, listening to him recount his earliest memories, pretending that nothing is amiss.

In short, the narrator lies. Someone always does, in a Lerner novel; lying is one of his great subjects. In his first novel, 

, the narrator, Adam Gordon, wrings sympathy from a romantic interest by telling her that his totally healthy mother is dead. In 

, we meet the same character during his adolescence as a champion debater, so skilled at taking any position on a given topic that facts twist and turn upon themselves, flexible and weightless. “The lie described my life better than the truth,” a character says in 

 might claim something similar. When it is revealed, in the novel’s middle section, that the conversation that has been published as Thomas’s last was, in fact, recreated from his own memory, people are furious at having been misled. The narrator is indignant. Yes, their conversation is a fiction, an imagined representation of the ineffable real, but it has captured reality better than any recording could.

I have always loved the intelligence and irony of Lerner’s novels. 

 has those qualities, but it has something else, too: a disarming sincerity. Lerner’s narrator is gentler than his previous incarnations, if no less confused by life’s puzzles. How do we care for a child who refuses our care? Why do we fail the people we love, and how do we love the people who have failed us? What does it mean to live alongside digital devices that ceaselessly demand our attention? The book is short enough to read in a single sitting, which I did, twice, surrendering to the music of its various voices. That’s by design. The novel, as Lerner said to me on stage at Pioneer Works, is its own kind of technology, and a powerfully transportive one. For better or worse, our conversation has not been recreated from memory, but transcribed (with light edits) exactly as it happened.

Alexandra Schwartz

When we were emailing very briefly about this event, you called 

 a weird book. I want to know what is weird about it to you.

Ben Lerner

I mean, I think it's weird for me because my memory of writing it is a little dreamlike. The book is about dreams, in part. And Thomas, the crucial character in the book, has this line about how waking does not finish a dream.

Part of what the book is about, maybe, is the contagion of Thomas's voice—that the characters start speaking in his voice or that his voice speaks through them. And when I try to talk about it, sometimes I feel like I'm channeling semi-fictional characters.

I wanted to write a really short book that kicked out a lot of issues, but had a lot of felt silence and weird angles. I wanted it to be more haunting than explanatory. And I think “weird” is a word I associate with the uncanny or the haunting or the doubling or the repetitions that happen.

I'm glad you say that because I thought about the “weird” that exists in the American vernacular, where everything can be weird—a word that can kind of come in when you don't have another word. But I also thought about this haunting and incantatory effect that I think this book has.

In the opening scene, the narrator is on a train and he's facing backwards, or what his daughter calls “the past.” He's facing the past because he's returning to Brown, his alma mater, and has the feeling that a younger version of himself could still be there, existing in a parallel reality. This book bridges the narrator's current middle-aged world, as you say, with this college world. What drew you back into that past?

That's an interesting question. Part of it is just the power of mentorship. I had influential teachers, but college was the first time where there were people who seemed like they might be channeling voices of the dead. It was the first place I was really thinking about intergenerational artistic transmission. And also where I encountered people who just had capacities for attention and reading that were totally otherworldly to me, like Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop. These people introduced me to deeper relationships with media, with the book as a form, or the painting as a form, or whatever. And college was also very formative in all kinds of other ways, as it is for everyone—it's where I met my wife.

I was also thinking about the similarities and differences between mentorship and fatherhood. The narrator of this book describes having a very serious, nervous, maybe psychotic breakdown in college. He starts hearing voices, and Thomas, his mentor in the arts, helps him move on from that experience and offers a kind of care that he never offered his own son. The narrator loses his mind and gets it back and it’s all caught up in art, or how art can channel forces from different times and make them feel present.

There is a sense, because you bridge this time in the novel between the present and the past, that the narrator has made it through. He can look back at the terror of that time of total disorientation, and he's made it through to the other shore.

You can't choose your parents, which I think many of us feel enraged by. But when you're a parent, you also know you can't choose your kids. Maybe Thomas tries to choose, in his way of mentoring.

Yeah, I think he does. I knew a lot of people who lost their purchase on reality in college, and some didn't make it. It had to do with many things, and they were always individual, but mainly: you're away from home, you're exposed to a whole lot of new languages, and you're either finding the self you already are or constructing a whole new self. It's quite confusing.

In the moment where the narrator has his most serious, pathological break with reality, Thomas opens up the possibility of redescribing the reel as a fiction, as a changeable fiction. And so there's a way that this moment of artistic encounter is intimately related with one of psychotic collapse. And the way that Thomas helps him is by playing an auditory illusion, which the narrator calls “art therapy.”

Basically, if you listen to a vocal track, and then convert it to a MIDI file so it all becomes flattened into computer piano notes, you’ll still hear the voice, even if it isn’t there anymore. Your brain assumes that the voice is present, and you unconsciously infer it. Thomas plays this for the narrator to normalize and socialize his experience of aberrance. He means to say something like, “See, we can all hallucinate and have auditory illusions in the right context. It’s just a question of the conditions.”

A lot of my life is organized around the idea that there’s something really important about imagination’s capacity to redescribe reality. It’s also a horrifying capacity, because it shares a wall with psychosis. And I think that’s part of what’s happening in college. I don’t know if that’s an advertisement for college or a reason to avoid it.

I think that's so true. In fiction, writers remake the world and sometimes they want to make it totally unrecognizable. In college, the same thing is happening—there are exceptions, but most people who go have never had the independence to create a life. And so there you are, doing fiction that's actually real. You're a character who's real.

I want to ask you about Thomas. Talk about the MIDI illusion, you can really hear his voice in your head as a reader. It's very distinctive. It has a German inflection, and that amazing grammar where there's total fluency in English, but something magical about how the speaking happens because it's not totally idiomatic English. Who went into making that character?

I mean, the voice is really Alexander Kluge's voice. It's his English. He died a few weeks ago, and he was a hero of mine. He was Adorno's favorite son. I don't know when he became a lawyer, but he was the lawyer for the Frankfurt School. And he was this major philosopher and filmmaker who studied film with Fritz Lang. When he spoke, it was this weird mixture of erudition and prose poetry, and you couldn't quite tell what was fabricated and what was the fruit of his bizarre archival research. It was really exciting to be around him. None of the familial stuff bears any resemblance to Alexander Kluge, and I didn't know him in college, but the voice is his voice.

How did you get it? Did you have it in your head already? Were you watching videos, or listening to your own recordings of conversations with him?

That voice is just really in my head. I often have trouble recalling voices. Some people really feel like they hear a voice as a material sonic event, and I don't. When I say I hear a voice, I mean the way I hear something when I read. I'm aware of the sonic shape, but there's no sound, though Alexander Kluge's voice is one I actually can kind of hear. So it was just really available to me.

 And why did you want to put your narrator in a situation where he would not be able to capture that voice on tape, where there was going to be no way to have a technological record of this conversation? What about that scenario appealed to you?

One thing that I've noticed in almost all my writing is that the dialogue tends to operate under the sign of something that destabilizes its claim to realism. I think dialogue for me has always been this really interesting problem because it's the biggest mimetic claim in fiction. You aim to just write down what people say, but of course, usually what happens is it's really cleaned up and can feel quite artificial—sometimes to great effect, like the way that Ivy Compton-Burnett's characters speak in these perfect, mean English sentences. There are other experiments in depicting all the fragmentation and incoherence of how speech usually functions. And neither of those work for me exactly.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I think in each book I've written, there's some way that dialogue can happen and also be destabilized at once. That's a condition of my being able to write. So to be able to write Thomas's voice and say, "There's no record of this," was just enabling for me as a condition.

On the one hand, the narrator has made it up or reconstructed it from memory, but on the other, it's a testament to the power of Thomas's voice that it could be reconstructed and passed through the narrator. This is a book, in part, that tries to establish a relationship between media like phones, or radio, or cinema, with the way that the individual human is a medium: you speak 

 someone and not just to someone. And there are specific perils or potentials of transcription when it's a human doing the writing and the voice that's being transcribed is resonating with the particular stuff of that human.

Not having that technological recording was a way to let me write dialogue, and it also became a way of actually amplifying the power of Thomas's voice and how it travels. The voice is all the more powerful for not being captured by the phone, the way they capture those ghosts in 

 in that thing. Instead, the haunting happens because the voice is not in the thing, it's still in the people.

A lot of my life is organized around the idea that there’s something really important about imagination’s capacity to redescribe reality. It’s also a horrifying capacity, because it shares a wall with psychosis.

It reminds me of when I started reporting and I didn't know what I was doing, and I would just let my recorder run because I was so afraid of missing anything. And then when I listened back, I was always overwhelmed by the nothingness of what was happening. It was too much, and it required a human intelligence to decide when to click start and stop. It’s such a great moment when your narrator walks around the campus after dropping his phone in the water. He describes an unusual experience of presence, where he feels super charged by both the past and the present because he's not stopping to consult this device. Reading that, I thought, "I'm going to put my phone in that little box that they're always advertising to me on Instagram. I'm going to live my experience of unusual presence."

Later, I do think it becomes complicated that he doesn't have his phone. This book isn’t just a manifesto for screens down, unless I missed the message? Should everyone leave here thinking that Ben Lerner says, "Put your phones away"?

No. It would be a really boring book if I just said that phones are bad, because we know they’re bad. First of all, the narrator does have this reverie that's produced by being phoneless, and I think that's real, but by the time he gets to Thomas's house, he's having withdrawal symptoms.

The book is less about putting away media and more about what it would mean for us to restore our wonder before all the different kinds of media that there are, including people or glass flowers or other works of art. But it's unpredictable. In the third section of the book, there’s Thomas’s granddaughter, who has a very serious eating disorder. Her parents have been fighting one of these conventional parental battles about not eating in front of the screen, but then when they let her watch the iPad, she actually eats. Max, Thomas’s son and the girl’s father, is very disturbed by why it helps or why she needs it. But it's an unpredictable use of the screen that would be hard to say is just bad, even though she's watching unboxing videos, which scandalize her father and surely have their own consequences.

There's also this scene where Max thinks he's saying goodbye to his father. And this is when Thomas is hospitalized with COVID, which actually happens before the narrator visits him for that last interview which the book opens with. Max says all these meaningful things to Thomas that he would not have been able to say in his physical presence, nor on Zoom, which they first tried in the hospital.

When a nurse calls him on the phone, and he can be a disembodied voice, that mixture of distance and proximity allows a kind of intimacy that otherwise had never been available in their relationship, which is just to say that the book is not about how “technology is bad” or whatever. Yes, it is about the atomization and the destructiveness of all these things, but it's also about little pockets of possibility in media configurations that are difficult to foresee.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is this visit that the narrator makes to Thomas's house. The middle part takes place in Madrid, where the narrator has given a talk after Thomas has died to a group of people who all knew him really well, and he’s confronted by the consequences of his decision to publish an interview that he didn't technically record. And the third part of the book is about Thomas's son, Max, who is a foil to the narrator. They both went to college together. They were friends in college. It's implied that they have not kept up their friendship, certainly not to the degree that they had when they were young. And Max has a really difficult relationship with Thomas, which is not that surprising—it's hard to be the son of a great man.

As I was reading the book, I wondered if you had even a physical shape in mind for its structure. I'm sure it wasn't the same for you, but it made me think of Virginia Woolf writing 

Cloudthieves

Robert Macfarlane: Rivers Are Alive!

Vaccines, Viruses, and Us

Ben Lerner Speaks to the Dead

Ben Lerner Speaks to the Dead

Entranced

Entranced

Madlib Finds the Heart

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

Issue 03, Available Now