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. 

Suppose that the everyday world we experience through our senses is but a tiny, impoverished fragment of a stupendously greater realm, one that is incomparably rich, exuberantly dynamic and bewilderingly alien. Envisage a domain of boundless possibilities, of subtle convolutions of form and substance, distributed all around us and inside us, flowing out into infinite dimensions beyond our ken and even beyond the reach of our imagination. That dazzling, gargantuan domain is in fact the world in which we are already inescapably embedded, but from which we are almost totally shut out. Access to this alien world is attained only through infinitesimal portals, observational pinholes that afford but momentary glimpses of a seething wonderland of restless activity, vaster than all the universe we see, vaster even than all possible universes we can comprehend, vaster indeed than all conceivable vastness. Welcome to the quantum universe.

And immediately we hit a foundational question: Is this magical metaverse merely an abstraction, a mathematical frolic of interest only to physicists and philosophers, or does it in some sense 

 exist? That question—what is real?—goes right to the heart of the quantum story, and indeed of the entire scientific enterprise.

To ease ourselves into this weighty topic, let’s start with a brief anecdote. When I was 15, my sister’s boyfriend saw a ghost. At least, that’s what he claimed, having spent the night sleeping downstairs in our living room, which we children long believed was haunted. My mother was skeptical, however. “He was probably just dreaming,” was her opinion, “or drunk.” I preferred the ghost story. Who was right? Was there “really” a ghost in our living room or was the whole affair just a figment of the young man’s imagination?

Each of us experiences a world “out there,” which we view through our eyes and interpret via the information-processing taking place in our brains. Reality, for any one of us, is a product of the external and internal, of matter and mind. To get around this, a long list of philosophers, from Aristotle and René Descartes to John Locke and Thomas Nagel, defended the notion of 

 reality—a physical universe that exists independently of our individual observations, and which has done so since long before human observers appeared on the scene. It is a world made of material objects that move and change in response to various forces. That, at least, is the normal view of existence adopted by Western thought. And yet, as I shall explain, quantum mechanics confounds this simplistic version of an objective, independent reality. There is indeed a world “out there,” but it is far stranger than most people imagine, or, in fact, 

Reality is a slippery concept, about which entire volumes have been penned by eminent thinkers over the centuries. Most of us, however, make do with a rough-and-ready notion that goes something like this: If an entity is real, then its existence could, in principle, be confirmed by someone else. It should be “independently verifiable by a disinterested investigator,” to put it formally. It’s a sentiment well encapsulated in the motto of Britain’s national scientific academy, the Royal Society: 

—Take nobody’s word for it. For the two and a half centuries after the Society’s founding in 1660, that pragmatic assumption accorded with the common-sense view that there are definite facts about the world, whether or not anybody is checking. Thus, science took as its basis objective truth, as opposed to personal subjective experience that might include dreaming, hallucination, hypnotic suggestion, mirages and, well, ghosts. It therefore came as a bombshell to scientists when, early in the twentieth century, a new theory emerged, which shattered this comforting belief by implying that the external world lacks definite objective existence when it isn’t being watched.

On January 27, 1926, the world changed forever. It was on that day that the German scientific journal 

 published a paper by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger which demolished centuries of belief about the nature of matter and the way the physical world is put together. It had been apparent for a quarter of a century that something was very wrong with the traditional concept of material objects on the atomic and molecular scale, but it took the publication of a specific equation—Schrödinger’s equation—to sweep away the old picture of matter and open the path to an entirely new way of thinking about the physical universe. What emerged, following a few years of frenzied analysis by the world’s leading physicists, was the birth of an entirely new scientific discipline called quantum mechanics. It transformed our understanding of reality, reshaped the landscape of science, and gave birth to entire new industries that have powered economic growth for decades.

Quantum mechanics didn’t spring ready-made into Schrödinger’s mind. His equation was an attempt to grapple with a plethora of oddities and paradoxes that pervaded the world of pre-quantum—now known as classical—physics. These oddities hinted that something was seriously amiss with scientists’ understanding of matter and forces: impossible stars, atoms that shouldn’t exist, heat radiation that ought to incinerate the universe—a puzzling array that nobody understood until it all fell into place in the mid-1920s.

Schrödinger was not alone in his endeavors. At that time, others were grappling with the baffling internal structure of atoms—most notably Werner Heisenberg, who was taking a different mathematical approach from Schrödinger, yet one that eventually turned out to be equivalent.

That dazzling, gargantuan domain is in fact the world in which we are already inescapably embedded, but from which we are almost totally shut out. 

The genesis of the basic quantum concept was in 1899. It was just another frustrating day at work for Max Planck, the German physicist who took the first, decisive, leap. Planck had for years struggled to understand the problem of runaway energy at high frequencies in heat radiation. He had long been wrestling with the equations for thermodynamics and electromagnetism in an attempt to combine them in a way that matched the measured spectrum of heat radiation, which rises to a peak and then falls in a distinctive manner. In the end, the solution to the conundrum was actually disarmingly simple, banal even, and for Planck totally gratuitous. He tried out what would happen if radiant heat energy couldn’t be emitted in any amount, but only in discrete little packets, which he called quanta—deriving from the same Latin root as “quantity,” or “portion”: This is the origin of the term. (A quantum of heat—and light—radiation is usually called a photon. In popular parlance, a quantum leap often means a big change, whereas most photons are extremely small units of energy.)

Each quantum, Planck proposed, possessed an energy in proportion to the frequency of the wave: higher frequency, more energy. That required Planck to introduce a new fundamental constant of nature into physics, one that fixes the scale, giving us the actual value of a quantum of energy for a specified frequency. It is, unsurprisingly, referred to as Planck’s constant. This was a drastic step, and Planck implemented it reluctantly, in the manner of a mathematical fudge—a computational maneuver—rather than as a serious hypothesis about nature. But it worked. If radiant heat behaves like a gas made up of particles rather than continuous waves, sharing out the energy democratically is straightforward.

Here is a rough explanation of how Planck’s proposal solves the problem. Since the energy going into an electromagnetic wave is not, according to Planck, infinitely divisible, the minimum amount a given frequency could possess is one quantum. However, a wave of that frequency might possess no energy at all, i.e. no quantum. The democracy principle is just a statistical distribution, so it’s okay if some wave frequencies don’t have any energy, while others have one, two, three quanta of energy, and so on, so long as the average comes out right. Obviously, the higher the frequency (requiring more energy per quantum, according to Planck’s hypothesis) the smaller the fraction of waves that, on average, can receive one quantum, even fewer two, etc. The upshot of this requirement is that the high frequency waves are suppressed in energy. It’s a bit like a lottery in which just one person gets the first prize of $100, 10 people get the second prize of $10 each and 100 people get the third prize of $1. That is equipartition of sorts: Each category of prize winners receives the same $100 in total. A simple calculation shows that, with Planck’s proposal, the energy spectrum of heat radiation at a given temperature matches the shape of his constant. Voilà! Problem solved, just like that—at the stroke of a pen—a bit of elementary algebra. But of course, the problem was far from solved. Planck was right, and the spectrum now bears his name in recognition, but in science it’s not enough to say, “I’ve been at this for years and I’m sick of the fact that the equations won’t give the right answer, so I’ll change one of them.” What that amounts to is altering a basic law of nature, a drastic step that you have to justify. Planck himself was less than ecstatic: He described his quantum hypothesis as “an act of despair.” In fact, he never came to fully accept quantum mechanics, the theory he helped incubate.

The next act of the drama came when Einstein offered a neat explanation for the photoelectric effect. That was 1905, Einstein’s 

, in which he laid the foundations for not merely one revolution in physics, but three. Similar to Planck’s suggestion that heat radiation is emitted in discrete quanta, Einstein also suggested that light comes in discrete packets, with energy proportional to their frequency. (Radiant heat and light are both forms of electromagnetic radiation, differing only in frequency.) When a stream of these light quanta—photons—hits a metal surface, electrons are kicked out, one electron per photon. If, as hypothesized by Planck and Einstein, higher frequency photons have more energy than lower frequency, then they will produce faster-moving electrons, but not more electrons. If you turn up the intensity of the light (use more photons), then you do get more electrons liberated—a stronger electric current—as observed in experiments. It was actually this work, rather than his famous theory of relativity, that later earned Einstein the Nobel Prize in Physics. Yet—as we shall see—Einstein, like Planck, never came to fully accept quantum mechanics.

The final piece of the jigsaw came in 1913. By this time, the “quantum” idea of energy coming in discrete packets was out there, although it was by no means generally accepted, given it was still completely unexplained. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr borrowed the basic concept and proposed that the orbits of electrons in atoms are also “quantized,” that is, they are confined to certain discrete radii and energy levels as they go around the nucleus. Bohr’s suggestion was not totally ad hoc. If one accepts with Planck and Einstein that light comes in little discrete packets, then the source that emits or absorbs the packets (e.g. atoms) must presumably also have discrete energy levels. In this picture, an electron may jump from one level to another, corresponding to a photon being emitted or absorbed. This early skirmish with atomic structure was a primitive model that made no attempt to account for why quantized energy levels exist, but Bohr proposed a formula for the energies of the levels that strikingly conformed with some known experimental results about the light spectra of hydrogen and helium. Bohr suggested that atoms would not collapse because there was a definite smallest orbit with the lowest energy—called the ground state—below which the electron couldn’t go, and any further radiation emission was forbidden—for what at the time were unknown reasons.

Taken together, the proposals of Planck, Einstein and Bohr set the scene for what would eventually become a fully worked-out theory of quantum mechanics. But their various proposals left a lot to be desired. The fact that light is “quantized,” that it comes in discrete lumps of energy, flew in the face of overwhelming evidence that light is a wave. This caused great confusion, for how could something be both a wave and a particle? Later, physicists would refer to “wave-particle” duality, but for two decades nobody could really wrap their heads around the idea. Nor could the existence of quantized energy levels in atoms, and in particular the existence of a lowest level, or ground state, be reconciled with any known principles.

Schrödinger’s equation requires us to abandon the simplistic assumption that the atomic world is merely a scaled-down version of the everyday world and to accept that it is something else entirely, something defying common sense.

Then came a new development. In 1924, a French aristocrat, the splendidly named Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie, proposed in his PhD thesis that electrons could sometimes behave like waves. It was a bold concept, given that electrons are quite obviously little particles. According to Planck and Einstein, light waves can sometimes behave like particles, and conversely, according to de Broglie, particles of matter can also behave like waves.

De Broglie’s matter-wave hypothesis was a huge leap, but he was spot on. It took a few years for his proposal to be definitively confirmed experimentally, but in the meantime, building upon de Broglie’s basic idea, Schrödinger presented his famous equation to describe how the mysterious matter waves propagate. He gave the strength (known as the amplitude) of the wave the Greek symbol psi, written ψ, in his original paper and the convention stuck. Schrödinger proposed that the wavelength—the distance between successive peaks of the wave—depends on the particle’s momentum. For example, fast-moving electrons should have shorter wavelengths—be more bunched up—than slow-moving, less energetic, electrons. And experiments confirmed that was right. This was the decisive breakthrough, following which everything fell into place.

Electron waves readily explained the mystery of atomic energy levels. Quivering wave patterns envelop the nucleus, vibrating at distinct frequencies like the notes of musical instruments, each pattern corresponding to a specific energy level. The numbers match up brilliantly, recovering Bohr’s ad hoc formula and more. The patterns have different shapes and sizes; the simplest pattern is a compact symmetric cloud that hugs the nucleus most closely; that is the ground state, below which there are no more available patterns on offer. Schrödinger’s equation could also be used to describe unbound electrons colliding with atoms, scattering off them or being captured, or moving through crystals, or bouncing away from each other. In addition, it described other particles, including entire atoms and molecules, accurately predicting their vibrational and rotational motions and the forces that bind them. Applications of Schrödinger’s equation came so thick and fast it was said that even a second-rate physicist could do first-rate work. The stage was set for what was to become the Golden Age of physics.

Mingled with the heady excitement, however, was a deep sense of unease, not to say outright bewilderment, concerning the sweeping implications for the nature of reality. Schrödinger’s equation requires us to abandon the simplistic assumption that the atomic world is merely a scaled-down version of the everyday world and to accept that it is something else entirely, something defying common sense.

Quantum mechanics would become the dominant scientific story of the twentieth century: a sensationally successful branch of physics with applications across all the sciences and engineering, but supported by a detailed theory that seemed to strike at the very root of rational inquiry about the physical world. It was the epitome of the “paradigm shift,” according to which true revolutions do not merely change a few technical details—they reconfigure the entire conceptual foundations of the subject. The reason quantum mechanics was so hard to grasp, and remains controversial to this day, is because it demands that we part with long-cherished notions about the way the physical universe is constructed and our place within it. ♦

 Quantum 2.0: The Weird Physics Driving a New Revolution in Technology

Paul Davies is the Regents' Professor of Physics at Arizona State University. He is a theoretical physicist and author who has worked on the origin and very early stages of the universe, the quantum properties of black holes, and the nature of time. He has published numerous acclaimed books presenting cutting-edge physics to general audiences.

Welcome to the Quantum Universe

Shanzhai Lyric's Endless Garment

Baby-Making on Mars

In the 1990s, astronomy professor Joe Patterson wrote and illustrated a seasonal newsletter, in the style of an old-fashioned paper zine, of astronomical highlights visible from New York City. His affable style mixed wit and history with astronomy for a completely charming, largely undiscovered cult classic: Big Apple Astronomy. For 

, Joe shares current issues of Big Apple Sky Calendar, the guide to sky viewing that used to conclude his seasonal newsletter. Steal a few moments of reprieve from the city’s mayhem to take in these sights. As Oscar Wilde said, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

January

(1801) On the very first night of the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Piazzi found a slowly moving starlike object, which he assumed to be a comet (at that time, only the planets of antiquity were known). But was it a comet? Maybe not, because it showed no tail or fuzz. Only a few precise observations were obtained before it was lost in the glare of the Sun. Fortunately, a very young Carl Friedrich Gauss—now regarded as the greatest mathematician since Archimedes—became interested in how to derive an orbit from merely three observations. He successfully predicted where it would be when it emerged from the solar glare…and later studies showed that the object moved in a nearly circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Sort of like an actual planet!

The object was named Ceres, after the Roman god of agriculture. It was the first known asteroid, or “minor planet” (the currently favored term). There are now many thousands known, most quite small and in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroid names have gone berserk. They ran out of Greek and Roman gods a long time ago. For a good time, google “funny asteroid names”—and if you actually 

 an asteroid (plus solve for the orbit), you can even contribute to the madness.

There was another planetary puzzle that dogged astronomers throughout the nineteenth century: the motion of Mercury. It did not exactly obey Newton’s Laws and some astronomers thought there could be another planet, close to the Sun, that was tugging slightly on Mercury. It even got a name: 

(of course). On January 2, 1860, the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier announced that he had discovered (through calculation) the orbit of Vulcan. But no one ever actually saw it. Le Verrier was wrong. There were scattered claims of seeing the 

of unknown objects crossing in front of the Sun. But none were confirmed, and Mercury’s odd motion wasn’t explained until Einstein’s General Theory (in 1915) showed that the geometry of space in the near vicinity of the Sun is slightly non-Euclidean.

as close as it ever gets to the Sun, just 0.983 AU from the Sun. Amid January’s deep freeze, this may be surprising. But remember that the seasons are caused not by distance, but by the 

 of the Earth’s axis. The variation in distance (0.98 AU in January, versus 1.02 AU in July) is just not enough to make a big difference.

Still, wouldn’t you expect that the maximally close Sun in January and the maximally distant Sun in July would give the northern hemisphere warmer winters and cooler summers? The opposite

is true—the highest recorded temperature on Earth is 134°F (Death Valley) and the lowest is -109°F (Yakutsk, Siberia). Can you guess the reason for the extremes being reached in the North rather than the South?

The anniversary of Galileo’s death, in 1642. Still under house arrest from the Inquisition, Galileo hung on just long enough to get his magnum opus on dynamics (

) smuggled out to Holland, where it could be published. On this precise date three centuries later, another adventurer in space and time was born: Stephen Hawking. Hawking showed that the two bedrock principles of twentieth-century physics—relativity and quantum theory—can actually be reconciled if black holes emit some radiation. It has never been observed, but we’re still looking!

On these four nights in 1610, Galileo turned his telescope on Jupiter… and noticed four stars which moved around Jupiter—the “Galilean satellites,” as we now call them. Or the Medicean Stars, as Galileo called them, in an effort to curry favor with his patron, Cosimo de Medici (a boy of nine). This discovery did a lot to demolish the Ptolemaic model of planetary motions. It had previously been argued: “If the Earth moves, how can it hang onto the Moon?” Well, there was Jupiter up there, obviously moving around 

, and having no difficulty hanging onto its moons.

Before the discovery scene in Bertolt Brecht’s play 

, a curtain appears with the ominous words: “January 10, 1610: Heaven Abolished.”

Last quarter Moon, rising near midnight. Also, Jupiter is at “opposition” tonight—meaning “opposite the Sun, transiting near midnight”… and therefore in a great position for telescopic observation.

 
The Orthodox New Year, which is New Year’s Day on the 

 calendar (as distinct from the modern calendar, which was instituted by Pope Gregory in 1582).

 
Five good overpasses of NYC (or anywhere nearby) by the ISS (International Space Station) occur this month. Here’s the schedule:

Magnitude -3 and -4 means “brighter than any star, and as bright as Venus.” For these ~five-minute apparitions, look first near the WSW horizon. It looks like a plane, except that (a) its light doesn’t flash, and (b) it disappears suddenly in the middle of the eastern sky (as it enters the Earth’s shadow).

The ISS moves at about 18,000 mph, so it travels about 1,500 miles during these quick visions. It’s strange that the station could be mistaken for a plane—yet it is, frequently.

ALL appearances of the ISS start from the west, and end (roughly) in the east.

The waxing crescent Moon passes pretty close to Saturn on these nights. Saturn’s rings are pretty close to edge-on this month, so they won’t present the beautiful view we all love. But if you have a decent telescope and a good southwestern horizon, give it a look. As a consolation prize, look for the brilliant Venus, low in the southwest, an hour after sunset. The medium-bright starlike object next to it is Saturn, as a telescopic look will confirm. But you’ll need a really good southwestern horizon.

First-quarter Moon. Excellent time for telescopic observation—when the mountains and crater walls cast long shadows, as seen from the Earth.

The Moon is next to the Pleiades tonight. Very nice target for observation through binoculars.

Things are getting a little crowded up there. On these nights, the nearly-full Moon is practically on top of Jupiter and the Gemini twins.

February

, as we have come to call it. This is the first of the four “cross-quarter days,” roughly the mid-points of the four seasons. The groundhog connection dates back to an old German legend about the predictive power of badgers. In Christian liturgy, it’s also called Candlemas (candles are lit during services).

BTW, since you’re reading a calendar, it’s a fair guess that you’re interested in such things. If so, indulge yourself, visit 

, read about this day, and find room for a new habit.

The nearly-full Moon is very close tonight to Regulus—the brightest star in Leo and the “backward question mark” of the winter sky.

For observers in NYC, the International Space Station (ISS) will make a pass directly over NYC at precisely 6:37 pm EST tonight. These overpasses are dramatic. You’ll first see it low in the NW, at 6:34 pm. It bears repeating that it may resemble a plane—except that it has no flashing lights and appears to be flying directly over NYC (which only hijacked planes do).

At 6:37, directly overhead, it’s as bright as Venus, and at 6:40 it 

in the SE, even though it’s still 30 degrees from the horizon (only UFOs do this). That’s because it’s entering the Earth’s shadow.

The ISS orbits at ~18,000 mph. When you first see it, it’s roughly over Minnesota. Three minutes later, it’s over NYC. You can see why “landing” this giant structure—a football field in size and requiring 42 visits by astronauts to assemble in orbit—will eventually be a gigantic engineering problem.

Theoretically, these overpasses happen a lot, but only a few are so conveniently placed and timed for NYC. The only other really good one this month occurs the next night, February 4, starting at 5:46 pm. Same progression and duration. A splendid reward for six minutes of observation!

Last quarter Moon, rising around midnight.

On this day in 1913, sky-watchers from Saskatchewan to Bermuda saw a great procession of meteors moving rapidly across the sky. There were hundreds, throwing off sparks as they went and maintaining a near-perfect formation. This was probably a tiny comet or asteroid, which happened to strike the Earth’s atmosphere at grazing incidence. It might have dissipated or skipped off the atmosphere, like a flat stone skipping off a pond.

such objects are out there. Our detection methods mainly pick up the larger ones, and those are too few to pose a serious concern. 2021 had a real groaner of a movie about one (

 had some silliness too, but the science was spot-on perfect. A 400-foot tsunami roaring over Columbus Circle is just what you’d get with a deep impact in the ocean!

Galileo’s birthday in 1564. Very nearly the day of Michelangelo’s death (February 18). Perhaps the greatest scientist and artist of the last millennium.

First day of Ramadan, probably. The mullahs in Mecca will be carefully scrutinizing the western sky tonight, to glimpse the thin lunar crescent (just following the New Moon). If they see it, Ramadan starts. But they do have modern calendars, so they might bend the rules a bit to allow for cloudy weather.

On this day in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered a faint moving object beyond Neptune, soon named Pluto after the ruler of the underworld. It was considered the outermost planet of the solar system, until it was ruthlessly dethroned in 2006. (Basically, it was deemed too small, too distant, and more closely resembling the “dwarf planets” in the debris at large distances from the Sun.)

This decision was massively unpopular among America’s children, partly because of what they had learned in school, and partly because of Pluto the Dog. Astronomers be warned: Don’t mess with Disney characters.

Tonight, the thin crescent Moon gets very close to Mercury in the early-evening sky. It won’t be a barn-burner of a sight, very low in the southwest. I’ve only seen Mercury a few times—and supposedly, even Copernicus never saw it (he relied on Arab observations from earlier centuries). But if you have a clear SW horizon, give it a try! If you see a stationary point of light very near the lunar crescent, that’s Mercury. No telescope needed, of course—only naked-eye observations count. (Maybe binoculars are OK, in a pinch… but get away from any buildings in the southwest!)

Having visited Mercury yesterday, the lunar crescent pays a visit to Saturn in tonight’s early-evening sky. But no big deal—Saturn is on the Moon’s usual menu for monthly visits.

Birthday of Copernicus in 1473. Copernicus is often hailed as marking the great transition from medieval to modern ideas about the universe. But historians of science tell a somewhat different story. He seems to have published his master work, 

, from his deathbed in 1543—probably at the urging of his student, Joachim Rheticus. Perhaps despairing that the master would ever publish the full work, Rheticus pre-published his own version in 1540 (

Ironically (in view of what happened to later advocates of heliocentrism), Pope Paul III expressed interest in the idea, while Martin Luther called Copernicus “a damn fool.”

Tonight, the Moon is just north of that famous “Pleiades” star cluster—otherwise known as the Seven Sisters. Great sight in binoculars!

On February 27, 40–60 minutes before sunrise, look low in the southeast for a thin waning crescent Moon. Above it is Mars, and above Mars is the brilliant Venus. On the morning of the 26th, the planets are in pretty much the same place, but the Moon is to the

 (as you view it) of the Mars-Venus pair.

You’ll need a good horizon and clear sky (but not crazy-good and crazy-clear) to see these.

March

The 50th anniversary of the launch of Pioneer 10, humanity’s most ambitious venture out of our home solar system. The spacecraft was designed to study Jupiter (which it did in 1973), but then went sailing past Neptune—into what you might call “interstellar space.” It’s still there, coasting along at 51,000 mph in the direction of the bright star Aldebaran. It’ll arrive—well, get close, anyway—in a mere two million years. It bears a plaque showing who sent it (a man and a woman), where it came from (third planet from a star), and even a suggestion for what frequency to use in sending a return radio message (1420 MHz, the “song of interstellar hydrogen”).

Seems unlikely the Aldebaranites will figure all that out, but it’s worth a try—assuming, of course, that Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson don’t mount a recovery mission to add Pioneer 10 to their private collections.

Full Moon and a total lunar eclipse, because the Moon is now exactly opposite the Sun. Unfortunately for most of us North Americans, it occurs slightly too late at night to be easily visible. It’s mainly a Pacific Ocean affair. On the west coast of North America, you can see most of it if you have a clear view to the west. Mid-eclipse is at 6:34 am EST, so folks in eastern USA will see only the beginning—and even then, they'll need a very clear view down to the western horizon to see the Moon at all.

The date of the semi-annual rip in the fabric of time, scheduled for 2 am EST on Sunday, March 8 (“spring ahead, fall back”). It’ll go into effect just about everywhere in the U.S., except sunny Hawaii and Arizona, where they presumably don't need any help saving daylight.

Last quarter Moon, rising around midnight (1 am EDT).

The anniversary of the discovery of Uranus—the first planet to join the planets of antiquity—by William Herschel in 1781. Uranus was the father of Saturn and the grandfather of Jupiter; William was the brother of Caroline Herschel and the father of John Herschel—famous astronomers all! Although the discovery date is credited as March 13, the object was sighted and catalogued as a star many times previously. On March 13, Herschel realized that it changed positions in the sky, and he therefore classified it as a comet. (Since all

were known in antiquity, the idea of “discovering” a new planet was just too weird to contemplate.) After tracking it for two more years, he realized that it had no tail, and orbited in a near circle outside the orbit of Saturn. QED: PLANET. Herschel wanted to call it Sidus Georgium (Star of George) to curry favor with the English monarch. But Americans will recall that during 1781–3, George III had to deal with issues more serious than planets.

Also the exact anniversary of the 1986 flyby (within 600 miles) of Halley's Comet by the European spacecraft Giotto, which snapped some amazing photos

The original Giotto painted a famous fresco, 

, likely in the year 1320. In it, the Star of Bethlehem is represented as a comet, and we know that Comet Halley visited the inner solar system in 1301. Had old Giotto been around for Halley's 1986 visitation, he would surely have painted the comet in the background of Bill Buckner's famous error to “win” the World Series for the New York Mets.

Prof. Joe Patterson is a professor of Astronomy at Columbia University, an observational astronomer, and a baseball enthusiast. (He was also our editor-in-chief’s first astronomy professor.)

sci-ameliapro

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

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Once, in Midtown Manhattan, you could visit a shop with a sign that read, simply, VERMONT. Its display windows presented seasonal dioramas. Evenings, the ebullient marquee of Radio City Music Hall shouted out in neon. But Vermont, its cozy neighbor, had gone to bed early. Vermont was dark and silent.

Inside Vermont, the air smelled of woodsmoke, cider, and maple syrup. Vermont boasted that it sold nothing at all, except “the virtues of Vermont.”

But Vermont’s “virtues” were in fact for sale. In the winter of 1954, the shop window was taken over by a large three-dimensional map of the state, with colored bulbs attached where the ski areas were located. It looked like a game show prop. The bulbs shone red, yellow, or green, depending on how much snow had fallen in the real Vermont, far from Midtown. Passing cars slowed as their drivers squinted to make out the map.

Cabbies felt “despair” at driving by, according to 

; their fares showed a tendency to cut short their trips, hop out, and study the display. The windows became one of the big city’s minor attractions. “There is no official count on the ‘window watchers,’” the 

 reported, “but they are believed to number in the thousands.”

Inside Manhattan’s Vermont, a staff of Vermonters, mostly young women, greeted visitors, handed out brochures, and answered the phones. Winter was the busiest season. “Between 1,000 and 1,500 queries a week are received about snow conditions,” the 

 reported. Many young men stopped in just to talk with these delightful, helpful women, who tended their serene island in a sea of noise and traffic.

“Vermont in New York: An Invitation!” read the full-page ad in 

 magazine. “Drop in and visit about our favorite State with Vermonter Mary Jean Ogden.” “Visit about” was a nice touch: a Yankee speech artifact, suggesting a whole world of front porches and shade trees, and wholesome nontransactional encounters, free of the taint of money.

Outside it was Midtown at mid-century, the world that the poet Frank O’Hara captured on his frantic lunch hour walks: workmen fed “their dirty glistening torsos” between parked cabs, while on “the avenue” women’s skirts could be seen “flipping / above heels” and blowing “above grates.”

Inside, it was another kind of poem: Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” with the despair erased, leaving only the ambience: the “snow upon the roof,” the “icicles along the wall.”

In the fall of that year, 19-year-old Larry Sanders took his little brother, Bernard, then 13, on the subway from their home in Midwood, Brooklyn, to Midtown Manhattan, a 45-minute trip, and visited “Vermont”: the Vermont Information Center.

They were not skiers. It might have been an accident: the shop was just to the right of the subway exit. But in 1954, a minor cultural draft blew down from Vermont. Everyone had heard “Moonlight in Vermont,” the popular song, beloved of crooners, each verse a woodsy haiku. Hitchcock’s 

 filmed that fall in the village of Craftsbury, where the foliage stole the spotlight from the cadaver. And Bing Crosby’s 

 minus the blackface, now set in a Vermont inn, premiered in November of that year.

Though there were bins of apples and little samplers of maple syrup on offer, the Sanders boys brought a different kind of souvenir back home to Midwood that day. A wire rack presented fliers for “Vermont land,” Bernie Sanders recalled in 2015. “We picked up the brochures and we saw farms were for sale.”

“It sounds like a made-up story,” Larry Sanders told me in the first of our interviews, “but it really happened.” On the subway home, Larry and Bernie pored over photos of “farm after farm, pages of farms.” The land was beautiful—but more importantly, “it was cheap.” “Cheapness,” frugality, thrift: these concepts come up over and over as we follow Bernie Sanders’s rise. They were yoked early to the idea of the state of Vermont.

There is something funny about two lanky Brooklyn teenagers discussing real estate with the reputable ladies of the Vermont Information Center. But the boys had been primed by attending the Ten Mile River Scout Camp, in Narrowsburg, New York, on the Pennsylvania border: a wild, wooded, “stunning place,” according to Larry.

“Bernard loved the countryside,” Larry explained. Vermont, he said, was “a fantasy—but an important fantasy.”

Larry Sanders, whose resemblance to his brother is strong but not uncanny—he is not Larry David—is the keeper of the family’s stories. Bernie has made a stand against the politics of folksy charm and personal anecdote, ever since his first races in the early 1970s. In their place he has developed a counter-charisma, an orneriness that in old age makes him seem a flinty, Yankee figure. Bernie’s cantankerousness has been very easy to sentimentalize, especially for the young. But it scalded and confused many throughout his political rise.

“The usual path is to begin with biography,” Tad Devine, a Bernie aide, told 

 in 2015. “I don’t see us going there.” While Larry very naturally faces backward, Bernie has always barreled ahead. He will not, or perhaps cannot, look back; but he is shaped thoroughly by the braided economic, medical, and emotional traumas of the first little economy he saw up close, that of his childhood home.

The elder Sanders brother has lived mostly in England since 1969, where he is now retired as a Green Party official. Many Americans met him for the first time on the night of July 26, 2016, when, as a delegate for Democrats Abroad, Larry nominated Bernie for president of the United States. The clip can be found easily online: “I want to bring before this convention the names of our parents, Eli Sanders and Dorothy Glassberg Sanders,” Larry Sanders begins, his voice breaking and tears welling. “They did not have easy lives, and they died young. They would be immensely proud of their son and his accomplishments. They loved him very much. They loved the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, and would be especially proud that Bernard is renewing that vision.”

Larry was weeping by then. Bernie had lashed himself to the mast as usual, but soon his own tears began. (I don’t believe Bernie had ever cried publicly before that night.) “It was a hectic household,” Larry told me. “My mother had a very strong temper.” Dorothy Glassberg was born on the Lower East Side in 1912. Home movies from the 1940s show a handsome, stylish woman, at home in a swagger coat and pillbox hat. She waves baby Bernie’s hand to the camera, broadly smiling.

“Cheapness,” frugality, thrift: these concepts come up over and over as we follow Bernie Sanders’s rise. They were yoked early to the idea of the state of Vermont.

But her “hectic household”—three and a half rooms in a tenement—reminded her perhaps too much of her childhood. “She wanted a house,” Larry said; she “yearned for status in the synagogue” and in the surrounding community, which came only with having a home where a woman could reciprocate her neighbors’ hospitality.

The apartment at 1525 East 26th Street had a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen/living room, and a “half room, a widened part of the hall,” which, according to Larry, served as a second bedroom. When they were both living at home, Larry and Bernie alternated, the one sleeping in the makeshift bedroom, the other on the living room couch. “They threw a bathroom in as well,” Bernie once wrote. “My memory of that one time a fish actually came up through a toilet.” The apartment “was incredibly cramped,” Larry told me. “Not only didn’t we have a room of our own, we didn’t have a room together.”

In the main room, there was a bookshelf with perhaps 20 books (including a eugenics textbook whose anatomical illustrations were “very popular” with the boys), a radio, and, from 1948 or so on, a TV. The apartment offered “no privacy at all”—no place, Larry added solemnly, that Bernie and Larry “could decorate.”

With space indoors scarce, Larry said, “the street was our second home.” The rule on the pickup basketball courts was “Make it, take it”—you score a basket, you get the ball back—a brutal capitalistic model for competition, and one that Bernie practiced in his political life, whatever his ideological commitment to the fair distribution of wealth. “We played baseball, softball, punchball, stickball, stoopball, roller hockey, variants of American football, touch football, touch tackle, basketball, marbles,” Larry said. “It was a very good way to grow up.” Bernie, he added, “might not entirely agree.”

In some marriages, the party that insists on a narrower world automatically wins, though the victory is costly. Dorothy Sanders apparently wanted a broader life.

But three and a half rooms were quite enough for Eli Sanders, who had emigrated to New York from Słopnice, Poland, in 1921, at the age of sixteen. His family in the old country sometimes went without food. “My father’s imagination, his life story, was survival,” Larry explained. Anything extra was trivial. Larry remembers his father watching a TV show about middle-class “psychological distress” and shaking his head. “But they’ve got plenty of money,” Eli Sanders muttered. “They’ve got everything they need.” Eli had an existential sense of life, drawn in part from his subsistence childhood, and augmented by the news dawning from Europe. Leafing through an old family photograph album, Eli Sanders pointed to one relative after another who’d been killed or lost— “gobbled up,” as Larry put it, in the Holocaust.

Eli Sanders was a commissioned paint salesman for the Keystone Paint and Varnish Company. He traveled up and down Long Island for his work and, according to Larry, “probably stopped at every diner along the way.” In the home movies I have seen, he is a paunchy man, and ill at ease throwing a ball to his sons. But he had a ready smile and a sweet, gregarious manner. Larry suggests that he spent a lot of his days chatting with his clients, which might have cut into his commissions. In Eli’s mind, the family had arrived. In his wife’s view, they had stalled out just on the other side of poverty.

In a story both Bernie and Larry tell, their father saw Arthur Miller’s 

 late in its Broadway run and wept for weeks after whenever he thought of Willy Loman, its thwarted protagonist. “He was devastated by it,” Larry told me. The play brought home to Eli how close his family had always been to economic collapse. Like many Americans in their precarious position, the Sanders family lived near despair. “The bottom could fall out,” as Larry put it. You might be tempted to conclude, as Willy Loman did, that “a man is worth more dead than alive.”

So Eli and Dorothy Sanders fought. They fought because they were frightened. The fights were unbearable to the boys, since, as they could plainly see, their parents were closely attached, and loved each other very much.

“My father’s thing was, you were spending too much,” Larry explained, “and my mother’s was, you’re not earning enough money.” This went round and round and “destroyed what they had.” These were “arguments that seared through a little boy’s brain, never to be forgotten,” Bernie Sanders wrote in 

Once, in the 1980s, I saw Bernie shopping at a department store in Burlington, now long gone, called Magrams. He pointed tentatively at the shirt racks, as though trying to make contact with an alien being. A few minutes later, from a second-floor window, I watched him exit the store and storm down Church Street toward city hall, empty-handed. I’ve always told it as a funny story; but when you hear the brothers discuss the anxiety that money caused them as children, it seems not funny at all.

, Bernie describes an errand he ran for his mother to buy groceries. “I went to the wrong store,” he wrote. “I went to the small shop a few blocks away, rather than the Waldbaum’s grocery store on Nostrand Avenue. I paid more than I should have. When I returned and my mother realized what I had done, the screaming was horrible.”

“The worst of it,” Larry told me, still agonizing 70 years later, “wasn’t what we didn’t have. It was the tensions. The arguments.”

I drove out to Midwood from the Upper West Side one beautiful April afternoon, across Central Park and down FDR Drive, over the Brooklyn Bridge, through a tangle of on- and off-ramps and, at last, out Ocean Avenue. How could it all work so well, said I, a Vermonter, to myself; every bolt and rivet holding as I sped through the balletic chaos of New York’s built environment?

The temperature fell several degrees as I neared Sanders’s childhood home in a mid-rise tenement on the corner of 26th Street and Kings Highway. Coney Island and Brighton Beach are nearby. You sense the beach in Midwood, in the flat, shadowless glare of the light, and in the gusts of fog that blow across the playgrounds and parks.

The food critic Mimi Sheraton, who grew up in Midwood, described an April day there in 1946. It matched what I saw nearly perfectly: mid-rise brick apartments trellised with black metal fire escapes on the avenues, and “builders’ houses, usually duplicated three or four in a row” on the side streets, “brick and stucco affairs.” Bright yellow forsythia blazed in many of those small backyards, just as she had described during this same calendar week in 1946.

It was, and is, a middle-class neighborhood with the feeling of an inner suburb. In Bernie’s day, it was an enclave of rapidly assimilating Jews within the larger neighborhood of Flatbush. Now the place has been carved out from Flatbush, and attracts a wide array of immigrant families, but especially Orthodox Jews of Russian descent. The day I was there was during Passover; a bunch of guys selling homemade matzoh on the street asked me if I was Jewish.

“Nope, Catholic,” I replied, and they waved me off with a chuckle. 1525 East 26th Street, a six-story, yellow-brick tenement, stands apart from the cheerful single-family homes. Many families in the neighborhood began their lives as renters in buildings like this one, aspiring to purchase one of the little houses at its ankles. Bernie’s parents dreamed of making that leap, but it never came. In Midwood, in the 1940s and ’50s, to own a “private house,” as Bernie’s parents called them, meant you were seen, your family was acknowledged, you were part of the neighborhood’s fabric. Once inside 1525 East 26th Street, though, you vanished.

I walked down 26th Street to James Madison High School. There they remember Bernie Sanders: in the entry hall, just beyond the metal detectors and security guards, is the Madison High School “Wall of Distinction.” Bernie Sanders ’59 is one in from the lower left corner, next to Beverly Stoll Pepper, the sculptor, who is the mother of the poet and my friend Jorie Graham. They are in distinguished company. Ruth Bader Ginsberg ’50 shares the top row with the famed environmentalist Barry Commoner ’33, Charles Schumer ’67, and Stanley H. Kaplan ’35, the founder of the test prep company. Working down the grid, we find Carole Klein King ’58, several professional athletes, four Nobel laureates, and Judith Blum Sheindlin ’60— “Judge Judy.” The roster of graduates is “more distinguished than Eton’s,” Larry Sanders told me, with a laugh.

What was the secret to the school’s success? “It was one of those schools where you felt what the old world was,” Jorie Graham told me. “The permission to get an education was an astounding gift because so many had died in Europe.”

Bernie entered Madison in the fall of 1954, around the time he and Larry picked up their Vermont brochures. Classmates recall a quiet and serious boy, not terribly political but, as his brother put it, “aware” of politics. “Jewish boys growing up in that time couldn’t but be aware just how important politics is,” Larry said. “It’s a matter of life and death.” Sanders eventually ran for student body president, finishing last among three candidates, on a platform to aid orphans of the Korean War.

But sports, and not politics, offered Bernie his first method of channeling his intensity. In a setback, Bernie, always a great pickup player on Brooklyn’s “Make it, take it” outdoor courts, was cut from the varsity basketball team. He was a “tremendous player,” Larry said. I confirmed that I had seen his game on the pickup courts in Burlington: strong ball handler, solid outside game, and, always, a complete, transforming intensity. Madison “wasn’t the skyscraper squad,” according to Larry, but they did have one of the “top-ranked teams in the city.” If only he’d been “an inch or two taller.” (Bernie stands around six feet one.)

Sanders became a standout athlete in track and cross-country, and eventually captained both teams. It baffled me, when Bernie sought to introduce himself to voters in his two presidential runs, that he did not capitalize more on his astonishing high school running career; the ads write themselves. Bernie’s best mile was 4:37, which earned him third place in New York City. That’s blazing fast, when you consider he ran in it on a cinder track, wearing primitive spikes. Even more impressive, to Larry, was his brother’s cross-country prowess. The course, way uptown in Van Cortlandt Park, “was always amazingly muddy,” he recalled. The races showed Bernie’s “tremendous stamina and dedication.” 

Practices were just getting underway when I left Madison High that afternoon, April 15, 2022; the courts and fields were filling up with students. Other kids were walking home alone, glued to their phones, or flirting in small, raucous groups. There is really nothing on earth like a high school dismissal, I thought to myself. The teachers and administrators streaming out looked almost as happy as their students, and took me for one of their own.

 describes the strong web of public projects from which the Sanders family benefited as a result of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which Larry Sanders also invoked at the 2016 convention: it brought baskets of federal money to New York City, expertly distributed by Roosevelt’s local ally, Mayor Fiorello—the name means “little flower”—LaGuardia, who stood only five feet two. Their apartment was rent controlled; Larry guessed the rent was about “50 bucks a month,” perhaps a tenth of his father’s pay. Beginning in the 1930s, there were new roads, schools, and swimming pools, and a new campus for Brooklyn College, where Dorothy Sanders eventually organized the Hillel seder every spring.

It was “an environment where New Deal politics were quite normal,” Larry said in a 2015 interview with Vermont’s 

. “It was widely understood that government could do good things.”

And yet, anybody who has hefted Robert Caro’s 

 knows that these anonymized government works had a dark side. Larry Sanders recalls the new public library, which replaced a makeshift space attached to the fire station, a romantic, enchanting hideaway for the neighborhood’s kids. The update was a modern, spic-and-span building.

Life in the family apartment seemed alternately clenched and explosive. Outside, though, Brooklyn appeared to be blossoming and changing. Government was indeed doing “good things”: Larry points to “a comfortable environment” where the “streets were free and easy and safe.” But ordinary families had no say in their neighborhood’s transformation. Some were relocated by eminent domain if their buildings blocked construction of an exit ramp. Old homes were now mere feet from the cascading traffic; fragrant blocks were turned into dank, toxic canyons by the new highways.

And none of these grand improvements had eased the worries of Bernie’s parents in their small apartment, or altered their wearying daily pattern.

“Nobody would have chosen the new library,” Larry Sanders told me. And the concrete of the new city playground was “very destructive to arms and legs.” It was mystifying when a new building or playground suddenly materialized where another, beloved structure had been. Who made these decisions? The Midwood families themselves had played no role.

I told Larry that it reminded me of seeing Bernie for the first time on my front porch, when I was nine, as he was priming people for votes. It was a scene that played out over and over in his eight years as mayor. You’d hear about a bond issue coming before the city for some important public works project. Soon, Bernie or one of his disheveled volunteers was out on the street, or in the parks, or at your front door, looking for your support. The skinned knees kids got on those Brooklyn playgrounds stayed with him: a visitor to Burlington, Bernie once boasted, would visit its parks and say, “This is a people’s country club. You have tennis, you have swimming, you have softball.”

“Inform your parents,” Bernie would exclaim, finishing his pitch to a group of disaffected 14-year-olds.

Bernie’s politics clearly began at his parents’ breakfast table. Their scorching arguments showed him the emotional and psychological costs of being underpaid.

“The train stops somewhere in Brooklyn,” Bernie Sanders wrote in 1969, in the 

A crowd gets out, someone walks a few blocks into a 3 room apartment, family, dinner, arguments TV and sleep. Eight-thirty the next morning the train is back on 14th street.

The years come and go, suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow, death, fast death. DEATH.

The piece was published under the headline “The Revolution Is Life Versus Death.” It provides a quick montage of Bernie’s childhood, inflected by his radical politics in their embryonic, late-1960s form, heavily influenced by his reading of 

While Larry weeps when he shares his childhood stories, Bernie is mostly silent about those years. Larry told me that his brother sometimes accuses him of “minimizing” the degradations of the household. But Bernie’s politics clearly began at his parents’ breakfast table. Their scorching arguments showed him the emotional and psychological costs of being underpaid. If his hard work didn’t pay Eli Sanders enough to support their family’s modest needs, who was being paid for his father’s labor? Where did the money go? Eli and Dorothy Sanders turned those frustrations against each other. “The money question to me has always been very deep and emotional,” Bernie wrote in the 

. As Larry told me, it “ruined” the bond their parents had.

All through their childhoods, the Sanders boys carried the sense that the “bottom could fall out” of their household, as Larry put it. Dorothy and Eli Sanders saw their sons leave home; and then, almost instantly, the bottom did, in fact, fall out. The strain of raising their small family had weakened and sickened them both. Throughout the 1950s, Dorothy Sanders had treated her congenital heart condition with rest and whatever remedies the family could afford, all the while rooting for the rapid advances in open-heart surgery, widely reported in the papers, that would repair her mitral valve and save her life. But this costly, risky surgery would require more than a financial miracle for the hard-pressed Sanders household: Dorothy Sanders had a blood type of AB negative, the rarest variety. A typical open-heart procedure required at least 25 pints of fresh blood; banked blood loses oxygen in storage and could not be used.

“19 ‘Blue-Bloods’ Aid Boro Woman Battle for Life,” read the punning headline in the March 14, 1960, 

. After her condition dramatically worsened, Dorothy Sanders was rushed to a charity facility, Deborah Hospital in New Jersey, where she awaited a blood donation from the National Rare Blood Club, a Park Avenue philanthropy. The procedure would stand her “in good stead in her efforts to regain her health,” according to the paper. But on March 25, Dorothy Sanders succumbed to surgical complications at the age of 47. Bernie, a freshman at Brooklyn College, had coordinated her care and sat by her hospital bed: he was now “destroyed” and “wanted to get away from Brooklyn,” his brother said. The experience was Bernie’s first with doctors and hospitals, and it left the lasting impression that whether a person lived or died in our medical system was a function, not of the severity of a patient’s condition, but of her ability to pay. Of all the stark economic lessons Bernie learned in the family, the last days of his mother’s life struck him most powerfully.

Now alone in a silent, darkened apartment, Bernie’s father “completely fell apart” after his wife’s death, and died just two years later under tragic and strange circumstances, behind the wheel of his car, evidently of a heart attack. From news reports at the time, it can be surmised that he had tried to drive himself from Midwood to the emergency room of New York–Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. Eli Sanders, just 58, was found slumped over his steering wheel, having crashed his car into a bank of construction barriers outside the hospital entrance.

There is a clip that can be found online from the 

 that Bernie hosted in Vermont in the 1980s, when he was Burlington’s mayor. He’s come to Cathedral Square, the mid-rise senior living facility in downtown Burlington where, as it happens, my uncle Esau lived out his final years. Though the apartments are for elderly people on fixed incomes, many have million-dollar views across Lake Champlain. A few times I went along with my mother to bring Uncle Esau a bag of McDonald’s for his dinner. I remember baseball on Channel 11 from New York City, on Uncle Esau’s dinky TV; and behind it, ravishing purples and oranges of the sunset as it broke apart on the peaks of the Adirondacks.

Bernie is at Cathedral Square to connect with the elderly. He describes a city plan to bring seniors relief from rising taxes, then checks in on whether progress has been made on wiring Cathedral Square for cable TV. The room, I can see, is full of immigrants and children of immigrants, including many likely displaced from Burlington’s Little Italy, the thriving neighborhood razed by the city during the 1960s, and located on the very spot where Cathedral Square and the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Paul were later built.

The meeting is both funny and poignant. Sanders does not have a special personality reserved for the elderly. Sitting on the edge of a folding table, he spars with the old men and women, pushes back, cross-examines, shows a bit of exasperation and impatience. There is never a note of condescension.

“See, the beauty of the program is, it’s called ‘bulk billing,’” Sanders explains. Since you likely have heard Bernie’s voice, you know how much of Midwood, Brooklyn, enters the room with a word like beauty.

A woman interrupts. By her accent I can tell she is from St. Joseph’s Parish and grew up in Ward 3, the Old North End. She and Sanders are two working-class people from ostensibly different worlds. But they recognize each other. She begins: “It is my understanding from our meeting that they had to have a good number, not 100 percent, in order to get the low rate, otherwise we would have to pay the $10.50— ”

“—let’s say like 30 people signed up— ”

“Nope! Absolutely not! Is that what they told you?”

Grumbles, nods of assent all around; Bernie, sounding flabbergasted, makes a note, and promises to follow up. The woman seems unconvinced and irritated.

The year is 1987: if they’d lived, Eli Sanders would have been 83, Dorothy Sanders, 75. ♦

 BERNIE FOR BURLINGTON: THE RISE OF THE PEOPLE'S POLITICIAN 

Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from 

Dan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, journalist, and the author of 

Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People's Politician

, from which the excerpt below is drawn, and which 

we'll launch at Pioneer Works on February 19

ser-martin

Becoming Bernie

Like its mythological namesake, the real-life Hydra

is hard to slay. These tiny animals, freshwater polyps related to jellyfish, can survive just about any encounter with a blade. Hack away one of its tentacles, and a Hydra will simply regrow the lost limb. Chop off a Hydra’s head or slice its cylindrical body in half, and within a few days you’ll have two new animals instead of one dead one.

Hydra can even regrow after being shredded to bits, centrifuged, and then smooshed back together into balls of a few hundred cells (they have no brains, so this probably isn’t as traumatic as it sounds). Each of those little balls—despite being, initially, a haphazard hodgepodge of random cells from the original, ill-fated animal—will grow into a perfectly functional Hydra. And if that weren’t enough, Hydra are so unfussy that they can even regrow from clumps of cells cobbled together from several 

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