Nominated for a National Magazine Award, our second print issue features Hilton Als on Prince's Eyes, How Adderall Changed America, Sex with Neanderthals, New Fiction by Isle McElroy, Ordering Elements, and more.

hosted a debate between two physics professors in Ohio over a broiling national controversy: Was there such a thing as a curveball?

Pitchers claimed they were throwing them, batters claimed they were missing them, and fans claimed they were seeing them, but a chorus of doubters argued that the “curved ball” was a physical and scientific impossibility. On one side of the 

debate was Orange Nash Stoddard, a distinguished science professor at Wooster University, lovingly nicknamed the “Little Wizard” by students. On the other was Robert White McFarland, a mathematician and civil engineer at Ohio Agricultural, which we now know as Ohio State. Stoddard’s position: “There is no such thing.” McFarland’s: “There is a curve.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, baseball was rapidly professionalizing and growing in popularity. For many, its geometric diamond arrangement and the spectacular physics of bat and ball made it a truly 

sport. In turn, fans, players, commentators, and even natural scientists used baseball to test theories about the natural world. How far could a hit ball travel? Could a thrown ball really curve? Although debates over the curve are known to fans and sports historians alike, they are usually understood in a narrative of progress: an old misperception of physics that inevitably gave way to scientific truth. But the curveball debate was more than that. It was an argument about the contours of our shared reality. Could baseballs really bend along their path, or was it all a collective delusion?

A century of debate about the curve shows how professional and amateur sports served as venues not only for entertainment but for knowledge production. Curving baseballs invited researchers to rethink their understanding of physics and test inherited theories against physical demonstration. In turn, the debates brought new understandings of physics to a reading and sporting public. Debating the curve was an opportunity to grapple with the complexity of our physical world. But the curve controversies were also about what it meant to live 

that world, and particularly what it meant to be American; about truth and deception in public life. The very question of whether there is such a thing as a curveball revealed how our societies and our knowledge of the physical world evolve in constant dialogue.

The first curveball is generally credited to William Arthur Cummings, a star of mid-nineteenth-century baseball, who earned the nickname “Candy” for his sweet mastery of the craft. Using an underhanded motion, Cummings twisted his hand as he released the ball, producing an initially straight pitch that curved away to the side as it reached home plate. He claimed his inspiration was the spiraling motion of tossed clamshells. In September 1875, his “peculiar inside-curving ball” was noted in coverage of a game between the professional squad from Hartford, Connecticut, that Cummings played for and an amateur team from Ludlow, Massachusetts. (The amateurs still won the game, the early equivalent of a local rec team defeating the Yankees.)

As other pitchers began to integrate Candy’s technique, newspaper discussion of “curved ball” pitching spread across the eastern U.S. In 1877, the 

 of Indiana hailed a new local hurler who pitched “the popular ‘curved’ ball so swiftly that no one in the club was able to strike the balls.” After years of batters’ domination, curving balls rebalanced the scales back in the pitchers’ favor. Within a decade, the curveball was heralded as a revolution—“the greatest change ever introduced into the game,” according to an account from 1883, around the same time that Candy considered retiring to become a house painter.

How the curve worked, however, was initially a mystery. “Please tell me what a curved ball is in playing base-ball,” asked one 

reader in May 1876. That August, another inquired, “What is meant by a curved ball—is it a pitch or an underhand throw, how does it curve, and can you explain how it is done, how the ball is held, etc.?” The curveball was, in the first place, a tactical curiosity for passionate fans and aspiring players. With many men eager to make a nickel on the new national pastime, mastering the pitch promised upward mobility. Yet as the 

 answers made clear, its exact mechanics were elusive: “A curved ball is one which leaves the hand in a straight line and just before it reaches the home plate suddenly curves out toward the end of the bat…. by a twist or twirl of the ball that can not well be described.” Commonality did not initially mean common understanding.

to be mastered, the great curveballers were labeled “artists” for decades. But over time, the pragmatic matter of how to throw a curveball became a 

to do so? Spectators, after all, had witnessed balls that appeared to contradict the laws of motion. That all this might simply be trickery of the eye accorded with a widespread wariness in the late nineteenth century about fraud and deception. Newspapers of the era abounded with accounts of sleight-of-hand subterfuge: “Pepper’s ghost,” for instance, in which reflective glass panes made an off-stage ghost appear to float before theater audiences, wowed crowds from London to New Orleans. Magic was often just a trick of the eye.

“Why does a ball ‘curve?’” asked Columbus Ohio’s 

in July 1876. Here was a question “our scientific heads can spend a deal of brain power in solution of.” While it was widely accepted that the “laws of motion” made a curving pitch impossible, the 

“it is a fact … that there is such a thing as curved balls. Every base-ballist knows it.” The everyday know-how of players seemed to trump the public understanding of science. Could it be, as one popular theory proposed, that the force of air against the ball slowed one rotating side more than the other and produced a curving motion? The 

 granted that “the thinking men among us may ferret out something more probable.” Debates continued: In July 1877, “several young men” wrote the 

 that they were fully divided on whether it was possible to throw a curving ball. In September, a writer asked the Chicago 

to “Explain the philosophy that governs the curved ball as thrown by some of the professional baseball players of the United States, or as curved on a billiard table by scientific players.” People wanted not just to behold or even throw the curve themselves, but to understand how it could be possible in the first place.

, finding the curve debate was good for business,

decided to bring in experts to settle the matter: “The question of whether there is such a thing as a curved ball in pitching is dividing in opinion not only the patrons of the game, but also learned Professors and Doctors of Natural Sciences.” An unnamed resident of Cincinnati had even promised $1,000 (nearly $30,000 in today’s dollars) to any man who could demonstrate a true curve in controlled conditions.

For Orange Nash Stoddard, who “cheerfully” proffered his opinion on the subject, it was transparently obvious that a pitcher could not produce a curve. “That the hand can not affect the path of the ball after leaving it seems plain enough to those who are familiar with the laws which control the motion of matter,” he wrote. A late-breaking curve, Stoddard argued, would require some additional force on the ball during its flight. This was the essence of the physics of motion set down by Isaac Newton, and it applied to “the base-ball and the dust in the air, as well as the planets.” Believers in the curve, Stoddard suggested, were mistaking the performative spins and gesticulations of pitchers with the physics of their delivery.

McFarland rejected this illusion theory of the curve and was equally quick to dismiss a concurrent opinion that had appeared in 

.” Unlike Stoddard, who argued from first principles, McFarland proposed a simple experiment: If the reader threw a large board forward while spinning it, they would notice a curving trajectory as the friction of the air seemed to exert a stronger force on one side of the board than the other. “Try it and see,” he urged, with a stone, disk, or anything else handy. “Whether the philosophy of it is right” was uncertain, McFarland cautioned, but the 

demonstrated clearly that the curve existed. The debate between Stoddard and McFarland was, in other words, a question of whether immutable scientific laws theorized and passed down by great thinkers could be contradicted by experience.

was unwilling to immediately side with one argument over the other, so a full demonstration was planned for October 21, 1877, when the Cincinnati Red Stockings played the visiting Boston Red Caps. After two innings of miserably muddy play, the game was paused so that Bobby Mitchell, a lefty from Cincinnati, and Tommy Bond, an Irish righty from Boston, could attempt to throw curving balls. “Infinitely more interesting than the game was the experiment,” explained the 

, which pitted “Disciples of Isaac Newton” against “Base ball scientists.” A chalk line running from home plate to first base was chosen as the test site, and Mitchell stood on one end of the line, facing one barrier erected about halfway along the balls’ path and a second barrier at the end. For his ball to reach the other side, it would need to bend around the first and then arc back to avoid the second.

The weather was “insufferably disagreeable,” and Bond struggled, at first, to get his ball to cooperate. Finally, he managed a pitch that “started fairly on the west side of the line, curved over to the east side to pass the first barrier, and back again to the west side to avoid the other barrier.” Bond had thrown an undeniable “curved” ball. Mitchell went next, the experiment flipped to account for his southpaw delivery, and after a series of attempts managed a perfect “meanderer” that curved around the barriers as well. That a righty and a lefty had both accomplished the feat demonstrated wind alone was not diverting the balls. The test was reported as a success and satisfied “nearly all who witnessed it that a curved ball is a reality, whatever theorists may say.”

Accounts of the Cincinnati exhibition rippled through nearly every major newspaper in the country, where it was often a front-page story. The trial was repeated the next day, and then again during the final game of the season—the public couldn’t get enough. Similar demonstrations cropped up in other states: A pitcher visiting Rochester, New York, demonstrated the curve there as well after astronomer Lewis Swift, best remembered for discovering 13 comets, insisted it was a physical impossibility. “College professors should not dispute with base-ballists in matters of science,” one newspaper snarked. The 

was no less decisive in its appraisal of the showdown between “Science and Base-Ball”: “If Professor Stoddard … had been at the Cincinnati Base-Ball Ground Saturday … he would not have demanded a wait of 200 years for another Sir Isaac Newton to convince him it could be done. Mitchell of the Cincinnatis, or Bond of the Bostons, would have answered every purpose of Sir Isaac.” Swift, for his part, acknowledged his mistake and overconfidence: “I began to investigate the matter, and soon saw, that instead of being impossible, it was in accordance with the plainest principles of philosophy.” Baseball players had taken on the role of educators and experimentalists, making games into popular science.

If the demonstrations were convincing to those who saw them, their verdicts were not, in an era dominated by print media, immediately accepted by everyone. As late as 1885, Charles M. Schaefer, a self-professed “learned” gentleman and world traveler in Shelbyville, Indiana, wrote Cincinnati’s 

insisting that the curved ball was physically impossible—he was willing to journey to any demonstration and be thumped by such a ball if it did. After a test was arranged for October 6 in front of 800 Cincinnati fans, Schaefer was a conspicuous no-show. Yet the continuation of the debate revealed persistent fears of public deception: Americans were not the sort to believe a fable on authority. They needed to see the evidence for themselves.

We now know that the curving motion of a spherical object relies on a physical phenomenon called the Magnus effect, named for German physicist Gustav Magnus, who argued back in the early 1850s that rapidly rotating projectiles deviate from a straight path as they move through air. Isaac Newton had actually recognized that tennis balls could behave similarly, but his brief comment on the subject in 1672 escaped wider notice until the twentieth century. In 1877, the same year as the curved ball debates, the physicist John Strutt, who was known as Lord Rayleigh and later won a Nobel Prize, wrote a short article applying Magnus’ theory to the irregular movement of tennis balls. In 1904, as the American press started referring to “curveballs” as a distinct type of pitch, German physicist Ludwig Prandtl theorized the existence of a thin “boundary” layer around rotating objects, which influenced their movement and yielded anomalous deviations from their expected path.

Commonality did not initially mean common understanding.

That Rayleigh and Prandtl were both involved in early aerospace investigations reveals how “baseball science” was, in part, a matter of aerospace engineering. The wind tunnel test chambers that inspired Rayleigh and Prandtl would have been unknown to many generalist American scientists and educators of the late nineteenth century. Over time, however, some began to explore the curve question from this theoretical perspective. In 1879, mathematician and astronomer Henry Turner Eddy, later the president of the University of Cincinnati, published a paper exploring the “lateral deviation of spherical projectiles,” a phenomenon best known and most frequently observed “in pitching baseball.” Although it was commonly asserted that throwing a curving ball was scientifically impossible, Eddy sought to offer an explanation for the undeniable evidence of experience.

that encouraged American scientists and mathematicians like Eddy to think about the physics of curving balls. That Americans generally associated the phenomenon with baseball and billiards, rather than tennis, shows how local cultures of sport could shape the formulation of scientific questions. Magnus recognized the fundamentals without watching a single game, but many Americans needed to see it in person. Thus, beginning in 1877, 

 returned to the question multiple times: An article that year included multiple diagrams demonstrating how a curved pitch could be thrown and explained the underlying physics. But a follow-up in 1886, two years after the sport formally allowed overhand pitching, revealed how far understanding had advanced. Henry Chadwick, the writer who invented the sport’s box scores and penned its first rulebook, noted that pitching at the end of the century was not fundamentally different from earlier decades—many of the greats would still be highly effective hurlers. But one fundamental difference was “

the horizontal curve of the ball through the air

”; this innovation was “the great feature of the modern art of pitching.” Why and how the curve worked was obvious to Chadwick: The art was sustained by settled science. For the next few decades, being able to throw an effective curve partly determined your ceiling as a baseball pitcher, as an exceptionally curved ball became the norm.

It may seem surprising, then, that the curveball reemerged as the subject of existential quandary in the middle of the twentieth century. In May 1941, a man named R. W. Madden wrote in to 

to share the winding tale of a conversation held some years earlier with a part-time baseball scout. Over the course of a few draught beers on a relaxing hotel veranda in Flemington, New Jersey, discussing the encroaching threat of fascism in Europe, the former scout told Madden that Americans were not safe from collective delusion. In fact, their national pastime proved it: “

No man alive, nor no man that ever lived, has ever thrown a curve ball

,” the scout said. “It can’t be done.” Madden at first refused to believe it: He had been to games and 

curveballs. “Because you expect to see them,” the man responded, explaining that female fans rarely noticed the curve because they were untrained to expect it. Curveball belief, Madden explained, was a relic of “the mass American mind.”

A stream of responses followed the letter, with most focusing on the blasphemous rejection of settled science. A purported former classmate of “Eggy” Madden, Donald Larkin, claimed that Madden had always been a gullible sort. Ernest Kellogg found a 1911 copy of Albert Spalding’s 

, which presented McFarland, Stoddard, and Swift as participants in a single, outdated newspaper debate, already long settled by “reputable contemporary scientists.” Johns Hopkins physicist Robert Wood, a veteran of the original curve wars, wrote in to set the record straight with quotes from his own 1899 demonstration in the journal 

. Few, however, reckoned with the political overtones of Madden’s suggestively allegorical letter. If there was no such thing as the curveball, his story suggested, it revealed something fundamental about American public opinion. In contrast to the fear of deceptive showmen latent in earlier curve debates, Madden’s note positioned the existence of the curve as a metaphor for the susceptibility of modern mass society to fascist delusion. The one respondent who took up this thread—Ray Lillibridge, of New Haven—voiced hope for a scientific analysis, but concluded that “kidding ourselves that we can temporize with a united, capable, ruthless world-combination aligned against us put curve balls in the shade.” The vital matter was instead to “think straight about more important things.” Clear, linear logic to make sense of a disastrous, curving world.

In response to the reopened curve debate, 

magazine hired the celebrated photographer Gjon Mili to take high-speed images of a curveball thrown by Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cy Blanton. “Baseball is founded on the premise of the curve ball,” 

article began, even as “the no-curve theory has always had a small group of backers.” Mili’s photographs track Blanton’s “curve” from an elevated angle and the batter’s perspective, a ghostly grey ball traveling just to the left of a straight white index line against a black, Eadweard Muybridge-inspired background. Blanton’s curve and his “screwball,” a pitch intended to twist in the opposite direction, looked indistinguishable. Baseballs were simply too heavy for a pitcher to impart a meaningful curve the way one might with a ping-pong ball, 

argued. The late, “breaking” motion of pitches was an artifact of the batter’s perspective: “What control a pitcher has over the ball is simply the ability to apply varying degrees of speed.” As the world raced rapidly to war, the curve was, once again, an “optical illusion.”

The debate between Stoddard and McFarland was, in other words, a question of whether immutable scientific laws theorized and passed down by great thinkers could be contradicted by experience.

“demonstration,” which pitted scientifically framed photographs against the perceptual experience of players and fans, produced further waves of skeptical responses. Now, however, the situation was reversed from earlier debates: Physics suggested that a ball 

curve on its path, so scientists set out again to demonstrate it. Frank Verwiebe, the author of a celebrated introductory physics textbook, arranged a test in Illinois that ultimately suggested 

curve, but the perceptual challenge of tracking a spinning, onrushing ball made minor movements appear more dramatic. World War II delayed further effort on the problem, but a second photographic study, this time from 

magazine in 1949, confirmed Verwiebe’s findings, suggesting that “a curve ball actually does curve.”

returned to the question in 1953, by which time baseball had acquired “a new television audience subject to strange new electronic illusions”—the curveball might just be one of them. In the decade since Mili’s first images, high-speed photography had seen dramatic improvements: Wartime researchers, for example, developed rotating mirror cameras capable of more than a million frames per second to capture the explosions of atomic bombs. Slow-motion video had also progressed, and the television show 

deployed new cameras to attempt to settle, with future Hall of Famer Bob Lemon, “baseball’s oldest argument.” The very foundations of an “objective” visual demonstration had shifted.

This time, Mili had Cincinnati Reds’ pitcher Ken Raffensberger throw a ball that was half-black and half-white on a pitch-black night, its rotations captured by rapidly flashing strobe cameras. Raffensberger’s curve, it turned out, moved at half the speed of a fastball—but spun very quickly, more rapidly than previously thought possible, at nearly 1,400 revolutions per minute (MLB data suggests today’s curves are closer to 2,500). Aeronautical engineer Joseph Bicknell, who helped develop the famous Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel at MIT, then tried to verify this initial data in his lab. Bicknell built upon contemporaneous studies by Igor Sikorsky and Ralph Lightfoot, two engineers with the United Aircraft Corporation, who had also used a wind tunnel to test the existence of the curve. The result in both cases was clear: “Yes, a curve ball does curve, but in a gentle arc.” The curve was real, even if the aerial zigzags imagined by earlier viewers were not.

 suggests that curveballs have lost their former prominence in baseball. Play in the last few decades has been dominated instead by “sliders” and “splitters,” pitches of an intermediate speed with less of an extreme break than traditional curves. As Michael Baumann 

“Gen-Z is Killing the Curveball”: A disproportionate percentage of the declining number of curves thrown over the last five years have come from older pitchers. The curveball could join the Southern accent and alcohol industry as victims of Gen-Z’s cultural proclivities. But over a decade ago, sportswriter Malcolm Kelly had already 

 that curveballs were “slowly disappearing from the weapons rack of Major League Baseball.” Eulogies for the curve may be premature, but the pitch that once defined professionalism and art in baseball has certainly lost its centrality.

“Is there such a thing as a curveball?” was a persistent question for over a century. Some may still wonder. But the uniformity of its formulation masked ways that the “curve” itself was also changing, just like the technologies available to test it. The underhand curve of Candy Cummings and his ilk was gradually replaced by faster sidearm and overhand curves. Then, over time, these were overtaken by the 12–6 curve, made famous by Sandy Koufax, which moves in a largely straight trajectory but appears to break dramatically from the top of the clock to the bottom just as it reaches a batter. In Game 4 of the American League Championship Series this year, 40-year-old Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer “

” to strike Randy Arozarena out with exactly such a curve for a crucial out.

The 12–6 curve actually “curves” very little, in the traditional sense, exhibiting less lateral movement than some “sliders.” Blanton’s curve for 

was a 12–6, which helps to explain why it had minimal lateral motion. “The curve” thus did not exist, in one sense, because it referred to a number of different approaches. That disambiguation might also explain why the metaphorical usage of “throwing a curveball,” in the sense of a disorienting social maneuver, only became part of popular vernacular in the latter half of the twentieth century. The curveball lost its art and became something anyone could do.

Scientists continued to study the physics of rotating baseballs, a sporting and intellectual problem that never fully lost its intrigue. In the late 1950s, Lyman Briggs, a lifelong baseball fan who had led the United States National Bureau of Standards during World War II, published one of the clearest wind tunnel analyses in the 

, confirming the findings of earlier curve supporters. Briggs had first studied the physics of baseballs during the war, when rubber shortages pushed the American and National Baseball Leagues to use balls with a cork interior. His follow-up study, like the analyses that preceded it, reveal how dramatic mid-century advances in aerospace engineering helped settle the scientific side of the curve debate. The same tools that allowed for the perfection of fighter jets helped to simulate the miraculous movements of curving balls.

What did it mean that the curveball existed? In 1911, Albert Spalding, of sporting goods fame, had argued that the early curve debates were “only interesting from historical and scientific standpoints, since every careful observer in the grandstand… is able to clearly note the very wide deflection given the ball by modern pitchers of every league.” It seemed that the overwhelming evidence of direct experience would always trump the claims of skeptics and sophists. But this ignores the centrality of trust

in the creation and acceptance of scientific facts: A researcher must 

the evidence of another’s experiment and experience is valid and reliable, as Steven Shapin and a host of historians have shown.

When the curve debate reemerged in the 1940s, it also revealed that the controversy was always more than a simple question of fact. The existence of the curve was about what it meant to be American—whether one would be taken in by tricksters and frauds, fall prey to collective hysteria, or worse. Seeing was not always believing, it turned out, so theory and experiment were necessary to convince generations of skeptics that a pitcher really could produce magical movements in his throws, even if what they tossed was an illustrious amalgam of physics and optical illusion. Sports offered an improbable yet invigorating occasion for scientific experimentation and theoretical analysis: athletes as physics demonstrators, aerospace engineers as supporters, entertainment merged with public education. In another moment of political turmoil, it seems only right to have our facts straight about the curve. ♦

Brad Bolman is an Assistant Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Tulane University. His first book, 

Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles

, is out now from The University of Chicago Press.

tec-wonder

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve

Zadie Smith: Flowering Under Stress

The Cooler Jesus

Where were you when New York City’s climate was reclassified from humid continental to humid subtropical? I was in a borrowed apartment on 101st Street, overlooking the west side of Central Park. The apartment belonged to a widower, a man who kept a gun in a filing cabinet that he warned us not to open. His hallways were lined to the ceiling with boxes overflowing with photos and paper scraps, a memorial of sorts to his deceased wife, and to the grief he would not let go of. There was no table in this apartment, so we stacked some of these boxes by the window overlooking the park, a view worth more money than I’d ever care to have. Living in that apartment felt like one of those rare summer days in this century—not too hot, almost indecently pleasant, but already unraveling at the edges. The type of day where sublimity is found in a makeshift table of a single plank of wood laid upon a lifetime’s worth of loss.

I was sitting at that makeshift table when I saw the July 2020 

’ headline, tucked into the Climate section, a headline worthy of the opening lines to a romance novel: “Sultry Nights and Magnolia Trees: New York City Is Now Subtropical.” As I sent the article to friends, I realized its insinuations of pleasant, exotic things like palm trees and mild winters did not aid my insistence to anyone who would listen that this mattered. That August was ranked the third hottest on record globally—a title that was superseded just last month. Despite the heat, or perhaps amplified by it, demonstrations for racial justice were shaking the streets of nearly every major city across the U.S. A close friend of mine, who was encamped outside New York’s City Hall, called me after sleepless nights of being terrorized by the police, insisting that the revolution was nigh. I believed her. The city's energy that summer felt unstoppable, ready to build a new world from the detritus we’d leave behind. And amidst the cacophony of protests, joyous and furious alike, a different barrier was crossed. Though that threshold break barely registered as news, our city on the North Atlantic is now, climatologically speaking, a part of the tropics.

The Earth’s climate resists Cartesian logic, yet humans persist in their classifications. The Köppen system, the most renowned climate classification system, was created by Wladimir Köppen in 1884, a botanist so hubristic that he believed all life forms could be named and classified. He used the same logic to fit all the earth’s continents and regions into five discrete climate zones.

The ongoing usage of Köppen’s zones, and their ever-shifting boundaries, offer a dire signal that geological changes are occurring on human timescales. But there are other, bitter ironies attached to the continued use of a system that dates from an era when European empires were carving up the planet. There were other consequences to devising systems of classification, like Köppen’s, to render colonized landscapes and peoples, many of them in the tropics, legible to northern ears and tongues. In Köppen’s system, there are five major climate types: A (tropical), B (arid), C (temperate), D (continental), and E (polar). All of them use temperature as their primary criterion, except for B. While the system has evolved since its early twentieth-century origins, it still bears the logic of its age, reducing the world’s complexity to five letters and swathing the Earth in colored bands on commonly reproduced maps. On the day the climate zone shifted, it was clear that we had to find new colors for subtropical New York City on these maps.

While the system has evolved since its early twentieth-century origins, it still bears the logic of its age, reducing the world’s complexity to five letters and swathing the Earth in colored bands on commonly reproduced maps. 

, meaning “a turn” and once referred to the point at which the sun reaches its apogee at the solstice. To call a place tropical is to place it at the imagined center of the Earth, where heat resides, within the celestial realm where the sun hangs high. The tropics are now expanding at a rate of 30 miles per decade—a prophecy that recalls past epochs in Earth’s history. 50 million years ago, palm trees, those eternal symbols of tropical delight, grew in the Arctic. If the Köppen categories were in competition with each other to consume more of the Earth, it is Type A, tropical, that stands poised to devour the rest.

When the whole world is tropical, what words will we use to describe and define ourselves?

We bemoan the fact that every summer is now one of the hottest summers ever. But the notion of “records” as benchmarks to be broken no longer holds weight. What is the point of a record when the certainty of its being broken is undeniable and in close sight? Will future records revolve around how cool a summer is? Where will the line be drawn between the era of accounting for the hottest summers and that of accounting for the coolest ones? After decades of denialism around the perils of fossil fuel use, which saw companies like ExxonMobil spend millions on marketing campaigns to frame those perils as 

,” not even certain to occur, it’s not hard to understand why many are tempted to see the planet’s crisis as a mere shift. A crisis, by definition, should abide by binary logic—either there is one or there is not. It’s harder to see a crisis as a creep or ever-worsening condition. This binary between crisis and non-crisis demonstrates one of the many ways in which our classification systems fail in the face of climate breakdown. We cover our eyes from both consequence and source. As Amitav Ghosh has reminded us, the climate crisis isn’t singular or new; it’s inseparable from the history of colonialism, whose primary actors, in the ruthless pursuit for riches, relied on classification systems to render the world and its beings knowable and expendable. Our systems of classification, as we know them, are often not far removed from our systems of exploitation.

What anchors a memory of heat? I remember that on June 24, this past summer, temperatures breached 100 degrees. Descending to the train platform uptown felt like entering into the innards of a large, inhospitable animal, its density a flesh that my body had to press through. It was hot, and the station’s fever seeped into my skin, slicking me with a layer of sweat that ran. I remember how the sweat slid into my contact lenses and burned my eyes, blurring my vision while I waited for that train. At lunch, I felt an eerie sense of anguish wandering in desolate public spaces. Madison Square Park, usually packed at midday, was at half-capacity. And among those who were there, I glimpsed a shared sense of uneasiness. What were any of us doing, after all, outside in these conditions? Heat stretches the limits of imagination because imagination is so often visual, and the visuals of heat are often images of absence: people not outside, events not attended, deaths not recorded. We often depict heat by showing the means by which people evade it. Look at the children splashing in the spray of fire hydrants; look at the families dipping into pools; look at the young women sunbathing. The dangers of visualizing extreme heat in these ways have been the focus of advocacy campaigns like one by 

, which begins with the assertion: “Heat is Not Fun.”

It’s anachronistic and harmful for us to ascribe carefree images and language to heat, as the 

invoking “sultry nights.” But what’s even more harmful is how all of us are beginning to respond to extreme heat emotionally and relationally—not through the shock or horror with which we’d respond to a hurricane, but with the silent, subconscious rewriting of social norms. This creeping, unclassified disaster reshapes us in ways we barely perceive. In asking people to adjust their behavior, we excuse the conditions for their discomfort.

I knew many people this summer who got heat exhaustion and heat stroke—all in the Northeast. One of them, a friend of my mom’s, is a neighbor I grew up with and a marathon runner who’s always been in rude health. On one of this year’s hot days, though not the hottest, she went for a run around the loop in Central Park. That evening, she came down with an illness that could not be diagnosed by her husband, a doctor, who suggested it was because she had spent three hours that day rigorously moving her body in 92-degree heat. My mom ended the story with a judgment—“So stupid, right?”

My impulse was to agree—of course, it’s insane to believe that the way you've lived your life for its entirety up until the past few years is the way you can live your life today. I spend every day steeped in climate-related content, with “heat” being my primary keyword search. But I realized that the day my mom’s friend took ill hadn’t even registered for me as a particularly bad day. In fact, on that same day, I had gone on a seven-mile walk.

My own notion of danger was in part shaped by a threshold for extreme heat I first learned about in college, when I spent a summer working on a climate adaptation plan for the city of Penang. The number I had seared into my mind then was 95°F wet-bulb, or 35°C wet-bulb—the maximum temperature at which the human body, through perspiration, can cool itself. In New York City, where the average August humidity is 70%, this would mean a temperature of 104°F—a threshold that is breached on occasion in the Northeast, though far more commonly in some of the hottest regions of the world. This upper boundary was recently thrown into question by research suggesting that 

 better represents the maximum safe temperature for humans. In a New York City August, this threshold would be reached when the temperature hits 96°F—which it did, multiple times this past summer. But although this number wasn’t hit on the ill-fated day when my mom’s friend went on a run, the issue is that heat and the human body do not abide by binaries. What is safe for a 65-year-old marathon runner on a hot day is not the same as what is safe for a 25-year-old on a long walk, or an elderly person with lung disease, or an energetic child. All of us possess unique combinations of exposure risks, access to adaptive measures, and physiology. This variability begs for classification systems that are as sophisticated as they are simple.

When systems for classifying the external world fail, it is this constant recalibration of social norms that serves as a hastily constructed bulwark against external threats. We create new systems that are directed at our fellow human beings.

What is the point of a record when the certainty of its being broken is undeniable and in close sight?

A close friend of mine got heat stroke in Boston this summer while moving her furniture from one apartment to another on a 90-degree day in August. She is from Karachi, where temperatures of 118°F have been recorded. And still, despite her familiarity as a climate and health professional who has first-hand experience with the dangers of heat exposure, she fell ill and was sick for three days. “Since when do people from Pakistan get heat stroke in Boston?” she asked me, incredulous. Not only do our recalibrations get redirected at others—we turn them on ourselves.

The result is often punitive. A firm line is drawn between those who are affected by heat and those who are not, between those with “common sense” and those without, which weaponizes the evolving notion that while impacts of heat exposure may be horrid, they are still avoidable, and therefore it is your fault if you fall ill. It is an ethos of individualism that pervades American culture and our historic and ongoing treatment of those who are sick, differently-abled, or otherwise fail to survive in a landscape that is less livable for some than others.

Last summer, my grandmother died on one of the hottest days of that year. I was sitting in a stifling subway station in Downtown Brooklyn when I got the news. For some reason, her care attendant had not turned on the air conditioner that day. I still find it hard to shake that fact.

The next morning, I woke up at 5 am and marched to a bank that funds fossil fuels. With other activists in tow, we blocked people from entering the corporate headquarters for two hours. I remember standing at an entrance with my arms locked in step with another activist, preventing employees from passing as a woman who had tried to shove me to the ground five minutes earlier screamed “IDIOTS” again and again. She’d found her classification.

In that moment, she drew a boundary. Her anger, her fear, her inconvenience were real—and mine, her screams told me, were not. My body did not belong there, neither did the cresting anxiety I felt in the heat of the morning, nor the grief I carried from the day before. And so, too, was my body a boundary, one that sought not to define but reframe what constitutes violence in the age of climate breakdown. When the whole world is tropical, the only boundary left to cross will be whether we remember one another, or whether we let the heat unmake us alone. ♦

Zoe Voss Lee is a New Yorker living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She works at the intersection of climate justice, data, and urbanism. 

ser-kosugi-maru

Becoming Subtropical

Change the frequency. Subscribe to Broadcast.

I have it on the highest authority that summer will never end. It might get cooler, intermittently, but it will never stop being summer. Which is of course wonderful, because summer is a bubble during which life's ordinary rules are suspended. Summer is when we don't have to get up in the morning, or even the afternoon. Summer is when nobody ever has to make eye contact. Summer is when nothing ever happened before this moment right now. Summer is when we trash the joint because whatever. Summer is when we fire guns into the air and the bullet never comes down.

All the very best countries celebrate their national holidays in summer. Summer is the season best adapted to modern commerce. When you think "Hollywood" you think "summer." Arson perpetuates summer; it makes it an action and not just a moment. In summer we think of rain as a calamity, and so does the weatherman. Summer craves fresh bodies. Summer has no consequences. Summer has children in every orphanage. Summer just walks into your house and goes straight to the refrigerator without saying hello. Summer has not spoken to the other seasons in decades. Summer cannot get served because it abjures shirts and shoes. There are open warrants out on summer.

But summer, however phlegmatic, dominates. There is no arguing or reasoning with summer. If you try to, summer just belches and everybody laughs. Summer doesn't need money because it has yours. Summer lies over the land like syrup on an ant hill. Summer wears your body like a shroud. Summer suddenly lashes out when everything is quiet. It pretends to retreat and then lashes out again. Summer knows your weaknesses, your blind spots, your unacknowledged biases, your unspoken shame. Summer pretends to love you but then burns you and runs. Your mind goes tilt whenever you try to think about summer. You try to tell people the truth about summer but no one believes you.

Summer wasn't always like this. It had a decent upbringing and a reasonable education. It lived in harmony with the other seasons, sometimes trading off bits of one another's weather. Just where it went wrong is uncertain, except that it happened in our lifetime. It was all those cars, all those drugs, all that red meat, all that money it sucked up and vaporized. Summer only remembers luxury and rage. Summer will not stop until it gets every inch of its way, and since that is impossible it will never stop. Summer will destroy everything we know and when called to account for itself summer will just belch. Summer is mindless. Summer is nothing but fun. Everybody loves summer. ♦

Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist whose most recent book is 

. The following piece first appeared, in different form, in 

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

I’ve never been the kind of person who orients herself towards pleasure. While raised Protestant, I have a Catholic sense of guilt and an innate inability to “just relax.” Recently, while driving back to New York City from Dia Beacon with my friend Frankie, I told her I wished I was more reckless. I couldn’t describe what it would mean to move towards this goal. Was it tactile? Sensual? Erotic? Chemical? A few weeks later in LA, the poet Rosie Stockton told me they were writing poems to discover the difference between love and desire. It seems an amorphous difference. The two share so many similar qualities. I told my boyfriend I felt like my life wasn’t moved by desire. “It is,” they said. “Just a different kind.”

Over the past few months the work of Pippa Garner has circled me like a huntress playing with her prey. From upstate New York to the Lower East Side to Joshua Tree to Los Angeles, I’ve trekked two coasts in search of Garner’s utopian pleasures. Her zany inventions—wearable stereo system-outfitted Blaster Bras, functional backwards-driving cars, classified ads, even her body—all exude a deep reverence for the joy of play, and range from the useless to the erotic; they always spin forward towards a new world, one ruled by femme-of-center androgyny. For Garner, the body is the ultimate playground, and bodyhacking is an experiment worth wagering fertility, class, marriage, and security on. “Gender tampering gets the conscious and the subconscious into a wrestling match,” she wrote.

Born in 1942 outside Chicago, the artist was the product of post-World War II suburban America. Her father was an ad-man breadwinner and her mother a “frustrated housewife.” After enrolling at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena—intent on becoming an automotive designer—Garner became obsessed with cars and industrial design. She gained notoriety for 

 (1974)—a stunt in which she drove a ’59 Chevy across the Golden Gate Bridge, its passenger compartment facing the wrong way—before touring the late-night TV circuit to talk about her speculative inventions. Eventually she began to transition, her body becoming her most intimate creation. This may account for the art world’s failure, until recently, to reckon with her legacy, though the ephemeral nature of her work is also difficult to monetize in the traditional art world. She’s only now getting her due with multiple shows across the country. “Act Like You Know Me,” which just closed at White Columns in New York City, topped off a slew of exhibitions featuring her work over the past year, including “$ELL YOUR $ELF” at Art Omi in upstate New York, “I’m With Me” at OCDChinatown in Manhattan, and “Made in L.A.” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Most of these exhibitions used Garner’s sketches of unrealized inventions as their primary motif, and walking by them was like walking past a comedy show; people tried to stifle their laughs until they realized Garner’s work is intentionally humorous. Her machinations toy with optimism like a mad scientist intent on one last magical discovery.

A comprehensive monograph on Garner’s work, 

, recently published by Pioneer Works Press and Art Omi, is one of two such recent books on the artist. The other, White Column’s 

, includes contributions from Fiona Allison Duncan, Dodie Bellamy, and Shola Von Renhold. 

 was timed to coincide with her New York solo shows, and includes essays by McKenzie Wark and Jackie Ess. The girls clearly have a lot to say.

Her zany inventions all exude a deep reverence for the joy of play, and range from the useless to the erotic.

The way Garner treats cars is less straightforwardly erotic and more humorous than the abstract crash sculptures of James Chamberlain or the erotic collisions in David Cronenberg’s films; Garner enjoys teasing the macho world of car enthusiasts. Vehicles have been recycled into couches (

 (2023), a backwards pickup truck with oversized plastic testicles hanging lewdly from the back bumper.

From 1995 to 2010, Garner placed drawings of her inventions—many involving automobiles—in the magazine 

 as “Ms. Goodwench.” But instead of providing greater efficiency or optimization, Garner’s products only mocked productivity. There was a door knocker designed to look like a penis, cookie-cutter templates for pubic hair, and the ability to text with one’s tongue. Other ideas included converting a family’s second-floor guest room into a garage by installing an access ramp, or hiding fire hydrants with fake trees to allow for more plentiful parking spots.

These car-focused home goods expanded upon an earlier series of inventions from the 1980s, which were featured in Garner’s book 

 (1982). No one seemed to understand her conceptual projects. They were considered dead ends. (Much like some consider transitioning to be.) A palm-tree umbrella’s leafy striations, demonstrated on TV by Garner, would hardly protect its user from rain. Her commodities flirted with capitalist absurdity, the commercial oblivion of “As Seen on TV” gizmos. To promote the catalog, she wore 

(1981), a midriff-baring tweed suit, for talk-show appearances (pre-transition). Pointless, simply pointless—yet so stylish too, an unwieldy and wild solution to a problem no one ever complained about. The consumer and the consumed critiqued and seduced.

In some ways, Garner’s gender transition echoes an attitude more common among trans people now than during the time of her first hormone injection. Setting aside questions of transness as a fundamental political identity, the question for her was, why 

transition? Why not be open to change, to pleasure? Why not get big tits just for fun? Whether or not you conceptualize this axis as a political project shifts how much you enjoy Garner’s work. Is individual joy revolutionary? Many of us are still trying to find out.

Garner’s work is rarely written about under an explicitly trans rubric. Often she is placed alongside contemporaries like Ed Ruscha and other cis conceptual artists. But to avoid the gendered element of her work doesn’t do justice to pieces like the 

(2017), a small wooden box concealing a wheelchair. Her work breaks down binaries of public and private, voyeur and performer, boy and girl, useful and useless.

In more recent years, Garner has made an endless amount of shirts as her ability to fabricate large-scale work has declined with age. 

(2005 to present) flaunts social convention. A daily practice, she flips and remixes common phrases to produce T-shirts that say “Guess my HIDDEN AGENDER,” “MAXED OUT ON MINIMALISM,” “AUNTIE CLIMAX,” “I need an inner child abortion,” and, one of my favorites, “Burn GALLERIES not calories.” Art Omi, OCDChinatown, and the Hammer Museum all prominently featured her shirts and sold replications. Like the popularity of Keith Haring’s work, this mass reproduction calls into question ideas of highbrow art, accessibility, and commerce. Ownership becomes oblique. Another favorite shirt: “I’m 70… but my tits are only 25!”

This sense of play wasn’t always welcome. Garner was kicked out of the ArtCenter for making 

(1969), a small white sculptural car with hind legs raised as if to piss, and testicles hanging low where backwheels should be. The DMV in California wouldn’t let Garner change her license plate to SX CHNGE, though they did let her use HE2SHE—another example of how she continually winds her way around institutions that freeze her out, from museums to local government.

The capitalist underpinnings never escape Garner’s critique even if she doesn’t fully abandon them either. 

At Art Omi upstate, Kay Gabriel (the inescapable trans “it” girl) read the classified ads that Garner had placed in local newspapers not long after getting a vaginoplasty. In the write-ups, Garner sought a “fembryonic fun fest” for her “fully-programmable pussycat.” Her self-descriptors were a whirlwind of laconic self-confidence: “R-U man enough for freshly-minted Amazon blonde Gym-bunny with brains?” The transexual is a human built for optimum consumption, or at least, the kind of transexual Garner was referring to. The “doll” was surged up and ready for action. There was an almost combative sense to the ads: “You’re suffering from chronic PMS (Post male syndrome).” Her questions—“Are you fit, attractive, futuristic?”—postulated a utopia not of gender equality, but of estrogen over testosterone. (One curator told me he asked Garner about trans men only for Garner to look at him as if that was besides the point entirely.)

Taking Garner’s meandering writing too seriously may be a false start. “Balance can be stalemate as well,” Garner writes in 

, ever the provocateur. Androgyne is only helpful as a starting point. “Gendercide” is Garner’s goal: “To ‘be’ one of my own ideas.” One short story Garner wrote follows a man who suddenly grows breasts overnight only to try and cover them up during business meetings. Eventually he stops hiding and sells the concept to the board. Plastic surgeons eat it up—it’s a whole new market: tits for “cis” men. The capitalist underpinnings never escape Garner’s critique even if she doesn’t fully abandon them either.

Later in the museum’s cafeteria, I heard a man sitting behind me refer to Pippa by the masculine pronoun. “There’s Pippa! He used to be a man. Or they. Or…” His wife, or female companion of some kind, didn’t correct him. She seemed even less interested in the process than he was. The entire time I was at Art Omi I was acutely aware of my body. I was a trans woman going on a trip to see a trans woman’s body of work in the middle of nowhere. Plenty of the work on display was explicitly tied to Garner’s body modifications—a highly decorated walker, writings about her surgeries, and videos of her life pre- and post-transition. It was nearly impossible not to be thinking about such mods. Without divulging too much, it is Garner’s playful attitude toward transition that has given me the space to step away from taking passing so personally. For too long I would cry on the subway tracks when someone clocked me, or worry obsessively about leg hair, tucking, or whatever random bodily dysphoria consumed me at the time. Garner offers a gentle reminder that it’s supposed to be fun.

After my trip to Art Omi and a visit to the bustling OCDChinatown gallery, I made a voyage to Garner’s home state of California. Not for business, at least not officially, but simply to see the sights. I hadn’t been to the West Coast in over three years. Besides, I wanted a solo trip and I needed a break. My world since the pandemic has been claustrophobic and closed to possibility, only occasionally punctured by hints of recklessness. I wanted to try and remember the contours of my body—and perhaps orient towards pleasure once again. I needed a place where I could crash with friends who knew me and go on long walks outdoors without freezing my ass off. I split my trip into multiple stops. First San Diego, then Joshua Tree, and on to LA.

While Garner is finally being recognized by institutions, her punk and DIY ethos still shines. You can tell she’s someone who cut her teeth in the trans club scene and made do in the Southwest. The same is true, though in vastly different contexts, of two artists I encountered while in California, Niki de Saint Phalle and Noah Purifoy. Their works evoke a dystopian-utopian edge similar to Garner’s, piercing the mundane with ethereal interventions into public space. Saint Phalle is the queen of joy. Her colorful work, abounding with vibrant patterns, sickening colors, and rotund shapes, are all over San Diego, where she lived out her last years after a life spent around the world. Purifoy’s permanent desert exhibitions can be seen from miles away. I hadn’t expected to encounter either of them; when you’re traveling, so much is outside of your control. You must relinquish yourself to your own curiosity.

In San Diego, my friend Russell and I went on a hunt to see all the Saint Phalle we could. (Why? For fun.) As Russell’s kid played around her statues of baseball players and gators, we gazed at the endless pieces of tile and mirror affixed to them. Snakes wind around the black-and-white checkered walls and strange pillars rise up above the marbled ground. Her sculpture garden in Escondido was our last find—it is only open three hours twice a week, and only if it hasn’t rained the day before. The result was magnificent, a strange 

After San Diego we went to Joshua Tree, a completely alien landscape to a Hoosier like me. The desert was not as flat as I’d imagined, nor as arid. Cacti and the eponymous trees rose amid pieces of steel and charred buildings. We arrived late at night after trying a variety of Chamoy candies from the 7-Eleven. In the dark it was hard to make out much. We slept in a tiny hundred-square-foot cabin. When I woke up, I walked around in heels and a skin-tight flesh-colored dress. I poked around a burned building and saw a shredded mattress before I walked back to Russell, who was fixing a broken pane of glass. We got coffee and eggs in town. We wandered the Art Queen (modeled like a Dairy Queen, but with embroidered shirts), the World Famous Crochet Museum (a store of undyed garments for obscene prices), and all the health food stores I could ever want.

We then drove to the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art. There should be more critical writing on Purifoy. Born in Alabama, he started making art during the 1965 Watts Rebellion. He was a Black sculptor with a fondness (not unlike Garner) for Duchamp. He lived primarily in California, working on a fifteen-acre desert property in Joshua Tree for the last fifteen years of his life. The resulting sculpture garden is haunting and dizzying in scope. Multiple auditoriums are set up, strange in their eerie emptiness under the blank blue sky. Makeshift sectioned-off graveyards and toilet sculptures adorn the desert floor. A drinking fountain for whites only is next to a toilet. Shelters are filled with computer parts, busts, and beds. We walked around in silence before driving back through the desert to the City of Angels.

LA was not for me, it felt normcore with an athleisure twist. Everyone spent a lot of time trying to convince me that I should move out West but few people could summon up convincing reasons.

“I still can’t figure it out,” a friend, Rosie, said.

But the highlight was seeing Pippa’s work at the Hammer. It was the punk trick I needed. Her shirts winked back at me mischievously. I thought about seeing if she would be down for a visit while I was in town but that felt intrusive, opting instead to look at her sketches of Lindsay Lohan on the museum wall. Everyone was obsessed with her T-shirts. They commodify an anti-capitalist aesthetic, allowing a kind of anarchic posturing. Her exuberance and magnetic presence stood out alongside many other incredible artists, like Miller Robinson, Ishi Glinsky, Kang Seung Lee, and Akinsanya Kambon. Somehow it reflected something about the smoke and mirrors of LA, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Many artists reflected on the land, gentrification, gender, or industrialization. Pippa seemed to nod at all of these machinations. Driving over bridges, refusing optimization, deconstructing the body. Everyone in LA is a hobbyist and a careerist, playing two contradictory roles on a technicolor set fading into dusk.

 The making and remaking of the body continues long after transition. 

Tattoos are one way of reclaiming the body. After a trauma, they can serve as reminders of autonomy. After a car crashed into Garner’s bike, her leg felt stiff, “almost wooden—no longer her own.” The tattoo artist Dawn Purnell helped devise a wood grain design for Garner. Tattooed underwear soon followed, a light purple bra and a thong with money hanging out. She also got a tramp stamp that looked like a Post-it with the phrase “I is a Ass.”

A beautiful self-portrait of Garner in the hospital, taken shortly after the crash, features her taut abs, supple breasts, a nose ring, painted nails, flowing hair, arms crossed with metal supports, and a hospital admission bracelet clearly visible. She stares back at the camera defiantly, oozing a serious eroticism in the hospital bed. The making and remaking of the body continues long after transition.

OCDChinatown offered tattoos of Pippa’s work during Garner’s exhibition. A small group of trans artists and willing participants were paired together. I was paired with Zyra West. The catch was that we had to be willing to be tattooed publicly. My slot was during the opening. Voyeurs welcome, the invitation said. I invited my boyfriend and my friend Agnes to come watch. I wore a shiny light blue slip that my new breasts filled out nicely. I stared at the ceiling as Zyra started on my arm. It was my first tattoo with a gun; all my others have been stick and pokes. I received a detailed finger with a lit cigarette piercing through the nail. Now Pippa is with me wherever I go.

There’s a decadence to Garner’s work. A luxury in the ability to subvert class and hegemonic gender. It’s no walk in the park, but it’s something. My boyfriend has continually nudged me to try and let pleasure into my life. From simple logistical things like rugs and lamps to the joys of Diet Coke or eating dessert. (Trans women are unfortunately known for fighting eating disorders. I am no exception.) But I’ve also been thinking these past few months about how to be more open to life writ large. Garner, if anything, continually throws herself into the impish work of tinkering, inventing, and creating. How can I be more open? I thought going on a little slog through the desert would help, and in some ways it did. But by the time I got home there was also joy in laying down, making gochujang soup, having a quiet night in, and reading about people whose lives are far more interesting than mine. Maybe that is enough, because there is a pleasure in that too. ♦

Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in 

 among other outlets. Find her @emotrophywife.

mus-robur

What's Your Pleasure?

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.”

October

Notice that daylight is now less than 12 hours—we've passed the equinox.

On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union startled the world by announcing that it had launched 

, the first artificial Earth satellite. It was just a little metal sphere, but it carried a radio transmitter which allowed the world to verify its existence and track its orbit. Alongside the U.S. lunar landing in 1969, this moment is remembered as humanity's first venture into space.

 was quickly followed by the much larger 

, which carried a dog, Laika, who actually managed to survive for a few orbits. Laika became an international folk hero; her story (or stories—there are many versions) is well told in the National Air and Space Museum and in 

magazine. She belongs with Balto and Hachiko in the pantheon of dog heroes.

Tonight’s evening sky features the third quarter Moon passing just north of Saturn.

On this day in 1882, Robert Goddard was born. At the age of 17, on a day which he always called his “Anniversary Day,” he climbed a cherry tree and dreamed of building a machine that would travel to Mars. As we all know, the successors to his rockets 

 travel to Mars—in particular, the Mariner spacecraft of the 1970s. But Goddard had to battle enormous skepticism about his plans. His first test rocket rose 114 feet and landed in a nearby cornfield; a newspaper greeted his success with the headline: “Moon Rocket Misses Target by 239,785 miles.”

 ran a famous article criticizing him for ignoring “the facts ladled out in every high school”—namely, the incorrect claim that you need something to push against for propulsion in the vacuum of space. In the aftermath of the July 1969 Apollo landing, the 

republished their critique, followed by the simple correction: “The 

 regrets the error.” (Notably without explaining 

 their earlier analysis of the physics was incorrect.)

However, Goddard had some powerful and early allies, who knew more physics than 

: Charles Lindbergh, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Guggenheim family. And late in World War II, after the Germans demonstrated the enormous potential of rockets (the 

), there was a mad scramble by Russian and U.S. troops to kidnap German scientists for their own military programs. The U.S. got the most and sent them to New Mexico to work with Goddard.

 as it's the full Moon nearest the autumn equinox. Because the Moon is opposite the Sun, it rises when the Sun sets and the bright moonlight allows you to extend your harvesting time by a few hours.

The Harvest Moon is my first remembered experience in astronomy. One day around evening twilight, I saw a big old orange ball hanging low in the East. I asked my mother what it was, and she replied, “It’s the Harvest Moon.” Somehow, this answer seemed satisfactory at the time. Maybe I thought the orange color meant it was ready for harvesting.

These were the days that never existed for most of Europe in 1582. The inaccuracies of the Julian calendar had caused an error of nine days to accumulate between the calendar and the dates of seasonal phenomena (solstices, equinoxes). This was worrisome to the Catholic Church because it meant that the timing of Easter was slipping away from its historic connection to Passover and springtime. Thus the Gregorian calendar was born, improving the leap year convention and restoring calendar agreement by legislating nine days out of existence. It caused a lot of social unrest too—landlords charging rent for the missing days, etc.

The Gregorian calendar isn’t perfect either. Its error accumulates to about one day per millennium—good enough for practically everyone, except some enterprising souls determined, in odd ways, to make the world a better place. Recent proposals have impressive names like Equitable Calendar, International Fixed Calendar, Edwards Perpetual Calendar, etc. Another possibility is that we’ll go to a completely metric system of time, with millidays, centidays, etc. This was attributed in the 1976 

to “an anonymous joker in Norfolk,” though one kiloday it may not be a joke.

Birthday of Niels Bohr in 1885. Bohr became famous for the “Bohr model” of the atom, which depicted each atom as a “miniature solar system,” with a massive central nucleus of positive charge (consisting of protons), surrounded by negatively charged electrons in very distant orbits. Although it was mostly superseded by the invention of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, the Bohr model remains the way that practically all astronomers think about atoms. For most of the century, Bohr's institute in Copenhagen became a mandatory stop for nearly all European physicists.

On this evening in 1992, a 28-pound meteorite crashed into a parked car in Peekskill, New York—the only known such event in history. The last few seconds of the meteor’s path were well photographed because a high school football game was going on next door. The car was a 1980 Chevy Malibu, recently purchased for $300 by a 17-year-old girl. It later sold at auction for $50,000.

Join the AAA (Amateur Astronomers Association) for a night of observing (99th Street and Central Park East). Weather (clear sky) permitting. See 

 (not the car organization) for details concerning this and all AAA events.

Solar observing at Pioneer Works from 1–4 pm. 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn—weather permitting.

The last quarter Moon rises around midnight. It’s practically on top of the Gemini twins (Castor and Pollux) tonight.

On this date in 2019, observers in Hawaii reported the discovery of what might be the strangest astronomical object in history. It was possibly cigar-shaped, moving through the solar system faster than anything else ever found and seemingly violating Newton's Laws. In a famous or maybe infamous paper, a Harvard astronomy professor suggested it might be an alien spacecraft. It received the name "ʻOumuamua"—Hawaiian for "scout from afar." More recently, two similar objects were found, and they're now called "interstellar comets." But you've gotta love the swashbuckling name of the first!

Early this morning (on the 22nd), the Earth “collides” with the orbit of Halley's Comet. The comet itself is long gone (totally invisible, somewhere in the rough vicinity of Neptune), but its dust debris, shed by solar heating during thousands of previous visits to the inner solar system, continues to orbit the Sun. There's a continuous trail of dust along all the places the comet has recently been. Twice a year, in October and May, the Earth’s orbit carries us through that trail, and a meteor shower occurs as the dust particles burn up in our atmosphere. Away from city lights tonight, a naked-eye observer might see around 20 meteors per hour.

They're called “Orionid” meteors because they'll appear in the rough (VERY rough) vicinity of Orion. More correctly, they'll appear to 

 from Orion—but appear all over the sky. Despite a mediocre ranking among the annual showers, the Orionids are my favorite for observing. Why? Because Orion, grandest of the constellations, hasn't been properly seen since March, and the October mornings still permit viewing without frozen fingers. It's also a chance to welcome back all those winter constellations. This year, there’s no moonlight to hamper the view.

In tonight’s evening sky, if you have a clear western horizon, look for a bright starlike object just west of the (very thin) crescent Moon. It’s Mercury! Very few people have ever seen it, because it’s always so close to the Sun. Even Copernicus never did.

First quarter Moon, setting around 1 am. Any night within a few days is a good time for telescopic lunar viewing because the angle of the Sun (near 90 degrees) will cast long shadows on the lunar surface.

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve

Zadie Smith: Flowering Under Stress

The Cooler Jesus

Becoming Subtropical

Becoming Subtropical

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

What's Your Pleasure?

What's Your Pleasure?

Big Apple Sky Calendar: October, November, December 2025

Picture This: Hot Bodies

Tentacle Memory

Tentacle Memory

Guardians of Gowanus

Guardians of Gowanus

Climate Hacks