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.

Why do we die, and what happens to our biologies when we do? PW’s Founding Director of Sciences Janna Levin hosted Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan to find out. He’s the author of 

Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality

, and won the Nobel with his co-laureates for determining the atomic structure of the ribosome, a molecular machine that synthesizes proteins in all living cells. Together, Ramakrishnan and Levin discuss the biological mechanisms that initiate the process of dying and the ethical questions of immortality. ♦

Why do we die, and what happens to our biologies when we do? PW’s Founding Director of Sciences Janna Levin hosted Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan to find out. He’s the author of Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality, and won the Nobel with his co-laureates for determining the atomic structure of the ribosome, a molecular machine that synthesizes proteins in all living cells. 

Why We Die with Venki Ramakrishnan

Dogs’ reputation as super smellers is overrated, while ours is underrated. Olfaction, or the sense of smell, is thought to be reduced in humans compared to other animals—but in fact there is little to support this notion. In truth, the evidence points to humans possessing a rather refined sense of smell compared to other mammals. I am often asked, as an olfactory scientist, if the reputation dogs have as superior smellers is true. This question, and the conventional wisdom behind it, has always puzzled me. It seems to me that if dogs had such a miraculously good sense of smell then they could perform their customary method of greeting—sticking their noses quite directly into the private parts of some other unknown dog—from a greater distance, like at least a foot or two.

There is actually a perfectly good reason for this friendly if invasive practice. Dogs, and other animals, are simply willing to put their noses where the odors are. The single greatest challenge to our sense of smell is that we stand upright—an anatomical fact that places our noses some five feet or so in the air. Odor molecules have some weight and tend to accumulate near the ground. This is why, when dogs catch some interesting scent, they put their noses directly on the ground to follow where the smell is coming from. When we humans meet a stranger, we may shake hands. Social decorum (thankfully) prevents us from sniffing each other’s armpits, where there is much more olfactory information to be found. Even canine breeds that have been bred for a more refined sense of smell and to detect some scents at greater distances, like bloodhounds, need to put their nose to the ground and will sniff very close to an object or trail.

If dogs had such a miraculously good sense of smell then they could perform their customary method of greeting—sticking their noses directly into the private parts of some other unknown dog—from a greater distance.

There is one other interesting example that demonstrates our refined sense of smell, and that is flavor. Not taste, which refers only to sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory (or umami, as it was named in Japan). Flavor, on the other hand, is a blend of these tastes with smells, and is the result of an evolutionary adaptation specific to humans. An estimated 80–90% of flavor is determined by olfaction. When our jaws became shorter and our faces flatter, a change in the pharyngeal bones led to an opening between our oral cavity and our nasal organ. This conduit, known as the retronasal pathway, is how odor molecules released by chewing food find their way to the olfactory epithelium, the thin tissue at the very top of our nasal cavity where the cells that detect odors are located. When we eat, stimuli from food—odor molecules—and the nasal organ are in close proximity, facilitating the olfactory sense. Humans possess what is likely the most discriminating palette of any animal on the planet. Not to pick on our poor canine companions again, but as any dog owner knows, they will eat just about anything.

Our sense of smell, compared to our dogs’, is actually quite good. Scientists working in this area tend to place humans right about in the middle of the pack of terrestrial animals. Not as good as some, but not as bad as many.

But what exactly are we smelling? What are we detecting? Or more simply put, what is an odor? The answer is also not as simple as it seems.

Almost all odors are organic molecules, which means they are combinations, sometimes very complex combinations, of just three atoms: carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Occasionally among the fouler odors there may be a bit of nitrogen or sulphur, but that’s about it. You wouldn’t think just three to five atoms could be put together in so many varied ways, but theoretical models show that there are likely to be trillions of organic molecules. We ourselves are mostly made up of organic molecules, often quite large ones. DNA, RNA and proteins are all organic molecules with nothing but chains of these five atoms strung together, by the thousands, in incredibly complex ways. An entire branch of chemistry, organic chemistry, is devoted to molecules made up of these five atoms. Carbon is the linchpin of sorts because a single carbon atom is able to form bonds, stable connections, to as many as four other atoms, the most of any atom in the entire periodic table. An oxygen atom can form two bonds and a hydrogen atom just one. This is why organic chemistry is often called the chemistry of carbon—and why scientists looking for signs of extraterrestrial life elsewhere in our galaxy do so by searching for complex carbon chemistry.

Odor molecules are on the simpler side of organic chemistry, typically consisting of between three and 50 atoms of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Even with this number of atoms, it is possible to construct many millions of complicated molecules. And your nose can detect and discriminate between several thousands of these molecules. One could make the case, in fact, that your nose is the best chemical detector on the planet.

The nose’s receptors are proteins embedded in the surface membrane of the cells that live in your nasal epithelium (that aforementioned tissue that lines the upper nasal cavity). They are called olfactory neurons because they are actually brain cells that have evolved to detect odors and send signals back to the rest of the brain. Each protein receptor has a differently shaped pocket that is capable of capturing differently shaped odor molecules—a kind of lock-and-key arrangement where the receptors are the locks and the odor molecules are the keys. If the key (odor) fits into the lock (receptor) then it will activate the olfactory neuron and send a signal to the brain that such and such a molecule must be in the area. It’s not quite that simple, because most of the things we smell are actually mixtures of many different molecules, but that’s pretty close to the general idea.

I doubt you would ever mistake a banana for a pear. This means that you can smell the difference of one carbon atom! 

When molecules activate many different receptors at once, complications arise. For example, coffee is known to contain 780 odorous molecules. Some of them will activate the same receptor because they have similar shapes or properties, but it is still likely that sniffing coffee grounds will activate a fair number of the receptors in your nose.

One might wonder how different two molecules have to be in order for our olfactory system to register their smells as distinct. The answer lies in the diagram above, which details one way chemists show the structure of a molecule. Each of the little balls represents an atom—gray for carbon, red for oxygen and white for hydrogen. They are connected by bars that represent the bonds between them. In this case, the two molecules consist of a chain of carbon atoms with some hydrogens attached to them and what is known as a “functional group” at one end where the red oxygens are. The functional group shown here is called an ester. Among the sorts of organic molecules that make up odors there are about 25 different types of functional groups. Esters are among the most common of odor molecules.

If you count the number of carbon atoms in the two chains (from the red oxygens to the left) you will see that one of them has six carbons attached to the ester group and the other has seven. In other words, they are identical except for this difference in one carbon atom. Now here’s the kicker. The 6-carbon molecule (known as hexyl acetate) smells like bananas, while the 7-carbon molecule (known as heptyl acetate) smells like pears. While both are fruity smells, I doubt you would ever mistake a banana for a pear. This means that you can smell the difference of one carbon atom! And you aren’t even a trained perfumer.

Our noses can make a discrimination that only the most sophisticated chemistry equipment can make—a single carbon atom in a chain of only six or seven atoms. Your remarkable nose performs many feats like this dozens of times a day: at every meal, when you enter a room, when you take a walk in the park or down a narrow street on garbage day in the summer. It tells you what to avoid and what to seek out, bringing sensual pleasure to many simple activities. And all this without requiring you to think much about it at all. Next time you’re at the grocery store, go to the fruit section and close your eyes. Smell the bananas and the pears, and impress yourself with the amazing power of your olfactory sense. ♦

Stuart Firestein is a neuroscientist studying the vertebrate olfactory receptor neuron.

sci-cirgeos

Picture This: Atoms of Aroma

Toward a Maternal Gaze

Few Drugs Like Dying

It has now been more than 160 years since Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace laid the keystone of modern biology with the theory of evolution. But geology—Darwin’s original field of study—would wait almost another full century, until the 1950s, for the first light of its new dawn. As evolutionary theory revolutionized biology, the theory of plate tectonics brought geology into the modern era and did away with the comforting fiction of the eternal, unchanging Earth once and for all. From then on, everything—from the distribution of earthquakes and volcanoes around the globe to the heights of the Himalayas and parallel peaks and valleys of the American Basin and Range—could be explained as facets of the same underlying theory. The planet finally began to 

: the Earth’s outermost rocky layer, the lithosphere, is not a solid shell, but a jigsaw of rocky plates adrift over an ocean of hot rock with the consistency of silly putty. Where warm material rises from this viscous part of the mantle, plates tear apart, and new land forms as lava pours forth from the ruptured crust. Where plates collide, they thrust up new mountain ranges and drive cold, dense oceanic crust back down into the mantle. It is a ceaseless cycle of creation and destruction; every few hundred million years, each rock on the seafloor will have been replaced and the contours of the continents redrawn.

Geology waited a long time for its revolution. But if not for one map—and the remarkable woman who created it—earth science would have had to wait even longer still.

Oceanographer Marie Tharp’s 1957 map of the North Atlantic turned geology upside down by revealing the topography of the seafloor, which until then scientists had largely assumed was a flat, featureless abyss. Tharp’s survey is cut through by twin chains of drowned volcanoes that rise along the banks of a rift valley rivaling the Grand Canyon in width and depth, but that stretches from Greenland to the edge of the Antarctic. This is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a long mountain range and rift valley that we now understand as the violent border marches of the great tectonic plates on either side of the Atlantic.

Tharp’s first map revealed only one section of this underwater topography, which she and her colleagues discovered was just one part of a larger system of mid-ocean ridges encircling the globe. Between 1952 and 1977, Tharp and her colleague Bruce Heezen would go on to chart the entire seafloor, revealing this world-spanning ridge in its entirety for the first time and connecting it to rift valleys on land like the East African Rift. However, the 1957 North Atlantic section was enough, eventually, to convince geologists to entertain the possibility that the continents were 

—a controversial idea that for decades had been widely dismissed as scientific hocus pocus. The Plate Tectonic Revolution had begun.

The theory of plate tectonics brought geology into the modern era and did away with the comforting fiction of the eternal, unchanging Earth once and for all. 

The polymath skillset that made Tharp such a unique and important mapmaker was very much a product of her place and time. Had she been born a few decades later, she might have gone directly into science. She grew up following her father, a soil surveyor for the USDA, across the country and developed an early interest in geology. But in college, she studied fine arts; women were not welcome in technical fields. Intellectually restless, she flitted between majors and ended up graduating with degrees in English and Music and four minors, including one in geology. She also learned technical drawing. Tharp thought she’d ultimately become a teacher, like her mother. But in 1941, Japan bombed American ships at Pearl Harbor and the US declared war in return. With so many young men gone to fight in World War II, institutions that had previously shunned women suddenly competed to recruit them. The University of Michigan, which had previously only admitted men to its geology program, put up flyers at other colleges advertising a geology master’s degree program for women, and Tharp applied. She graduated in 1944 and earned another bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1948.

That year, she moved to New York and went looking for work. After the tedium of cleaning fossils dissuaded her from applying to jobs at the American Museum of Natural History, Tharp decided to try Columbia. Her math degree earned her an introduction to Maurice Ewing, a geophysicist and founder of Columbia’s fledgling Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. But it was her drafting skills that got her the job. Ewing—who colleagues at Lamont just called “Doc”—was gearing up to chart the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and he needed a cartographer.

A mysterious underwater rise had been discovered halfway across the North Atlantic in the 1850s when sailors aboard the 

 dropped cannon balls tied to ropes overboard to sound the depths. In 1872, the 

 expedition discovered a similar ridge in the South Atlantic. But for decades, that’s about all scientists knew. The only way we could chart the seafloor was by throwing heavy things downward. Everything that lay beneath a few miles of water might as well have been on the moon.

 met its icy end in the North Atlantic. This major world-historical event had the accidental effect of catapulting seafloor exploration into a new age. Just a few months after the disaster, English polymath and pacifist Lewis Fry Richardson filed a patent for a device that could detect underwater icebergs using sound pulses. Other engineers quickly followed suit and developed new and more powerful ways to “see” by listening. World War I submarine warfare drove acoustic research to new heights, and when peace returned, improved echo sounders were put to alternative use seeking routes for transatlantic telegraph cables—and, eventually, charting the depths. By the 1920s, researchers were increasingly convinced that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was real, and that it might run up and down the entire Atlantic—a fact that was eventually confirmed by the German 

 expedition, a scientific mission between 1925 and 1927. But despite this progress, by the 1950s no one had managed to translate these first echoes of the Earth’s drowned landscapes into a full picture.

In 1948, Ewing bestowed that enormous task to a young grad student named Bruce Heezen. Heezen needed someone who could transmute reams of echo sounder measurements into accurate diagrams of the seafloor topography, and Tharp quickly proved herself up to the job. Tharp was unable to accompany Heezen out to sea, as women were not allowed on research vessels. So, she stayed behind at Lamont, processing data. In 1952, she noticed something unexpected: a V-shaped indentation right at the center of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

A trained geologist, Tharp knew immediately what she was looking at. It was a rift valley—a dip in the Earth formed as its surface pulls apart.

At first, Heezen dismissed Tharp’s interpretation as impossible “girl talk.” If the Earth’s surface was pulling apart from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the continents on either side of the Atlantic would presumably be drifting apart—and continental drift was, at the time, tantamount to scientific heresy. But Tharp was confident she was right and Heezen came around eventually. In 1952, he had her begin work on a full map of the North Atlantic seafloor. In parallel, Heezen hired a graduate student to plot the epicenters of undersea earthquakes on a map of the same scale as Tharp’s. With the two maps layered over each other on a light table, the earthquake epicenters ran right down Tharp’s V-shaped valley. Further expeditions revealed that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge extended into the Indian Ocean and into the East African Rift on land, and Heezen concluded that the Atlantic ridge must be just one arm of an enormous, 40,000-mile rift system spanning the entire globe.

When Heezen first presented this result in 1956, he was met with a mix of enthusiasm and disdain. Years later, researchers were still arguing over whether the rift valley was real and if it was evidence for continental drift. Tharp let them fight. “I was so busy making maps, I let them argue,” 

. At the time, she was hard at work turning Heezen’s data into a physiographic map, which would show the Mid-Atlantic Ridge as if viewed from a low-flying plane. “I figured I’d show them a picture of where the rift valley was.” In 1957, she did just that. It took a little over a decade from there to work out the details of plate tectonic theory and for critics to finally come around. It took even longer for Tharp, a rare woman in science working in the deeply sexist 1950s, to receive credit for her contribution to the revolution.

Everything that lay beneath a few miles of water might as well have been on the moon.

Today, Tharp’s groundbreaking maps of the seafloor have attracted the attention they deserve—though I’m not sure that’s true for plate tectonics itself. When I studied geosciences at Caltech in the 2010s, it was not presented to me as any kind of revolution. In physics and biology courses, we took time to appreciate the history and significance of paradigm-shifting ideas like Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics and, of course, Darwin’s theory of evolution. I was taught about plate tectonics, but I can’t recall ever sitting through an enthusiastic lecture on the Plate Tectonics Revolution. I suspect this has to do with the startling newness of it all: while biologists have had more than a century and a half to work with evolution, plate tectonics has been accepted for less than 60 years.

It was only when I became interested in the origins of life and the possibility of finding it elsewhere in the universe that I started to understand the significance of Tharp’s discovery. I assumed, when I learned geology, that plate tectonics was simply what planets did. But in fact, Earth’s geology is downright weird—perhaps even one of a kind. No other world in our solar system has plate tectonics. And this one difference can explain so much about why our world is, in so many respects, a world apart.

Plate tectonics is why many of the rocks most common on Earth’s surface are vanishingly rare everywhere else. Granite, the most abundant component of Earth’s continents, is practically nonexistent in space; producing it involves melting and re-solidifying rock over and over again, which is hard to do without plate tectonics. That’s why researchers were so surprised when, in 2023, they discovered a patch of granite lurking on the Moon (we still aren't sure how it got there). Plate tectonics is why you’ll find white quartz sand on Earth but practically nowhere else, and why Mercury, Venus, and Mars don’t have continents.

The churn of the plates may even be the reason why our planet can host life. Many researchers believe that Earth could not have remained habitable over geologic time if not for plate tectonics; constantly recycling the crust regulates Earth’s carbon cycle over millions of years and prevents climate runaway. Our oceans’ fertility depends on nutrients that erode from the continents. Plate collisions likely raised the continents in the first place, and today they continuously thrust fresh rock up above the sea. Were the plates to halt, the continents would grind down over time to flat sheets, effectively ending erosion and starving the seas of nutrients. Of course, we don’t know if life on Earth would have been impossible without plate tectonics. The origin of life on Earth is still a hotly debated mystery—as is the onset of plate tectonics. Both happened so long ago that the rocks that might have borne witness to these pivotal events no longer exist.

We might be able to glimpse aspects of Earth’s lost past in the present time of other worlds. Researchers study Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io and its alien tectonics as a possible analogue of the early Earth, before its crust broke into plates. Looking further afield to exoplanets, one day we may discover more direct parallels to Earth. It’s early days for exoplanet geology. With the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers can now glean a few precious facts about the rocky surfaces of worlds orbiting a particular class of dim star. We can measure their temperatures and begin determining what covers the surfaces of other airless, “bare rock” exoplanets. One day, it might be possible to search for evidence of alien plate tectonics and ask whether habitable conditions depend on the phenomenon.

In a way, we’re still in the nineteenth century, dropping roped-up balls into the sea to find out where the water ends. Space telescopes purpose-built for hunting habitable worlds won't arrive for a few decades. But when they do, they will allow us to directly view light from Earth-like planets around sun-like stars for the first time. We will get our first pictures, however fuzzy, of alien earths. And as Marie Tharp’s incredible maps show, the right picture can be a revolution in itself. ♦

Elise Cutts is a science writer in Austria who distills complex science, math, and tech into words that spark wonder and curiosity. 

Picture This: A Tectonic Revolution

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It was back in 1972 when I first announced to my family and friends that I was going to write the Greatest Cook Book Ever. I told them that when it was done, Julia Childs, Amy Vanderbilt, Graham Kerr, Betty Crocker, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Colonel Sanders, and Fannie Farmer, just to name a few, would all fade in the minds of culinary persons throughout the world. Swamp Dogg would become the new champion of the kitchen. Heralded not only by the creditable but the sleazy as well.

The name of my book, I told anyone who'd listen, would be... no that's been done... maybe... good, but... 

... Bullshit, I need something great like the 

... only... someone beat me to those (keep on thinking)...

In 1980, I still didn't have a title. But I decided the book must have a theme... French cooking (who are you kidding?)... Italian! (your sense of humor knows no bounds)... Chinese! (please, spare me)... Korean (you've mastered one dish and that's still too greasy)... German (no!) British (no!) Spanish (hell no!)... Do your own thing Swamp Dogg style (Yes! Yes! Yes!) 

What dishes would be included? My favorites? My most excellent? The ones my friends salivate over? Or... all of the above? The latter is the key.

... Great!!... now explain it, tie it in and make it work. Well, back to the drawing board.

Several more months (years?) went by and I'm still cooking, discarding dishes, creating dishes and dissipating flour and sugar on a scale comparable only to General Mills and C&H. But as fate would have it, I did it!! My culinary genius came to the fore and I completed this masterpiece.

After that, it sat around for a while. But then my friends made a movie about me, called 

, and these people at Pioneer Works said they'd put out my cookbook.

And now it's here. With this book as your aid you can impress, dazzle, spellbind, fascinate, and mesmerize your friends and family.

I'm strongly recommending a $399.95 price to my publisher... and that's for paperback. Whatever they sell it for, I know it will rank with the Magna Carta, 

This is the book that Hemingway wanted to write, Agatha Christie couldn't, Irving Wallace needed help with, and Alex Haley didn't have enough "soul" for... I did it infallibly. Not only does it make for good cooking but good reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic (sorry, I got carried away).

Doo Wop Squash

We had squash on our plates at least once a week when I was growing up around my Aunt Kini. She would rent rooms in our house for musicians that would come into Portsmouth, during the doo-wop era. We only had two hotels in town. But they were white; niggers couldn't go in. So people stayed with Kini.

I remember one time, Fats Domino and a bunch of other people came through after a law passed saying blacks could stay in the same hotels as whites, on the same floors and stuff. Fats stayed at The Americana Hotel in Portsmouth, as it was called at that time. But the hotel's owners weren't ready for all this. Fats and everyone jumped in the pool with their head rags on and everything. "Fuck y'all," they said. "Y'all not going to swim with our water." They drained the pool while they were in it. Staying at the Americana wasn't like staying at Aunt Kini's.

You can eat a bowl of squash and not have anything else. Because you always put something in it like a sausage, and you cut up some sausage, a little ham. You need a little pork in it. Beef ain't going to do it. But squash, it's delicious—just like Kini made it. 

– 5 medium-size squashes about 1 ½ pounds total
– 4 tablespoons bacon fat
– 1 onion
– ½ tablespoon pepper
– ¼ teaspoon salt
– 3 italian hot sausages
– ⅔ cup water

– Wash squash good with a vegetable brush. Heat bacon fat in fry pan, cut squash into ¼ inch pieces. Dice onion. Add squash and onion to bacon fat, cover, and cook over a medium flame. Cook for 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper. Stir and cook 10 minutes stirring frequently. Add Italian hots and continue to cook for 15 minutes. Cut each sausage into sections of four and continue to cook for 20 minutes more. Add ⅓ cup of water and cook another 10 minutes.

Temptations Cornbread

Like millions of others, I loved The Temptations and I dedicate this recipe to them because they summarized my cornbread in their songs when they sang "It's Growing"... which was really about what happens to one's appetite after one slice... just like "Get Ready" is your attitude when you're cognizant of what's in the oven... and "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" is how you feel once you've devoured your slice or slices... and "(I Know) I'm Losing You" names your sentiment when the last existing morsel is being masticated. Of course, "Cloud Nine" is the place everyone feels they've reached as they retire from my dining table.

– 1 cup soft butter
– ⅓ cup sugar
– 1 cup flour
– 1 tbsp. baking powder
– 1 cup yellow cornmeal
– 3 eggs (beaten slightly)
– 1 ¼ cups milk (room temperature)
– ¼ cup Monterey Jack cheese diced
– 12 oz. can whole kernel corn

– Grease skillet or pan and place in oven while preparing the ingredients. Place butter in a bowl and allow to soften at room temperature for 1 hour. Cream butter and add sugar and cream until semi-smooth. Combine flour, baking powder, and cornmeal. Add to butter mixture and mix well. Add eggs and milk, beat until well blended. Add cheese and corn, beat 1 minute more. Pour into a 9-by-13-inch pan or skillet. Bake 25 minutes.

(NOTE: Bread will appear bubbly because of the Monterey Jack cheese. Nevertheless it will be done.)

Libby's Grated Sweet Potato Pudding

My Aunt Libby was more like a parent. She couldn’t have children so she bestowed all of that love on me, and as I look back to my childhood, I needed it.

1971 found me very successful and I went home to see my parents driving a new Rolls Royce accompanied by my bodyguards who were driving my two new Lincoln Continentals. Yes, I was showing off and I needed bodyguards about as much as a bull needed tits... I digress. After several days of visiting, we prepared to go back to New York. As I was walking out the door, Libby walked up to me, gave me a big hug and kiss, then slipped a twenty-dollar bill into my hand with a “take it baby, anything can happen out there.” That was love. She had seen a million motherfuckers come through town acting like Donald Trump worked for them and didn’t have funds to get through the Midtown tunnel. I took it and sent it back in presents quadrupled.

– 2 large uncooked sweet potatoes
– 1 ½ cups sugar (more if the season has not produced a good crop of sweet potatoes)
– 1 tbsp. vanilla
– 2 cans of evaporated milk
– 3 eggs beaten
– 2 tbsp. all-purpose flour
– 2 sticks of butter

– Peel and finely grate the raw sweet potatoes. Melt butter and add to potatoes. Add beaten eggs, vanilla, milk, sugar, and flour to potato mixture. Stir until well blended. Bake in a large baking dish for 55 minutes.

Born Jerry Williams Jr., in Portsmouth, Virginia, Swamp Dogg is an American country soul and R&B singer, musician, songwriter, and record producer. The following is drawn from 

, available this week from Pioneer Works Press.

ser-martin

Swamp Dogg: If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It

Three hemlocks stand close in the small grove. They have grown up together, about 20 feet apart, their branches touching in places, their life histories intertwined. They have been through the same storms, felt the same winds, the same heat, and the same winters. They have shared creatures. Squirrels, chipmunks, warblers, flycatchers, thrushes, spiders, and dozens of other animals have moved between them. Deer, skunk, turkey, porcupine, bobcat, fisher, hare, bear, and perhaps a moose or few have moved beneath them. Hemlocks are among the longest-lived trees on the East Coast and in the right conditions—in cool damp, absent certain pests—these conifers can live at least 500 years and reach over 100 feet.

These three are about 70 years old and 80 feet tall. Even young hemlocks have gravitas. They are stunning dark trees, their bark deeply creviced and thick. Some hemlocks have bottom branches that droop toward the ground at the tips, creating around the trunk a circular open-air room with a low roof. These three have no lower branches that are easy to grab hold of. Their green-needled limbs start 15 feet up.

15 feet can be 15 feet too high when you are learning to climb trees, as I set out to do one May weekend at Camp Hi-Rock in Mount Washington, Massachusetts. Two dozen women and I had come to participate in the Women's Tree Climbing Workshop, an organization founded by identical twin sister arborists Bear LeVangie and Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll. I was there to be in trees and to better understand them. Trees and forests are facing existential threats because of climate change, but it can be a struggle to grasp the extent of the danger or to make sense of the complex and deadly interactions playing out between heat, drought, fire, water, disease, and pests. I hoped that being in trees would allow me to better see them through the eyes of people, like the LeVangies, who care for trees and who perceive so much more about trees and forests than many of us do. Forests are always shifting; they change form and location, they are in constant motion. At Camp Hi-Rock, I climbed a hemlock descended from trees that made their way here after glaciers started to recede some 20,000 years ago. Eastern hemlock, 

, likely traveled up from various sites in what is now Georgia or North Carolina and started settling in New England about 10,000 years ago. Pollen from lake sediments show that white pine had by then replaced the spruce and jack pine that had become abundant in the area soon after the ice left. Hemlock arrived as the climate kept warming and rainfall increased as ice melted, refilling ocean basins. Beech, birch, and oak arrived too. By roughly 8,000 years ago, the forests of the region had many of the tree species common today.

Hemlock, slow-growing and shade-loving, gave rise to forests that were dark and cool, that held onto the moisture key to their survival. Hemlock forests lined creeks, streams, and rivers, keeping temperatures low and holding soil in place with their roots. In their shade, salamanders, frogs, and brook trout flourished. In their branches, ants, arboreal spiders, and dozens of birds found homes. The hemlock grew in clusters among other trees and in vast uninterrupted stands.

The hemlocks’ journey north is one of many arboreal migration stories that have helped scientists understand the climate and ecology of the postglacial period we live in. Hemlock have also helped unlock a fine-grained weather and climate record that tells us what trees have been though in the last several thousand years, what they have adapted to and survived, and how perilous and divergent their current experience is proving to be.

In the early 1970s, Edward Cook, now a researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, enlisted in the Army and was stationed at West Point, New York. He spent his free time driving around looking for rock-climbing sites and old trees. He had finished college at the University of Arizona, where he had been captivated by dendrochronology—the science of reconstructing past climate by examining tree rings—and now everywhere he went, he looked closely at trees. In the Shawangunks, which form a northern ridge of the Appalachian Mountains, he saw some ancient-looking gnarled pitch pines. From a dendrochronologist’s perspective, the older the tree, the better.

When the cambium comes to life each spring, it needs to get photosynthesis going fast. To do that, the leaves need a lot of water, which is elemental to breaking down carbon dioxide to make sugars. To get water quickly from roots to canopy, the cambium initially creates big xylem cells that stack vertically, forming long pipes running up the tree. These gallon-bucket cells form the early wood. As the growing season wanes, the tree starts to pack things up after the picnic and produces compact, thick-walled xylem cells that make up the late wood. The next spring, the process begins again, and the cambium comes to life between last year's late wood and the bark. The old dead or dying weed becomes the internal foundation on which the new live wood lies.

Cook wasn't sure how many rings—each one marking a year of early wood and late wood—he would see in the pitch pines. He used an increment borer to take his first samples. These devices only pierce a tiny bit of cambium, allowing dendrochronologists to see a tree's growth without causing it significant harm. They are elegant tools; two metal tubes, one nested inside the other. The tubes are assembled into a T, with the outer tube serving as a perpendicular handle. The extremely sharp end of the smaller tube is cranked until it reaches the heartwood or pith, the innermost and oldest part of the tree. Once the dendrochronologist has reached the heartwood, they often make a half reverse twist, which breaks adhesion between the metal tube and surrounding wood. Then they carefully pull out a tray that runs inside the boring tube, on which lies a delicate dowel-like core.

In a lab, the core is sanded and burnished to bring out the details of the bands of dark and light that to the expert eye can tell of rain or drought or fire, or radioactive fallout. Although the annual cycle of early wood, late wood, and dormancy is generally similar in temperate trees, every species has its own fingerprint: a maple and a spruce growing a few feet apart may tell the same story in different colors and textures. Pitch pines, like other conifers, have regular xylem cells, called tracheids. As Valerie Trouet writes in 

Tree Story: A History of the World Written in Rings

, "In conifers, individual wood cells queue up in straight lines like Roman soldiers."

From the tidy light-dark bands of the Shawangunk pitch pines, Cook could see that they were what is called sensitive. That is, their rings varied in thickness, reflecting changing environmental conditions. Trees that are not as responsive and have consistently sized rings are termed complacent. He also learned that one of the trees was 400 years old, 200 years older than his textbook said pitch pines could be. That was the first surprise. On the Mohonk Preserve, also in the Shawangunk Mountains, Cook found another. There, on a rocky slope with virtually no soil, Cook caught sight of some hemlocks like the ones I’ve taken to climbing, with Bear and Melissa, in nearby Massachusetts.

Modern dendrochronology had emerged in the early twentieth century in the Southwest, in part because the desert simplified the yearly story trees told about the weather. There was plenty of sun. Plenty of warmth. But there was not plenty of rain. The trees of the region put on a lot of growth when the year was wet: they made bigger cells in those years. Wet and dry years were visible in the thick versus thin rings of ponderosa pine and giant sequoia that came to anchor the young field. The pine told of rainfall in northern Arizona going back 500 years, the sequoia of rainfall in the Sierra Nevada going back 3,000 years.

With a few exceptions, the field had remained largely fixed in semiarid landscapes in America. "There was this belief that dendrochronology couldn't reliably be done in the Northeast," Cook says. The concern was that the region had too many variables— rain, snow, seasonal extremes of temperature. It was too complex a place to provide a clear picture about any one aspect of climate. But when Cook saw the hemlocks growing on sere exposed rock, he realized that they might tell a story about rain. He learned that the Smiley family who owned Mohonk Preserve had been recording rainfall and temperature since 1896. Depending on the age of the hemlock, he might be able to fact-check the annual rings against the Smiley's data.

The hemlock turned out to be more than 300 years old and for the period they overlapped with the family's weather records, they matched. Eastern hemlock showed that decipherable information about rainfall, or not much rainfall, could be found outside semi-arid landscapes. They were one of the few regional tree species able to do this. "I knew that hemlock was potentially the single most important species because it was likely to be the most common old-growth community in existence, left in existence, in the forests in the Northeast," Cook says. Some hemlock had survived waves of colonial deforestation because its soft, light, easily decomposed wood made poor lumber or firewood.

In the 1800s, though, hemlock's thick bark was almost its undoing. In most trees, a corky outer layer of phloem becomes bark. In a beech or other smooth-boled tree, this cork cambium puts on little girth each year and the bark that it replaces dusts away. In rough-barked trees, the corky layer grows wildly and the trees package the growth increases and convolutions. That is why hemlock bark is a mesmerizing world of tectonic folds, of rivulets and ravines that visitors—an ant, a climber—can travel. In the case of hemlock, that profuse growth contains a high concentration of tannins, chemicals produced to stave off herbivores, but that can also render animal skins more water resistant. In the nineteenth century, the American tanning industry expanded and tanneries arose throughout the hemlock's range.

In the Catskill Mountains and on the ridges of the Shawangunks alone, an estimated 70 million hemlock were cut, their bark ripped off, their bare trunks left to decay.

Even so, pockets of inaccessible old growth persisted. Cook kept seeking out those stands and, in time, found hemlocks older than those at Mohonk. He read an article describing 500-year-old trees in the Tionesta area of Pennsylvania, so he set out with a friend to find them. The two found plenty of middle-aged hemlocks. They found a forest littered with pipelines from an era of oil exploration. They got lost. Then they happened into a hemlock grove that felt old. Old trees should not be stereotyped: they are not all massively tall, thick, moss draped. They can be small, their age revealed in bent posture and scars, in roots that run close to the surface, like the veins that rise on the backs of our hands as our skin thins with time.

Old trees should not be stereotyped: they are not all massively tall, thick, moss draped. They can be small, their age revealed in bent posture and scars, in roots that run close to the surface, like the veins that rise on the backs of our hands as our skin thins with time.

They took cores from several Tionesta hemlocks, one of which, it turned out, had started growing in 1426. The records kept by the Tionesta hemlock joined those kept by the Mohonk hemlock—and Mohonk pitch pine, white pine, and chestnut oak. Those records were, in turn, joined by those of hemlock from Nova Scotia down to the Carolinas and as far west as Michigan. Hemlock became the backbone, as Cook describes it, of the North American Drought Atlas. The atlas, first published in 2004 and expanded and deepened since, is a database of tens of thousands of tree-ring records that reveal patterns of drought in hundreds of locations and as far back, in some regions, as two millennia. Cook's invention became a reference work for understanding historical drought and it allowed novel interdisciplinary work. Fire ecologists, anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and modelers, among many others, have used the drought atlas to understand environmental history and cultural shifts as well as to fact-check climate models. Similar atlases have since been made for Europe, for South America, for Australia, for Mexico, for Asia.

Tree ring records cover a human-history timescale. The oldest living tree ring record is from a 4,800-year-old bristle-cone pine called Methuselah—a sapling during the world of Gilgamesh, of the Minoans and the Mayans, of the last mammoths. (The oldest fossil tree ring record goes back nearly 14,000 years.) Because trees are sessile for their lifetime, the information they hold is specific to a site. That specificity helps researchers know what has been true for a particular place and, when records can be combined across nearby areas, a particular region. Tree rings show that the Northeast, generally now a rain-rich place, underwent severe droughts in the 1500s and 1600s. In places where water is not in short supply but temperature changes, as in a wetland, tree rings can tell the story of temperature. They can also reveal global temperature patterns: tree rings document the "year without a summer" triggered by the explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which spewed ash and ejected sulfur particles into the stratosphere, where they reflected the sun's warmth back to space until some washed down as acid rain.

Increasingly, tree rings are adding detail about how we are changing the climate, making clear that we are in a new era. Valerie Trouet and her colleagues can see in European tree rings that the North Atlantic jet stream—the westerly wind that determines so much about formerly familiar weather patterns, season length, and temperature across the Northern Hemisphere—has become more erratic since the 1960s. Tree rings are helping scientists document precipitously declining snowpack in the Rockies and other mountain ranges. Tree rings are ground-truthing satellite observations of changes in forest extent and productivity. Tree rings reveal that the new character of wildfires—their intensity, their frequency—has no precedent in the last 2,000 years. And drought, the tree rings show, is going rogue with its coconspirator heat.

Dendrochronological drought atlases emerged in the Northeast, extended across the country and then across the world, in some small part because several wind-pummeled strong-rooted hemlocks on a talus in the Shawangunk Mountains shared their memories of the rain that came, or did not, for every one of their more than 300 years. And because amateur naturalists kept records down through generations and shared them with a young scientist who happened to show up one day. Mohonk Preserve and its trees remain deeply special to Cook. "Hemlock always has a very soft spot in my heart because it turned out to be such a pivotal species," he says.

As far as I know, the three Hi-Rock hemlocks I’ve spent time with have never been cored. I don't know their exact age. The hemlocks must feel the seasons changing length, the winters becoming less cold, the summers longer and drier and hotter. They may feel a pull to migrate as their ancestors did and as some of their contemporaries have: in the last three decades, hemlock seeds carried by wind have been able to germinate and survive further north; hemlocks have shifted range by about eight miles over that time. It is entrancing to be in a huge hemlock and to feel its solidity and rootedness and to think about it as a traveler.

Climbing in the way that the LeVangies teach it—engendering a culture of consideration, attention, and care—can change people in surprising ways. As I learned to climb, I did things I never thought I could do. I overcame physical weakness and phobias. I found a new way to confront climate anxiety. And I came to know trees more deeply. I began to look closely, to see and to understand our profound connection to them.

Everything that flows from trees and forests—clean air, biodiversity, cooler temperatures, clean water, human health, carbon kept solid and out of atmospheric currency, rain, regional weather patterns, culture, history—is unraveling. If trees are to continue to sustain us and to help us address our apocalyptic mess, we need to pay them more attention, give them more care.

As Melissa and Bear have taught me, we need to take to the trees.

Four or so decades after his first visit to Tionesta, Edward Cook returned to western Pennsylvania to visit the hemlocks he hadn't seen since. He was with several colleagues, including Neil Pederson of Harvard University, who studies forest ecology. It was a difficult day. They spent many hours searching, passing through clear cuts. The forest was unrecognizable to Cook: there were so many dead beech trees, so much disturbance. Pederson felt saddened as well. "I am walking through a graveyard," he says. "Adelgid is on its way... the mature beech are gone."

The group made their way through thickets of beech saplings knowing that they too would be gone soon: they saw evidence of beech leaf disease in two places, following right behind the devastations of beech bark disease. "So that national landmark forest is doomed," Pederson says. Old-growth forests are not permanent, he adds, but "to me personally they feel as though they will always be there." Seeing forests change so radically during his lifetime has been devastating. And, he says, he was worried about Cook.

Pederson kept reliving in his mind a trip he had taken with his doctoral advisor, the late Gordon Jacoby, cofounder with Cook of Columbia University's dendrochronology lab. Jacoby had gone to revisit a tree in Mongolia. "It was the first old Siberian pine that he had cored that showed global warming in Mongolia, and it turned out that it was a stump and someone had cut it and it was gone," Pederson says. "I just didn't want to deal with that again. I couldn't deal with someone at the end of their career going back to see one of their favorite trees and..."

In the last hour of daylight, they found the hemlocks Cook and his friend had cored 40 years ago. "I had to run away, because I started crying and I was just like, Oh my God, he's reunited with his trees, you know," Pederson says. "They're not dead."

That the Tionesta hemlock were thriving despite woolly adelgid was a surprise. Another team of dendrochronologists had gone to a different site in the region where Cook had also found hemlock in the 1970s and those trees were gone. Cook discovered after the trip that the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has been treating the Tionesta hemlock, something that can be done with individual trees around homes and along streets, but that is extremely challenging to do in a forest. The department has been trying to save hemlock for about two decades.

The oldest living tree ring record is from a 4,800-year-old bristle-cone pine called Methuselah—a sapling during the world of Gilgamesh, of the Minoans and the Mayans, of the last mammoths. 

It is an enormous undertaking, requiring a big and consistent budget and lots of trained people, and it entails the use of pesticides, which many states opt not to use. "Pennsylvania, historically in this program, has been willing to kind of do almost whatever it takes," says Sarah Johnson of the department's Bureau of Forestry. There are "key functions of hemlock that cannot be replicated by any other species." Where hemlock forests have disappeared, waterways heat up, embankments erode, and populations of birds plummet, including the black-throated green warbler. And the blackburnian warbler. And the hermit thrush. And the Acadian flycatcher. A tree is not just a tree. A forest is not just a forest. Both contain and sustain multitudes.

Johnson says that in the long term, the bureau's goal is to use chemicals less or not at all and to manage instead with other methods, including biocontrol—breeding and releasing non-pest insects to prey on pest insects—as well as genetic selection. A biocontrol program is underway: a fly and two beetles, one from the Pacific Northwest where they feed on a native woolly adelgid, have been released in some places. Johnson says she sees a lot of the beetles in the forest. "They're reproducing really well. We can find them very easily. They're moving very well," she says. But so far, in her view, "they're not helping trees very much." The second strategy, genetic selection, is moving slowly.

Tree genetics is a universe unto itself and is not always best understood in comparison with animal genetics. Unlike other plants and animals, trees can have enormous genetic variation within a single tree, especially if they are long-lived. The meristem of one branch may develop a mutation that every subsequent cell produced by that meristem will carry. Meanwhile, on another branch, perhaps a different mutation has occurred. Researchers studying Sitka spruce found one old-growth tree with 100,000 differences: needles, trunk branches... many were genetically distinct from one another. One tree can be many trees. In the Hi-Rock hemlock, the branch I sit on might be genetically distinct from the branch my foot rests on, from the branch hosting the lichen I am entranced by, from the branch my hand holds.

Trees can also have enormous genetic diversity at the species level. Some species have genomes that are fifty times as large as any animal's. Also, unlike many animals, plants often have more than two copies of a chromosome in each cell. At one end of the spectrum—the record holder for the moment, notes Kew Gardens Ilia Leitch—is a fern with ninety-six copies of its genome in each cell; near the other end are quaking aspen, which can be triploid, carrying three copies. Plant polyploidy, as multiple sets of chromosomes are called, arises from whole genome duplication and gives plants extraordinary genetic range and nimbleness—some mutation or some combination of genomes might solve an emerging problem. Diploid aspen seem to be more drought resistant than triploid aspen, for example. Many trees show great genetic variation both within a population and between populations, variation that reflects their migratory history, where they waited out glaciers or hot house times, how connected they were to other trees across the landscape, how they reproduced, who was eating them.

Eastern hemlock genes reveal their travels north from several southern refugial core populations. After the glaciers receded, some hemlock headed more centrally, toward today's Indiana. Others, including ancestors of the Hi-Rock hemlock, traveled along the Appalachian Mountains. The southern, the central, and the northern populations diverged genetically, as would be expected. Some of these lineages also reveal a pattern perhaps best explained by the hemlocks' rapid near disappearance 5,000 years ago. Eastern hemlock pollen vanishes from sediment records at that time, throughout the continent, likely because of infection or infestation, or both. A few trees lingered, genetic studies show, and, over several thousand years, restored hemlock populations. All the hemlock we know today are, in essence, descendants of those lingering hemlock.

The Hi-Rock hemlock I know do not look as though they are carrying a solution in their genes. They don't look like robust lingering hemlock. Melissa says these trees will be unclimbable soon. After that, the trio of big hemlock will need to be cut down for safety. I hope the wind has carried their secrets away, whispering them to hemlock in the nearby woods. ♦

Marguerite Holloway is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The following text is adapted and excerpted from her latest book, 

Take to the Trees

, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk describes a fascinated infant watching a ball of air drift away. “While exhaled air usually vanishes without a trace," Sloterdijk writes, "the breath encased in these orbs is granted a momentary afterlife. While the bubbles move through space, their creator is truly outside himself—with them and in them.” Bubbles are fragile—even as the image of the sphere bears something of the promise of totality: little wonder they offer a vessel for our fantasies about the self. In the bubble we have the image of a first externalization of the self in breath. Then, pop!	

We’re always at risk of going too far with this extension of the self into the air. Are we aware of the inevitable popping of the self, or are we transfixed by the fantasy that we might encase and preserve it forever? What is the difference between breathing that acknowledges loss and breathing that denies it?	

The story of Wilhelm Reich, who championed the curative potential of breath and bodywork, offers a cautionary tale. Reich was a disciple of Freud who emigrated to the United States during the Second World War, having been kicked out of the International Psychoanalytic Association (the only other analyst to share this fate was Jacques Lacan) for his ties to communism. While Freud was certainly responsible for the excommunication of his early disciples (notably Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Otto Rank), Reich and Lacan were more officially banished by the professional association established in Freud’s name. The “International,” as it is often referred to, carried on the work of insuring psychoanalytic orthodoxy. As a member of the profession born of Freud's ideas, I’ve often felt that we psychoanalysts are still trying to recover from these constant professional wars.	

, he spoke about people’s wish to remain sick: the little man cannot take responsibility for his life or pleasure, wishing to crucify and stone the great men who he refuses to see have brought him the truest benefits in his own life. Written twelve years before his death, Reich was seemingly already talking about himself as a martyr. In subsequent years, his ideas of sexual revolution would make him an influential figure for the Beat generation.

If there is a psychoanalyst of the air, it is Reich. His experiments in psychoanalysis led him to postulate a form of life energy—orgone—borne of orgasmic breath, which he thought could be accumulated in a machine he invented to cure neurosis, sexual impotence, fascism, and eventually cancer. Later, he would endeavor to shoot this energy out of large gun-like machines, a practice he called “cloud busting,” in the hopes of changing weather patterns and chasing away UFOs. But his theories of honing orgasmic energy arose at the height of hopes for a sexual revolution that would never actualize.

“I still dream of Orgonon,” sings Kate Bush in her song “Cloudbusting.” “I wake up crying.” The song is an ode to Reich told from the perspective of his son, Peter, watching his father’s tragic life unfold. Peter and his father used to go cloudbusting at Orgonon, their home in Maine. Reich was loved by the local farmers to whom he would promise rain when they needed it.

Orgonon was a family home, a cult, and a laboratory. Peter saw his father arrested on a charge of contempt of court. As Bush sings of this moment: “You looked too small in their big black car. To be a threat to the men in power . . . I can’t hide you from the government.” Reich lost a torturous trial, in which he attempted to represent himself, and eventually died in prison. His books were burned along with the stockpile of orgone accumulators he had designed and made.

From the eyes of a child, there must have been something marvelous in Reich’s experiment. Reich’s desire to tap into the source of world discontent remains powerful. Throughout my twenties, I kept a copy of 

in my bathroom. What I find so moving in Bush’s lyrics is imagining Reich, his son, and so many of his followers, waiting for the fruition of his work: a universal liberation—a great intake of fresh air—that would spell the end of fascism and war and tyranny and bad sex.

Many were skeptical of the politics that would be practiced in this land of fuck.

Orgone was the greatest promise made by a psychoanalyst, a promise that proved hugely popular in America. Most of the West Village was under the spell of Reich. William Burroughs claimed to use his orgone accumulator throughout his life. Reich even gained the attention of Albert Einstein, who tested his accumulator box for changes in the energetic field, to no avail.	

Others were skeptical. In his essay “The New Lost Generation,” James Baldwin wrote that the Reichians had turned from an idea of the world being made better by political commitment to an idea of psychological and sexual healing. They reminded him of devout sinners at a revival running down the aisle. Indeed, Reich’s tumultuous and violent temper, showcased in his relationships with women, especially when drunk, as well as the maniacal control he exerted on relationships with his followers, all seem to have contributed to his story taking the path of so many cults during this period. One wants to admire—I want to. But, as Baldwin notes:

They had not become more generous but less, not more open but more closed. ...There are no formulas for the improvement of the private, or any other, life— certainly not the formula of more and better orgasms. (Who decides?) The people I had been raised among had orgasms all the time, and still chopped each other up with razors on Saturday nights.

What were Reich’s beliefs and hopes for orgone? In 1933’s 

, still a staple of many psychoanalytic trainings, Reich posited an emotional plague at work in civilization: “an organism whose natural mobility has been continually thwarted from birth develops artificial forms of movement. It limps or walks on crutches, in the same way a man goes through life on the crutches of the emotional plague when the natural self-regulating life expressions are suppressed from birth.” This plague can reach epidemic proportions, as it did during the Inquisition or, as Reich would argue in 1946, during the years of Nazi fascism backed by Protestant sexual repression.

Confronted with such psycho-political deformations, the talking cure couldn’t go far enough. So began Reich’s quest to get at the source of the problem. In 

, the writer Christopher Turner writes of his experience of Reichian somatic therapy with one of Reich’s followers, who instructed him to perform various difficult physical feats—and most importantly, to breathe. “Can you hear your breathing? Well, that’s what life is about and that’s what therapy is about . . . you see, Reich thought that breathing gives your body life and if you do enough breathing your emotions come alive and suddenly you’re crying and talking. BREATHE . . . otherwise you are half mechanical.” Heavy breathing, repetitive physical movements, and the manual release of muscle tension would create convulsions and vibrations in the body that would in turn allow for stronger orgasms, help along the curative spasming, and eventually cure disease. 

Reich is prophetic of an age when we’re incited to enjoy and enjoy—but wherein everyone, in a perverse twist, feels they are falling short of the enjoyment they could and should be having. 

Reich’s idea was to tap directly into soma and energy, to return us to our most primal sexual selves, thus bypassing any need for speaking—a far cry from the fundamental rule of analysis to say anything, say everything. For Lacan this fantasy is naïve at best, and violent at worst. Norman Mailer, a Reich devotee, put things a different way; this new world, he said, was “the land of fuck.” Reich’s orgone energy was suspected of being hidden in the body and, paradoxically, also in the air. So began the dream of the perfect orgasm, the relaxed and pliable body, breath freed from any tension, the just-wet-enough atmospheric conditions, and the obliteration of all enemies, domestic and alien. Mailer later admitted that the ideal orgasm had always eluded him.

For Reich, orgone harnessing was not intended to be confined to the individual. At a global level he was convinced that it would usher in a new politics: “The removal of blockages from the sick body became a metaphor for the cleansing from the body politic of all barriers to freedom,” writes Turner, who describes how Reich “would invent ever more intricate devices to combat the spinning forces conjured by his own mind.”

Kate Bush - Cloudbusting (Official Video)

Many were skeptical of the politics that would be practiced in this land of fuck. “This administration of happiness is nauseating to me,” the philosopher Herbert Marcuse said in a conversation about the new lost generation Baldwin described, and whose members sought psychological and sexual well-being above all else. The pursuit of freedom and satisfaction, Marcuse said, was a new kind of hell. It made little sense, he thought, to speak of excessive repression any longer—unless, that is, one suspected it of hiding within the new liberatory motifs. In this sense Reich is prophetic of an age when we’re incited to enjoy and enjoy—but wherein everyone, in a perverse twist, feels they are falling short of the enjoyment they could and should be having. When you fail to enjoy, you must blame and punish yourself. Where is the room for loss in this will to enjoy?

Reich’s goal of total enjoyment, it must be said, is rather lacking in a sense of irony or humor, born from a sense of human frailty and contradiction, sexual mishaps and bungled intimacies, and most importantly the inescapable pains of life. In the Reichian world, there isn’t even a veneration for the majestic construction of dreams or jokes—it’s all unblocking and unlocking and accessing and enjoying. Freud was skeptical of any wish to reach back to some time before civilization, however rotten it is. We need to keep working on it, as on ourselves—developing our capacity for intimacies. How else can we do that than through language and the flawed institutions that we create to bind our communities?

Kate Bush ends her song “Cloudbusting” imagining a young Peter Reich putting his father to rest: “You’re like my yo-yo, that glowed in the dark. What makes it special, makes it dangerous. So I bury it. And forget.” Where did all this revolutionary fervor go? In Bush’s music video for the song, she plays the small-framed Peter to a much larger Reich with his even larger cloudbusting gun. She interrupts the song suddenly with a repetitive chorus, panting “It’s you and me, Daddy,” like the secret call for an Oedipal victory, uniting parent and child in a cosmic-orgasmic battle. The clouds rally behind the two of them and they make rain as one. Then Reich is gone. Peter is left alone with the memory of his father and his tortured legacy. We are all reeling from the failures of the sexual revolution. ♦

Jamieson Webster is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Her book, 

The Perfect Orgasm

I have been asked to edit a small section of poets on death. First David, the editor, said 

. I went to poets I know who are always good and would say yes in their strange collective strength. Then he said 

. None of this is hard work for me. It’s just writing emails to your friends and reading poetry. I don’t know what else I do.

Here’s some very quick liner notes on this production. All of us of course are dying at this moment, coincidentally, so you couldn’t have asked for a better group. Ama is music and tragedy and eloquence. Ashley is in the room. Eileen couldn’t resist, the moment was so good. The longest poem, Laura’s, is always rich and funny while everything around us is unspeakably bad. Sallie’s is about what you do while it’s happening and it is always happening.

Eulogy for the Minks of Denmark and the World

Crying for the sea mink
An American casualty
Of war. Fur traders.
Pet a. Pet a. Pet a.
17 million soldiers
Gone. Too soon.
They rise. Rise.
Mary don’t you
Weep. Martha don’t
You moan. Suicide. Genocide.
Something wicked comes
This way. The culling
Has already begun.
They should be in gaol.
A trumpet plays “Taps.”
Now some of the dead
Float away in little cages.
Made of raw meat and brandy.
Helios’ radiant crown.
Sun chariot take us away.

3/13/25

Information Superhighway

I remember the day he pulled left
and got off the information superhighway,

that varicose coast where I
I have hovered for years
summoning curiosity with a trick
hair-thin lasso.

And my father spent the final days of his life


, which is to say
he spent the final days of his life listening

to science fiction novels in an endless series
through iPhone speakers, and we heard

garbled signals from the edge
of the solar system as he zoomed

down the highway, oiled
by endless language.

I imagine picking a word out from the air
as when I fall asleep to radio:

intergalactic solar storm,
political playbook, unsayable tragedy
in my ear.

My education has prepared me to sit like a receiver
at the menu of my own curiosity.

Death too has a gibberish to it.
Somewhere in the depths
of history, a voice rattles:
“Do not be scared. Get in the car.”

Late at night, with my ear
to whatever the world feels moved to say,
I try to drift into it,
the world, I hope to learn.

Untitled

my husband, my baby,
and i are in the waiting
room at the vet because
our cat has stopped eating
in a few hours she will be dead
we will soon learn

across the street ads
for products to protect
your brain from your cell phone

there are channels now
dedicated to one show looped
episode to episode all day
and night, day and night
useless with neither
chronology or progression

in the waiting room such
a channel played endless
fear factor

it was a special installment
in which all contestants
were twins

first twins dropped
each other from a helicopter
into a lake, the objective
was not clear
but the second challenge
was unambiguous

twins took turns
gnawing the meat
from a cow’s preserved body
and then they swam in
a trench thick with organs
and blood still holding
the meat in their mouth

on the other side, a juicer
awaited, and into it they spat
the meat, fed it through
the metal grinder, slowly
filling a cup

they repeated this rite
as many times as it took
to fill the cup and then
they drank the juice

i asked the man at the desk
if we could please turn off
fear factor and he did
offering the remote to us
to pick something new
which we didn’t do

called back from waiting
the vet explained that all her systems
were shutting down which meant
our cat was dying already

my baby laughed and smiled
because these words to her
were musical sounds
the vet’s consoling expression
another beautiful face
for a baby to look at and
feel inescapable joy

new truth

I saw Lee Miller
standing
in Hitler’s
bathroom.

Now
shoot her in
the head
shoot her in
the heart
Kill the child
who did it

Eileen Myles is an American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades.

ser-ceraph

Death Poems from Eileen Myles

Sense and Senescence

Hypochondria

When Eiko Otake and I hiked Mount Oyama just outside Tokyo last November, our conversation drifted from lamenting the fog obscuring our view of Mount Fuji to something far more sobering. Surrounded by a dense, towering forest, we found ourselves talking about death. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. After all, I work in The Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, and Eiko has created three performance pieces there, starting with 

We kept circling back to war—not just the ongoing violence between Israel and Palestine, but also the history of military aggression of and in Japan. It’s invasion of neighboring nations in the Pacific, America’s genocidal air raids in Tokyo, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s a subject deeply personal to Eiko. Born in Japan in 1952, she earned a master’s degree studying literature related to the atomic bomb and frequently teaches on the topic. It clicked for me then why Eiko’s work is so powerful. Her art isn’t a historical reenactment of devastation, nor is her body a passive archive. Instead, she draws our attention to how trauma reverberates and lingers in landscapes—like the empty streets and train stations in Fukushima—and potentially, in our own bodies.

I spoke with Eiko over Zoom while she was on tour with Wen Hui, performing 

(2025), a new multimedia work. In the trailers posted online, their entangled bodies twist and turn, weaving together a series of personal recollections about war. They don’t (and perhaps never could) offer solutions for ending conflict, but instead pose a more pressing question: 

Why We Die with Venki Ramakrishnan

Picture This: Atoms of Aroma

Toward a Maternal Gaze

Few Drugs Like Dying

Picture This: A Tectonic Revolution

Picture This: A Tectonic Revolution

Swamp Dogg: If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It

Swamp Dogg: If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It

Take to the Trees

Take to the Trees

The Perfect Orgasm

Death Poems from Eileen Myles

Sense and Senescence

Hypochondria

Life in the Shadow

Life in the Shadow