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

The first thing I hear in Madlib’s music might be the last thing he wants me to notice. Tucked behind the curtains of albums like 

 are warped horn phrases, staggered bass lines, and drum breaks summoned from the past. The music moves with a crooked logic that feels equally unruly and purposeful, rickety yet calculated. The beats—rooted in samples from obscure funk and underground jazz—feel like they might collapse at any moment, but they never do. On the surface, the music sounds 

—percussion pushed slightly to the right channel, vocals sometimes over to the left—but the mess flavors the arrangement. Beats that sound too clean just don’t have the same soul.

Among the more heartbreaking news to emerge from 

 in Los Angeles, at least for music lovers, was the word that Madlib lost his longtime headquarters to the flames. The Altadena home where he lived with his family was one of 9,000 structures claimed by the fire. But it was also where Madlib kept his recording equipment, and a collection of vinyl that filled three rooms of the place and which numbered some 16,000 LPs—a sum of vinyl he estimated to weigh 

, or nearly as much as an African elephant. It was an archive of Black music that some fans likened to the Library of Alexandria.

Madlib has inspired a generation of rappers and beatmakers, pushing them to live outside the box sonically, to push their arrangements off the grid. If hip-hop has always been about recontextualization, about taking what exists and making it speak differently, then we’ve long looked to Madlib to push that philosophy to its outer edge. The loss of his records to the chaos of the fires, for many of us who’ve admired him and others who donated to his campaign to rebuild, invited a reflection on the alchemy by which he’s turned those records into his music.

For three decades now, Madlib has made a career out of controlled disorder. Born Otis Jackson, Jr. in Oxnard, California, in 1973, he emerged in the early ’90s as part of the group Lootpack alongside the rapper Wildchild and DJ Romes. Even then, the sound was off-kilter: loops that felt a little chaotic, drums just a hair behind the beat. But beneath that looseness was an obsessive musical mind, one steeped in the deep crates of yesteryear that filled those rooms in Altadena—Nigerian psychedelia, library music, Italian free jazz, and German funk. Madlib’s beats weren’t disheveled because he didn’t know what he was doing. They were blotchy because he understood exactly how much disarray a groove could hold before it came undone.

Listening to Madlib’s work is a little like studying a weather map. Patterns swirl and systems collide, reshaping and reorganizing as they progress. Samples expand and unfold like storm fronts; others pop up like sudden blasts of heat. The surface can feel unpredictable, but there’s a rhythm to the turbulence. With all this frenetic energy, one could call it a form of musical chaos theory.

It’s the sonic equivalent of a nonlinear equation, a system where small tweaks lead to wildly different outcomes.

Chaos theory, as mathematicians describe it, deals with systems that appear random but are actually governed by underlying patterns and sensitivities. It’s the science of turbulence, of weather systems, of the famous butterfly effect—the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil might eventually set off a tornado in Texas. Tiny variables create massive shifts. Order hides inside apparent disorder.

Madlib’s beats operate in a similar space, blending the basic logic of rap sampling with the unpredictable wobble of funk. Traditionally, hip-hop producers like Pete Rock and DJ Premier might take a four-bar sample from a soul record, chop it cleanly, and let it cycle with precision, creating crisp, predictable grooves: stout beds for head-nodding emcees to rap over in four-bar bursts of flow. By contrast, Madlib seems more interested in what happens when the arrangement starts to fray, when the fragments loosen a bit and almost jump the rails. Take his work on 

 as an example: The album centers beats that feel like fragments of larger ideas—songs that stop abruptly, samples that appear for a few seconds and vanish. A typical producer might smooth those edges, but Madlib leaves them jagged, lending an alive feeling to the music, as if it’s constantly shifting under your feet. It’s the sonic equivalent of a nonlinear equation, a system where small tweaks lead to wildly different outcomes.

In mathematics, chaotic systems often hinge on recursive relationships and patterns that repeat with slight variations each time. Madlib works the same way with his audio clips: He’ll take an old jazz riff, thread it just long enough, then let the loop drift slightly off-center. Maybe the drums lag behind the melody by a fraction of a second. Or the sample itself is pitched slightly wrong. That microscopic misalignment becomes the engine of the groove, and keeps me coming back to songs like “Kneecap Jelly,” from 

, his collaborative album with Georgia Anne Muldrow, and “My People,” from Erykah Badu’s 2008 LP 

. In both instances, something about the beats felt off, as if Madlib tried to play live instruments through electronic equipment. Human error makes the music sing.

In Madlib’s world, the drum machine doesn’t have to be a metronome. It can stumble, drag, and surge forward. It can sound saturated and less than pristine. Those imperfections become part of the rhythm and play a critical role in his sound. They aren’t considered problems, or something to avoid in the pursuit of clarity. Rather, in the pursuit of said clarity, these hiccups—arriving coated in grit, as if the vinyl they came from had been played countless times on a dull needle—illuminate Madlib’s iconoclasm. Along with 

, he helped normalize the idea of a beautiful mess.

Madlib has always been an archeologist and educator, pulling and honoring a past you should know about and celebrate. 

I hear this especially in Madlib’s fascination with jazz, a musical idiom that thrives on controlled unpredictability. Improvisation is chaos harnessed into form; musicians reacting to each other in real time, pushing and pulling against the rhythm until something new emerges. Madlib’s connection to jazz runs deep. His father was a singer and session musician; his mother a songwriter and pianist. The trumpeter and educator Jon Faddis is his uncle. Under the aliases Malik Flavors, Ahmad Miller, Monk Hughes and Joe McDuphrey, and through the imagined ensemble Yesterdays New Quintet, Madlib has recorded entire albums of jazz fusion, playing many—if not all—of the instruments himself. Across his discography as a jazz purveyor, the albums were proving ground for how beatmakers could bring rap sensibilities to acoustic music. One can hear it in more contemporary jazz, in the work of Makaya McCraven, who chops and loops his live sessions like a producer blending samples. The results land somewhere between jazz and rap: equally indebted to the groove and the science of beat construction, this music is meant to introduce jazz to listeners who aren’t familiar with the genre. Madlib takes it a level deeper: He’s introducing Black underground jazz—artists like Horace Tapscott and Wendell Harrison and labels like Tribe and Strata-East—to those who appreciate the genre but may not know about avant-garde acts like these. Though artists like Tapscott and Harrison were never mainstream, their work still exists on the culture’s fertile edges, dotting the landscape of jazz as a whole, even if they haven’t received the credit they deserve.

Technically speaking, distortion introduces nonlinear behavior into a signal. When a sound wave becomes distorted, it no longer follows a clean mathematical curve. Harmonics multiply, overtones collide, and new frequencies emerge from the chaos. Musically, distortion can turn loops into living, breathing organisms—the type of phenomenon Madlib inhabits. His 

 series from 2013 felt like walking into a room where the music never stopped playing. By the time Madlib started releasing those volumes, he’d already cemented himself as rap’s great shapeshifter, a producer whose ears moved faster than the industry could categorize him. But 

 announced a new direction, revealing something deeper about how he heard music beyond jazz, funk and soul. You could call his 

 series a collection of beat tapes, but I’ve always called them excavation sites. Madlib has always been an archeologist and educator, pulling and honoring a past you should know about and celebrate. He exhumes prog oddities, fuzzed-out guitar riffs, and the kind of deep-cut vinyl that feels like it’s been sitting untouched for 50 years. He treats these samples as artifacts and clay—bending, melting and molding them until they become something else entirely—something that doesn’t quite belong to rock or hip-hop or jazz. And that’s where Madlib’s resonance lives.

When a sound wave becomes distorted, it no longer follows a clean mathematical curve. 

He’s letting drum licks and guitar chords scream through modern production equipment. He's heard the ghostly hum of old vibraphones and the din of forgotten vocals thunder through claustrophobic pockets. Madlib transforms, giving different breath to the bygone sounds. You can hear the air around the samples, the crackle, the imperfections coming forward. Tape hiss and dirt. Madlib leans into that, as if he’s trying to remind you that these mistakes lived before they reached his sampler. It’s music you can almost touch. That also extends to collaborations and projects one wouldn’t expect Madlib to be a part of.

When he teamed with rapper Freddie Gibbs for the album 

, released in 2014, Madlib stepped outside of himself, offering beats that oscillated between lush and soulful, with a little more gangsta than Madlib had delivered to that point. Though Gibbs’ voice became the element of order threading through Madlib’s kaleidoscopic swirl, my ear always centered on where the beats were headed, even beyond the rapper’s flows about sex, Indiana, and cocaine. Because of Madlib, their collaboration never settled into autopilot. There were surprises in the music that kept my ear affixed to 

. Through it all, Madlib’s intuition shined through these recordings, his music as daring as ever, the misshapen funk still persistent.

 Freddie Gibbs And Madlib: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

His beats often sound like they’re assembled quickly, almost carelessly, but longtime collaborators insist the opposite is true. He spends endless hours digging for records, testing samples, and tweaking instrumentals until the groove feels right. What sounds spontaneous is actually the product of deep listening, similar to the way jazz improvisers prepare for the unknown by mastering their instruments. When John Coltrane launched into one of his volcanic solos, the notes might seem to spill out unpredictably. But that freedom rested on years of discipline, of studying harmony and rhythm until the rules could be bent without breaking.

Madlib approaches the sampler the same way. And the sampler, in his hands, becomes less like a machine and more like an ecosystem of Black classical music. Frequencies collide and mutate. A bass line pulled from a forgotten African psych record might find itself dancing with Argentine piano chords from another decade entirely. The result is music that feels both ancient and futuristic, somewhere and nowhere concurrently. Part of Madlib’s legend comes from this sheer abundance, having released music under dozens of aliases. A dusty avant-garde sample on one record might echo the mood of a groove from another. A drum pattern might reappear years later in a completely different context. The themes recur, but never exactly the same way twice. Which is why fans keep digging through his discography, uncovering new patterns and reassessing old ones. Madlib’s catalog has a rare sort of replayability, despite kaleidoscopic aspects that challenge the ear. And yet, for all the talk of complexity, the emotional core of Madlib’s music remains simple: No matter how weird the beat becomes, it still moves your body, even if you can’t fully articulate why. He seems to know that chaos alone isn’t enough, and that noise without rhythm is just noise. The pulse must survive the turbulence as the gravitational force holding the whole beat together. Something magical happens when that balance clicks, when the disarray becomes precise, like a storm that somehow knows exactly where it’s going.

It’s why Madlib has become a legend. Because while he follows the tenets of hip-hop production, he keeps discovering new ways to break them. Since word broke last year of the fire that claimed his precious archive and modes of production, we haven’t heard much from Madlib. But we have the records he’s given us. They remind us that order and chaos are partners in a dance. And that somewhere inside that dance, amid the crackle of vinyl and the blur of repurposed brass, Madlib keeps finding the heart. ♦

Marcus J. Moore is a music journalist, editor, event curator, professor, and author of

 The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America 

 High and Rising (A Book About De La Soul). 

gen-fleya

Madlib Finds the Heart

Ben Lerner Speaks to the Dead

The Sonic Eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO

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

ROBERT MACFARLANE

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

, rather than undrinkable, unswimmable, untouchable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 I saw the most despair and the most hope there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

” You answer by insisting, as we must, that 

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

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

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

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

sys-tnr-std-cond

Robert Macfarlane: Rivers Are Alive! 

A full century after the discovery of a peculiar microscopic world, quantum mechanics has triumphed as the most precisely verified physical theory in the history of science. Yet the quantum world defies everyday intuition and conventional notions of reality. Particles exist in eerie superpositions, simultaneously there and not there, or become mysteriously entangled across vast separations, challenging comprehension. 

To take on quantum weirdness and its most pressing contemporary implications, our Director of Sciences, Janna Levin, hosted renowned scientist Paul Davies in conversation with innovative experimental quantum physicist Natalia Ares. Together, they untangle the quantum technology revolution unfolding in the burgeoning field of “quantum information science,” featuring new tools such as quantum computers, quantum cryptography, and the quantum internet—technologies that have attracted billions of dollars in investments and triggered a frantic quantum arms race between nations. At the same time, theorists are wrestling with this quantum realm, where ghostly quantum particles influence nanotechnology, cause black holes to evaporate, and may even contribute to the universe’s expansion. ♦

 brings together two scientists in conversation to explore unsolved quandaries. The focus is on ideas and the unknown, the precipice between where we are now and where we imagine the future will bring us.

Quantum Weirdness

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I’ve been making collages for close to 60 years, since I was a teenager. I guess you could say that collage-making has been my 

—Ingres, the painter, liked to exercise his unpainterly emotions by fiddling. For me, the work similarly provides another channel for my outsized ambitions. It also answers a permanent need. I had wanted to be an artist since I was a toddler, but I was colorblind and all thumbs. I couldn’t get my drawing to do what I wanted it to do. Collage was a way to make art while skirting my deficits. And collages were very hip in the late 1960s. I noticed Eve Babitz’s collages on the covers of rock albums, and the collages in 

by someone who called himself Sätty, and the use of collage by psychedelic poster artists such as Stanley Mouse. And I’d seen Max Ernst at the Museum of Modern Art and thought his collages of the 1920s were as hip as anything out there today. I had scissors, Elmer’s glue, and a sheaf of oaktag. My parents subscribed to 

 magazine, and someone had for some reason given us a lot of back issues of 

. I made one collage after another. All I can remember of them now is that at least two featured a mushroom cloud, a popular image at the time, and I was very proud to have followed the trend.

I went back to drawing not long after that, and didn’t resume collages until my first post-college job, at a large secondhand bookstore in lower Manhattan. Soon after I started there I was put in charge of the paperbacks, which meant that when the store acquired a library, I would be handed everything that wasn’t a hardcover book to judge and price. The result was a continual flood of collage materials, of every possible sort: magazines, newspapers, maps, posters, technical manuals, programs from the Folies Bergère, South Vietnamese government propaganda, disbound nineteenth-century geographies, entire stamp collections. Furthermore, I now had venues. Many of my friends had formed bands, and I started making collaged gig flyers for them—which also entailed going out and wheatpasting them furtively at night, but then you’d see your work in the streets. And in the run-up to a narrowly avoided strike, my bookstore colleagues and I started a zine, intended as a gripe sheet, that instead came to feature art and poetry. I put in my collages, as well as a collage-and-text series by my pseudonym, Dave Carluccio.

But I quit the bookstore and all the bands broke up and I no longer had a context for making collages, so I stopped, for decades, if begrudgingly. That didn’t prevent me from dragging my stock of materials from one apartment to another, and house to house. (I still have, and sometimes use, paper I acquired at the bookstore 50 years ago.) It was social media that finally brought me back. That and a book-exchange table that my local supermarket had for a while, where I found the damnedest things: German medical textbooks from the 20s, crudely illustrated Spanish pamphlets from the 30s, movie-star magazines from the ’40s. I deplore social media, of course, and the people who own these platforms, but Instagram is about pictures, my weakness, and gathers together many real-life friends. I am guaranteed an audience.

By now I have enough magazines to stock a midtown Manhattan newsstand in the 1950s. I favor imagery going back to the early years of the twentieth century and ending around the time of my birth, which was 1954. (When I was young, I had a theory that one’s clothing tastes were determined forever by the fashions one saw after leaving the womb.) I like a matte finish, and everything after that is too glossy. Also, a certain knowingness comes in; before the 1960s there was a prevailing innocence, visible in the faces in the crowd—as well as the terms in which they were pitched by commerce—that is now impossible to recapture. I also favor fading, foxing, water stains, scorch marks, rips, tears, all the blemishes that mark the distance between that time and our eyes. I grew up in postwar Europe, so before I ever saw movies or television or heard a pop song on the radio, it was magazines and movie posters—which were glossy and imposing until they were shredded and contemptible—which were the chief signifiers of the big world and its drama, that indefinable thing I wanted to escape to from an early age. 

Now and then I’ll also dabble in nineteenth-century engravings, but the truth is that between them, Max Ernst and Bruce Conner sewed up that field once and for all. I am in thrall to the collage tradition. The earliest work I know hangs in my house, a long-ago wedding gift. Against a midnight-blue backing dotted with stars, a tangled web of foliage entwines various cavorting mythic figures, including two by William Blake and one by John Flaxman, strangely streaked here and there with long drops of blood. It is dated 1860 on the back and attributed to John Bingley Garland, described as “an English clergyman,” who was nothing of the sort. (An album of 43 of his collages, known as 

, was once owned by Evelyn Waugh.) And then, running along the walls of the gallery in my mind, are Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and Valentine Hugo; Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy; Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield and Kurt Schwitters; Wallace Berman and 

; Gil J. Wolman and Jean-Louis Brau and Guy Debord; Joe Brainard and Robert Rauschenberg; Tadanori Yokoo; Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard McGuire.

I think of my collages as posters, no matter what size they are. Since they are often dominated by a word or a phrase, they could be advertising imaginary movies or bands—or perhaps less tangible attractions. Simplicity is always the best bet, so I like to work with as few elements as possible: word, background, figure; I’ve made collages with only two ingredients. Much like writing, making collages involves drastically using up options: 50 percent with the first item, 25 percent the next, and so on. The ideal result is something tight, inexplicable, and inexplicably tight. I enjoy the challenge of making an object that can be consumed by the eyes with no thought involved, and at the same time introduce a thought that lies just on the edge of meaning, preserving maximum ambiguity. 

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

. The following essay was written to accompany her exhibition 

, which is on view at the American Academy of Arts and Letters from March 14 to July 3, 2026.

ser-scandia-stencil

Lucy Sante's Knots

My father is obsessed with outdated maps. By which I mean he loves artifacts of history, theoretical relics, remnants of abandoned plans, evidence that someone was once on their way. My mother is obsessed with other people’s predilections—the more bizarre and arcane, the better. Near the end of his life, her father kept overstuffed manila folders by the desk he turned into his deathbed, where he asked me to file hundreds of printed articles into slots lovingly labeled in his all-capitalized, handwritten pen: LAMENTS, ATHEISM, STUCCATORS, PALINDROMES, PORPHYRY, STUPOR MUNDI, VALCOUR AIME. Map a man’s fixations, my mother would argue, and you might find out what happened to him, or worse, what he wants. But cartography, I’ve learned, is a wily art.

I discovered the writings of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips at the bottom of a rabbit hole, nearing rock bottom. It was a bad summer for almost everyone I love. The landscape was riven by nervous breakdowns, spiritual roadblocks, and camouflaged pits of emotional quicksand, not to mention mountains of credit card debt. I underlined maniacally, scrawling startled slivers of revelation in the margins.

 Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, Monogamy, 

in addition to incisive, psychoanalytically infused literary criticism, published regularly in the 

 I thought I wanted a map or a guidebook, so I found an irreverent Virgil in him, never mind the fact that he encourages improvisation when asked for stage directions. A riff is usually an off-ramp, so he suggests learning to lean into the curves and handling the open road with panache, one hand on the radio dial. On the other hand, I know a lot of people addicted to destinations. In his psychoanalytic biography of Harry Houdini, Phillips recommends clambering back up the escape hatches we build—all the better to get a bird’s eye view of the void, not to mention a closer look at what we’re running from, which, he’d wager, is whatever we are most afraid to lose.

I kept his prose on my person that July, hopscotching my way through emotional minefields, not without getting burned. I’d been diving headfirst into misadventures that I hoped would relieve my intrusive thoughts, but really I was surrendering myself to their whirring motor. Someone once shouted “She’s on fire!” across a party at me, and the man I was talking to yelled back “I know!

 because we were halfway through inventing a lingua franca that would lobotomize anyone attempting to eavesdrop. Really, I’d stepped backwards into a decorative candle, and my hair was in flames.

Phillips condemns theorists who prize gravity at the expense of gusto. If you have the juice, eureka is all about delivery. Not to be confused with deliverance, which, after all, is the detritus of a desire for risk, and usually requires a savior. “If you are keeping your eye on the exit, you can’t give yourself much time to see what is going on in the room,” he writes. “In other words––and most literature is these other words,” Phillips writes, there are “no experts on love. And love, whatever else it is, is terror.” In my experience, terror is not necessarily terrifying if you aren’t afraid to get your sense of self wet, or at least a little muddy.

If you have the juice, eureka is all about delivery. Not to be confused with deliverance, which, after all, is the detritus of a desire for risk, and usually requires a savior.

A friend once told me we have the same problem: emotional Pangaea. Contrary to the dictates of the self-help feministas who fill my TikTok feed, my boundaries remain demilitarized zones.

The internet divas encourage defining and enforcing your borders to protect your peace. This is not an uneducated or unearned stance––women have spent generations drafted into the endless battle of managing other people’s emotions. But a defensive crouch is a constrictive posture, one that keeps you from stretching your legs, let alone growing. Phillips finds our contemporary fervor for erecting emotional borders evocative, suggestive of a larger cartographic yearning: for a clear route to certain, enclosed selfhood, free of dependence in all its pains and pleasures.

Beneath the more unyielding language of boundaries, he sees a wish not just to protect the self, but to fix it in place. “The map becomes the ground beneath their feet; and maps are always a smaller ground,” Phillips writes in his provocative new book—whose playful title, 

, flirts with the possibility that you could describe your desires only to be surprised by deeper wants that exceed them, not to mention the other, still-illegible sentiments that might lurk beneath the enjambment. Phillips is an impassioned conversationalist, one who believes psychoanalysis betrays itself by putting the couch on a pedestal. The practice, instead, should be construed as just another genre of conversation, as sublimely quotidian as a meet-cute. This is a conviction that reveals his priorities for conversation, identity, and language itself, all of which are conceits he considers far more fungible, thankfully, than we’ve long assumed.

“In describing the life you want, you may be merely the ventriloquist’s dummy of your culture,” he writes. But, if we reconceive of “language as a tool kit rather than a bully or a saboteur or a dictator or a seducer,” we can instead cast our own internal puppet shows, weaving the narrative threads of our lives into novel tapestries. Treating “philosophy as [a] transitional genre,” Phillips writes a comedy sketch-cum-treatise, puppeteering Richard Rorty, the father of American pragmatism, and Sigmund Freud into his protagonists.

Where psychoanalysis inquires about our buried desires, insisting on their implacability to the point of determinism, pragmatism promises to rewrite a life story in vocabularies that might harbor a new ending. On their own, Phillip finds each theorem a bit dry and wanting—but in dialogue, they provide a choose-your-own-adventure game. Together, they allow us to traverse the harrowing territory between Freud’s unconscious—a threatening, “seething cauldron of instinctual life”—and Rorty’s much friendlier “conversational partner that feeds us our best lines.”

Putting the paradigms of psychoanalysis and pragmatism in conversation, he discovers they are equally seductive, useful “fictions.” The two have been counting cards under the table, playing unlikely accomplices all along. I fall easily for his fleshy connections; I like convoluted syntax I can misinterpret.

So in storytelling as in life, we are narratively intertwined. Our resistance to helping each other reflects a terror of needing help, evinces a “resistance to being properly noticed; and to the dependence being helped entails.” If we consider the entropy of our dependencies “an inspiration, not a terror” we might write our lives into unexpected genres: love letters, or––and!––novels. An exemplary, spry aside––wondering when, if ever, autonomy might be all it’s cracked up to be, he tucks the following parenthetical into his cheek: “(useful for voting, say, but not that useful for falling in love, or writing poems).”

Often, I can hardly tell whether I’m executing a rescue mission or embarking on a fool’s errand. I once borrowed a getaway vehicle to break my friend out of the psych ward. When I put the key in the ignition, an unnerving number of dashboard lights flared on. But what’s a little low tire pressure? A bumpy road is simply a rickety massage chair, if we accept “pragmatic redescription as secular alchemy.” Everyone got home safely, even if I got a little ash in the cupholder. The discharge forms filled a binder thick as a Bible.

If rescues require foolhardiness—an inclination towards risk, alacrity in the overstep—then so do the attachments Philllips finds fertile. Co-conspirators, frenemies, former lovers, real friends: these are relationships not governed by clean lines or best practices. They are improvisations, rife with lurking danger and open to misrecognition. By which I don’t mean misunderstanding, but zany translation, meaning melted down into something new, words welded into tools you didn’t know you needed until someone else strung the right sentence together, and tied it around your wrist as a friendship bracelet.

“If you beat a person into shape, you are bullying them; if you beat metal into shape, you are making something.” With a crafty rhetorical trick, Phillips transforms a liar into a fabricator, a master craftsman. If we operate from the premise that credulity is a bid for relation, fabulism is less deceptive than connective. The best storytellers want the listener to pen the coda. Two of my best friends are in an intellectual feud neither of them is aware of, over their diametrically opposed definitions of the word “durational.” One is a consummate flirt and a recovering liar, the other is prone to unconsummated affairs and autofiction. One finds the word meaningless, because doesn’t everything have a duration? The other thinks that’s the point, a blunt instrument is still a tool.

Phillips finds our contemporary fervor for erecting emotional borders evocative, and suggestive of a larger cartographic yearning: for a clear route to certain, enclosed selfhood, free of dependence in all its pains and pleasures.

Someone I almost knew believes fear is foresight. It might be a flare sometimes, but terror is also often a barely posed question—a muffled urge worthy of attention, a pool cue awaiting warm fingers, angled aim. A religious devotion to foresight fits a life into a sturdy masterplot, but I prefer my autofiction more digressive. Phillips insists that flirts are the opposite of experts, who promise to soothe your fears but are actually paid to stoke them. Our culture’s trophy chest rewards its players for winning old games: completing the marriage plot, getting rich, solving the crime––Phillips, instead, plays truth and dare with his readers:

Do you want to enjoy it or do you want to understand it?”

We were all beginners once. Mired in melancholy, my novice’s mindset can set someone else at ease, and melt my own malaise. Phillips admits that he was ineluctably altered by a book he never read with a title he never forgot––

. I imagine he got the gist, if not the point. The liminal spaces we’re trained to avoid might be life-affirming detours––flirtations, fantasies, and free association can “eroticize the contingency of our lives by turning doubt or ambiguity into suspense.” To their credit, my parents chose not to clutch old trophies in sweaty palms. Rather, they concocted tangential side plots, followed directions from bygone eras, made up the rules as they drove, and became beginners again. My grandfather’s manila folders, like any good map, charted the threads that pulled him off course. Take your eye off the prize, and you might catch the sparkle in someone else’s. Hatch an entropy plot and find “something you want more than the life you want.”

Here’s a story Phillips once told in a book, cribbed from a poem based on a rumor: A band of soldiers is totally mapless and utterly lost in the Pyrenees in the dead of winter, certain death approaching. A last cigarette is rolled with jocular dread. A folded map emerges, stuck to the bottom of a bag of tobacco. A miracle––they make it back to base camp, only to realize those faded lines charted an entirely different mountain range. They’d just needed the conceit of instruction—a pocketed, authoritative premise. The point Phillips makes about this myth or memory is that our edges are too often honed into razors. Wield a weapon like a toy, learn a new game, choose your words delicately, and you might just delight an opponent into becoming your teammate.

Missing the point or meandering around it reveals surprising angles, diagonal inquiries. Our culture sells smugness at the cost of spontaneity. Following a map of––or better yet, around––the wrong place raises questions, inspires punch lines, illuminates crevices. If these directions haven’t quite been clear, let the girl in the passenger seat tell you when to turn. Relentlessly en route, you might find yourself, suddenly, on the way home, which is somewhere you’ve never been. ♦

art-tenpoint

Entropy Plot

This essay was originally written to be released with Meshell Ndegeocello’s acclaimed 2024 LP, 

No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin

(Blue Note). Ndegeocello has now moved on from performing Baldwin material. But we’re honored to publish this piece in homage to her work—and in anticipation of the great bassist’s 

concert at Pioneer Works on March 29, 2026

In the old days—in the way back times, way back in what the American author, James Baldwin, called "the old country," or the American South—folks carried their dead with them. Took those shadows and memories down roads and into attics, let them romp and breathe by riverbanks in Georgia, told them stories in Maryland, gossiped with them for a spell in Pensacola, and Washington, D.C. The point was you didn't let the dead stay dead: they were your legacy, and your voice, and in talking to, about, and through them, you learned how you sounded as well, where those multitude of voices sat in your own throat.

You can hear the voices the gone but not gone leave us with in Meshell Ndegeocello's altogether brilliant sonic theatre piece, 

, a work that contains a cavalcade of voices, sounds, and unique utterances around one subject: James Baldwin, whose centenary we celebrated in 2024. But is celebration really the word? In Ndegeocello's hands and hearing, Baldwin was always there, an astonishing presence whose voice—whose multitude of voices as novelist, playwright, poet, screenplay writer, and especially essayist—always talked to us, if we only listened.

Born and raised in Harlem, Baldwin's writing created a universe rooted in the real: the reality of his queerness, his race, the fecundity of his ever expanding mind and heart, and the reality of his ancestors, all the voices that came before and helped make his voice. These included Henry James, his mother Berdis Baldwin's comforting sound, the wrath, piety, and drama, in the King James Bible, gospel music, the critic Edmund Wilson —and, too, the songwriter Charles Albert Tindley. Tindley may not have been a direct influence on Baldwin. But you can hear his retroactive influence on the writer in Tindley's hymn, "Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave it There," a hymn Baldwin, the boy preacher—he preached from the time he was 14; when he was 17, he stopped—might very well have sung on one of those Harlem Sundays, his white shirt stiff with starch and his heart beating out the rhythm as he clapped his hands, flashed a tambourine:

Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.
If you trust and never doubt, He will surely bring you out.
Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

But where could Baldwin leave his burden? Raised in the Christian church by a preacher father who embraced Jesus but who could not love his adopted son, Baldwin competed for his father's attention by becoming a preacher, too, an authoritative role he used, in the end, to distance himself from the terrifying complications of his own blackness and maleness in a country that did not love either. One place he could hear his complexity—the complexity of his mind and heart—was in music. "It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a proactive sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story," Baldwin wrote in his 1951 essay, "Many Thousands Gone." He goes on:

It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in hieroglyphics; it is revealed in Negro speech and in that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference. The ways in which the Negro has affected the American psychology are betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our estrangement from him is the depth of our estrangement from ourselves. We cannot ask: what do we really feel about him—such a question merely opens the gates on chaos. What we really feel about him is involved with all that we feel about everything, about everyone, about ourselves.

If music is unadulterated storytelling—the story that tells the truest story of us, and you, too—how do we make that music? What is the story we mean to tell through sound? In 

, which Ndegeocello and her magnificent colleagues Justin Hicks, Abe Rounds, Chris Bruce, Jebin Bruni, Julius Rodriguez, Jake Sherman, Kenita Miller, and Staceyann Chin worked on for eight years, we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a kind of inheritance: not only the words Baldwin left us, particularly when he published 

, his devastating report on the ways in which ideals of beauty and masculinity destroy as many lives as they hope to make, but how we, his audience, remade Baldwin, while taking some things away. Such as his queer body. His right to his sexuality and thus love. The intimacy that affects being. Did he sacrifice all that to be a voice—our voice? 

Baldwin left the U.S. to get away from racism and I believe homophobia in 1948. He had $40 and no French. The point was to learn how to write, he said once, without all those hang-ups. And to maybe learn how to love. Music helped him become the writer he meant to be. Listening to Bessie Smith records in a Swiss chalet carried him back to who he used to be, and with that he was able to finish his first novel, 

, a book about a Black church and the guilty queer boy Baldwin was in it. That book is filled with singing, with images of the "vertical saints" praying for a salvation that may never come. No God can wash them clean of their blackness, their history. Living abroad allowed Baldwin the distance to see the world he had come from. And music helped get him there. But he knew when it was time to go home. It was 1956, and he was in France. He picked up a newspaper; there was a photograph of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. She was one of the first black students admitted to Harry Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, under the Pearsall Plan to Save Our Schools. Instituted in 1956, the Pearsall Plan was North Carolina's attempt to integrate their public schools following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. For many blacks, North Carolina's "moderate" approach was just more of that Faulkner jazz about "going slow,” which Baldwin analyzes in his 1956 essay, "Faulkner and Desegregation":

The Southern tradition, which is, after all, all that Faulkner is talking about, is not a tradition at all: when Faulkner evokes it, he is simply evoking a legend which contains an accusation. And that accusation, stated far more simply than it should be, is that the North, in winning the war, left the South only one means of asserting its identity and that means was the Negro.

Degradation, violence, spit. "Spit was hanging from the hem of Dorothy's dress," Baldwin reports a witness saying to him; Baldwin: "One of us should have been with her." Returning to the U.S. led, of course, to his deepening friendships with Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, and it also led to him becoming a significant voice in the Civil Rights movement. But where was his voice? That interior voice all writers must draw on in order to become a self?

When James Baldwin published "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in the 

in 1962, the response was immediate. In the essay, the public self merges with the personal in order to produce a polemic that was a sermon born partly out of the heartache of leaving the church a marginalized queer boy and returning to the memory of the church as a queer man. Baldwin's essay deals, in part, with how the the faithless become just that, and how European ideals of religion and beauty crippled and then made whole and fierce, at least momentarily, the black body that ultimately rejected such specious, evil claims.

Writing "Down at the Cross" allowed Baldwin to vomit the church up, and to expose its smoke and mirrors, all designed to keep black people on their knees, sunk deep in piousness and ghetto-think. Despite its wrath, though, Baldwin's longest early piece is shot through with a kind of gay slyness and humor—he reads other people as much as he reads himself. Still, he doesn't forego the galvanizing power of black organization: What if the Nation of Islam, which he reports on and analyzes in the second half of the story, indeed has their revenge on all those white devils who wanted to (at best) keep a black man down? The once white world would be white no longer, and there would be no forgiveness for having equated one's race with power while treating all those others accordingly. Still, in all the controversy that followed his most famous work—it landed Baldwin on the cover of another magazine,

, and required him to display his oratory gifts in any number of non-literary venues—what got lost, at times, was the sheer talent and imagination that went into the thing, and how a changing universe always begins with the word.

Those words are music to Ndegeocello. Inspired by Baldwin’s most well-known essay, Ndegeocello’s piece, first staged as a church service, employed music, sermon, text, images, and movement, all of which entered into conversation with Baldwin’s monumental and delicate essay about how black bodies were perceived not only by white Americans but by blacks themselves. In the first part of the work, Baldwin wrestles with—without naming it—his homosexuality, and with the strain of being “saved,” when he knew, by virtue of his preference, that he was among the so-called “dispossessed.” And in going back to the sounds Baldwin made on the page, Ndegeocello mined those words that return Baldwin to his own body, his own voice, while creating music in her own name, too.

When I first saw the piece in 2016 at Harlem Stage, Ndegeocello’s performance put my heart in my throat. Because this was opera as a form of resistance. And music without rhetoric. “Eyes,” a song written and performed by Hicks, seemed to have been written from inside Baldwin’s body—the very body we had denied him in our veneration of him. But as Hicks sang, he gave Baldwin back to us, and oh, how we had missed him. It was not lost on many of us that afternoon that 

 was being performed not too far from where Baldwin was born and raised, those Harlem streets that made him, even as they threatened to unmake him. Some folks never left the avenue. But when he died in 1984, they gathered, remembering Jimmy, with all those sounds and words that bring him right back to us, with his poppy-sized eyes, and his head in stories. What those folks on the avenue saw in him was hope, his queer Black body shot through with rainbows. 

, too. That Jimmy body dug up; the bones wrapped in rainbow flags and stars: an honoring of the dead that do not stay dead. A legacy. Dig. The music Ndegeocello’s made here lets us hear how the dreams creeping out of his head got into her head and her various musicians, all those voices raised to give Jimmy back his body, that body he was always playing hide and seek with because who wanted to really see it when he was here, see it whole, and the language that went along with it? Language is music. And the music you hear in 

 is Jimmy talking to Meshell and his words meeting the language of her sounds and then coming out again through a multitude of voices, a multitude of sounds and thoughts that bring Jimmy back and give him—finally—his whole and true self, that which he offered up, time and again, if only we knew then how to listen. ♦

since 1994, and won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017. He is

gen-brody

How You Sound?

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.”

April

Full Moon at 10:11 pm EDT. The bright star next to the Moon tonight is Spica.

Until the year 1582, when Pope Gregory reformed all the calendars of Catholic Europe, April 1 was considered the beginning of the year. Or purists might say it was March 25—the traditional date for the vernal equinox.

Madlib Finds the Heart

Robert Macfarlane: Rivers Are Alive!

Quantum Weirdness

Lucy Sante's Knots

Lucy Sante's Knots

Entropy Plot

Entropy Plot

How You Sound?

Big Apple Sky Calendar: April, May, June 2026

Issue 03, Available Now