This February, we’re teaming up with our beloveds at The Believer for a special Valentine’s bundle. That's two great magazines, five beautiful issues, and unlimited online stories for $60.

Like its mythological namesake, the real-life Hydra

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

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

 individuals. These patchwork aggregates develop into one new, united being—albeit one with a few extra heads.

“Most of the time I mix, like, 50 Hydra together,” physicist-turned-biologist Anaïs Bailles told me. “They don't care, they will actually make just one individual out of that.”

Bailles’ 50-animal aggregates derive from clonal strains that once shared the same genome. But Bailles has also mixed together two strains so different from one another that people used to think they were distinct species. Still, the animals grow perfectly well, "united again as one species," she says.

I've been thinking about Bailles' doubly mythological Hydra-Chimeras ever since talking to her about her work on Hydra development this summer. I had learned to think of biological development in machine terms, as construction according to a "genetic blueprint” or “genetic program." But faced with the Hydra, my machine metaphors failed: If a single animal can have several different genomes at once, which one is the blueprint? This might not even be the right question to ask. Because life is not constructed along pre-drawn plans. It grows.

Bailles isn’t shredding up Hydra for fun, though she does radiate with enthusiasm for these plucky polyps. At the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, Bailles studies Hydra to answer a question she originally encountered years ago as a young physicist pondering how the Big Bang spiraled outward into the universe we know today: 

 does complexity emerge in the natural world?

In cosmology, this question is sometimes stated: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The universe started out simple and became complex; scientists are still piecing together the story of how that happened. When Bailles first peered at a developing embryo under the microscope, she saw an echo of the same problem. Like the uncomplicated early universe that became our star-studded cosmos, an animal egg is far simpler than the organism it will become. Where does the complex form of the adult animal come from?

By the eighteenth century, some scientists had concluded that embryos must—somehow, somewhere—contain the full complexity of the future adult. Some imagined tiny homunculi crouching in the heads of sperm cells. Others didn’t take things quite so literally, but still believed that the embryo was, somehow, completely sculpted in advance by its parents. Growing up was simply a matter of scaling up.

This idea, called preformation, might seem unscientific to us now. But in its heyday, it was a materialist alternative to vitalism, the claim that physical forces alone could not account for life. Today, vitalism is considered magical thinking. But centuries ago, many scientists struggled to imagine that mere “matter in motion”—the only stuff of the universe, for a materialist—could organize spontaneously into a living being. Vitalists could invoke a supernatural “life force” that they believed guided the gradual emergence of new forms during development. Materialists could not. But if each new generation was entirely predetermined and engineered by the last, biological complexity would be no more mysterious than human construction. Placing parents in the role of clockmaker brought embryos into the clockwork universe—a perfect, predictable machine ruled not by the laws of physics.

Now of course we know that it’s DNA, and not a preformed homunculus, that the sperm delivers to the egg. In the twentieth century, scientists identified the chromosomes as the units of inheritance. They “cracked the genetic code” by learning to read the protein messages written in DNA’s four-letter molecular alphabet—and much more. By the 1980s, scientists had counted the human chromosomes, linked sickle cell disease to a specific gene, cloned frogs, established the first genetic engineering company, and rebranded the leading embryology journal as one of developmental genetics. Researchers could now not only observe inheritance, but tinker with the “blueprint of life.”

And, very quickly, the genome was understood as just that—a blueprint. Writing in 1955, only three years after the discovery of the DNA double helix, physicist and biochemist George Gamow (who proposed the idea of the genetic code) described the cell as a factory and the chromosomes as the “filing cabinets where all the production plans and blueprints are stored.” The metaphor not only stuck, but shrunk: the genome metaphorically transformed from a filing cabinet of blueprints into 

 blueprint, singular. When the Human Genome Project completed the first full human genome sequence in 2000, President Bill Clinton described it in a White House announcement as the “working blueprint of the human race.” A quarter century later, in 2023, the announcement of the first human pangenome (a sort of collective genome accommodating human diversity) was announced as an “expanding view of humanity’s DNA blueprint.”

The blueprint is an intuitive metaphor, but Bailles and her Hydra should give us pause. When she shreds up and recombines multiple animals in a Hydra-Chimera, different patches of tissue could easily harbor distinct genomes. And yet, together, those cells become one animal. Where is its blueprint?

You can find it clutched in the tiny fist of the sperm homunculus: in other words, nowhere. The idea of the genetic blueprint is “a sort of neo-preformation,” neurogeneticist Kevin Mitchell of Ireland's Trinity College Dublin told me. Nobody is arguing anymore that dogs have puppies instead of kittens because dog embryos contain tiny, preformed dogs, Mitchell says. Nevertheless, the blueprint metaphor still asserts that, in its place, “there is a dog genome, which contains—in an inescapable, deterministic way—the outcome of development.”

Bailles studies brainless polyps; Mitchell studies brains. Specifically, he’s interested in the genetics of brain development, especially as it relates to psychiatric and neurological disorders and differences. And yet he’ll be the first to say that there is no genetic blueprint for a brain.

“The term blueprint is problematic because it suggests that one bit of the genome encodes one bit of the organism, right? There's a one-to-one mapping. You can already see in the genome the shape of the thing to come,” Mitchell explained. In a blueprint, windows stand for windows and staircases stand for staircases. But if you crack open a genome, you will not find anything that corresponds so directly and specifically to an eye, an optic nerve, or sickle-cell anemia. Genes specify the amino acid sequences of proteins, not fully formed body parts or behaviors or diseases.

Simon Fisher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands also criticized the idea of one-to-one mapping when I asked him about his problems with the genomic blueprint metaphor, which he’s vocal about on social media. Fisher studies the role of genes in language and language disorders and was on the team that, in 2001, discovered the first gene mutation associated with developmental speech and language disorders.

Genes specify the amino acid sequences of proteins, not fully formed body parts or behaviors or diseases.

“When I started working on this—on genes and language and genes and language disorders—there were people looking for a gene for grammar,” Fisher told me. “They really thought there was going to be one gene that would do an operation in the brain that would explain all of language. And there are still people who believe that.”

The gene Fisher and his colleagues linked to language, 

, is associated with the development of speech in people. In birds, it is involved in learning vocalizations and songs. In bats, it might play a role in echolocation. When 

doesn’t work normally, it can cause speech disorders in humans and disturb singing in birds. “It’s very easy to break a behavior by breaking a gene, right? But for it to encode this whole behavior?” Fisher said. “That's a stretch.”

 does encode is a protein. Trios of DNA “letters” correspond to specific amino acids, the building blocks of protein, and when a gene is expressed, its DNA is “read off” in a chain of biochemical steps to build a protein. 

’s protein then sticks to specific sequences of DNA to change how other genes are read off into their own corresponding proteins. Researchers still haven’t found all of its target genes, but there are likely hundreds. What’s clear is that 

 is far more than a “language gene”—mutant mice without it are runts with deformed brains and lungs so weak that most can’t survive longer than a month. It also plays roles in other organs and might not work normally in some cancers.

Hydra Cells Regenerating

Even in simpler cases, like the single-gene mutations that cause cystic fibrosis, the gene involved does not “code for” cystic fibrosis, Fisher explained. It codes for a protein that, when damaged or absent, leads to disease in the context of a body.

But if the genome does not contain a clear plan for an adult organism, what 

In the 1961, biologists François Jacob and Jacques Monod described a genetic circuit that switches a gene for lactase, the lactose-digesting enzyme, on or off in bacteria. Glucose is the bacteria’s favorite food, but it’ll make do with lactose in a pinch. The circuit Jacob and Monod discovered, the 

 operon, “turns on” lactase only when lactose is available 

 there’s no glucose around. This discovery won the Nobel Prize in 1965 and inspired Monod to imagine the genome not as a blueprint, but as a program or computer code.

This metaphor is perhaps more helpful because it acknowledges that development plays out in time: the genome, according to Monod, is a set of step-by-step instructions for building an organism, not a blueprint of the final product.

 doesn’t map to any one behavior or structure but rather controls how other genes behave, like a logical operation in a computer program. But there's a problem with the program metaphor. Run a program twice, and it should do exactly the same thing, yielding reliable, reproducible results. Real genomes, however, do not work that way. Environmental factors—for instance, prenatal exposure to alcohol—can clearly influence development in ways that are not preprogrammed in the genome. But even if the influence of nurture could be eliminated completely, nature would still not get the same result from every run of its genetic “programs.”

Mitchell believes that development involves a degree of random chance—what he calls “developmental noise.” In normal flies, for example, particular neurons involved in muscle activation almost always connect to the same muscles in the body wall. But Mitchell has shown that mutating a particular gene leads those neurons to fail to connect, but not always — only sometimes. The mutation doesn't guarantee any particular outcome, it just skews the odds.

Recognizing inherent developmental noise could help resolve some of the confusion around why traits like height, left-handedness, or—more importantly—autism are highly but not entirely heritable. When one identical twin is autistic, the other is autistic up to around 90 percent of the time. 90 percent sounds high. But it isn't 100 percent.

“Evolution has made this really robust program,” says Mitchell. “But when you start to degrade that program by adding genetic variation, it just becomes a bit more variable.”

Life is not a sermon “read out” from some genetic Book of Genesis. 

This is just one of many reasons some researchers think we need completely new ways of thinking about genes and development. Alan Rodrigues and Amy Shyer of Rockefeller University, both life scientists studying how organs self-organize in embryos, the genome is neither a blueprint nor a code. It’s not a machine at all, they told me, and thinking of life that way is holding science back.

Putting on the shoes of a twentieth-century scientist, it’s easy to understand why researchers looked to machines to understand life. The long effort to purge biology of vitalism and bring it closer to the domain of physical science and its “mechanisms” had been hard fought and only recently won. Industrialization had, over the preceding century, mechanized the world—and thanks to Alan Turing’s theory of computation, that even included human thought. The first commercial digital computer, a room-sized machine called UNIVAC I, was turned on at the U.S. Census Bureau two years before the double helix structure was discovered in 1953. The new sciences of machine code and genetic code matured in parallel.

So it’s perhaps understandable that genetics and developmental biology have long focused “on information transmission, linear causality, chains of cause and effect, and things like regulation and control,” Rodrigues told me. “I’m willing to admit that this was a useful way to get a grounding in biology over the last 50 years. But our view is that it is now a bottleneck and we need to let go of the machine.”

Shyer and Rodrigues are especially interested in how life self-organizes across scales in space and time. They are skeptical that genes and biomolecules are more fundamental than processes unfolding at the scale of tissues, organs or organisms. Two years ago, they showed that skin follicles in chick embryos are not pre-patterned by genes or proteins, but emerge dynamically out of physical interactions between clumps of stiffer or more fluid cells at the level of tissue. It’s not just gene expression that influences groups of cells, they argue. Mechanical properties that only exist at the group level—like stiffness or fluidity—can ripple downward to influence gene expression.

Bailles, Mitchell, Fisher, Rodrigues, and Shyer work on very different systems and come from very different disciplinary backgrounds. But their work echoes a common message: that the complexity of life is not pre-encoded in the genome, but emerges through development in a way that is not fully captured by the mechanical metaphors of blueprints and computer codes.

When I asked Fisher, Rodrigues, and Shyer about better metaphors, they said that they don’t have a ready replacement—though Shyer and Rodrigues are actively working with philosophers to develop new and better ways of thinking and talking about life. Mitchell, though, does have a concrete suggestion. Recently, he and a colleague proposed that the genome is like a generative model, the kind of computer program that powers AI art generators like Midjourney. Generative models learn abstract patterns—“catness” instead of a specific cat—and elaborate them dynamically in several increasingly complex, partially randomized steps to produce entirely new images. The same model, given the same prompt, is exceedingly unlikely to produce the same output twice.

Mitchell’s metaphor seems particularly helpful for understanding the role of chance in development and for recruiting machine mathematics to describe life in useful ways. Still, I can’t help but yearn for a more organic analogy. Generative models are, after all, machines. And life—a shifting, restless thing that's more process than artifact—is not.

, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson hypothesized that human language—and cognition—rests on metaphors rooted in our embodied, biological lives. Perhaps it’s a bit ironic, then, that I find myself leaning more and more on language itself as a metaphor to understand biology.

Life is not a sermon “read out” from some genetic Book of Genesis. Development, I imagine, is a dialogue between the genome, experience, environment, chance, and the forces of the physical world. And just like human conversation, it unfolds simultaneously across scales in space and time—a shared glance, a quick text, a dinner conversation, a public debate, a viral video, a protest, a movement. Each scale feeds into the next, tied up in tangled loops of cause and effect like the infinite staircases of an M.C. Escher painting. But even that impossible blueprint would be just a beginning. ♦

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

gen-mondwest

Myth of the Genetic Blueprint

Baby-Making on Mars

Becoming Bernie

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

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

January

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

, and having no difficulty hanging onto its moons.

Before the discovery scene in Bertolt Brecht’s play 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last quarter Moon, rising around midnight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The original Giotto painted a famous fresco, 

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

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

sci-ameliapro

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

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This note from the editors appears in print in our 

—alongside essays by Emily Raboteau, Marcus J. Moore, Dr. Sylvester James Gates, and Catherine Lacey; poems by Eileen Myles and Ariana Reines; and drawings by Daniel Johnston.

We humans get much less sleep than other primates, typically not succumbing to drowsiness until well past nightfall. We’re also inclined to socialize after dusk; some celebratory behaviors are only abided after sundown. These nocturnal habits are more than cultural norms. They reflect evolutionary consequences that can be attributed to our domestication of fire. The rise in evening hours spent around burning cinders may have shaped our ancestors’ circadian rhythms in ways that are now biologically embedded.

It was around a million years ago, give or take a few hundred thousand, that the first hominids controlled fire. Our evolutionary predecessors would have known fire’s heat and light, engulfing trees or torching plains, shaping their landscapes. Naturally occurring fires were first captured and maintained to warm hands and roast game, to protect caves and kin from predators at night. But then our forebears struck flint to dry grass to make fire themselves, a discovery that still eludes our chimpanzee cousins. This advance has been credited by scientists with much of what makes us human. Fire allowed us to migrate from tropical to temperate zones; to cook and consume vastly increased sums of protein and calories; to take in the fatty acids that our brains needed to grow. We controlled fire. But then fire controlled us––not just our daily cycles but our mandibles, our metabolisms, our minds.

With fire we developed a compulsive need to transform our circumstances by controlling Earth’s resources. We forged ever-more potent tools for doing so. Since the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, this impulse has defined our accelerating dash toward what once may have looked like techno-salvation but which looks increasingly like our own extinction. Our will to turn Earth’s combustibles into energy has been the essential story of the anthropocene ever since James Watt got his steam engine whirring in 1769. Ambition cooking the biosphere into oblivion.

We contemplate these aspects of our species’ story at Pioneer Works, sometimes with bemusement. After dark, our audience collects around the fire pit in our garden for conversations and music that have inspired pages in this print issue, 

’s third. Robert Macfarlane reminded us, as we recount in an assemblage of quotes from animals who’ve graced our stage, that “when we recognize what is human in the creaturely, we also recognize what is creaturely in the human.”

It’s perhaps inevitable, as our own oblivion feels proximate, that we’ve turned our technology toward a signal fantasy of our age: the aim of leaving our damaged earth altogether to colonize space—never mind that our mandibles, metabolisms, and minds have been forged by forces here on Earth. That’s the subject of one piece here. Others skirt our self-proclaimed importance and our technological compulsions. Biologists remind us that whales have been breaching and thriving in our oceans for 50 million years with no technological ambition, while we’re on the brink of self-inflicted extinction after tens of thousands.

We sapiens are a technological species. We’re also an artistic one, and have been since our forebears threw up drawings by firelight on the walls of caves. We examine our lot, and produce wonders. This issue charts some of those, in the prose of writers we cherish and drawings by a musician we love; in geometric diagrams of reality’s matrix and maps of ocean floors; in tributes to cosmic jazz and efforts to daylight a brook in the Bronx; in an excavation of the history, and ghosts, of the brick-walled former iron works we call home.

Our fundamental nature as pyrotechnic primates may well be incompatible with our longevity as a species. This we know. What will we do while we’re here? Are we apes? Are we geniuses? Are we poets? Will we burn Earth to the ground? Can we save it? Will we go to Mars? Should we? Are we the apex in life’s experiment or villains in the evolutionary story?

As Cornel West said from our stage, “We are a wretched species…yet we are also wonderful.” ♦

Janna Levin and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro are the editors-in-chief of 

gen-excaliber-nouveau

Issue 03, Available Now

—alongside pieces by Emily Raboteau, Marcus J. Moore, and Catherine Lacey; poems by Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, and Brandon Kilbourne; and drawings by Daniel Johnston.

The excavators, no matter how far down they went, couldn’t find a foundation. Down and down they dug, but all they hit was soft—gravel; sludge; dense mud that stank, beneath a certain depth, of oil. This was surprising, given where they were digging: under the heavy brick walls of an old industrial building, three stories high, whose structure isn’t light. An edifice this heavy needs to rest on something. This one, which dates from 1866, sits a few blocks from the water in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Once, it housed an iron works. Now it houses Pioneer Works, an organization devoted to the arts and science that was readying to install an elevator to its upper floors. The elevator required a footing, which is why the excavators were pawing under its walls—and finding nothing. This, to the place’s current stewards, was concerning. But the engineers, happily, said not to worry.

“That’s just how they built back then,” explained Willie Vantapool, who oversees the physical plant here. “Compact the dirt, slap some tar on timber, and up you go with your first course of brick.” Willie is a gentle man with a punk rock mien whose old Dutch surname isn’t the only trait that makes him a paragon of old New York. “That’s how they did it. And it hasn’t settled an inch.” He means this literally: when the engineers pointed a laser at the base of the wall 150 feet from where we’re standing, at the other end of the cavernous Main Hall, they found those walls to be within a thumb’s width of level, all the way across—despite being built on fill and atop what once were waves. This feels impossible. But also, somehow, apt. This brick-and-mortar monument to industry, which was built for smelting iron but is now filled with ideas and crowds thronging to talks on dark matter in outer space, isn’t so much sitting as it is floating on Pioneer Street. A lily pad on the muck.

“This was spartan construction,” Willie says. It feels hard to believe, gazing at the high west-facing brick wall of windows and gigantic beams—hewn from old growth pine, Willie says. Some of them are 40 feet in length and 16 inches across, and span a Main Hall proclaimed gorgeous by most who see it. But in the nineteenth century, this was the equivalent of knocking up a metal-walled warehouse today to churn out your newest byte-powered invention. It’s fair to assume that most contemporary visitors to the space, whether they’ve come for an outré art show or a concert from august alumni of Sonic Youth, don’t much ponder what its gantries lifted: the place’s look hews to a term—"industrial”—which in twenty-first century Brooklyn is more often used to describe an aesthetic than invite consideration of the actual industries such spaces were constructed to house, and the people who built them and kept them whirring.

Among the once-industrial neighborhoods of Brooklyn’s waterfront, it wasn’t long ago that Red Hook was best-known as a place to avoid. Few New Yorkers came here beyond the 6,000 of them who lived in the Red Hook Houses, the largest public housing project in the borough. In the 1990s, packs of wild dogs roamed the wharves. Now the very qualities that lend the neighborhood its marginal air—quiet streets and proximity to the water; old warehouses and maritime mystique; a certain essence of down-home grit despite the changes—are what draw brunch-seekers on weekends to eat lobster rolls and ogle pricy art. Transit access may still be an issue. But now the main hazard to getting here, if you fancy riding an e-powered Citi Bike down from Brooklyn Heights, is making sure all the docking stations aren’t full. More civilized still is hopping an express ferry from Wall Street to the once-teeming but now serene Atlantic Basin, a brick’s throw from Pioneer Works.

But the ghosts of this area’s industrial past still linger, if you know where to dig in this old “hook” that was named in colonial days for the red hue of its dirt. Not long ago, I aimed one of those Citi Bikes against the flow of brunch-seekers and toward Pierrepont Street, where the Center for Brooklyn History keeps its archives. I wanted to learn about the acquisitive and eccentric men who built Pioneer Iron Works to serve an industry—the sugar trade—that shaped New York and the Caribbean islands to which it’s long been joined. 

“Only the dead know Brooklyn,” wrote Thomas Wolfe of the churn of creative destruction that makes capturing the ever-changing character of this borough’s neighborhoods feel like a task achievable only by communing with souls no longer here. This is as true today as when Wolfe published his classic short story in 

in 1935. Maybe it’s true of all cities. Or of all urban zones, at least, that are typified by now-familiar cycles of industrial development begetting post-industrial decline begetting the arrival of artists whose presence inevitably leads, once financiers start dating the artists, to gentrification on speed. But it’s perhaps particularly true of the long-marginal neighborhood by the borough’s edge where Wolfe set that story for a reason. Red Hook’s historic denizens have included not a few mobsters, illicit importer-exporters, and others good at keeping secrets.

The ghosts of this area’s industrial past still linger, if you know where to dig in this old “hook” that was named in colonial days for the red hue of its dirt.

It was in the 1840s that the Atlantic Basin’s carving from the Buttermilk Channel’s shallows transformed this marshy district of islands and streams into a bustling port. Boosters of that protected 35-acre anchorage, soon to be dotted with ships from around the globe, dubbed it “the eighth wonder of the world.” Boosters of the Brooklyn Bridge made a better case when they applied the same tag to their stately span a few decades later. But the Atlantic Basin’s dredging was accompanied, with the help of rubble from the flattening of nearby Cobble Hill, by the infilling of adjacent waters atop which new streets were soon lined with tenements and stores. A decade later and just down the shore, the even-larger Erie Basin was built by local potentates to connect Brooklyn’s waterfront to the bounteous resources now floatable here, via the Erie Canal, from America’s heartland. Its other edges and nearby quays were lined with stately brick “stores” that one of those merchants built during the Civil War to fill with wheat and bricks and lumber and ore.

Today one such waterfront storage, built by William Beard, houses high-end homes and ateliers within handsome arced windows and thick walls. But in the late nineteenth century, the wharves those stores served sparked the industrial development of the area as the once-sleepy town of Brooklyn sprawled across Long Island’s nub. By the time urbanized Brooklyn became a part of greater New York City in 1898, thousands of factories were turning out pencils and varnish and tin cups and brassieres, along with heavy machinery to build the roads and bridges and boats of an industrial age. Greater Gotham became the world’s foremost industrial metropolis. And in Red Hook, it wasn’t only minders of dry docks and grain elevators who set up shop within spitting distance of the piers.

The most famous sugar refinery on Brooklyn’s waterfront was up in Williamsburg: The Havemeyer family’s American Sugar Refining Company, which in 2014 became home to a famous public art piece by Kara Walker dilating on its past, churned out the Domino brand of crystals that still dominates the U.S. market. But Red Hook, in the sugar department, was no slouch. Once, the American Molasses Company’s huge vats of syrup sat where an IKEA now sprawls. Next door, the Revere Sugar Refinery’s distinctive pyramid-shaped buildings loomed over the Erie Basin’s eastern edge for decades. The nearby Lidgerwood Manufacturing Company sent goods in the other direction. Its workers turned out grinders and boilers for sugar mills in the Caribbean, as well as patented tools for husking coffee beans, for customers in Brazil and across the Americas’ tropics. Later that century, Lidgerwood’s workers also forged winches and cables that were vital to digging the Panama Canal.

Red Hook’s piers helped make New York rich; they also linked Brooklyn to the world. Among the shipping companies whose vessels called Red Hook’s piers home were outfits plying regular routes to Haiti and San Domingo (the Clyde Company); Mexico (Ward’s); and Puerto Rico (the New York and Porto Rico Steamship Company). The latter’s vessels brought to New York many of its first Puerto Rican immigrants in the early 1900s. And the docks, peopled with sailors who crewed ships and stevedores who loaded and unloaded them—and the gangsters and bosses they worked for—also shaped the rough-and-tumble history of nearby blocks.

Access to work on those docks was commonly controlled, in the early 1900s, by Irish gangsters who apprised the daily “lineup” of hopeful stevedores—until the mafia moved in and an Italian organization called the Black Hand took over Red Hook’s wharves. In that same era, when the Black Hand gave famous gangsters like Al Capone their start, a strong community of Norwegian seamen established itself near the docks—and saw many of its transient members stranded there when shipboard work dried up during the Depression. Many of them took up residence in the “Hooverville” of shacks that sprawled across low-lying land east of Pioneer Iron Works. Robert Moses bulldozed the shantytown in 1936 to build a vast public pool, and then the Red Hook Houses was built there a few years later. Moses, the notorious “power broker” who shaped the city’s built environment for decades, also presided over the opening of the Gowanus Expressway that cut the Red Hook Houses off from the rest of Brooklyn and was later widened into the airborne six-lane monstrosity known as the BQE.

By the time that happened, New York’s center of gravity for maritime freight was already leaving Red Hook when Marlon Brando turned its docks into the backdrop for an immortal role in 

(1954). With the advent of container shipping in the 1960s, that center moved definitively to New Jersey (notwithstanding the small container port that remains). A few of Red Hook’s factories held on. At the Revere Sugar Refinery, workers kept clocking in until its parent company went bankrupt in 1985, and left its rusting buildings to molder by the sea (where you can glimpse them, in the 1994 cult film 

, behind a crusty fisherman played by Samuel L. Jackson). The hulking old home of the Lidgerwood Company was bought a few years ago by UPS. Now its old block will be home to a “last-mile” warehouse for parcels bound for Brooklyn’s bourgeoisie.

Such is the fate of many properties on this old industrial waterfront that’s now given over to nodes of a new economy exemplified by IKEA and the Amazon warehouse next door, from whence a steady stream of frowning delivery people now rolls on e-powered cargo bikes stamped with their employer’s smiley logo. But a couple of blocks from the Atlantic Basin’s edge, the husk of another old Iron Works with ties to the sugar trade survives from when it was built on a street once called Williams but renamed Pioneer Street in honor of its foremost factory.

Red Hook’s historic denizens have included not a few mobsters, illicit importer-exporters, and others good at keeping secrets.

The adventuresome young industrialist who built Pioneer Iron Works in 1866 was 39 years old. Alexander Bass hailed from Pennsylvania’s coal country. He trained there as a machinist on the railroad before he decamped for Cuba in his 20s to seek his fortune. Cuba in those days was still a Spanish colony. But its ports had opened to trade with the United States just after the Haitian Revolution saw a million enslaved Africans rise up on the nearby island of Hispaniola, to kill the owners of the French plantation colony that was the world’s leading source for sugar until the late 1700s. In the Caribbean, some six million enslaved Africans were trafficked during the Triangle Trade to feed the world’s hunger for sweetness. The end of slavery on British islands like Jamaica and Barbados in the 1830s also dented those islands’ capacity for sucrose-making. In Cuba, by contrast, slavery didn’t end until 1886, and there the sugar trade boomed throughout the nineteenth century.

Bass began his career by offering his services as an engineer to Cuban owners of slaves and sugar mills in whose businesses he soon also became an investor. He wasn’t the only American to alight in those years on this huge island 90 miles from Florida that Thomas Jefferson proclaimed “the most interesting addition that could ever be made to our system of states.” Conveying Cuban sugar to sweet-toothed U.S. consumers was a big American business. But Bass was the only one of Cuba’s American sugar barons to secure a patent for “temporary railroads” that moved cut cane from field to mill. This innovation inspired Bass, who doesn’t seem to have lacked for self-esteem, to regard himself a vital pioneer: He resolved to open a new iron works in Brooklyn to exploit his patent.

In 1865, in Havana, Bass had a son named William. The next year, Bass the elder sailed to Red Hook to open Pioneer Iron Works on newly reclaimed land by the Atlantic Basin. He took out ads in 

 featuring a drawing of Bass’s patented Portable Iron Railroad and touting the factory’s focus: “Machinery for Sugar Houses and Plantations a Specialty.” Equipment from Pioneer Iron Works, made for builders of sugar mills from Louisiana to Cuba to Puerto Rico, became a mark of distinction. The company also diversified by forging tar kettles and acquiring a patent in 1873 to produce the Lindelof Steam Road Roller: a striking beast of the industrial age that surfaced streets across America.

Alexander Bass evidently profited nicely from these products; he made his home in a stately townhouse facing Prospect Park, from which he commuted to his Red Hook factory when he wasn’t looking after his interests in Cuba. By 1881, Pioneer Iron Works was employing over 60 workers—a fact we know because all 60 lost their jobs, at least temporarily, when on October 27 of that year a fire devastated the building. Likely caused by a malfunctioning furnace, the flames took nearly an hour to extinguish and left some $60,000 in damage. The Iron Works, thanks to insurance, was quickly rebuilt.

Among the archives of Brooklyn’s newspapers mentioning the company in those years was a story from 1882 reporting that the beneficent officers of Pioneer Iron Works were moving, on Saturdays, to close the Works at 3 pm, “to enable their employees to obtain recreation in the afternoon and to give their wives ample time for shopping.” Another reported on the sporting endeavors of those employees, “among whom the cricket fever has broken out quite fiercely,” said 

: The Pioneer Cricket Club, taking advantage of those free Saturday afternoons, played a weekly game in Prospect Park.

Alexander Bass, from his park-side home, didn’t always enjoy pacific relations with his workers. In May 1886, mechanics, boilermakers, and patternmakers at Pioneer Iron Works went on strike to demand that their workday be shortened from 11 hours to nine, and that they be paid for 10. Bass’s response was to can them. But 13 years later, the writer of a letter to the 

 praised Bass for finally instituting the nine-hour day and for the fact that the factory’s workers, who now numbered 130, “were handed a glorious turkey wherewith to celebrate their Thanksgiving.” Hours and turkeys were one thing; working conditions were another. In 1905, the 

 reported that a Pioneer employee by the name of Julius Kastner, 32, was “seriously crushed” by a girder that left him hospitalized with a fractured spine. The next year, another devastating fire destroyed the Iron Works. Again, it was rebuilt.

By that time, the elder Bass’s passing in 1897 had won prominent obituaries in Brooklyn’s papers. His son and sole heir William—who declined to become president of Pioneer Iron Works; an associate of his father’s did so instead—had earned a prominence that outstripped his father’s in the sugar trade to which he was born. Where his father made his first fortune in Cuba, though, William made his in the Dominican Republic. The Basses’ doings there dated from a stormy period in Cuba known as the Ten Years’ War—the first of three wars in which Cuba fought for its independence from Spain, lasting until 1878. Many of the island’s American sugar barons, who would remain big players in Cuban affairs until Fidel Castro’s Revolution kicked them out a century later, rode out the war. Alexander Bass didn’t. He saw an opportunity to develop the sugar trade on the opposite end of Hispaniola from Haiti, in the old Spanish colony there whose cow-hands and merchants, in 1844, had founded the Dominican Republic by claiming their independence not from Spain, but from the new Haitian state whose leaders claimed sovereignty over all of Hispaniola. Bass bought extensive acreage in the young nation, in its eastern province of San Pedro de Macorís as well as a struggling sugar mill in a small town called Consuelo.

The same year he did, in 1886, Bass’s son William turned 21 and set about building a sugar empire centered around their mill in Consuelo, with the help of equipment from Pioneer Iron Works. “Of the group of foreign and local businessmen who dedicated themselves to promoting the development of the Dominican sugar industry,” according to a posthumous profile in Santo Domingo’s 

, William Louis Bass “stands out in particular [as] a figure endowed with extraordinary dynamism and a multifaceted personality.”

Until the 1880s, the Dominican Republic’s sleepy economy had been dominated by cattle ranching. But with the arrival of William Bass and the rise of other sugar pioneers, the country became a new player in the world sugar trade—and saw its landscape and populace transformed by the railroads that Bass built, per 

, to “expand the sugarcane frontier.” Among his other innovations, as a modernizer of industry on the D.R.’s fertile plains, was his bright idea to import 

—or impoverished Black cane-cutters from nearby islands—to work the fields for their yearly harvest.

Soon enough, the Basses’ sugar mill in Consuelo, some 60 miles to Santo Domingo’s east, became the most productive 

 in the country. With miles of rail lines bringing train carloads of cane to its great grinders and boilers, the mill—which Bass ran until 1915—could turn out 4,600 tons of raw sugar per day. During stints home from the tropics, William made Brooklyn’s papers for giving speeches in which he advocated, after Cuba finally won its independence from Spain with American help, for turning the Dominican Republic into a de facto colony of Washington, like Cuba and Puerto Rico were. This position perhaps had more to do with his business interests than with principle: Bass wanted Dominican-produced sugar, subject to much higher tariffs than sucrose from those other islands where he’d worked, to have equal access to the U.S. market.

To this end, he published pamphlets on trade policy and underscored his stature as a titan of his trade by publishing a 500-page tome, succinctly called 

, that detailed every alchemical aspect of how rough cane is turned into powder. A briefer volume, off-puttingly titled 

cane juice—in that process. Bass also fancied himself a poet, and in 1909 published a book of self-aggrandizing doggerel about his Dominican endeavors. It was illustrated with grainy photos of railways, cane fields, and of Bass with Black laborers who worked his estates and whose Jamaican accents he mimicked in verse: “Mista wheelee, you’se ah bad man” / I hear from dependents each day.”

Bass’s bibliography, evincing a more expansive intellect, didn’t end there. After retiring to New Jersey in the 1920s, he nurtured a fascination with the night sky that one imagines him ogling on warm nights by his fields in Consuelo. He contemplated astrophysics and Einstein’s new theory of relativity, which he became curiously determined to debunk. To that end, in 1928 he published a trilogy of textbooks on what he termed “celestial growth,” called 

. He dedicated them all to the memory of his father, “whose slogan of accomplishment,” William wrote, was “Give me a fulcrum and I’ll move the world!”

That attitude, borrowed from Archimedes, seems to have run strong in the Bass men—notwithstanding the unpaid and underpaid labor from which their accomplishments and lucre also derived. And William’s love for the cosmos, by some cosmic force that seems to draw fellow devotees of spacetime’s deepest questions to this corner of Red Hook today, anticipated how such questions persist at Pioneer Works. A new elevator will also soon bring visitors to its reinforced roof and New York’s first public observatory: a domed portal to the heavens whose centerpiece—a magnificent 1895 telescope, nearly 16 feet in length and with a lens 12.5 inches across—dates from the same era as this building. William Bass was a man of that era, when humankind’s capacities for mechanical engineering were at their peak. More an armchair astronomer than a pioneer of the field, he was best known to its followers for his meandering attempts to disprove Einstein in letters he sent to 

and elsewhere. But his love for such polemics found amused favor with Pioneer Works' Founding Director of Sciences, Janna Levin, when I showed her Bass’s assertion, on the first page of his 

from 1928, that, “Astronomy is the most interesting and simplest of topics.” It was a fact, in his view, made “obvious by the number who elect to take up the subject, particularly among the fair sex.”

In 1932, a final mention of William Bass’s name appeared in the 

when the paper reported that his Spanish-style mansion and library in New Jersey’s horse country had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground. In the fire’s wake and in his dotage in 1936, he reengaged the Caribbean by publishing a pamphlet in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, urging the country’s president—his plan never came to fruition—to turn the Haitian island of La Gonâve into a “free zone and free port” for American investors and tourists. He expired some time before Pioneer Iron Works did, at the close of World War II. His father’s old Iron Works, in ensuing years, was occupied by a moving company. Its great hall, once home to gantries and industrial iron, was filled with knickknacks and couches.

William’s love for the cosmos, by some cosmic force that seems to draw fellow devotees of spacetime’s deepest questions to this corner of Red Hook today, anticipated how such questions persist at Pioneer Works.

The knickknacks and couches were still there, 70 years after Pioneer Iron Works closed, when in 2011 the artist Dustin Yellin managed to buy the dusty home of the Time Moving & Storage Company. Yellin and associates, including Gabriel Florenz, the Founding Artistic Director of Pioneer Works (who now serves as the organization's Executive Director), turned the old factory’s carcass into a chapel of culture where history’s scars still linger: One of the giant beams in the third floor Science Studios, as Willie Vantapool showed me, is still charred from those nineteenth-century fires. A few years after this place’s opening as Pioneer Works, I watched a shipping container full of artworks from the other end of Hispaniola—Haiti—land here from the port nearby. Those works’ provenance in the capital of the Caribbean’s first Black republic isn’t all that made 

POTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince

 such an important exhibition at this old Iron Works. But it’s part of what lent special heft to the dots the exhibition connected, between Brooklyn’s waterfront and the Caribbean, that I pondered as I boarded a plane for Santo Domingo, more recently, to find what remains of the sugar empire whose building was enabled by the iron works once sited at 159 Pioneer Street.

The week that I left, a new president in the White House was making waves with policy pronouncements pulled straight from the playbook of a predecessor, William McKinley, who Donald Trump loves as much as William Bass did. In the 1890s, McKinley prosecuted policies animated by gunboat diplomacy and racist grievance. Now Trump, hell-bent on rewinding America’s cultural clock to that era, had just made news in the D.R. by removing a U.S. ban on sugar grown there by the country’s largest landowner and sugar producer, the Central Romana Corporation. Their product, sold in the U.S. under the Domino label, has attracted ill attention for its labor practices—which involve paying rights-less Haitian cane-cutters, who live in clusters of shacks in the fields called 

, pocket change per day for their toil. But those facts, for Trump, are of course less germane than the fact that Central Romana is owned by political cronies of his in Florida.

From Santo Domingo’s airport, I drove east along a highway lined with garish love motels touting rooms for rent by the hour, and baseball academies run by major league clubs—the Dodgers, the Royals—where young Dominican boys dream of cheating poverty with their skills. The capital’s sprawl thinned out into cane fields not long after I passed a road named “Ruta 66 - Honor de Sammy Sosa”—a highway hailing the number of home runs smote by the Dominican slugger during a record-chasing season—and continued toward a city whose nickname, in this baseball-mad land, is 

: the cradle of shortstops. The provincial capital of San Pedro de Macorís isn’t only known for producing major league infielders, though, as a monument by the city’s edge made plain. I paused to snap a picture of what sits there atop a broad plinth: a vintage locomotive from the era when William Bass stretched miles of narrow-gauge rails, built at Pioneer Iron Works, through nearby fields.

I angled north through the cane for 20 minutes, dodging buzzing 

s, to arrive at Consuelo, a heedless sprawl of cinderblock homes and bumpy lanes dotted with 

 selling jumbo bottles of Presidenté beer and small bags of plantain chips. By the town square, an old man told me about how when he was a boy, the mill here had become the property of the dictator Trujillo. He said the mill’s last 

 was in 1999, and gestured toward the brooding ruins amidst tropical trees a few hundred feet away. The main mill building had been torn down, but a gun-toting guard was glad to let me into an acre-sized hall filled with giant iron thimbles and gantries and mysterious machines—and to point me toward where another steam engine from the era of this 

Myth of the Genetic Blueprint

Baby-Making on Mars

Becoming Bernie

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

Issue 03, Available Now

Issue 03, Available Now

A Lily Pad on the Muck

A Lily Pad on the Muck

What Day Isn’t a Headlock?

What Day Isn’t a Headlock?

Miranda July: Circle Jerks

Julian Brave NoiseCat on Indigenous History and Myth

Maggie Nelson: Compatible Perversities

Death Poems from Eileen Myles

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve