Guardian writer Carey Dunne spent a month on an organic farm with a couple who believe in chemtrails. She writes an eye-opening piece on what she learned from the experience. 

An excerpt:
"If Rob were to start reading the news, he’d discover that most mainstream reporting about conspiracists ranges from subtly to explicitly condescending in tone. Maybe this seemed all in good fun back when conspiracy theories appeared to hold no sway in national politics. But with our new conspiracy-theorist-in-chief, President Trump, it’s become counterproductive to laugh off the fact-averse as paranoid kooks, or to passively ignore their perspectives in hopes that science will inevitably prevail.
​
Research suggests that condescension and passive dismissal won’t help change minds – especially given that conspiracy theorists are more likely to meet the criteria for all types of psychological disorder, including anxiety, depression and being socially disadvantaged."

Seventy years ago today, the entire new issue of The New Yorker was, without prior warning, taken up by a single article. Hiroshima was a sensation, with issues selling out almost immediately. Later, it sold over three million copies in book form. 

The New Yorker is making this masterpiece of journalism available for free on its website for some amount of time (I don't know how long). If you don't mind reading on a screen, this is perhaps the best piece of nonfiction journalism ever, and is certainly a founding text of the "New Journalism" movement. 

Calm, unflinching, and attuned solely to the human experience--not political posturing or retrospective debate--this is a harrowing and immensely moving story that makes us hesitate to consider the million small choices we make each day that, for several "lucky" survivors became the difference between life and death. 

First, from  "Traditional Burial Is Polluting The Planet. So Where Will We All Go When We Die?"

"Americans are funny about feeling like they own a 4-by-8 plot for eternity," Kate Kalanick, executive director of Green Burial Council, said in a phone interview Wednesday. "In an environmental sense, traditional burial is selfish for the impact it has. I don't think people really think about how their death affects the land or our world."

Below, From "Dissolving The Dead:"

"Dale Hilton can show you fear in a bagful of dust: 160 pounds of once-living human, pressure-cooked, baked, and pulverized into soft white powder fine enough to sprinkle over French toast. The ground bones sit in clear plastic on a counter, next to a pacemaker,
a false hip, and a pair of breast implants extracted from some of the eighty bodies Hilton has disintegrated at his bio-cremation facility in Smiths Falls, Ontario, an hour’s drive southwest of Ottawa. 'It’s a lovely product,' he says, looking proudly at his handiwork."

​

"Astronomers have uncovered a near-record breaking supermassive black hole, weighing 17 billion suns, in an unlikely place: in the center of a galaxy in a sparsely populated area of the universe. The observations, made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii, may indicate that these monster objects may be more common than once thought."
--from "Behemoth Black Hole Found in an Unlikely Place."


So, 17 billion times the mass of our sun is a lot of kilograms.

I tried to do a little bit of math (I AM NOT A SCIENTIST, A MATHEMATICIAN, OR EVEN ABLE TO MULTIPLY TWO-DIGIT NUMBERS BY HAND SO CHILL OUT IF I MAKE A MISTAKE) to work out how close you could get before getting trapped. It's really scary. The limit is called the event horizon--go past that invisible line and you are the most fucked it is possible to be. The official scientific term is "spaghettification."

I googled around and found an equation to calculate the radius around a black hole below which you have to go faster than light to escape (event horizon, aka: "Schwarzchild radius"). 

It's actually way simpler than I expected:

r = 2MG/c² 

r is the "Schwarzchild radius."
M is the mass of the black hole.
G is a fixed number that has to be used for science reasons.
c is the speed of light. 

Oh, by the way, the Sun (according to Google--I didn't measure it myself) has a mass of: 
1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. 

This black hole has a mass of THAT, times 17,000,000,000. 

Which works out to:
33,813,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms.
For comparison, I weigh about 65kg.

Plug that really big number into the top part of the equation, double it, and multiply it again by the special G number, then divide all that by the speed of light (times itself), and you get--you guessed it--another really, big number. But not QUITE as big:

5,018,500,000,000 meters. I looked up the metric prefix for that and it's "tera-," as in "Five terameters." Like "terabyte," for computers. It's a trillion of something.

Five trillion meters. Or, five thousand billion meters. That's the radius of the sphere of don't-go-there around this black hole. If you remember from math class, a "radius" is half the diameter. Our *entire solar system* has a radius of:
4,500,000,000,000 meters.

Put another way:
Diameter of our solar system: nine billion kilometers.

Diameter of the sphere of space and time that this black hole has cut off from the rest of the universe forever: ten billion kilometers.

"The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country."
​-J. Robert Oppenheimer



I bought a book from a secondhand store to pass the time on my flights to and from Japan. It is enormous, nonfiction, and I expected it to be mostly boring but maybe peppered with interesting facts.

I was very wrong. This book is stunning. Its scope is marvelously large, yet it manages to both explain complex scientific language lucidly and humanize the huge cast of characters all navigating very murky ethical waters as best they can. It is lyrical, philosophical, thrilling, meticulously researched and sometimes just plain terrifying. But it rises above morbid curiosity to ask and offer eloquent answers to the new existential questions that face our institutions and our species. I was reminded repeatedly of The Lord Of The Rings, for its scope and detail (and, to be honest, I liked this book better. But that's just me).

It's called The Making Of The Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. It won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the National Book Award. It's one of my favourite books ever and I really, really recommend you read it.

Here is an in-depth review of the book from the New York Times.

There's a fatalistic joy to looking through old pictures, especially those we have some connection to. It's an encounter with our mortality. The mundane made sacred by perspective.