The Drift Magazine – Fall 2023 Issue – Essays on dissidents, ecoterrorists, and mermaids; an interview with Veronica Gago, Dispatches on the future of the Supreme Court; also fiction, poetry, reviews and more…
Since these conditions are rarely discussed, this issue is also dedicated to ‘beginnings’ and their paradoxes: ‘you are supposed to begin knowing something but also doing something completely new,’ writes Renee Gladman in the Keynote. Taking in napkin sketches, competitions, references and photographs, AR November 2023 serves a useful reminder that others came before, and that the beginning is behind us.
Lahaina’s wildfire was the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century. Now the community is grappling with the botched response as it tries to rebuild.
At 4 p.m. on August 8th, Shaun Saribay’s family begged him to get in their car and leave the town of Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The wind was howling, and large clouds of smoke were approaching from the dry hills above the neighborhood. But Saribay—a tattooist, a contractor, and a landlord, who goes by the nickname Buge—told his family that he was staying to guard their house, which had been in the family for generations. “This thing just gonna pass that way, downwind,” Saribay said. At 4:05 p.m., one of his daughters texted from the car, “Daddy please be safe.”
The Hamas massacre, the assaults on Gaza, and what comes after.
The only way to tell this story is to try to tell it truthfully and to know that you will fail.
On the evening of Wednesday, October 18th, with the entire Middle East in a state of mourning and outrage, I took a taxi to the information offices of the Israel Defense Forces, a heavily guarded compound in northwest Tel Aviv. Like many reporters, I’d accepted an invitation to see video evidence of the worst massacre of Jews in generations, certainly in the history of Israel—Hamas’s rampage through Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Kibbutz Be’eri, and other communities near the Gaza Strip, extending to an outdoor electronic-music festival, Nova. At last count, the attack throughout what Israelis call Otef Aza—“the Gaza envelope”—had claimed some fourteen hundred lives; thousands were wounded, and around two hundred and twenty people had been kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. Hamas gave the operation a name, the Al-Aqsa Flood.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 29, 2023): The latest issue features The Scientists Watching Their Life’s Work Disappear; Can We Save the #Redwoods by Helping Them Move?; ‘It’s Like Our Country Exploded’: #Canada’s Year of #Fire and #ClimateChange Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night….
Some are stubborn optimists. Others struggle with despair. Their faces show the weight they carry as they witness the impact of climate change.
Interviews by Catrin Einhorn
Amid the chaos of climate change, humans tend to focus on humans. But Earth is home to countless other species, including animals, plants and fungi. For centuries, we have been making it harder for them to exist by cutting down forests, plowing grasslands, building roads, damming rivers, draining wetlands and polluting. Now that wildlife is depleted and hemmed in, climate change has come crashing down. In 2016, scientists in Australia announced the loss of a rodent called the Bramble Cay melomys, one of the first known species driven to global extinction by climate change. Others are all but certain to follow. How many depends on how much we let the planet heat.
The largest trees on the planet can’t easily ‘migrate’ — but in a warming world, some humans are helping them try to find new homes.
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
When Philip Stielstra retired from Boeing in 2012, he needed something purposeful to do. He and his wife, Gay, were casual golfers, but Stielstra, an antiwar activist in college who refused to fight in Vietnam — he worked in a post office instead — wanted a pastime with bigger stakes. Before leaving his job, he received an email from the city of Seattle: The Parks and Recreation Department needed “tree ambassadors.” Tree canopy cover had receded in the city, and the department was responding by promoting an appreciation for its remaining trees. The volunteer ambassadors would learn about these trees and lead residents on walking tours to marvel at them. Stielstra, despite being a self-described introvert, signed up.
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Anthropologist Zelia Nuttall traveled the globe, decoded the Aztec calendar and transformed the way we think of ancient Mesoamerica
On a bright day early in 1885, Zelia Nuttall was strolling around the ancient ruins of Teotihuacán, the enormous ceremonial site north of Mexico City. Not yet 30, Zelia had a deep interest in the history of Mexico, and now, with her marriage in ruins and her future uncertain, she was on a trip with her mother, Magdalena; her brother George; and her 3-year-old daughter, Nadine, to distract her from her worries.
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After 50 years, U.S. veterans commemorate their release from a notorious Vietnamese prison
In March of this year, I followed retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Robert Certain through the entryway of the former Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi. French colonists built the prison in the 19th century, calling it the Maison Centrale and using it to imprison and behead Vietnamese dissidents. During the Vietnam War, American prisoners facetiously called it the Hanoi Hilton. For the first time in 50 years, Certain was about to step inside the notorious compound where he’d been held, interrogated and beaten.
If you pause for a second and think about the activities that occupy most of your day, presumably sleeping, eating, and engaging in social interactions are among the first that come to your mind. Perhaps surprisingly, a small area buried deep inside the brain, called the hypothalamus, is responsible for coordinating neuronal signals related to these activities. By controlling the homeostasis of the neuroendocrine, limbic, and autonomic nervous systems, the hypothalamus is a key brain region for many physiological and pathological processes. Despite its small size, the hypothalamus has a complex cellular organization and circuitry that determine its structural and functional organization. It is composed of 11 nuclei grouped by their location and has vast, mostly bidirectional connections with many neuronal and endocrine systems.
Plants bred or engineered to be short can stand up better to windstorms. They could also boost yields and benefit the environment
To an interstate traveler—or anyone lost in a corn maze—the most impressive feature of corn is its stature. Modern corn can grow twice as tall as a person, but height has drawbacks, making the plants vulnerable to wind and more difficult for farmers to tend. Plant scientists think corn can be improved by making it shorter, and leading seed companies are doing that through both conventional breeding and genetic engineering. Bayer has launched a short variety in Mexico, another company is selling its versions in the United States, and more are getting involved.
How Joe Biden manages the war between Israel and Hamas will define America’s global role
Sergio Massa, the economy minister, will now go head-to-head with Javier Milei
A summit in Britain will focus on “extreme” risks. But no one knows what they look like
Fiction
“Thinking Ahead” by Joan Silber:
“How does a person behave when he knows he’s dying? There’s a myth that people go off and do what they’ve always wanted to do—sail to Spain, buy a horse, eat at the world’s most famous restaurant. ‘They never do that,’ my mother said, ‘that I’ve seen. They don’t even remember why they wanted to do it.”
“Seabreeze” by Korey Lewis:
Jojo and Jaz wait for The Defendant to pick them up from their mother’s place and take them to Seabreeze. “If Disney is where dreams come true, then Seabreeze is where they give up.”
“Eau de Nil” by Chloe Wilson:
“It was a website called Geriatrix. On it were women my age, in various states of undress. I saw breasts droopier and flatter than mine, necks that were crêpier, bellies that bulged and hung. But what really struck me was how happy they looked.”
“Country Furnishings” by Earle McCartney:
The equilibrium in a tetchy blue-collar workshop gets jostled with the arrival of Frank Wonderwood—future son-in-law of the business’s new co-owner and future woodworking graduate from Del Tech.
Poetry
Karen Leona Anderson, Stuart Dybek, Johanna Carissa Fernandez, Mike Good, Cleo Qian, Sarah Lynn Rogers, Joel M. Toledo
Nonfiction
Laura M. Furlan her birth parents, identity, and butterflies. Adam Foulds on the home-turned-museum of one of England’s greatest architects, Sir John Soane. Sam McPhee on the singular fascination hands have on his attention. Jessica Francis Kane on her lifelong affinity with the fascinating James Boswell. And Devon Brody’s “Beth”: “I’m glad to be with only Beth and her long hair that meets the hair on my arms, and the hair on her arms that meets the hair on my arms.”
In Conversation:
Ricardo Frasso Jaramillo delves with Justin Torres into Torres’s career and his new novel, Blackouts, a finalist for the National Book Award.
Art
Wangari Mathenge
A Foreign Policy for a Changed World
Nothing in world politics is inevitable. The underlying elements of national power, such as demography, geography, and natural resources, matter, but history shows that these are not enough to determine which countries will shape the future. It is the strategic decisions countries make that matter most—how they organize themselves internally, what they invest in, whom they choose to align with and who wants to align with them, which wars they fight, which they deter, and which they avoid.
Can a Divided America Deter China and Russia?
The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia. And no one alive can remember a time when an adversary had as much economic, scientific, technological, and military power as China does today.
Boomers Daily 