I am flying. Tomorrow I visit the gates of Bangor Naval Trident Submarine base, the largest collection of usable deployed U.S. nuclear weapons, and challenged by Archbishop Etienne of Seattle in his Oct. 7 pastoral letter, "because the Puget Sound could be on the front lines of a nuclear war." The existential threat emphasized here is followed by his appeal to Catholics to renew their study to Catholic teaching, and cites Pope Francis's 2019 address at Hiroshima decrying the possession of Nuclear weapons. At the gates of savage dreams, where social death not triumph beckons, what if all the unmade roads, trains planes, if at the threshold of nuclear tolerance, all the civic unrest, the living dead, arose to alarm? "the loss that makes the world" –Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism Ornate or basic, thresholds do, architecturally speaking, what acts of recognition, ceremonies of acceptance, ritualize. The opening to a space is marked by the style in which the...

The first person to escape from the Chelmno death camp, Abraham Roy, would live to teach his granddaughter the importance of resistance. Saifullah Parucha, recently released from Guantánamo Bay, may have that chance to pass on a life lesson. Aimeé Ledwell hastens to an appointment with an Indigenous language instructor. Helen Scales popularizes the potential of anticancer chemical compounds extracted from chemosynthetic mussels from hydrothermal vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Rescued from malignant normality, Robert J. Lifton, assures us our extraordinary adaptive skills can avoid the twin apocalyptic threats to humanity and that a new dimension of reality awaits our grasp. 58 percent agree with the statement, 'I am afraid we are headed toward nuclear war with Russia, according to a Reuters/IPSOS poll taken October 4, 2022, " This, the day after another direct threat to use nuclear weapons by Putin. The article introducing this poll aims at the rear guard of the professiona...

 Some years ago  I attended a Boston Book Festival event, the refulgent Colum McCann, effervescent on his collection of short stories, 13 ways of seeing. At the open mic I asked him, “What does it feel like to write a two-page sentence?” He said, “Like music,” and elaborated a comparison to a composer feeling the notes, before he said, he had actually written a forty-page sentence in his book Dancer . Oh, the hypnotic prose of his character Victor gyrating his hips as he walked—the physicality translated on the page—movement, the synthesis of transgressive theme and plot working out that sentence, drawing me as a reader from the street, through the club scene of Studio 54, Victor selling coke, charming, dazzling, life of the party—ever competitive with Rudy, the Dancer, trying in a bath scene—and dueling cock-sucking—a body whose dance would live on, but whose meaning would lay still, lonely, except for the compassion of a masseuse’s hands.  This morning I took up the que...