Keepers: look what we've done.
Yesterday, I took the kids to the annual Sea Turtle Festival in Titusville, Florida. There wasn’t much to it; standard booths and exhibits for various companies and causes, local craftsmen selling their wares, food trucks, face painting.
But we also heard from local conservationists on the status of and threat to local sea turtles. The kids got to hold a couple, reminding me of the power of nature to awe and inspire us with her creations, if only we allow in ourselves the sense of wonder so foundational to childhood.
We learned, too, of the threats facing sea turtles, from wild boars to climate change. And on the latter point, it was hard to shake the vague sense of doom lingering in the back of my mind, placed there with some urgency by a new UN report.
According to the report:
Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival.
We know what we’re doing to the planet, and we know how hard it’s going to be to stave off total annihilation—even if everyone got onboard, which is certainly not what’s happening.
That vague sense of terror becomes less vague when we see, directly in front of us, the animals whose one and only home we share.
My Keepers
Attention is the beginning of devotion. The idea exhilarates, but it also saddens. If the attention of humans can be so easily filched by a machine—or, more precisely, the companies that operate those machines—then it follows that the capacity for devotion is damaged along the way.
Franklin Foer wanted to read a poem every morning, as a guard against a time—not so far in the future—when we’re all too distracted to read a novel. Foer reasoned that since poetry suffered a catastrophic fall in popularity last century thanks to television, the novel is the next to go, thanks to the internet. He chose one particularly prescient poet as his guide.
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Light from these objects has been shooting across space since about 500 million years after the Big Bang and just recently hit Hubble’s camera. Every week when we fetch photos of objects in the universe, we travel back in time.
WIRED has a small collection of Hubble’s most recent discoveries. Humbling, all.
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If humility has a nemesis, it is hubris. And nothing encapsulates hubris in 2019 quite like Mark Zuckerberg. In a brilliant and clarifying video (which is truly a work of art), Ben Grossman pored through The Zuckerberg Files, looking for any and all instances of Zuckerberg mentioning growth. He then chained them all together. The result is unnerving in how explicitly it lays bare Zuck’s obsession with growth at all costs.