“There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.”
In this edition of the Weekender: the history of pizza, reading the stars, and the study of a meadow
This week, we’re hanging in a meadow, admiring sea glass, spying on distant galaxies, buying pizza, and watching Balenciaga’s next show.
NATURE WRITING
Once upon a meadow
Claire L. Evans heads outside to consider leaf shapes, birdsong, and the limits of what can be known.
Enter the Meadow
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inThe woods are still wet from the storm. With each breeze, the trees shudder down droplets, as if remembering the rain, and the surrounding meadow steams lightly in the sun. Everything is buzzing. Black-eyed Susans tilt under the weight of the bumblebees and grasshoppers spring from their hiding spots in the grass.
I’ve decided to try and know this meadow as best I can, so I’m sitting on a bench with my phone pointed at the sky, recording bird songs. I’m smelling the wildflowers. I’m taking photos of leaves and comparing them to illustrations in a local field guide. But descriptions are static, and out here in the meadow, everything changes. Without thinking, I pop open a pod and it reveals a tidy row of seeds as green as new peas.
Oh shit, I think. It’s meadows all the way down.
What draws me to nature is how persistently it defies capture. I could count each blade of grass, every worm, ant, bud, and splat of bird-shit, and still know nothing about this meadow. It’d be about as useful as counting grains of sand on a beach. I’m reminded of the late essayist Barry Lopez, who spent thirty years watching and writing about a stretch of the McKenzie River near his home in Western Oregon.
A true student of the living world, Lopez was confident in little else but the fact that the river would continue to reveal itself over time. A river, he explained, cannot be known, not the way a rocket engine can. Because although an engine is complicated, a river is complex, “an expression of biological life, in dynamic relation to everything around it.” Those who really understand landscape—field biologists, hunting and gathering peoples, artists—prefer specificity: how the light moves on the water on a given day. “This view,” Lopez wrote, “suggests a horizon rather than a boundary for knowing, towards which we are always walking.”
I like Lopez’s model of a horizon, rather than a boundary, for knowing. Our relation to that horizon never changes, no matter how much ground we cover trying to reach it. As any scientist will tell you, the more we learn, the less we know, and this is especially true in biology: for all the data we gather, the dynamics of living systems remain impossible to capture and model at scale. It’s all meadows, all the way down.
MUSIC
WHY? ‘Circles’ (Mac Miller Cover)
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in
PAINTING
POETRY
sea glass
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inWhat I love is how it stayed long enough for salt to take its sharpness. Not healed, but changed. Not whole, but held.
PHOTOGRAPHY
HISTORY
A brief history of pizza
While tracing pizza’s storied past, Paul Lenz finds a case for street food as economic indicator, long before the Big Mac index.
A history of… pizza
—Paul Lenz in Histories
For a firsthand account of Neapolitan pizza we have the great Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), who travelled to the city in 1835:
“We deceive ourselves strangely. The Neapolitan of the lower class is not wretched; for his necessities are in exact harmony with his desires. What does he wish to eat? A pizza.
A pizza of two farthings suffices for one person, a pizza of two sous is enough to satisfy a whole family. At first sight, the pizza appears to be a simple dish, upon examination it proves to be compound. The pizza is prepared with bacon, with lard, with cheese, with tomatoes, with fish.”
He goes on to explain how one can assess the abundance of other foodstuffs simply by looking at the prices of pizzas:
“It is the gastronomic thermometer of the market. The price of the pizza rises and falls according to the abundance or scarcity of the year. When the fish-pizza sells at a half grain, the fishing has been good; when the oil-pizza sells at a grain, the yield of olives has been bad.”
The price of pizza was not only determined by the cost of its ingredients. A lot depended upon how old it was:
“The rate at which the pizza sells is, also, influenced by the greater or less degree of freshness; it will be easily understood that yesterday’s pizza will not bring the same price as today’s. For small purses, they have the pizza of a week old, which, if not agreeably, very advantageously, supplies the place of the sea-biscuit.”
STILL LIFE
SCIENCE
Reading the light
Derek Thompson reports on astrophysicists learning to read starlight like language.
The Sunday Morning Post: GLP1s Do Everything, How to Find Aliens, and the End of the World
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in Derek ThompsonMy favorite thing I’ve learned from my podcast Plain English this year is how astrophysicists, such as MIT’s Sara Seager, look for aliens in the universe.
Our telescopes can’t zoom in on faraway exoplanets to spot alien highways, or ET metropolises. What they can do is detect faint starlight from hundreds of light-years away. When an exoplanet passes in front of its star, some of that starlight filters through the planet’s atmosphere. Molecules and particles in the atmosphere absorb specific wavelengths of light, leaving behind a spectral fingerprint. When this blur of filtered starlight reaches our telescopes, scientists use a technique called transmission spectroscopy to analyze it. The result is an educated guess about which gases are present in the planet’s skies—and, by extension, what lies (or lives) below. If a distant alien civilization performed the same experiment on Earth, they’d detect a strong oxygen signal in our atmosphere, possibly suggesting a lush planet teeming with photosynthetic life that’s coughing up obscene amounts of O2.
In April, the New York Times sent the following push alert to millions of people: “Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet.” A team of researchers performed a transmission-spectroscopic analysis of a little blur of light from an exoplanet about 100 light-years away. You can see one result of their analysis in the chart [above]. The acronyms DMS and DMDS refer to the scientists’ estimation that the exoplanet, K2-18b, has traces of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide in its atmosphere. On Earth, the source of abundant DMS is life, especially algae. That’s why some scientists got really excited that we might be looking at evidence of a huge ocean planet blooming with algae-like organisms.
There’s lots of fighting inside the astrophysics community over how exactly to do this science. That’s okay. Fighting about methodology is what science is. But the fact that the science exists at all is what’s most astonishing to me. When babies look at book pages, they see only serifs and scribbles. It’s only as they develop language skills that they find meaning in the lettering. When astrophysics was in its infancy, humans looked at faraway stars and saw nothing but the dumb glare of ancient light. Now we’re learning to read the light, as if the wavelengths themselves are words connoting the density of gases swirling around planets that might hold living things. Scientists are turning faint starlight into something legible to human minds, something almost like an alphabet. If we discover alien life, it may be because science made us literate in the language of exoplanet transmission spectroscopy.
FASHION
Wool sommeliers
on the fine art of the wool auction.
RELATIONSHIPS
Attachment styles
Ava, who moonlights as a matchmaker, examines the difference between platonic and romantic compatibility.
dialectical damage
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inOn the walk, a girl asked me why I wrote about relationships and I said it was because relationships, like clothes, are things you can’t avoid. Unless you’re a hermit, you come in contact with people every single day, and the decisions you make around who you like and dislike, who you keep close and avoid, who you love and how you treat them become the foundation of your life. Everyone has a philosophy on relationships, even if they can’t articulate it. If you’re good at relationships, you don’t need to be good at literally anything else; if you’re bad at relationships, you will never be happy, no matter what other virtues you possess or what you achieve in the world. Put that way, it sounds scary, and I’ve always approached relationships with a certain kind of terror.
Being in a relationship with another person often involves a clash of styles. Like, someone else might have a similar philosophy on relationships, but they probably don’t have the exact same approach. And relationships are inherently a two-person game, so suddenly you’re subject to someone’s process—how they communicate, how they spend their time, who they like, what they value. And you have to decide if you like it, and more than that, are capable of adapting to it.
I used to believe that you should love someone for who they are. I still believe that, but with the caveat that I think that you should also love how they handle things. Is the distinction meaningful? Maybe it’s obvious—as a matchmaker, a lot of people certainly tell me they want to date someone whose judgment they respect. Of course, someone’s judgment can be broken down into a million little things. What’s their prose style? Do they talk slow or fast, do they think slow or fast? Are they confrontational? Are they direct or indirect? How do they talk when they’re angry? How do they apologize? How do they give feedback? Are they expressive or contained?
I mentioned offhand to a friend recently that I could never date one of our mutual friends. He has a habit—I’m gonna make it up for privacy—something like, he believes in only buying plane tickets when he’s already at the airport. My friend couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get past that. And my take was basically that it’s not about the habit itself, it’s about the way that it’s representative of a million other things about this person and their style of doing things and how they live. About their relationship with time, anxiety, control. The great thing about friends is that you aren’t exposed to every single downside of their style and general conduct—like, to some extent it doesn’t really matter if they’re messy or clean, if they’re avoidant or anxious, if they’re a good romantic partner or only an okay one, because you’re not affected by it. But if you’re dating someone and living with them, you are impacted by everything they do.
Often I wish I could approach romantic relationships with the loving detachment I bring to friendships. Like, sometimes you’re on the phone with a friend and they’ll be like, “I’m considering doing [The Worst Idea Ever]” and you’ll be like, “Yeah, I don’t think you should do that, but good luck if you do!” But that would necessarily be a rejection of the merging that occurs in romantic love, where what they do to themselves becomes partially something they do to you.
I keep thinking about this Gillian Rose line from Love’s Work: “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless.” Love necessarily involves exposure and damage. But another word for damage might be change, or expansion. Falling in love with someone’s style is not the same thing as believing it’s the one most compatible to yours. It’s more frustrating than that, and more magical.
TEXTILES
What we’re watching this week
Wednesday, July 9, at 6 a.m. ET
Join Balenciaga as it streams the 54th Couture Collection—Demna’s final collection for the House—marking the first time a fashion house has livestreamed a collection on Substack.
Thursday, July 10, at 3 p.m. ET
of will go live with The Gist’s to discuss making the pivot from legacy media to being an independent creator as a member of Gen X.
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Hello, thank you for assembling a delightful batch of subjects. I particularly enjoyed the idea of a wool sommelier, who can choose a wool based on how well the farmer looked after the sheep, the environment in which they lived and the additional aspects of the wool determined by certain aspects of what they eat. I hate the idea that the price of wool does not even cover the cost of the shearing. The history of England was determined by wool and a sack of wool (The Woolsack) is kept under the seat of the leader of the British House of Lords (equivalent of the US Senate but with 250 active members out of over 800 people entitled to attend).
In the 1980s, on my honeymoon, we spent three days on a Merino wool Farm outside of Melbourne Australia. We stayed in The Farmhouse with the family that raised sheep who talked about the whole process of collecting wool and demonstrated a sheep shearing for us. I held one day old lamb and then it tried to follow me as I left the field. I remembered that the kids in the family were so excited about the movie Crocodile Dundee that was coming to the USA. A golden experience!