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There is exactly one swear word in this letter and it is at the very top.
BUBBLE TRAP*
You need to make the question ‘How the fuck do they think that?’ not a rhetorical question.
Supercontext, episode 134, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time, by Brooke Gladstone
To dull the weirdness of quantum mechanics, a physicist’s best bet is to start at the very beginning of its historical development and emphasize experiments. If an experiment is constructed just right, a light wave produces measurements that can be explained if it has actually been a particle and not a wave all along. If an experiment is constructed just right, an electron produces measurements that can be explained if it has actually been a matter wave and not a particle all along. Different physicists worked out how to explain different experiments that classical theories just kept getting wrong, and once they stitched these experimentally driven conjectures together, they had what is now called quantum theory. It was new and odd and some of the greats, ushers of previous theoretical revolutions, pushed back on it. However, the question could always be raised: what about the double slit experiment, what about the photoelectric effect experiment, what about measuring blackbody radiation intensity? Here’s the too-long-didn’t-read version of what these experiments implied: anything that moves can be a wave and anything that moves can be a particle and all that matters is how you construct your experiment – if you fish for wave-like behavior you find it and same goes for the particle side of things. Encoding this notion in mathematical formalism is significantly more nuanced but if everything can (under some circumstances) be described as a wave then it should be mathematically represented by something wave-like as well. Years after the fundamentals had been laid down, physicist settled on the word ‘wavefunction’ and it has become the object at the center of many projects, papers, theses and misguided philosophical diatribes.
What do you do with a wavefunction? To begin, you look for it. As in most of physics, first you specify your system, then you write down some equations (Newton’s, Hamilton’s, Lagrange), then attempt solving them in the hope of predicting future behavior. Consider a ball rolling down an incline. There’s some kinetic energy in this system because the ball is moving, some gravitational potential energy because the incline is elevated, maybe some energy is lost to friction if either is made out of a rough material. You can turn each of those facts into a term in some appropriate equation then solve it to find the trajectory of the ball. Ask me where the ball will be in five minutes and how fast it will be moving and whether it will come to a stop if you wait a little longer – if I can solve the equations, I should be able to tell you. In a quantum system, one wants to play the same game except that instead of a trajectory the object being solved for is the wavefunction and the equation in question the famed brainchild of Erwin Schrodinger. Once you know the wavefunction you know everything. Except you don’t because it is probabilistic. Here is where it all gets confusing if you abandon just dryly calculating and consider thinking and questioning instead.
Suppose you make a really small box with very tall walls then obtain a single electron by some complicated experimental procedure and drop it into the box. The classical equivalent of this problem is a marble in a very deep hole in the ground. Where is the marble most likely to be? It will be exactly where you put it and nowhere else. Where will the electron be? Most likely at the center of the box but there will also be some non-zero probability of finding it close to its very left edge and also the very right and also everywhere in between. Will you find it at one exact spot if you open the box and make a measurement? Yes. Can I tell you what that spot is from my equation-solving? No. All I can tell you is that if you do very many measurements, most of the time you will find that the electron is at the center. But not every time. It’s a wave so I don’t really know where it is, all I can hang onto is probabilities. In physics parlance, we say that the wavefunction collapses once a measurement has been performed: it ‘shrinks’ from allowing for non-zero probability of finding the electron anywhere in the box to describing a state where the electron is exactly at the place where it has been measured to be. If the measurement is performed for the second or third or thousandth time, it will now always produce the same result – the collapsed wavefunction reflects the increase in the knowledge of whoever performed the measurement and things suddenly become more deterministic.
A theory that tells you waves are particles and particles are waves and you can’t really say anything exact about a measurement before you execute it is too much. Further, it is tantalizing because it works. As Stephen Hawking noted in 1983: “Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I'm concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements. Quantum theory does this very successfully”, and the types of physicists that Max Tegmark somewhat pejoratively classified as ‘shut-up-and-calculate’** have for years been proving the latter point. Physicists may not have the most profound philosophical grasp on quantum theory, but it has led to so many practical developments. Virtually all of modern electronics rely on transistors and semiconductors which have to be treated quantum mechanically, and quantum mechanics continues to match experimental advances in academia and industry alike. In courses, students are typically taught the Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) of quantum mechanics, dead-and-alive cats included, but the subtleties of that interpretation are rarely dwelled upon. The typical approach to learning quantum mechanics is far more utilitarian than it is philosophical.
At the same time, if one were to judge based on popular science books, lushly produced documentaries or numerous science-inspired TV shows, quantum mechanics is nothing short of a blank check for all sorts of near-magic. One of the most common ways in which this tendency manifests is in invoking the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) to support some plot-related need for parallel universes. Developed by Hugh Everett III in the late 1950s, the MWI is grounded in the idea that a wavefunction is a real object rather than some handy mathematical way for describing a wave-like state of the system. According to MWI, the many probabilities one can calculate from the wavefunction all point to the existence of something real as well. In other words, if there is even a 0.000000001% (or arbitrarily smaller) probability of finding the electron at the left edge of the box then there is some reality in which the electron is at the left edge of the box – this is one of the many worlds. In popular science writing it is often noted that Everett believed that performing a measurement splits the universe into a number of parallel universes, a different possible outcome occurring in each. In the physics literature, this notion is less lyrical, and world-splitting is denounced in favor of just one large superposition state or a sort of ‘parallel sum’ of different measurers, or different copies of the same measurer, finding different measurements. The copies cannot talk to each other nor can they experience any other measurement outcome than the one they found. While it avoids philosophical discussions of how our knowledge of a system can be so limited that only an interaction with it can provide a definite answer about its state, the MWI is still quite severe, leading to such gruesome thought experiments as quantum suicide – “an iterated and faster version of Schrodinger’s cat experiment – with you as the cat.” Yet, it is a media darling and a possibility (so far not proven to be falsifiable beyond proving all of quantum mechanics is incorrect) that seems to very successfully capture imaginations of non-physicists and physicists alike***.
In fiction, the reality of many worlds, or existence of parallel universes, usually plays the same role as time travel in the sense that it provides characters with an existence alternative to the one they find themselves in. If parallel universes are allowed, we get the redheaded Olivia Dunham and a confident Lincoln Lee, the Batman that is Bruce Wayne’s father, Barry Allen pulling Wally West from the Speed Force, the Cronenberg Morty and Simple Rick, Dessert Bluffs, the Upside Down and a number of books by Stephen King. Unlike in quantum theory, in fiction the philosophical implications are often transparent and as audience we are either supposed to ponder what it is that made a beloved character who they are rather than one of the alternate versions or be relieved that we have developed affection for one of the good iterations of them. The possibility that alternate versions of everyone exist invite self-reflection but they also constitute a safe, inert way to test out decisions and actions one would usually never make. An alternate me may have made the mistakes I have not made but she might have also made bolder choices, confronted things that scare me and grown more as a consequence. If she existed, I could observe this in her and avoid the things that hurt her while taking cues from things that made her great. More realistically, I could also convince myself that some things about her are the ultimate proof that I am correct and that my way has truly been the right way. I would probably judge most alternate me’s pretty intensely.
Being somewhat more subtle than discussing parallel universes, early in her book-length essay The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time, Brooke Gladstone reaches for an example from animal science and introduces the reader to concepts of umwelt and umgebung. She quotes neuroscientist David M. Eagleman to explain that “The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean is called the umgebung.” The umwelt is what hosts of Supercontext in their discussion of this essay more colloquially designate as one’s own ‘bubble’ and this is easily visualized – it’s one’s Facebook and Twitter feed combined with the set of coworkers they routinely interact with, their favorite restaurant, their favorite shirts always on top of the laundry pile, the little pieces of slang and internal jokes they developed with their friends and partners. The umwelt strikes me as something that could be quantified, list-ified, archived or indexed. The umgebung is more elusive and more scary. In the quantum suicide experiment, assuming the MWI is true, one keeps pulling the trigger of a gun aimed at their head and it may or may not fire. Some number of times it does, and the experimenter dies but as long as the experimenter can notice they survived then they reside in a world where they survived. The implication usually cited is that if they are alive then they must have been performing this experiment forever as they could not remember the ‘has fired’ condition by the virtue of having died in that case. However, the more troublesome one occurs once you consider everyone that is not performing the experiment – the rest of us are bystanders stuck in a world where the experimenter has died, or so it would seem because there are no immortal people running around. This is our quantum-many-world umgebung and if the theory is correct, we are completely unware of its true setup i.e. it being just a kooky experiment. (It all always comes back to experiment in the end, just as advertised.) Gladstone is interested in the umgebung and whether we can construct it as a consensus state of some sort. In the language of quantum mechanics, she is interested in overlaps of states rather than products that just slot them into non-interacting components of some larger space.
Just as with characters in fiction that recoil at meeting their doubles (reach for their broken staplers in the midst of a sandstorm), Gladstone notes that realizing our umwelt and the umgebung are mismatched shocks us, feels like an attack on what we have deemed to be the truth. She is not shy about her motivation for exploring this world-collision\bubble-bursting type violence: post 2016 American politics have become a master class in parallel universe rhetoric. Not only does every side in the conflict that is supposed to somehow result in governance steadily hold to their own set of facts and truths, specific to the limitations of their own ideological field of vision, but once confronted with the fact that there is a bigger world out there they use the opportunity to utilize the part of it that is not their umwelt to justify their righteousness. And when one is right, everything seems allowed, including lies about these other worlds that are (morally, politically, philosophically) incorrect anyway.
The instinct is one of self-preservation; us knowing what is real and correct is intimately connected to us being real and correct people. If we recognize our world is limited, we recognize we are limited as well. It hurts our pride when we find out we had been incorrect about something, it hurts our idea of identity when we find out we failed to be more than what our eyes can see, and our ears can hear. The distinctiveness of the reality of our neighbor feels like an insult because if it were so different yet so close in space and time then how could we have possibly not have seen it also. “Who would choose violation over validation? The very wiring of your mind and body rebels against that choice” Gladstone writes. And the rebellion is public and visceral and touches everyone once certain types of people engage in it. More bluntly, reaching for another Welcome to Night Vale reference: “The press conference then erupted into shouts of “Phony!” and “Impostor!’ as the press corps suddenly doubled and began fighting itself.” This seems to be what I see every night at the gym when I look up and there are two TV screens, side by side, playing the same footage on very different channels.
In the subtitle to her essay, Gladstone identifies the seeming dissolution of a shared notion of reality by the means of private lies, office-sanctioned lies, reported lies and lying reports as a moral panic. Reading through her work, full of snippets of analysis and commentary punctuated by quotations from thinkers and scientists that had contemplated this type of reality conundrums in the past, the notion of morality felt particularly sticky. Is it immoral to not question the smallness of your world and do we have a moral obligation to try and expand it? The answer seems to be a strong, resounding yes. What landed us in the current iteration of political chaos seems to be in large part the inability to do so and the embrace of lies and (self)delusions that allow us to avoid that obligation. In his On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century Timothy Snyder articulates this in much more terrifying terms by putting forward that: “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.” Snyder is less slick than Gladstone in his writing, but their punchline is shared: in order for society to protect itself long-term we have to give up some of our animal-like instinct to protect ourselves from conflicting views on reality short-term. To be a moral citizen one just might have to recognize the limits of their field of vision, actively identify where they are then consider peeking over before casting a vote. We ought to perform the kind of parallel-universe-hopping that is forbidden in quantum mechanics.
What is missing from Gladstone’s book is a concern that is something of an ever-present thorn in the side of arguments in favor of more inclusivity and more open-mindedness. Namely, what do you do when someone’s umwelt has no space carved out for people like you? How do you even start to consider a bubble that may be filled with hostility towards “your kind” without resorting to old, isolation-inducing self-defenses? She writes “We breed infinite realities and they never can be reconciled. We cannot fully enter someone else’s. But if we really look, we might actually see that other reality reflected in that person’s eyes and therein lies the beginning of the end of our reality problem.” She does not explain how to morally deal with those eyes potentially being hateful.
Despite the fact that I reside at an intersection of a number of privileged identities, I consider this issue fairly often as it becomes a practical concern, albeit less harmful than a threat of real violence, even in the smallest organizing and advocacy efforts. For instance, if I am involved in organizing an event centered around discussing why my field of work is not more diverse and inclusive, I have to worry about someone raising their hand and saying the discussion is stupid and maybe diversity doesn’t matter or only certain types of people are naturally predisposed to be good physicists so all this advocacy is in vain. At the same time, their opinion is along some axis adding to the diversity of people having the conversation. Even more strikingly, they should be primary targets of many of these events, and not just people that already agree with the premise, that already reside within my bubble. In an episode of Krista Tippet’s On Being, writer Claudia Rankine recounts a situation where she was driven to an event by a person hostile to much of what she stands for, yet they bonded during their ride because they were stuck together and forced to have a conversation that went beyond making it loud and clear that their bubbles are divided by a pretty impermeable membrane. “I’m often being driven by people who are not me, and I spend a lot of time thinking about, how can I say this so that we can stay in this car together, and yet, explore the things that I want to explore with you?” Rankine explains at the end of her story and Tippet is immediately taken by it, recognizes the central role of this stuck-together-so-we-better-see-what-the-other-sees phenomenon, the car here being, and forgive me for stretching the metaphor, something like a temporarily shared reality bubble.
What I personally really want to say is “I don’t have to talk to someone who thinks something about me is wrong and hate-worthy. I don’t have to consider them as a person.”. What Rankine seems to be saying is “if you were stuck in a car with them long enough, you’d realize they think other things too, you’d realize that there’s no escaping that they’re a person”. What Gladstone seems to be saying is “you have some moral responsibility to imagine being stuck in that car or otherwise everything implodes”. Gladstone’s challenge to me is to let go of this favorite overly hateful straw man and try to allow them some real-life complexity instead.
It takes humility to realize that your own point of view is shaped by a very narrow set of circumstances you reside within, but it takes some amount of respect and compassion to realize that you have to honestly deal with other people’s bubbles even when it would feel the safest and most comfortable to dismiss them completely. Dismissing them however makes your bubble both harder to breach and more brittle in the case of a breach, more likely to cut and scar in the breach aftermath. Compassion and respect can provide way more flexibility. In the Supercontext discussion of Gladstone’s book, one of the hosts shares that listening to conservative podcasts has made it easier for him to have conversations with conservatives without immediately losing his composure. The cynical view is that he has become somewhat numb to their rhetoric through exposure, the more generous one is that getting a peak into their bubble has made them more people and less straw and as such easier to commit time and patience too. The other host brings up alien abductions and ghost sightings – you don’t have to believe that alien abductions are real to believe that they are real to people that say they have experienced them. A traumatic experience contextualized through a worldview that allows for the supernatural feels safer if it is ascribed to the supernatural. Quoting the actual episode: “this is subjective reality and the framework of a ghost or an alien is, is what the human mind latches onto in order to make sense of its surroundings.” A priori, this is a relatable process as we all deal with difficult events and topics in ways that make most sense to us rather than someone else. We just fail to relate when we forget that our idea of ‘sense’ in ‘make sense’ is not objective, that it is part of the dialect of our umwelt, not the umgebung.
Being a faithful listener of On the Media, the radio show and podcast that Brooke Gladstone co-hosts, for much of my reading of The Trouble with Reality, I could hear her voice in my head, delivering the lines on the page with all her wit and panache. The tone of the essay is near conversational and despite referencing the likes of William James and Hannah Arendt it is far from stuffy. It was an easier read than I anticipated and upon finishing it I felt surprisingly less crushed than I had expected from the title. There’s a lot of doom and gloom in my bubble and there is a lot of fear and anxiety in there as well, but the 87 small pages I had inhaled in two sittings somehow bypassed that structure and left me pondering the fact that Gladstone ends her work on an almost optimistic note, a cautious exclamation point ringing in my ears. On the last page, where she delivers that ‘we might actually see’ line I circled ‘actually see’ and wrote “can you??” in tiny mechanical no. 2 pencil scrawl. Picking the book back up a few week later, the note seems silly, childish even because it betrays an excuse for not allowing my own bubble to be more permeable or at least less brittle. In another On Being interview, Maria Popova of Brain Pickings argues that ‘we need to bridge critical thinking with hope’ and the tone of Gladstone’s book struck me as almost surreptitiously working towards being hopeful while not neglecting everyone’s favorite critical thinkers in the least. Gladstone knows here audience and she must know that we are bitter and jaded in this era of falsehoods and bad reporting of offensive yelling. No matter how many terrifying quotes about conspiracies, decline of the press and fascism she includes, the overall message is not one of resignation or pessimism. I really found this to be a challenge. Do I really not think we can all do a better job in seeing each other’s realities? Is my own experience really so glum that detecting hopefulness is something I default to dismissing? Has being critical and nothing else become an overly rigid wall of my bubble? The moral panic crept in, just as I imagine Brooke had wanted it to.
Before writing this, being a Copenhagen Interpretation girl through and through, I spent the tail end of one of my late nights reading about MWI and trying to gauge whether it had actually become more mainstream now that we also take strings and holography pretty seriously. A cursory literature search led me to a few papers proposing actual experimental tests of this interpretation of quantum mechanics, concrete steps one could take to prove or disprove that parallel universes exist. These proposals generally require the use of technologies we don’t quite have yet or run into other impracticalities to such an extent that it is probably not too controversial to claim that most if not all will likely not be realized in a laboratory or some similar facility anytime soon. So maybe our umgebung is the scene of someone else’s quantum suicide and we’ll just never know. Gladstone’s prescription, though, is much more straight forward. She cautions against protests and marches and recommends a healthy dose of self-reflection: “You cannot march to a long-term solution to your reality problem with a cadre of like-minded allies. This is a solitary journey, and it never ends. You have to travel out of your universe into the universe of others, and leave your old map at home.” Bonus points for getting stuck in a car with someone during that journey.
Best,
Karmela
* In ultracold atomic systems, the atoms under consideration (typically potassium, sodium or rubidium) have to be ‘trapped’ by carefully calibrated magnetic fields and sets of laser beams in specific geometries or otherwise they warm up and undergo something like evaporation. In other words, in order for cooled atoms to stay close to absolute zero, the degrees of freedom available to them have to be severely constrained. Throughout the development of atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics as a branch of science that studies these systems, multiple canonical traps have been invented and are now used routinely. In contemporary experiments, researchers typically utilize variations of existing traps to manipulate their systems of interest. The bubble trap is one such variation and it forces the cooled atoms to form a hollow shell rather than a fully-filled system. As the name suggests, the atoms in this trap make-up an ultracold atomic bubble. Hollow systems are very interesting physically as they have two boundary surfaces (inner and outer) which changes the way in which they can be excited (think of vibrating membranes on a drum for instance), but they are also mathematically distinct in the sense of homotopy groups (you can shrink a sphere to a point continuously but if you try to shrink a shell you run into the inner surface). Some of my research focuses on such hollow, ultracold systems and experimental physicists are working on realizing them in microgravity environments on the International Space Station (which is very exciting).
** While this Tegmark paper seems to pretty openly come to the issue of whether MWI should be more widely accepted from one particular perspective and is fairly biased in its conclusions, it is still quite interesting as it confronts the fact that physicists do have to choose between believing whether mathematics is ‘real’ or just a useful descriptor of nature that humans invented. Talking about Platonic ideals is typically not a part of a young physicist’s education, so I found this intriguing.
*** Appropriately enough, I am finishing up this letter while attending the American Physical Society March Meeting where roughly 11,000 physicists are presenting their work over the course of the week and some of them have actually spoken about the Many World Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Most notably, Sean Carroll of CalTech (and many podcast guest appearances) gave a fairly long talk arguing in favor of this interpretation. This prompted one of my colleagues to conjecture that Carroll has finally lost it but the tightly packed room of physicist present for the talk would likely beg to differ.
***
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: When I first started writing these letters, I imagined that I would use this section to highlight some cool new piece of physics I might come across in my work from week to week and consequently flex my science communication muscles. I quickly found that that is actually quite difficult since my work process is fairly non-linear and often things I do learn are very specific bits of already very niche topics or, worse yet, technical facts that allow me to calculate something or modify a certain equation a computer might be able to crunch more effectively. Certainly, I am learning a lot – working on three and a half or maybe even four projects at the same time does not leave much idle time for my mind and information can’t help but get lodged there. However, what I seem to be learning most weeks is perseverance and patience. At year five of my degree, research work feels more and more like a marathon race and even the buzz of my advisor outlining a possible publication in a meeting with a collaborator has worn off slightly because I now know that nothing is actually ever fully over, even if you publish it. My recounting of this feeling is further colored by attending March Meeting this past week which is always very powerful in making me aware just how much science there is out there, currently being worked on or just lurking in the back of people’s heads as open questions. I am returning to Illinois and my regular work hours with a pretty full agenda and some good feedback on the one project I had the privilege of presenting as a short talk so the theme of just pushing ahead and soaking up as much new knowledge as possible is bound to continue.
LISTENING: I’ve referred to quite a few podcast episodes in this letter and all of them are probably worth checking out.
On the Media, the show that Brooke Gladstone co-hosts, is not only one of my favorites but likely one of the most informative and educational programs out there. It is a fairly dense show that does not shy away from having an opinion but its analyses of the media landscape, its grasp of history and its success in pushing the listener into being more media literate just by listening to the rather varied stories being covered is really quite incredible. New episodes come out weekly and to a large extent deal with current events. This is the most recent one.
Supercontext is another one of my favorites (full disclosure, I support this show on Patreon) and I found the episode on Brooke Gladstone’s book to be helpful with processing it. The hosts unpack some of Gladstone’s writing while also providing context for it by bringing in her overall approach to journalism and details on how the book itself was made. I think I also have to admit that my boyfriend gifted me this book after hearing this Supercontext episode, which is fortunate because I had tried to order a copy months before just to then have it disappear from my mailbox or maybe never even get delivered regardless of what Amazon had to say. Conspiracy?
I have also mentioned two episodes of Krista Tippet’s On Being which has made it more heavily into my podcast rotation in the recent months though I am not sure Tippet’s style and interests always resonate with me all that much. On Being is an interview show featuring thinkers and writers and Tippet is interested in a broad set of topics one might clunkily categorize under the umbrella of spirituality. She is not always the most coherent interviewer and the guests seem to be given every benefit of a doubt. However, I find myself drawn to it as it is quite different from many other podcasts I keep up with and the fact that it’s dwelling on, for the lack of better word, soft topics and concepts presents a mild challenge to some of my thinking. As I wrote about in my birthday letter, I am interested in being better to myself this year and cultivating more kindness and emotional flexibility so maybe taking a show that occasionally annoys me with talk of mindfulness or overly poetic takes on love is a worthwhile thing to do.
Finally, there are two How Stuff Works shows that have featured discussions of the multiverse and its implications in the past and both are quite good: this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind (a show that pretty much never disappoints) on quantum immortality and this episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe (featuring a real, working physicists as a co-host) on whether the multiverse is real.
On the music side of things, I am still spinning the latest Le Butcherettes vinyl I got after their Portland show a pretty non-trivial amount and still finding new songs to enjoy. Their sound is a very potent mix of angry and catchy, but after listening to the record a couple dozen times I have started to appreciate some of the more mellow songs as well. I’ve played this one, La Sandia, way too many times.
On a similar note, and I am fully aware that the teenage me would hate this indie-type stuff, I have also listened to Lucy Dacus’ record The Historian an embarrassing number of times. It made it onto one of my playlists after I heard a snippet of her soothing and soft yet somehow still urgent and almost cautionary voice on the New York Times’ Popcast and though I can’t remember what critics had to say about it I’ve found some of the songs very compelling. Timefigther in particular is really great and makes me excited in the same way that listening to likes of Chelsea Wolfe does even though Dacus is admittedly way more mainstream.
The last record that has made it into my rotation while I was preparing for a conference and really needed a soundtrack composed of not just podcasters’ voices is this Black Angels record. This is some solid, mildly trippy, mildly psychedelic stuff that speaks to me the same way a lot of stoner or sludge metal does – I am not at all interested in the substances associated with these genres, but I feel their heaviness, their slow reverb and their deep steady roll somewhere in my bones.
WATCHING: My leaving Illinois for a conference last week managed to coincide with the culmination of an eight-week course I typically teach so I spent a few days grading, packing and cleaning my apartment in various stages of frenzy. These tend to be conditions that have me reaching for Netflix and in this instance, I made it through season two of Jessica Jones. Not atypically, I had rather mixed feelings about the show’s first season and was fairly skeptical about where it could go next. Season two was still not perfect but went above my expectations and left me actively interested in a follow-up. Jessica Jones is a show about trauma and the difficulty of processing it and living with it. While season one was often quite ham-fisted and at times simply trying to do too much, season two seems to have found a better pace and given Jessica some time to be more than a caricature of a ‘broken’ person (or a ‘broken woman’ – much of the acclaim season one received dwelled on this fact). Some details about her past still struck me as cartoonish and in need of refining, but one of the big strengths of this season was the time spent with other characters that did seem to get a somewhat more nuanced treatment from the writers’ room. Both Trish Walker and Jessica’s neighbor-turned-associate Malcom are given their own storylines of something that could have been recovery in a less complicated world. Similarly, I found Carrie-Anne Moss as Jeryn Hogarth much more magnetic and interesting than in the past despite her storyline being fairly simple, I might even dare say basic. Walker’s plotline in particular really shines through. There is so much real desperation in her actions and the exploration of addiction through her character is much more convincing and disturbing than a somewhat shorthand attempt at it with Malcom in season one. As the plot shifted more and more towards themes of family with Jessica (in a way that I understand is not present in the comics the show is based on) I found myself increasingly invested in Trish and I hope season three will keep the momentum of her story going. I do also want to note that I was pleased to see the season end on a cautiously positive note for Jessica – as terribly corny as some parts of her romantic plotline in this season are (with some questionable nods to current political controversies sprinkled in), I don’t think I could have taken yet another season of yet another Marvel show that was all desperation and darkness.
Before heading to Boston for March Meeting I spent a really nice weekend in Brooklyn with my boyfriend and on our one lazy night we ended up watching the Academy Award nominated film Can You Ever Forgive Me. I spent a few days thinking about how to formulate what I felt about this movie and came up with no statements stronger than asserting that it was, you know, good and that’s sort of it. Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant certainly deliver strong performances and the story about failed writers, forgery and the inevitable undercurrent of queerness sounds really intriguing as a pitch for a piece of media. Despite these being themes that I would usually be fairly invested in, the overall impression was underwhelming and not more emotionally or otherwise provoking than if Lee Israel’s (the main character) story had been featured in a half hour episode of The Grift I’d listen to on my way to the gym. Throughout Can You Ever Forgive Me it is quite clear what the story is trying to do and what the viewer is supposed to make of McCarthy’s character, but it just does not seem to fully commit to anything. Clearly, we were not supposed to like Lee Israel, yet she was not fully played as unlikeable and the film similarly would not make any other strong statements about her. Her monologue in court towards the end of the movie is as close as the story gets to giving her a bit more depth than ‘scared, failed, slobby, queer, woman’ and even then, it feels almost didactic, like it is explaining to the viewer the ironies and feelings the film is actually trying to highlight. It is a well-made movie, and the backdrop of the 90s and the AIDS crisis is at times rather powerful, but it certainly could have been more impactful and just overall strong as a piece of art had it just reveled in both its dark and light moments a little more.
Finally, feeling somewhat burned out on Marvel shows and having heard some good buzz about it I watched a few episodes of the Umbrella Academy and roped my boyfriend into it in the process. As a big fan of the Hellboy universe and Casanova, I have been peripherally aware of the existence of the comic version of this story because the artist Gabriel Ba had worked on all three but I am also childish enough to have been put off by the idea of reading a comic scripted by someone who was in My Chemical Romance so I never gave it a shot. Watching the show however made me think I should give it a chance as I can imagine its visual identity, quite rich and eye-catching in the Netflix production, being stunning in Ba’s rendition on the page. The story however impressed me less. I have to admit that I got sucked into regardless, sweeping under the rug occasional moments of frustration with how illogically characters can act on a purely logistical level or enjoying griping about it with my boyfriend. The music choices had me most conflicted – some work very well with the show’s lush-music-video-adjacent aesthetic and some just feel terribly forced, like the viewer is being coerced into nostalgically jamming out a little on their couch. I want to finish this season before fully passing judgement on the show, but it has been both entertaining and different from other comic-based shows I have watched recently. It has not been as good as Legion, a big favorite of mine in the genre, so far but the fact that it made me think of it is definitely promising.
READING: Over the past few weeks I have been reading snippets from a book of poetry called Junk by the queer indigenous writer Tomy ‘Teebs’ Pico. I flipped through this book in a bookstore in Portland in February, decided to buy a few other books instead then found myself ordering it from Amazon on impulse. I am not quite sure why, but I have been reading more poetry than probably ever in the last few weeks (I signed up to receive a poem a day from poets.org and sort of spiraled from there) and it feels very new and fresh albeit occasionally challenging. Pico’s book is one long poem about a break-up, junk food and anxieties of being an indigenous gay man in New York City. It is quite unlike anything I have willingly picked up to read in the last couple of years yet very much compelling and hard to put down. He is at times clever and witty, at times devastatingly real and at time simply just crude in a way that preteens would chuckle at. The junk from the title is both the emotional baggage he carries, the candy and sweets he is so partial to and the below the waist situation that seems to bring him as much trouble as being alone does. The poem moves fast, twists and turns the way a conversation might, and the Internet-like punctuation and spelling convention make it feel like it could almost be a collage made of Tweets, Instagram direct messages and heady Facebook posts. I have not finished it yet but here is one of the passages I highlighted while reading:
“A lock on the bridge An old self I pat on the head Post yr grief
Have a personal anecdote It’s crass, performative, self-centered,
and only cute when I do it Call out everyone’s lack of grieving
everything simultaneously Just because I’m not in public
mourning doesn’t mean I’m not w/ grief Mourning sickness”
EATING: Since I have been traveling for the past week or so, my cooking has been all over the place but I did fly to New York with a loaf of homemade sourdough bread in my backpack and squeezed in one night of earthy, feel-good lentils and veggie nights while in Brooklyn. We also attended a vegan pop-up featuring a variety of brunch foods including amazing breakfast burritos and I had some great Chinese food and some really foamy oatmilk lattes while in Boston (as I was staying in an Airbnb I had a chance to make breakfasts for myself as well). Before leaving my kitchen I also quite successfully tried my hand at making seitan from scratch and put together a mac’n’cheese-like dish with a creamy cauliflower sauce but since both of those require a number of ingredients you might not find in a pantry that doesn’t belong to someone either vegan or food-obsessed, I am sharing a much simpler recipe below. It’s for a small batch of peanut butter cookies, adapted from this recipe, and can be modified to fit whatever you have at home fairly easily.
For about a dozen small, soft cookies you will need:
1/2 cup natural peanut butter (the kind where the only ingredients are peanuts and maybe salt)
3 tablespoons flour
5 tablespoons coconut sugar (or brown or any other type)
1/2 very ripe banana, mashed
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
1-2 tablespoons almond milk (or other milk of choice)
2-4 pieces of bakers chocolate, chopped (or a 2 tablespoons of chocolate chips)
Mix all the dry ingredients in one bowl. In a separate bowl whisk the mashed banana, milk and vanilla extract as much as possible then add peanut butter. If your peanut butter is very stiff you can briefly warm it up to make it more liquid.
Add the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until no streaks of flour remain then fold in the chopped chocolate. The dough will be stiff, sticky and crumbly.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper then form the dough into balls, about a tablespoon each, and set them on the sheet. Put the whole thing in the fridge for about an hour.
Bake the cookies for 8 minutes in a preheated 350F oven. They will seem soft and underdone when taken out but will firm up as they cool down. If desired, you can press down on them with a fork to flatten and make a pattern right after you take them out but allow at least 10 minutes of cooling before you attempt eating them.
Tips: Flours and sugars in this recipe can be substituted quite freely with the caveat that brown sugar is more moist than white or coconut sugar and that coconut flour is extremely dry so I would be cautious with substituting the former (maybe add a bit more flour to the mixture if using brown sugar) and avoid the latter. Almond flour or some oats ground to flour consistency in a food processor would likely work well instead of all-purpose flour and produce a gluten free cookie. Buckwheat flour might be a good gluten free choice as well. You could also attempt using few tablespoons of maple syrup (a quarter cup perhaps) instead of sugar and increase the amount of flour until you get a crumbly cookie dough consistency, but I have not tried this. You could use other varieties of peanut butter but be aware that most peanut butters that are not labeled ‘natural’ have palm oil added to them which will make for a different texture. In this case refrigerating the cookies before baking would be particularly important so that the oils don’t cause too much spreading as they bake. I believe the recipe would work well with almond butter or even sunflower seed butter as written as well. The mashed banana can be substituted with two tablespoons of applesauce or a flax or chia ‘egg’ (one tablespoon of ground seeds thoroughly mixed with three tablespoons of warm water and let sit until it forms a gel-like substance).
If you are running out of time, you can pop the unbaked cookies into the freezer for ten minutes or so instead of refrigerating them for an hour, but I would very much encourage not skipping this step as it affects the shape of the cookies. (In general, I am of the opinion that most if not all cookies with high fat content such as butter of any sort should be chilled prior to baking.) You could also freeze some of them on the baking sheet then transfer them to a freezer bag and save them for a future cookie emergency.
Instead of adding in chopped chocolate or chocolate chips you could dip the finished cookies into melted chocolate or drizzle them with it instead. You can melt the chocolate in short microwave bursts (20 to 30 seconds at a time, stirring in between with a fork or a small whisk), in a bowl set over a pot of boiling water or go the ganache route and pour boiling milk or cream over a bowl of chopped chocolate and whisk until it reaches a pourable or dippable consistency.
I made twelve small cookies, but this recipe would likely produce no more than five or six regularly sized (American) cookies.
If you’ve made it all the way down here, then there’s a chance that you care for me and my messed-up sleep schedule enough to consider buying me a cup of coffee. I take it as black as possible, thank you.