Closed Timelike Curve

On food and time travel

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, some of my recent writing, then some thoughts on the media that I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. 

If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Instagrams about cooking, you may not be interested in every essay in this space, but please do stick around until I loop back to whatever it is that we have in common.

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CLOSED TIMELIKE CURVE*

The laws of physics do not outright forbid traveling through time, but they do make it really annoying to devise ways for moving in any direction other than forward. Infuriatingly, physicists today are pretty certain that time is at least somewhat malleable. 

Until the early 20th century, disagreements about the nature of time may have happened among philosophers, but the most prominent physics theories, like theories of gravity and mechanics that were built from the work of Isaac Newton, did not explicitly dwell on it. In your lab, you would use a clock or a stopwatch or some similar device to demarcate different parts of an experiment as happening at different times. If you asked a friend in a different lab to repeat your experiment, as long as your clocks were synchronized you could be fairly certain that you’ll come up with largely identical results, save for some experimental errors. This notion that time is something that is reliably the same for everyone faced a significant challenge when Albert Einstein developed* his two theories of relativity - special relativity in 1905 and general relativity in 1915.

Roughly speaking, special relativity deals with light while general relativity deals with gravity. And both offer clear recipes for how to change time. In special relativity, if you travel fast enough, time starts slowing down. In general relativity, extremely strong gravitational fields, like at the edge of a black hole, also dilate time. Between the two theories, there is no such thing as an absolute sense of time that we can all commonly refer to. In the relativistic world, you and your friend can synchronize watches all you want, but if your friend hops on an extremely fast spaceship or finds themselves near something monstrously massive, the time they will experience will genuinely be different. 

Neither scenario seems very practical, but we have come close to establishing the first when astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year aboard the International Space Station and returned 5 milliseconds older than his twin brother. This is not a relatable experience, nor is it one that could just happen to you randomly, but the fact that these two theories, which are widely accepted to be good descriptions of our world, allow for them is in itself meaningful. 

The idea that different people perceive the passage of time differently is not so shocking or odd in disciplines like psychology, but physics is a different ball game. Here, researchers have long been bothered by any necessity to specify an agent or an observer before you define a quantity or discuss a measurement instead of being able to make absolute statements. The quantum revolution of the 1920s rocked the physics world so much exactly because it put the experimenter back at the center of how we conceptualize what can be known about the world, and it is what still bothers physicists about all things quantum. The ideal that physicists always seem to be chasing is the one where the world is just kind of out there, waiting to be discovered, and who we are and what we do as we discover it simply cannot matter. 

Theories of relativity challenge this because they open the door for some observers to be in situations so extreme as to completely change their experience of the fabric of reality, or spacetime. Faced with his work, Einstein’s contemporaries were faced with a non-trivial paradigm shift. But Einstein played by the rules of Western science, his math checked out, he provided empirically testable predictions, and he was a man who could hold his own in arguments with other men. His theories persisted and continue to be taught as part of the physics canon. Working as a science journalist more than a hundred years later, a few times every year I still often find myself reporting stories that can be summarized as “new experiment proves Einstein right yet again.”

So, time can be stretched by traveling fast or by cranking up gravity. But what about moving through it?

***

It’s a Friday morning in late July and I am on a video call with my grandparents, my nonno and nonna. Most of what I can see are the tops of their heads because neither of them is used to having to hold the phone and point its camera. That is usually my mom’s job, but she can’t do it this time because she is actually holding the phone for me. She doesn’t have to, but we are rarely on the same continent, let alone in the same kitchen, so she is enjoying it. I am cutting plums for a cake, and my nonno is bemoaning not having put a homemade sausage in my mom’s luggage before she left Croatia. I have been vegan for years now, but the familial urge to share homemade food is so strong that this one small fact simply cannot keep it back. 

“Your husband would have loved to eat it!” my nonno yells as my mom swings the phone to capture me opening the oven. The cake I have in there, not the one that the plums are for but two rounds of a thick vanilla sponge, is not yet ready. “The cake is not ready yet!” my mom also yells into the phone, doing her best impression of someone calling a soccer game. Returning to the plums, which have to be mixed with a good amount of flour in order to not sink to the bottom of the cake that I am about to fold them into, I try to butt into the conversation to say something about the olives, which nonno grew and cured, that my mother did manage to bring all the way to Queens, New York. But we are all speaking at once and words are getting lost across the distance, in translation, and from the sheer interference of our voices.

Most weekends during my childhood, and almost the entirety of every summer was spent in situations just like this. My parents, my brother and I would stay at my grandparents house where food and yelling, be it angry or excited or joyous or just plain in that way that Croatian people just love to be loud, were equally prominent and equally important. If we weren’t eating or yelling or, often, both, I honestly couldn’t tell you what we were doing other than maybe watching the seven o’clock news. So, for me, years later, and miles away, what my phone and my mom are doing for me is allowing me to time travel.

Of course, things were different back then. In the summer, I would have been sitting at the table and my nonna would have been cutting the plums. I would have been wearing a bikini top and denim shorts instead of a sports bra, track pants and an apron. My brother would have been somewhere nearby, instead of working construction a whole ocean away. In the  fall,  I would have been helping make those sausages that I don’t eat anymore, watching the pink and red chunks of meat fill up a greasy casing every time my grandfather turned the crank on an old-timey machine that fascinated me more than grossed me out. Maybe we would not be in the house at all, maybe it would be closer to winter and me and the men in my family would be in our olive orchard, cutting dead branches from our thirsty, old trees and grilling the previous year’s sausages in an impromptu bonfire. I have a vivid memory of my favorite flavor in my nonno’s cured meat repertoire, the sausage heavily seasoned with fresh rosemary that so deliciously soaked up the smokiness of the fire.

You know those time travel paradoxes where you go back in time and kill your grandfather? In my version I don’t hurt the man, I just become him as he is salting olives, laying fresh figs out to dry on the veranda, or picking slightly overripe cucumbers in his garden. I don’t tempt the universe to annihilate my future and present self, but go through the motions of how he cares for his family by putting food on the table just like his parents did, and try to encode them into my muscles so I would be able to do the same. I don’t want to travel backwards in time to change things, I just want to make sure that the connection with the land and the gratitude for its gifts that is quickly slipping away from my big city life becomes reinforced in my core before it’s too late. 

I know that he will never understand veganism because to him meat was not always something that came from the grocery store, wrapped in plastic. When I was six or seven I’d follow him around our vineyard and orchard as he pulled rabbits from homemade traps, went fishing with him on our small boat, and through squinty eyes watched him slaughter our neighbor’s lamb for Easter. His mother made cheese from the milk of sheep herded in his village. My mother remembers her own nonno’s oxen and how they were skinny because there was never enough of anything on the rocky Croatian island where he lived. 

Though my grandparents shop at the supermarket now, the world of factory farming, animal abuse, overuse of hormones and antibiotics in animals raised to become food, of mistreatment of workers in meat plants, of governmental lobbies and environmental damage is not the world that they can see on their plates. Much like me when I load up a stew with rosemary and smoked paprika to recapture some of those cold days in our olive orchard, what they see on their plates is the world of the past and the land that built up the bones and muscles that have allowed them to keep growing tomatoes and peas well into their 80s. 

You know they cling onto that world, the world where excess really was a luxury, because for every special occasion they still serve meats that they cured themselves, pasta that my nonna made by hand, zucchini from their garden, fish they caught by themselves. No matter how strongly I feel about my role in shaping the world of today by being intentional about what I put on my plate, I will always be sympathetic to this, to our shared urge to let food take us into the past. As Melissa Faliveno wrote of making her mother’s sauce with meat even though she is mostly vegetarian: 

“It’s being transported to a place and a time that exists with each day a little more hazily in the dark pockets of the mind. It’s the taste and smell and the feeling of a place, and a time, shards and slivers and pale ghosts of which you can conjure sometimes, but to which, in the end, you can never really return.”

A few days after that video call, my mom will complain about my nonno’s cucumbers. “Did I tell you that he left them on the vine for too long again? He’s always been so stubborn about that. You have to peel them when they’re old like that, they get so bitter,” she will off-handedly mention as if I had never left home and we have nothing more urgent to discuss. I will be grateful for that brief moment of anachronistic normalcy. When we get cucumbers in our farmshare the week after, I will immediately feel six years old again.

A cucumber growing overripe in my nonno’s garden

In theory, you could concoct a way to travel backwards in time, but, as I said, it would be annoying. Likely, you would have to create a wormhole that connects one point in spacetime to another.

Spacetime is often described as the fabric of reality, and you can actually imagine it as such - a taut fitted sheet that all the planets and stars sit on top of, like marbles and softballs and maybe some bowling balls that form indentations in the sheet because they are massive. If you were an ant on this sheet and started walking towards one of the balls, eventually the dimple in the sheet around it would make your path curve. This is the sense in which massive objects warp and bend spacetime. The fact that smaller objects, like moons, move around planets in circles because of this warping is attributed to the force of gravity. 

Before Einstein, you’d say that there is a gravitational interaction between the two celestial bodies or maybe that the force of the planet keeps the moon orbiting around it. General relativity revealed this more dynamic, malleable picture where it’s not really about one-on-one interactions between objects as much as the fact that they all have an impact on the shape of our shared spacetime. 

The taut sheet analogy has one flaw in that it does not fully capture that spacetime is four-dimensional. Each point in spacetime has three spatial coordinates, just like a point on a globe does, but it also has a  coordinate in time. Traveling across spacetime then does include traveling through time, but the spacetime paths that allow you travel back in time require more extreme configurations than a dimple. 

If you want to travel to the past, your best bet is to create a tunnel, or a wormhole, between two spacetime points that have the same coordinates in space, but correspond to different times. Einstein considered this possibility in the 1930s and many other theorists had looked into it since. The equations that we think describe the spacetime that we live in are not mathematically inconsistent with some wormholes. Yet, most physicists agree that they are unlikely to be out there, just waiting for us to use them for time travel. 

As physicist Aron Wall told New Scientist a few years ago: “There are two questions here, which are: whether you would expect this to occur naturally – and there the answer is almost certainly no – and also if you could expect a sufficiently advanced civilisation to be able to make it.” He left the second question open, but the fact that year after year researchers publish papers filled with mathematical recipes meant to do exactly that speaks to their hopes and curiosities.

In addition to the question of how you would go about making a wormhole, you’d also have to worry about how to keep it open. In fact, many mathematical models suggest that any wormhole, even the tiniest one, would collapse almost immediately after being created. There are differing opinions on how an extremely technologically advanced civilization could remedy this. 

They could, for instance, use negative mass or negative energy, neither of which seems to naturally occur in our universe. Or maybe they could leverage some quantum mechanical effects which would affect the wormhole on the microscopic scale, one atom at a time. The rub here is that physicists don’t yet know how to marry quantum theory and general relativity - we do not know how to make gravity quantum - so the details of this idea are speculative. And then there are even more outlandish theories like the wormhole staying open because we actually live in a world made of strings, or because our universe is a giant hologram. These are ideas that capture the imagination and if you spend enough time studying them you may find their mathematics aesthetically pleasing - but they are still just a fantasy encoded in the pages of academic journals more than anything else.

There is one more option, however, and it has to do not with spacetime and wormholes, but with quantum entanglement. This is an idea that goes back to physicist David Deutsch’s work in the 1990s, but is just now been experimentally tested in earnest. Here, what is traveling in time is not a person or an object, but a property of some quantum particle, like the way an electron is spinning or the direction in which a particle of light wiggles. It is a more tame form of time travel, yet still a very contentious one among physicists.

To begin with, you need two quantum particles that are connected in the very singular manner of quantum entanglement. This type of connection follows from the mathematical structure of quantum theory - the equations tell you it is allowed - but from the very beginning physicists didn’t quite know how to make sense of it. Then, they started entangling particles in the lab. This forced them to think that there is more to entanglement than just math, but clarity on how exactly it works is still lacking. The thing is, if you entangle two particles then separate them by some incredibly large distance, they always seem to stay intensely correlated. 

Suppose you entangle two electrons but you don’t know how each is spinning individually. You then give one to a friend and keep one for yourself while your friend hops on a spaceship to Mars. If your friend, now temporarily a Martian, makes a measurement to determine how their electron is spinning, because the two are entangled, your friend will immediately know the outcome of the measurement you could make on your electron before ever picking up the interplanetary phone and asking you to make it. The naive interpretation is that the two particles have a way to communicate instantaneously so that they can immediately change their state in reaction to what has been done to their pair. All that we currently know about physics suggests that this is impossible. Instead, physicists argue that the quantum world is “non-local” i.e. distances between objects don’t actually matter at all.

The idea of non-locality is at odds with the way classical physics works, and how we experience the physics of everyday objects, so many researchers have tried to find explanations for entanglement that do not involve it. Deutsch’s work inspired one such alternate take that is usually called “retrocausality.” It reframes entanglement as a connection through time. In this interpretation, when you measure something about your electron, a signal is sent back to the time when you had first created the entangled electron pair. This retroactively changes the electron that you gave to your friend. Locality is preserved but we have now allowed information to travel back in time.

Just this year, science writer Miriam Frankel reported on an upcoming experiment that will test this scenario in the pages of New Scientist. Flipping through the magazine in search of something I had written, I was stunned to read one of her closing paragraphs:

“We may, however, be able to use quantum time travel to subtly but usefully tweak the past. Imagine setting up a pair of entangled particles and preserving them in perpetuity. This could act as a kind of waymarker in time. Physicists in the future could use retrocausality to tweak the state of the particles, influencing the result that physicists in the past would get if they measured them. This could never directly alter an awful past event in the real world, like an accident. But perhaps you could link the outcome of the quantum measurement to the real world and so – in theory – change the course of history.”

As it turns out, you may not actually need a machine that can pierce spacetime to travel back in time - a strong enough connection could do the trick.

***

The reason why we are pretty certain that we are always traveling forward in time is because of something called the “thermodynamic arrow of time.” The idea here is that you can tell you are in the future - you have moved along the direction of the arrow - by realizing that some things around you have changed in an irreversible way. To illustrate this, physicists and physics teachers, like the one I used to be, often use food. For instance, we know the arrow of time is real because a broken egg never spontaneously reassembles itself. Or, if you leave a hot kettle of tea on the counter it will eventually cool down and to revert it back to its hot state you will have to pay a price in terms of having to add energy to it by putting it back on the stove.

I am prone to wreaking havoc in the kitchen, whether it be spilling, dropping or forgetting things, so the menace that is the thermodynamic arrow of time is not foreign to me. When I cook, in my mind, we are, however, often moving in opposite directions.

Nothing that I cook now is actually exactly as it was when I was a child, because I live abroad and because I am vegan. But almost none of it would exist if I could not selectively access the past. Take that Friday morning, when I was getting ready for a bake sale and my mom was so enjoying showing off my American kitchen through her phone. I baked three desserts that day: a lemon olive oil cake topped with cherries and plums, a vanilla cake with salted vanilla frosting and a fairly sour pineapple filing, and soft yeasted buns filled with apricot jam. In the version of spacetime that exists in my mind, each has had a well-defined trajectory through it. And each carries a strong connection to something that has shaped me in my past.

The buns are the simplest example. They are a vegan take on what I remember both of my nonnas making when I was a child, down to the apricot jam which is very popular in Croatia and used to be sold in small plastic buckets. The vanilla and pineapple cake is the most complicated. It was an homage to cakes my mom made for family gatherings in the summer, which consisted of a simple sponge, a layer of fruits that were considered exotic on the shores of the Adriatic, like pineapple and kiwi, encased in gelatine and topped with whipped cream. 

I took a lot of liberties here, ditching kiwis and gelatin and opting for a tiered cake instead of just one gorgeous but practical layer. But what being away from home and eating differently than I used to taught me about this type of emotional time travel is that it is not about getting the details exactly right. For me, it is about recapturing a specific moment of juxtaposition and conspiracy of flavors that happens on the tongue and a brightness and joy that a scent or a familiar glide of the spoon across a mound of cream triggers in the body. What I am after is not a perfect replica, which is almost always impossible to achieve, but some more ephemeral yet intensely emotional connection between who I used to be when I first ate the dish and who I am now. I’m not just looking to push the nostalgia button, and the past is not available to me with encyclopedic precision, yet an embodied familiarity with a flavor, a texture or a smell persists. 

When my mom tried the pineapple vanilla cake, I did not ask her if it tasted like something she may have baked for me in the past, I asked her if it reminded her of our past summers together. She could taste it, those old summers, some nearly forgotten. I thought about retrocausality - did we just send a signal in the past, making sure this mixture of flavors elicits an emotional reaction from us in the future? After all, neuroscientists will tell you that the brain rewrites our memories every time we access them.

A few days after the bake sale, we ate at a Thai restaurant and my mom intently searched her plate for traces of her past travels, offering me extra bites of papaya salad and fresh mangoes as if eating them could retroactively write me into her trip to Thailand. When I came home really late one Thursday, chasing deadlines at work then chasing that with a boxing class, she made stuffed peppers and mashed potatoes. 

“I knew you’d make that, you always make that when you visit,” I said, covered in sweat and M train grime, heaping a pepper that was bursting with rice and beans onto my plate. Traditionally, peppers are stuffed with rice and ground beef and though they are a Croatian staple I never really liked them before I was vegan. Veganism expanded my palate so much that I looped all the way back to dishes I used to dislike and reimagined them within my new frame of eating for kindness and sustainability. My mom caught on and started making them too. We created something like a loop in time all within the confines of a single bell pepper.

***

Most popular science articles about time travel open with a quip - don’t you know that you are time traveling right now? What writers mean by that is that we are subject to that arrow of time too and it is always, relentlessly pushing us forward. 

Traveling into both the past and the future are popular topics in science fiction and make for a great exercise in imagination, but, practically, the latter is the one where we can make a difference. At work, I cannot escape having to imagine the future. “If I were to call you in 3-5 years, in the best case scenario, what would the impact of this research have been?” I ask scientists several times a week. I acknowledge that predicting the future is a big question and encourage them to “hedge as much as you want,” but I always have to ask.

Will we have an unhackable internet thanks to emerging quantum technology? Will AI recreate the smells of our childhoods? Will we actually manage to add new elements to the periodic table?  I ask fanciful questions that border on science fiction and the researchers light up when given a chance to employ their own imagination. Then, I go home and take my much needed computer break by cooking dinner, letting myself time travel just enough to remember how my nonna salts eggplant before cooking with it, or my mom’s stews so full of vegetables that we kids called them “čudovište,” a veggie Frankenstein dish of sorts. That past, filled with home cooked meals and hanging out in the kitchen, helps me worry less about the future, even if worrying about the future is a staple of my profession. 

In July, I attended a public conversation between Jerusha Klemperer of FoodPrint and Alicia Kennedy, author of No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating and a great food and culture writer all around and really enjoyed their animated discussion of different ways in which how we eat is important. The idea of the future kept coming up, whether it be the future of food, the future of the planet, or the deep connections between the two. 

I took notes on my phone: “Who are we trying to save? Whose diet is important for the future?” and “Envisioning a future based on eco feminism? The question is not how to feed the whole planet but how to support regional foods,” and “The future of food is an imagination problem, not a tech problem.” Walking home with a friend later, rehashing our summer so far, the thorny question of imagination rattled in the back of my mind. 

Imagination that we are offered now, the panelists argued as many heads in the audience nodded, is based on technology because that is the staple of the sociopolitical system we exist in now, the same one that has already gotten us into trouble. Technological progress and Western science, the kind that all these folks working on time-travel theories draw funding from, have always been intertwined with colonization, with imperialism, with upholding inequality and depleting natural resources. Meat and dairy industries are industries in the most literal sense of needing machines as well as more broadly, and this is true of all other kinds of big agribusiness. How far can we get by imagining slotting different machines into the existing assembly lines? This is particularly salient when it comes to ideas like genetically engineering crops that will be resistant to climate change or replacing animal meat with that grown in labs or produced from plants in a highly technological manner.

Certainly, replacing every beef burger with a plant-based one would make a big difference, but we can do better than imagining a future based on proprietary protein blends, copyrighted chemical processes, and foods that only recreate something as culturally narrow as a burger. Someone at the talk mentioned a utopia where all big meat companies shift to being big bean companies. An even more utopian utopia, someone else argued, would be one where it’s all regional and local, not Big Bean but the beans grown by your neighbors, or maybe ones that you grew in your own garden like my grandparents used to do. There was no talk about making butter from carbon dioxide or vaccinating cows against burps, because everyone in the room was invited to imagine change, to imagine a future, that does not just tweak and amend the harmful practices we are so used to now, but rather break away from them completely. 

As Cassandra Marsillo beautifully wrote about her own nonni recently, some of the things we should be imagining to bring about a more kind and sustainable future also harken to the past, to the way our elders were more self-sufficient and how they always thought of food as something to be done in community. It is all, of course, intertwined: many people do not have the option to grow their own food, or learn to cook in sustainable and nourishing ways because the places where they live are dominated by big food producers and industrially made products. They cannot live like my or Marsillo’s nonni, because land is unavailable, rents in neighborhoods with good grocery stores are expensive, and time to learn to cook is scarce if you have to constantly work just to survive, so they also cannot eat like them. 

Technology has given so many of us the illusion of being able to get whatever we want in any season but at a high environmental cost and one that we actually rarely fully see reflected in the price tag or the nutritional label. If I were to buy some sausages like those that my nonno makes, nothing would alert me to their carbon and water footprint and I would certainly not be instructed on how their price reflects government subsidies and victories of the meat lobby. 

Adding more items to this system feels doomed to fail, but we spend so little time collectively imagining anything else, whether it be public gardens or fruit you could pick on the street or just a little more transparency as to where our food comes from and who benefits from us finding it desirable. I don’t want to let myself off the hook: when I buy avocados in New York or strawberries in the winter I am also not living like my nonni used to. And I am also not living in line with the future that I say I want for all of us when I say that I am vegan.

So, I am rethinking my relationship to time travel. I have become really good at piling food on my plate as a way to access the past. Now, I want to make room for a few more spoonfuls of the future. The ultimate time machine just as well might be that bell pepper, filled with the hints of the bean utopia.

Best,

Karmela 

*In physics a closed timelike curve is a path in spacetime that always returns to its starting point, like a loop that would get you stuck in Groundhog Day.

ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

I spent the last few weeks of July writing a feature that I hope will be published mid-September and my Augut started with a slew of stories about gnarly fundamentals of quantum theory. Specifically, I wrote about several studies related to non-locality, the property that I shout out above, in this article about a particle’s angular momentum becoming disembodied from it like the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland being separated from the animal’s body, and this article about an experiment that directly tested non-locality yet again and yet again found it to be true. These sorts of articles are really interesting to write in part because they force me to re-engage with the idea that I was taught one specific interpretation of quantum theory but that actually isn’t all that there is to it. It is also both nerve-wracking and exciting to call famous physicists, people whose names I once read in textbooks, and try to interview them about these topics. 

As for the actual subject matter, every time I write one of these, as my editor would say “quantum nonsense” stories a new round of philosophical discussions about the nature of reality erupts in the newsroom and I always surprise myself by being largely unbothered by whatever the nonsense at hand is. Can objects really influence each other across huge distances and our world is non-local? I think I’m ok with that. At the end of the day the instinct to argue that this is weird when I have never been able to experience what an electron does is a learned one, passed down to me from Ancient Greeks or maybe Newton, and I don’t feel a deep urge to rigidly cling onto what they once deemed canon.

READING

I loved this essay from Charlotte Shane on kindness and especially kindness to non-human animals. In one of the many powerful passages she writes:

Everything changes when a person accepts the beguiling challenge of being kind—at least, the “everything” a human has access to does. It is a way of (re)making the self, replacing the gauzy fiction of the inviolable “I” with the thirsty tree roots of an “I” that is eternally dependent and therefore responsive. Sensitive. The dream of self-sufficiency falls to the reality of radical instability, of an existential fragility that can only be mollified by cooperation. This is the first vector of risk, and it begets another. After breaching the fabric of self, the instinctual insight that compels a kind action might begin to breach the legitimacy of the state and its institutions. A vision of taking care might pierce the paranoia, confusion, and pathological aggression that are so profitable for a nation to stoke and entrench.

And then later, engaging more directly with critiques of veganism

Plenty of ardent animal rights activists have built lives around helping humans, too. They are journalists and EMTs and so on. One passion hardly precludes the other. What vegans do or don’t do, however, is beside the point, especially because this accusation comes so quickly from people who've chosen to sacrifice nothing at all. There is no need to prove what is self-evident: that the wounds of the world are infinite and I am finite. This is not real argumentation, it is a clumsy self-defense, and not self-defense against an assault from the outside but the lashing out of a self trying to protect itself from its self. It’s an attempt to silence one’s own conscience, to stanch caring before it starts. The people who attack vegans see a chink in which they would like to wedge a crowbar. They want to crack you open before the implicit rebuke of your presence can crack them.

Vox’s Future Perfect put out a whole package on ending factory farming and though most of the entries have been quite good, I found this one, by Astra and Sunaura Taylor to be especially important. The two offer a very eye-opening history of how activism for the welfare of animals has been criminalized in the past and how it has never entered the progressive mainstream in a way that hurts the left’s supposed fight for democracy. Paragraphs like this really made me, yet again, consider how nothing actually happens in isolation when it comes to the law, and how focusing on one issue is never actually as effective as engaging with the structures that underlie it.

What is less well known is that Big Meat is also busy undermining democracy. Globally, animal agriculture is a $2 trillion business, amply supported by government subsidies, and companies fiercely lobby around the world to protect their interests. Meat and dairy companies and industry trade groups have spent millions of dollars in recent decades to derail climate action and block animal welfare legislation. Their campaigns have spread disinformation while bankrolling politicians, and, as Vox recently detailed, university scientists who advance their agenda.

Big Meat’s agenda increasingly focuses on suppressing First Amendment rights, whether by pushing to make it illegal for plant-based dairy alternatives to use the word “milk” in their marketing or to criminalize undercover investigations on factory farms under so-called ag-gag laws. The industry has close relationships with law enforcement and in recent years has helped deploy disproportionate police force against animal rights activists.

I was also disturbed by the reporting in this MIT Technology Review piece on “How covid conspiracy theories led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism.” For all my gripes with institutionalized science in the US, this level of disbelief and harmful weaponizing of skepticism is absolutely terrifying.

LISTENING

I binged Tested from Rose Eveleth, NPR and CBC, which was a very timely exploration of the history and the current status of sex testing in sports. I cannot recommend this show enough, especially for folks who may think that if they are cisgendered something like sex testing could never become their problem. Eveleth, whom I’ve loved ever since Flash Forward, is a gifted storyteller and someone who really does their homework so the show is as rich with facts as it provides compelling characters and makes the stakes of the situation really clear. The point that the series makes, in my view, is that ideas like sex testing in sports, are about dictating who counts as a woman for the sake of control and not anything like fairness - and science is too often used as not just a tool of this control but also to lend it undue legitimacy.

I have also been really intrigued and amused by the 99 Percent Invisible project of reading The Power Broker, the legendary biographer Robert Caro’s book about the life and influence of New York City public official Robert Moses. Moses is a huge part of New York lore, a sort of reviled figure that gave us parks and parkways, but displaced hundreds of thousands of people in the process. The Power Broker has its own lore, which the podcast series explores in a pretty fun and engaging way, and it is such a huge tome that I can’t imagine finding time to read it anytime soon. Hosts Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan have made it a little over halfway through the book so far and just from tuning into their recaps and discussion I feel like I have learned a ton about New York history, and how one person can amass power in government, already.

WATCHING

It took us a long time, but my partner and I finished the second season of Tokyo Vice, a show that never really delivered more than a few episodes of greatness, with the first one being a clear stand out, but kept being good enough to watch night after night. It’s a bit jarring that the main character is a journalist who breaks every single rule of ethics in journalism, but the fact that no one in this show acts particularly well is part of its appeal. It’s a show about crime with not necessarily likable but definitely interesting characters and some very good acting performances, all couched in the aesthetics of 1990s Japan, so I would have mindlessly watched a dozen more seasons had it not been canceled. I would have loved for Tokyo Vice to have become my Law and Order.

While my mom was visiting, we saw Twisters in 4D and though everything about the film and this type of movie-going experience was sort of ridiculous, I have to admit that I had a ton of fun. The plot of the movie is sort of nonsense and its engagement with politics is interesting but always implicit so intellectually there is a lot missing from Twisters. But I did find Glen Powell spewing science jargon charming, the actual tornadoes looked pretty good, and being rocked and rained on and feeling the wind my hair at the theater definitely elevated my heart rate. I am not sure that I would ever really want to watch a film in 4D again, but for Twisters this choice proved lowkey perfect. Raechel Anne Jolie had more coherent things to say about Twisters in her newsletter, and I am sure there’s other good criticism out there, but mostly I had just forgotten how fun a mindless summer blockbuster can be and it was really nice to be reminded.

EATING

Our farmshare has been an absolute source of joy for me this summer and I have let it drive my cooking as much as I can. Everytime we get lots of herbs and kale, I make pasta in green sauce (Bettina Makalintal is the goat of this approach). The last time we got Chinese eggplants, I stir fried them with yuba. When we got beautifully plump zucchini, I made fritters and served them with hummus and sourdough bread that I make weekly. Another batch of zucchini and bread went into Hetty McKinnon’s chilled soup, heavy on basil and lemon. And I’m still leaving out other wonderful gifts of the season like perfectly sweet corn (roast it in the oven in its husk then peel and eat with nothing except for maybe a little salt) and golden beets that I will never be tired of steaming and eating cold with a drizzle of olive oil.

The restaurant I mentioned above is Thai Diner, which I had been meaning to check out ever since we moved to New York several years ago, but somehow never managed to follow through. I’m happy to report that it absolutely lived up to the hype.