Squishy Systems

On softer ways of making meaning

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. 

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SQUISHY SYSTEMS*

Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull opens with a description of water:

”It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.” 

The sentence is informative as it gives the reader the ‘where’ and the ‘when’ and it is just descriptive enough to help them picture the scene. The sun is new and it sparkles instead of being high up or setting the water ablaze. The sea is gentle and rippling, rather than roaring with waves. There is nothing dramatic happening here yet. Bach saves all the drama for the descriptions of how the titular seagull breaks the norms of his flock. His transgression is being interested in flying for the sake of flying rather than just flying to find food. Jonathan Livingston is an aficionado and a dreamer - and he gets cast out for that. 

Bach doesn’t dwell on the biology or ecology of seagulls much nor does he set the story anywhere particularly well-known for seagulls. The birds are a convenient vessel for his message more than they are fully fleshed out characters. That message packs a heavy punch of something like enlightenment, and maybe a dose of kindness, with Livingston being the winged equivalent of someone who managed to escape Plato’s cave then returned to it unexpectedly successfully. 

Like that first sentence, the structure of the book is fairly simple and inoffensively to the point. Jonathan is outcast for being more enlightened than the other birds but he perseveres in doing what he loves. For this, he is rewarded by being taken in by a different flock of birds who are all even more enlightened than he is and seem to reside in seagull heaven. After he learns how to fly through space perfectly, and also sometimes through time, Livingston absorbs another enlightened lesson by returning to the flock that outcast him and kindly teaching its rebellious seagulls how to fly like him. In the end, he moves on to some other realm, signaling to the reader that learning, or maybe becoming the best you can be is never truly over. 

This plot moves quickly and efficiently without any unnecessary embellishments. Bach only budgets space to dwell on details when it comes to descriptions of the mechanics of flight. This seems anomalous until you learn that Jonathan Livingston’s story was originally published in an aviation magazine, and that the author is a flying aficionado himself. As one Reddit user unkindly put it “The themes are banal and unoriginal, the writing is at the level of a children's book.”

Yet, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a book that I think back on very often, and I was thinking about it recently as I watched a calm sea gently ripple under the golden sun on the last Sunday of March in a park in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was Easter, and it was Trans Day of Visibility, and I was having coffee with someone very curious and kind. The seagulls we could see on the horizon brought me back to the shelf above the couch in my childhood home where my mom’s Croatian copy of this book used to reside. Later, I learned that my companion, who grew up on the other side of the world, had also read the book as a young person and had a strong sense memory of it. A funny coincidence given that I’d brought this book up to everyone that has ever observed me observing either a bird or the sea and have pretty much always been met with blank stares.

My experience re-reading the book afterwards was not unlike that Redditor’s, but Jonathan Livingston Seagull influenced me an awful lot when I was young. It has also always been a touchstone for all sorts of heady discussion I had had with my mom in the intervening years, something I think I have to be grateful for. 

There are few surprises here - I had always been the odd kid out and my mom had always taken pride in that, especially when my oddness aligned with her own sense of non-conformism and progressive-ish politics. Suggesting that I read Bach’s book offered me some reassurance and encouragement, not just from my mother, but from an incredibly popular best selling author. And my memory of my mom suggesting that I read it, which I took deeply to heart and inhaled the slender paperback in one afternoon, is that it had an air of adulthood to it, like an introduction to philosophy for grown ups instead of just advice for kids. I remember a vague notion that there was something exotic and Eastern about the book, but almost certainly my mom and I just made that up based on some misguided understanding of “zen” and a lack of context about Bach being a guy who just really loved to fly. This is all to say that reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull felt meaningful and deep to me, like I had learned something profound about capital-L life and capital-M meaning. 

Squinting at a .pdf of the book on my phone while finishing my evening cup of coffee now years later it was much harder to shake the ridiculousness of seagull heaven, or the clunkiness of how often Bach uses technical terms like terminal velocity while also trying to dispense emotional wisdom, or passages that put quips like “To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.” in the mouths of very flat feathered characters. But I could still glimpse some of what must have appealed to me as a young person, that very mundane assurance that it’s ok to be different and march at the beat of your own drum, even when the only way you have to frame it all is really so very cringe.

And life loves to write us, or at least me, into its own mundane and cringe narratives so it’s only fitting that the conversation I had been having all of that afternoon before I saw Brooklyn seagulls flock underneath a golden sun was about the pain and growth of always being a beginner at something, and the transformation that one is inevitably pushed into as they keep trying to live their life more in line with their values, and what they deem to be their nature. I have found myself having these conversations an awful lot in recent years and undoubtedly if someone were to overhear them, they’d likely sound not all that dissimilar to some passages in Jonathan Livingston Seagull. 

For instance, one of the best experiences I had this past month had been attending a writing workshop led by writer Raechel Anne Jolie, which opened with a tarot reading. With my conditioning from years spent in academia and education still going strong, I dutifully took notes on the two cards that were pulled and how Cameron Steele interpreted them. At the top of my notepad I wrote: “almost everyone here is a recovering academic!” Then, directly underneath: “two cards as angel wings of our session today.” I appreciated the cards as a tool for framing the afternoon and setting intentions. Everyone’s openness to it was refreshing and sweet, even over Zoom. Once the workshop ended and we all closed out computers, I found myself really touched by having been in community with other writers even for just a few hours, even remotely. The warmth I felt surprised me because I do work in a newsroom full of people who write for a living and interface with them every day. But there is little room for vulnerability or self-reflection in a newsroom and journalists are, much like many academics, by default more beholden to the myth of absolute objectivity and impartial rigor. It was powerful to realize how much I actually may need to engage in a mode of work that can balance out my journalistic output with something more tender, fuzzy and personal. 

I felt similarly around the solar eclipse, which did not reach full totality in New York city but still could not be ignored. I watched it from a sidewalk in-between tall buildings in midtown Manhattan, just around the corner from my employer’s office. Me and my coworkers took a long break from the glare of our computer screens and tried to replace them, briefly, with the glow of this rare cosmic event. The experience was full of tensions, from the large screen at a nearby H&M competing with the Sun and the Moon, to the chatter about astronomy competing with more woo astrology talk. I wanted to participate in both, and I absolutely wanted the sign turned off so that I could fully feel the Sun’s brief descent into half-darkness. Walking back to the office after it was all over, the eclipse somewhat spoiled by the tag-team of clouds and skyscrapers, I could not help wishing that I had been a squirrel in Vermont or a deer in Indiana, a creature in the path of totality who would have found it as terrifying, or as awe-inspiring, as an act of some deity, rather than a person with a job and a working knowledge of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. I wasn’t craving a miracle per se, but I had wanted to take a thought more complex than ‘storefronts are awful’ home with me.

I can justify this need to be philosophical, and at times a little more spiritual than I am willing to admit, by appealing to a good variety of tropes about aging, or maybe about the collective trauma of the health and political crises of recent years. A sharper left take would tell you I had become disillusioned with the meaning and worth capitalism gave me so I had to go looking for something else. A purely practical take would be that my life has stabilized a lot since I completed my doctoral degree and moved in with a long-term partner so now I’m staving off boredom and complacency by trying to re-find myself. Having time and energy for meaning making, after all, is a marker of privilege and stability in a world where attention and comfort are some of the biggest commodities.

There is a slight irony to feeling a bit shy about engaging in Jonathan-Livingston-esque discussions and experiences too, because my job under capitalism is all about making meaning too. In fact, every job I have had as an adult has been to make meaning.

As a scientist it was making meaning through and from equations and experimental measurements. As a teacher the task was similar except the evidence and history I was meant to interweave into meaning was a lot more broad. As a journalist and a writer now, my voice is meant to bring the reader an easy distillation of meaning someone else had tried to make of the world already. 

Across these professions, there has always been an unspoken invitation for me to make judgment calls and interpret the seemingly cold, hard, objective facts at my disposal, even though the end product is never really supposed to explicitly reference the process of how I arrived at meaning on the page. It’s all always been the same: building blocks meant to be universally true glued together into a tenuous whole with a soft stickiness of my own perception, me desperately trying to keep them as unmarred and unblemished as possible. A small impossibility, almost by default (As Wesley Lowery wrote in the New York Times in 2020 when newsrooms around the country reckoned with implicit and explicit racism in their coverage:“We also know that neutral “objective journalism” is constructed atop a pyramid of subjective decision-making: which stories to cover, how intensely to cover those stories, which sources to seek out and include, which pieces of information are highlighted and which are downplayed. No journalistic process is objective. And no individual journalist is objective, because no human being is.”)

Practices that are crucial for playing this game when it comes to writing, and also to doing science, are not losing awareness of context and not overlooking nuance. Jonathan Livingston Seagull feels naive and unsatisfying to my adult eyes because it often does both. Jonathan himself is too much of a Mary Sue and can never seem to do wrong, even when he is angry or shows hubris. The other seagulls are similarly uncomplicated as are some of the plot twists. The fact that returning to the flock that shunned him is made successful by Jonathan having a bigger heart and more patience feels so simple as to be impossible. All too used to the pop psychology missives on social media I caught myself thinking “you can’t love someone out of hating you” while reading about Jonathan’s return and his somewhat patronizing desire to spread enlightenment to those that once ostracized him.

(Of course, this is true. Of course, it is also true that closing yourself off to everyone who dislikes you or disagrees with you does not change the world. Of course, wanting to change the world can easily make you seem cringey and naive regardless of whether you converged on that desire by reading books about seagulls or committing yourself to rigorous academic studies.) 

Gathering contextual information for a story, learning the history of a phenomenon, immersing yourself in deeply logical arguments about a behavior, these are all things that shape and sharpen a sense of what something means to us or for us. Without a doubt, it makes for better storytelling and more potent arguments. But there is also always the inherently cringey question of what made you care about that thing at all, ever? I ask scientists some version of this question every day and hearing their genuine excitement for an idea they may have committed years to exploring is often the best part of the conversations we share. 

There are so many good reasons for physicists to do the kind of work they do, but at the very bottom of that pile of justifications is often a sense of wonder and joy that is intrinsic to them and who they are, and nothing less squishy than that. If I’ve done a good enough job making them comfortable throughout the conversation, sometimes researchers will just tell me, in a way that is so unfussy that it must be universal, that they just think their experiments and equations are cool. This is a sentiment that goes way back, and back to the greats of Western science, with luminaries such as Henri Poincare writing about “the soul of the fact,” which he thought that a machine could never comprehend, but a human scientist would.

These moments are some of my favorite parts of my job as science journalist, even if those words of excitement don’t often make it into print. What I am trying to share with the reader is not just that so-and-so thinks something is cool but also as many related why’s as I can. But I hope that the discerning reader can still tell that there’s often something mildly indescribable under all of those why’s, and I hope they can at least sometimes hear an echo of their own wonder and passion in it.

The understanding of the world that I bring into my writing and present to that reader has certainly been shaped by the training I received as a scientist and my time participating in the institution of science. My becoming a person was always concurrent with, and inextricably intertwined with my becoming a scientist, and that will never not show in how I speak, think and write. Yet, even during the times when I was the most focused on ideals of rigor and impersonality, when I wanted to banish that squishiness that now seeps into many of my conversations with loved ones, I could never fully do so. That emotional, nearly spiritual drive was always there, an inherent part of me. I have come to think that that bit of unscientific thought, like a belief in the beauty and wisdom of nature beyond what we can glean by breaking it into empirically accessible building blocks, is simply necessary for the scientific endeavor, regardless of how much the professionalization of science under capitalism may obscure that. 

And science under capitalism, and science as an institution that exists within colonial states and regimes that thrive on inequality, also offers a specific container for personal drives like curiosity. Within universities and other institutions where scientific research is front and center, physicists and engineers talk about their curiosity about nature in the same breath as talking about discovering its features or uncovering its secrets. Within physics we break nature into pieces that suit our understanding then try to work out how they form a whole through a construction problem where we are either in charge or even in an antagonistic relationship with the physical world. Nature withholds some of its mysteries from us, like dark matter or dark energy or what protons are actually like, and we try to poke it and prod it in the hope that it will eventually relent and let us take a better look. I am always struck when scholars, organizers and healers talk about plants and other living beings as teachers, because the idea is so disconnected from my scientific training. Could I have found different meaning in my academic work by thinking about atoms, about gravity, about intricate fractal patterns of energy levels as teachers rather than test subjects? The notion feels flimsy and emotional, but that is also exactly the judgment that your run-of-the-mill physicist is supposed to pass on it. 

The need to find meaning complementary and supplementary to what equations of theoretical physics felt like they could reveal to me partly led me to becoming a writer. The same drive is also bound to form some of the emotional skeleton of my upcoming book. Sometimes I wonder whether I had to learn a lot of fancy words and how to be impartial and cold just to then have a chance to circle back on it with different eyes and a little more softness. This too is a somewhat spiritual belief, an unsubstantiated conviction that there is a right time to do certain things and be certain people, that sometimes you just have to feel the right-ness of a certain thought in your bones. Many years and words later I have to own up to this being a time in my life when I am constantly re-defining and re-finding a sense of self that is much more like Jonathan Livingston Seagull than a person who would list all the rational caveats to every pie-in-the-sky vision of the future I have been known to advocate for.

And the need for redefinitions is unavoidable. In the same way that scientific theories and models have to be updated as new data, and new computational techniques become available, stories have to be updated too. I’ve told the story of who I am many times, in many ways, and to many people since I moved to New York, changed jobs and made new friends. Sitting by the water on that Sunday with another nonbinary person, on a day meant to commemorate our trans kin but that immediately got hijacked as the most recent cause for outrage by the far right, it wasn’t lost on me how the language of queerness and access to queer community made it easier for me to change through soft ripples of understanding instead of through violent crashing waves of crisis. Letting go of rigid structures of gender or relationship hierarchies and the pressure to always know exactly who I am - and I fully believe that queer people are always in the process of becoming the future - simply made that kind of drama unnecessary.

In Jonathan Livingston Seagull, one of his early breakthroughs in learning to fly fast, faster than seagulls seem hardwired to be able to, is to pull his wings close to his body and maneuver only with the “faintest twist of his wingtips”. Bach is making a point about precision here, illustrating for the reader that when you move at speeds that push your body to its physical limit the smallest of motions make a huge difference. When Jonathan gets them wrong, he violently crashes into the water. In physics you would call this a nonlinearity and you’d consider it useful for all sorts of devices where getting a big effect at the price of a small action is a good energy-saving tactic. 

But instead of thinking about efficiency or the price of sloppiness when you’re doing something high stakes, I liked the visual of the fast-flying bird perfecting his trajectory with the tiniest of moves for a different reason. It felt like an assurance that change does not have to require dramatic gestures every time, and that even when your life is quickly barreling forward, the small things you can do for yourself and others can, and do, affect it meaningfully. Small things like that afternoon where hearing someone else’s story and thoughts presented me with moments of solidarity and moments of newness, all tiny twists in how I may choose to fly towards meaning. That rosy future that I keep trying to imagine will come through some big actions and radical change, but some of how we get there will certainly be like this too - devoid of drama and full of tenderness.

Bach’s book ends with Jonathan putting another seagull, Fletcher Lynd, in charge of his disciples and leaving for a different beach where another flock resides. As they part he says: 

“You don’t need me any longer. You need to keep finding yourself, a little more each day, that real, unlimited Fletcher Seagull. He’s your instructor. You need to understand him and to practice him.”

 It’s another simple, self-evident statement, maybe even a banal one, but I can imagine being awed by it as a kid. And I will still never not want to hear that there is a seed of something unlimited within me, even if that takes me off the course of perfect objectivity and detachment and towards something more soft and unfashionably earnest. Maybe this is why wherever I see a seagull I can’t not think about Jonathan Livingston. 

Best,

Karmela 

*The idea of “squishy physics” has gained some colloquial use in recent years as there are more physicists working in the intersection of condensed matter physics, biological physics and active matter physics. The three are as disparate and broad as it gets, but where they meet is a very generative space where you find researchers studying how starfish larvae arrange themselves in living crystals, how fluids can be designed to change their viscosity on demand, how exactly bacteria manage to swim and how tiny robots may swarm in biological fluids. It’s an exciting, growing area of work that shows how, simultaneously, physics touches and everything and physics can work better when combined with sciences that may have at some point been seen as less rigorous.

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

I got to write a few longer pieces for my job recently which is always a treat. The first was about a new theory of the multiverse which was both intellectually challenging to understand and extremely interesting to discuss with various physicists. I have never been much of a believer in the multiversal “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics, but working on this story fleshed it out for me a lot more, and gave me new insights into both how it works and why it’s fun to write about it.

My other longer piece was a retrospective on the Nobel laureate Peter Higgs, the originator of what we now call “the Higgs boson” or the particle that helps explain why almost all particles have mass, who passed away recently. I am proud of this piece partly because I have almost no background in particle physics, partly because I reported and wrote it over the course of less than eight hours. It is always an absolute privilege to talk to researchers that have been part of history as momentous as the theoretical proposal and the experimental discovery of a particle that is pivotal for our theories of the universe, and I hope I will eventually also have more cheerful reasons to do such historical dives.

Finally, as part of a recurring baking column, New Scientist published my vegan carrot cake recipe, alongside a short write up of mine and photos that I took. At least one person made it already and I could not be more flattered.

I realize a lot of my writing on New Scientist is behind a paywall and I hate for that to be a barrier to sharing stories about cutting edge science so please do email me if you ever need access to any of my articles.

READING

Poet Seamus Fey was once a student in a class on physics and art that I was helping to teach in graduate school and remembering his series of poems about the lifecycle of stars was more than enough reason to pick up a copy of his debut poetry collection called decompose. These are poems that feel both polished and raw, that feel both very personal and very universal, and that resonated with me on a more visceral level than I expected. I loved the order of poems too - I read the whole thing across two train rides to and from work and by the time I made it to the last one it really was like closing an arc of a story.

Raechel Anne Jolie writing about abolition for her newsletter. This piece, originally a keynote address, makes connections between different kinds of activist work in a very methodical and clear way while also making the stakes seem personal and tender. Raechel is a scholar and clearly has deep mastery of the theoretical, but the fact that she does not divorce the sociopolitical analysis of this speech from her lived experience and her more spiritual and emotional beliefs is what makes it truly impactful. Towards the end, she beautifully connects the ideas around abolition and transformative justice to the recent solar eclipse:

“But I also want to end on the eclipse because the moment of totality, for me, was one of the best visual metaphors I’ve ever seen — and felt — for the real work of our movements. To me, and I wonder if you might relate, that moment of totality felt like an embodied “click.” The moment the moon covered the sun, something seemed to shift not just cosmically, but like an energetic tether that connected all of our bodies. Did you feel that? Everyone was sharing a moment of connection, it was the opposite of alienation, it was joyful and nearly unbelievable. It was also temporary. The light returned, people started shuffling home. But we felt that taste of utopic connection, that click when it all came together. 

I believe transformative justice — and the path of liberation more broadly — requires a radical acceptance of this timeline. The seemingly impossible is possible. And we will taste it, we will feel it if we keep doing the work. But it’s not a permanent state. And so the dismantling and the building will be our task, all of it, simultaneous, and if we’re lucky, more and more of those respites of when it all clicks. Let those clicks sustain us.”

Scholar Mimi Khúc interviewed about the idea of “unwellness” and her new book in the Guardian. “Unwellness” is a way to recast illness and I appreciated how Khúc uses it to call out pressures we are under to always feel, and make ourselves well. This is work that is very much in conversation with ideas around health as an individual’s responsibility as opposed to health as something that heavily depends on the environment and the system that the individual exists within. I especially appreciated the way Khúc calls this out within academia. She says:

“I also focus on universities as a venue of unwellness. Universities adopt the language of wellness, but defined by hyperproductivity and achievement – take care of yourself, but only so that you can be the best worker possible. This is a wellness that is compulsory, that puts pressure on you to pretend you are OK and frames not being OK as some kind of personal failure. What most people don’t realize is that this construction of wellness actually produces unwellness. We are being forced to be “well”, to pretend we’re OK, to never have needs, to never be sick, because all those things would mean something is wrong with us and we don’t actually belong. This constant pressure can be deadly.”

Journalist Molly White on AI assistants like ChatGPT, what they could possibly be used for, and whether those uses are actually worth the price of running and maintaining them. This is a long post and somewhat in-the-weeds, but I found it very useful and comprehensive even though I am constantly exposed to new AI news and commentaries at my job. If you’ve not engaged with these issues past a few headlines, this is probably a great place to start. Sharply, White writes:

“I, like many others who have experimented with or adopted these products, have found that these tools actually can be pretty useful for some tasks. Though AI companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or develop a video game from scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.”

And then later

“But I find one common thread among the things AI tools are particularly suited to doing: do we even want to be doing these things? If all you want out of a meeting is the AI-generated summary, maybe that meeting could've been an email. If you're using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre, auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them? Or is it just middle-management busywork?”

WATCHING

My partner and I saw Dev Patel’s Monkey Man in the movie theater and quite liked it. Though this is a film that has clearly been over-edited and the flow of the narrative definitely makes the rumors of a troubled production fee very plausible, Patel still manages to squeeze in an awful lot of good stuff into his directorial debut. To an extent this is a film in the vein of John Wick and it embraces violence, and a bloody, squelchy kind of violence, without reservations. But Patel is also significantly more political than the Wick movies would ever dream to be and even if he could have gone further, I still very much appreciated the nods to the state of the Indian government and especially to the persecuted queer community there. It was also really exciting to watch an action movie situated abroad that did very little to cater to a white audience or do an explainer on India. I really felt thrust into a different world and enjoyed the challenge of it and the vividness of the whole thing.

We have also been slowly watching FX’s Shogun, a medieval epic set in Japan that has not necessarily clicked for me emotionally but does have all the trappings of prestige entertainment and a complex story that make it hard to quit.

LISTENING

Like every other queer person in New York, I have also not managed to escape Cowboy Carter and though I have little love for Beyonce as a billionaire, I do have to admit to enjoying this record. I also really liked Renaissance, which was the first in what seems to be a trilogy of records that is being continued with Cowboy Carter, so clearly what works for me is Beyonce doing conceptual genre records, rather than Beyonce doing Beyonce. Having said that, this record is chock full of references, plays with ideas about what is and is not country and still delivers both moments of emotional vulnerability and veritable pop bangers. It is at times heavy handed and maybe a little too self-aware about its own mythology, but that is part of Beyonce’s project here anyway - or at least I have understood it as such. The New York Times’ Popcast had a nice historically grounded discussion of it that I found helpful.

I have also been enjoying the debut record from The Last Dinner Party called Prelude to Ecstasy. This is a record that is very clearly indebted to both glam rock and Brit pop, full of drama and antics, a sort of Wet Leg imbued with more seriousness and grandeur but not in an annoying way. The second half of the record is particularly strong and shows range and depth that make me excited for whatever this band does next.

EATING

After a somewhat long break, I recently participated in another vegan market and both the vanilla cake with vanilla frosting and coffee custard filling, and the crunchy vegan butter cake that I made for it turned out really well. On the cake front, I also made a chocolate and hazelnut cake for a friend’s Easter gathering with their family and was delighted to hear that their mom loved it.

I was recently gifted an air fryer so I have been experimenting with frying a little more than usual (I am notoriously scared of hot oil) and the most interesting outcome so far was making silken tofu that was chewy on the outside but still creamy on the inside. I served it with noodles heavy on garlic and scallions and a sour-yet-sweet cucumber and mango salad and it was all very lovely together.

My partner and I also tried a pizzeria in our neighborhood called Decades and both of their vegan pizzas were really great.