John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World, has won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. Per Frederick Studemann, chair of judges for the prize:

Fire Weather brings together a series of harrowing human stories with science and geo-economics, in an extraordinary and elegantly rendered account of a terrifying climate disaster that engulfed a community and industry, underscoring our toxic relationship with fossil fuels. Moving back and forth in time, across subjects, and from the particular to the global, this meticulously researched, thrillingly told book forces readers to engage with one of the most urgent issues of our time.

The climate disaster in question is the 2016 wildfire that swept through Fort McMurray, in Alberta, Canada, swallowing half a million acres of land and displacing nearly 100,000 people. You can read an excerpt from Fire Weather here.

The Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction is awarded annually, and comes with a £50,000 prize.

Over the years, Einstein received a lot of letters from children. “I am a little girl of six,” one announced in large letters drawn haphazardly across the full width of the writing paper. “I saw your picture in the paper. I think you ought to have a haircut, so you can look better.” Having given her advice, the girl, with model formality, signed it, “Cordially yours, Ann.”

“I have a problem I would like solved,” wrote Anna Louise of Falls Church, Virginia. “I would like to know how color gets into a bird’s feather.” Dear Mr. Einstein was asked the age of Earth and whether life could exist without the sun (to which he replied that it very much could not). One child asked him whether all geniuses were bound to go insane. Frank, from Bristol, Pennsylvania, asked what was beyond the sky—“My mother said you could tell me.”

Kenneth, from Asheboro, North Carolina, was more philosophical: “We would like to know, if nobody is around and a tree falls, would there be a sound, and why.” Similarly, Peter, from Chelsea, Massachusetts, drove straight to the heart of human inquiry: “I would appreciate it very much if you could tell me what Time is, what the soul is, and what the heavens are.”

Other questions were not quite so fraught. A boy named John informed Einstein that “my father and I are going to build a rocket and go to Mars or Venus. We hope you will go too. We want you to go because we need a good scientist and someone who can guide a rocket good.”

Occasionally, skeptical correspondents emerged, such as June, a twelve-year-old student from Trail Junior High School in British Columbia, Canada. “Dear Mr. Einstein,” she wrote. “I am writing to you to find out if you really exist. You may think this very strange, but some pupils in our class thought that you were a comic strip character.”

In a similar vein, Myfanwy from South Africa had thought Einstein dead:

I probably would have written ages ago, only I was not aware that you were still alive. I am not interested in history, and I thought you had lived in the 18th c., or somewhere around that time. I must have been mixing you up with Sir Isaac Newton or someone. Anyway, I discovered during Math one day that the mistress was talking about the most brilliant scientists. She mentioned that you were in America, and when I asked whether you were buried there, and not in England, she said, Well, you were not dead yet. I was so excited when I heard that, that I all but got a Math detention!

Myfanwy proceeded to tell Einstein how she and her friend Pat Wilson would sneak around the school at night to carry out astronomical observations, and about her love of science. “How can Space go on forever?” she wondered. “I am sorry that you have become an American citizen,” she finished. “I would much prefer you in England.” Einstein was obviously taken with Myfanwy’s exuberance, as he sent her a reply in which he praised her nighttime escapades and apologized for remaining alive. (“There will be a remedy for this, however.”)

On his seventy-sixth birthday, Einstein was sent a pair of cuff links and a tie by the fifth-grade children of Farmingdale Elementary School in Pleasant Plains, Illinois. “Your gift,” he wrote to them, “will be an appropriate suggestion to be a little more elegant in the future than hitherto. Because neckties and cuffs exist for me only as remote memories.”

This was one of Einstein’s last letters. He died around three weeks after writing it.

*

In December 1925, the young Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger was holed up in the village of Arosa, Switzerland, with one of his mistresses. He was there for his health: suspecting a mild case of tuberculosis, his doctors had ordered him to rest at high altitude. There, among the calm of the mountains and deep snow, placing a pearl in each of his ears when he wanted quiet, he developed a theory that became known as “wave mechanics.”

Schrödinger’s theory was inspired by the ideas of Louis de Broglie, a physicist who in his doctoral thesis of 1924 had showed how to calculate the wavelength of a particle based on its momentum. In 1905, Einstein had demonstrated that waves can act like particles. What de Broglie argued was that particles can act like waves.

Wave mechanics provided a set of equations that prescribed how wavelike particles could behave. On first encounter with the theory, Einstein and many others were impressed and pleased with its useful- ness, but it was soon noticed that some implications of Schrödinger’s mechanics were a little problematic. For one thing, the theory stated that the waves it described would, given time, propagate over a very large area, much like a ripple on the surface of a lake spreading out and out, making for the shore. But Schrödinger’s waves were, of course, also particles—they were electrons and other subatomic objects. To Einstein it seemed almost nonsensical to say that an electron would propagate over such enormous distances. It simply didn’t accord with reality.

So Schrödinger’s mathematical description of waves raised a question. If it didn’t represent literal waves, waves in the real world, what did it represent? Einstein’s good friend Max Born, a professor at the University of Göttingen, devised an answer: it represented the probability of a particle’s location. Which is to say that each particle has what’s called a “wave function,” and one can use this to predict the likelihood of finding a particular particle in a particular place.

Put an electron in a box. According to this idea, the electron has a number of potential locations spread throughout the box, and it exists in a kind of muddled-up mixture of all these possible positions. This mixture is mathematically represented by the electron’s wave function, which gives us the various different probabilities of detecting the electron at the various different locations within the box.

Einstein, consistently throughout his career, was unhappy with quantum mechanics’ reliance on probability. In fact, he did not like it at all. He strongly believed, even though evidence suggested otherwise, that at a deep level the universe was not run on chance and that the order apparent in the observable universe was built on order in the subatomic realm.

When debating with the theory’s various advocates, he would often tell them, “God does not play dice.” To which Niels Bohr had a rejoinder: “It cannot be for us to tell God how he is to run the world”—or in other words, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”

*

In the summer of 1925, when he was twenty-three years old, Werner Heisenberg traveled to the tiny island of Heligoland in the North Sea, hoping that its beaches and sheer cliffs would allay his bad hay fever. There, in one intense night, he finalized his interpretation of the difficulties of the quantum realm. Heisenberg worked from the premise that he could completely ignore what could not be observed, measured, or proved to be true. This sounds quite reasonable, but in this instance it meant that, in order to develop his theory of the laws that govern the behavior of electrons, he made no effort to describe, or really even to think about, the motions or orbits of electrons, as they could not be observed. Instead, he looked at the light emitted by electrons under different circumstances. If you bombard an atom with light or disturb it in other ways, an electron will produce light. Heisenberg looked at what went in and what came out, and didn’t concern himself about what happened in between. The result was a paper so mathematically complicated that he couldn’t fully understand it himself. He gave the paper to his supervisor, Max Born, and then went camping, hoping that Born might be able to figure it out for him. Born did just that, and had the paper published.

Einstein didn’t like Heisenberg’s approach any more than he liked Schrödinger’s wave mechanics. He called it “a big quantum egg” and declared outright to one of his friends that he didn’t believe in it. The problem, as far as Einstein was concerned, was that Heisenberg had skipped over the need to actually understand what was happening. The mathematics didn’t really require you to “know” anything about what the electrons were up to between the input and output—they could be doing anything, and it wouldn’t affect Heisenberg’s theory. To Einstein that wasn’t a good enough description of reality.

In 1926, Heisenberg came to Berlin to give a lecture. Einstein, who had already exchanged a few letters with the radical young man, invited him to visit his house, where they soon fell to arguing, as was only to be expected. Heisenberg thought that he would be able to win his host around to his way of thinking, precisely because it had once been Einstein’s way of thinking. With relativity, Einstein had done away with seemingly logical but—crucially—unobservable concepts, such as the ether or Newton’s absolute space and time, and produced a sweeping, progressive theory. Heisenberg felt he was up to much the same thing.

“We cannot observe electron orbits inside the atom. A good theory must be based on directly observable magnitudes,” Heisenberg insisted. “But you don’t seriously believe that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory?”

“Isn’t that precisely what you have done with relativity?”

“Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning, but it is nonsense all the same.”

Einstein was at least consistent in his contrariness to his old beliefs.

To his friend Philipp Frank he made a similar complaint.

“A new fashion has arisen in physics,” he rumbled, “which declares that certain things cannot be observed and therefore should not be ascribed reality.”

“But the fashion you speak of was invented by you in 1905!” Frank reminded him with amused disbelief.

“A good joke should not be repeated too often.”

 __________________________________

Excerpted from Einstein in Time and Space: A Life in 99 Particlesby Samuel Graydon. Copyright © 2023 by Samuel Graydon. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

A message had arrived at the telegram office that morning. As the mailman approached the seaside apartment in Mumbai, India, that my grandfather Brij Kishore shared with my grandmother Chandrakanta and their four children, he felt his throat tighten as she pulled on his sleeve and said, “Taar aaya hai.” In Bombay in the 1960s, the arrival of a “taar”—a telegram—usually meant bad news. Few homes had telephones, so far-­flung family would send updates of their children, cooking, and cricket scores via the well-­named snail mail. Only if a matter was more pressing and urgent would they send the news via telegram.

Babuji, as we all called him, tore open the envelope and took out a sheet of pale blue paper. On it was glued a strip of white paper that contained three words: ANXIOUS TO RETURN. He looked at his wife, rolled his eyes, and reassured her that there was nothing to worry about.

After graduating college, Babuji’s son Shekhar had traveled to Italy to look for work. Evidently, he didn’t like it there and wanted to return, but Babuji was determined that Shekhar should give it a shot. So, he put on his chappals and walked down to the post office to send a telegram saying so, using as few words as possible, because telegrams weren’t cheap and were charged by length. Over the next few weeks, many more telegrams arrived from Italy, begging for a ticket back to Bombay. After ignoring many of them, Babuji finally relented. His son, my uncle, returned to Bombay, where he lived out his days.

Less than sixty years later, each week of pandemic lockdown was punctuated by the demanding squeaks of my toddler: “I want talk Nani right now!” The child of a pandemic, there were eighteen months of her life when she couldn’t see her grandparents in person, so her demands to speak to her grandma were swiftly obeyed. With the swish of a finger on a touchscreen, a call flew through the air to the other side of the planet, to which my mom responded. She saw my daughter crawl for the first time, and speak her early words, in color, live, on the screen of a smartphone. When I stop to think about the ease with which we were able to stay in touch through those tough times, I find myself not only in awe of how far we have come but also immensely grateful.

We have been through a radical shift in technology across just three generations of my family, and each step of the way has changed our lives dramatically, just as they did for society as a whole: allowing us to communicate with our loved ones, creating the world of instant news, changing the way we work, and altering the way we entertain and are entertained. But while a video call may seem a far cry from the telegram, all these forms of modern communication are based on the science of signals being sent from one distant point to another, almost instantaneously. And our ability to do that centers around magnets.

I find magnets magical. The magnetic fields that radiate from them are invisible, but they can be substantial, far-­reaching, and influential across large distances. The science is complex and wasn’t understood for thousands of years—­indeed, many physicists will tell you that magnetism, and especially electromagnetism, still isn’t fully understood. But once we had at least some understanding, we were able to create practical mechanisms. Humans harnessed the magic of magnets to create machines that could interact and exert forces on other machines, farther away than had ever been thought possible.

Unlike the inventions we’ve looked at so far, magnets—­or objects that exert magnetic forces—­exist in the very essence of our universe. You and I are magnets (very, very weak ones—­don’t worry, there’s no danger of us suddenly becoming attached to our refrigerators). Atoms, the minuscule building blocks of matter, are magnetic. The planet on which we live is a giant magnet. Magnets, unlike wheels and nails and springs, were discovered rather than invented by humans. Despite this, they nonetheless deserve their place in this book, because it was humans who figured out how to make them more useful than they were as supplied by Mother Nature. The magnets we found naturally in our surroundings a few thousand years ago were weak and hard to come by. They were formed of magnetite, which came to be known as lodestone, a natural mineral found in the earth that is a mix of iron and oxygen, plus other impurities. It’s a magnetic material, but only a small proportion of the magnetite that exists in nature is magnetic, because it needs both a specific combination of impurities inside it, and to have been exposed to specific conditions of heat and magnetic fields outside it.

The earliest references to this natural magnet date back to ancient Greece in the sixth century BCE. Around two hundred years later, the Chinese documented the phenomenon of a natural stone attracting iron, and in another four hundred years, they began using this material for geomancy (a form of divination). It took another thousand years, advancing into the Middle Ages, before it was used for navigation in the form of a compass. Navigators in the Song Dynasty in China shaped lodestone to look like a fish, and let it float freely in water, so it pointed south. This knowledge spread to Europe and the Middle East soon after. Even then, with over a thousand years of knowing about natural magnets, we couldn’t replicate them, and their use was restricted to navigation.

Magnets themselves come in two distinct forms: permanent magnets and electromagnets. Permanent magnets are the horseshoe-­ and bar-­shaped magnets we saw in school science demonstrations and those that decorate our refrigerators. They have two poles, north and south: bringing together the south poles or the north poles of two magnets creates a pushing or repulsion force, but bring a north and south pole together and the magnets will cling to each other.

It took millennia to come to grips with how magnetism works, because this requires an advanced understanding of atomic physics and material science. To become a magnet, a material requires many particles, at many different scales, behaving in a very particular way. Let’s start with the electrons that orbit the nucleus of an atom. Just as electrons have a negative electric charge, they also have what physicists call spin, which defines its magnetic characteristics. By “pointing” in different directions, the spin cancels out the magnetic forces of electrons entirely in some atoms, leaving them nonmagnetic. But in others, while some of the electrons are arranged so their spin cancels out, not all are, so there is a net magnetic force left over, creating a magnetic atom.

Then, if we zoom out from the electron scale to the atomic scale, the atoms in an element are naturally arranged at random, which means that the magnetic forces of the individual atoms cancel each other out. In some materials, however, little pockets of atoms—­called domains—­have atoms all arranged in the same direction, giving the domain a net magnetism. However, they are not yet magnets, because the domains themselves are usually arranged at random.

To make a material produce a net magnetism, then, the atoms in the majority of the domains need to be forced into magnetic alignment by a strong external magnetic field, or by large amounts of heat applied at particular temperatures in particular sequences. Once the domains point in the same direction, you have a magnet.

Even today, there is a debate as to how magnetite becomes magnetized in the first place, so artificially replicating this has been a challenge. Certain materials like iron, cobalt, and nickel have electrons favorably arranged to make their atoms magnetic, which in turn sit in well-­defined domains. Our ancestors tinkered with mixes of such metals, heating and cooling them in various combinations to try to figure out the best recipe for forming permanent magnets. They succeeded, to a degree, making somewhat weak magnets that didn’t hold their force for long.

The development of permanent magnets in a scientific way started in the seventeenth century, when Dr. William Gilbert published De Magnete, which outlined his experimentation with magnetic materials. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we developed more sophisticated methods for making iron and steel, and observed that certain combinations made much stronger or longer-­lasting magnets—­and sometimes even both. But we still didn’t really understand why. The nineteenth century also saw the advent of understanding electromagnetism, which we’ll come back to, but it took until the twentieth century and the conception of quantum physics before we were able to define and understand atoms and electrons well enough to create strong and long-­lasting permanent magnets ourselves.

This led to the use of three types of materials to make permanent magnets: metals, ceramics, and rare-­earth minerals. The first major improvement was the development of a metal mix of aluminum-­nickel-­cobalt, used to make “alnico” magnets, but these were complicated and expensive to make. Then in the 1940s, ceramic magnets were created from pressing together tiny balls of barium or strontium with iron. These were much cheaper, and today account for the vast majority of permanent magnets produced by weight. The third family of materials are the rare-­earth magnets, based on elements like samarium, cerium, yttrium, praseodymium, and others.

Within the space of the last century, these three types of permanent magnets have been refined to produce produced magnetic fields 200 times stronger than before. And this improved efficiency led to permanent magnets playing an important role in much of our modern lives: a car, for example, can have thirty separate applications for magnets, using over 100 individual magnets. Thermostats, door latches, speakers, motors, brakes, generators, body scanners, electric circuitry and components—­take any of these apart and you’ll find permanent magnets.

But as we saw, the stories of permanent magnets and electromagnets intertwine, and since the discovery of electromagnets around 200 years ago, each has swung in and out of favor as humanity learned more about how they worked and what they could be used for. The prevalence of permanent magnets in the past few decades is due not just to their increasing strength and compactness but also to the fact that, unlike electromagnets, they never need a source of power. But from the nineteenth century onward, and even today in situations where immense fields are needed, electromagnets dominated. We can control their strength, switching off or cranking up the magnetic field of an electromagnet when it suits.

The reason electromagnets took so long to make an appearance in the field is because we needed an understanding of the science of materials, electricity, and light—­and the mysterious force of electromagnetism. It’s only when we were able to move electrons in materials that we understood how to create and change this force and apply it to our technology.

Like gravity, electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces in nature. It is the physical interaction that happens between particles, like electrons, that have an electric charge. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, André-­Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday, and other scientists published numerous theories about electric and magnetic fields, which were eventually brought together and summarized by the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell in what are now known as “Maxwell’s equations.” These gave us crucial information that led to the invention of electric motors, and these equations are also the basis of our power grids, radios, telephones, printers, air conditioners, hard drives, and data-­storage devices; they are even used in the creation of powerful microscopes.

The key principle that led to such technological advancement was the realization that moving charges create magnetic fields. Without getting too deep into the complex science, this means that if an electric current is flowing through a coil of wire, it behaves like a magnet. If you change the strength of the current, you change the strength of the magnet. And the converse is also true: applying a variable magnetic field near a wire will create an electric current in the wire. Following on from this science, experiments proved that when a charge, like an electron, moves within a magnetic field (either freely or inside a wire), it feels a pushing force.

Studying the electromagnetic force led us to define the phenomenon of electromagnetic waves. Think of these as waves of force that flow because of the interaction between electric and magnetic fields. Our understanding of light increased manifold when we were able to quantify it as an electromagnetic wave. And, in addition to visible light, we saw that a whole spectrum of electromagnetic waves—­from radio waves (with the longest wavelength) to gamma rays (with the shortest)—­exists, and that these waves can be used in different ways. It is electromagnetism and electromagnetic waves that form the basis of our long-­range communication technology: the technology used by countless people around the world to share news with their loved ones. People like my uncle, the prolific sender of telegrams.

__________________________________

From Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way by Roma Agrawal. Copyright © 2023. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.

Imagine our world without writing. No pencils, no pens, no paper, no grocery lists. No chalkboards, typewriters or printing-presses, no letters or books. No computers or word-processors, no e-mail or Internet, no “social media”; and without binary code—strings of ones and zeroes that create computer programs—no viewable archives of film or television, either. Writing evolved to perform tasks that were difficult or impossible to accomplish without it; at some level, it is now essential for anything that human societies do, except in certain increasingly threatened cultures of hunter-gatherers. Without writing, modern civilization has amnesia; complex tasks need stable, reliable, long-term memory.

My new book, How Writing Made Us Human: 3000 BCE to Now, is about Homo scribens, Man the Writer, because whatever else they said about “man,” most writers in the Western tradition have assumed that writing made Homo fully human. Am I suggesting that writing is the only skill that makes “us” human? Of course not. Yet historically the idea was often implied and occasionally explicit. According to a late sixteenth-century treatise on penmanship, “Plato says that the difference which divides us humans from the animals is that we have the power of speech and they do not. I, however, say that the difference is that we know how to write but they do not.”

Throughout Western history, there have been other shorthand definitions of humanity in terms of some single, overarching, inherent trait. The most laudatory definition was devised by a botantist of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, who dubbed us Homo sapiens, Man the Wise; later we were promoted to Homo sapiens sapiens. This flattering label has stuck, peremptorily declaring our superiority to all the hominins that went extinct. By enshrining the epithet in anthropology and other sciences, we continue to imply that some definition of wisdom is entwined with our species’ evolution.

Whether Neanderthals or others of our relatives laughed or played is unprovable (precisely because they did not write). But it seems likely; archaeology tells us they made things, as hominins had done since Paleolithic times. Yet writing is the one accomplishment we do not share with Neanderthals and our other ancestors.

Every age had its own ideas of how writing came about, what it was for, and what human life would be without it. For thousands of years, Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Latins, Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared two projects, the creation and refinement of writing, and the attempt to understand its history and meaning. Other cultures, notably in China and Central America, have long traditions of writing, to be sure, and scholars have studied them for centuries. But to do them justice here would risk tangling the emotional thread that connects the history of Homo scribens from Babylon to our own time. That affective evolution is coherent and compelling, from myth to method, from fireside legends of gods and heroes to scientific excavation and decryption.

Throughout recorded history, humans have regarded the art of writing with awe and even reverence. To imagine humanity without writing was not impossible, but it was in many ways difficult. Prehistory, defined by the absence of written records, only entered the English language in 1836. A few years previously, in 1828, a North American schoolgirl praised writing as miraculous, “the wondrous, mystic art of painting speech, and speaking to the eyes.” This synesthetic quality, the capacity to translate information from one sense to another, had been a source of enthusiasm since the most ancient times, yet its appeal remained undiminished. Then, within twenty years, the electromagnetic telegraph expanded the definition of writing, by retranslating “painted speech” into a binary system of audible pulses capable of spanning continents and oceans.

Two centuries after the marveling schoolgirl, we can hardly imagine her degree of enthusiasm. Throughout five millennia, the art of writing has always been paradoxical, as mundane and practical as a pencil, yet miraculous, more stupefying in its way than end products like Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy, the Iliad, or, ultimately, the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh.

As if echoing the nineteenth-century schoolgirl, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has remarked that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and from its beginnings writing seemed indeed magical, even god-given. Praise for letters as the foundation of civilized life developed in ancient societies as soon as records progressed beyond bare lists and inventories. On clay, papyrus and parchment, paper, stone, and metals, men—and a very few women until the Renaissance—marveled at the art of writing and celebrated its awesome magnification of memory and imagination.

*

For most of history, the epithet scribens would have been grossly inappropriate to describe the genus Homo; writing was a skill limited to a tiny elite of scribes and scholars. As the specialized technology of a guild, the art acquired a prestige, an aura, a mystique that made it seem magical, sometimes in the fullest sense of the word. Until nineteenth-century archaeology, anyone interested in the history of writing had scarcely better evidence than the Sumerians. Lacking historical perspective, but immensely proud of their craft, early scribes imagined its origin and development as superhuman, the gift of gods and heroes. Would-be historians inherited, transmitted, and embellished mythical tales about heroic or divine individuals who single-handedly invented an art imbued with a power that was sometimes tangible—that is, magical—as well as political, religious, or symbolic. Although these stories became steadily less mythical, their leitmotifs remained remarkably stable.

Writing as “The Wondrous, Mystic Art”
The conviction that writing was worthy of the highest admiration, a marvel so astonishing that only a god or godlike human could have invented it, permeated countless stories about it before 1800. Writing enabled memory to outlast the human voice and transcend the individual person; written thoughts could remain stable over generations or centuries. By bridging space as well as time, writing abolished isolation and created community. It could even enable interaction between the ephemeral human world and the invisible society of gods, demons, and spirits. Writing was so central to definitions of humanity that, as I note above, the concept of prehistory only emerged around 1800, while the notion that Adam, Moses, or another biblical patriarch had invented writing lingered among the religious.

Inscription and Erasure
Writing was a facsimile of immortality for individuals and whole societies; thus, a medieval Latin translator of Plato referred to memoria literarum. The phrase suggested that writing is a kind of receptacle, which contains memory as if it were a tangible physical object. Still, it was no secret that literary memory is not “literally” eternal because even the most durable media are overshadowed by the threat of erasure. The tension between inscription and obliteration (literally de-lettering) was and remains an omnipresent theme.

Lost Books and Libraries
Lost writings are a powerful leitmotif in the emotional history of writing. The erasure of a single work seems tragic even now, but in the long manuscript age before Gutenberg, the destruction of a book could symbolize the loss of the whole world. If nothing but fragments of a text survive, the biblioclasm inevitably stimulates writers to imagine the complete whole that was destroyed. Like the armless Venus de Milo, mutilated writings have inspired nostalgic dreams of reconstitution, ranging from scholarly treatises to fantasy and kitsch. The immense Library of Alexandria was already the archetype of mass erasure during antiquity and the Middle Ages, and it still excites both scholars and nonspecialists.

Rediscovery
Not all lost writings are gone for good; some are merely misplaced, and startling rediscoveries have been made over the centuries. Famous recovered works that crowd scholarly daydreams include the dramatic example of an entire library belonging to Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian emperor who died in 627 BCE. Discovered in 1849–1852, it contained thousands of cuneiform tablets, many broken into tiny fragments. The trove included the epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest major work of world literature, containing what its first reader in two millennia christened “the original version of Noah’s Flood.” More recently, space-age technologies have permitted unprecedented collaboration between manuscript scholars and cutting-edge scientists, who miraculously salvaged lost texts by that archetypal mathematician Archimedes.

Bookhunters
Many recoveries of lost works have been owed to random good fortune, but just as frequently they were the result of deliberate searches. The figure of the Bookhunter, an Indiana Jones who traces clues and braves danger to recover priceless written treasure, was already present in ancient Egyptian myth. During the Renaissance, scholarly bookhunters transformed the ancient fables into an exciting reality; as they rediscovered landmarks of Greek and Roman culture, they laid bare centuries of dramatic stories about the history and powers of writing. Even today, the search and recovery operation is still going strong, including in cultures far older than Greece and Rome.

Ancient Wisdom
Biblioclasms—lost libraries and damaged manuscripts—inspire a romantic nostalgia so intense that writers have often imagined whole utopias of extinct wisdom. Sometimes hard evidence of destruction inspired these bookish fantasies, but paradoxically, daydreams of loss were often provoked by exciting rediscoveries. Until the eighteenth century, sapientia veterum, the wisdom of the ancients, was the scholar’s imagined paradise, his (or increasingly her) Garden of Eden. Democratized literacy since 1800 has made reveries about the stupendous achievements of Egypt and Atlantis into perennial favorites of popular culture. Plato imagined Atlantis 2400 years ago, yet modern daydreams about lost utopias, from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to the 1985 film Back to the Future, differ from their ancient counterparts mainly through their anachronistic or pseudoscientific assumptions about technology and science.

Forgeries and Fakes
Forged texts were common in ancient Greece, and even earlier in Egypt. During the Renaissance, when genuine Greek and Roman texts and epigraphic inscriptions were being rediscovered in droves, forgery and falsification ran rife. Scholars developed techniques for detecting them, but forgers stayed a step ahead of their critics. Moreover, by the eighteenth century, novelists were employing narrative techniques—some of them dating back to ancient Greece—that blurred the boundaries between fact, forgery, and fiction in suggestive and often disturbing ways. In 1719, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, subtitled “the life and strange surprising adventures” of an Englishman from York, “written by Himself,” was told so realistically that a century later many readers, including a notorious forger of Shakespeare manuscripts, still mistook it for a factual account.

Books of the Damned
Not all enthusiasm is positive. Whether genuine or forged, physically real or only imagined, books have at times incarnated an ideal of evil. Early Christians destroyed numbers of books they considered theologically, morally, or intellectually dangerous, including the Book of Enoch, which claimed to be the memoirs of Noah’s great-grandfather. Other scandalous books were nonexistent or unlocatable to begin with: the mere title of a book could ignite passionate controversy, even—or especially—when no one could find copies of it. Beginning in the thirteenth century, scholars gossiped and daydreamed apprehensively about a Book of the Three Great Impostors, which supposedly argued that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were charlatans and tricksters, and their religions nothing but tissues of lies. In the skeptical eighteenth century, a book was finally forged to fit the title, to widespread disappointment.

Holy Books
The opposite of damned books were sacred books, which were off limits (sacer in Latin) in a different way, “untouchable” because religious leaders declared them immune to all criticism. These holy books—or scriptures—are the most radically explicit example of creating authority—religious and political credibility—through writing. Their defenders claim that scriptures descend vertically from a god to humans, whereas modern scholars call them mere texts and explain their trajectories horizontally, across human history. From the Book of Enoch onward, legends about God and the Hebrew alphabet, including the origins of the Torah itself, were based on passages in the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament, the Qur’an, and the Book of Mormon, as well as numbers of would-be scriptures now forgotten, went further and described in “autobiographical” detail how they came to be written by gods or their human amanuenses.

Imaginary Books
As the previous two categories suggest, a letter, an inscription, or even an entire book can be wholly imaginary, as thoroughly nonexistent as cloud-cuckoo-land. Paradoxically, a brief title makes the hypothetical existence of a book easier to imagine than the narrated life of a Robinson Crusoe or an Elizabeth Bennet. Conversely, it is more difficult to establish the unreality of an imaginary book than that of a unicorn or a utopia. The metahistory of writing is entwined with the history of imaginary books, and examples of full-on mythical bibliography are far from rare. Whether as earnest scholarly quests for literary chimeras or as satirical send-ups of learned pretense, mythical bibliography remains a major expression of the social and emotional importance of writing.

Writing, Books, and Libraries as Metaphors and Symbols
Various myths about the history of writing are strongly symbolic or metaphorical. At the end of Dante’s Paradiso, his famous description of God as the ultimate book symbolized the overwhelming consequence of writing and books for Christian culture in 1320. Six centuries later, Jorge Luis Borges came to international fame through his tale “The Library of Babel” (1941). Borges describes the cosmos as an infinite library whose only inhabitants are despondent librarians searching vainly for the ultimate book that will make sense of their bibliocosm. Borges’s tales and essays frequently couch the deepest philosophical truths in enigmatic narratives, glorifying language, writing, and books as convincingly as genuine primitive myths ever did, sometimes naming uncanny or savage gods as their authors.

Conclusions
The history of writing is ready for its emotional close-up: what people have done with writing is now well known, but how they felt about it over time remains uncharted. The celebrities of bookish myths were not only gods and humans, but also writings, and ultimately the art of writing itself. Discarded documents, when they survive, have told us much about the way people used writing, in every kind of activity from accounting to religious contemplation, poetic meditation, philosophical inquiry, and scientific research. But discarded attitudes to writing still await the same kind of systematic spadework that archaeologists perform on material remains of the past.

The attitudes buried in myths and legends of writing reflect times when digging in the ground was for farmers, not archaeologists. Later, scholars researched the history of writing by reading books, but they had to construct that history for themselves from scattered, sometimes enigmatic anecdotes. Like the texts of Sappho’s poems or the Dead Sea Scrolls, emotional evidence about the history of writing survived in mutilated, fragmentary form. Nevertheless, that lore is as vital to the history of literature as Shakespeare’s sonnets or Dickens’s novels.

Generations of scholars have told us how a single author or a vaguely defined period (“the Middle Ages” or “the Enlightenment”) thought about books or libraries. But aside from writing as a profession (monk, scrivener, poet, historian, journalist, novelist, etc.), little has been collected of what earlier ages thought and felt about writing as an art, that is, as a whole phenomenon, in its organic relationship to humanity and civilization. Essential evidence for the emotional history of writing is only infrequently found in revered masterworks by Homer, Dante, or Jane Austen. The best sources are often lurking in outmoded scholarship: their technical obsolescence actually makes their defunct erudition more compelling as emotional history. Hiding under the dunes of dusty bygone scholarship are stories as captivating as Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”—a familiar poem inspired by an ancient, now-forgotten anecdote about writing.

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Adapted from How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now by Walter Stephens. Copyright 2023. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children draws on thousands of pages of internal documents and over 100 hours of interviews with clinicians and service users.  One service user, Jacob’s, story is told here.

*

Jacob has never really seen himself as a girl.

“Even when I was like a toddler, I would go by names from male characters I saw on TV,” he says. “I would say, ‘My name’s Jack-Jack,’ or Indiana from Indiana Jones or Harry from Harry Potter.”

Jacob’s mum, Michelle, agrees.* From the age of three Jacob would take his younger brother’s clothes and wear them. “And Jacob’s favorite thing was the backwards hat and an Indiana Jones T-shirt.” Even at preschool, he hadn’t liked answering to the female name he’d been given at birth, Michelle remembers.

Jacob started presenting as a boy at school from Year 1, he says, aged five or six. “I wore a hat, because I didn’t want to show my long hair, and when we went swimming, I’d wear trunks.”

When Jacob was seven, Michelle went to her GP for advice. Jacob’s desire to be a boy was increasing, not going away. She’d read about something called gender dysphoria online, but didn’t know much about it. She thought that Jacob’s behavior seemed “a little bit more than just tomboy behavior,” she says. Jacob wanted to be a boy, Michelle explains, and “used to describe thinking as a boy.” The GP listened and sent Michelle away. “She said, ‘Look, go away for two years. Come back when Jacob’s nine and then we’ll talk about it again.’”

That’s exactly what Michelle did. At nine years old, Jacob still wanted to be a boy. He used the boys’ toilets at his junior school and continued to choose boys’ names to be referred to. This time the GP agreed that what Jacob was experiencing seemed more than just being a tomboy. The GP was aware that there was a specialist gender clinic for children at the Tavistock in London, but referred Jacob to his local CAMHS first so that they could explore if there was anything that might be influencing Jacob’s behavior.

Michelle thought CAMHS did a good job. The psychotherapist Jacob saw talked about all sorts of things—not just gender. “They talked about relationships at home, relationships with friends at school,” Michelle says. And they talked about an “incident” that occurred, which, Michelle explains, “could have exacerbated the issue with being a bit more anti-female.” She doesn’t go into any more detail because Jacob doesn’t want her to. But the implication is that something happened to Jacob that might make him feel uncomfortable towards his female body.

CAMHS also discussed Jacob’s parents’ divorce and how that had made him feel. He’d been about five when the split happened, but Michelle describes her ex as “very sexist.” He’d get their sons doing what he saw as ‘very masculine jobs’, Michelle explains, but get the girls— Jacob and his sister—to “tidy up and clean things.” CAMHS explored both this family background and the “incident” with Jacob but felt when it came to his continuing desire to be a boy, he needed to be seen by experts. CAMHS referred him to GIDS, noting in their referral letter that Jacob had “persistent ideas about wishing to be seen and treated as a ‘boy.’”

Jacob and Michelle had their first appointment at GIDS in 2014. Jacob was 11 years old. That same month, GIDS’s Early Intervention Study recruited its final participant, having reached the end of its first three years.

By now, all Jacob’s school friends knew him “as a guy.” But it was a confusing time. “Being trans,” he explains to me, “is like you have moments where you feel like yourself, you feel like the person you should have been,” but his feelings changed a lot. “There were moments where I felt very, very low” about being trans. “I wanted to create a new person to go with how I actually feel,” he says. But there were other moments when “it wasn’t really something that mattered as much” as things going on in everyday life: starting a new school or other life events. “But it was always there. It wasn’t something that went away.”

When Jacob arrived for his first GIDS appointment, he says he was at the beginning of his “lowest point.” Puberty had started, and while Jacob hadn’t had a period yet, he was frightened. “It feels wrong,” he explains to me. “That’s not what should be happening; that isn’t the right type of puberty; that’s not the one you should be experiencing. And then it’s the fear. You start overthinking about what it’s like to have periods, what it’s like to have breast tissue, and it becomes more scary than anything else.”

Jacob had a good group of friends at school, who accepted him for who he was. They saw him as a boy, called him by the name he’d chosen and thought little of it. These were the people he relied on and with whom he felt most himself. “But then you have moments where that kind of is pushed aside by the fact that you weren’t born properly, if that makes sense?” he says. “Boys thought I was weird,” he says. “They didn’t like hanging around with someone who wasn’t a real boy.” But girls were more accepting. “So you end up living your entire life in a no man’s land, where you’re not really a girl but you’re not a boy. You don’t fit in with either side… If I hang around with the boys, I have this, like, envious jealousy towards them. Because for me, I want that so badly… But it’s not a reality. And… when you hang around with the girls, you feel like you’re in the wrong place.”

Neither Jacob nor Michelle knew anything about puberty blockers when they arrived at GIDS. They’d never heard of them and weren’t asking for them.

“I think it was my first, maybe second appointment with Tavistock, and they were the ones who brought up hormone blockers,” Jacob recalls.

A lot of the things that had been discussed at CAMHS—the distressing “incident,” Jacob’s parents’ divorce—weren’t really spoken about at GIDS, Michelle says. There was next to no exploration of Jacob’s broader life. The sole focus was on gender identity. How Jacob saw himself, where he saw himself in the future, and what he wanted from GIDS. It felt strange to Michelle to ask this of an 11-year-old child. Both she and Jacob say that the clinicians were keen to promise an outcome that would make Jacob “happy.” But Jacob describes himself repeatedly, even at the age of 11 or 12, as “a realist.” “Jacob’s very much, ‘Well, this is the gender I was born and no surgery or drugs or anything is ever going to change the biology. It’s very much putting a cloak over it,’” Michelle says. “I admire Jacob for that because by being a realist—although it does make Jacob very unhappy—it does mean that Jacob has a kind of very logical understanding about being gender-dysphoric or transgender. And the Tavistock actually got frustrated with Jacob about that.”

Jacob did not even speak in some of the GIDS appointments. He felt unable. ‘”I had pretty bad anxiety,” he explains, “so I couldn’t, like, talk to them properly. To me, they were strangers.” When the conversation turned to puberty blockers, he didn’t feel able to talk to his two clinicians about “more personal stuff.” Michelle would do most of the talking. Not in an overly pushy-parent way, but because Jacob couldn’t. He would tell Michelle what he wanted to say on the train ride from home to the Tavistock, so that she could then pass this on to the GIDS workers. “And so she would say, ‘Well, Jacob’s feeling really bad about herself** at the moment,’” experiencing body-image problems “because of all of the anxiety about having to go through girl puberty,” Jacob says. Michelle asked the GIDS team if there was any kind of therapy or therapeutic intervention that could help ease Jacob’s distress, that would mean that puberty wouldn’t be as bad as he feared. Jacob and Michelle say they were told no. There wasn’t. But Jacob says the GIDS clinicians explained that “there’s this thing called hormone blockers. And they’re basically like a full stop at the end of the sentence. They’ll stop your puberty for as long as you need it to be stopped. And then as soon as you get old enough, you can go on testosterone.” Jacob relays the words as if he can remember the conversation as though it were yesterday.

Jacob was pleased when he heard about puberty blockers. He was a realist, but these sounded great. “I was relying on the so-called experts to give me information,” he says, and they had given him this option. “A cure is how they sold it to me.” He was told not to worry. Puberty blockers were “completely reversible” and wouldn’t harm his body. “It basically stops your female hormones,” the GIDS clinicians had said, adding ‘it doesn’t make you gain weight.”

“After the conversation we had with them, I was like, I want to do it,” Jacob explains. “I am scared. I don’t want to go through puberty, I can’t go through puberty. I really don’t want to. And then my mum’s like, ‘Okay, well, I really want to do some more research about [the blockers].’” Jacob couldn’t wait for Michelle to do the research. He wanted the blockers immediately. “I actually ended up pushing my mum to just sign the consent forms,” he says. “I was the one pushing my mum to push my dad to sign the consent forms, because the way it was sold to me was like an answer to all my worries.”

To Michelle it seemed that the message coming from GIDS was less of a sales pitch, but more “Why else are you here?” “I know that’s awful to say,” she says, “but that is how I felt. Unless you’re there for them to be a vehicle to send you to the UCLH to get the drugs, I felt that their view was, well, what’s the point?” She understood why young people were so keen on a “miracle cure,” as she puts it. “I think from their perspective, they’re living in a body that they don’t feel comfortable in and obviously they’d want to do anything to fix that situation. And I really did feel that GIDS did play upon that.”

Michelle was surprised too. When she’d first sought help years earlier from her GP, she’d been told that GIDS were the experts. They’d be the ones to talk through what all the options were for Jacob. “But that fundamental word, ‘options’—I really didn’t feel that that was really covered. They offered one solution. One. There is an option—which [is] you go on blockers, and then you go on testosterone, and then you have an operation,” Michelle claims. Less invasive options, like Jacob continuing to dress in the gender he preferred, weren’t discussed.

Although she was concerned, Michelle says she felt she was in an almost impossible situation. “As a parent, you feel like you have to be so careful what you say because one of them is a social worker,” she says, referring to the people assessing her child at GIDS. It would never have been GIDS’s intention to make parents feel uncomfortable—GIDS clinicians simply have a variety of professional backgrounds. But it did impact on Michelle. Michelle says she felt like she didn’t have much of a choice, “that that was the route that they were taking with Jacob.” She didn’t feel she could say she wasn’t sure.

Ultimately, Michelle trusted the experts. “I’m quite an enquiring mind,” she says, “but you think that they’re doctors and psychologists, and they kind of know what they’re talking about… we felt like they knew what they were talking about. And we thought that we were doing the right thing to help Jacob, really.”

It wasn’t just the medical pathway that Michelle felt was being pushed. She says the family were asked whether they’d thought about changing Jacob’s name by deed poll. “And then the next minute, we’ve just done it,” she says.

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Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes has been shortlisted for the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

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After four appointments spread over just four months, Jacob was referred to UCLH to commence treatment with the blocker. He had just turned 12. The assessment report written by his two GIDS clinicians stated that “hormone blockers can provide young people with the opportunity to explore and experiment with their identities without the anxiety and challenges associated with ongoing pubertal development.” It added, “It is considered to be a fully reversible treatment.” Jacob arguably did not meet the criteria of the Early Intervention Study, or early intervention more generally, which had now been rolled out as standard practice at GIDS. Jacob had not actively been requesting blockers. Technically, by the time his assessment report and referral were written, he had been at GIDS for six months—as stipulated by the study—but his four appointments had taken place over just four months. He had no contact with the service outside of those.

Like all GIDS patients on the medical pathway, Jacob continued to be seen by the service, albeit infrequently. Appointments would be every four months, then every six months. He would have liked to have been seen more often. Meetings were spaced so far apart that an issue he might have raised at the previous meeting could have changed or resolved itself by the next, he explains, but it would then be brought up again. “You never get a chance to actually move on,” Jacob says.

Jacob’s mum Michelle says that the trans-led support group Gendered Intelligence was talked about ‘all the time’ throughout Jacob’s time at GIDS. The group listed GIDS Executive member Sarah Davidson as part of its team for a time and also, according to Anastassis Spiliadis, once worked alongside GIDS clinicians to deliver official training on gender diversity to other health professionals. Bernadette Wren has also spoken publicly of GIDS’s relationship with Gendered Intelligence.

Jacob was encouraged to look at the group’s website and do some research. But this baffled Michelle. “To me, if you’ve got someone that’s working for the NHS, why are they pushing a charity?” she asks. Jacob was given a leaflet for Mermaids too, but it was Gendered Intelligence that was talked about more. Michelle felt that to point young people towards certain resources and “like-minded people” was “pushing an agenda.” At the time of writing in 2022, young people are still directed towards Gendered Intelligence and their resources on several pages of the GIDS website.

The influence of these outside groups—Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence—was also felt at GIDS “Family Days.” Neither Jacob nor Michelle speaks favorably of the events, Michelle branding them “chaos” and lacking any kind of structure or boundaries. Jacob did not like the fact that the sessions for young people attending GIDS were invariably led by trans adults from either Gendered Intelligence or Mermaids. These adults had often not been through GIDS themselves, Jacobs says, and they were only interested in hearing about positive stories. “I couldn’t discuss my way of thinking,” he says, because those facilitating the discussion only chose people who were like them—fully sold on medical transition and its merits, Jacob recalls. It’s understandable that GIDS would want to try to show that many who transition are happy. But to Jacob there was no diversity of opinion allowed or presented. No other ways of seeing what “being trans” could mean.

The GIDS appointments and Family Days were a sideshow, however. Life for Jacob was immensely difficult. Being on the blockers was not living up to what he had been promised.

The puberty blockers prescribed to Jacob by UCLH slowed down his puberty, he says, but they didn’t stop it. “I still got showings,” Jacob says, referring to spots of blood. “And I still got breast-tissue development.” The response from the endocrinology team at UCLH was to adjust the dose of medication Jacob was on. It didn’t work. Each time a higher dose of triptorelin—the drug predominantly given to the young people attending GIDS—was tried, Jacob still “broke through.”

“I was on the highest-level dose of a completely experimental drug they’d only used twice,” he says. When upping the dose or changing the drug didn’t work, they say, endocrinologists at UCLH gave Jacob beta blockers—medication that slows the heart down—alongside the puberty blockers in the hope that this would help. Michelle says she was told that this was to see whether they could get the hormone blocker to move more slowly around Jacob’s body, something that—combined with the higher dose of the blocker—might “stop the breakthrough.” “To be honest,” she says, “that’s an experiment.”

And one that seemed dangerous.

Jacob collapsed at school. Just 14 years old, he was left lying on the floor behind a locked toilet door for 40 minutes before someone found him. “I rang up UCLH and I was not happy,” Michelle recalls. “And I said to them, ‘I’m not doing this—the beta blockers—any more. If you want to carry on with the blockers with Jacob, you need to find a way of doing it without putting Jacob at risk’… I said there’s no way you should be messing around experimenting with these things with my child.”

The puberty blockers affected Jacob in other ways he wasn’t anticipating, and which he says he hadn’t been told about before starting treatment. He experienced a range of intense and unpleasant side effects, as he tried different doses. “On one of them I had really bad insomnia. And another one, I had really bad anger problems.” The anger didn’t feel normal. “I actually broke my knuckle while I was on the blocker,” from punching something, he says.

Then there was the depression. “Your mood goes like it’s a roller coaster,” he explains. “There are moments when you’re euphorically happy. And the next day, you crash really bad and you are exhausted. And then you’re really, really depressed, like, suicidal depressed.” Jacob says he had felt depressed before starting on puberty blockers and had experienced anxiety. These had made him “feel low” but nothing compared to his temperament on the blocker. Jacob’s physical health suffered too. He gained “tons of weight,” so much so that he got stretch marks.

Then there was the problem with Jacob’s bones. They kept breaking. “I’d never ever broken a bone before I started the blockers,” Jacob tells me. “On the blockers I broke my wrist twice, my knuckles, my toe. It really ruins your bone density.” Four broken bones in just a few years. Jacob was advised to take vitamin D. His blood work showed that he was “incredibly deficient.”

As Jacob’s health deteriorated and his puberty continued to “break through,” he grew increasingly distressed. Like any other person experiencing medical problems he wanted to be able to talk to his doctors in privacy, but he didn’t feel he was given that basic right. Every time Jacob and Michelle would attend appointments at UCLH, someone from GIDS would sit in. They wouldn’t have minded so much if it were Jacob’s own clinicians, but that’s not how the arrangement works. GIDS clinicians are rota’d to attend the endocrine clinic at UCLH. It means that on any given day there’s a chance the young people attending might be their own patients, but the likelihood is that they won’t be. But the agreement between GIDS and UCLH is that someone from GIDS must attend all endocrine-clinic appointments at UCLH. For Jacob, it meant that every time he and Michelle made the trip to London to talk about the medical problems he was encountering while on the blocker, a different member of GIDS staff would sit in each time. “It’s awful,” Jacob says. “These were private medical discussions about things that I was already self-conscious about. And I had to talk about them in front of a stranger.”

After more than four years on the blocker, Jacob felt worse than he ever had before the medication. While his friends were getting their first boyfriends and girlfriends, experiencing their first kisses and sexual experiences, he felt nothing. “You have no desire, no drive whatsoever,” he says. “You don’t even feel attracted to people.” While sitting his GCSE exams he felt he was “being left behind.” Emotionally, he felt years younger than his peers. Michelle noticed it too. And physically, Jacob had stopped growing. Her child was not developing in the way he should.

“I was desperate for it to work,” Jacob says. But the puberty blockers weren’t working. And he’d been told by his doctors that even when he went on to testosterone, he would have to continue taking blockers. “They told me that I would have to be on the blocker for the rest of my life if I decided to take testosterone, and I was like—excuse my language—I was like, screw that.”

At the beginning of 2019, Jacob had had enough. He told his mum, Michelle, “I’m not doing this any more.”

Jacob took his last injection of puberty blockers in January 2019. He had started on them aged 12, and had been receiving regular injections for more than four years. They hadn’t been the “magic bullet” he and his family had been promised.

His decision to walk away from UCLH and GIDS wasn’t planned really, but he’d had enough. A number of factors combined. There was the news that even when Jacob went on to testosterone, as GIDS had talked about from his initial assessment at the age of 11, he would still have to take blockers to suppress his naturally occurring estrogen. He could not face the prospect of his health problems—both physical and mental—continuing indefinitely.

Then there was the challenge from Jacob’s siblings. “You’ve been on the blocker for so long,” they said. “How do you even know that you’re trans? How do you even know that you have these feelings?” Jacob knew these questions were coming from a place of love. His brothers and sister thought he should come off the blockers because they were ‘ruining’ his body. Michelle remembers Jacob’s response. “I don’t know. I just know that’s how I feel,” he said, “and I dream as a boy.”

And finally, there was what happened at UCLH. Jacob was 16 and feeling “very body-conscious,” Michelle explains. He wanted to have a private conversation with his doctors, without a GIDS member of staff present. On one occasion, the request was agreed to, but Michelle and Jacob say they were told, “If this happens again, you won’t be allowed to be seen without a representative from GIDS in there.” Those were the rules, and they had to adhere to them.

Jacob claims they were told that there were many others who could take his place if he was unhappy.

Jacob never went back to GIDS. A year later, in March 2020, Jacob’s GP received a letter informing them that he had been discharged.

The improvement to Jacob’s health was immediate when he stopped the blockers. “I felt so much better in terms of mood. I could sleep better. I grew quite soon after I stopped them.”

His identity didn’t change.

In 2022, more than three years after stopping puberty blockers, Jacob is 19 and still trans. He uses a male name and male pronouns, and dresses in a way that he says is typically male. His passport and driving license say male. But he’s not on any medication. He hasn’t chosen to take testosterone and has no plans to. “I’m quite content with just being me at the moment,” he says. “To be honest, I think I’m gonna be like that for the rest of my life. I’m just all right with what I’m doing at the moment, which is nothing. I’m happy dressing as a boy, I’m happy saying that I’m a ‘he.’ And even if people don’t really believe it… it doesn’t really bother me.” As he gets ready to start university, Jacob tells me he wants to leave the experience at GIDS behind, and “live my life.”

But he’s angry about the five years he was at GIDS. He says he was “sold a lie.” Jacob uses the word “sold” dozens of times over the several hours that we speak. He says it’s the only accurate way he can describe how he feels.

GIDS clinicians “raced at 100 miles an hour,” Jacob says. “There had only been four appointments, and they had already been discussing hormone-replacement therapy, already discussing the operations you could have. Always talking about hormone blockers. For me they were complete strangers, and they were selling me false hope.”

Michelle is angry too. Watching Jacob go through so much pain was “shocking.” All she wanted was for her child to be safe, healthy and happy, but she didn’t know how to help him. “It felt like they were abusing my child, and I felt helpless to stop it,” Michelle says, explaining that she hates to put it this way, but it’s how she feels. “And I actually felt like if I did speak up and say anything, that I was the one that was being judged. Because why would I think like that? Surely, I should be doing everything I can for Jacob to follow his pathway?”

Michelle is left with unanswered questions. “They’re happy to dish out drugs without knowing those answers,” she says. GIDS had talked about the blocker providing young people “with the opportunity to explore and experiment with their identities without the anxiety and challenges associated with ongoing pubertal development,” Michelle says, so why weren’t the ongoing meetings with Jacob about doing that “exploring”? They weren’t. Instead, it felt more like “you get on the train, and you continue to testosterone,” Michelle says. She is understanding about the fact that GIDS clinicians might not have known everything there was to know about the blocker and its impact at that time, but says that should have been reflected. She questions why the blocker was talked about with such certainty. “It shocked me that they’re pushing for the kids to go on [them],” Michelle says. “It did feel like that.”

Michelle would have liked it if they had been better supported as a family, too. It would have been useful, she says, to have someone to talk to and “not feel judged.” Someone independent, perhaps, who she could honestly air her worries with. It would have helped Jacob’s brothers and sister too, who also struggled to deal with what their sibling was going through.

What Jacob wanted was for someone to be more truthful with him. Someone to explain what going through puberty might be like. Someone to prepare him for what challenges might lie ahead if he continued to identify as male. And someone to acknowledge that the medical pathway might not be the only way to live a happy trans life. The Tavistock does not have the capability “of offering anything other than giving you the drugs,” Jacob claims. “I honestly don’t think that they have the slightest clue about what it actually means to be trans.”

Jacob absolutely believes that puberty blockers should be available to young people. For some people, he says, that will be the “only option.” And for those people the blocker must be fully explained, he says, complete with all the side effects and unknowns. “But I think that there is a spectrum,” he says. Not everyone has to “go the full nine yards to be trans like the Tavistock suggests. I honestly do not think that’s how it works.” Plenty of people, just like him, are “going to the Tavistock as children not really knowing where they stand and being offered permanent solutions,” Jacob believes. “And I think that that is wrong.” “All I wanted was guidance,” Jacob continues. “How to use bathrooms when you’re comfortable enough to use the boys’ toilets, how to explain yourself when you have relationships (if that’s what you want),” explaining being trans to family. “I was needing that. But that’s not what I was given. I was given miracle cures and false hope and then I was told to put up with it, and if you’re not willing to, then leave. And that is what happened.”

It’s difficult talking to Jacob and Michelle. The experience of more than four years on puberty blockers and frequent visits to both the Tavistock and UCLH have clearly taken their toll. They both regret, and possibly resent, all the time spent focusing on Jacob’s gender identity. Michelle says the more Jacob’s gender identity was concentrated on—”and it was talked about all the time”—the more it became the only focal point in life.

“I would have preferred Jacob to spend all of that time at school,” Michelle says. “Every day that we had to go the Tavistock, or the UCLH or to CAMHS or to the doctor, was school time.” “When I left [GIDS] and I actually got a chance to do proper work and proper revision… my grades got increasingly better,” Jacob says.

How is Jacob now?

He still feels left behind when he compares himself to his friends and his siblings. It’s like “playing catch-up,” he says, “but it’s that you can’t really catch up because you’re so far behind.” It’s “weird,” he says. “I still haven’t had my first kiss and I’m almost 19.” But he does not have any sexual feelings at all. “I still don’t feel attracted to people,” Jacob says, and he doesn’t know if that is something that will ever come back.

The claim always made about puberty blockers is that they are physically reversible at least, and as soon as you stop, normal puberty resumes. This is based on their use in the treatment of precocious puberty, where treatment is generally discontinued as soon as a child reaches ten or 11. When used in the treatment of gender dysphoria, so few young people come off puberty blockers that we really don’t know what happens.

With Jacob, his growth resumed quickly, he and Michelle agree. But resumption of puberty was much slower. It took more than two years for Jacob to start having periods. They didn’t begin until a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday. Even now, more than three years after coming off the blocker, Jacob’s periods are sporadic and there are many months between them.

These “data” are not being recorded anywhere, however. Since deciding to come off puberty blockers in February 2019, no one from GIDS or UCLH has been in touch to see how Jacob is, or to offer monitoring of any kind. Michelle finds this astonishing. She cannot understand how Jacob could have been on a drug for more than four years, experienced known adverse side effects, and been offered no follow-up. Both GIDS and UCLH have “absolutely no idea how Jacob is and more importantly how both having blockers and subsequently coming off them has affected him,” Michelle says. And Jacob does not know either. “It is one of the biggest regrets in my life is that I went on blockers,” Jacob tells me. “I went on the blockers because I was petrified of the possibility of puberty.” He says GIDS should have prepared him better for that and “not just given me this drug.”

“I was a child,” Jacob says. “And I still don’t know how it’s affected me properly. I still don’t know the full damage that it could have done to my body. And that is just a scary fact.”

*Names have been changed.

**This is a verbatim quote.

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Excerpted from Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes. © 2023. Available from Swift Press. 

You may have heard a story about women astronauts of the 1978 NASA class being given an absurd amount of tampons by clueless techs. It goes like this: Kathy Sullivan and Sally Ride, both members of the ’78 class, are asked to check a hygiene kit for women in space. Ride begins pulling out a series of tampons fused together in small sealed packages, sort of like links of sausage. And they just keep coming. And coming. Sullivan later recalled that “it was like a bad stage act. There just seemed to be this endless unfurling of Lord only knows how many tampons.” When Ride finally got to the end, the male engineers asked, “Is one hundred the right number?” Sally Ride, with the controlled emotions of a natural astronaut, politely responded, “you can cut that in half with no problem at all.” This is an old tale but was widely circulated online in the late 2010s, at one point featured in a popular musical comedy routine by Marcia Belsky titled “Proof That NASA Doesn’t Know Anything About Women.” It’s a great story, and it isn’t wrong exactly, but it may be missing some context that seriously alters its meaning.

Here’s the thing: Dr. Rhea Seddon, the only combination medical doctor, astronaut, and period-haver in the class of ’78, helped make the decision about how many tampons to include. According to a 2010 interview, the large number of tampons was a safety consideration. As she said, “There was concern about it. It was one of those unknowns. A lot of people predicted retrograde flow of menstrual blood, and it would get out in your abdomen, get peritonitis, and horrible things would happen.”

According to Seddon, the women were skeptical of the concerns, and their preference was not to treat it as a problem unless it became a problem. But she was involved with the final decision made with the flight surgeons, and according to her:

We had to do worst case. Tampons or pads, how many would you use if you had a heavy flow, five days or seven days of flow. Because we didn’t know how it would be different up there. What’s the max that you could use?

Most of the women said, “I would never, ever use that many.”

“Yes, but somebody else might. You sure don’t want to be worried about do I have enough.”

In other words, the story may have been less about idiot male techs and more about the NASA approach of solving all problems with more equipment. As Seddon remembers it, they decided to take the maximum amount they imagined a woman with a heavy period could need, multiplied that by two, and then added 50 percent more.

This would be typical NASA behavior—if you read the 1,300-page long Human Integration Design Handbook, which we unfortunately have, you will encounter the word “maximum” 257 times, as on page 604, which contains a remarkably detailed treatment of Number 1, including what you might call a peequation,

VU = 3 + 2t,

where VU is the maximum total urine output in liters per crewmember, and t is the number of days of the mission.

The story may have been less about idiot male techs and more about the NASA approach of solving all problems with more equipment.

In the case of tampons, the excessive concern may have been appropriate. Lynn Sherr, longtime journalist, friend to a number of female astronauts, and also Sally Ride’s biographer, said the first woman who ever menstruated in space had problems with “leakage.” Remember, space is awful. There is no gravity to pull fluids in a generally downward direction. Blood, through a process called capillary action, tends to climb out. 

According to Sherr, that anonymous astronaut elected to wear a tampon as well as a pad.

Women astronauts today mostly favor hormonal birth control. These may have to be reworked a bit for a long trip to deep space, since most Earth women don’t require birth control pills that are shelf stable for three years in the presence of space radiation. On a first Mars trip, where the major focus is survival, pregnancy would be a disaster. On any attempt at permanent settlement, pregnancy will be one of the goals.

We apologize for slightly ruining the tampon story, but look—if you want to hear about NASA engineers not understanding female anatomy, better options are available. Take a look at the urination devices they originally proposed for women, of which Seddon once said, “Borrowed from chastity belt designs for sure!”

In what you might call a literal example of structural sexism, the engineers were trying to duplicate the condom-shaped system used by male astronauts. As Amy Foster wrote in Integrating Women into the Astronaut Corps, “it seems that none of the male engineers assigned to this project felt comfortable enough to consult a woman first.” The female-anatomy edition never flew, and ultimately women wore a version of what we now call a MAG: maximum absorbency garment. Basically, adult diapers. MAGs are now the standard clothing for situations like launch and landing, where astronauts can’t just get up to use the potty.

This is true for men as well, and it’s a blessing. In order to use the old system, men were required to specify whether they needed a small, medium, or large. The choice between being honest with the medical attendant and potentially wetting yourself while strapped in for launch was apparently Scylla and Charybdis for some. According to Michael Collins, among Apollo-era astronauts, male egos were spared by referring to small, medium, and large as “extra large, immense, and unbelievable.”

This is perhaps not the best “equality helps everyone” story, but it may be the weirdest.

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From A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Copyright © 2023. To be published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Featured image: Francesco Mocellin via Wikimedia Commons

Nestling alongside strange lunar plains, bright red lakes, mountains of salt and fuming volcanoes, the Salar de Atacama is a place of rare, discomforting beauty. On its fringes are flamingos, guanacos and vicuñas, the wild cousins of the llama and alpaca. But as you journey inwards, towards what scientists call its nucleus, life begins to disappear. Here, within a barren desert is an even more barren expanse.

This is the driest place on earth, save for some benighted parts of Antarctica. You notice it the minute you arrive: you feel it on your skin, in your throat and on your cracked lips. In my time there the humidity did not exceed 12 per cent, which is perfect for a Finnish sauna but less ideal for biological life.

The technical explanation is that this desert of sand, stone and salt sits in what is termed a two- sided rain shadow. To its east is the Andes; to its west is the Chilean coastal range of mountains. The upshot is that rain is very, very rare. There are some weather stations that have never recorded a single drop, though in some parts, including the Salar, there are very occasional torrential showers. Locals call them the Bolivian winter, though paradoxically they usually fall in the summer.

The Salar itself is a salt lake, though it doesn’t look much like the kind of salt lakes you might have in your mind’s eye: those massive, flat expanses of white like the Great Salt Lake of Utah or the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. The Salar de Atacama is, by contrast, brown and slightly scaly. The brown color is in fact a very thin coating of sand, which has blown out from the neighboring desert on to the surface here and clings to the salt. The scaliness is a function of the fact that the salty surface is still slowly, imperceptibly growing, with new stalks of salt reaching like fingers towards the sky. Other salt lakes are white and flat because the rain tends to wash away the sand and dissolve the scaly claws before they can form. But since it doesn’t really rain here, the fingers and crust slowly carry on growing.

At one point I strode out on to this crispy surface and soon realized I’d made a mistake. You are supposed to wear tough gloves if you go near the unbroken salt, since those fingers and edges are sharper than a chef’s knife. The surface is so uneven and unpredictable that it is hard to pick your way through without occasionally stumbling, and if you stumble and use your hands to break your fall…after five minutes of unsteadily picking my way through the thicket of salt I paused, looked down at my fingers, visualized what they’d look like if I fell and turned back. With each new stride the salt crackled and snapped at my feet. Strange echoes twanged through the surface like the thawing ice on a Nordic lake. These sounds were all the more spooky because of what I knew lay a few meters beneath the surface: an utterly gigantic underground reservoir of concentrated saltwater. This saltwater, this brine, is the business; it’s what we are here for. It is a deep, rich solution of many different salts of sodium, magnesium, potassium, boron and, yes, lithium.

There is a certain empirical logic that secures lithium’s place as one of the six key members of the Material World. This is a magical metal: alongside hydrogen and helium it was one of the three primordial elements created in the Big Bang, making it one of the oldest pieces of matter in the universe. No other element has quite the same combination of lightness, conductivity and electrochemical power. No other metal is quite as good at storing energy. So light it floats in oil, so soft you could cut it with a kitchen knife but so reactive that it fizzes and bangs when it makes contact with water and air, it is one of those materials you don’t ever see in its elemental form outside of a chemistry lab. And this reactivity helps explain why lithium is at the heart of the most powerful batteries, and therefore the heart of the twenty-first-century world.

If we are to eliminate carbon emissions and phase out fossil fuels in the coming decades we will have to electrify much of the world (less oil but more copper). We will need to build many more wind turbines (steel, silica and copper) and solar panels (copper and metallurgical silicon), not to mention hydroelectric dams (concrete). But none of this will do the trick unless we have a way of storing that energy. We will need to store it for short periods to deal with the inherent intermittency of renewable sources of energy, such as the sun and the wind. And we will need to store it so that road vehicles can get from A to B without burning fossil fuels.

While batteries do not provide all of the answers, they are a large part of that missing link that might just get us there. And while there are many other chemicals inside batteries—of which, more later—there is no beating lithium when it comes to its lightness and its ability to store energy. As science writer Seth Fletcher puts it, “The universe hasn’t given us anything better.”

The reason we are back in Chile once again is that in much the same way as there is nowhere else on the planet with quite so much copper, there is also nowhere else on the planet where we can lay our hands on quite so much lithium. The Salar de Atacama is the single biggest source of lithium anywhere.

Quite how it came to be here is one of those mysteries we are only beginning to fathom, but as things currently stand, the most compelling explanation is as follows. Think of the Salar as a kind of cauldron, with the Andean volcanoes on one side and another smaller set of hills on the other. Water comes down from the Andes in a number of different rivers, which run down through deep gorges—quebradas—towards the basin. Along the way this water picks up microscopic amounts of those unusual minerals in the Chilean earth, but when it hits the bottom of the valley it has nowhere to go. Trapped inside the cauldron, the water percolates into the gravelly ground, where—this being one of the driest regions on earth—much of it evaporates.

Only when you imagine this process happening over millions of years of deep time—the river water with its tiny quantities of leached volcanic minerals coursing into the basin, soaking through the alluvial fan and then evaporating under the punishing South American sun—do you start to comprehend how this enormous salt lake came to be. Millennium after millennium the water evaporated, leaving that concentrated liquid cocktail of salts. Millennium after millennium the sodium chloride, which precipitates faster than the other ingredients in this brine, formed into a crust on the surface: that crust I briefly stumbled over. In the oldest sections furthest from the rivers, the salt folded into an entire mountain range, the Cordillera de la Sal, as the tectonic plates beneath this landscape continued to crunch together. The process is probably still happening today, but too slowly to be in any way discernible.

And there you have it. The Salar is undoubtedly striking to behold, but what is more mind-boggling is what lies beneath it. In parts, the salt is at least 3 miles thick. In parts there is only a thin skin and beneath it vast quantities of ancient brine, which has sat beneath the surface, soaking underground like a sponge, for at least 3 million years. We tend to think of water as being constantly in motion, whether in the sea or our rivers or in the droplets that evaporate from lakes into clouds which rain down and complete the cycle. But the water here has been imprisoned in this dark, salty dungeon—still and inert—since well before the dawn of humanity.

That the batteries in mobile phones, laptops and electric cars are made in part from this ancient liquid is another one of those paradoxes you are already familiar with from the Material World: the very old giving birth to the very new. But there is nonetheless something dizzying about it. As you watch the briny water gushing out of the pipes here it is hard to get your head around the fact that this is the first time it has seen the light for millions of years. Or that it will soon be entombed again inside a battery in a contraption on the other side of the world.

Two companies mine the lithium in the brine. There is Albemarle, which started out as a paper manufacturer and chemicals firm before doubling down on lithium as well, and SQM, that same chemicals company we encountered back in the salt section, which mines caliche and turns it into fertilizers elsewhere in the Atacama.

The way this type of lithium mining works is relatively simple. The ancient brine is pumped out from under the salt crust, from brine wells located all over the Salar. It is channelled into gigantic ponds where the water is evaporated away. It is a slow process taking many months: first the sodium chloride precipitates, then the remaining brine is channelled into another big pond where the potassium salts precipitate, then into another evaporation pond where the magnesium salts are removed. Eventually, after well over a year, that brine that left the underground reservoir as a pale blue liquid has been concentrated into a yellow-green solution, almost as bright as a neon highlighter. At this stage, it is about 25 per cent lithium chloride, though the green color actually comes from the boron still left in the solution.

You might have noticed that not only is this process rather straightforward, it’s also precisely the same technique the Phoenicians used when making salt in Ibiza thousands of years ago and artisan producers still use today to turn seawater into fleur de sel. Only here, alongside the sodium chloride is lithium salt: lithium chloride. Really, the main difference is its scale: the evaporation ponds turning out Mediterranean salt are measured in meters whereas the ones here in the Salar are measured in kilometers.

SQM, which these days extracts most of the lithium, became one of the world’s biggest lithium producers almost by accident. It originally started pumping out brine from the Salar in the 1990s not so much to produce lithium as to produce potassium: potash. The lithium was an interesting by-product. Indeed, up until recently, no one paid all that much attention to this element, which unlike the other materials in this book played little more than a passing role in civilization.

Perhaps its most important use was as a pharmaceutical: lithium became such a popular treatment for bipolar disorder and depression that it entered the cultural lexicon, featuring in songs by Evanescence and Nirvana. Indeed, it is so effective at subtly altering one’s mood that some have argued it should be added to drinking water in much the same way as many countries add fluoride to help dental health. It has a small but all-important role in new nuclear power technologies. Lithium turns out to be an essential coolant for molten salt reactors and is the main way of breeding the tritium we will need if we ever get round to achieving mainstream nuclear fusion. There are a few other uses: it can help strengthen glass (lithium being one of the first elements Otto Schott added to his melts in the nineteenth century). It plays a role as an alloy in certain metals and its slipperiness means lithium compounds make for excellent lubricants, as well as improving the look and wear of ceramics.

All of which makes lithium something of an outlier in the Material World. All of the other materials we have encountered thus far have been essential parts of our lives for generations if not centuries. But had this book been written a few decades ago lithium would likely not have made the shortlist at all. Its place as one of the essential substances in our lives is the fruit of a long-standing challenge, a little like the rediscovery of the recipe for cement or the invention of the solid state semiconductor. The quest to create a strong, powerful, resilient battery was a century in the making.

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Excerpted from Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway. Copyright © 2023. Available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to David J. Helfand, author of The Universal Timekeepers, about the power of atomic science to unveil the mysteries of unreachably remote time and space.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

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David J. Helfand has served on the Columbia faculty for forty-five years, nearly half that time as Chair of the Department of Astronomy. He has also spent three years at the University of Cambridge, most recently as the Sackler Distinguished Visiting Astronomer, and earlier was a visiting scientist at the Danish Space Research Institute. He has mentored 22 PhD students in high energy astrophysics projects ranging from supernova remnants and neutron stars to the cosmic X-ray background and various areas of radio astronomy. He was a principal in two large radio surveys using the VLA, the FIRST survey of the 10,000-square-degree Sloan Digital Sky Survey footprint, and the MAGPIS survey of the Galactic plane that complements the Spitzer GLIMPSE IR survey. Most of his pedagogical efforts have been aimed at teaching science to non-science majors; in 2004, Columbia’s 250th year, he finally succeeded in implementing a vision he began working on in 1982 that has all Columbia first-year students taking his science course, Frontiers of Science, as part of the University’s famed Core Curriculum. He received the University’s 2001 Presidential Teaching Award and the 2002 Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates.In 2005, he became involved in the effort to create Canada’s first independent, non-profit university, Quest University Canada. He was a Visiting Tutor in the University’s inaugural semester and served as President & Vice-Chancellor from the Fall of 2008 through 2015. From 2011-2014, Prof. Helfand served as President of the American Astronomical Society and was named a Society Legacy Fellow in 2020. His is currently Chair of the Boards of the American Institute of Physics and of AIP Publishing. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Science Counts, an organization formed to communicate with the public about the importance and impact of publicly funded fundamental research. His first book, entitled “A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age”, provides essential tools any informed citizen must have to combat the tsunami of mis- and dis-information that threatens to drown all rational approaches to personal decision-making and the formation of good public policy.

The Marabou stork is a scavenger bird usually found on the African continent south of the Sahara. Like most storks, it has long legs and a long, stout bill, perfectly engineered for catching fish and small aquatic animals, but the Marabou stork is even more unique in its appearance—and dietary preference. Bald-headed and scabbed, sporting large, reddish air sacs on their necks, and reeking of decay, these odd birds keep their stomping grounds clean by feasting on carrion, slowing the spread of disease and pathogens.

Often called “The Bird of Nightmares,” Marabou storks reject the old wives’ tale that babies are delivered by storks and in fact, would probably consume them whole too. During the sixth mass extinction, Marabou storks are one of the few species that are thriving. More waste means more food.

I spend too much time thinking about beauty. I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, picking acne scars and stray hairs with stork-like precision. If I look long enough, the image distorts, and all I can see is a sea of brown-pink skin lesions peppered with eyes, nose and a mouth.

An avid young Animal Planet viewer, I watched the colorful male bird attempt to entice the camouflage-preoccupied female with a display of pomp and elegance. I wanted to be useful like that, be the backdrop on which beauty could find a perch. I dove into the world of strange creatures because for the longest time, I had felt like one. Now, I stand at the nexus of aesthetic and loss, mourning the beauty that is lost due to human greed, celebrating the creatures that survive in spite of it.

Since 1970, human activity such as industrialization, colonization, and urban sprawl has eradicated sixty percent of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, not to mention countless invertebrates we rely on for decomposition, filtration, and pollination. These essential ecosystem contributions make life possible: breaking down waste into organic matter, siphoning out harmful toxins in our soil and water, assisting plants to reproduce. Every animal has its role, and gaps in the matrix leave room for larger tears.

Scientists have been ringing the alarm for years, alerting us that the dual harms of habitat loss and wildlife extinction are a global emergency that could bring about the end of human civilization (as we know it). But there are some organisms that will remain.

The category “species of least concern” is an intriguing moniker. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) categorizes species according to their vulnerability, and this category is reserved for species that are still plentiful in the wild and thus not a conservation focus. In 2008, humans were deemed as a species of least concern. Fifteen years later, and I wonder if that categorization deserves an update.

When all attention (rightfully so) is on species who are in decline or increasingly at risk due to human influence, such as climate change, little notice is given to species that remain stable or, in some rare cases, thrive as heat worsens and habitats are lost. Many of these “resilient” species are critters who already benefit from decay or are themselves harbingers of it. Many of these species already cause some damage to human life: mosquitoes, ticks, termites, and raccoons, just to name a few.

As temperatures warm and humans are driven in closer contact with each other, these creatures find their habitat ranges expanding, adapting to an abundance of new food sources, many of which are made available by human activity. The Marabou stork is one of the few creatures categorized as a “species of least concern” that may actually benefit humans (and their surrounding ecosystems) as the climate crisis worsens.

As of late, Marabou storks have become more common in urban areas, eager to be closer to the human refuse they feed on. They are an in-between species reflective of the landscapes it inhabits: landfills, fisheries, grassland fires, all places where decay and growth meet. Black ecologies offer a different perspective, one that is reverential of the relationship between environment and humans, one that rejects the tired mysticism of the untamed Dark and instead seeks to identify modes of insurgency among overlapping environmental and social justice crises. And despite systemic neglect of these regions, we don’t die, we multiply.

In his essay “Forever Gone,” ornithologist and author J. Drew Latham writes: “Humans have always looked skyward for inspiration, imagining themselves unbound by gravity or the weight of oppression. Flight means freedom.” I too look upward, bewitched by the sky’s capaciousness, watching distant cousins of the Marabou stork glide over a human-made lake in the dead center of a city known for its decay. I see people who look like me emerge for their daily commutes, overlooked, cast to the margin, penalized for existing, nevertheless building better worlds out of spoilage, growing gardens in vacant lots.

Somewhere on the other side of the equator a strange looking bird is shitting on its legs to keep cool, basking in the heat. Simultaneously gregarious and ill-tempered, the Marabou stork reminds me of my hair braider, who gives me a different price every time I come to her, the man at the bodega keeping a watchful eye for shoplifters, the grill lady slinging greasy plates at the lake. Its existence parallels the way we make do when everything around us relies on our suffering. How we transform our pain into possibility.

Marabou storks are shockingly successful at finding new habitats when their old ones are no longer viable. How a creature can build its entire livelihood off destruction—of course, not by its own hand—and thrive ignites an impossible dream during the climate crisis. Their adaptability and utility make them beautiful. Their tenacity, enviable.

When I first began writing my debut poetry collection, Heirloom, I wanted to reach elbow-deep into the muck of the past to extract some bare green roots. But the deeper into the archive I dug, I found that those roots were woven around bones; I had unearthed strange carcasses that I was meant to devour.

If I could stomach this, digest, become part of a cycle I haven’t quite figured out my place in, perhaps I would lose my desire for the “Before.” I could endure all of this, help others endure it too, processing the refuse of the past in order to fertilize the soil of the future. The way Marabou storks chase after reminds me of how this work can be buttressed by both hope and pragmatism, and of course, a voracious appetite.

Even when I’m writing about climate possibilities, the specter of extinction lingers in the space between word and page. Too often, I find myself writing my way out of apocalypse by writing from a place of it, sewing together raptures and fragmented histories, chewing on the fat that greased wheels turning towards a new life. As a Black femme, people want me to write about hope, because if I am hopeful, they are then allowed to feel that hope as well. But I am reluctant to conflate hope with fantasy, burying my beak in what is readily in front of me. Black earth. Connection. Seeing the beauty in the mundane.

Marabou storks take care of each other, creating groups of one thousand or more birds, working together to find better hunting or nesting grounds. After these gatherings, they scatter, moving on to new pastures, supplying their contributions wherever they land. It’s just their trash-filled world, and we’re living in it.

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Heirloom by Ashia Ajani is available via Write Bloody Publishing.

By now, we’ve seen the ChatGPT parlor tricks. We’re past the novelty of a cake recipe in the style of Walt Whitman or a weather report by painter Bob Ross. For the one-hundredth time, we understand the current incarnation of large language models make mistakes. We’ve done our best to strike a studied balance between doomers and evangelists. And, we’ve become less skeptical of “emergent” flashes of insight from the aptly-named foundational models. At the same time, Google, Meta and a list of hopeful giant swatters have released credible competitors to ChatGPT.

For all those reasons, global use of ChatGPT recently declined for the first time since its November 2022 release. Perhaps now we’re ready to get to more elemental questions about what generative language artificial intelligence can or cannot do for us in the everyday.

I come to this discussion from a long career managing IT systems in large enterprises, where, as MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted in 1995, everything that could be digitized was digitized. I’m not a cognitive scientist, but I understand enough of how large language models work and how humans separate digital wheat from chaff to begin to think about what they might do with software with an opinion of its own.

As a multi-generation, American Southerner of a certain age, I’m also drawn to the notion of a machine that can extract meaning from abstracted language and play it back in sentences and paragraphs. If generative language artificial intelligence is about anything, it’s about words. So too, is the South. It took the mastery of character and storytelling from the likes of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor to lay bare the enduring contradiction and transcendence of my region.

Large language models are trained on a vast digital, linguistic expression of human intelligence, and Flannery O’Connor’s cast of misfits is certainly buried in there somewhere. Could it be that the giants of Southern Literature left behind mysterious patterns in their collective body of work that can be divined and reproduced by a powerful neural network? Does the presence, or absence, of such a pattern tell us anything about how we might actually use these contraptions in real life?

I decided to show OpenAI’s GPT-4 model a picture. My thought was to use a discussion of a photograph to make GPT-4 “think” a little differently, to make the patterns it sought a bit less obvious. I also wanted to center this discussion around a short list of functions that generalized the innumerable human activities to which generative AI can be applied. My goal was two-fold: to see what it could do with the photograph in a practical sense and, at the same time, try to spark some of those human-like insights from the patterns in its data set (or, if not too technical – “in the data on which it is trained.”

Between 1933 and 1936, Eudora Welty, then in her late twenties and living in Jackson, Mississippi, worked for the Works Progress Administration. This was a Great Depression-era federal relief program that employed millions, including artists. Miss Welty was a publicity agent and photographer. During her time at the WPA, she took a series of evocative photographs that foreshadowed her talent for wringing universal themes from everyday lives. In that same year, she wrote the first of the evocative short stories that would eventually form part of the Southern canon.

I uploaded one of Eudora Welty’s enigmatic photographs — “Home By Dark” — to Bing Chat. This is the chatbot interface Microsoft has bolted on to OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model. This coupling is the early AI battering ram Microsoft has deployed to try to topple Google as the ruler of the Internet search. OpenAI had recently made available through Microsoft Bing early access to its “multi-modal” function that allows GPT-4 to process images as well as text.

*

The number of human activities potentially served by generative language AI is difficult to fathom, much less count. But, they can be imperfectly generalized into three categories: we seek to understand; we engage outside ourselves and we create. These categories work surprisingly well across disparate domains: from teaching yoga to quantum physics; from building software to cooking; from preparing a lesson plan to writing a eulogy.

AI evangelists have shrewdly, and I think correctly, framed the general use case for Generative AI as that of assistant; as an augmenter and amplifier of human effort. They strenuously differentiate user-facing language AI from the kind of AI hidden in system plumbing that analyzes, recommends and predicts. I aligned my categories with their definition, but flipped the use case from what the machine does to what we do; to underscore the assistive nature of these language machines; to emphasize that their sole purpose is to amplify human agency and ability.

This framing also helps us think of generative language AI as something new. When presented with one of these chatbots, or any new tool for that matter, our reflex is to define in comparison with something we’re already familiar with. The novelty, the work-in-progress nature and the sheer surprise at what these AI chatbots can do gets lost and diminished in comparison with existing digital tools and our experience with them.

*

The photograph I uploaded to Bing Chat was taken by Eudora Welty in 1936 in Yalobusha County, Mississippi. It shows a young Black family of three, mom, dad and child, traveling in a mule-drawn wagon on a dirt road. They are driving away from the camera at dusk, too far away to make out faces, clearly in motion, toward a broad Mississippi horizon, framed on either side by a fallow field. The mother looks back at us, father and child look forward.

Once Bing Chat loaded the photo into its context window, the real-time memory of our conversation, I gave it that exact description and tried the first of my categories: “Help me understand this photograph.”

It typed back a ticker-tape response, in the way these things do. The one-letter-at-time, the polite tone, the spare interface all calculated to draw us into dialog and trust.

Bing Chat dutifully complimented my description and followed it with three rich, fact-filled paragraphs. It summarized Eudora Welty’s biography with emphasis on her early photography, the macro social and economic setting of 1936 Mississippi and the likely daily realities of the family in the wagon. Each paragraph was peppered with links to websites to ensure veracity.

There was no emergence, epiphany or poetry, but there was something that rivaled it. The response was pure utility: thoroughness, value and convenience. The system used as input the photograph, my description of it and the patterns in its training data to help me understand more about Eudora Welty and the lives of the family in that wagon, proofed by the Internet.

The difference in helping me understand versus simply informing me is to add context to facts, to make them more digestible, to spark a next question. This, by the way, is what Wikipedia does. It too summarizes almost the total set of human knowledge domains. But, to deploy a cinematic metaphor, it cannot adjust the aperture, pan left and right, or surprise — in conversation.

This kind of information retrieval is where most of us will start with generative language AI. “Google” and “Wiki” didn’t become verbs for no reason. “To help us understand” is where generative language AI will become generalized language AI and become our interface to all that has been digitized, absorbing “search” and “wiki” in the process. How that manifests is a high stakes, thank-you-very-much-OpenAI, all-hands-on-deck work in progress for the big tech companies.

*

Now that the model and I had spoken about Eudora Welty and her picture taking, and GPT-4 had those Eudora Welty patterns front-of-mind, I thought it might stumble upon some emergent patterns if I asked it to help me engage her work, my second generalized use case category.

This is where the model is guided — prompted — to take on the role of tutor, coach and helper. This second category of how we will use generative language AI leverages all the functions of the first: information retrieval, a broad vista of subject matter and nimble content manipulation. But, it presents all of that in a scripted and structured way, of which real time presence, of both user and machine, is fundamental property. It is still conversational, but with the roles reversed: the model now prompts and encourages us to engage the content.

This time, I asked the model to “take on the role of tutor. Teach me more about Eudora Welty’s writing. Give examples of her use of language. Ask me questions that develop my understanding of her writing and use of language, until I say “class is over.”

It did exactly that. It presented lovely snippets from short stories, and asked about themes, humor, irony and symbols. When I didn’t know an answer it would patiently explain, and continue until “class was over.”

At one point we discussed equity. As I engaged Miss Welty’s writing, I thought of science fiction writer William Gibson’s quote, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” I considered the family in the wagon. A future was showing up in Mississippi in 1936, automobiles, radio, electricity. I expect that family eventually got some part of it. Each time they got access to a piece of it they added to a baseline. The same will be true as these generative AI tools are distributed. We will each add the intelligence of the machine to our unique baselines.

In terms of equity, access to these tools is likely to be equivalent to access to the Internet today; most of us can get there. Where the question of equity becomes interesting is the extent to which we can take advantage of these marvels. We will each bring a complex alchemy of components to a generative language AI conversation. Innate intelligence, literacy, domain knowledge, curiosity, patience and courage are a part of what will define the advantage we gain from these tools. There can be levers that influence equity, but they will not be business as usual.

Imagine a rural school of limited resources with access to this expansive tutor. Caveats about the limits of online learning aside, how can it not be additive? What premium applies to literacy, beginning with children, in the presence of such tools? It is no small irony that Mississippi and Alabama are leading the country in relative gains in early literacy, mostly as an act of will and priority. When you are behind, small gains mean much more than when you are ahead. It may well prove that the value of generative language AI is greater to those with the farthest to go. I’ve heard more than one AI thinker declare, because of language AI, English has become the most important programming language in this century.

*

For the third of my use categories, “to create,”  it was time I asked GPT-4 to help me write. I asked the model to take all we had discussed and write a vignette that described the moment Eudora Welty captured with her camera. Of course, I asked it to use her voice.

GPT-4’s response in a verbatim excerpt:

“The sun was setting behind them, casting a golden glow on the horizon. The sky was clear and blue, the air was warm and still. The road was dusty and bumpy, the fields were barren and brown. The wagon creaked and rattled, the mule plodded and snorted. The family was silent and calm. 

I saw the woman turn her head and look back at me. She had a round face and bright eyes, a scarf around her head and a shawl around her shoulders. She did not smile or frown, she did not wave or shout. She just looked at me, with curiosity and dignity. She did not seem afraid or angry, she did not seem ashamed or proud. She just seemed to be. 

I pressed the shutter and captured her gaze. I felt a connection, a recognition, a revelation. I felt like I had seen something true and beautiful, something human and divine. I felt like I had seen her soul.” 

By any measure, this is a feat of engineering, a marvel of immense promise. Acknowledging all the fears about sentience and agency, about active misuse and unintended consequences, its ability to help us create can only be transformative in result and implication.

But, what of emergence?

I began this essay with a question. There are writers who can elicit within a reader a visceral connection with the universal and elemental just by describing a scene. I asked, is that mastery expressed in patterns in the language of writers like Eudora Welty in a way that generative language AI can detect and repeat? The vignette that GPT-4 produced did indeed approach that asymptote. It attributed possession of self and a soul to the mother in the wagon. How close did it get? That’s for the eye of the reader, but it’s greater than zero.

Had I simply asked ChatGPT to “describe an image of a depression-era Mississippi family riding in a wagon,” I would’ve gotten a flat description of a conveyance and a landscape but not much more. Instead, our back and forth conversation, and the photo itself, caused the model to ascribe characteristics of humanity to the passengers in a much deeper and unexpected way. This phenomenon of eliciting richer responses through iterative prompting may well prove to be the source of the unpredictable flashes of human-like intelligence these models sometimes produce.

There’s always two parties in a dialog, and our “help me create” dialog was no exception. If the depth of the conversation sparked a meaningful perspective in the machine, what about the human? A large language model has never fallen in love, held a baby or experienced a poverty of cupboard or heart. What happens when we add the Generative AI context window to our human experience? We, too, are synthesizing patterns in our own neural networks during these conversations. Could it be, the thunder of these systems is that they engender flashes of emergence in us? I was assisted; patterns were discovered and transmitted; connections made, scaffolded by facts. My ability was amplified, to help me render my own description of what Eudora Welty revealed in that photograph. In whose voice? Hers, its, mine? Isn’t that blend, after all, what a tool is supposed to do?

Here’s my description of Miss Welty’s photograph after my conversation with GPT-4. You decide:

“It was my daddy’s favorite hour. Even coming home from Saturday town after a day of bossing ourselves, spending out of a Prince Albert sack like he wasn’t the only one wearing a button up vest. 

That old mule liked it too. He and my daddy knew without looking when the sun was touching the edge of a field. We rode on, night on our heel. Splitting right through that wore out ground on either side of us. Over that dirt road, if that’s what you want to call it, packed and dusted with a powder ground to diamond by a thousand rusty bands nailed to a wheel. The creak in the hames of that mule’s collar counted every turn, one, two, one, two. The sky sat right down on the edge of that field. What you couldn’t see, you could feel, and beyond it, plumb to Arkansas. 

On an evening like this, after a day like that. We saw a picture show, up in the balcony, shoulders touching in the dark. Couldn’t see anything till the projector lit our hands and the shoulders in the front of us. My mama giggled a little when the screen did, felt like a pie smells coming out of an oven. My mama, giggling. About time for a pie. Just about time.”