When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the polymathic poet, painter, novelist, and philosopher Etel Adnan(February 24, 1925–November 14, 2021) wrote at the foot of a mountain she saw as a lens on the meaning of life.
I was always going to like Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. I was predisposed to like it. Anyone who devoured Bourdain’s work, and who still hasn’t quite gotten over his 2018 death, was predisposed to like it. It was made for them.
End of the road: The Anthony Bourdain documentary ‘Roadrunner
Nothing takes me back to autumn in the High Tatra mountains quite like the smell of mushrooms: the humming mulch of the forest floor with an edge of death and rot …
Mushrooms are mysterious – cloudy, fairytale puffs risen from the earth. For an inexperienced forager, they are a minefield, so hunt with a veteran and practise caution – or stick to the wild or cultivated bounty in your local shops. They’re meaty in texture, stand up to bold seasonings and burst with unique flavour, which they release with little encouragement. It’s easy to see why cooks fall under their spell.
The Street Photographers Foundation has announced the winners of the Street Photography Awards for 2021. What an amazing selection of photos — it was so hard to pick just a few favorites (embedded above). From top to bottom, Subhran Karmakar, Paul Kessel (like a Renaissance painting), Akib Amjad (so reminiscent of this iconic photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson), Andy Hann, and Dimitri Mellos. (via curious about everything)
MARK JUDGE: Who Hated Pope John Paul II More — Sinead O’Connor or the Jesuits?
The Pigeon Puzzle: How Do They Figure Out Their Impossibly Long Routes Home? The Walrus
“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote in her stunning poem about what gives meaning to our mortal lives as she neared, but never quite reached, the triumph of having lived a century — a bittersweet triumph, for to live at all, however long or short, is an unbidden bargain to lose everything you hold precious: every love and every life, including your own. Loss is the price of life — a price we never chose to pay any more than we chose to be born, and yet a price not merely worth paying but beyond questions of worth and why.
One corollary is that, both in the evolutionary sense and in the existential, every loss reveals what we are made of. But every loss also reveals what it is made of, which is more loss: Each loss takes a piece of us — a piece soft and alive — and leaves in its place something cold and heavy; each subsequent loss becomes the magnet that draws out those old leaden pieces, pulls them out from the reliquary of scar tissue where we have been keeping them in order to live, makes them rip through our being afresh. And yet the shrapnel pieces that surface are smaller and softer-edged than when they first entered through the open wound of raw bereavement, smoothed and contracted by the ongoingness of life.
Sometimes it just doesn’t work: Why Apple is finally letting its customers fix their iPhonesProtocol