The sea's gone from grey-green to a thick blue now

My brother's godfather has died. He was a geologist married to a botanist, for half my life in Colorado, the other half in Arizona, their house a triple-stacked library of speculative fiction in my childhood and in their retirement filled with the art the two of them made. With the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with the Bureau of Reclamation, as a citizen scientist and volunteer on the San Pedro River and Ramsey Canyon Preserve, his specialty was rivers, aquifers, water in the earth. He had built dams and blown them. He cared ferociously about conservation. I walked above the treeline in the Rockies with him; I saw the most stars I have ever seen in a night. Once as a child, I didn't recognize him at the door because he had traded his badger-beard for a ponytail, which eventually he traded back. Famously, the family story went, after getting his advanced degree, he was so unemployable with it that he ran for dogcatcher and lost to a zoologist who was in much the same position. I have a scan of a sun-blown slide from the middle of the 1980's where, a long lean hiker in blue jeans and a Christmas-plaid shirt, aviator sunglasses and a bucket hat decorated all over with the logo for Miller High Life, he is toting my infant brother across some high country on his back. He told me never to let the Puritan work ethic catch up with my art. I have photographs of his right up until this last year. He was not replaceable in the world.

I wonder what they taught you in your PPE degree

I have slept in the sense of napping in the middle of my day. At this rate I might be awake for the eclipse if it isn't rained out.

I called both of my senators and my representative to thank them for writing and signing on to the letter calling for the release of Rümeysa Öztürk and answers in the matter of her Constitution-testing detention. This op-ed from Tufts alumni making a call of their own on their alma mater is urgent and clear. This administration keeps pushing the far-reaching fast-tracked xenophobia of the last of the Alien and Sedition Acts. John, on that one, you really should have sat down.

If I see one more article referring to Chaim Grade's Sons and Daughters (2025) as the last great Yiddish novel, I am going to start demanding that one of my friends write the next great one instead. On that front, if demographically relevant to you, please tell the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston to get their heads into a sharper statement than that sand.

Recent conversation has reminded me once again of just how much of Babylon 5 (1993–98) lives rent-free in my head, often soundtracking the politics I have found myself living through. The heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots never does seem to go out of style, but it looks like the latest diamond-tipped needle-drop is "It doesn't matter if they'd stop! It doesn't matter if they'd listen! You had an obligation to speak out."