“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind”*…
As Greg Woolf observed, “The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest examples of what is sometimes termed a “Mirror of Princes,” a book that illustrates the conduct of both bad and good rulers, and makes clear the difference between them.”
Nicolas Liney reviews a new verse translation of the 4,000-year-old text by Simon Armitage and considers its remarkable power, its extraordinary history, and its profound relevance to our moment…
There are two stories of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian epic written in the second millennium BCE. First, there’s the story of Gilgamesh himself, the semidivine king of Uruk. He is 11 cubits tall and four cubits from nipple to nipple (roughly 16 by six feet). He is hyperactive and priapic. He is not a good ruler. The gods create the wild Enkidu out of clay to keep him in check. The pair clash mightily, and then become inseparable. Restless and hungry for glory, they journey to the Forest of Cedar to defeat the monster Humbaba. Then they slay the Bull of Heaven sent by Ishtar, the god of sex and war whose advances Gilgamesh rejects. The gods deem that Enkidu must die, and so he does, slowly and unheroically. Gilgamesh watches over Enkidu’s body until a maggot falls from his nostril, a fantastically intense image that drives home death’s finality.
At this point, the register of the poem shifts, and Gilgamesh’s triumphs are replaced by sorrow and an overwhelming awareness of his own mortality. Alone and anguished, he journeys to the underworld to visit Uta-napishti, the immortalized survivor of a cataclysmic flood, intent on unlocking the secret to eternal life. Inevitably, he is disappointed and returns to Uruk. Gilgamesh is an epic about power, about self-knowledge, about passionate companionship and the unquenchable pain of its loss. Fundamentally, it is an epic about death. Rilke labeled it “das Epos der Todesfurcht”—the epic of the fear of death—and this is what gave it its vital appeal: “It concerns me,” he confessed. “Thousands of years later death is no less bewildering to humankind,” the poet Simon Armitage says in the introduction to his new translation of the epic; “there is no more relatable subject.”
The second story of Gilgamesh is about the text itself, one of the world’s oldest surviving long-form poems. Like Homeric epic, its roots are most likely oral, and questions of authorship are futile. The earliest version was a Sumerian cycle of five poems from around 2100 BCE, probably part of a larger group of stories about the heroic dynasty of Uruk. Sumerian eventually died out, and the five episodes were replaced by one unified version in Akkadian. This was recorded in cuneiform script, often carved in clay tablets, and spread throughout Mesopotamia and the Levant. Sometime between 1300 and 1000 CE, a man called Sin-leqi-unninni created a heavily revised edition organized into 11 “tablets”—referred to now as the Standard Version—which was copied widely and included in the great library of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king, built in Nineveh in the seventh century.
And then … silence. By the new millennium, Akkadian was a defunct language, and Uruk and Nineveh were in ruins. As far as we know, Gilgamesh was not translated into other writing systems, so when cuneiform fell out of use, the epic seemed to go with it. For centuries it slept, until the Library of Ashurbanipal was discovered by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam in 1850, and what documents could be recovered were transported to the British Museum. Cuneiform was eventually deciphered, and in 1872, George Smith, an assistant curator working on the archive, came across a fragment of the epic describing a great flood—similar to the one in the Book of Genesis,but in a work significantly older than the Bible. This was too much for Smith, who began stripping his clothes off in excitement: “I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion.”
Critics like to say that Gilgamesh is both incredibly old and refreshingly young. Its sheer age staggers—for comparison, just try to imagine a current novel being rediscovered in the year 5120 CE. As a quasi-historical figure, Gilgamesh was considered by Babylonians to be even older: the Sumerian King List,a chronographic record,hyperbolically places his reign in 7800 BCE. Within the world of the epic itself, time reaches back further still: when Gilgamesh meets Uta-napishti, the Noah-type figure who survived the flood long before Gilgamesh, even he can speak of an “ancient city,” Shuruppak, on the banks of the Euphrates. The epic constantly forces us into these dizzying loops of deep time, forces us both to drastically exceed the limits of our brief lifespan and to be persistently reminded of them.
But Gilgamesh’s comparatively recent reentry into the modern imagination makes it feel fresh, not overburdened by centuries of interpretation and adaptation, like Homer or Virgil, and firmly outside Western literary traditions. There is no first looking into Chapman’s Gilgamesh.This can be dangerous for translators and adapters: there’s an urge to treat the epic like a blank canvas, to make it say something relevant to contemporary concerns, which can strip it of its strangeness and also cut it loose from its Iraqi heritage. But the subject matter of Gilgamesh also seems undeniably contemporary: how could a story about ecological destruction, poor leaders, and misogynist alphas not concern us here and now?…
Eminently worth reading in full. A classic which has survived, against all odds, and what it offers us today: “The Epic of the Fear of Death” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.
* William Butler Yeats
###
As we reach back, we might recall that it was on this date in 2004 that the discovery of what was (and is) believed to be the world’s oldest seat of learning (dating from 295 BCE), the Library of Alexandria, was announced by Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities during a conference at the University of California. A Polish-Egyptian team had uncovered 13 lecture halls featuring an elevated podium for the lecturer. Such a complex of lecture halls had never before been found on any Mediterranean Greco-Roman site. Alexandria may be regarded as the birthplace of western science, where Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years.
See also: “Oldest University Unearthed in Egypt“
“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest”*…
Dillon Osleger explains that, while the future of Western forests depends on professional pinecone collectors, they’re slowly being starved out of existence…
High in the crown of a giant sequoia, the world becomes a cathedral of green and amber, hushed but for the creak of ancient wood and the sharp, rhythmic snap of cones being pulled from boughs. Dan Keeley, 31, moved around with a practiced, fluid economy, suspended by thin lines of high-tensile rope 200 feet above the ground on the western edge of California’s Sequoia National Park. To his left, the sequoia’s cinnamon-colored bark provided a steady presence as he leaned out over the negative space between branches.
“There is a lot of trust that goes into this work,” Keeley said, speaking over the wind. He eyed a cluster of green, egg-sized cones. “Trust in the trees, predominantly, but also trust in the system — that I’m being sent to the right trees, at the right time, and for the right reason, not all of which are always the case.”
Keeley, a lean, tanned former rock climber and arborist, is what some in the forestry industry call a pinecone cowboy, a freelance contractor hired to harvest the genetic future of Western forests. He climbs trees of important or threatened species to collect ripe cones for seeds intended to be used for reforestation.
Keeley is part of a specialized workforce that’s become the primary resistance against the rapid erasure of a Western landscape. As megafires — fueled by climate change and a century of heavy-handed forest management and fire suppression — incinerate millions of acres in the West, natural regeneration is failing. Cones from serotinous species, which open their scales and drop their seeds in response to low-intensity wildfires on the forest floor, are now incinerated in increasingly common crown fires — high-intensity blazes that leap into the canopy. Meanwhile, other species’ seeds, dropped into the soil by wind and animals like squirrels and birds, are choked underneath layers of ash or outcompeted by invasive shrubs. The future of a relationship between trees and wildfires that has existed for 350 million years now rests on the shoulders of rope-suspended climbers who collect the trees’ cones one 45-liter bag at a time…
[The work, which dates back to the 1930s, is both arduous and precise; the workers, dedicated. But, as Osleger explains, a number of forces– main among them, Federal budget cuts, have taken a huge toll on the effort…]
… The result is an annual reforestation shortfall that is compounding and transforming entire ecosystems. The Forest Service produces 30 million to 50 million seedlings a year, according to American Forests, a mere fraction of the 120-million annual seedling goal the REPLANT Act established. Roughly 80% of those seedlings will survive, while it takes about 220 trees to reforest each burned acre. Altogether, the agency meets just 6% of its post-wildfire planting needs annually, according to its 2022 Reforestation Strategy Report.
And that’s just on Forest Service land: Wildfires on both public and private lands have affected, on average, 7.8 million acres a year over the last decade, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. In California alone, current seedling production and planting rates mean that it would take 15 to 20 years to reforest what has already been lost, while each additional fire “puts us further behind,” said Kuldeep Singh, operations manager of seed production for CAL FIRE. While the Forest Service considers a tract reforested after seedlings survive their first five years, research says that a functioning ecosystem like the one the fire destroyed won’t return for several decades.
When a forest fails to regenerate, either because it wasn’t replanted or because new seedlings didn’t survive, it often becomes scrub-land, in a permanent ecological shift known as type conversion. The new brush-based ecosystem creates a more flammable fuel bed that resists the forest’s return, effectively locking the land into a cycle of fire and scrub. In areas like South Lake Tahoe, California, for example, fields of 8-foot-tall manzanita and buckbrush now dominate hundreds of acres where conifers once stood. In Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and throughout the Southwest, Forest Service research says that high-severity burn areas — which are difficult to regenerate regardless of human intervention — are increasingly repopulated by invasive grasses or the flowering plants called Brassicaceae, which store less carbon and prevent conifers from taking root. This process is permanently altering the hydrology, fire cycle and carbon-sequestration capacity of the West…
More– and more photos– at: “The plight of the pinecone cowboy,” from @highcountrynews.org.
Pair with: “Make Your Own Micro Forest” (“The Miyawaki method of reforestation inserts small, densely packed wild acreage into urban environs. It’s proving wildly successful.”)
* John Muir
###
As we treasure trees, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana was established. The park encompasses more than 1 million acres and includes parts of two mountain ranges (sub-ranges of the Rocky Mountains), more than 130 named lakes, more than 1,000 different species of trees and plants, and hundreds of species of animals. Its pristine ecosystem is the centerpiece of what has been referred to as the “Crown of the Continent Ecosystem,” a region of protected land encompassing 16,000 square miles.
The park’s predominantly coniferous forest is home to various species of trees such as the Engelmann spruce, Douglas fir, subalpine fir, limber pine and western larch, which is a deciduous conifer, producing cones but losing its needles each fall.
“Gambling is a tax on ignorance”*…
And as Einstein observed, “two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Gambling– and related specualtive investments– have always been, for the vast majority of punters, a sucker’s bet. But, as Paul Kedrosky explains, the growing prevalence of AI and the emergence of prediction markets have amplified that painful reality…
The return skew in prediction markets’ returns is startling. It is partly a function of their nature, but also of vibe-coding script kiddies attacking every market anomaly as quickly as it arises. Check a recent WSJ article for examples.
The same dynamic is now spreading across retail-dominated markets. A driver is how AI lowers the cost of systematic exploitation and exploration to near zero. What used to require infrastructure, data pipelines, and bearded quants is now accessible via off-the-shelf models, APIs, and loosely stitched “agent” workflows doing … stuff that even their users don’t fully understand.
The result isn’t democratization of returns. It is wider participation, of a sort, alongside the rapid re-concentration of profits. A small subset of users—those willing to iterate fastest, monitor continuously, and deploy capital programmatically—capture gains, with everyone else just liquidity.
They scrape sentiment, parse new information, and reprice positions in seconds, compressing the half-life of mispricings. That doesn’t eliminate inefficiency, but changes who harvests it. The edge shifts from insight to speed, coverage, and execution discipline—areas where even modest automation compounds quickly, and edges disappear overnight.
Prediction markets are simply the cleanest expression of this trend because they combine thin liquidity, discrete outcomes, and high retail participation. But the same pattern is visible in options flow, single-stock volatility events, and even online poker, which AI increasingly dominates.
As AI tools continue to scale, expect this to get worse: a small cohort running semi-automated strategies extracting semi-consistent edge, and a much larger base supplying them returns. Under the pressure of AI prevalance, markets don’t flatten, the return gradient steepens to a cliff…
Fewer and fewer winners take more and more of the pot. The mechanics of concentration: “AI is Eating Markets” from @paulkedrosky.com.
* Warren Buffett
###
As we contemplate concentration, we might note that today is Mother’s Day. As noted yesterday, the observance became official on that date in 1914. But the quest to honor moms began a good bit earlier. On this date in 1908, Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, the location of the International Mother’s Day Shrine. But her quest to create Mother’s Day had begun three years earlier when her mother Ann, a lifelong activist, died.
Ann had tried to start a “Mother’s Remembrance Day” in the mid-19th century. On her passing, Anna enlisted the support of retailer extraordinaire John Wanamaker, who knew a merchandising opportunity when he saw one, and who hosted the first Mother’s Day ceremonies in his Philadelphia emporium’s auditorium. In 1912, Anna trademarked the phrases “second Sunday in May” and “Mother’s Day”, and created the Mother’s Day International Association. By 1914, she and Wanamaker had built sufficient support in Congress to score the Congressional Resolution noted yesterday. (President Wilson, who was by current accounts uninterested in the move– distracted as he was by the beginnings of his ultimately unsuccessful effort to keep the U.S. out of the troubles in Europe that became World War I– nonetheless knew better than to take a stand against moms.)
“Everything is ephemeral, both that which remembers and that which is remembered”*…
Sally O’Reilly on “gray literature,” why it fascinates her… and how an early “AI” attempt to harvest it misses the mark…
In my modest collection of gray literature, the specialist title that comes closest to a blockbuster is Jean Aspin’s Vaginal Examination: A Unique Pocket Guide (ca. 1980s). Or perhaps it’s Dovea Genetics’s Beef Directory (2014).
Aspin was a community midwife in Luton and Dunstable University Hospital’s maternity wing. Her pocket guide is a well-produced, ring-bound, wipe-clean, tongue-shaped booklet, published by the baby milk company Cow & Gate. Its Latinate lists, labeled diagrams, and die-cut holes of increasing diameters, representing vaginal dilation, step a midwife through the assessment of fetal skull position during labor. The Beef Directory promises “Rock Solid Beef Genetics.” It peddles not anonymous meat but the sperm of individual bulls with names that sound like variety acts: Tonroe Lord Ian! Utile Ben! Virginia Andy! Vagabond! Mornity Handyman! Pinocchio! Seaview Tommy! Atok Socrates! Kilowatt D’Ochain! Immense D’Yvoir! It is richly illustrated, suitably glossy, and a chilling ode to muscle. (Behold the bulging rumps of Belgian Blues!)
Among the most niche in my collection of niche titles is the UK Ministry of Defence’s Corrosion: R.A.F. and A.A.C. Aircraft (1966), a bone-dry primer on the control, rectification, and treatment of nine types of corrosion. The Kent County Constabulary’s booklet Special Constabulary Inter-Divisional Competition (1971) is possibly the least read of all. Copied from typewritten documents, with hand-drawn diagrams, and stapled between two pieces of medium-weight red card, the booklet was produced “to enable officials and spectators to follow the progress of the Competition and the fortunes of the teams” during a public event at a Kent police station.3 Fun-seekers watched on as teams, comprising police officers from different divisions within the county, underwent an inspection of uniforms and accoutrements, competed in a quiz, and responded to a hypothetical incident at a demonstration involving a vicar, an unconscious policeman, a drug-addled youth, and an old man with a loaded shotgun.
Gray literature is a diffuse genre. Informational at base, its tone might tend toward bouncy sales patter or flinty authoritativeness. Visually, it ranges between perfunctory pragmatics, rickety flamboyant amateurism, and the polish of corporate comms. The most reliable way to identify an item’s grayness is by its function and milieu. According to the 2010 Prague definition, established at the 12th Annual Conference on Grey Literature and Repositories,
Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.
Gray literature does not have the market or cultural value of a novel or textbook. It is not an end in itself, but facilitative paraphernalia of some other endeavor—midwifery, policing, animal husbandry, war. This vicariousness, and its heterogenous forms, makes it notoriously difficult to place in library catalogues. Should a practical primer on the mitigation of corrosion in airplanes be placed under Dewey Decimal class “671: Metalworking & primary metal products,” “387: Water, air & space transportation,” or “358: Air and other specialized forces”? When a bull sperm directory is a matter of genetics, food production, and commerce, which can it be said to be about? Gray literature isn’t made with libraries or bookshops in mind. It strides out into the world to do an honest day’s work. None of this hanging around on hushed shelves waiting to impart knowledge in the abstract. It’s got sperm to tout, babies to birth, aircraft to maintain, a policed public to mollify.
I find these publications compelling by their very existence and, for the most part, unreadable. Their content slides off my mind. Gray literature’s high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else’s water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious. Each publication is an invitation to speculate on a sector’s operations, to marvel at the specificity of other people’s knowledge and the focus of their working lives. My paltry library gestures toward the infinite complicatedness of human activity and the vast, disorganized array of murky buckets out of which the materiality of our lives somehow continues to emerge.
I have recently acquired some items that confuse the already untidy category of grayness. While seeking out books on theatrical quick-change (more on that another time), I came across the Webster’s Timeline History series and, out of curiosity, bought the three cheapest of the second-hand editions available: Wallpaper, 1768–2007; Secrecy, 393 BC–2007; and Bristol, 1000–1893. They are collations of excerpts, references, and citations that feature their titular word or phrase, and there are thousands of them. The series’s aggregate subject matter reads like the archest of list poems, the word associations of a disheveled mind, or dying humanity’s life flashing before its eyes…
Do read on for a fascinating/horrifying/illuminating tale all-too-relevant to our times– the story of the Webster’s Timeline History series…
On gray literature and Webster’s Timeline History books: “The First Tomato to Know Everything,” from @sosallyo.bsky.social in @cabinetmagazine.bsky.social.
###
As we hold onto the human, we might (in preparation for tomorrow) remind ourselves that it was on this date in 1914 that President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother’s Day. The previous day, May 8, Congress had designated the 2nd Sunday in May as Mother’s Day and had requested the proclamation.
“It is by the deep, hidden currents that the oceans are made one”*…
A significant part of the earth’s climate infrastructure is under threat. New research suggests the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (or AMOC) could weaken by half this century with wide ranging consequences for weather, food, and sea levels across the world. Alison Smart and Charlotte Venner unpack the past and ponder the future of this critical ocean current…
London, England, and Quebec City, Canada sit at roughly the same latitude (51°N and 47°N, respectively) but have vastly different climates. Historically, Quebec City had 99 freezing days in an average year—weather you might expect from its relative proximity to the Arctic—but London only experienced three freezing days in an average year, despite being slightly further north. This difference is largely due to an ocean current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which distributes warmth from the Tropics via the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, impacts from climate change are weakening the AMOC, and it could collapse entirely in the near future. AMOC collapse would rapidly make regions of the Northern Hemisphere with historically mild weather colder and harsher, while triggering irreversible changes in the global climate.
The AMOC is both the product of a stable climate and a factor in maintaining weather patterns around the planet. To plan for future scenarios, we need to first understand how the AMOC works and what might happen if it collapses…
[Smart and Venner explain the AMOC and outline the ways in which it shapes the climate of regions around the world…]
… Even minor weakening of the AMOC can significantly impact local climates, as has happened several times in the past 12,000 years. A “Little Ice Age” occurred in Europe in the Middle Ages, likely connected to a disruption in the AMOC. Just a slight slowdown in the AMOC could make Europe colder overall, disrupt global precipitation patterns from South America to India, and worsen drought in Africa.
The more freshwater pours into the ocean, and the more ocean temperatures rise, the weaker the AMOC becomes—until, at some threshold, it could stop moving altogether.
It is possible that the AMOC will collapse entirely if warming continues. There is no agreed-upon global average temperature at which collapse becomes certain, but there are signals we can track and historical examples we can examine to predict the likelihood of collapse…
… The consequences of total AMOC collapse would be far-reaching, severe, and irreversible on timescales relevant to humans. AMOC collapse would cool parts of the Northern Hemisphere and warm parts of the Southern Hemisphere by multiple degrees Celsius and drastically alter weather around the world.
In Europe, winter temperatures would drop, cold snaps could increase, and winter storms would intensify. A 2025 research letter found that, even if global warming reached 2°C, AMOC collapse would make Europe colder than it is today, creating extreme winters in Northwestern Europe in which record cold might reach -20°C (-4°F) in London and -50°C (-58°F) in Scandinavia. Even milder cold days would increase, with approximately 150 to 180 frost days per year in Utrecht, Netherlands, compared to a historic average of about 53. Precipitation would likely shift and decrease, potentially drying out some parts of Europe and making others wetter.
Around the world, other climates would change, likely in less extreme ways.
- North America. The East Coast of North America would likely experience rapid sea level rise as the gravitational pull of the AMOC weakens, as well as cooler conditions, with some parts of Eastern Canada and the North Atlantic coast cooling by several degrees Celsius, erratic storms, weather variability, and more intense hurricanes.
- Tropics & South America. Without the AMOC, the ITCZ would shift south, potentially leading to drying in the Northern Tropics and parts of the Amazon and wetter conditions in the Southern Tropics.
- Africa. Because of the shift in the ITCZ, West Africa and the Sahel would be much drier, experiencing severe and frequent drought and reduced rainy seasons. The Sahel could possibly transition from a semi-arid climate to hot dry desert.
- Asia. Because of the shift in the ITCZ, weakened and more erratic monsoons in Asia would lead to increased drought and a higher risk of extreme precipitation events.
These changes may occur rapidly, create climate risks, and cause systemic disruption in affected regions. The collapse of the AMOC would also be a tipping point in the global climate, meaning that the changes would likely be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse on human timescales.
Once the AMOC passes a critical threshold of weakening, called a tipping point, it would continue to weaken until it collapses. AMOC collapse could also create systemic impacts that activate other tipping points as well as feedback loops that could generate further warming.
For example, if AMOC collapse contributed to changes like a permanent dieback of the Amazon Rainforest or increased ice loss, those changes would generate their own warming effect on Earth’s climate. A 2026 paper suggests that AMOC collapse would result in substantial carbon release from oceans and add around 0.2°C in additional atmospheric warming.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions may slow warming enough to reduce weakening and delay collapse. If collapse begins, it is unlikely we could stop it. There is no feasible technological way to reengineer ocean currents…
A bracing, but important read: “A complete guide to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).”
See also: “What would happen if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapses? How likely is it?”
###
As we put on our sailin’ shoes, we might send interconnected birthday greetings to Andrew Sharrett; he was born on this date in 1946. An archaeologist, his application of world-systems theory to questions of change on large, often global, scale made him one of the most influential archaeologists of the late 20th/early 21st centuries. Sharrett is best known for his theory of the secondary products revolution; but his work touched on a broad range of fundamental human developmental issues: global migration and colonization, the spread of agriculture, the development of metallurgy and urbanism, and the development of new forms of consumption, to name a few. All of those dynamics were, as Sharrett observed, shaped in significant ways by the climatic conditions in which they unfolded.
You must be logged in to post a comment.