I wrote about Maná in Friday’s newsletter. The Mexican band Maná was nominated to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year. Their nomination is especially significant because they’re the first rock group to be nominated that primarily sings in Spanish. This is a great article explaining why this is the perfect moment in history to induct such a deserving band. My dad—a Spanish teacher—introduced me to Maná when I was just 12 years old. I remember spending many summer days listening to their album Dónde Jugarán los Niños(#250 on the top 600), fully absorbed in the sunny vibes it radiates. My good friend Charles Hughes over at the No Fences Reviewknows that I’ve been a long-time Maná fan, so he asked me to do a write-up for one of their songs for his newsletter, “Turn It Up – Rock Hall Nominees, Part 1” (also check out Part 2). This is what I wrote:
At a time when many Latinx artists had to “cross over” by singing in English to expand their reach, Mexican band Maná just kept rocking out en español. Their sound is a fusion of diverse genres—rock & roll, of course, but also reggae, ska, and funk. In many of their songs, lead singer Fernando “Fher” Olvera gives voice to love’s yearnings and heartbreaks. Llorar (crying) is often compared with llover (raining) and you’ll frequently hear words that rhyme with corazón (heart). The song “Cuando los Ángeles Lloran” (When Angels Cry) is a softer ballad that has all the classic Maná sounds, but with an added lyrical depth that highlights an aspect of the group I admire—their protest. It tells the story of Chico Mendes, the Brazilian activist murdered in 1988 for his efforts to protect the Amazon rainforest. Here, too, llorar and llover mix together, but for a different reason: when an earthly angel like Mendes dies, the angels above cry along with us—and it rains. Beyond their environmental and social advocacy, Maná tells stories that connect with the human experience. It’s why they’ve remained a staple in the Latin rock scene for so long—transcending borders and generations, and absolutely earning this historic nomination.
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. … Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimism and pessimism.
There’s a middle ground, according to Solnit, that exists between being too positive or too negative. It’s the room where hope resides. Maybe we can find other things in that room too.
The cult British singer-songwriter Bill Fay died this past week at 81. I was only vaguely familiar with his work from Jeff Tweedy having routinely covered his song “Be Not So Fearful” (also featured in this scene of the excellent I Am Trying to Break Your Heart documentary).
I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life—finding songs in the corner of the room.
For much of his life, Fay’s music lived on the periphery. His recording career started in the early ‘70s and abruptly ended only a few years afterward. Later, his career would have a resurgence of sorts after being rediscovered my musicians like Tweedy, among others.
Fay’s comment about “finding songs in the corner of the room” circles us back to something else Solnit writes of hope:
How the transformation happens … recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.
Bill Fay didn’t occupy the limelight and our hope doesn’t have to either. This doesn’t make it any less transformational or less powerful. In fact, it does just the opposite.
Rest in peace, Bill Fay. You can read the whole newsletter here.
Jellyfish made of recycled plastic water bottles at the
Monkey Bar
At the very beginning of 2025, I wrote a newsletter about letting go to welcome in. The Spanish put this idea into action beautifully during Las Fallas de Valencia. Artists create beautiful monuments called fallas in the main plaza of the city that serve as a commentary on current social issues. Then, on the final day of the festival, they set the fallas ablaze in an event called La Cremà (see pictures here)—a symbolic cleansing and renewal of society. I like the idea of letting something go to create space for something new.
Las Fallas will be in full swing soon. The festival takes place each year from the 1st to 19th of March in Valencia, Spain. You can check out this year’s festival map and explore the festival website to learn more about what makes this such a special event (also refer to Rosetta Stone’s guide and this article from Move to Traveling). The following video gives a good idea of the esthetic and emotion involved with Las Fallas.
We tend to welcome in the new year with so much hope for the future. As winter wears on in the colder parts of the world—and as administrations change—that hope can quickly diminish. February, after all, is the worst month of the year. It would seem to make sense, then, that Las Fallas takes place in the spring—a season of rebirth and renewal. Maybe there are some things that we’d all like to see burn and go away right about now.
In Grenada, recycling plastics is difficult. But there’s a group here that’s working hard to change that—they’ve organized a plastics drop-off that happens once a month. We save any plastic recyclables we accumulate throughout the month and when the next drop-off date arrives, we load them up and make the trip. The Monkey Bar also helps alleviate the plastics issue—they repurpose plastic bottles in many of their art installations (see the jellyfish featured above).
Instead of burning away the bad to make space for the good, I wonder if we might just remember the good we’ve forgotten—recycle it and bring it back. Can we recycle our hope once we’ve lost it?
Last Sunday, Angie and I hiked out to Hog Island. Right now, it’s the dry season in Grenada and our trek felt strangely similar to what we’d experience on a very nice autumn’s day in Wisconsin. The leaves are changing colors, ever so slightly—light yellows and browns—and some are even falling off their trees. The temperature has calmed down a bit and the sun hits you at just the right angle so as to create the golden, breezy feel of fall.
Trees were all around us and I was thinking about hope. Sarah Vos, of the Dead Horses, has a song called “Swinger in the Trees” (see full lyrics), that is based, in part, on a Robert Frost poem called “Birches” (see reference). The song ends like this:
All these strangers Passing by me But we choose not to see, Yeah we choose not to see (I wanna be) Oh, we choose not to see
There is always hope, There is always hope. There is always hope (I wanna be) A swinger in the trees
There is always hope, folks. Choose to see it. Recycle it and reuse it. And, watch Sarah Vos sing about it here:
Street muralin the Barranco neighborhood of Lima, Perú
Earlier this month, I traveled to Lima, Perú. I wrote about it in last week’s newsletter on unity through difference:
At midweek, we were fortunate to go on a tour of Lima’s Historic Centre with workshop participants. We walked through the expansive plaza at the heart of Lima while looking at the beautiful colonial-era buildings surrounding it and the Andean foothills beyond. When we entered Lima’s stunning cathedral, I was handed a little card with a short prayer of unity on it. As I read it something immediately felt wrong. Classical music was gently playing in the background of this nearly 500-year-old cathedral and I sat down on a pew to take it all in. After a while I realized that I didn’t like how the prayer advocated for unity through “sameness” or “oneness.” If we somehow were to achieve unity through “sameness,” life would be reduced to something far less that it actually is. It reminded me of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on the dangers of a single story, where she encourages us to see the multiple layers of people and cultures, and to fight powers that would seek to silence them. Some would argue that the silencing is already taking place. It’s why I’m appreciative of people like Kendrick Lamar, who publicly give voice to a counter narrative, both directly and symbolically. If we’re ever going to get to a place of unity, we have to do so through accepting and embracing “difference.”
This week, I started reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. In the book, Solnit calls for continuous hope and action. And she makes an important point about the past—be it good or horrible—and how it relates to hope:
We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope.
I’m encouraged by this—to be fueled by hope as I lean forward into action. In my newsletter, I wrote about other “untold” or, perhaps, “forgotten” histories of Perú that you can read about here.
In my newsletter last week, I wrote about Peruvian public speaking in anticipation for my work trip to Lima, Perú:
To learn more about Perú ahead of my trip, I’ve been listening to episodes from their Perú playlist. One of Radio Ambulante’s co-founders is Peruvian-American journalist Daniel Alarcón, who has an excellent short story collection about Perú called War by Candlelight, which I’ve also been digging into. A few years ago, Alarcón did a video for Pop-Up Magazine in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month called “Peruvian Tips for Public Speaking.” In the video, he talks about a cherished little book he bought from a street vendor in Lima, Perú. The pirated book contains inspirational and oftentimes hilarious advice on public speaking, yet it also ends up revealing a profound truth about Latin America and the complexities associated with its diverse cultural makeup. Language is power, and in Perú, the language of the majority is Spanish. But minority languages, like Quechua and Aymara, are still widely spoken today among Perú’s vast indigenous populations. You can see historical traces of these languages and cultures—present long before Spanish imperialism took hold—in the names of streets and cities. It reminds me of Wisconsin’s indigenous languages, which are still present in the names of many of its cities and lakes. Alarcón’s comments address language as a means of access. Spanish speakers hold power in Peruvian society and the public speaking book is meant to extend that access to indigenous groups.
Alarcón’s story about his Peruvian public speaking book—with its direct and hilariously exaggerated speeches and toasts—appeared as part of a series of videos put out by Pop-Up Magazine‘s “Stories for Hispanic Heritage Month.” In the video, Alarcón recites several toasts from the book. Here are two of my favorites:
“Eulogy of a drowned fisherman”
We’ll no longer find Juan sitting on the shore. We’ll no longer hear him tell stories of fishermen. He’ll never throw a line into the water again. And though his fishing nets are empty today, our eyes are filled… with tears.
“Words offered by a member of an institution on the occasion of the inauguration of a radio receiver”
These modern times have arrived to offer us this receiving machine, now installed in the social hall of the Club, from where it will not only capture information from all over the world, but offer the same back to the people, so that they may participate in the news that travels atop the ethereal waves directly to our ears, all those events taking place throughout this diverse and fractured globe where we earthlings reside.
Alarcón summarizes the toasts by saying, “It’s not poetry, not exactly, but it’s not not poetry, you know?”
He goes on to say that Perú is a country divided by language. There are 15 different language families found in Perú, the most popular indigenous one being Quechua—spoken by around 5 million Peruvians and an official language of the country since 1975.
But Alarcón points out that Spanish is the language of power, and that how you talk and look in Peruvian society determines how you will be perceived. Spanish is the language of access and Alarcón concludes that the public speaking book is intended to serve as a bridge between the in-group Spanish-speaking majority and the out-group minorities who speak other languages.
Alarcón calls the public speaking book “an attempt to heal a national wound,” and without even cracking a smile, he finishes the story in typical Peruvian fashion, pointing out this subtle and underlying purpose:
There’s no speech addressing this, there’s no soothing discourse on the bifurcated identity of a country fractured by its own complicated and troubling history. There’s no tribute to the possibility of creating a hole from disparate, often warring, cultural tribes that constitute, for now, a purely imaginary nation. There’s no homage to the Quixotic 200-year-old attempt to hide the fault lines intrinsic to this national project, from our very first, very flawed moment. None of those speeches are in this magical little book. I know, because I looked.
You can watch the full video below and read the rest of my newsletter here. Enjoy!
Two days ahead of the album’s release, Bad Bunny posted a short film (also titled DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS) featuring Jacobo Morales, the much beloved Puerto Rican filmmaker, actor, director, and poet. The 12-minute film addresses the problem of gentrification on the island as tax incentives make it easier for foreign businesses to take up residency there. In the opening scene we see the 90-year-old Morales dig up a small box of photos, marked by a small Puerto Rican flag in the middle of a field, while he reminisces about the magic of the Puerto Rico that used to be—a magic he goes on to say is still there. Also in the film is Morales’s small friend Concho, a native toad that has come to symbolize Puerto Rican identity and cultural memory. The sapo concho is in danger of extinction, much like Puerto Ricans themselves who continually confront forces driving them away from the island. Morales is wonderful in the film, co-directed by Benito A. Martínez Ocasio (a.k.a. Bad Bunny) and Arí Maniel Cruz Suárez. He also makes an endearing appearance in the official video for the song “BAILE INoLVIDABLE,” where he joins a lesson to learn how to dance salsa.
I wanted to write more about the themes developed in the short film because they’re worth taking a closer look at. There’s a lot going on. This is what Morales says to open the film:
Español:
Qué muchas cosas he vivido. Conocí mucha gente. Gente buena. Fui a muchos países. ¡A casi todas partes del mundo! Pero ninguna como Puerto Rico… O como lo que era antes. Aquí había algo… No sé qué. Una magia increíble. Y todavía la hay. Todavía la hay.
Quisiera haber tirado más fotos, Para enseñarte. Las fotos son momentos vividos. Recuerdos de cosas que pasaron. Yo no era de estar tirando fotos por ahí. Ni estar subiendo stories ni nada de eso. Yo decía que era mejor vivir el momento. Pero, cuando llegas a esta edad, Recordar no es tan fácil. Debí tirar más fotos. Haber vivido más. Debí haber amado más, Cuando pude. Mientras uno está vivo, Uno debe amar lo más que pueda.
English:
How many things I’ve lived. I met a lot of people. Good people. I went to a lot of countries. Almost to every part of the world! But none of them like Puerto Rico… Or how it was before. There was something… I don’t know what. An incredible magic. And it’s still there. It’s still there.
I wish I’d taken more photos, To show you. Photos are lived moments. Memories of things that have passed. I wasn’t one for going around taking pictures. Not uploading stories or any of that either. I said that it was better to live the moment. But, when you get to this age, Remembering isn’t as easy. I should’ve taken more photos. Lived more. I should’ve loved more, When I could. While you’re alive, You should love as much as you can.
These words from Morales appear in various parts of Bad Bunny’s album. In “BAILE INoLVIDABLE,” for example, the intro music that’s been building into a rocker suddenly cuts out and we hear Morales say, “Mientras uno está vivo, uno debe amar lo más que pueda,” right before a glorious salsa reincarnation of the melody takes over. In “DtMF,” Bad Bunny sings the album’s title to start off the chorus, using the same words as Morales—“Debí tirar más fotos.”
After the opening monologue, Morales begins to converse with his friend, Concho the toad, who like Morales is a native of Puerto Rico. This is a shared characteristic not to be missed. One of the main themes of the short film is Puerto Rico’s ongoing problem with gentrification and the multiple ways in which it’s displacing native Puerto Ricans on the island.
After they both realize they’re hungry, Morales goes for a walk downtown to pick up some food for the two of them. On the way, the signs of gentrification abound—foreigners living on the island blasting their music, English being spoken to the exclusion of Spanish, franchise restaurants taking over local cafes. Morales has the appearance of someone who doesn’t even recognize his hometown anymore. It all comes to a head when he tries to make a simple order at a newly-established chain restaurant and is met with a barrage of choices and inflated prices. He even has troubles paying for his order due to the restaurant’s no-cash policy. At this point, a younger Puerto Rican man intervenes to pay for him and offers an encouraging, “Seguimos aquí” (We continue here).
Songs from Bad Bunny’s new album are sprinkled throughout the short film. Upon returning home, we see Morales percolating some coffee on the stove while the song “TURiSTA”—not unintentionally—plays gently in the background. The song directly calls out the issue of tourists benefiting from the beauty of a place without being willing to help solve the challenges associated with preserving that beauty. The beauty of Puerto Rico—both in its physical landscape and the cultural identity of its people—is something worth preserving. In this song, as he does throughout the whole album, Bad Bunny is commenting on the risk of it disappearing.
As Morales and Concho enjoy their food on the back porch, Concho inquires about seeing more of Morales’s photos. After Morales reminds him that he didn’t take many, Concho suggests that they take a picture today, implying that it’s never too late to start recording their cultural identity. There’s hope for its future.
I loved this short film because I love Puerto Rico, and I love the devotion and care with which Bad Bunny positions himself as an advocate for his homeland. It’s not the first time he’s done so. In 2022, he released a music video for his song “El Apagón,” which included a documentary at the end of it called “Aquí Vive Gente” (People Live Here) that addresses how foreign investments in Puerto Rico are negatively impacting island natives. DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS also introduced me to the wonderful Jacobo Morales. I’ve since discovered more of his work, like his 1989 film Lo que le pasó a Santiago, which was the first and only one from Puerto Rico to be nominated for an Academy Award.
I also loved the film because—as good ones often do—it challenged my own thinking about important issues. I’ve done a fair amount of traveling in my life and have even lived abroad as an expat. The film’s commentary made me wonder: have I traveled and lived abroad in ways that preserve and support local communities? Or have I unknowingly aided and abetted the takeover of their spaces and the displacement of their people?
Two summers ago, for example, my wife and I stayed in an Airbnb in downtown Murcia, Spain. It was only afterward that we learned about the recent trend of foreign investors buying up downtown properties to rent out to tourists, and how this is a growing problem—contributing to a higher cost of living and the displacement of local peoples who end up being forced to live outside of their preferred urban spaces. It has led me to explore more responsible travel and adopt more sustainable practices, like regenerative tourism. We can all do better.
But at the core of the film is Morales’s attempt to preserve the cultural identity of Puerto Ricans, at a critical point in history when that identity is again being threatened. At the end of the film, Morales promises his friend that he’ll share his photos and his memories with him—both elusive attempts to capture the essence of what it means to be Puerto Rican. Photos and memories are snapshots frozen in time. They are not completely reliable in their ability to represent cultural identity, as cultural identity is active and always evolving. I think that’s why it takes the effort of a full community—not just one individual—to remember its past identity and carry it forward into the future.
Such community efforts exist. A large portion of the Puerto Rican diaspora lives in New York—or, “NUEVAYoL,” as Bad Bunny’s opening track of the album pays homage to. In 2019, two of these nuevayorkinos—Djali Brown-Cepeda and Ricardo Castañeda—started the digital archive and multimedia project Nueva Yorkinos. It’s a beautiful community project that serves as “a love letter to Nueva Yol” and the type of group effort that seeks to achieve the cultural preservation that Morales longs for in DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. Since its founding, the website “has amassed over 2,000 pieces of visual media, and 1,500 personal stories and family histories” of Puerto Rico’s diaspora in the city. Visitors can peruse the many media and stories that others have submitted, and of course, submit their own.
These are the kinds of projects we need to ensure that the marginalized have a voice and that their stories are heard. This, too, is what Bad Bunny is using his platform and creative energies to accomplish. His final lyrics on the album leave a powerful and definitive statement:
Español:
De aquí nadie me saca, De aquí yo no me muevo. Dile que esta es mi casa Donde nació mi abuelo. Yo soy de P fuckin’ R.
English:
Nobody’s taking me from here, I’m not moving from here. Tell them this is my house Where my grandfather was born. I’m from P fuckin’ R.
For more Bad Bunny and Jacobo Morales, check out the official music video for “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.” It’s simply excellent! It will make you excited to live your life to the fullest and to dance like no one is watching.
It’s always difficult to spend the holiday season away from family and friends. You find yourself missing the traditions you’ve long held for this time of year, along with the special events and gatherings you look forward to with such anticipation. Your place in the world shifts and you have to deal with the friction the shift produces. One way is to bring the familiar into your new space—some Christmas tunes, favorite holiday movies, putting up a few recently bought decorations (instead of the beloved ones from the bins in your attic crawl space). Another way is to open yourself to how the holidays might be celebrated in your new place—spending unexpected time with new friends or observing the little changes in honor of the holidays happening around you.
I was thinking about friction this past week when I took a break from my comforting Christmas playlist and turned on Television’s song “Friction” from their album Marque Moon. Like so many forces in life, I started to process how friction can be both good and bad. So like Santa shimmying down the chimney, this week’s newsletter is gonna involve some friction.
In Television’s song “Friction” (from the excellent Marque Moon), Tom Verlaine sings, “You complain of my diction. You give me friction” while cleverly pausing for a noticeable moment between “dic” and “tion.”
Innuendo aside, I think we need more friction. Our world tries so hard to reduce it. Get there faster. Buy it more easily. Watch it whenever you want. Our convenience culture often leaves us feeling disoriented, reaching for something solid to hold onto. The rapid pace of it all can cause us to become desensitized to the richness of all that life has to offer—blinded to what is truly valuable.
Friction can help us slow things down—see things more clearly. It can help make things a little harder so that we’re forced to grow. And it can also set up limits for us—limits that surprisingly make life more enjoyable.
I remember reading this Guardian article around the time I started getting into vinyl. In the article, Jeff Tweedy discusses why the album still matters in an age where you can just as well download individual songs from iTunes. While discussing the album Sukierae that he and his son Spencer released back in 2014, Tweedy says:
I just want to listen to the album and have a feeling that one part has ended, and now I can take a little breather before I listen to the second part. Or I can listen to the second part another time. It’s a double record on vinyl, so there are three breaks like that. I wanted it to have different identities artistically and the album format allows me to do that.
Listening to music on vinyl brings intentionality to the listening experience. There’s more friction compared to streaming an endless playlist on Spotify. You have to pay attention to when the record is finished, get up out of your seat, physically flip it over or change it, go sit back down. Changing the record requires even more friction—you take the record off the turntable, put it back in its sleeve, take a new record out of its sleeve, place it on the turntable, and so on. If you want to keep listening, you have to take all of these steps all over again. The intentionality brings mindfulness.
I also think of watching holiday specials when I was a kid. Each December, we use to pull out our living room hide-a-bed and lie down under it to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. The idea of a holiday special is mostly lost on us today, but we can still add some friction into the mix to bring the “special” back. Rather than binge-watching a show, pick a night and watch one episode weekly. Showing some restraint and delaying satisfaction makes you appreciate it the show a lot more. Like listening to vinyl, it also might help you watch the show more mindfully.
This is true of a lot of things when you think about it. It’s the reason seasons are so cool. The season changes and you have to wait a whole year to see it again. As a result, you appreciate it a lot more when it finally comes around. Limiting yourself to eating out once a month makes that night a whole lot more special than if you eat out every night.
Friction can create more mindfulness and enjoyment for us, but it has an enemy: efficiency. In his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin writes about the dangers of our efficiency-based culture:
Our continual quest for efficiency discourages looking too deeply. The pressure to deliver doesn’t grant us time to consider all possibilities. Yet it’s through deliberate action and repetition that we gain deeper insight.
Friction allows us to look deeper, but the cost of it is time. Where do you have time to sacrifice efficiency and gain the benefit of deeper insight?
In the summer of 2023, I took a lot more time when I chose to bike from Wausau to Eau Claire (a journey that ended up being 120 miles) to see a late night concert at the Blue Ox Music Festival. There was certainly a lot more friction for me riding my bike than driving my car. It was a lot harder! But, I gained a great deal from the experience. When I arrived, Them Coulee Boys were singing “Ten Feet Tall,” and that’s just about how I felt.
Entering Eau Claire County
Feeling 10 ft. tall in front of the porta potties
There are so many ways you can add some more friction to your day. And the benefits are many—you get to know yourself better, you grow as a person, and you live with more intention. Ultimately you decide what is important to you rather than letting someone else determine that for you. Life becomes a lot more meaningful and satisfying as a result.
This week I was listening to Francis Quinlan’s song “Another Season,” and I caught the word “friction” in the opening verse. It struck me as a good way to close out the end of another year:
Hey Nothin’ much, just Wrappin’ up another season What do you make of this town? Here I have been taking the long way around Do you, like me, keep closest to the most familiar friction?
Lynda Barry is a cartoonist and professor at UW-Madison who teaches a class called The Unthinkable Mind. In the class, Barry combines neuroscience, psychology, and drawing to help students build the skill of creativity and apply it to their life’s work. Last week I saw this Instagram post by Barry and it reminded me of the incredible link between art and science. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, widely considered to be the father of neuroscience, also understood this connection. Cajal’s work drew inspiration from both the sciences and the arts, and his drawings of the brain beautifully communicate its complexities.
I like how this work is both artistic and scientific. Referencing visuals and producing them ourselves has always helped us understand the world better. Branching in particular is helpful, I think in part, because it’s all around us. Its reproductions and reflections are seemingly endless, as Barry’s lesson plan highlights.
I’ve enjoyed watching Angie study medicine these past few months. To me, her notes look like works of art to and I’ll often ask her to send me pictures of them, like this one, which of course reveals some branching:
Angie’s notes
As we wrap up 2024, thinking about branching has me thinking a lot about the big decisions we make in life. Looking into our past, we might envision a fork in the road that was created in the moment of deciding—one path branching off to the left and another off to the right, each leading to a separate reality that was created by our choice.
Or maybe we can envision a separate reality that was created simply by circumstance, as is the case in the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, where Gwyneth Paltrow’s character experiences two alternate realities based on whether or not she successfully catches a subway train. Throughout the rest of the movie we see her life play out along these two separate paths.
The idea of alternate realities has always fascinated me. Even more fascinating is the theory suggesting they may actually be real. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that every possible outcome of every event creates a new universe or world that runs parallel to our own. Physicist Aaron O’Connell talks about the feasibility of this idea in his 2011 TED Talk.
Alternate realities have long been the subject of some of the best science fiction. If you love speculating about these branching realities as much as I do, here are some great stories to check out:
Ted Chiang has a short story entitled “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” from his book Exhalation, that looks at this idea. It’s somewhat of a redemption story in which characters use a device called a prism that allows them to communicate with versions of themselves from alternate realities—realities that stem from divergent past decisions the characters have made. You may already be familiar with Chiang’s work from the movie Arrival, which was based on his short story “Story of Your Life,” from Stories of Your Life and Others. It dawned on me that one of my family’s favorite holiday movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, also deals with alternate realities. Blake Crouch’s book Dark Matter (recently made into an Apple+ series) was first described to me as an “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the 21st century. And then, of course, there’s a wealth of amazing works by the Spanish-speaking world that dive into choice and the alternate realities it produces. Check out Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (also see this TED Ed video on his mind-bending work) and the Spotify podcast Case 63 (based on the Chilean Caso 63).
They’ve been on my mind as of late. Maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to Mac Miller’s album Circles, or because I just read an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson called Circles. Maybe it’s because there was just an election and it seems as though there are some people within my circle and some outside of it. Then again, maybe it’s the circular movements around me—the changing of the seasons or the cycling of the moon. Whatever the reason, I hope you read on and find something you’d like to circle and add to your list of things to check out.
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. (…) Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning
It made me think about circle stories I’ve read or seen, where the ending circles back around to the beginning, like in the movie 12 Monkeys. I recently learned that 12 Monkeys was based on the 1962 French film La Jetée, a minimalist 28-minute movie consisting of nothing more than 422 photos, a voiceover, and a score. This video provides a beautiful analysis of the film that doesn’t move (yet still moves in a circle):
You can also draw circles around circles, and zoom in and out on them. I thought about how Prezi allows you to do this and it led me to compare Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now” with something Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Mitchell zooms out to find differing perspectives while Whitman zooms in to also find differing perspectives. Whether you zoom in or out, life is still complex.
Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti album cover on a towel, gifted to me by some very thoughtful students
When I was in college, I took a semester-long class on the history of Puerto Rico. It was fascinating—such a rich and nuanced history, filled with the ongoing struggle of living through colonialism’s legacy, but also with the pride of overcoming it in the celebration of life as a Boricua, or Puerto Rican.
Last week’s newsletter included the following with respect to Puerto Rico:
You may have heard what the comedian said about Puerto Rico at the Trump rally that took place in Madison Square Garden on October 27. I wanted to share some resources that say otherwise. Puerto Rico Strong is a “comics anthology that explores what it means to be Puerto Rican and the diversity that exists within that concept, from today’s most exciting Puerto Rican comics creators.” Since Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, all sales of the book have gone to support ongoing relief efforts. La Brega is a podcast from WNYC Studios that looks at the history and music of Puerto Rico. There are both English and Spanish versions of each episode. From the website:
There’s no direct translation of la brega in English, but for Puerto Ricans, it’s a way of life. To bregar means to struggle, to hustle, to find a way to get by and get around an imbalance of power. It’s got a creative edge, a bit of swagger; as Puerto Rican scholar Arcadio Diaz has observed, it’s a word that belongs to the underdog.
A good example of la brega comes from Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, who released El Apagón – Aquí Vive Gente(click on CC for English subtitles)—part music video, addressing the challenge of constant power outages while celebrating the pride of being Puerto Rican, and part documentary, addressing the dual problems of foreign real estate investments on the island and the reduction of public beach access. For further reading on the beautiful complexities of Puerto Rico, as often revealed through Bad Bunny’s music, check out The Bad Bunny Syllabus.
