Jonah King

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

- Leonard Cohen (who would have turned 91 yesterday).

This Saturday!

Male Costa’s Hummingbird

Overcast skies? Find a hummingbird… male Costa’s 🪶☀️🌵

This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered

The Stack What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and ...

A comprehensive political and design theory of planetary-scale computation proposing that The Stack—an accidental megastructure—is both a technological apparatus and a model for a new geopolitical architecture.

mitpress.mit.edu/978026202957...

Bloodbath Nation by Paul Auster review – US gun violence under the microscope A brilliant storyteller attempts to get at the roots of the American obsession with firearms – but leaves readers feeling as hopeless as when they started

"After 12 years in the US I concluded that many Americans regard gun deaths like traffic fatalities – an unavoidable, if horrific, consequence of everyday life."

www.theguardian.com/books/2023/j...

Only a week left to apply to Synthetic Narratives, a symposium on AI, XR and the Future of Storytelling I am co-directing at Stevens Institute this October

Not because it points to a clear future, but because it shows, with devastating clarity, how little of one exists.

So why are so many ypeople identifying with Palestine? Because it exposes the unbearable reality of the present.

Internationalism, once the backbone of global solidarity, is gone. And what’s replaced it? Grief. Anger. Disorientation.

We support Palestinian resistance because it is right to resist oppression. But we do so without any belief that what follows will be just, liberatory, or transformative.

Today, there is no such alignment. Hamas, Hezbollah, Arab nationalism — none of these represent a future worth building toward.

In the past, protest was often tied to a vision. Anti-Vietnam War movements aligned with the Vietcong, imagining a post-colonial, socialist future. That vision may have been flawed — but it existed.

Beneath the chants and solidarity lies a strategic vacuum. This movement, for all its energy, lacks a political horizon.

(thoughts inspired by Bifo Berardi's new book, Quit Everything

Not because it points to a clear future, but because it shows, with devastating clarity, how little of one exists.

So why are so many people identifying with Palestine? Because it exposes the unbearable reality of the present.

Internationalism, once the backbone of global solidarity, is gone. And what’s replaced it? Grief. Anger. Disorientation.

We support Palestinian resistance because it is right to resist oppression. But we do so without any belief that what follows will be just, liberatory, or transformative.

Today, there is no such alignment. Hamas, Hezbollah, Arab nationalism — none of these represent a future worth building toward.

In the past, protest was often tied to a vision. Anti-Vietnam War movements aligned with the Vietcong, imagining a post-colonial, socialist future. That vision may have been flawed — but it existed.

But beneath the chants and solidarity lies a strategic vacuum. This movement, for all its energy, lacks a political horizon.

The radical idea that space-time remembers could upend cosmology There are new hints that the fabric of space-time may be made of "memory cells" that record the whole history of the universe. If true, it could explain the nature of dark matter and much more

Is SpaceTime a memory system?

www.newscientist.com/article/2482...

A Garden of Ideas in John Berger’s Letters to His Son “Over to You” is an ever-evolving meditation on images by the art critic and his youngest son, two men linked by blood and art.

John Berger has always been a major role model for me, not least because I was named after a character in his screenplay, (Jonah will be 25 in the year 2000). It's always been his personal writing that moved me most.

hyperallergic.com/988748/a-gar...

Oh yeah, so this happened.

The universe is… beige?

In 2002, astronomers found that the average color of everything in the univerise that emits or reflects light is a color called ‘cosmic latte.’ It’s a beige hue very close to white.

At least it’s not millennial gray.

Frieze New York Is Back to Its Old Ways The blue-chip art market inflates with anger and slams its fist if you keep pestering it with the nuisance of the outside world.

This year, the upscale trade fair Frieze is true to itself, finally abandoning the facade of being socially forward while selling art as a luxury item in the tens of millions.

A Garden of Ideas in John Berger’s Letters to His Son “Over to You” is an ever-evolving meditation on images by the art critic and his youngest son, two men linked by blood and art.

Composed shortly before art critic and essayist John Berger’s death in 2017, “Over to you” is an ever-evolving meditation on art and picture-making by two individuals who are linked by blood and, perhaps more than anything, by art.

Werner Herzog to direct his first animated feature, The Twilight World 27/03/2025 - The prolific German filmmaker is scheduled to begin production on his debut animation, based on his best-selling 2021 novel, in early 2026

German filmmaker Werner Herzog is set to direct his first animated feature, The Twilight World. The film is based on his best-selling novel Das Dämmern der Welt (2021), based on the real story of World War II Japanese intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda.
Find out more: cineuropa.org/475584

Josh Schrei’s latest jewel felt like a soothing balm on the seering wound of this cultural moment. Thank you for putting this out in the world 🙏

www.themythicbody.com/podcast/on-s...