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Photograph by Nicolaia Rips.
When he walked into my bedroom for the first time, he pointed at the top right corner of the room. “What is that?”
The answer was a hole. Directly above my closet and several inches below the start of my ceiling is an obvious nook—a deep-set crawl space suspended inside my wall. If that weren’t fun enough—“fun” said through gritted teeth, like how the realtor said “Now, this is fun” when he showed me the nook—there’s another feature: a bolted door within the nook. A dusty, intrusive, and creaky wooden door that points up to the sky. Between the bolts that secure the door is a sliver of light, slim enough that you can’t see what’s on the other side.
My building is an old Boerum Hill brownstone with a criminal exterior renovation. Inside my bedroom, though, the floors slant and the ceiling droops. It’s a beautiful princess bedroom, if the princess never got saved and lived forever unmedicated in her virginal bedroom. It’s a room of illusions, and the nook is its most illusive element. The nook is the last thing I see every night before I go to sleep. Goodnight Moon, good night dollhouse room, good night nook.
He was the first person I dated after a catastrophic college relationship. He was sweet. He reminded me of a portrait of a medieval saint or a beautiful lesbian. He asked questions.
“What are your dreams for the future?” Don’t know. “What did you want to be when you were small?” Taller. “Where does the door in the nook go?” Not sure. “Have you ever opened it?” Never. “Never?” Never ever. From my bed he would stare at it, and the more I tried to ignore it, the more he pushed. “What if there’s something amazing up there?” And what if there isn’t. Here we are in my bed, I thought, no point in fantasy.
He believed doors were made to be opened. I believed, firmly, that some doors should not be. Locked basement doors, closed bedroom doors, the door to a safe, the attic door in a horror flick, a patio door on a burning summer day when the AC is on, the seventh door in Bluebeard’s Castle. He argued for letting in the elements; I, for the threat of a draft. I could unleash a spirit or an alien or a doll left up there imbued with the spirit of a child born during the Depression or of some creep who studied acting at an Ivy League. A ghost is like a pet or a child, and I’m not responsible enough to handle a poltergeist.
Unfortunately, my refusal to deal with the door rendered the whole nook a lost space. There, above my head, was a nook the size of a rich child’s tree house, and I was neglecting it. It was large enough that I imagined I could stand in it fairly comfortably. Being raised in Manhattan, I started to obsess about the nook. I could rent it out as a fourth bedroom. I could use it as off-season storage for several lumpy hand-knit sweaters I felt too guilty to get rid of. I could build a library in it for books I’d stolen and borrowed. In fact, he was upset that I’d never read any of the books he’d lent me. He noticed I was using his favorite book as a coffee coaster.
Our relationship, like most organically sweet things, rotted. When he dumped me, he said there was a disconnect. He said maybe we’d find our way back to each other, and I said we would not. A classic door-half-open divide: he tried to keep it open, but I bolted it shut.
A few days after we broke up, I propped a chair against the wall and scrambled upward. Halfway into the nook, my arm strength dissolved. I dangled, my tush protruding from the wall, wiggling stupidly. I considered shouting for my roommate. Then, I considered her laughing at me. Maybe, I thought, I should just allow myself to be stuck. It’s fine to be stuck. I continued up. There I crouched, panting, in the crawl space, jamming at that ungiving door. With a crack it broke.
From the waist up I stuck out through the ceiling. I could see over Brooklyn. Brooklyn could see over me—a ghoulish, dust-covered, and bizarrely grinning woman escaping from an attic. I wedged myself up further. Suddenly, I was on the tilted roof. The door was open and there was nothing to be scared of. When one door closes, God opens a trapdoor.
Nicolaia Rips is the author of the memoir Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel.
Guest post by Alexandra Byrne, Zoha Siddiqui, and Kelebogile Zvobgo
Haitian officials and world leaders are calling for an armed humanitarian intervention backed by the United Nations (UN) to defeat organized crime. Gangs in Haiti have reportedly kidnapped and killed hundreds of civilians and displaced thousands. Gangs are also limiting access to fuel and blocking critical humanitarian aid to civilians. Add to this a resurgence of cholera.
The United States asked the UN Security Council in October to approve a targeted intervention, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield underscored “extreme violence and instability” in Haiti and proposed a mission led by a “partner country” (not the United States or UN peacekeeping forces).
There is nominal support for the mission. In the coming weeks, Canada will send naval vessels to Haiti’s coast, and Jamaica has offered some troops, but no country is taking the lead. Critics argue that past missions in Haiti did more harm than good. In 2010, UN peacekeepers even reintroduced cholera into Haiti. Nonetheless, the United States is pushing for an intervention.
What is an armed humanitarian intervention and would it be legal under international law? Here’s what you need to know.
An armed humanitarian intervention is a use of force to protect, maintain, or restore peace and security in a target country and internationally. Armed humanitarian interventions differ from ordinary military operations because they aim to protect populations from severe human rights abuses.
Past armed humanitarian interventions achieved limited success in places like Somalia, where troops initially stabilized the country but failed to improve the country’s security environment long-term.
Armed interventions fundamentally clash with state sovereignty—the idea that states control activities within their territories—because they can be conducted without the target state’s consent. While sovereignty is important in international law, it can nevertheless be sidestepped to stop atrocities and restore international peace.
The prevailing law on international interventions is the UN Charter, which binds all UN member states. Chapter VII of the charter governs international interventions and comprises thirteen key articles. Article 39 establishes that the Security Council may determine when international peace and security are breached or threatened. The article also gives the council authority to take all necessary measures to restore peace.
The remaining articles elaborate on those measures. Article 41 authorizes actions “not involving the use of armed force,” such as economic sanctions, while Article 42 permits “action by air, sea, or land forces.”
So, the Security Council decides whether, how, and why state sovereignty may be infringed, including through the use of force. States may only use force without council authorization in response to an armed attack, under Article 51, but they must still notify the council.
Security Council-authorized interventions may be conducted by UN peacekeeping forces or by UN member states’ troops. (Regional armed interventions require approval under Chapter VIII, Article 53.)
The Security Council has not always authorized armed humanitarian interventions, notably failing to prevent genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s. To avoid repeating those failures, the UN in 2005 adopted the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle.
R2P delegates to all states the responsibility to protect all people from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Under R2P, the international community must be prepared to take collective action through the Security Council “should peaceful means be inadequate,” a line taken from Chapter VII.
R2P was invoked once in Kenya, not to justify armed intervention, but to rally international mediation. R2P was also used in Côte d’Ivoire to deploy additional UN peacekeeping forces. (These forces completed their mandate in 2017.) One of the largest military actions authorized by the Security Council under R2P was the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, which has since been criticized for poor planning, increasing instability, and pushing regime change.
Possible Legal Armed Intervention in Haiti
If the US resolution for an armed humanitarian intervention in Haiti is approved by the Security Council, the operation would be legal and, if it focused solely on humanitarian objectives (i.e., opening aid delivery channels, providing aid, and protecting civilians), it could succeed. Still, there is the risk of failure. A more ambitious plan, seeking to change the country’s overall security environment, could also fail, as in Somalia.
But even if the intervention complied with international law and was invited by Haitian officials, critics argue it would be unethical, undermining Haitians’ sovereignty.
If the United States fails to gain Security Council support for an armed humanitarian intervention in Haiti, there are other measures available. The United States can increase the humanitarian aid it already provides, and provide tactical equipment and armored vehicles to the government. The Biden administration could also reverse recently expanded immigration restrictions, and instead provide asylum to Haitian migrants while also supporting struggling transit countries.
For its part, the Security Council could expand the economic sanctions and arms embargoes it adopted against criminal actors in Haiti. But such measures take time to implement and might not be felt for months.
The biggest challenge to mitigating the crisis in Haiti is the gangs that are blocking the delivery of food, fuel, and medical supplies to civilians. The challenge for the United States and the broader international community is to not repeat past mistakes—either by intervening too little, too late, or too much.
Alexandra Byrne is a research fellow in the International Justice Lab at William & Mary. Zoha Siddiqui is a 1693 scholar, a research fellow in the International Justice Lab at William & Mary, and an incoming George J. Mitchell Scholar at Queen’s University Belfast. Kelebogile Zvobgo is an assistant professor of government at William & Mary, a faculty affiliate at the Global Research Institute, and founder and director of the International Justice Lab.
My earliest memory of Fiona Apple is watching her give that infamous "This world is bullshit" speech live at the VMAs. I was 11 or 12 at the time, and I know I'd least seen the video for "Criminal," but my blossoming adolescent male mind presumably had no idea how to wrap his head around it. — Read the rest
Researchers have uncovered the first evidence of “cosmological coupling”—a newly predicted phenomenon in Einstein’s theory of gravity, possible only when black holes are placed inside an evolving universe.
The researchers studied supermassive black holes at the heart of ancient and dormant galaxies to develop a description of them that agrees with observations from the past decade.
Their findings are published in two articles, one in The Astrophysical Journal and the other in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The first study found that these black holes gain mass over billions of years in a way that can’t easily be explained by standard galaxy and black hole processes, such as mergers or accretion of gas.
According to the second paper, the growth in mass of these black holes matches predictions for black holes that not only cosmologically couple, but also enclose vacuum energy—material that results from squeezing matter as much as possible without breaking Einstein’s equations, thus avoiding a singularity.
With singularities removed, the paper then shows that the combined vacuum energy of black holes produced in the deaths of the universe’s first stars agrees with the measured quantity of dark energy in our universe.
“We’re really saying two things at once: that there’s evidence the typical black hole solutions don’t work for you on a long, long timescale, and we have the first proposed astrophysical source for dark energy,” says Duncan Farrah, University of Hawaii astronomer and lead author on both papers.
“What that means, though, is not that other people haven’t proposed sources for dark energy, but this is the first observational paper where we’re not adding anything new to the universe as a source for dark energy: Black holes in Einstein’s theory of gravity are the dark energy.”
These new measurements, if supported by further evidence, redefine our understanding of what a black hole is.
In the first study, the team determined how to use existing measurements of black holes to search for cosmological coupling.
“My interest in this project was really born from a general interest in trying to determine observational evidence that supports a model for black holes that works regardless of how long you look at them,” Farrah says. “That’s a very, very difficult thing to do in general, because black holes are incredibly small, they’re incredibly difficult to observe directly, and they are a long, long way away.”
Black holes are also hard to observe over long timescales. Observations can be made over a few seconds, or tens of years at most—not enough time to detect how a black hole might change over the lifetime of the universe. To see how black holes change over a scale of billions of years is a bigger task.
“You would have to identify a population of black holes and determine their distribution of mass billions of years ago. Then you would have to see the same population, or an ancestrally connected population, at present day and again be able to measure their mass,” says Gregory Tarlé, professor of physics at the University of Michigan. “That’s a really difficult thing to do.”
Because galaxies can have life spans of billions of years, and most galaxies contain a supermassive black hole, the team realized that galaxies held the key, but choosing the right types of galaxies was essential.
“There were many different behaviors for black holes in galaxies measured in the literature, and there wasn’t really any consensus,” says coauthor Sara Petty, a galaxy expert at NorthWest Research Associates. “We decided that by focusing only on black holes in passively evolving elliptical galaxies, we could help to sort this thing out.”
Elliptical galaxies are enormous and formed early. They are like fossils of galaxy assembly. Astronomers believe them to be the final result of galaxy collisions, behemoths with upwards of trillions of old stars.
“These galaxies are ancient, don’t form many new stars, and there is very little gas left between those stars. No food for black holes,” Tarlé says.
By looking at only elliptical galaxies with no recent activity, the team could argue that any changes in the galaxies’ black hole masses couldn’t easily be caused by other known processes. Using these populations, the team then examined how the mass of their central black holes changed over the past 9 billion years.
If mass growth of black holes only occurred through accretion or merger, then the masses of these black holes would not be expected to change much at all. But if black holes gain mass by coupling to the expanding universe, then these passively evolving elliptical galaxies might reveal this phenomenon.
The researchers found that the further back in time they looked, the smaller the black holes were in mass, relative to their masses today. These changes were big: The black holes were anywhere from 7 to 20 times larger today than they were 9 billion years ago—big enough that the researchers suspected cosmological coupling could be the culprit.
In the second study, the team investigated whether the growth in black holes measured in the first study could be explained by cosmological coupling alone.
“Here’s a toy analogy. You can think of a coupled black hole like a rubber band, being stretched along with the universe as it expands,” says coauthor and University of Hawaii theoretical astrophysicist Kevin Croker. “As it stretches, its energy increases. Einstein’s E = mc2 tells you that mass and energy are proportional, so the black hole mass increases, too.”
How much the mass increases depends on the coupling strength, a variable the researchers call k.
“The stiffer the rubber band, the harder it is to stretch, so the more energy when stretched. In a nutshell, that’s k,” Croker says.
Because mass growth of black holes from cosmological coupling depends on the size of the universe, and the universe was smaller in the past, the black holes in the first study must be less massive by the correct amount in order for the cosmological coupling explanation to work.
The team examined five different black hole populations in three different collections of elliptical galaxies, taken from when the universe was roughly one half and one third of its present size. In each comparison, they measured that k was nearly positive 3.
This value was predicted for black holes that contain vacuum energy, instead of a singularity, four years earlier by Croker, then a graduate student, and University of Hawaii professor of mathematics Joel Weiner.
The conclusion is profound: Croker and Weiner had already shown that if k is 3, then all black holes in the universe collectively contribute a nearly constant dark energy density, just like measurements of dark energy suggest.
“Is it enough?” Tarlé says. “Are the black holes made over time enough to account for 70% of the energy in the universe today?”
Black holes come from dead large stars, so if you know how many large stars you are making, you can estimate how many black holes you are making and how much they grow as a result of cosmological coupling. Using the very latest measurements of the rate of earliest star formation provided by the James Webb Space Telescope, the team found that the numbers line up.
The researchers say their studies provide a framework for theoretical physicists and astronomers to further test—and for the current generation of dark energy experiments such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and the Dark Energy Survey—to shed light on the idea.
“If cosmological coupling is confirmed, it would mean that black holes never entirely disconnect from our universe, that they continue to exert a major influence on the evolution of the universe into the distant future,” Tarlé says.
“The question of the nature of dark energy is perhaps the most important unanswered question in contemporary physics. It’s the majority, 70% of the energy of the universe. And now we finally have observational evidence of where it comes from, why 70%, and why it’s here now. It’s very exciting!”
Source: University of Michigan
The post Team finds link between black holes and dark energy appeared first on Futurity.
Enlarge / People queue for clean water on February 9, 2023, in Hatay, Turkey. (credit: Getty | Burak Kara)
Deaths from the massive earthquake and aftershocks that violently struck parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria in the early hours of Monday have now surpassed 20,000—a staggering toll of devastation.
As of Thursday, Turkey’s national emergency management agency reported more than 17,000 deaths, as well as over 70,000 injured. Syrian Ministry of Health, meanwhile, reported 1,347 deaths and 2,295 injured. Rescuers in rebel-held northwest areas of the country reported at least 2,030 deaths and at least 2,950 injured.
As heroic rescue crews continue sifting through the rubble of collapsed structures, concern is growing for those tens of thousands injured and countless others made more vulnerable by the crisis.
Astronomers have discovered a galactic table for two—a pair of unusually close black holes that are feeding together after their respective galaxies collided.
The finding could have a profound impact on our understanding of later-stage galaxy mergers and suggests that the phenomenon of side-by-side black holes occurring during a merger may be more common than previously known.
“Relatively few dual black holes like this have ever been confirmed,” says Meg Urry, professor of physics and astronomy at Yale University and director of the Yale Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics. “This pair has the closest separation yet measured, only about 750 light years.”
Urry, part of the international research team that made the discovery, is coauthor of the new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and presented at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle on January 9.
A considerable body of research exists on the early phases of galactic mergers, which occur when gravity slowly draws two or more galaxies together. However, relatively little is known about the later stages. A key component in such mergers is the behavior of black holes—areas of space that have intense gravity and can grow by gobbling up gas and dust from their immediate surroundings.
For the study, astronomers enlisted a variety of powerful instruments to observe the late-stage merger of the galaxy UGC4211, located 500 million light years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. Using multiple instruments enabled researchers to observe the side-by-side black holes in different wavelengths and gather a more complete picture of the phenomenon.
Urry contributed data from the W.M. Keck Observatory’s OSIRIS near-infrared field spectrograph in Hawaii; Yale has maintained a years-long association with Keck that has yielded significant data.
“It’s super important that we can make these kinds of observations with Keck,” Urry says. “First, with Keck’s NIRC2 instrument, to survey the remnants of galaxy mergers to find hidden dual nuclei—supermassive black holes that will eventually merge—and then, in this particular case, to confirm the presence of two galactic nuclei with Keck’s OSIRIS near-infrared field spectrograph.
“OSIRIS found broad infrared lines in the southern nucleus, confirming it is certainly an active galactic nucleus, and measured the velocity offset between the two nuclei.”
Data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—an international observatory co-operated by the US National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory—enabled astronomers to find the exact location of the two black holes in the UGC4211 galaxy. Additional data came from the Chandra and Hubble telescopes, the ESO’s Very Large Telescope, and the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECalS) on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
“Simulations suggested that most of the population of black hole binaries in nearby galaxies would be inactive because they are more common, not two growing black holes like we found,” says Michael Koss, a senior research scientist at Eureka Scientific and the lead author of the new research.
Koss added that the use of ALMA was a game-changer, and that finding two black holes so close together in the nearby universe could pave the way for additional studies of the phenomenon.
Urry and her colleagues says that if close-paired binary black hole pairs are indeed commonplace, there could be significant implications for future detections of gravitational waves, as well.
“It will help us develop estimates of black hole merger rates for future gravitational wave detectors,” Urry says.
Source: Yale University
The post Team finds black hole ‘table for two’ appeared first on Futurity.
Thirty years ago, Parker Palmer wrote a new preface for the paperback edition of his book, To Know as We are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey.1 Reporting there on his experience traveling the country to explore the issues raised by the book, he writes:
Everywhere I go, I meet faculty who feel disconnected from their colleagues, from their students, from their own hearts.2
Thirty years later, that sense of disconnection has calcified into alienation.
The processes and practices that shape our academic lives are badly out of joint with the purposes that give our lives meaning.
Palmer puts it this way:
Most of us go into teaching not for fame or fortune but because of a passion to connect. We feel deep kinship with some subject; we want to bring students into that relationship, to link them with the knowledge that is so life-giving to us; we want to work in community with colleagues who share our values and our vocation. But when institutional conditions create more combat than community, when the life of the mind alienates more than it connects, the heart goes out of things, and there is little left to sustain us.3
It’s not just that institutional conditions have an alienating effect on the communities that give them life, but our institutions themselves are disconnected from the mission they profess to advance. As we put it in the HuMetricsHSS white paper:
The values that institutions of higher education profess to care most deeply about — articulated through university mission statements, promotional materials, and talking points — are often not the values enacted in the policies and practices that shape academic life. This disparity has led to a growing sense of alienation among faculty who entered higher education with a deep commitment to certain core values, values that are themselves very often articulated in the founding documents of institutions of higher education.4
Palmer’s book looks to spiritual traditions for a path forward in the face of such pervasive personal and institutional alienation. He writes:
In the midst of such pain, the spiritual traditions offer hope that is hard to find elsewhere, for all of them are ultimately concerned with getting us reconnected. These traditions build on the great truth that beneath the broken surface of our lives there remains — in the words of Thomas Merton — “a hidden wholeness.” The hope of every wisdom tradition is to recall us to that wholeness in the midst of our torn world, to reweave us into the community that is so threadbare today.5
To cultivate the wholeness to which Palmer points requires discipline and intentional practice. To reweave ourselves into community, reconnect ourselves with our purpose, and realign university values with institutional practice, we need to create structures and cultivate habits that reinforce the work that gives our personal and institutional lives meaning.
In this effort, it is helpful to have examples. I am grateful to work with imaginative colleagues who have managed to create a few. The appointment of Morgan Shipley as the inaugural Foglio Chair of Spirituality is a tangible effort to integrate what Palmer called “authentic spirituality” into the life of the University. “Authentic spirituality,” writes Palmer,
wants to open us to truth—whatever truth may be, wherever truth may take us. Such a spirituality does not dictate where we must go, but trusts that any path walked with integrity will take us to a place of knowledge. Such a spirituality encourages us to welcome diversity and conflict, to tolerate ambiguity, and to embrace paradox.6
This fall, a trusted path led us to a place of wholeness where we celebrated the Ascension of the new Department of African American and African Studies. This event marked the opening not only of a new Department, but also of new possibilities for deepening our connections with one another and with the reciprocal, community engaged work our torn world needs most urgently.
At the heart of these efforts to put the heart back into things beats the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative, a framework and a process designed to elevate the quality of teaching, research, and engagement by integrating practices of wholeness into the life of the university. We have tried to capture something of the spirit of this initiative in the video below.
Beneath the din of anxiety that animates our public conversations about the future of education, concrete steps are being taken to reconnect higher education with the “hidden wholeness” that gives it life and purpose and transformative power.
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