Supermen against surveillance: What happens when our past becomes a weapon? In her essay “Superman in Skotoprigonievsk” Hannah Mayerfield argues for the courageous affirmation of the good even in the face of an evil past, both in the “evil and lustful” father of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Superman’s Kryptonian-supramacist progenitor Jor-El. Instead, Alyosha Karamazov and Clark Kent look to their adoptive fathers, Elder Zosima and Jonathan Kent, to reclaim the universal brotherhood lost to the past’s wanton destructiveness. William Moursund, meanwhile, responding to this season’s letter prompt “There’s nothing left to conserve,” argues that the intentional destruction of our online footprints is necessary to free us from AI-powered surveillance—and keep our present lived experience separate from overwhelming metadata. In the face of the past’s tyranny, free choice remains a cudgel against unhappy obedience and a beacon for an uplifted future.
Reilly Pryma, assistant editor
Thoughts from a Coastal Outsider: In her West Coast homage to James Baldwin, “Notes from a Native Daughter,” Joan Didion, the girl who cried “gentrification” on the city of Sacramento in 1965, would, as the rest of us, never see that cry addressed. Presently, no one ever thinks of Sacramento and gentrification in the same sentence. Instead, it flickers on our tongues as we lament the tech transplants choking out every last drop of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley’s queer, artistic, and civil rights legacies. Kids from Palo Alto who have never heard of the word “gentrification” will become the norm, and our doomsday warning will cease to exist in the aftermath, as it did in Didion’s Sacramento.
But Didion, no matter her Donner Party bona fides, lacks the claims to indigeneity her essay promises. Her use of the word “native” in the essay’s title reveals a calculated ignorance to the Indigenous communities of California, violently slaughtered and displaced not only by the oft-reviled Spanish colonizers, but people like Didion’s Manifest Destiny ancestors. Didion’s own nostalgic lament about original Sacramento families is ironic, given that it is exactly the creation of ahistorical narratives that Didion criticizes in the new generation of Sacramentans.
Whether it be her omission of Indigenous peoples in California history, or the fantasy of indigeneity bestowed on a vanishing Old Sacramento, Didion’s writing raises an important question: how can we be faithful to our own personal history while honoring the truth?
Mimi Mikhailov, contributing editor
Hundreds of Beavers: Not to be confused with recent Earth Day celebrations, Chicago’s annual Beaver Festival took place in Hyde Park’s Nichols Park over the weekend. Many of the groups represented—The Morton Arboretum, Garfield Park Conservatory, and the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, to name a few—were to be expected at a public ecology festival.
Others, though, were so far from mainstream that there are few words which can encompass how delightful they were: The Insect Asylum, for example. A self-described “non-profit vintage taxidermy and insect museum,” the Asylum is dedicated solely to the celebration of insects’ role in the ecosystem. Or the Feminist Bird Club, which welcomes with open arms those “who may be new to birding but unsure of more traditional bird groups.” The presence of the quirkier booths reveals the Beaver Festival to be not just a gathering for environmentalists, but a delightfully off-beat celebration of the assiduous beaver and its loyal human supporters.
Like all things worth conserving, America’s natural landscapes are only safe to the extent that individuals from all walks of life care about them. In 2021, National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman wrote of hope as the antidote to the indifference gnawing at democracy, but perhaps the same can be said of delight. As the Beaver Festival reminds us, where there is delight there is delight, “if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Nora Holmes, contributing editor
Image: J. H. W. Tischbein, Three Beavers Building a Dam, watercolor, ca. 1800 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).