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Javier E

The Roman Republic Was Teetering. Then a Volcano Erupted 6,000 Miles Away. - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • a volcanic eruption in the remote Aleutian Islands, 6,000 miles away from the Italian peninsula, contributed to the demise of the Roman Republic. That eruption — and others before it and since — played a role in changing the course of history.
  • At the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., it’s not unusual to find researchers in puffy parkas and wool hats handling chunks of ice in a minus 4 Fahrenheit “cold room.” Ice cores, typically drilled vertically from glaciers, hide bits of volcanic material that rained down from long-ago eruptions within their layers.
  • Joseph McConnell, a climate scientist at the institute, and his collaborators are in the business of looking for that debris. Using an instrument they designed and built, they melt the ice and pipe the water into an array of sensors. With hundreds of feet of tubing, the setup looks downright chaotic, but it’s exquisitely sensitive. The sensors pinpoint many substances, including about 30 different elements, and they do so by catching just tiny whiffs.“They have sensitivities of parts per quadrillion,” Dr. McConnell said.
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  • Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It’s a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. “The tephra comes from the magma itself,
  • Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth.
  • The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that’s seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it’s possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. “It’s like a tree-ring record.”
  • In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists’ attention.
  • Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, “There hasn’t been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream,”
  • The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. “There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there’s nothing else that looks like it.”
  • This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate.
  • “They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,”
  • Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • “It’s an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart,”
  • That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. “This was a period of Mediterranean-wide political, social and economic upheaval.”
  • Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and “animals never tasted before,” the philosopher Plutarch wrote.
  • For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick-started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire.
  • Rain patterns changed as well — some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed.
  • The links in the study are probable, but not definite. “They’re not being heavy handed and saying this is absolutely it,” Dr. Holmberg said.
  • Egyptian society, before the installation of the Aswan Low Dam in the early 20th century, was anchored by the annual summer flooding of the Nile River. These summer floods, sustained by monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia, delivered irrigation and silt, both critical to Egypt’s agrarian society. “The whole rhythm of the year was built around responding to the flood,” Dr. Manning of Yale said.
  • But volcanic eruptions, even those on the other side of the world, could have disrupted that flooding, Dr. Manning and his colleagues recently showed. Using records from Cairo’s Nilometer — an octagonal marble column that was used for recording Nile flood height from 622 to 1902 A.D., the team found that flooding tended to be weaker, or entirely absent, during years when there was a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the world.
  • he culprit, the team reasoned in a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there’s less water available for flooding that year.
  • Ptolemaic-era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following “Nile failure,” Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees — intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers — also became more commonplace.
  • “There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century.”
  • Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they’re nothing to worry about — it’s doubtful you’ve even heard of them. But every once in a while, there’s bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen.
Javier E

Silicon Valley Renegades Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet - The New York Times - 0 views

  • After bouncing around a bit more, he was drawn to the kite surfing and spearfishing in Baja California, Mexico, and decided to set up shop there. Then, in early 2022, as Mr. Iseman installed solar panels on the roof of his R.V., he listened to the audiobook of “Termination Shock,” a science fiction novel.
  • The book, by Neal Stephenson, plays out what happens when a billionaire in Texas takes it upon himself to start a massive solar geoengineering program, spraying huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the air with a giant cannon. Mr. Stephenson declined to discuss Make Sunsets.
Javier E

As Pollution Worsens in China, Solutions Succumb to Infighting - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • infighting within the government bureaucracy is one of the biggest obstacles to enacting stronger environmental policies. Even as some officials push for tighter restrictions on pollutants, state-owned enterprises — especially China’s oil and power companies — have been putting profits ahead of health in working to outflank new rules, according to government data and interviews with people involved in policy negotiations.
  • the sulfur levels of diesel in China are at least 23 times that of the United States.
cjlee29

Mosul Fight Unleashes New Horrors on Civilians - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Islamic State has moved hundreds of civilians from villages around the city to use as human shields,
  • United Nations said the militants may have killed nearly 200 people.
  • hit a Shiite mosque in northern Iraq, killing more than a dozen women and children.
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  • A sulfur plant set on fire by the Islamic State has sent dozens of people for treatment for respiratory problems, and several journalists have been hurt, and two killed, covering the fighting.
  • “ISIS has lost hundreds of its members from airstrikes when they withdraw, so now they are forcibly displacing the residents of villages they are leaving and using them as human shields,”
  • The human toll and factional distrust are early examples of the complex humanitarian crisis
  • killed close to 200 people, including civilians and children, in and around Mosul in the past week.
  • Among them were said to have been 50 former Iraqi policemen
  • Mr. Colville said that in one case, several women and children, including a 4-year-old, who were being held as human shields by Islamic State fighters were suddenly gunned down by the militants, possibly because they were lagging behind the group.
  • Although the government’s military operation itself is largely meeting its goals in progressing toward the city, the turmoil surrounding it is a sign of just how difficult it would be to secure a lasting peace across Iraq’s many divisions even after a victory.
  • So far, about 9,000 people have fled the fighting as Kurdish and Iraqi government forces have moved to secure villages around the city, according to the United Nations.
  • as the United Nations has worked to protect civilians, it has at times been undermined by the Iraqi security forces.
  • On the military front, the Islamic State has managed to launch two attacks on cities far from Mosul, diverting the attention of Iraqi security forces and the warplanes of the American-led coalition.
  • Kurdish officials in Kirkuk responded by forcing out hundreds of Arab families who had sought safety there, according to United Nations officials and local residents, as they feared that terrorists had sneaked into the city posing as displaced civilians.
  • local authorities were exacting collective punishment on Arabs for the crimes of the Islamic State
  • Local officials blamed the American-led coalition, but United States military officials have said the episode was not the result of a coalition airstrike.
  • Some have suggested that an artillery shell hit the mosque, but Human Rights Watch said the evidence it had seen “is consistent with an airstrike.” The Iraqi forces are also conducting airstrikes, and Human Rights called for a thorough investigation.
  • Citing safety concerns, the Iraqi government said recently that it would begin restricting journalists’ access to the front lines
malonema1

Industrial Facilities' Toxic Chemical Releases Dropped 8% in 2015 - Environmental Leader - 0 views

  • Air emissions of toxic chemicals from industrial facilities saw an 8 percent decrease from 2014 to 2015, continuing their 10-year decline, according to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) National Analysis.
  • hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, toluene and mercury were among chemicals with significantly lower air releases at TRI-covered facilitie
  • This year’s report also includes a section highlighting the new Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which updated the Toxic Substances Control Act
B Mannke

China Exports Pollution to U.S., Study Finds - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Filthy emissions from China’s export industries are carried across the Pacific Ocean and contribute to air p
  • Filthy emissions from China’s export industries are carried across the Pacific Ocean and contribute to air pollution in the Western United States,
  • air pollution in the United States is affected by China’s production of goods for export and by global consumer demand for those goods
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  • “outsourcing production to China does not always relieve consumers in the United States — or for that matter many countries in the Northern Hemisphere — from the environmental impacts of air pollution.”
  • The movement of air pollutants associated with the production of goods in China for the American market has resulted in a decline in air quality in the Western United States
  • “Trade changes the location of production and thus affects emissions.”
  • “Dust, ozone and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins in California and other Western states,” the statement said.
  • Black carbon is linked to asthma, cancer, emphysema, and heart and lung disease.
  • in 2006, sulfate concentrations in the Western United States increased as much as 2 percent, and ozone and carbon monoxide levels also increased slightly because of the transportation of pollutants from emissions that resulted from the manufacture of goods for export to the United States.
  • The amount of air pollution in the Western United States resulting from emissions from China is still very small compared with the amount produced by sources in the United States that include traffic and domestic industries.
  • They estimated that in 2006, China’s exporting of goods to the United States was responsible for 7.4 percent of production-based Chinese emissions for sulfur dioxide, 5.7 percent for nitrogen oxides, 3.6 percent for black carbon and 4.6 percent for carbon monoxide.
  • . Coal-burning factories were the biggest sources of pollutants and greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming.
  • “This is a reminder to us that a significant percentage of China’s emissions of traditional pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions are connected to the products we buy and use every day in the U.S. We should be concerned, not only because this pollution is harming the citizens of China, but because it’s damaging the air quality in parts of the U.S.”
  • So the overall percentages of economic output might not by themselves be fair indicators of the importance of exports to the Chinese economy.
qkirkpatrick

The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.
  • He lifted a shell. Oily paste oozed from a crack. “That doesn’t look like pond water,” said his team leader, Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling. The specialist swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red — indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical warfare agent designed to burn a victim’s airway, skin and eyes.
  • From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.
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  • In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
  • more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.
  • In late 2005 and early 2006, soldiers collected more than 440 Borak 122-millimeter chemical rockets near Amara, in southeastern Iraq. And in the first nine months of 2006, the American military recovered roughly 700 chemical warheads and shells, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
g-dragon

Ancient Chinese Invented Gunpowder - 0 views

  • Few substances in history have had as profound an effect on human history as gunpowder, yet its discovery in China was an accident. Contrary to myth, it was not simply used for fireworks but was put to military uses from its time of discovery. Eventually, this secret weapon leaked out to the rest of the medieval world.
  • Ancient alchemists in China spent centuries trying to discover an elixir of life that would render the user immortal.
  • mixed 75 parts saltpeter with 15 parts charcoal and 10 parts sulfur. This mixture had no discernable life-lengthening properties, but it did explode with a flash and a bang when exposed to an open flame.
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  • Many western history books over the years have stated that the Chinese used this discovery only for fireworks, but that is not true. Song Dynasty military forces as early as 904 A.D. used gunpowder devices against their primary enemy, the Mongols. These weapons included "flying fire" (fei huo), an arrow with a burning tube of gunpowder attached to the shaft.
  • Flying fire arrows were miniature rockets, which propelled themselves into enemy ranks and inspired terror among both men and horses. It must have seemed like fearsome magic to the first warriors who were confronted with the power of gunpowder.
  • By the mid- to late-eleventh century, the Song government had become concerned about gunpowder technology spreading to other countries. The sale of saltpeter to foreigners was banned in 1076. Nonetheless, knowledge of the miraculous substance was carried along the Silk Road to India, the Middle East, and Europe. In 1267, a European writer made reference to gunpowder, and by 1280 the first recipes for the explosive mixture were published in the west. China's secret was out.
Javier E

The Arrogance of the Anthropocene - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages
  • At the end of all their travels—after cataloging all the bedrock of the entire planet—they might finally be led to an odd, razor-thin stratum hiding halfway up some eroding, far-flung desert canyon
  • Unless we fast learn how to endure on this planet, and on a scale far beyond anything we’ve yet proved ourselves capable of, the detritus of civilization will be quickly devoured by the maw of deep time.
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  • Yes, billions of dinosaur bodies died and fell to the Earth here in this span, and trillions more dinosaur footsteps pressed into the Earth, but hardly a trace remains today. A cryptic smattering of lakeside footprints represents their entire contribution to the Triassic period. A few bones and footsteps miraculously preserved in New England and Nova Scotia are all that remains from the entire 27-million-year Early Jurassic epoch. No trace of dinosaurs remains whatsoever from the 18-million-year Late Jurassic. A handful of bones from one layer in Maryland represents the entire 45-million-year Early Cretaceous; the Late Cretaceous gives up a Hadrosaurus in New Jersey, and part of a tyrannosaur in Alabama, but mostly comprises unimpressive fragments of bone and teeth that cover the remaining 34 million years of the Earth’s most storied age, until doomsday
  • So that’s what 180 million years of complete dominance buys you in the fossil record. What, then, will a few decades of industrial civilization get us? This is the central question of the Anthropocene—an epoch that supposedly started, not tens of millions of years ago, but perhaps during the Truman administration
  • as the example of the dinosaurs shows, the chance that any city-swallowing delta deposit from a window of time only a few centuries wide would be lucky enough to be not only buried and preserved for safekeeping, but then subsequently not destroyed—in the ravenous maw of a subduction zone, or sinking too close to the cleansing metamorphic forge of Earth’s mantle, or mutilated in some m
  • there exists a better word in geology than epoch to describe our moment in the sun thus far: event. Indeed, there have been many similarly disruptive, rapid, and unusual episodes scattered throughout Earth history—wild climate fluctuations, dramatic sea-level rises and falls, global ocean-chemistry disasters, and biodiversity catastrophes
  • nd then, after all that, find itself, at a given point in the far future, fantastically lucky enough to have been serendipitously pushed up just enough so as to be exposed at the surface, but not too high as to have been quickly destroyed by erosion … is virtually ni
  • What else of us could be sampled from this sliver of deep-sea-muck-turned-rock—these Anthropocene clays and shale layers? Pass it through a mass spectrometer and you would see, encoded in its elements, the story of the entire planet in this strange interval, the Great Derangement of the Earth’s systems by civilization. You would see our lightning-fast injection of hundreds of gigatons of light carbon into the atmosphere written in the strange skew of carbon isotopes in this rock—as you do in rocks from the many previous carbon-cycle disasters of Earth history. The massive global-warming pulse created by this carbon disaster would be written in oxygen isotope
  • The sulfur, nitrogen, thallium, and uranium isotopes in these rocks (to mention just a few) would whisper to you—again, in squiggles on a graph—that the global ocean lost much of its oxygen during this brief but enigmatic interval. Strontium isotopes would tell you that rock weathering dramatically accelerated worldwide for a few tens of thousands of years as sweltering, violent storms attacked the rocks and wore down the continents during a brief, CO2-driven fever.
  • The most enduring geological legacy, instead, will be the extinctions we cause. The first wave of human-driven extinctions, and the largest hit to terrestrial megafauna since the extinction of the dinosaurs, began tens of thousands of years ago, as people began to spread out into new continents and islands, wiping out everything we tend to think of as “Ice Age” faun
  • we’re very likely to return to our regularly scheduled programming and dive back into a punishing Ice Age in the next half-million years. This means that sea level—after shooting up in the coming millennia by our own hand, and potentially burying coastal settlements in sediment (good for fossilization)—will eventually fall hundreds of feet below where it is today, and subject the shallow continental shelves, along with our once submerged cities and magnificent seams of garbage, to the cold winds of erosion (bad for fossilization), where they’ll be mostly reduced to nothing
  • The first major mass extinction, 445 million years ago, took place in multiple pulses across a million years. An event. The second major mass extinction, 70 million years later, took place over 600,000 years—400,000 years longer than the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens.
  • The idea of the Anthropocene inflates our own importance by promising eternal geological life to our creations. It is of a thread with our species’ peculiar, self-styled exceptionalism—from the animal kingdom, from nature, from the systems that govern it, and from time itself. This illusion may, in the long run, get us all killed.
Javier E

Scientists Discover Some of the Oldest Signs of Life on Earth - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The Earth was formed around 4.54 billion years ago. If you condense that huge swath of prehistory into a single calendar year, then the 3.95-billion-year-old graphite that the Tokyo team analyzed was created in the third week of February. By contrast, the earliest fossils ever found are 3.7 billion years old; they were created in the second week of March.
  • Those fossils, from the Isua Belt in southwest Greenland, are stromatolites—layered structures created by communities of bacteria. And as I reported last year, their presence suggests that life already existed in a sophisticated form at the 3.7-billion-year mark, and so must have arisen much earlier. And indeed, scientists have found traces of biologically produced graphite throughout the region, in other Isua Belt rocks that are 3.8 billion years old, and in hydrothermal vents off the coast of Quebec that are at least a similar age, and possibly even older.
  • “As far back as the rock record extends—that is, as far back as we can look for direct evidence of early life, we are finding it. Earth has been a biotic, life-sustaining planet since close to its beginning.”
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  • living organisms concentrate carbon-12 in their cells—and when they die, that signature persists. When scientists find graphite that’s especially enriched in carbon-12, relative to carbon-13, they can deduce that living things were around when that graphite was first formed. And that’s exactly what the Tokyo team found in the Saglek Block—grains of graphite, enriched in carbon-12, encased within 3.95-billion-year-old rock.
  • the team calculated the graphite was created at temperatures between 536 and 622 Celsius—a range that’s consistent with the temperatures at which the surrounding metamorphic rocks were transformed. This suggests that the graphite was already there when the rocks were heated and warped, and didn’t sneak in later. It was truly OG—original graphite.
  • Still, all of this evidence suggests Earth was home to life during its hellish infancy, and that such life abounded in a variety of habitats. Those pioneering organisms—bacteria, probably—haven’t left any fossils behind. But Sano and Komiya hope to find some clues about them by analyzing the Saglek Block rocks. The levels of nitrogen, iron, and sulfur in the rocks could reveal which energy sources those organisms exploited, and which environments they inhabited. They could tell us how life first lived.
leilamulveny

Oil's Turbulent Year Stirs Debate on Relevance of Benchmarks - WSJ - 0 views

  • A tumultuous year in oil markets left the energy industry reeling and gave fresh impetus to a perennial debate: What is the best gauge of crude prices?
  • The Covid-19 pandemic confined billions of people to their homes and shut or slowed portions of the global economy in 2020, crimping demand for oil.
  • The crisis reached its crescendo in April, when the price of light, sweet U.S. crude futures dived below $0 a barrel for the first time. Some traders were paying others to take oil off their hands.
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  • “What we saw was the single largest demand event in history,” said Peter Keavey, managing director for energy products at CME Group, owner of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where U.S. crude futures trade.
  • Prices have since somewhat recovered. But those jarring moves of the spring added urgency to arguments about whether benchmarks used since the 1980s adequately reflect the modern oil market
  • The crash rippled through the physical market, where, for example, Saudi Arabia sets prices for exports to the U.S. using an assessment tied to futures prices.
  • The pricing system based on three benchmark crudes—West Texas Intermediate in the U.S., Brent in Europe and Dubai in the Middle East—has broadly stayed the same.
  • WTI futures show no sign of being displaced as the primary gauge of U.S. crude prices, said CME’s Mr. Keavey. “Crude-oil infrastructure in the U.S. still revolves around Cushing,” he said. “The Gulf Coast is certainly an emerging price point, but it is still a secondary benchmark.”
  • That means the price of the contracts typically converges with oil prices at Cushing in the run-up to their last day of trading.
  • “We need to open up the benchmarks to be more reflective of global oil prices,” said Greg Newman, chief executive of U.K.-based Onyx Capital Group, which specializes in oil swaps. “How can it be accurate if you’re focusing on one tiny localized area?”
  • Even before coronavirus, there was growing interest in assessing the price of crude at the Gulf Coast, home to other U.S. trading hubs.
  • there has been a boom in U.S. oil exports since a four-decade embargo on its shipments ended in late 2015.
  • Crude oil comes in dozens of varieties that differ by density and sulfur content. WTI, Brent and Dubai act as reference points against which other grades are priced. They also are the basis for financial contracts that allow players in the oil market to hedge against and speculate on price swings.
  • “Benchmarks always reflect flows,”
Javier E

'The Magic Mountain' Saved My Life - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • I had never noticed the void before, because I had never been moved to ask the questions Who am I? What is life for? Now I couldn’t seem to escape them, and I received no answers from an empty sky.
  • a “moist spot” on one of his lungs. That and a slight fever suggest tuberculosis, requiring him to remain for an indeterminate time. Both diagnosis and treatment are dubious, but they thrill Hans Castorp: This hermetic world has begun to cast a spell on him and provoke questions “about the meaning and purpose of life” that he’d never asked down in the flatlands. Answered at first with “hollow silence,” they demand extended contemplation that’s possible only on the magic mountain.
  • I fell under the spell of Hans Castorp’s quest story, as the Everyman hero is transformed by his explorations of time, illness, sciences and séances, politics and religion and music.
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  • he climactic chapter, “Snow,” felt as though it were addressed to me. Hans Castorp, lost in a snowstorm, falls asleep and then awakens from a mesmerizing and monstrous dream with an insight toward which the entire story has led him: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”
  • Hans Castorp remains on the mountain for seven years—a mystical number. The Magic Mountain is an odyssey confined to one place, a novel of ideas like no other, and a masterpiece of literary modernism.
  • Mann analyzes the nature of time philosophically and also conveys the feeling of its passage, slowing down his narrative in some spots to take in “the entire world of ideas”—a day can fill 100 pages—and elsewhere omitting years
  • As I made my way through the novel by kerosene lamplight, I took Mann’s bildungsroman as a guide to my own education among the farmers, teachers, children, and market women who became my closest companions, hoping to find myself on a journey toward enlightenment as rich and meaningful as its hero’s
  • Mann has something important to tell us as a civilization. The Mann who began writing the novel was an aristocrat of art, hostile to democracy—a reactionary aesthete. Working on The Magic Mountain was a transformative experience, turning him—as it turned his protagonist—into a humanist
  • What Hans Castorp arrives at, lost and asleep in the snow, “is the idea of the human being,” Mann later wrote, “the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.”
  • In our age of brutal wars, authoritarian politics, cultures of contempt, and technology that promises to replace us with machines, what is left of the idea of the human being? What can it mean to be a humanist?
  • For Mann, the Great War was more than a contest among rival European powers or a patriotic cause. It was a struggle between “civilization” and “culture”—between the rational, politicized civilization of the West and Germany’s deeper culture of art, soul, and “genius,” which Mann associated with the irrational in human nature: sex, aggression, mythical belief.
  • The kaiser’s Germany—strong in arms, rich in music and philosophy, politically authoritarian—embodied Mann’s ideal. The Western powers “want to make us happy,” he wrote in the fall of 1914—that is, to turn Germany into a liberal democracy. Mann was more drawn to death’s mystery and profundity than to reason and progress, which he considered facile values
  • This sympathy wasn’t simply a fascination with human evil—with a death instinct—but an attraction to a deeper freedom, a more intense form of life than parliaments and pamphleteering offered.
  • Mann scorned the notion of the writer as political activist. The artist should remain apart from politics and society, he believed, free to represent the deep and contradictory truths of reality rather than using art as a means to advance a particular view
  • Settembrini, like Heinrich, is a “humanist”—but in Mann’s usage, the term has an ironic sound. As he wrote elsewhere, it implies “a repugnant shallowness and castration of the concept of humanity,” pushed by “the politician, the humanitarian revolutionary and radical literary man, who is a demagogue in the grand style, namely a flatterer of mankind.”
  • As an artist above politics, Mann didn’t want simply to criticize “civilization’s literary man,” but to show him as “equally right and wrong.” He intended to create an intellectual opponent to Settembrini in a conservative Protestant character named Pastor Bunge—but the war intruded.
  • He published his wartime writings in the genre-defying Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in October 1918, one month before the armistice. Katia Mann later wrote, “In the course of writing the book, Thomas Mann gradually freed himself from the ideas which had held sway over him … He wrote Reflections in all sincerity and, in doing so, ended by getting over what he had advocated in the book.”
  • The war that had just ended enlarged the novel’s theme into “a worldwide festival of death”; the devastation, he would go on to write in the book’s last pages, was “the thunderbolt that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates,” soon to become a German soldier. It also confronted Mann himself with a new world to which he had to respond.
  • Some German conservatives, in their hatred of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles, embraced right-wing mass politics. Mann, nearing 50, vacillated, hoping to salvage the old conservatism from the new extremism. In early 1922, he and Heinrich reconciled, and, as Mann later wrote, he began “to accept the European-democratic religion of humanity within my moral horizon, which so far had been bounded solely by late German romanticism, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner.”
  • in a review of a German translation of Walt Whitman’s selected poetry and prose, he associated the American poet’s mystical notion of democracy with “the same thing that we in our old-fashioned way call ‘humanity’ … I am convinced there is no more urgent task for Germany today than to fill out this word, which has been debased into a hollow shell.”
  • when ultranationalists in Berlin murdered his friend Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s Jewish foreign minister. Shocked into taking a political stand, Mann turned a birthday speech in honor of the Nobel Prize–winning author Gerhart Hauptmann into a stirring call for democracy. To the amazement of his audience and the German press, Mann ended with the cry “Long live the republic!”
  • Abandoning Pastor Bunge as outmoded, he created a new counterpart to Settembrini who casts a sinister shadow over the second half of the novel: an ugly, charismatic, and (of course) tubercular Jesuit of Jewish origin named Leo Naphta. The intellectual combat between him and Settembrini—which ends physically, in a duel—provides some of the most dazzling passages in The Magic Mountain.
  • Naphta is neither conservative nor liberal. Against capitalist modernity, whose godless greed and moral vacuity he hates with a sulfurous rage, Naphta offers a synthesis of medieval Catholicism and the new ideology of communism. Both place “anonymous and communal” authority over the individual, and both are intent on saving humanity from Settembrini’s soft, rational humanism.
  • Naphta argues that love of freedom and pleasure is weaker than the desire to obey. “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego,” he says. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.” Mann understood the appeal of totalitarianism early on.
  • It’s Naphta, a truly demonic figure—not Settembrini, the voice of reason—who precipitates the end of the hero’s romance with death. His jarring arrival allows Hans Castorp to loosen himself from its grip and begin a journey toward—what? Not toward Settembrini’s international republic of letters, and not back toward his simple bourgeois life down in the flatlands
  • Hans Castorp puts on a new pair of skis and sets out for a few hours of exercise that lead him into the fateful blizzard and “a very enchanting, very dreadful dream.”
  • In it, he encounters a landscape of human beings in all their kindness and beauty, and all their hideous evil. “I know everything about humankind,” he thinks, still dreaming, and he resolves to reject both Settembrini and Naphta—or rather, to reject the stark choice between life and death, illness and health, recognizing that “man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they.”
  • e’s become one of death’s intimates, and his initiation into its mysteries has immeasurably deepened his understanding of life—but he won’t let death rule his thoughts. He won’t let reason either, which seems weak and paltry before the power of destruction. “Love stands opposed to death,” he dreams; “it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death.”
  • We succumb to the impulse to escape our humanness. That urge, ubiquitous today, thrives in the utopian schemes of technologists who want to upload our minds into computers; in the pessimism of radical environmentalists who want us to disappear from the Earth in order to save it; in the longing of apocalyptic believers for godly retribution and cleansing; in the daily sense of inadequacy, of shame and sin, that makes us disappear into our devices.
  • the vision of “love” that Hans Castorp embraces just before waking up is “brotherly love”—the bond that unites all human beings.
  • he emerged as the preeminent German spokesman against Hitler who, in lectures across the United States in 1938, warned Americans of the rising threat to democracy, which for him was inseparable from humanism: “We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.”
  • Mann urged his audiences to resist the temptation to deride humanity. “Despite so much ridiculous depravity, we cannot forget the great and the honorable in man,” he said, “which manifest themselves as art and science, as passion for truth, creation of beauty, and the idea of justice.”
  • Could anyone utter these lofty words today without courting a chorus of snickers, a social-media immolation? We live in an age of human self-contempt. We’re hardly surprised when our leaders debase themselves with vile behavior and lies, when combatants desecrate the bodies of their enemies, when free people humiliate themselves under the spell of a megalomaniacal fraud
  • In driving our democracy into hatred, chaos, and violence we, too, grant death dominion over our thoughts.
  • Mann now recognized political freedom as necessary to ensure the freedom of art, and he became a sworn enemy of the Nazis.
  • The need for political reconstruction, in this country and around the world, is as obvious as it was in Thomas Mann’s time.
  • Mann also knew that, to withstand our attraction to death, a decent society has to be built on a foundation deeper than politics: the belief that, somewhere between matter and divinity, we human beings, made of water, protein, and love, share a common destiny.
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