A real-world Jurassic Park scenario. The puzzle of immigration, and the immigration of puzzles. The Mapplethorpe x Doolittle collaboration you never imagined. Finding solace in poetry. The inner lives of farm animals. All that—and more—in this week’s edition.

1. What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?

Sabrina Imbler | Defector | December 6, 2023 | 5,436 words

Ever imagine what it would be like if a long-lost species roamed Earth once again? Colossal, a well-funded company at the forefront of the de-extinction business, plans to make this a reality. On the surface, this sounds like an ecological dream, as well as a way for humans to do good and reverse some of the destruction we’ve caused on this planet. But what does de-extinction entail? In this fascinating read, Sabrina Imbler explains that a recreated dodo would not actually be a dodo, but a genetic hybrid of the dodo and its closest living relative (the Nicobar pigeon). What, then, would teach this lone dodo how to be a dodo? Or, in the case of the mammoth, which would be developed with the genetic help of the Asian elephant, how would the animal physically come into being? The uneasy answer: a surrogate elephant mother who would never be able to consent to carrying another species. (In the hope of an alternative, Colossal has a team focused on developing an artificial womb, which—depending on your perspective—might be even creepier.) There’s a lot more to ponder here, including the key question of who, ultimately, de-extinction is for. As Imbler asserts, it’s not for the animals, but for Colossal’s VCs and investors, who include Paris Hilton. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Always, always click on a link with a Sabrina Imbler byline. They write my favorite kind of science writing: curious, thoughtful, and accessible. This piece is no exception. —CLR

2. Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

Natan Last | The New Yorker | December 18, 2023 | 4,675 words

So here’s something about me: I take crossword puzzles seriously. I’ve done them since I was old enough to hold a pen. I’ve written about them. (More than once!) I don’t say this to establish any nerd bona fides, but to make clear that I know from good crossword stories. And in a week when multiple national magazines ran longform pieces about puzzles, Natan Last’s New Yorker feature—which ran in print under the far better headline “Rearrangements”—became one of the best crossword stories I’ve ever read. A longtime crossword constructor and writer, Last is currently working on a book about you-know-what. Still, this piece contains multitudes in the best way possible. On one level, it’s a profile of Mangesh Ghogre, a man from Mumbai whose love of crosswords increased his English fluency and ultimately earned him a so-called Einstein visa to the U.S. On another, it uses Ghogre’s story to interrogate the cultural history and linguistic conventions of American-style crosswords—and on a third, it contends with the current movement trying to push those crosswords out of their Western rut and to be more expansive in both their clues and their fill. This conversation has been going on for years among constructors and editors, and the resulting sea change is evident everywhere from the iconic New York Times puzzle to outlets like The New Yorker and USA Today. Yet, Last wraps a human-interest story and a thorny bit of discourse into a bundle that’s accessible to non-solvers while also being sharp and nuanced enough to satisfy obsessives like me. If you didn’t have a clue, now you do. —PR

3. A Work of Love

Lulu Miller and John Megahan | Orion | December 7, 2023 | 3,100 words

This utterly winning Q&A is about “the Noah’s ark you never heard about,” as Radiolab host Lulu Miller puts it in her introduction. Miller talks to John Megahan, an illustrator who spent years secretly drawing detailed pictures of animals engaging in queer behavior: “male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.” The illustrations, which eventually filled the pages of the seminal 1999 book Biological Exuberance, are entirely based on fact—they’re inspired by “well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate, rather than binary, expressions of sex (like intersexuality and sex-changing) in the animal world.” This interview about art as activism is a bright light at the end of a challenging year for so many of us. It is as funny as it is earnest, filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and eloquent articulations of important truths long sidelined by opponents of queer existence. “It definitely did not stay a day job,” Megahan says of his illustrations. “It became a work of love for me, in a sense. I became really committed to it. Once we got going and I saw the scope of the project and what it was all about, I basically wanted to pay respect to these animals.” —SD

4. How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith

Casey Cep | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 5,978 words

Casey Cep profiles poet Christian Wiman who, nearly 20 years ago at age 39—newly married, his life before him—was diagnosed with a “rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia.” He imagined he had five years to live. As a child, his family’s anger and depression boiled over into violence in fits they referred to as “the sulls.” Wiman, so afflicted, used exercise to quell his feelings until he discovered reading as a way to change his life. He made poetry his obsession, “swallowing all of Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes” and later John Milton, thinking that to write great poems, you first must consume them. Cep is nearly invisible in this piece; it’s so carefully researched and written, you feel as though you’re face to face with Wiman as he shares stories and what poetry has meant to him at various stages in his life. Poetry, he has written, is a salve “for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.” Despite that, as Cep notes, when Wiman was in “the cancer chair” undergoing treatment and its excruciating side effects, he turned to verse. “In the cancer chair, Wiman would recite every poem he could remember, and, when he ran out, try to write one of his own,” she writes. Cep’s nuanced profile is a testament to dogged determination, coming to grips with faith—both in God and the power of poetry—and the feat of sheer will against despair. —KS

5. What Are Farm Animals Thinking?

David Grimm | Science | December 7, 2023 | 3,694 words

A couple of years ago, my downstairs neighbors kept chickens. (Finger, Tender, and Nugget. I take no responsibility for the names.) These sassy ladies realized that I was a soft touch, and every day merrily hopped up the stairs to my deck to peer in through the patio door, awaiting kitchen scraps. I soon noticed that when I got up and opened my bedroom curtains, the chickens peered up from the yard. Curtains open, they would race up the stairs: the café was in business. These girls were so on the ball that I have not eaten a chicken since we became acquainted. It’s little wonder, then, that I pounced on this investigation into research on the complexity of thinking in farm animals, an area I have mused on since the food-savvy chickens but that is often ignored by scientists. David Grimm bravely faces the “cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails” and “sour miasma of pig excrement” to enter the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) and learn about the questions being asked there, such as do cows have friends? (Considering that scientists have potty-trained cows here, I think they probably do.) Grimm keeps the tone light—sliding in a few quips between the science—but still provides a comprehensive overview of the work. With a staggering 78 billion farm animals on Earth, it is time we gave them more thought. —CW

Audience Award

What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?

LM: In the mid-1990s, when you were starting to work on this, was there a lot of doubt that homosexuality takes place in the natural world? Was there a sense that this was something people were aware of, or did it feel new even to be bringing it out?

JM: It felt new. It was something that I was not aware of and had not really considered before, so I was personally fascinated by the subject.

All these things that are compiled in here were the notes and observations of scientists. For years they’ve been seeing this stuff, but usually just in side notes. And they published very little about these subjects. This is the one publication that pulled everything together into a single document.

LM: That’s interesting. It’s taking the side notes and the things that were listed as deviant or abnormal and saying, Wait, when you actually put them all together, maybe they’re not.

Do you remember any drawings, or the journeys to a drawing, that were funny or hard or complicated?

JM: Well, a fun one for me was the hand signals by chimpanzees. We spent quite a bit of time working on this illustration. We actually studied the symbols that they use in sign language publications.

LM: There’s a sideways wave and there’s one that almost looks like you’re dribbling a basketball, which is apparently an invitation for sexual interaction. There are ones that seem to be telling the partner what to do: turn around, position yourself, spread your legs. Were you watching videos? How did you get so precise with these? It’s so cool. It’s like a language—like sex talk.

JM: Bruce basically gave me rough sketches of what he wanted on these. And so I had a rough idea of how to go about this. And then I think I asked my wife, Anne, to move her hand about in various ways, and then I turned her hand into a chimpanzee hand.

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can always visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

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1. Coming Into Focus

Carla Ciccone | Harper’s Bazaar | September 5th, 2022 | 3,231 words

“Getting diagnosed with ADHD on the cusp of 40 brought my personal history into sharp focus,” writes Carla Ciccone in this personal piece for Harper’s Bazaar. There’s been a spike in the number of ADHD diagnoses among adult women, especially in the last several years, and Ciccone was one of them. “But women aren’t suddenly waking up with a neurological disorder,” she writes. “It’s likely been there all along, masquerading as low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, ‘she’s difficult,’ ‘she’s an airhead,’ ‘she’s unlucky,’ ‘she’s lazy,’ and other labels that tend to mark a girl as she moves through her life.” Ciccone describes her own struggles growing up — in school, in relationships, in processing traumatic events — and how her diagnosis at 39 has helped her reframe the way she sees herself, her family, and her past. It’s an honest and illuminating read, especially for those who may see their own experiences reflected in hers. —CLR

2. Serena Williams Refused to Bend. She Bent Tennis Instead.

Lex Pryor | The Ringer | September 8th, 2022 | 2,554 words

There’s been no shortage of encomia written since Serena Williams exited the U.S. Open a week ago, but none of them have felt quite so lived-in as Lex Pryor’s remarkable paean. It details her many distinctions, obviously, but more importantly it properly situates her as the watershed player she is — a subverter of the head-down gentility that Black tennis pioneers like Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe embodied, and the mother of an entirely new lineage of champions. “Is there anything more alpha,” Pryor asks, “more Tiger, more Michael, more wonderfully and ridiculously competitive, than Williams, in the midst of yet another Grand Slam victory, reacting to a bad shot by throwing her arms back, arching her spine, and screaming ‘Fuck are you doing’ into the sky?” If you’ve been lucky enough to watch Serena over the years, you already know that she’s a one of one. This piece not only articulates that with insight and brio, but it drives home the miracle of what she accomplished: remaking American tennis like few have done before, and fewer still might do after. —PR

3. The Match

Bhavya Dore | Fifty Two | September 2nd, 2022 | 5,241 words

“Wouter Dijkstra always knew he had two mothers: his Dutch adoptive mother and his Sri Lankan birth mother. In September 2020, he found out he had three.” With a lede like that, you know a story is going to be excellent. Bhavya Dore’s reporting on the long-term consequences of a fraught adoption pipeline between Sri Lanka and Western Europe is tender, eloquent, and nuanced. There are surprises and disappointments, bright glimpses of beauty and quiet moments of profound grief. The subjects of Dore’s story leap off the page, and I found myself wishing for happy endings I knew could never be. Of all the pieces I’ve read recently, this one felt the most alive — it crackles with humanity. —SD

4. The Curious Case of Gina Adams: A “Pretendian” Investigation

Michelle Cyca | Maclean’s | September 6th, 2022 | 7,624 words

How far would you go to secure a job? In the case of Gina Adams, the answer seems too far. Far too far. In this riveting piece, Michelle Cyca explores Adams’ claims of Midewiwin descent from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. She used this claim to further her university career — but has not been able to prove her heritage in the face of allegations these ties are false. Cyca’s narrative races along, exploring other people’s doubts about Adams until, with Adams remaining in her position, Cyca feels compelled to investigate herself. As a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, and having worked at Emily Carr University at the same time as Adams, Cyca has a unique perspective to give to this story, and she tells it exceptionally well. While delving into Adams’ case, Cyca opens the Pandora’s box of university hiring practice: In the rush to add First Nations to faculties, no one was checking backstories, and now, invented Indigenous heritage is emerging at several universities. This story will grip you — and frustrate you — to the last word. —CW

5. The Mushrooms That Ate Luke Perry

Casey Lyons | Orion Magazine | Sep 6th, 2022 | 2,869 words

I confess, it was the headline that drew me in. I wasn’t a Beverly Hills, 90210 fan, never got suckered by Luke Perry’s squint-smirk combo. But I couldn’t resist that monster-movie construction, so I read it — and I’d urge the same of you, regardless of your feelings about Aaron Spelling primetime soaps. This piece starts with Perry’s death, but Casey Lyons uses the actor’s green burial as a springboard to trace the remarkable arc of his life as well, and in doing so to explore what we seek from our corporeal end. “Luke Perry knew about desire, having been buried in a laundry hamper to escape it,” Lyons writes. “He also knew it as the holder of a notion about physical erasure from the planet, that our bodies don’t have to harm the earth when we die. We all know desire. Death is a muse, but desire is a blunter sort of thing.” Regardless of whether the mushrooms feasted the way they were supposed to (spoiler: they didn’t!), you’ll walk away with a fuller sense of the man inside the suit, and maybe even of your own plans for that inescapable day. —PR

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can always visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. Meet the Lobbyist Next Door

Benjamin Wofford | WIRED | July 14th, 2022 | 5,000 words

A business feature that doubles as a horror story, Benjamin Wofford’s chilling piece could be the premise for a Black Mirror episode. Wofford profiles Urban Legend, a tech startup that has built “the Exchange,” an interface connecting advertisers looking to promote political ideologies with influencers ready to peddle for a price. Urban Legend’s CEO, Ory Rinat, who previously worked in the Trump White House, and his colleagues like to talk about trust, authenticity, and empowerment, but as Wofford skillfully shows, there’s no heart to their business model — there’s only a black hole, a moral vacuum. The dread of it all crept up on me as I read, which is a testament to the writing. Now excuse me while I go scream into the abyss. —SD

2. The Great Fiction of AI

Josh Dzieza | The Verge | July 20th, 2022 | 5,091 words

Could artificial intelligence help you write your next novel? Josh Dzieza dives into the world of AI-assisted genre fiction, and how independent authors are experimenting with tools powered by GPT-3 to write stories faster. Dzieza recounts Kindle novelist Jennifer Lepp’s experience with one such tool, Sudowrite, which, at first, generates strange and hilarious output. Eventually, as Lepp learns how to control the software’s quirks, she gets results that are more promising. But they are unsettling, too: When Lepp gives a finished chapter to her husband to read, he isn’t able to distinguish between her voice and the machine’s. Dzieza also talks with authors who view AI as a welcome disruption to the field, such as Joanna Penn, who envisions a future where writers will be left behind if they don’t embrace the technology. This is a fascinating read that explores ethics, creativity, and authorship, and is a complement to the stories in our reading list on the future of machine-written prose. I love the playful article design, too. —CLR

3. The Haves and the Have-Yachts

Evan Osnos | The New Yorker | July 18th, 2022 | 10,000 words

Inflation. Pandemic. Recession. Yet, since 2020, 573 more people have become billionaires — and the tres-comas club has seen its aggregate worth balloon by nearly $4 trillion. What do you do with all that money? Easy. You spend it on reminding people, as one interviewee memorably relates in this piece, that “I am in a different fucking category than you.” In this case, that means multi-hundred-foot, multi-hundred-million-dollar superyachts, the world of which Evan Osnos excavates over (exactly) 10,000 deliciously arch words. These aren’t just phallic manifestations of mind-boggling wealth. With their onboard IMAX theaters and 50-person staffs, they’re manifestations of the one thing their owners want desperately but can’t quite attain on land: absolute sovereignty. But while you and I and the rest of the hoi polloi might be seen as “ineligible visitors” to this ionosphere of luxury, that doesn’t mean that you’re not in for one hell of a read. —PR

4. What Counts as Seeing

Alice Wong and Ed Yong | Orion Magazine | July 12th, 2022 | 3,948 words

Are you as excited as I am to see these names side by side? Here, Wong and Yong engage in a wonderful conversation that celebrates the strange and unpredictable in nature and fosters empathy for all creatures. They discuss Yong’s books, the incredible senses of other organisms, and, in turn, the limits of our understanding for how rich and diverse the natural world really is. (I love the bit where Yong compares his dog going on a walk to sniff and pee on things as the pup’s version of checking his social media for the day.) As you’d expect, their dialogue is delightful and accessible, thanks to Wong’s ability to open people’s eyes to experiences that are not their own and Yong’s knack for explaining scientific and biological concepts in plain language. What a treat to read. —CLR

5. The 50 Greatest Fictional Deaths of All Time

Dan Kois (and Other Contributors) | Slate | July 20th, 2022 | 8,250 words

This list is so damn fun. Starting in 431 B.C. and progressing chronologically, it levels the cultural playing field, quoting passages from Beowulf and Macbeth while also reveling in the transgressive lyrics of “Goodbye Earl.” It reminded me of at least one brilliant cinematic death that I’d somehow forgotten — before using an inhaler, make sure it’s not a gun! — and made me tear up at its description of a groundbreaking storyline in Doonesbury. Like all the best GOAT lists, it also made me consider what I would include: one of the gruesome deaths in The Omen, Mr. Jingles’ demise and resurrection in The Green Mile, Alec’s murder in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (ooooh — or the raising of the black flag at the end!?). “We’ve made this list during a pandemic, as real-life death has stalked us all, more tangible than ever,” Dan Kois writes. “One of the many things art can do is to help us navigate the pitfalls of life, and there’s no deeper pitfall than the final one.” —SD

Many people knew this before, but the last three years have hammered home the fact that we cannot protect things that we don’t empathize with.

Animals aren’t interesting just when they are better than us. Things that are simpler than us are actually deeply fascinating too.

He’ll smell plants, places where other dogs have peed. I think of going for a walk with Typo as him checking his social media. It’s very much like when I’m scrolling through Instagram or Twitter and seeing what my friends are up to. He does this on a walk. He checks out what all the neighborhood dogs are like, what they’re doing, where they’ve been. It’s a deeply social activity for him.

At Orion Magazine, as part of its series “on the effects of the petrochemical industry on life, economics, and democracy,” David Farrier reflects on gloves and their medical history, as well as the strange beauty and environmental cost of cast-off plastic gloves — now oft-sighted street detritus that have become a requirement for many to survive amid the pandemic.

In late March, around the same time I first noticed the gloves outside my house, photographer Dan Giannopoulos was pondering how to document life under lockdown. After the order to isolate was issued, he didn’t leave home for several days, and when he finally stepped out his front door he was immediately confronted, like I was, by a lone discarded glove. He noticed more and more as he approached his local shop, and over the next four days—walking for an hour each day within the same one-mile radius of where he lived, in Nottingham—he documented 363 of them.

The human finger is extraordinarily sensitive. One study found that participants could detect a difference of thirteen nanometers (roughly the width of a human hair) between the textures of two surfaces. But unlike wood and stone, which wear their histories on their surfaces, plastic is strangely mute to the touch. There is a subtlety to even the most garish plastic, a kind of discretion, because all plastics decline to speak of their origins. The illusion that even the most ordinary plastic object is somehow out of time, perpetually isolated in its moment of use, is fundamental to its promise to be disposable. History sloughs off their wipe-clean surfaces. The cut-price synthetics that initially flooded postwar American society betrayed this promise when they quickly became discolored and tacky, often leaving behind an oily residue. The more robust plastics that followed gave away nothing of where they came from, and so could easily be taken for granted and cast away. Roland Barthes understood this, when he celebrated plastic’s alchemical promise. “Plastic is wholly swallowed up in the fact of being used,” he wrote in Mythologies. It arrives in the hand as if from a void, to which it returns when we let it go.

Plastic breaks its promise to seal us off from the messiness of life from the very start, dipping our hands in the sumps of oil wells and leaving a trail of chemical fingerprints, but so are its prints all over us.

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In my adolescence, summer was a time of self-improvement. I planned my reinvention meticulously. Come the fresh school year, I’d breeze through the doors of my high school with perfect hair, new clothes, and a laser focus. Of course, I had a limited budget, hair that refused to straighten completely, and a tendency to get discouraged or distracted by the slightest obstacle. To be honest, the fun wasn’t in the result. It was the daydreaming, the dog-earing pages of Seventeen and the endless bookmarking of WikiHow articles in Internet Explorer that made everything seem possible.

This summer is my twenty-seventh. I’m looking forward to self-reflection, but I won’t be switching shampoos or going on a shopping spree. Instead, I’m going to live alone for the first time.

My partner accepted an exciting job at his childhood summer camp in another state. I’m thrilled for him. I’m proud of him for doing something that makes him happy. I’m also scared of being alone. I can be mean, jealous, petty, and insecure. I’ve lashed out at him: “Don’t you love me? Why do you want to leave me?”  I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote from The Crack-Up: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Unfortunately, I lack in the “ability to function” category. Every snide comment I mutter chips away at the foundation of trust and kindness we’ve worked so hard to build over the past four years. That’s not functioning; that’s sabotage.

My partner reassures me: I am not someone someone wants to leave. I tell myself: I’m someone worth returning to. I want to return to myself. So I’m taking the time to plan things I’ll do when I feel lonely. I haven’t let go of my self-improvement fetish completely; I’m planning to read Rising Strong, Journal of a Solitude, and Super You.

I’m going to take a solo trip or two, visit friends, and explore their hometowns. I’ll go to work. I’ll write. I’ll take long walks in the park and pet some dogs. I’ll do laundry and clean my co-habitant’s litter box. Along the way, I hope to return to the knowledge that I can take care of myself, that I deserve to feel well.

This week’s list is called “Adventures in Solitude.” I’m no hermit, but I do see this summer as something of a solo mission. I’m working on: “How to be surrounded. How to be the only,” like writer Delaney Nolan describes in her essay “On Being Unalone.” I feel my teenage optimism rising again—maybe this summer will be different. Maybe I’ll emerge, changed forever.

1. “Failing to Write a Novel in the Most Distraction-Free Place on Earth.” (Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, April 2017)

If I could choose my ideal writing locale, it would be close to a bookshop and a coffee shop, or some combination of the two. I would not, under any circumstance, relegate myself to, say, the Falkland Islands. But that’s exactly what aspiring novelist Nell Stevens did, choosing to spend a month-long writing residency on uninhabited Bleaker Island. The result is Bleaker House—part memoir, part fragmented novel. At the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead analyzes and ultimately praises the book’s unusual structure. Stevens, she writes, is “deftly comic about her predicament, while also being deeply earnest about her aspirations.” I may not see any penguins or ration my oatmeal like Stevens, but I’m going to try to integrate her perspective into my own experience with solitude: comic and earnest, creative and determined.

2. “May Sarton, The Art of Poetry No. 32.” (Karen Saum, The Paris Review, Fall 1983)

May Sarton, author of Journal of a Solitude, discusses her vast body of work, coming out as a lesbian when that was “not done,” meeting Virginia Woolf, and her experiences with the Muse.

3. “Since Living Alone.” (Durga Chew-Bose, The Hairpin, January 2015)

I broke my no-new-books rule to buy Too Much and Not The Mood, Durga Chew-Bose’s new essay collection. I think she’s one of the most interesting writers working today, and I always feel smarter for having read her. I was delighted to discover she wrote about her experience living alone back in 2015 and enjoyed this observation in particular:

“But living alone is the reverse of mastery. It’s scuttling around in surrender while hoping you don’t stub your toe because living alone is also a series of indignities like bouncing around on one foot, writhing in pain. Living alone is an elaborately clumsy wisening up.”

4. “She Wants to Be Alone.” (Rhian Sasseen, Aeon, February 2015)

Rhian Sasseen writes about female ascetics, Buddhist nuns, the male gaze, and our Thoreau-ly patriarchal double standards regarding who deserves solitude.

5. “On Being Unalone.” (Delaney Nolan, Vela, October 2013)

As this gorgeous essay progresses, Delaney Nolan’s attitude towards solitude ebbs and flows.  Some days, she revels in the sparse environment surrounding her rural Icelandic cabin (her descriptions of the ponies are hilarious); during the evenings, she craves “the shiny gold coin of their attention,” the voices of the people she phones from isolation.

“The core message is: In the long run, the best thing for people and the best thing for wildlife will be the same,” he added. “We’re called to love our fellow man, and we’re called to be good stewards. So find a way to work together—either legislatively, through compensation, through whatever kind of programs—so that you want to have panthers on your property.”

–In Florida for Orion magazine, Dean Kuipers examines efforts to manage the coexistence between homeowners and endangered panthers, without killing them.

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Beaked whales are one of the last large mammals about which little is known. Their history is rife with erroneous or fanciful assumption. When, for instance, the French biologist Georges Cuvier described in 1823 the species that now bears his name, he thought it was already extinct. Five decades would pass before scientists confirmed that the Cuvier’s beaked whale still existed, and was in fact quite common.

The rest of the beaked whale episteme can be summarized fairly quickly. They are the most diverse family of whales; to date, 21 species have been identified (or, after some haggling over genetics, it might be 22). They range from 12 to over 40 feet long as adults, although most species are between 15 to 25 feet. They belong to the suborder Odontoceti — the toothed whales — but usually only the males have visible teeth, and then just a pair. These erupt out of the lower jaw and can be elaborately structured. In one species, the strap-toothed beaked whale, the two teeth curve over its upper jaw, preventing the whale from fully opening its mouth. Scientists think it might use its snout like a vacuum hose to inhale its food.

On May 12, 1996, twelve Cuvier’s beaked whales were stranded along twenty-five miles of the Grecian coastline. Why they were stranded was a mystery, but while searching for the cause, Alexandros Frantzis, a biologist at the University of Athens, saw a notice that a NATO warship was performing a sonar exercise in the Kyparissiakos Gulf. The sonar could produce sounds in excess of an unimaginable 230 decibels. (A jet taking off reaches 130 decibels.) For Frantzis, the coincidence of sonar and dead whales was no coincidence at all. The report he would publish two years later was the first to suggest a link between naval sonar and beaked whales stranding. The event would repeat itself: in Greece in 1997, in the Bahamas and Madeira Islands in 2000, and in the Canary Islands in 2002 and 2004. The most recent stranding potentially attributed to naval sonar happened last year, when five Cuvier’s beaked whales died on the coast of Crete following a joint naval exercise between Greece, Israel, and the U.S.

Biologists suspect whales have been affected since the 1960s if not before, when, in secret, the U.S. Navy started testing its powerful “mid-frequency active” (MFA) and “low-frequency active” (LFA) sonars. Sonar has always been a means of revelation, but whereas the old passive sonars merely listened, active sonar demanded, blasting sound into the undersea environment to roust what was there. For beaked whales, the problem likely became more pronounced at the end of the Cold War, when the U.S. Navy’s overarching mission changed from containing the Soviet fleet to becoming, as they say now, a global force for good. Warships ranged over vastly larger territories to find whatever might lurk in the ocean’s many nooks and crannies — the same nooks and crannies beaked whales preferred. As the most widespread species, the Cuvier’s beaked whale was by far the most affected.

* * *

So it was that the Truth set out. On the back deck, a biologist named Jay Barlow unspooled a giant acoustics cable in the boat’s wake, where it would listen for the sounds that might mean whale. Disappearing into the distance to spearhead the  search were Ari Friedlaender and John Calambokidis in John’s Zodiac, the Ziphid. (The Cuvier’s beaked whale’s scientific name is Ziphius cavirostris.) On the Truth, other observers took up station on the flying bridge. They would spend hours scanning the water with giant binoculars called Big Eyes. My contribution was to retreat to my bunk. Once the Truth cleared the channel the waves had picked up. As much as I wanted to sit on the flying bridge, it was gastrically unfeasible.

* * *