Launched This Week: June 5th-9th

A roundup of stories from our week together at Catapult.

We began our week with this hard, beautiful essay by Kate Schapira on climate change, political upheaval, and the choice not to have children:

Climate change is a future thought, the way human people talk about it, the way human scientists write about it. Recently, though, scientists have become more and more willing to use the past tense: The river moved. Climate change moved the river. Climate change cradled the ticks, woke the pollinators out of step with the flowers, froze off the fruit trees, held back the rain.

Children too are a future thought, the body’s vote of confidence. Of those people who become parents, some of them fight tyranny in many forms and nourish all the people around them—not just their own child—with a fierceness far beyond anything I’ve done so far or may ever do. They live in the presents, the presences, of those babies as they try to bring life into a livable condition.

Justin Engles with a powerful essay on teaching in the age of Trump and the balance between empowering and protecting his students, especially those most vulnerable. 

In Which the Magpie Takes to the Field

Tabitha Blankenbiller on loss and The Leftovers:

It is not death that eats us alive. It is the living ghosts, the questions that life isn’t tidy enough to answer. The best friend who stops speaking to us. The love who leaves. These staircases-to-nowhere serve loss while leaving the technical, remote possibility of reconciliation. The undefined, complicated, unresolved trauma makes us messy—how do we tell our story without an ending?

There are so few maps to guide us, the strange grievers, as we try to veil our pathetic desire for one last chance, a final word, a miracle. We fortress our weakness behind whatever bricks and boulders we can scavenge, cobbling a façade that crumbles at the simplest suggestion of what if things could be different? The Leftovers becomes a rare touchstone for indefinite mourning, as it understands that the only force more devastating to the heart than death and loss is the specter of hope. Faith eats us from inside.

A History of Godzilla

“Whenever I need a good laugh I look at different frog sex positions.”

STAFF PICKS

Our June TinyLetter of the Month author, Laura Goode, shared an excerpt from one of her recent issues: Rooting for Your Rebirth

Why religious people and communities must recognize and support those with depression and anxiety, instead of pretending that faith itself is the solution.

“Age 13: I watch the opening of Garden State and hear the only prayer I know and truly believe that Zach Braff gets me”: I really loved this comic by Soumya Dhulekar about her Hindu American childhood.