Freed from the demands of realism

Some highlights of a New School panel discussion on generative AI today. We are definitely of the "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" school. 

I sat next to one of the few other faculty there (others may have been watching the livestream). A historian of 19th century France who long ago moved into administration, she said she knew nothing about ChatGPT but that the hysteria about it reminded her of an article she wrote long ago about anxieties around how railroads would destroy distance, local identity, civilization itself (which they didn't.... did they?).

The director of IT started us off with a lightning history of AI and some bold thoughts about the future unfolding before our eyes, building from "Imagine AI not as our creation but as our co-creator" to "Imagine a future where the Turing Test is not for AI but for us."

An old professor of Design & Technology said the panic about AI reminded him of resistance to bringing personal computers on campus in the late 1980s, something ultimately embraced not because one side won but because students demanded it. Everyone wound up benefiting! As for AI, he told us he uses it all the time to get new ideas; it "shakes up his brain" in a way nothing else can.

A freshly graduated industrial designer described how AI had found its way into everything students he knew did in the last year, but he had noticed it was mostly for the things people weren't "passionate" about - like writing emails (especially onerous for those for whom English isn't their first language), artist's statements, etc. Using AI for these "clerical" things, he felt like there were now ten of him: how cool to have a team!

A faculty member from the public policy school recounted asking students if they used ChatGPT and one saying she'd used it to write the paper for another class. Did she hand it in? Yes. How did she feel? A little strange... but she was really under a of of stress and didn't have time to write it herself and without the paper she would have failed the class. The faculty member "left it there" in his class, and with us. But, he added, our students really are under a lot of stress. 

A student in Design & Technology described being inspired by a Florida museum's interactive Salvador Dali replica, with whom patrons could have AI-enabled conversations. She and a classmate decided they wanted to be "immortal like Dali," she said, and brought together different AI programs recording and manipulating their facial expressions, movements, "voice cloning" and the like. In the end it "fell apart" (somehow her avatar wound up with an English accent!) but she found it amazing what they were able do in just a day and a half (!!!), with just a few 10-minute youtube videos explaining how to use these programs, and all for $0 - cheapest Parsons project ever!

The somewhat heavy-handed moderator, the director of our virtual reality lab, emphasized how ChatGPT has radically democratized what had been a very exclusive world. She deflected leery questions from the audience regarding ethics and privacy and expertise, argueing that being a creator is the best way to understand the ethics of AI, learning through doing how you can manipulate the model and how it manipulates you. 

The discussion brought out a few problems. There's a vast amount of data more and more people now have access to, but that data set is still biased, and likely to remain so. (Nobody mentioned how much of that data is not just incomplete but false, or designed to mislead.) AI still sometimes makes things up ("hallucinates"), but we were assured it's getting better rapidly. Copyright issues were raised but not plagiarism, or the way the student who outsourced her paper to ChatGPT shortchanged not just the school but herself.

Nobody on the panel thought that use of AI could be or should be constrained: that train has left the station. The point instead was how to live into its possibilities, how not to be left behind. The public policy professor argued that we should to require all our students to learn to use AI, and make this a selling point of a New School degree - and we need to do so in a matter of months, not years! The other professor agreed but noted there was no way faculty could stay ahead of students here; it was an opportunity for co-learning.

The student who'd worked on an immortal avatar told us her own misgivings had been assuaged by a friend who told her that the invention of photography, experienced as an existential threat by artists, had instead led to an artistic renaissance, freeing artists from the "demands of realism." She felt the ubiquity of AI released her from the "pressure to be perfect," and allowed her to focus on work that is "rich in feeling" and storytelling. In the face of the crisis of loneliness, we need work with "emotional intelligence." (Like this?)

The recent graduate noted that as a New School student he had learned a skepticism which made him wonder whether this all doesn't move too fast - last he heard, "fast fashion" and "fast furniture" were a bad thing! But he also told how a fan had created a deepfake song by the Canadian singer Drake which was the best Drake song in years. Drake had quashed it, but another singer, Grimes, had a better response, allowing fans to use her voice in generating songs and offering them 50% of the profits. Imagine when Grimes sings one of those fan-generated songs in a concert, he said; it'll be insane.

This was the first of what will be many events exploring how we can and should integrate AI into our work as a university. (Some in the future might have better representation of those concerned not just with making but with research and analysis.) It convinced me I should face it head-on in my own classes, asking not whether but how it can be used in our learning and thinking, and building on the ways students have already integrated it, knowingly and unknowingly, into their ways of being. Actual experience with manipulating and being manipulated will make for more meaningful discussion.

Speaking of ways of being... The AI-enthusiast veteran of the PC wars, citing some old sci-fi series where robots have long surpassed human capacities but "keep us around for some reason," said he always asks himself what makes him different from the machines he uses, eliciting appreciative nods from the audience. But what sticks with me is the table-turned Turing Test question. The better AI gets at replicating what we think important and valuable (like "emotional intelligence"), the less competent we may feel ourselves to be, not just at what machines do well but even at being human.

Botanic bliss

Another picture from the BBG, whose gardeners are such artists!

Trees as community hosts

Went back to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden today, after much too long a hiatus. (The last time may have been Aug 20, 2019!) Lovely to see what they've done, plotting a meandering brook across its center, with serpentining paths disclosing verdant spaces intimate and grand. My reason for going was "Power of Trees," a series they've just kicked off, which encompasses special signage, events, and six site-specific artworks designed by members of the AnkhLave Arts Alliance to the theme "Branching Out: Trees as Community Hosts." Three of these particularly captivated me.

The one above, Jasmine Murrell's "Fingertips that Touch the Stars," in a little island between meanders, pays tribute to the all the hands that sculpted the land, from stars to ancestors. (The mirrors give it a depth and lightness a photo can't capture.) She observes: The most important thing to learn from trees is that nothing is done alone.

Seema Lisa Pandya's "Seed of Potential" invites you to enter the casing from which a seed has broken forth. As you approach you find it inscribed with values of care: mindfulness, emergence, creativity, respect, menstrual reverence, community, laughter, love, peace, vibrancy, cosmic awe, TEK (traditional ecological knowledge), equity, kindness, storytelling, togetherness. The seed has more...

Natsuki Takauji explains her "The Heart of the Tree": personification of nature is fundamental in Japanese mythology and Shintoism; I grew up interpreting trees as spirits, gods, shelter, or even myself, a human. The piece was watched over by a bird, which hopped around to keep an eye on me as I circled it.

I'd like to bring the fall "Religion of Trees" class here. These works about the cultural or spiritual significance of trees (another celebrates the Peruvian tradition of yunza, where a tree is festooned with gifts then festively cut down) are in a fascinating dialogue with the majestic and reverently tended trees surrounding us. 

Religious Anthropocene

I've been trying to write a short article about religion and the Anthropocene for a magazine of environmental science and policy. It's a fun assignment but proving to be difficult. The subject is of course one I've thought and taught about for years, but always in a religious studies or religious studies-adjacent context, and in a seminar liberal arts college context to boot, where everything's open-ended. Framing its questions for this different audience is proving clarifying. I'm also realizing I've moved a bit on the subject.

What I want to emphasize is that the concept of the "Anthropocene" is a charged one, and to be approached with care. It's qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different from the language of environmental crisis and climate change. It asserts an irrevocable break from the stability of the Holocene, the result of things (some) human beings have done and are doing. Even if we get our act together, we will be living with the consequences of human events for as long as we survive. We're part of the fate of the rest of life on this planet, too, even if we don't precipitate the Sixth Extinction. 

I want to suggest that this makes the Anthropocene a religiously resonant category. 

You can think of Anthropocene as religious in the somewhat flip sense that, as some advocates of a "good Anthropocene" would have it, we are the "god species" now, responsible for cleaning up our mess and taking care of the planet. Stewart Brand famously said that "we are as gods and might as well get good at it." Many critical appraisals of the concept of the Anthropocene warn against this apotheosis. The understanding of God assumed here - and of human beings as created in his image - was decisive in creating the practices which led us to this impasse in the first place, they argue, and the idea of humanity taking charge of creation offers it new life just as we've learned how harmful it has been.

While some (mostly white male scientists) seem confident that they can play god here and are indeed called to do so, the growing consciousness that our species has hastened the end of the Holocene has more complicated religious resonances. The kind of "planetary agent" the Anthropocene anoints us isn't like any human agency we know. This haplessness is deepened by our evident incapacity for concerted response. Arguably the Anthropocene then takes or returns us to a world in which human actions are thought to have cosmic significance - but not one we understand or control. 

This predicament can seem more akin to ancient tragedy than the order and comfort offered by most religions. Indeed, the old religions' promise of restoration, redemption or balance from some rule or ruler beyond us starts to seem an artifact of the stabler, now irrevocably lost world of the Holocene. Religious hope, couched in terms that rang true in the Holocene, now seems a delusion and a dangerous distraction. It's not surprising that theologians are largely avoiding the language of the Anthropocene. Few theists recognize the paradigm shift as candidly as Timothy Beal in When Time Is Short. 

But while Holocene certainties and their divinities wobble, the scope and strain of the Anthropocene challenge secular pieties too.

Amitav Ghosh has described the Anthropocene world as newly "uncanny," where unfathomable causality jumbles time and space and scale, and where the fingerprints of estranged human agency are detected or suspected everywhere. Ghosh thinks this might reconnect us to ancient practices of myth, a cosmos with many agents. 

I'm taken by Bronislaw Szerszynski's kindred suggestion that the experience of living in the Anthropocene is already generating new religious ideas, what he calls "Anthropocene gods" - superhuman powers impinging on human destiny in almost person-like ways. The earth, perhaps conceived of as a more or less conscious Gaia, is one. The newly ecological God of Pope Francis' Laudato Sí, with his dark double in apocalyptic movements yearning for the end of the world, is another. Others aren't theorized as gods until you think about it: the sun, Capital, the Cosmos. Beyond these "high gods," conjured or manifested by human beings who feel entitled to speak for humanity as a whole, Szerszynski describes new demons and spirits showing up in the chaotic margins and shadows of global change.

Szerszynski couches his argument in an only partly fanciful phenomenology of geospiritual flows, but it seems clear there are many powerful subterranean energies coursing beneath the surface of the idea of the Anthropocene. We shouldn't assume we are immune to their pull. While the realities recorded in the geological category of the Anthropocene are incontestable, as these realities sink in we can yet challenge those unthinking understandings of human agency which exacerbated the crisis in the first place. 

Do we need religion for this? Ghosh thinks already transnational religious organizations and religious ideas, which confront us with limitation, may be our best hope.

Witness

It's the last Sunday in June, the day of New York City's Pride Parade. When in the city I've been involved in one capacity or other since 2000, when I was part of a Dignity protest at St. Patrick's Cathedral; it's fun and a little transgressive to participate in the religious part of the parade! Since 2018 I've enjoyed queer Christian witness of another kind at Church of the Ascension's "water station" at 10th Street and Fifth Avenue, offering trays of water to people marching by as well as garbage bags for them to dispose of the empty plastic cups. Between groups, I pondered the folks gathered to watch the parade, and considered how much has changed since 2000 - and how precarious some of its victories feel today. What a blessing to be reminded how many of us there are, from every station of life, and how various.

Background trees

I thought the exhibition "Van Gogh's Cypresses" at the Met would be one of the highlights of a treeful summer but I'm underwhelmed. Cypresses are key to the landscape of Provence, and capturing their strange darkness in a region of luminous colors seems to have been one of Van Gogh's aspirations in Arles. But the 40 works on view, few as compelling as the New York City stars brought together in the poster, tell you little about what cypresses meant to Van Gogh, or should mean to us. They're associated in western art with death (as in Arnold Böcklin's "Toteninsel" paintings, one of which hangs in the Met) - was Van Gogh working with or against that? We never find out. He didn't know, as we did, that the two years in which he painted cypresses (among other subjects) would end in his death, or did he? 

It's not that I didn't find works to like, such as "Landscape from Saint-Rémy" (June 1889), from the section of the exhibition where cypresses are not the main concern. (This was included also because its landscape is a precursor to the painting at the center of this show.)

Arguably the cypress wasn't a particular object of the luminous "Tree in the Garden of the Asylum" (October 1889) either, where leaves of all colors are dancing together in a bath of light and wind. Cypresses were around, but so were olives and mulberries. I wasn't convinced they were of special interest. 

Except in one place, a small canvas he painted while confined to his room in April 1890, "Reminiscence of Brabant." There are many 

more colors here than initially meet the eye, but this landscape shows a different, duller world. Except for the cypresses which have snuck in at the left! 

What are they doing there? Now I'm interested. Or could have been... Reviews I've read of the show are similarly unpersuaded by its premise, if grateful for the chance to spend time with a concentration of works by a great artist. For my part I wonder that the show didn't bother to tell us anything about cypresses - what they look like, how they've otherwise been represented, how they are like and unlike other trees in Van Gogh's oeuvre and imagination.

Abandon hope - or don't

Our congregation usually has two "summer reads" each year. I'm never there for the discussions, and won't be this year either, but I decided it wouldn't hurt to have a look at this July's read, Brian McLaren's Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned. The book assembles many reasons why people might want to distance themselves from Christianity (all the folks he mentions are burned-out pastors, mostly Evangelical), then offers some reasons one might choose nevertheless to stay. 

The book's final section, coming after the insistence that he respects whatever choice people make, proposes ways of living more humanly either way, beyond the sins of the church. The reasons for leaving were familiar to me, surrounded as I am by religious nones: Anti-Semitism, Christian vs. Christian violence, Crusader colonialism, institutionalism, money, white patriarchy, toxic theology, lack of transformation, constricted intellectualism, demographics.

Those for staying were newer. Here are the names of the chapters:

11 Because Leaving Hurts Allies (and Hurts Their Opponents)

12 Because Leaving Defiantly or Staying Compliantly Are Not My Only Options

13 Because ... Where Else Would I Go?

14 Because It Would Be a Shame to Leave a Religion in Its Infancy

15 Because of Our Legendary Founder

16 Because Innocence Is an Addiction, and Solidarity Is the Cure

17 Because I'm Human

18 Because Chistianity Is Changing (for the Worse and for the Better)

19 To Free God

20 Because of Fermi's Paradox and the Great Filter

I confess I skimmed rather than read these, most of which seem like variations on the same few themes. But a few surprised and intrigued me. 16 built on McLaren's experiences of the curdling sanctimony of the pro-life movement to diagnose a quest for innocence which is really about finding and demonizing others, fancying yourself their innocent victim while relishing the thought that they'll roast in hell. There's nothing innocent about this desire, he says, but this "cult of innocence" is among the main reasons many people become and stay Christian. Hateful hypocrites! McLaren confesses

one of the prime reasons I sometimes want to leave Christianity is to achieve innocence. 

By distancing myself from a discredited religion, I can feel innocent of its wrongs, weaknesses, and failures. 

Paradoxically, this confession gives me one of the most compelling reasons yet for staying Christian: Staying Christian is a way of leaving the cult of innocence. (127)

Instead of disavowing the hateful "Christians" who make more and more young people head for the door, what if one recognized one's kinship with them? Not to justify their limitations but to recognize one's own. And perhaps, in so doing, to help them see - and see beyond - their fear and hatred? The church, a priest friend of mine often said (quoting someone I don't recall), is the cross on which Christ is daily crucified. And yet is there anywhere better than the church for confessing this? McLaren tells, a little glibly, about people he knows who have left the church, only to find the same human weakness wherever else they went. And suggests that his friends in other religions would rather he stayed Christian, hot letting the haters take over, as they do the same in theirs. Elsewhere in the book he reminds us that, while its numbers are falling, white nationalist Christianity has incredible wealth, wealth which will only grow as they sell off unneeded real estate, and which they can use to influence politics (indeed, already do).

Another reason for staying caught me up short. It's chapter 14, which places Christian history in the longer history of our species: the last 2000 of 200,000 years. Wouldn't it be a shame if human history ended, and one saw Christianity as precipitating the end? How much better to imagine another 200,000 years, with Christianity shaping the glorious the second half! Of course that would mean leaving most of what we know behind, and recognizing that "the future is our deepest and truest reality" (words borrowed from Sister Ilia Delio). 

A forward- rather than backward-looking Christianity sounds good to me - and not looking forward to the End Times! But 200,000 more years of human history just seems like pie in the sky. What faith or hope or ignorance it takes to think our days aren't very much more numbered. McLaren's a decade older than me. Didn't he also grow up with the near certainty that we were living the last years of human history before a nuclear holocaust? And hasn't he heard about the Anthropocene? On the other hand, perhaps my time frame is too short, my hopes too dim. Thinking about Christianity (or any other tradition) as something to be saved from its manifold faults so it might serve a perhaps unimaginably different future is intriguing.

Urban orchard

I just submitted my exam for the Citizen Pruner's class. It seems designed to facilitate passing, but I still have my fingers crossed just to be sure. In one exercise, we were asked to choose five of ten places marked in a zelkova for pruning, and I wanted to choose six. Assuming I pass and get my Citizen Pruner's ID, I'll try to join expeditions with more seasoned folks.

But, you may be wondering, how would becoming a Citizen Pruner - however beneficial for my local street trees - contribute to my "Religion of Trees" project? I'll have more to say once I actually hit the streets, but it might be useful to gather some thoughts now.

One of the books which really opened my eyes to trees, Sproutlands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees, was written by a poet-pruner, William Bryant Logan, but most of the other things I've read approach trees in quite different ways. Some are by botanists and ecologists, describing the inner workings and outer networks of the arboreal, in individual trees and forests. Others are more philosophical and cultural, articulating the ways trees have contributed to human civilization, and how humans have made sense of this. The most compelling emphasize that trees are people with whom human beings have been and again should be in relation. But all of these approaches remain (at least from reading about them) distant, spectatorial. We respect trees by keeping our distance from them. In the first iteration of the "Religion of Trees" class we occasionally touched trees but mostly admired from a distance, drawing rather than, say, tasting. Let alone pruning!

The pruner has an entirely different relationship to the tree, and reveals ways in which trees can benefit from our active interventions. Pruned trees, like the tended clusters of sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer describes, do better because of knowing human intervention. Logan suggests that a coppiced tree can live forever. Without this lived experience, discussion of relations with trees too easily becomes transactional and abstract - they breathe out the oxygen we need, and we breathe out the CO2 they need. As any gardener or farmer can tell you, our involvement is much more involved. 

Street trees offer a further level of interest here. They are not fruit trees (or sources of wood for building or burning) but their lives are every bit as human-shaped as those of trees in an orchard. With a few grandfathered exceptions, every tree you see in a city was planted. As I've learned in the Citizen Pruner course, there are all sorts of guidelines and criteria for which kinds of trees to plant and where and for the kind of care they need to thrive. Many, like New York City's eponymous honeylocusts, are grafted varieties. (Perhaps thriving is too much to ask, when you consider the stew of exhaust fumes, dog pee and winter salt street trees have to contend with from tiny concrete-encircled beds distant from their kin.) Even the approved trees need smaller and larger prunings, for their sake and for the sake of the humans who walk, drive and park by them at all hours. 

I'm more than a little embarrassed that, for all my oohing and aahing at city trees, I hadn't really taken much of this in. I knew these trees were planted (I knew I knew a few years ago when, on returning to Princeton for a visit, I was amused to find myself wondering at a roadside forest: "who planted all these trees?"). But I was happier, as I've found many of my students are, to forget this. Street trees are trees, wild nature, the non-, the other-than-, the bigger-than-human. Their beauty, their song, their comfort, even their distress are parts of a world beyond the city with its inorganic angles and all-too-human din. They were here before we arrived and will be here when we're gone. Even if initially surprising it's quickly intuitive to think of street trees as parts of an "urban forest" - and not because, as we've only recently realized, every known forest shows the effects of human husbandry. 

City people like me don't know what it is to live in intimate exchange with plants, the way farmers and foresters do. And so street trees connote to us not connection but distance, not interdependence but self-sufficiency, not fellow people but whispers of a world without - human - people. Ecological historians have noted how recent (and American!) the idea of "wilderness" is, how it arises from the learned inability to think of the human as part of nature, fuelled by the "omnicidal" legacies of colonialism and capitalism. Perhaps I read too much in here. Don't many city folk have special relationships with specific trees? Isn't that individuality part of the gift of street trees, an individuality not compromised by the sustaining reality of human planters and pruners? I'll need to think more about this, and think while pruning! 

But still: what about religion? Since first reading Logan I've been wondering how much the ideas I'm finding in books about religion and trees are shaped by the experience of modern urbanization. (Before the industrial revolution, trees were what cooked your food and kept you warm in winter - and not the fossilized trees from millions of years ago.) I'd already wondered how city folks' distance from orchards had made us forget about grafting - and how this leads us to misread all those tree diagrams of the past as showing natural lineage rather than manmade order. If premoderns' experience of trees was of our collaborators in culture rather than outsiders to (or "resources" for) it, how might that have shaped their thinking about, say, "world trees" and the "tree of life"? 

My hope is that pruning consciousness will help me better understand what trees meant to people who had more intimate and dynamic relationships with them, that this will help me better interpret the history of religious representations of trees - and to offer these interpretations as correctives to understandings of trees (and religion!) which make interdependence and intervention hard to grasp, let alone embrace. I'm not sure how much of this I want to be new, rather than recovered. But I do think that thinking about religion with pruner's tools in hand might be fruitfully different. 

See the wind, can you taste it too?

Window

Ashen air makes for impressive special effects... 

Tree care

Our Citizen Pruners class got some hands-on experience today, taking down damaged and dead branches from a Japanese zelkova on Lex, a swamp white oak and a golden raintree on East 26th Street. 

It was valuable to put into practice things we'd only seen in a powerpoint slide deck - why you make three cuts when taking down a larger branch, how different the wood of different trees is, how to 

ensure the cut branch falls in a safe place, good and bad kinds of tree beds, consequences of more and less effective past prunings, the endless movements of cars and trucks - but it was also fun. As promised, passers-by stopped to enquire and admire, and some volunteered information about the travails of their own street trees.

One of my fellow students lives near me and has the gear. Once we pass our test, we're going out on our own!

Needle point

Meet the Pinus Strobus 'Contorta', an eastern white pine cultivar whose needles are always dancing.

Nearby, the floating world of a Kornus cousa 'Wolf eye' dogwood

Citizen arborists

Have I mentioned that I scored a spot in the coveted Trees New York Citizen Pruners class? (All slots in this season's four concurrent sessions were snapped up within fifteen minutes.) The third of three zoom sessions is tonight, to be capped with an in-person pruning experience on Thursday, and I can feel my relationship with street trees changing. 

For one, I've finally had to learn some tree identification. Our final exam will ask us to identify five from the city's sixteen most common street trees. It really does make a difference to know and recognize them! Then add things we've learned about how street trees are selected and cared for (nothing's left to chance) and appreciate the diversity of trees and tree combinations on each street.

So I've been walking the streets with interactive NY Tree Map (which I've known about for years) on my phone and I'm getting better and better - though I still waver between pinnately compound leaves of thornless honeylocust (a grafted cultivar) and Japanese pagoda tree, the finely toothed and uneven leaves of elm and linden. 

The map offers details about 875,480 street trees and has recently been supplemented with details of trees in many parks. Each tree is recorded with species, girth, location and forester's visits and tree-care activities. (The site also gives speciously precise values for each tree's "Ecological benefits": stormwater intercepted, energy conserved, air pollutants removed. The willow oak outside school, for instance, apparently saves $321.42 each year. A little silly, but I guess I appreciate the idea.)

The tree map is the impressive work of citizen volunteers but could use some work. After many a delighted discovery, including happening on newly planted trees not yet registered, I was caught short by glitches on streets I walk every day. (The south side of West 12th between Seventh and Sixth, for instance, ends with two littleleaf lindens and two ginkgos, but the map has flipped them.)

But for now it's a pleasure to be part of a community of people who think and care explicitly about street trees - some of the hardiest and hardest-working of trees, living in sometimes appallingly inhospitable circumstances - and who can feel a comfortingly natural counterpoint to city life precisely because they are so thoughtfully worked by collaborating human hands.

I will arise and go now

Enchanted at Innisfree Garden, a true idyll

This modernist-romantic-Chinese-Japanese garden is truly alive!

Release

Stayed indoors yesterday as the harzardous levels of AQI slowly subsided. 

By this morning, it was safe to go out, savoring the crisp air and the shapely clouds in the blue sky. 

But of course the fires in Canada haven't gone out, and it's still early in the fire season...

Perfect storm

Oh, my. Yesterday was really really bad! The article has a cool time-lapse map. Still, it was brief, and it seems to be blowing over.

Smoke gets in your eyes

Smoke from distant fires has found us again, this time from Quebec.

Somewhere in NYC we apparently breached dangerous AQI 400 today, this in a city whose record before yesterday's 174 was 167 (in 2002).

AQI maps are colorful; from within it justs looks yellowish brown.

Top dramatic image from the iPhone's Weather app at 5pm (my no longer go-to AccuWeather was unerreporting AQIs by a factor of two!); bottom from AirNow.gov at 8pm. Our nearest sensor was unaccountably disabled all afternoon. NY's not used to this!

Sooty

The sky a browning yellow, New York smelled like burning today as smoke from brush fires in Canada blew in. (Image)

Coast to coast

Home on a swanky new plane with amenities like a twirlable globe.

Showy

Beach wedding

The other reason I was in San Diego: congrats, Derek + Markie!

Sand gradients

Familiar sands getting into unfamiliar patterns on Coronado Beach.