The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Read Online Free PDF

Lisa speculates.) “The females have straighter teeth and they don’t generate the big pink warted neck. Those with the biggest teeth can lie in the middle of the group, in the warmest, nicest spot, protected from predators. Tusks start to grow at age two, and the animals live up to forty years. Killer whales and polar bears prey on walrus but pursue only the females on Svalbard. Diet is sometimes fish, sometimes swimming birds and other seals, but mostly mussels—fifty to sixty kilos of mussels, or 4,000–6,000 per day ,” she explains, guiding us to know walruses.
    A Warm West. This is what Tyrone, the expedition leader, told me to bring, grossly understating the degree of cold we would encounter. I liked the instruction, though, since I am always wearing the West in some sense. Butthis was the far north, and I wish I had brought my faux-fur-lined vest I wore all through my times in Montana and Wyoming in winter and much of Iceland in summer. And not lost my insulated jacket in the Frankfurt airport. A cold north.
    Water the Color of Gunmetal. See Color
    Wonder. You are north of everything on a ship out of a story, sailing onward, with glaciers, crags, peaks, mists looming up on either side, and the moment requires so many practical reactions it is not until you are sitting in an armchair forty-three degrees south of this experience that the full wonder of it sets in.
    Wood. So many long logs on the shores of this place where not even a bush grows, evidence of the great forces that drop trees into water and send them on tides far beyond the scenes of their growth. More wood in the fox traps, the graves, the houses, and other structures that are lightly scattered across the land. The bare wood houses that weather to gray, like driftwood. The house we saw on the last day that was sturdier and more expansive than the rest we’d seen, more like a farmhouse than a survival hut, with fresh wood showing that it was maintained, and inside it, penciled names from the nineteenth century onward written on the bare wood walls, and one massive table with an X, and another structure like a stool for oxen, massive and lone in the sunlight that streamed through the windows we had just removed the protective boards from.
    Zodiac. Black rubber raft used for all landings in the wild, expertly captained by Lisa, clambered down onto with a ladder on the side of the boat, and afterward heaved up onto the Stockholm ’s deck by a crane and pulley. Its name suggests another zodiac, a rubber ring as black as night bearing the arctic zodiac in which the constellations are different and one is born under the sign of fox, walrus, ring seal, whale, polar bear, reindeer, pink jellyfish, ivory gull, spiral snail, scurvy grass, cod, and mosquito.
    2013

THE BUTTERFLY AND THE BOILING POINT
    Reflections on the Arab Spring and After
    Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.
    Revolution is a phase, a mood—like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass. The women of Cairo do not move as freely in public as they did during those few precious weeks when the old rules were suspended and everything was different. But the old Egypt is gone and Egyptians’ sense of themselves—and our sense of them—is forever changed.
    No revolution vanishes without effect. The Prague Spring of 1968 was brutally crushed, but twenty-one years later when a second wave of revolution liberated Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubček, who had been the reformist Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, returned to give heart to the people from a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square: “The government is telling us that the street is not the place for things to be solved, but I say the street was and is the place. The voice of the street must be heard.”
    The voice