DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: June 1, 2025
A Deep Dive Into Why Sufjan Stevens Dislikes “Carrie And Lowell”. Meaning, a deep dive into his life and his (non?) relationship with his mother:
I think this album is evidence of creative and artistic failure from my vantage point. I was trying to make sense of something that is senseless. I felt that I was being manipulative and self-centered and solipsistic and self-loathing, and that the approach that I had taken to my work, which is to kind of create beauty from chaos, was failing me. It was very frustrating. And for the first time I realized that not everything can be sublimated into art, that some things just remain unsolvable, or insoluble. I think I was really just frustrated by even trying to make sense of the experience of grief through the songs.
Throughout, the interviewer is empathetic and really draws the artist out. An estimable triumph of the form and at least one practitioner of it.
How The Lives Of Scientists (And Science) Are Being Upended:
Amid the grant terminations, program cuts, federal firings, disappearing databases, and myriad other disruptions U.S. science has seen during the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s administration, researchers are facing an uncertain future. Those studying hot-button topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), vaccines, and transgender health are squarely in the crosshairs, but the turmoil extends much further. The experiences of these five scientists offer a glimpse of the wide-ranging implications for the people who make the science happen.
Translating statistics into the incalculable damage being done by The Society Of Psychopaths.
Can Playing Dead Onstage Win You A Tony? It’s hard work. Here’s how the actor does it:
An hour before a Wednesday evening show, the actor Andrew Durand clambered up to a platform on the stage of the Longacre Theater and began doing jumping jacks. “When I walk onstage I never want to feel like I walked in off the street,” he said between jumps. “I want some sort of elevation physically.”
Durand, 39, a Broadway regular, is a first-time Tony nominee this year for his role in “Dead Outlaw,” a new musical that tells the improbable true story of Elmer McCurdy, a bandit fatally shot by a sheriff’s posse in 1911. Because his preserved corpse went unclaimed, McCurdy spent the following decades as a sideshow attraction and an occasional movie extra before ending up as a prop in an amusement-park ride.
McCurdy’s unusual life and afterlife mean that Durand spends the first 40 minutes of the show leaping on and off tables, climbing up and down ladders, and hanging upside down. He spends the next 40 minutes standing still, barely breathing when the lights are on him. Before each performance, he puts himself through a 30-minute workout to prepare for all that motion, all that stillness.
I wanna see this show!
Artist Of The Week: Ben Shahn. As relevant as ever. Perhaps more relevant than ever.
Ben Shahn, “Scotts Run, West Virginia,” 1937. During the Great Depression, Shahn felt sympathy for Americans suffering the deprivations he grew up with. (This painting was based on a photograph he took.)Credit…Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; via The Jewish Museum
Cosmology: The End Of The World As We Know It May Not Be The End Of The World. Hey, when the guy who won the Nobel Prize for predicting it says he might have been wrong, we (meaning cosmologists) should pay attention:
In the simplest version of the theory, the strength of dark energy—the faint, repulsive force that’s everywhere in the universe, pushing it apart—is fixed for all eternity. But DESI’s first release, last year, gave some preliminary hints that dark energy was stronger in the early universe, and that its power then began to fade ever so slightly. On March 19, the team followed up with the larger set of data that Riess was awaiting. It was based on three years of observations, and the signal that it gave was stronger: Dark energy appeared to lose its kick several billion years ago.
This finding is not settled science, not even close. But if it holds up, a “wholesale revision” of the standard model would be required, Hill told me. “The textbooks that I use in my class would need to be rewritten.” And not only the textbooks—the idea that our universe will end in heat death has escaped the dull, technical world of academic textbooks. It has become one of our dominant secular eschatologies, and perhaps the best-known end-times story for the cosmos. And yet it could be badly wrong. If dark energy weakens all the way to zero, the universe may, at some point, stop expanding. It could come to rest in some static configuration of galaxies. Life, especially intelligent life, could go on for a much longer time than previously expected.
Well, that’s a relief.
We’ll let Sufjan Stevens sing us out:
