Articles to Read if You Are Generally Curious
On plastic rain, political board games, and Foucault's bad trip.
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Can board games offer hopeful futures? What’s really falling from the sky now? Should you hire a houseplant whisperer? Who introduced Michel Foucault to LSD? These questions have nothing to do with each other, but as a generally curious person, I am interested in the answers.
If you are, too, read on.
Plastic Rain
— Benji Jones (Vox)
Over time, these modern-era substances — which famously take decades to millennia to degrade — have leached into the environment, reaching every corner of the planet, no matter how tall or deep. Microplastics, PFAS, and some other compounds, such as pesticides, are now so widespread that they’ve essentially become part of our biome, not unlike bacteria or fungi.
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Plastic rain is an environmental threat that’s harder to fix than the last one.
All Games Are Political
— Max Haiven (Jacobin)
Board games aren’t just escapist — they play a unique role in helping us imagine new worlds and different ways of working together. Recent games like Pandemic and Daybreak put the crises of our time on the table and ask us to solve them.
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Modern board games stem from the tabletop war games used to train military officers, and from attempts to use the printing press to create toys for middle-class children to teach history and impress bourgeois values on them. This was hardly apolitical.
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In the past decades, many game designers have struggled to tell different stories and create games that move us away from the common themes of accumulation, competition, violence, and scarcity.
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Avery Alder’s mapmaking game A Quiet Year movingly depicts the joy and struggle of building community after the fall of “civilization.” Live action role-players (LARPers) explore queer and radical political themes from the past, present, and future by playing characters in immersive, interactive theatrical productions that can be profoundly transformative.
Houseplant Therapists
— Alice Vincent (Financial Times)
Now, a number of houseplant consultancies are not just treating the problem of wilting plants, they’re trying to prevent it happening at all: horticulturally trained stylists will “landscape” a room with the plants best-suited to the space, then provide the expertise to nurture them.
Foucault’s Bad Trip
— James Penner (LA Review of Books)
[Simeon] Wade’s described his planned experiment as “the formula”:
[F]irst, take the world’s greatest intellect, the man who went beyond the nostrum that “knowledge is power” to figure out that power produces knowledge; second, provide this intellect with a heavenly elixir, a digestible philosopher’s stone [i.e., LSD], which has the potential of increasing astronomically the power of the brain; enchantment.
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The subtext is clear: What would happen if this amazing bald head was tripping on LSD? Would the “supermind” have an extraordinary visionary experience?
Watch
What I’ve been talking about on Instagram.
A review of a short but mighty space novel.
Do you know which Bollywood movie is based on this viral short story by one of Russia’s great male writers?
James Joyce said that this is “the greatest story that the literature of the world knows.”
Literary News
Exciting literary news that I just found out about.
1. Europa Editions acquires a new novel by Guapa author Saleem Haddad
Saleem Haddad wrote the moving and beautiful novel Guapa (2016) — published as One Last Drink at Guapa in India. So, I am more than excited for their next work, Floodlines, to be published in Spring 2026.
Floodlines is described as a "sweeping, multi-generational novel" about three estranged Iraqi-British sisters who are grappling with "the legacies of war, exile and family secrets".
2. BBC announces new drama Open Water, based on the award-winning debut novel by Caleb Azumah Nelson
The next Normal People in the making, you think?
The eight-part series for BBC iPlayer and BBC One will be produced by Mam Tor Productions (a Banijay UK company) and B-Side Productions, with Azumah Nelson serving as the drama’s lead writer, director and executive producer.
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Caleb Azumah Nelson says… “I can’t wait for viewers not only to meet Marcus and Effie but to step into their world: their private, intimate spaces, their communities, their desires.”