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I have an announcement that I’m excited to share with you: Starting in the new year, I will be joining The Atlantic as a staff writer. Fret not, dear readers; Brooklyn, Everywhere shall live on. My pieces for the web and magazine will be sent to you directly and, albeit not quite as frequently, you will still receive exclusive missives about the topics close to my heart.
Having this space to share with you—and getting your notes and emails and even poems—has been extraordinarily grounding for me, at a time that I have really needed it. This has been a wild year.
As a kid, science was never really my thing, with the exception of geology. I loved how rocks could tell the story of a living Earth, one subject to constant change. Like in our own lives, most change in the Earth happens slowly. But every once in a while, a sudden event can happen—like a volcano erupting or a meteor hitting the Earth—that creates abrupt and irrevocable change; later, when you chart the Earth’s story, you can mark the event as a turning point with a definitive “before” and “after.” For me, 2022 was a volcanic year, one that saw 44 years of slowly layered sedimentary rock quickly and suddenly covered over with smooth, shiny quartz.