#the atavist

[longreads]

There is a noise that, for a Navy captain, may well be the worst sound imaginable—worse than the boom of cannon fire, the whistle of a missile, or the whoosh of a torpedo. That noise is the long, piercing scrape of metal against rock. It’s the sound, quite simply, of everything going wrong.

The latest Atavist Magazine story by Robert Kolker recounts how a a wrong turn led to the largest peacetime disaster in American naval history. Read an excerpt on Longreads now.

[atavist]

Fourteen U.S. destroyers barreled down the California coast in a dense fog—until a wrong turn led to the largest peacetime disaster in American naval history.

“Dead Reckoning,” issue no. 142 from The Atavist, is now available.

Two boats behind the Delphy on the Young, William Calhoun still couldn’t make out the lights from Point Arguello. Perhaps the fog was too thick, or the Young too far from shore? But he did see the lights of the Delphy and the S.P. Lee, just ahead, and some of the other ships behind. So he continued to follow the leader.

Then came a jolt to the ship—not so much heard as felt, a slight trembling in the hull. At once, Calhoun thought they’d been rammed, but by what? He rushed to the bridge just in time for a second jolt. There was nothing slight about this one. The Young’s navigator had lurched out of the formation—technically the correct reaction for a ship running aground—only to slam into something harder.

Right away the Young started to list, its engine room filling with water through a gash in the hull. It took just seconds for the entire destroyer to lean about 30 degrees. Then the power went out. Between the darkness and the fog, no one could see a thing. By the time Calhoun ordered his executive officer, Lieutenant Eugene Herzinger, to pass the word to stand by to abandon ship, the ship was listing nearly 45 degrees. This meant that the lifeboats were no longer an option—they were completely submerged.

[bennettmarko]

[yaziatolyesi]

Günün Kitabı | Bul Beni Anne | Dursaliye Şahan

Fakir Baykurt Roman Ödüllü Kitap raflarda… Kitap Tanıtım Bülteni “Bul Beni Anne,” 1974 yılında Fatih Cami avlusuna bıra­kılan bir bebeğin, Cemil’in yaşamından esinlenerek yazıl­mıştır. Yurtlarda ve sokaklarda geçen, kimsesiz, engelli bir ço­cuğun annesini arama serüveniyle birlikte, temiz kalabil­me mücadelesine tanık olduğumuz eser, “Fakir Baykurt Roman Ödülü”ne lâyık görülmüştür. 8 aylık bir…

[i-am-a-megalodon]

why do i keep seeing ads about an elephant

[biglisbonnews]

Big Love A woman, an elephant, and an uncommon love story spanning nearly half a century. https://longreads.com/2023/03/08/big-love-sanctuary-elephant-atavist-magazine/

[paladinbaby]

spidersona doodles

[Image Description: Two drawings of a Spider-Man variant on a grey blue background. They wear a pale blue bodysuit from their waist up, under a black tank top and shorts as well as roller derby elbow wrist and knee guards and quad skates. Their mask is separated by round white eye holes and the bottom part is red with a web pattern radiating from one eye. They are drawn standing neutrally on the left and leaning back against something on the right with white eye like shapes surrounding their head. In the larger drawing they’re wearing a red bomber jacket on top of their spider suit. Their tank top has a red sacred heart in the centre with blue spider legs coming off it. End ID.]

[anticbrvtalist]

Alys Tomlinson: Gli Isolani (The Islanders)

[littlemut]

your boyfriend fell for the youtube bear trap. yeah. he’s stuck there and there’s nothing we can do to get him out. yes. he’s gonna keep appearing on your dashboard every 5-6 seconds

[cremationisirreversible]

𝕽𝖚𝖉𝖏𝖊𝖛𝖎𝖙 – 𝔇𝔦𝔰𝔞𝔭𝔭𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔠𝔢𝔰 ℑ𝔫 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔚𝔬𝔬𝔡𝔰

Where The Vulture Gathers / Atavistic Insurgence / 2014

[longreads]

In 1917, the year the United States entered World War I, Cook assisted paleontologists from the Denver Museum and the American Museum in digs at fossil beds along Snake Creek, some 20 miles south of his family’s ranch. Whether he picked up the tooth while scouting for those excavations, during one of them, or sometime after, he never said. Broken bits of fossil, turned blue-black by iron phosphate, were common in the region, and had little scientific value compared with the bones of entire herds of pony-size rhinoceroses or the corkscrew-shaped dens of prehistoric beavers. But Cook believed he had found something truly special. Based on his knowledge of fossils, he suspected that the tooth belonged to a primate, and not a mere monkey—an ape perhaps. An even more tantalizing prospect was that the tooth belonged to an early human.

If Cook was right it would be a heady find, as scientists had yet to identify either variety of fossil in America. Meanwhile, paleontologists around the world were eager for evidence of so-called missing links—transitional fossils that could help prove that humans evolved from apes. Men who claimed to have found missing links often became famous.

Cook was correct about one thing: The tooth was important. But it would become part of history in a way he never imagined.

The latest @atavist story, “The Curious Case of Nebraska Man,” concerns a fossil tooth, a splashy debate, and a strange chapter in America’s long history of science denialism. This 1920s battle over science and faith is eerily resonant a century later—read an excerpt here. 

[atavist]

As Russia invaded Ukraine, three women from the same family became pregnant at the same time. Then the war tore them apart.

Atavist issue no. 143, TWO THOUSAND MILES FROM HOME, is now available.

If Lida were to tell these babies a story instead of singing a song, how might she start? Perhaps like this: There were three women—Liuda, Lida, and Lera. They were from two generations of the same family; they lived a few miles from one another, and they all became pregnant just a few weeks apart. But a war came between them and divided them from one another. One of them traveled 2,000 miles to come home; another was lost.

No. That story gets too sad too quickly.

Perhaps she could start like this: There is the story about David and Goliath. Little David went out to fight the giant Goliath, who threatened to destroy David’s whole nation. And everyone thought that Goliath would win in three days, but little David would not be defeated.

Yes, that’s a better way to begin.

[madmonksandmaenads]

Adoration of the Cyan King

(Prepare a bowl of pond water, stand before a plot of land you intend to sow, raise the water to the noontide sun)

Hail oh, Cyan King!

Great Sire of untold numbers.

First to breath! First to rule!

You whose children multiplied to cover the world.

You whose breath encompassed and rusted the world.

You whose toxins carry the foolish from the world.

You whose legacy is blood and iron. I dig this trench, a canal from past to now (with iron tool dig a small trench in the earth)

Conqueror of Archae

Great Herald of Flora and Fauna

I give you now the fruits of your labor

The children of the world you have borne

(Sprinkle some rice or other grains into the bowl and upon the earth)

I thank you for your oxygenating breath.

I thank you for the nitrogen planted within the soil.

Breath your life into this earth

as you breathed your life into me.

Ignite the fire of generation within this soil.

As you ignited my inner flame upon my birth.

Breath with me,

As I breath with you.

(Pour out the bowl upon the soil trench as you let out a long exhale)

Welcome, oh Cyan King,

to a world of your making.

[yaziatolyesi]

FAKİR BAYKURT ROMAN ÖDÜLLÜ KİTAP, “BUL BENİ ANNE” OKURLARIYLA BULUŞTU | DURSALİYE ŞAHAN

2023 Fakir Baykurt Roman Ödülü’nü kazanan, Dursaliye Şahan‘ın “Bul Beni Anne” adlı dosyası yayımlanarak, okurla buluştu. Çiğli Belediyesi Kültür Müdürü Nail Çetin’in duyurusu şöyle: “Literatür Yayınlarınca yayınlanan kitabın Türkiye genelinde dağıtımına başlandı. Bul Beni Anne, okuru derinden sansan, gerçek yaşamdan alınmış bir Anadolu öyküsü. Çiğli Belediyesi Kültür Müdürlüğü olarak yedenci…

[shuttershocky]

There’s a really interesting, missable scene in the Arcueid route.

If Shiki chooses to have Dr. Arach patch his broken leg up instead of Kohaku, Arach will start yammering about Shiki and Akiha’s unnatural bodies, foreshadowing the Far Side routes as early as Arcueid route.

She notes that Shiki appears to have been bred for short bursts of speed, with hollowed bones like a bird and incredibly fast-moving muscles, to Shiki’s disbelief.

To annoy him further, Arach then goes into Akiha’s body and the Tohno family’s history of interbreeding with humans and selecting from the right stock (though as Shiki has no idea that oni exist nor that he’s in a family of them, he may have just thought Arach was calling the Tohno family eugenicists.)

What’s interesting though is that Arach reveals that, whether by a miracle or freak accident, Akiha was born pure-blooded. Her DNA matches that of a pure oni from before interbreeding even began. In other words, Akiha doesn’t have any human blood in her. A true oni from ancient times born in the modern day.

It’s also notable that when Arach asks Shiki to guess how ancient Akiha’s physiology appears to be, even the answer of “Once in a millennium”, which would put her on roughly on the level of Shuten, Raikou, and Ibaraki, is wrong. Akiha is the sort of oni only seen once in ten thousand years.

Akiha shouldn’t even look remotely human.