I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm

I am glad that bee hummingbirds hatch nests of eggs each smaller than a pea. I am glad that there are oceans two miles deep where fishes unknown to science glow like fireflies.

I am glad that the crumbs taken from my bedroom are returned to tiny cities built by ants, and that the thunder of the storms rolling in from the north trembles in my chest when it is still a ways off. Hello, says the world, you are so little. Hello, says the world, you are so big.

obsessed with mass market paperbacks. their pleasing rectangular proportions. how they fit badly in a hoodie pocket so you can drag them around everywhere with you like a temporary little buddy. the way they fit in your hand because they're MADE for human hands and not as bookshelf decoration. the way the pages feel when you riffle them gently with your thumb. How pristine and crisp they look when you get them and how creased and folded they look when you're done, even if you try to be nice to them. how that wear is okay, how that's correct actually, because they're made with the philosophy that books aren't meant to be PRETTY, they're meant to be read. that little ripple new ones get on the left side from where you hold them when you're reading, the way the ripple only goes as far as you've read, because u change stories by reading as they are changing you. how you can find thousands of these creased and folded and loved little dudes in every thrift store and used book shop and neighborhood library and you can instantly see the ones that someone carried around in a backpack for weeks or read to pieces or gave up on halfway through because they wear being read like fresh snow wears footprints. I love these poorly made, subpar little rectangles so much. truly the people's books.

obsessed with mass market paperbacks. their pleasing rectangular proportions. how they fit badly in a hoodie pocket so you can drag them around everywhere with you like a temporary little buddy. the way they fit in your hand because they're MADE for human hands and not as bookshelf decoration. the way the pages feel when you riffle them gently with your thumb. How pristine and crisp they look when you get them and how creased and folded they look when you're done, even if you try to be nice to them. how that wear is okay, how that's correct actually, because they're made with the philosophy that books aren't meant to be PRETTY, they're meant to be read. that little ripple new ones get on the left side from where you hold them when you're reading, the way the ripple only goes as far as you've read, because u change stories by reading as they are changing you. how you can find thousands of these creased and folded and loved little dudes in every thrift store and used book shop and neighborhood library and you can instantly see the ones that someone carried around in a backpack for weeks or read to pieces or gave up on halfway through because they wear being read like fresh snow wears footprints. I love these poorly made, subpar little rectangles so much. truly the people's books.

Me, too! And you can't convince me otherwise.

there is always tomorrow

I love soulmates but also this-

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

“X celebrity is the most beautiful woman in the world etc etc.” Uh no it’s my mom and also a random girl i saw while i was at work once

how much of ur online presence is performative and how much is it u being u