Anna Badkhen’s 2022 National Book Award Nomination

To celebrate this occasion, we bring you a short excerpt from “Bright Unbearable Reality,” Anna Badkhen’s collection of essays. [View in browser]( | [Become a member](   Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here](. Dear Nautilus Reader, We’re delighted to share the news that Nautilus contributing editor Anna Badkhen has been nominated for the 2022 National Book Award Longlist in nonfiction. [Bright Unbearable Reality](, a collection of essays, takes its title from the Greek word enargeia, literally the appearance of the gods in their true form, as translated by the poet Alice Oswald. It spans four continents and concerns itself with polarities of communion and displacement. Photo credit: Kael Alford Badkhen, [a former war reporter]( who has published six other books of lyrical nonfiction, turns to history, geology, archaeology, anthropology, biology, mythology, to contend with what she sees as the preeminent story of the 21st century: dislocation, physical and ethical. Badkhen seeks to find a way in which we can all gaze toward the future from a depraved present, and to see and care for one another in an atomized world. An excerpt from Bright Unbearable Reality: What do the birds foretell? From the shore in New Jersey I watch a murmuration of plovers skim the ocean. It stretches and compresses, tumbles, changes shape, now a horse pulling a chariot, now a goldfish flaunting a mermaid-princess tail; it narrows into a long line that glides just above the waves like a snake, then, lifting, balls up again into a sphere. Then, one after another, the birds fold their wings and plunge into the silver-banded sea. Do the plovers embody how torn we are between the noble and the base? Or maybe they are simply fishing. Three pelicans sortie on their bombing raid. The pelicans are early harbingers of climate change; until the eighties they rarely showed up north of the Carolinas. To see them here at the end of October, after the first frost, tells a story of planetary-scale negligence; surely it must augur something, too. Then a Coast Guard helicopter drones into sight, and brings my mind back to the howling grief of Philadelphia. Walter Wallace Jr. was twenty-seven, barely older than my children. I think of his mother, who woke up with a son one morning, and the next morning without. Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [SUBSCRIBE TO NAUTILUS](   By Anna Badkhen   [ANTHROPOLOGY]( [The Sorcerer’s Apprentice]( An anthropologist schooled in spiritual healing offers wisdom for troubled times. BY ANNA BADKHEN [Continue reading →](   [ENVIRONMENT]( [The Men Who Planted Trees]( In West Africa, a model for worldwide conservation takes root. BY ANNA BADKHEN [Continue reading →](   Today’s newsletter was written by Kevin Berger   [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( Copyright © 2022 NautilusNext, All rights reserved. You were subscribed to the newsletter from nautil.us. Our mailing address is: NautilusNext 360 W 36th Street, 7S, New York, NY 10018 Don't want to hear from us anymore? Click here to [unsubscribe]( .