01 Jul 2026

Looming disaster / Humor in uniform

Ben Ehrenreich on a warm summer day, and Dave Karpf visits the Great American State Fair

Detail of wing of Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui). Photo: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT

Today: Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks and The Way to the Spring; and Dave Karpf, professor of political communication at George Washington University, writer of “The Future, Now and Then” newsletter, and author of the forthcoming book, Vaporware, Inc: How Silicon Valley Sells the Illusion of Progress.

Issue No. 598

At Bay, for Now
Ben Ehrenreich

Great American Despair
Our Man (Dave Karpf) in Washington

At Bay, for Now

by Ben Ehrenreich

I try to notice the rhythms of urban life. I don’t mean the inhalations of the buses and trains in the morning and the evening and then again after midnight when the kids head out to the clubs, or the way the sidewalks fill around nine when it’s finally cool enough to walk and hold hands and maybe sit somewhere outside and have a drink. I certainly don’t mean traffic. I mean the other living things: the bats that appear with the dusk just as the last swift disappears from the sky. (I tell my daughter that swifts turn into bats at night. She pays no attention, bless her.) I mean the ants that appear on the kitchen counter as soon as the temperature breaks 80 and the sequence of trees that burst into blossom with the spring: first the mimosas, then the cherries and the almonds. June brings the lucky fortnight when the tipuanas and jacarandas are both in bloom at once and the sidewalks go bright with fallen purple and yellow petals.

I know on precisely which corners and what days of the year to find the lurid, orangey-red blossoms of the flame trees, so bright you think your eyes have broken, and the feathery pink and white blooms of the Persian silk trees. I have lived in the same apartment on the same street for most of eight years but it was only this year that I noticed—actually it was my partner who drew my attention to it—that the little pyramidal clumps of white flowers that form on the branches of the privet trees lining our block attract small and fluttering storms of butterflies: black and orange painted ladies that have flown here from thousands of miles away and will keep going, circling north and south and north again, until they can’t.