![]() ![]() ![]() Philosopher Timothy Morton has coined the term “hyperobjects” to refer to things that are “massively distributed in time and space in ways that baffle humans and make interacting with them fascinating, disturbing, problematic, and wondrous.” Global warming, Morton argues, is one such hyperobject, along with planetary objects, the biosphere, even Styrofoam. What else was there to say? What else was there to do? How strange, we all said to one another and to ourselves, though it was something more than strange, something ineffable and uncanny. The haze was smoke, carried nearly 3,000 miles east from the wildfires in Oregon and other western states across the Rockies and the Great Plains and the Midwest before blanketing the northeast in an opaque smog. Swimming laps in the lake in the afternoon, the water tasted acrid a slight itch spread at the back of my throat. Out on the road for a walk at midday, I observed the sun as a blurred orb, muted enough that I could look right at it. In the last few weeks of July, a soft orange haze hung in the sky over the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where I live. ![]()
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