Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
There is something quietly unsettling about the science of Ophiocordyceps, the so-called zombie-ant fungus, which researchers have now discovered leads an even stranger double life than we knew. This organism commandeers a living creature, steers it to a precise location, and then fruits from its body — and new findings suggest the fungus itself may be manipulated by forces deeper still. What does it mean to be the author of your own movement?
That question echoes differently when we turn to the ongoing reckoning with America's pandemic years. David Frum and others have written with quiet grief about how conservative media and political leaders discouraged masking, dismissed vaccines, and watched their own supporters pay with their lives. Trust, misplaced in those who held power, became something irreversible.
And then there is the story of Marriott Bonvoy, whose licensed travel partner is now selling tours through Nagorno-Karabakh, a region from which more than one hundred twenty thousand ethnic Armenians were expelled in two thousand twenty three, in what former International Criminal Court prosecutors have named a genocide. When commerce moves through the architecture of erasure, we must ask what it is we are actually selling.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
