Jesse Barber

Vol. 38 Issue 9 Apr 12, 2019 From the Editors The image appeared in a Facebook message with no context: a fuzzy, orange ring. “Are we looking an accretion disk?” I asked. “Black hole!” came the response. “It’s even got the jets...” Sure enough. The image was taken using data from eight radio telescopes at once, forming a composite telescope the size of the earth, thanks to an algorithm by computer scientist Katie Bouman. It shows a distant black hole with the mass of six billion suns.

How Modern Monetary Theory reimagines government spending by Jesse Barber Illustration by Eve O'Shea published March 15, 2019 A few weeks ago, a group of children confronted Senator Dianne Feinstein to plead for her to make a commitment to fighting climate change by endorsing the Green New Deal—a nonbinding resolution co-authored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that proposes converting 100 percent of energy production to renewable sources and guaranteeing a “family-sustaining wage”...

As the seasons change, so must the music I spend my day with. Not every song has a season, but the most affecting ones are impossible for me to separate from particular times of year. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the weather—Kate Bush’s chilly “Wuthering Heights” is about as summer a song as it gets, with a soaring chorus made for July nights. It can be obvious—the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” is platonic spring—but it isn’t always easy to figure out what season a song falls into.