From the Publishing-Editor of Hubris: Our November/December 2026 double-issue opens with a pair of essays on the subject of multilingualism, the first by polyglot Dean Kalimniou, writing from Melbourne, in the aftermath of Australia’s 2026 census; the second, from English/German-speaker Skip Eisiminger. (Kalimniou references French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote, “Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees with different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness,” a quote which gave this most arbitrary of editors pause as she prepared this issue for publication.) The issue then opens out into poetry. First, plurilingual poet/translator Philip Nikolayev returns to us after a long hiatus with five poems. Award-winning Janet Kenny follows, rhyming and scanning. New Contributor and poet-lyricist Marcus Bales (accompanied by musician Mike Whitney), follows, with five poems set to music, and Hubris’s Poetry Editor Claire Bateman introduces us to the writing of poet Mark Halliday. Kathryn E. Livingston, a belled cat regarding her bell, contributes a wry piece about her personal tracker. Dr. Jason Page writes about the narrowing of our children’s horizons in the analog world, and the impoverishment of community knowledge as informed and enriched by free roaming, now that more and more of us live the majority of our lives indoors, “in captivity.” Jenks Farmer, in his own idiosyncratic, South Carolinian patois, composes an ode to “Daddy Tractor.” And we close with a pair of meditations: Michael Tallon’s essay on 9/11, written in this, the 25th year after New York City’s great, shared cataclysm; and Culinary Editor Diana Farr Louis’s annual retelling of her late husband’s Christmas memories, from 1930s Athens, Greece.

As a child growing up in San Francisco and Palo Alto, California, our November/December Home Page Artist, Gail Siptak, aspired to become an entomologist, collecting and studying pollywogs, frogs, and insects; more interested in closely observing the creatures than in drawing them. Today, still exploring the grandeur of the natural world around her and finding her church in its actuality, she says, “I paint to communicate what I see of the human and animal condition in all its pathos and hilarity.” Since 1964, Siptak has been painting our enveloping world and the experiences that derive from it. At the height of the Covid pandemic, she veered away from oils and took up the more restorative process of working in gouache on handmade papers, densely layering the opaque, chalky paint and closely imitating “body colour” or “egg tempera,” painting mediums dating back to the Middle Ages. Siptak says, “I paint what I see of the human condition—be it animal or object. The glimmer of humor and spirit in so much of what I see is the basis of what I paint.” Her most recent exhibition, at Houston’s Koelsch Gallery, was titled “Gail Siptak: Rescue,” and featured a plethora of people and animals escaping dire situations aboard small boats, accompanied by birds and sea life; sailing through an ocean and sky that promise new life. Her gouache paintings comprise a prayer for our turbulent times, exhorting us to to gather together and carry on. See more of Siptak’s work at her website; find her works for sale at Artsy; and learn and see more of her at the Koelsch Gallery, 1020 Peden Street, Houston, Texas 77006.

Diatribe/North

“Census 2026: Boxing Multilingualism,” By Dean Kalimniou

MELBOURNE Australia—(Hubris)—November/December 2026—Every census tells us as much about the assumptions of the state as it does about the people it seeks to enumerate. The questions it asks, the categories it creates and the answers it permits are never neutral. They are acts of classification, and classification is always an exercise of power. As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, the authority to classify is itself a form of symbolic power, because those who determine the categories also determine the social reality that emerges from them. Michel Foucault would go further still, arguing that systems of knowledge do not merely observe reality but actively produce it. In that sense, a census is far more than an exercise in counting. It is an exercise in imagining the nation, deciding which identities become visible, which relationships matter and which forms of life are worthy of official recognition. This year’s Australian census contains a deceptively simple question that reveals the persistence of a remarkably old way of thinking. Respondents are asked whether they speak a language other than English at home. Those who use more than one language are then instructed to nominate the one they use “most often.” At first glance, the question appears entirely reasonable. (Read more . . .)

Skip the B.S.

“Two Tongues in One Mouth: Bilingualism,” By Skip Eisiminger

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Hubris)—November/December 2026—In the lobby of the Columbus, Georgia DMV, in September of 1963, a crude sign instructed those renewing licenses to fill out a white form. First-time applicants like my German bride were to complete a pink form. After puzzling out the bureaucracy’s intent, and while I parked the car, Ingrid crossed the threshold of the office where she met two more signs overhead: “Colored,” and “White.” These had been professionally made and had nothing to do with the form she’d selected. Glancing at her rosy application, she took her place in line behind an elderly Black man holding a white form between his thumb and forefinger. In Germany, Ingrid was one of the post-war generation who’d been taught to accord Jews and African Americans the same respect as extraterrestrials. Shifting on her feet, she said, “I’m Sorry, sir. But I sink you are in sa wrong line.” The elderly man turned slowly, surveyed Ingrid’s pinkness, and murmured, “I kin tell you ain’t from dese parts, Missy, but cain’t you read the signs?” Ten years into a six-decade marriage, “Ingrid” became “Maudie,” and the story above became “Maudie-dote # 1.” (Read more . . .)

The Art of Forgetting

“The Mercy of Errors,” By Philip Nikolayev

CAMBRIDGE Massachusetts—(Hubris)—November/December 2026—Editor’s Note: Though Philip Nikolayev has not appeared in the virtual pages of Hubris since 2023 (“On My Immured Sonnets”), he returns to us this month with five poems. Nikolayev is a multilingual, Russia-born poet living in Cambridge, Massachusetts whose collections include Monkey Time (Wave Books, 2003, winner of the 2001 Verse Prize) and Letters from Aldenderry (Salt Publishing, 2006). His translations of Alexander Pushkin’s poetry, The Star of Dazzling Ecstasy, was published in a bilingual edition by Tiptop Street in 2021. With poet-psychologist Anna Halberstadt, he coedited Lyric Resistance: Ukrainian Poetry of War and Hope, the summer 2024 issue of The Café Review. Nikolayev is coeditor-in-chief of Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. His latest book, a bilingual collection of poems and self-translations, is The Mercy of Errors/La misericordia de los errores (Nueva York Poetry Press, 2026). The Mercy of Errors: You misread the email and stay home that evening./The train you meant to catch leaves in a hurry without you./You hear the insult wrong and answer with a shrug instead of fire . . . . (Read more . . .)

Singing & Drowning

“How Metrical & Rhymed Poetry Found Me,” By Janet Kenny

POINT VERNON Australia—(Hubris)—November/December 2026—My mother used to tell the tale of a very young me, who talked before I walked, sitting up in bed and singing “Early one mor-or-ning, just as the sun was ri-i-sing, I heard a maid si-i-ing in the va-a-lley below. Oh, never lea-eave me. Oh, never grie-ieve me. How-ow could you u-u-use a poo-er maiden so.” She didn’t know where I’d learned the song. We were not what’s known as a musical family. At that time, we had no piano and my parents never bought a gramophone. Our country didn’t have an orchestra until I was aged about 15. But my father played the harmonica, a fact which made my mother ashamed. My father also liked to tap dance but that was definitely not approved of. What I am talking about, though, is melody and rhythm. Rhythm is what gripped me. I had a wooden xylophone and played Turkey in the Straw which my father played on his harmonica. My poet-aunt gave me books with simple poems in them. Even Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, which I didn’t know was an old French tune. Mozart loved its simplicity. From such models I rapidly developed a love of rhythm which was emphasized by rhyme and a sense of the diatonic scale which also was emphasized by rhyme. (Read more . . .)

Balefully Yours

“Baleful Ballads,” By Marcus Bales

CLEVELAND Ohio—(Hubris)—November/December 2026—For the past nine years, Mike Whitney and I have been collaborating on writing songs together. It began when Mike wrote and asked if I’d mind if he sang one of my parodies to the original tune. Mind? Like any sane person, I accepted immediately. And it was terrific. He’s a master at matching tone of voice to tone of voice; and we find the same things funny, or not. Then he said he’d like to set one of my non-parody poems to music, and I was thrilled. That was even more terrific. For a while in the first Trump administration and then during Covid (Mike lives in North Carolina; I live in Ohio, so there was no fear) we produced dozens of parodies and had a great time posting them on Facebook. But after a while, Mike suggested that we back off the parodies and work on original songs. So, we did. I don’t know why we’re not rich and famous, yet. Probably we’ll find out from the comments here. Recently, Elizabeth Boleman-Herring noticed my posts of both my poems and Mike’s and my songs on Facebook and asked whether I’d be interested in contributing a regular column to Hubris. That’s why you’re reading this, if you’re still with me, here. So, the requirements are a few paragraphs of prose and a few poems, as often as I can within the six-times a year format. (Read more . . .)

Speculative Friction

“The Writing of Mike Halliday: Close Reading,” By Claire Bateman, Poetry Editor

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—November/December 2026—Each of us, as seen by the great anthologist in the sky, is like a short poem. I told my daughter, on a hot summer day, that I was failing to choose a book of poems to write an essay about. She asked, “What poetry has interested you most recently?” I said I’d spent the morning puzzling over a short poem by my friend William Olsen, a poem I’d been drawn to for many years without fully understanding it. “Write about that,” Devon said. I smiled—“A whole essay on one short strange poem?” “Sure,” she said, “you love close reading!” I do. The effort of close reading expresses our belief that we may be able to find and appreciate the depth of emotion and of insight in another person, and that another person may be able to do that for us. We don’t want to lose hope. Hope is endangered for us all now—we have to think of this every day in a hot summer of global warming. To say this sounds banal—because it is a truth too vast and too unremitting. It can make you miss the drama of the fear of nuclear war; nuclear war would have to come from the monstrous stupidity and evil of national government leaders—they could be disempowered, removed from office . . .  But every one of us contributes to global warming every day. (Read more . . .)

Words & Wonder

“Mr. Inquisitive,” By Kathryn E. Livingston

BOGOTA New Jersey—(Hubris)—November/December 2026—Several years ago, my youngest of three sons gave me a fashionable little gift because what mom doesn’t crave a personal fitness tracker? But truly, I was delighted (and I adore the mauve wristband he chose as well). The device is said to monitor how well I’ve slept, because of course I can’t figure that out myself (clue: bags under my eyes, persistent yawning?). At first, I regarded my device as a cute, portable novelty, but as the years have passed and we’ve become more attached (I went for a hike without it? Curses!) it’s become more of a judgmental and intrusive spy who wants to have a “conversation” and poses such questions as, “Was there a reason why you were up so early?” Doesn’t he (I call it he because he seems to possess an air of male energy) realize I’d rather discuss my sleeping habits with my girlfriends? And why does he never ask—as my sister or yoga pals often do—“Was it the full moon?” So yes, while the planet is debating whether we will still be alive in ten years due to AI, I’m in a personal, ridiculous feud with my tracker (there are a number of makes and styles, so I won’t disparage this particular one. Full transparency, however, I covet my daughter-in-law’s attractive Oura ring).  (Read more . . .)

Off the Page

“The Shrinking Radius: How Far Children Are Allowed to Roam,” By Dr. Jason Page

HOMER New York—(Hubris)—November/December 2026—There is a version of community that we talk about as though it were a feeling, a warmth shared among neighbors, a shared sense of benevolence almost familial. But before it is an emotional bond, it is something more basic: knowledge. To belong to a place is first to know it. Which path cuts through to the next street, which garden the dog patrols, which shopkeeper knows your face. This is not a sophisticated skill set. It is one of the oldest human competencies, built not upon good intentions but something far simpler and far harder to manufacture: time spent in a place, moving through it, learning it from the inside. For most of human history, childhood was the primary time for that learning. Children had the unstructured time and the inclination to wander, to acquire the granular and unhurried knowledge of a neighborhood that no adult with a schedule and a destination could easily replicate. And in acquiring it for themselves, children were also, without knowing it, building something larger: the web of mutual familiarity that makes a street readable, a community legible, a stranger identifiable as such. The community did not produce the roaming child. In many respects, the roaming child produced the community. (Read more . . .)

Plant People

“Daddy Tractor,” By Jenks Farmer

COLUMBIA South Carolina—(Hubris)—November/December 2026—I let him run hot. In searing, record-breaking September heat, I was anxious to finish limb clean-up from last October’s hurricane. Too anxious. Just like Daddy, his old tractor needed a slow and steady hand. I’d run him all day. Just before noon, I smelled the wet, rubbery, melting zinc first. Then I saw the fumes. I knew what it was all about but tried to deny it. Shame, regret, and then white steam clouded around me. All that old stuff bubbled up. Daddy stuff, a tractor’s laden with responsibility. Hissing steam from under the hood and tears and drips and smells meant I’d have to make the call after all these decades. The men and machines I learned from all fuse together now—green paint, gruff silence, grease, distant and disciplined but steady and warm as smoke from a scrap-wood fire in a 55-gallon steel drum. He was a tough old dude but always there. Every single time. He wasn’t always easy. Unlike modern ones, the connection was rough, heavy, clangy, and dangerous. (Read more . . .)

Fairly Unbalanced

“The Victim’s Gift,” By Michael Tallon

ANTIGUA Guatemala—(Hubris)—November/December 2026—Author’s Note: I wrote this essay in 2011, shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden. I share it again today, as it still expresses my heart clearly when I think about that awful, humbling day when everything hurt, and yet everyone I knew became almost unbearably beautiful for their fragility. Love and peace to you all. Earlier this spring, news reached out from a mountain city in Pakistan to my small apartment in Guatemala, as it did all over the world, that Osama bin Laden was dead. I was alone as the message first appeared on the Facebook page I let idle in the background when I’m working. I put aside an essay I was writing and sat quietly on the couch, staring at my laptop, watching the news spread virally through the pages of my former students from Brooklyn, many of whom I’d been with on September 11, 2001. From most of them, now in their late 20s and still living in New York City, the news was perfunctorily given: a link to the New York Times or the Daily News websites, a one-sentence observation of good riddance, a profile picture changed out for an image of Lower Manhattan or one of a cousin who was with Ladder 12 and never took a step backward once he hit the doors of the South Tower. (Read more . . .)

Eating Well Is the Best Revenge

“An Ancient Greek’s Christmas Memories,” By Diana Farr Louis, Culinary Editor

ATHENS Greece—(Hubris)—November/December  2026—When I was young, growing up on Long Island, my father used to bring home The New York World-Telegram and Sun when he came back from his Wall Street office in the evening. Every Christmas season, I looked forward to rereading their holiday column, “Is There a Santa Claus?” a tradition begun in 1897. And now, thanks to Hubris, I like reading my late husband’s Christmas reminiscences over and over again. I hope you do, too. Crises bring up memories of other crises, and this country has had more than its share in the past hundred years: world wars, Balkan wars, a civil war, dictatorships, and financial upheavals. But there have also been times of relative calm and prosperity, so let’s look back to the kinder, gentler Greece of the 1930s for a dose of Christmas cheer. These are the reminiscences of my husband Harilaos, known to some of you as “Joy of the People,” a rough translation of his name. As a very youthful octogenarian, he does not live in the past, but I compel him to tell his stories over and over. So, in his own words . . . . (Read more . . .)

Our September/October 2026 Issue

The Hubris Review

“To the Cyclops Cave: A Homecoming,” By David Havird

SHREVEPORT Louisiana—(Hubris)—September/October 2026—The poet Don Schofield, who spent his boyhood in California, paid his first visit to Greece in 1976, when he was a 26-year-old tourist. “And to my surprise,” he observes in this “braided memoir,” “rural Greece looked and felt a lot like central California in the ’50s.” He’d be traveling by bus and “gaze out the window at long, symmetrical rows of trees—lemon and walnut, orange and pear—all leading to the same vanishing point. Whenever we neared a town, there were long rows of eucalyptuses with thick branches arching out over the road. Was this Greece I was traveling through, or Highway 99 north of Fresno?” (His description of the countryside, its evocation for him of the San Joaquin Valley, is richer than this short passage, even with its particularity of detail, reveals, and one of the challenges for me is resisting the impulse to quote at greater length, so actively does Schofield’s scene-setting involve the senses.) The several years of Schofield’s early childhood with foster parents in Fresno compose the principal braid. (Read more . . .)

Imagination’s Favors

“Drifting Toward Home,” By Don Schofield

THESSALONIKI & ATHENS Greece—(Hubris)—September/October 2026—As a writer, and as a human being struggling for decades to find greater self-awareness, I have carried on a lifelong dialogue with myth narratives. As a child, I believed, sometimes fiercely, in Christianity (until my mid-teens). In my early twenties, as an undergraduate lit major I focused on Myth Criticism, an approach to literature that uses ancient, mostly Greek, myths to talk about modern and contemporary works. One reason I moved to Greece once I finished graduate school—but by no means the only reason—was to immerse myself into the landscape, culture and language in which those ancient narratives still reverberate. I’m not naïve. I know Greece is a modern European country. And that the ancient myths have been the basis of so many works of literature, art, and music over the centuries—in multiple languages and cultures—that by now any new rendition, including, most recently, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, is but a palimpsest of those original tales. Nevertheless, the archetypes continue to show through. And it’s those archetypal motifs, especially as found in Homer’s Odyssey, that have inspired my writing for decades. (Read more . . .)

Diatribe/North

“The Odyssey after Christ,” By Dean Kalimniou, Atty. at Law

MELBOURNE Australia—(Hubris)—September/October 2026—Few assumptions have proved more resilient than the proposition that Christianity and the classical tradition existed in a state of perpetual antagonism, that the triumph of the cross necessarily entailed the eclipse of Homer, and that the poems which had educated the Greek world for centuries survived the Christian centuries only despite the Church, awaiting their liberation by the humanists of the Renaissance. Such a narrative sits uneasily beside the writings of St. Clement of Alexandria. There are not many Christian authors who quote Homer with such frequency or such ease. Fewer still assume so confidently that their readers will recognize Homeric verses without explanation, understand their allusions instinctively, and accept The Odyssey as part of the common intellectual inheritance within which Christianity itself is to be explained. Homer is everywhere in St. Clement’s writings. The question, therefore, for him is never whether The Odyssey should continue to be read. It is how it is now to be understood. The answer lies in one of the most beautiful images in his Stromateis: “There is one river of truth, but many streams flow into it.” (Read more . . .)

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

“Prospero’s Kitchen: A Cookbook’s Modern Odyssey,” By Diana Farr Louis, Culinary Editor

ATHENS Greece—(Hubris)—September/October 2026—In 2012, Prospero’s Kitchen, a collection of stories, customs, not to mention recipes from the Ionian islands, experienced its fourth incarnation, no small feat for any book. In 2013 a new bookshop in Kifissia, a northern suburb of Athens, Greece, offered to host a “delicious book presentation” to celebrate this event. June Marinos, my co-author, and I chose a few of our favorite dishes to entice our guests into coming and buying our cookbook. Before we served them, they had to sit through a short history of Prospero’s origins and subsequent career. It all began on a tennis court in the late 80s. I was co-editing a magazine for a Greek hotel chain and, since we were writing most of the articles ourselves under pseudonyms, we were searching for someone to do a food column. Whom to ask but my French tennis partner? You can always rely on a “Frog” to be in the know where cuisine is concerned. Immediately, she shouted back over the net, “The eggplant lady!” This mysterious person turned out to be an English woman named June Marinos, who was gathering recipes for a cookbook tentatively titled “Around the World with the Eggplant.” (Read more . . .)

Epicurus’ Porch

“A Feast for Any Season,” By William A. Balk, Jr.

ELKO South Carolina—(Hubris)—September/October 2019—My sister Libby was rifling through the kitchen drawers, the ones that seem to catch all the “where-does-this-go?” stuff: batteries, wine corks, rubber bands, extra mason jar lids, stubby lead pencils. Several of those drawers actually hold useful things, and she was looking for the folders of carefully saved family recipes, special dishes perfected over decades, stored here among long-neglected guides to brewing beer and making wine. Libby was looking for Mama’s version of the classic Angel Biscuits, that exquisite blend of yeast roll and baking powder biscuit that has been on our Thanksgiving table for generations. It is autumn, so the planning must begin. Libby and Tom have assumed the mantle this year, hosting the extended family—relations by blood, history, and affection—and doing it properly necessitates digging up all the old holiday recipes that are required for a real Thanksgiving. There are, in fact, a number of files of these family recipes, some from pit-masters and camp cooks among our kin, others from mothers and grandmothers and family cooks who worked in kitchens with wood stoves, and some from our parents’ years of exploration and experimentation with the glorious products of our local farms and waters and woodlands. (Read more . . .)

Off the Page

“Two Weeks West: Father, Daughter & the Myth of the Open Road,” By Dr. Jason Page

HOMER New York—(Hubris)—September/October 2026—Perhaps it has always been part of the American psyche, this need to explore, to see what lies over the horizon. After all, the history of the Americas is one long record of people in motion, from the earliest human settlers moving south from Beringia some 16,500 years ago, to the European migrations east to west during the age of discovery. But while those migrations left their mark on human history and culture at large, it was the 20th century that gave rise to something more personal, the great American road trip. The first transcontinental drive was accomplished in 1903 by Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, mechanic Sewall Crocker, and their dog Bud, who took 63 days to travel from San Francisco to New York. My choice of the word “accomplished” is deliberate. The party crossed trails, rivers, mountain passes, and alkali flats, tracing the Union Pacific Railroad west across the country. Sixteen years later, in 1919, things had not improved much. Dwight D. Eisenhower took 62 days to cross the country as part of a US military convoy. Over the following decades, America’s love affair with the automobile shifted into gear as mass ownership became possible through improved production. (Read more . . .)

Speculative Friction

“The Poetry of Gil Allen,” By Claire Bateman, Poetry Editor

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—September/October 2026—Born and brought up on Long Island, poet Gilbert Allen has lived on Paris Mountain in Upstate South Carolina since 1977, where along with his wife, longtime teacher and environmental activist Barbara Allen, he has enjoyed gardening on the couple’s three acres of land and serving as a guardian biped for a succession of cats—most recently Ginger Boy. Allen is the author of two collections of linked short stories and eight volumes of poems, most recently, Stanzas in America, from Measure Press. His long poem “The Assistant” received the Robert Penn Warren Prize from The Southern Review, and his short story “Trash” received Special Mention for a Pushcart Prize. The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily have all featured his poems, and his stories have received the Porter Fleming Award and The South Carolina Fiction Project Prize, as well as a South Carolina Literary Arts Fellowship. (Read more . . .)

Plant People

“The Hypocrisy in Our Gardens Must Stop,” By Jenks Farmer

COLUMBIA South Carolina—(Hubris)—September/October 2026—I run a small mail-order nursery in South Carolina. I also run a garden design firm, and I’ve spent decades helping create two of the largest botanical gardens in the state—institutions that collectively employ hundreds of people and host hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. My trade is the beauty of South Carolina’s landscape. I know the art and industry from the ground up. In my world, finding people to do the physical work of horticulture is getting harder every year. For several years my business has relied on wonderful local young people—high schoolers and college students who show up, learn fast, and are genuinely good workers. I’m grateful for every one of them. But most of them don’t need the money badly enough to put in 40 or 50 hours a week. They live at home. They’ve got school and practice and all the things young people should have. That’s not a criticism. What a small operation needs is workers who want full-time hours and a steady paycheck. Nearly one-fourth of all US crop workers are employed in horticulture, according to the National Agriculture Workers Survey. (Read more . . .)

Skip the B.S.

“Collective Shame: The Holocaust,” By Dr. Skip Eisiminger, aka The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—Hubris—September/October 2026—For two and a half years (1961—1963) as a US Army ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) operator stationed on “gallows hill,” near Bahrdorf, West Germany, just two kilometers from the old East-West German border, I logged the “Big Mesh” radar operating most hours of the day and night at the Russian army’s Gardelegen military compound The town of Gardelegen was only 30 miles from our company’s Army Security Agency (ASA) site, so its radar was an “easy blip to scarf.” For the uninitiated, that means it was an easy signal to find, record, and analyze on magnetic tape which was then forwarded to the National Security Agency to be further analyzed along with thousands of other recordings from dozens of other Cold War listening posts on the land, sea, and in the air around the world. If the Gardelegen radar and dozens of other regulars were “down,” the Russians and East Germans were up to something—like building a wall in Berlin. In a nutshell, the ASA was reading the enemy’s mail that percolated through the rusting Iron Curtain between 1947 and 1991. There would be no “brewski with a Russki” on my watch. (Read more . . .)

Words & Wonder

“An Exceptional Cat: My Jenny Year,” By Kathryn E. Livingston

BOGOTA New Jersey—(Hubris)—September/October 2026—This year I fell in love. Not with a man, woman, child, or place. With a cat, an adorable Siberian cat that I was babysitting for more than a year for my son while an extensive renovation took place on his house. During this year, I officially joined the ranks of the crazy cat ladies (yo, Taylor!). But what does one do when the cat is gone? Is it because of this damn crazy world that we get so attached? Yoga teaches nonattachment but, after 20-some years of practice, I’ve not come close. Although I knew she was on loan, I confess that I became glued to the cat and as much as I detested being awakened by her pitiful meow at 5:30 a.m. I arose almost joyfully, tromped downstairs, administered her pets, and served her food. (She is a picky cat goddess preferring the priciest brands as well as superior cat grass purchased at Whole Foods; in NJ a lawmaker has introduced a pet tax credit and after a year of feeding Jenny I believe this makes good sense, as does New York City Mayor Mamdani’s opening of a pet food pantry program.) I viewed my role as cat mother just as I had my role as mother to three sons; I embraced it without malice despite the years (nay, decades) of sacrifice and exhaustion. (Read more . . .)

On the Other Hand

“Through the Lens of Poetry: The Problem of Humans,” By Anita Sullivan

EUGENE Oregon—(Hubris)—September/October 2026—Much soul-searching is taking place in these historically difficult times, some of it private, but some through the enormous and complicated sieve of the collective unconscious. We feel one another’s pain, enough so that once again we find ourselves re-visiting the perennial “Problem of Humans,” and once again hoping for the possibility to see it in a new light. The light of Poetry, for example, especially its ability to stimulate visionary thinking. Poetry is vastly under-rated, under-utilized and misunderstood in the world we have mostly inhabited as rude guests for some 250,000 years. Our inconsiderate behavior has sometimes been so gauche and ignorant that I wonder if that in itself is part of a Larger Plan yet invisible to us. Does the Earth benefit from humans wreaking havoc upon its stately code of reciprocities? In many origin myths, some kind of original sin or fatal flaw is part of the basic nature of homo sapiens right from the start, as if the world were gleefully founded upon an error—which should in itself be logically impossible. (Read more . . .)