From the Publishing-Editor of Hubris: Our July/August 2026 double issue opens with a review-via-interview by Poetry Editor Claire Bateman of  former Hubris Contributor Emily Hipchen, author of Animal Husbandry: Stories of Relinquishment. Hipchen, editor of Adoption Studies, deals with adoption, in all its iterations and considering all its ramifications in her scholarly work (see her essay, “Adoption Geometries”), but widens her focus in the stories of Animal Husbandry to deal with relinquishment in a multitude of other settings. Bateman’s discussion with Hipchen is essential reading for all of us loving, losing, and living on (despite losing) in what Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell termed “the House of Love.” We follow with seven poignant love letters: Diana Farr Louis recounts a summer of love (and loss) in Greece; Skip Eisiminger muses on happy marriage (and divorce); Dr. Jason Page reminisces on the lost pleasures of youthful mischief; Kathryn Livingston writes fondly of, yes, the Bronx; poet Janet Kenny shares memories of 2oth-century Italy; Jenks Farmer recalls his beloved Rhodesian Redneck, Jack; and David Havird writes of a calico cat named Meeskite. Dean Kalimniou reviews Christopher Nolan’s new film, The Odyssey. Dr. Guy McPherson calls our attention to the wingèd chariot always at our backs, climate change. And last, in this issue, comes the first chapter of the late Paul Broneer’s unpublished manuscript, Working Watercraft of The Levant, with an Introduction by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring.

Our July/August Home Page Artist, Sally Muir, is based in Bath, UK and is a prodigious portrait painter of dogs. Other subjects include humans and landscapes, as well as the occasional rodent and bird. For years, Muir focused on her knitwear business, Muir & Osborne, as both a designer and author. Muir and her partner, Joanna Osborne, have published seven knitting pattern books that include Pet Heaven, The Animal Accessory Bible, Best in Show, Knit Your Own Dog, (also Cat, Pet, Zoo, Farm and Dinosaur) and the children’s book Patch’s Grand Dog Show. Muir returned to university as a mature student with a concentration on Fine Art. Children’s portraits gave way to dog portraits as is evidenced in her 365 Facebook dog-fest “A Dog A Day.” (Muir’s A Dog A Day book—based on the series, with 365 artworks of dogs in all shapes, sizes, breeds, and mixes—is widely available through online vendors.) True to her dog-loving nature, Muir owns two Whippets, Lily and Peggy. “Lily is 14 and very devoted to me while Peggy is seven years old and not that bothered about me,” says Muir. But she adds, “They are both very beautiful, as all Whippets are.” Her most memorable subjects are located in Spain. “I love painting the Galgos, Spanish hunting dogs who are very badly treated,” says Muir “I’ve visited a rescue in Spain called Galgos del Sol several times, and they are wonderful dogs, totally trusting, wanting to participate in everything!” She’s incredibly endeared by their “trying to eat your pencils and drink your painting water.” Says Muir, “They just love being with you. And they are the most gorgeous dogs to paint!” Anthropologie, the clothing and décor store, has commissioned Muir to create dishes, pillows, wallpaper, and tea towels. A recipient of many awards, Muir is represented by Cricket Fine Art London and Church Gate Gallery. Enter her website here, and her online shop here. To view a video of Muir at work, go here.

The Hubris Interview

“Emily Hipchen’s Animal Husbandry: Stories of Relinquishment,” By Claire Bateman, Poetry Editor

GREENVILLE South Carolina—Hubris—July/August 2026—Emily Hipchen’s books are deeply immersive reading encounters. Each takes a different and distinct approach to complex questions inherent in the experience of loss, grief, adoption, and family bonding; Animal Husbandry, the most recent book, both deepens these questions and expands the exploration of various kinds of relinquishment in vivid and surprising ways as she portrays her interactions with and observations of the animal world (with a porous boundary between humans, animals, and place) and tells the story of her marriage, her husband’s death, and experiences such as the recovery of her singing voice and reuniting with her biological parents. The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader, which Hipchen compiled as editor of Adoption & Culture, the journal of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture, is a pedagogical Humanities-based interdisciplinary compilation of scholarly excerpts that investigate how adoption and other forms of alternative family making intersect with race, history, culture, and identity. (Read more . . .)

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

“The Funeral That Wasn’t,” By Diana Farr Louis

ATHENS Greece—Hubris—July/August 2026—Last summer, my husband’s last, we were able to enjoy two and half months in our island home on Andros thanks to an unlikely geriatric ménage à trois: Harilaos aka Joy of the People was 100, our friend, Michael Sisk, sometimes referred to as “young Michael” because he was merely 90, and me, half a decade younger. Michael Sisk, an American who had dedicated his life to producing operas and festivals in Athens and other parts of Greece, Paris, the US, and Egypt, had no family and a meager pension. But he thought of us as family and, on July 8, 2024, landed on my son’s sofa “for a few days,” hoping to organize an opera festival in the ancient theater of Butrint, Albania (not far from the controversial, proposed Kushner resort). The first opera was to be Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas since, according to myth, Aeneas founded Butrint on his way back from Troy to Italy. A splendid idea, it was obviously a pipe dream, given his age, Trump’s slashing of aid to just about every organization that did not benefit him personally, and the state of the theater itself. (Read more . . .)

Skip the B.S.

“Twinkles in the Wrinkles: Divorce & Marriage,” By Dr. Skip Eisiminger, aka The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—Hubris—July/August 2026—Imagine some new assistant rabbi serving in an orthodox temple assigned to preach on Deuteronomy 22:13-19. If you’ve forgotten how the Mosaic anecdote goes, let me refresh your memory. An Israelite “man” marries a nubile “girl” and soon decides he’s tired of her, so he accuses her of marrying him under false pretenses: she claimed to be a virgin but wasn’t. The girl’s parents, perhaps suspecting something like this might happen, have preserved the wedding-night sheets, and they bring these “smoking guns,” to use a modern phrase, to prove to the court that their daughter wasn’t lying. Against all odds, the court decides in her favor, assigns someone to whip the slanderer, fines him 100 silver shekels, and orders him to take his wife back as if nothing has happened. Jesus would later allow a divorce under some narrow circumstances, but in this case, perhaps a thousand years before the Old Testament was “revised,” the lying husband is told he can “never divorce her as long as he lives.” (My emphasis.) (Read more . . .)

Off the Page

“Ding Dong Ditch: A Love Letter to Mischief in a Surveillance State,” By Dr. Jason Page

HOMER New York—(Hubris)—July/August 2026—The nervy walk up the garden path, friends waiting by the gate behind you, coiled like springs. You raise your hand to the doorbell, extend your finger, heart hammering, and push. The bell barely registers, muffled and distant, as though heard underwater. Far louder is the slap of your own feet already beating pavement, carrying you back out to the sidewalk and into the street. Your friends are 20 yards ahead, screaming with laughter. Behind you, the yells of your victim ring out into the street, but it’s too late for them. You’re already in the wind. If you grew up in the latter half of the 20th century, you almost certainly know this feeling. The prank goes by many names, we called it Cherry Knocking where I grew up in England, though it answers to a dozen variations depending on which end of the country you’re from, but its appeal has always been the same: a small, gleeful inversion of the adult world, available to any child bold enough to push a button. What has changed is not the prank. It is the world waiting on the other side of the door. (Read more . . .)

Words & Wonder

“On the Avenue,” By Kathryn E. Livingston

THE BRONX New York—(Hubris)—July/August 2026—The Bronx, as perhaps you know, is an exciting place. The streets teem with human beings of all shapes and kinds, from all over the world. Cars double-park everywhere. Traffic is a horror. But there is a vibrancy, a pulsing, that reminds me of Beethoven’s frenetic Grosse Fugue, Op. 133. There is no getting away from it or around it; the Bronx is a phenomenon, and it is fully alive. This busy borough (pop 1.4 million) is approximately ten miles from the mile-square New Jersey town—which doesn’t possess a single high-rise—in which I reside. My town is close to Manhattan as well. With a 25-minute bus ride from my 1906 bungalow to the Port Authority, we live in a perfect location for a musician-and-writer couple seeking a small-town feel for raising three kids, with quick and easy access to Lincoln Center. I knew nothing about The Bronx, a place I’ve always ignored or feared (A Bronx Tale anyone?), a rough area except for the zoo (do monkeys fight?), and the botanical gardens. (Read more . . .)

Singing & Drowning

“Italian Meanderings,” By Janet Kenny

POINT VERNON Australia—(Hubris)—July/August 2026—In summer, the narrow lanes of Venice are crowded with tourists.  When I was there, the other tourists seemed mainly to be American. The lanes were crammed with tiny shops filled with glass swans and fully rigged sailing ships balanced on glass shelves. This incident involving an American tourist actually happened: Commedia dell’arte/Splish tinkle! Eek! a woman’s shriek./Klish klash—the sound of breaking glass./An errant pigeon caused the farce./(Venetian glass shops fear to speak/of pigeons.) The signora’s cries/increase the panic of this bird./Musique concrète becomes absurd./Her top notes only energize/the manic fowl’s destructive flight./“Keep still!” A military man/stands in the door. “I know I can/remove the pigeon.” See, a knight/in shining armor, perfect, brave/and pure of heart, intent to catch/the monster that has met its match./His gaze is confident and grave./He holds his jacket ready, stalks,/then hurls the coat which smashes all/remaining kitsch against the wall/as out the door the pigeon walks. (Read more . . .)

Plant People

“Jack’s Big Adventure,” By Jenks Farmer

COLUMBIA South Carolina—(Hubris)—July/August 2026—Melrose Heights was funky and cheap back in the early 90s. The little house Pat and I bought on Maple Street became a de facto crash-pad for wanderers. Plant lovers of all ilk showed up, curious about the ongoing construction of a big botanical garden in small-town Columbia. We bought an eight-foot-long, gold, flame-stitch 70s couch from an old Jewish couple’s condo sale, 50 bucks, to accommodate the drop-ins. For a while, a photojournalist from California kept the back room. Jack was always there. Drag queens, Mexican migrants, an international rock climber, everyone who came through loved Jack. I traveled a lot, myself, seeking new plants for garden construction by taking $29 Air South flights to wherever they went in Florida. I’d rent a truck and load up with plants. The new migration of Mexican men into South Carolina was in full swing, so Pat was often down in Mexico reporting for The State. (Read more . . .)

Close Encounters

“Home With a Cat,” By David Havird

SHREVEPORT Louisiana—(Hubris)—July/August—2026—Mostly black, but with some white and tan and a smudge of orange on her forehead, she was the most interesting looking of the kittens—also the shyest. “Meeskite,” Yiddish for “a face that could stop a clock,” as we knew from the song in “Cabaret,” became her name. It was during the pandemic that I began remembering—not that I’d forgotten—our one cat thanks to some photos not of her nor even from that early time in our life, but rather of a fountain in a mountainside village on Crete, photos taken almost 20 years later, by which time we had a seven-year-old daughter. Homebound by the pandemic and able to travel only in albums that pictured us away, I wound up if not home, where home for us began to be. We were right out of college, newlyweds at 22, and a job was taking us away from our home state, away from the city where I’d grown up, Columbia, South Carolina, where both of us had gone to college—a six-hour drive away to a small North Florida town that neither of us had heard of: Palatka. (Read more . . .)

The Hubris Review

“Odious Odysseys: Reinventing Homer,” By Dean Kalimniou

MELBOURNE Australia (Hubris)—July/August 2026—For centuries, the West has returned obsessively to Homer in moments of civilizational uncertainty. Renaissance princes, Victorian imperialists, German romantics, American filmmakers, and modern strategists have repeatedly ransacked the Homeric world in search of reflections of their own anxieties, ambitions, and ideals. It seems that every age has remade Greece in its own image. Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming The Odyssey appears poised to continue this long tradition through a translation of Homer into the emotional grammar of contemporary Anglo-American culture: spectacle, trauma, masculine isolation, endurance, and the solitary individual wandering through a fractured world in search of home. No civilization encounters antiquity innocently or recovers it in some pure historical form. Epics survive precisely because successive civilizations conscript them into their own moral and psychological dramas. (Read more . . .)

Planetary Hospice

“Burning Up at Both Ends,” By Dr. Guy McPherson

BELLOWS FALLS Vermont—(Hubris)—July/August 2026—I have frequently spoken and written about the Arctic Ocean as the planetary air conditioner. Recently, I have been reporting on the importance of Antarctica in regulating this planet’s temperature. It has become clear that the temperature of both poles is critical to the maintenance of habitat for all species on Earth. An article in The Conversation, titled How Antarctica warmed by 28°C in the depths of winter—and what it signals for the decades ahead. Published on 24 April 2026, the piece includes an embedded link to a peer-reviewed, open-access paper in the renowned Nature series of peer-reviewed publications. I’ll refer to this paper later. The first five paragraphs of the article in The Conversation provide abundant information: In the middle of the Antarctic winter, during months of darkness when temperatures often dip below −30°C, the continent warmed dramatically. In July and August 2024, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica rose by up to 28°C above average and stayed high for more than two weeks. (Read more . . .)

The Hubris Book Excerpt

“Paul Broneer’s Working Watercraft of The Levant, Chapter 1,” By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—July/August 2026—This month, I take up one of three tasks I have put off for far too long, imagining that, in my final decades, I would have the leisure to devote to digitizing as yet unpublished works by Philhellenic friends who have predeceased me: Kevin Andrews, Kimon Friar, and Paul Theodore Broneer. At 74, however, I find myself busier than ever “among the living.” But, still, time’s wingèd chariot . . . The author of the original, heretofore unpublished manuscript which I will be “publishing in its first iteration” here in Hubris, chapter by chapter, over the course of the coming months—in the hope that, by fixing it in digital form now, it will be available for readers, scholars, and serious publishers going forward—was written by Paul Theodore Broneer (1929-), of Ancient Corinth. (One chapter, along with a Glossary and Brief Lexicon, I published in Athens in the spring of 1990 in Volume I, Number 1 of The Southeastern Review: A Quarterly Journal of the Humanities in the Southeastern Mediterranean.) (Read more . . .)

Our June 2026 Issue

The Hubris Review

“A. E. Stallings’ Frieze Frame,” By Dr. William Ramp

LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA Canada—(Hubris)—June 2026—I should note three things quickly before getting to the Parthenon marbles and a review of A. E. Stallings’ new book about them, Frieze Frame. The first two relate to the front and back covers. The third is more lengthy and biographical. The book’s title contains a pun that manages both to be groaningly obvious and delightfully inspired. Stallings argues that the “freezing” of the British Museum’s Parthenon sculptures, both in their Duveen Gallery cella and in their capture by a certain kind of art discourse, has had consequences both for our understanding of classical Greek statuary and of terms like “civilization.” The somewhat more lamentable back-cover blurb characterizes the book’s contents as “deliciously gossipy.” I suppose it’s a fair label: Stallings does include a gourmet supply of anecdote in Frieze Frame, and the one about Boris Johnson in his university days is not to be missed. (Read more . . .)

Planetary Hospice

“The Unintended but Inevitable Famine of 2026,” By Dr. Guy McPherson

BELLOWS FALLS Vermont—(Hubris)—June 2026—I have mentioned many different means by which we can bring about the extinction of our species. This will almost certainly lead to the loss of all life on Earth because of the rapid rate of environmental change in our wake. An article at HR News adds another means of extinction for our species. Titled “Experts Warn Global Mass Starvation is Coming By Summer,” the article was published on 28 March 2026. The subhead reads “Lack of Oil, Diesel and Fertilizer As the US War of Aggression on Iran Has No End in Sight.” The first two paragraphs of the story at HR News provide a daunting overview: “On March 27, 2026, Stanislav Krapivnik — a former US Army officer, supply chain executive, and military-political analyst now based in Russia — gave his assessment of two converging crises: an attack on a key Russian position on the Baltic coast, and what he describes as a permanent or near-permanent collapse of Gulf energy infrastructure. (Read more . . .)

The Hubris Review

“If Anyone Builds It,” By Dr. Jason Page

HOMER New York—(Hubris)—June 2026—I should be transparent about the lens through which I read this book. Over the past three years I have spent increasing amounts of time using, learning about, educating on, and helping to shape policy around AI. I have used it in my research, in my writing, and in building tools for my students. I have even used it to co-create a play (See: Fakespeare Minus the Daddy Issues). I am not, in other words, a skeptic reading from the outside. I believe this technology has genuine potential to improve society, and I have built enough of my professional practice around it to have skin in the game. That investment is precisely what makes Yudkowsky and Soares’s argument land with particular force. It is one thing to be warned away from something you were never drawn to. It is another to find a compelling case that the thing you have come to rely on, and in many ways champion, may be moving toward consequences that no amount of good intention can redirect. Like so many developments before it, I fear that greed and malice will prove more consequential in the next era of AI than compassion and social good. This book made that fear harder to dismiss. (Read more . . .)

Skip the B.S.

“Rhythmic Sense: Light Verse,” By Dr. Skip Eisiminger, aka The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—Hubris—June 2026—After publishing prose for over a decade in Hubris, I’ve decided to take the road not previously taken in these pages—verse. As a versifier, I’m aware that rime does not pay; as a recovering Presbyterian, my firmest belief is in the illusion of free will; as an essayist, I know it’s not the eloquence but the evidence; as a critic, I assume the best until I know otherwise; as a linguist, I pride myself on being an ento-etymologist (a debugger of words); as a teacher, I have discovered that if I make the material seductive, the students will teach themselves; as an employee, I usually complete the worst first; as a husband, I come to the table with something to share, and as a father and grandfather, I’m a carpet bonder. Gradually, I’ve come to understand the virtue of giving more and expecting less, and that while curiosity did kill the cat, I hope I have several more lives. In my 42 years as a teacher at Clemson University, I taught over 9,000 students in 29 different courses. (Read more . . .)

Fairly Unbalanced

“Per Ardua Ad Astra,” By Michael Tallon

ANTIGUA Guatemala—(Hubris)—June 2026—Over eight bloody and awful years of Ronald Reagan, the only time I had an ounce of respect for the man was in the terrible aftermath of the Challenger explosion when he quoted John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a poet and aviator from the middle of the 20th Century. Magee was born in China to missionary parents in 1922. His father was from the States, and his mother was British. Through his mother’s lineage, he was able to join the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1939, with the intention to fight with the Allies in World War Two, and was sent to England for pilot training. Tragically, at 19, he was killed on a practice run before seeing action. Thankfully, for the world of letters, shortly before he died, he sent a copy of this poem to his mother, and she saw that it was published posthumously. Now it lives, tenderly, in the back of a million minds to be recalled when some few of us strive upward into the light as did the crew of Artemis II. (Read more . . .)

The Hubris Review

“Aline P’nina Tayar’s Lingua Franca,” By Janet Kenny

POINT VERNON Australia—(Hubris)—June 2026—I, the reviewer, am not Jewish and yet Jewish people have influenced and enriched my life. I have a sort of love affair with aspects of being Jewish. My own family was inflexibly British-colonial in character, and I was trained to regard Britishness as the apex of human development. During the World War Two, I felt proud to be part of all the pink territories on the map that my father had affixed to the wall of the dining room. My Bohemian aunt was a respected teacher and poet and the books she gave me emphasized the importance of being English. In wartime New Zealand, we never heard a foreign language apart from some mispronounced Maori names and a couple of Māori songs sung in the same Esperanto as the French songs we also sang at school. France was never mentioned. It was only when I escaped to art school that I encountered, on my first day in the women’s university hostel, the most beautiful and exotic human I had ever met. (Read more . . .)

On a Hiding to Nothing

“A Meeting in Rome,” By Laurence O’ Dwyer

IRELAND—(Hubris)—June 2026—“My uncle on my father’s side, was a priest. He was the head of the clan. He bussed people to the west of Ireland to see moving statues. He loved the paddywhackery of Irish Catholicism; the pomp and the superstition. He had been a missionary in Peru where I was told that he had learned Spanish but I found that very hard to believe. The few times I saw Pat and Father Séan together, at weddings or funerals, they looked distinctly uncomfortable in each other’s company. They had nothing to say to each other. Séan belonged to the world of John Charles McQuaid. He would have been a faithful disciple of the man who had clobbered Pat to death, at least professionally speaking, in the early 1970s.” When I first wrote to Father M asking him about my uncle he replied: I was a good friend of Tom’s; we were together in the Priory for many years. But when I followed up with a question about my uncle’s run in with John Charles McQuaid, ruler of Catholic Ireland from 1940 to 1973, he did not reply. (Read more . . .)

Epicurus’ Porch

“Frogmore Stew & The Gold Eagle Tavern,” By William A. Balk, Jr.

BEAUFORT South Carolina—(Hubris)—June 2026—After decades of cosmopolitan life in the nation’s capital, and nearly a decade of watching more than a hundred friends die in the viral plague which left us survivors pained and angry, depleted, exhausted and, finally, facing a future deprived of much of a gifted—and loved —generation, I finally returned in 1990 to the state of my ancestors and the places where I grew up. Beaufort is where our family spent summers. My father recalled his own childhood escapes to Beaufort, when his parents would pile all four boys into their Model A for the hours-long drive, much of the way over still-unpaved highways. The family would stay downtown in the handsome village of Beaufort; and, after the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1935 created the magnificent state park, Hunting Island, long days were spent in the surf and in the maritime forest there, a trip of only a few miles from Beaufort, but which took an hour or more, depending on drawbridges and shrimp boats. (Read more . . .)