From the Publishing-Editor of Hubris: Publication, even of online -zines, now lags far, far behind events happening in real time. As I write this, I know that when this issue goes live, Trump’s ill-begotten, lunatic War of Choice (like his ballroom bunker and the Republicans’ steady reenactment of the Civil War—their hope, a different outcome) will be in yet another stage than it is today, and the foreseeable repercussions for the planet, and all its occupants—genocide, famine, mass displacement, possible nuclear holocaust—will loom even larger on our shared horizon than they do now. But despite our dismay in the face of current events, I insist that we step aside, for just a moment, and attend to a rare visitation from perhaps my favorite author (Dr. William Ramp) with his book review of a new work by another favorite author, A. E. Stallings. As a binational American-Greek, I have followed the saga of The Parthenon Marbles from my childhood in Athens and on, and Stallings’ book, Frieze Frame: How poets, painters, and their friends framed the debate around Elgin and the marbles of the Parthenon breaks new ground in the ongoing tug-of-war-by-other-means over their disposition. After this opening salvo, our June issue continues with a short update by Dr. Guy McPherson addressing the supply chain disruption set in motion by Trump’s war. (If the timeline changes, I’m here, virtually, to update Guy’s piece. What I am not able to do, analogly, is to escape or even prepare for what is coming.) Dr. Jason Page follows with a cogent review of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’ If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, and then, I promise you, our tone lifts. Skip Eisiminger, aka Our Resident Wordspinner, offers us a bouquet of light verse; and Michael Tallon remembers poet-aviator John Gillespie Magee, Jr. From Australia, poet Janet Kenny reviews My Family and “Them Languages”: A Multilingual Life, by Aline P’nina Tayar. Then, New Contributor Laurence O’ Dwyer of Ireland (and exotic elsewhere), introduced to us last month by Poetry Editor Claire Bateman (see “The Poetry of Laurence O’ Dwyer”), contributes a first-person prose essay filed from Rome, where he has gone in search of an elusive relative. We close with an archival column by William A. Balk, Jr., who recalls indelible summers in Beaufort, South Carolina (and Hoppin’ John Martin Taylor’s Frogmore Stew).

Our June Home Page Artist, Massachusetts-based Emma Kohlmann, grew up in The Bronx and performed as a dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater prior to earning a BA from Hampshire College, where she studied philosophy and feminist theory. In a 2018 interview with Amadeus Magazine, Kohlmann discussed the very personal nature of her artwork, citing the liberal ideas and activism of Western Massachusetts as major influences. Her paintings embody a contemporary feminine mythology through the media of ink and watercolor, wherein elements from the natural world intersect with enigmatic faces and figures. Her “landscape” is a profoundly introspective one, marked by deeply saturated color and evoking dreamlike and surreal states of being. Kohlmann has participated in many solo and group shows, both in the US and internationally. In 2020, she illustrated six articles in succession for Vogue Magazine. Follow Kohlmann on her website and on Instagram; explore her picture book here and purchase Emma Kohlmann: Watercolors through Anthology Books; listen to an interview with the artist regarding her collaboration with Hay here; and buy her original works through V1 Gallery here and Artsy here.

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 . . .)

Our May 2026 Issue

Speculative Friction

“The Poetry of Laurence O’Dwyer,” By Claire Bateman, Poetry Editor

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—May 2026—Laurence O’Dwyer has published four collections of poetry; Photosynthesis (Templar, 2025), Catalan Butterflies (Templar, 2022), The Lighthouse Journal (Templar, 2020), and Tractography (Templar, 2018). His awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Prize, the Yeovil Poetry Prize, the AUB International Poetry Prize, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Project Award and a Hennessy New Irish Writing Award. He has received a major bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland and fellowships from MacDowell, the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Trust, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He holds a doctorate in neuroscience (“in paradigms of memory formation”) from Trinity College Dublin. O’Dwyer writes: “Recently I’ve become fascinated by the way mathematicians talk about discovering new mathematical landscapes. They can often be quite bad at explaining their ideas which in itself can be endearing. (Read more . . .)

Plant People

“Learning to Love Pearl Fryar & His Plant Sculptures,” By Jenks Farmer

COLUMBIA South Carolina—(Hubris)—May 2026—I was a freshly minted horticulture graduate in 1999, newly hired to build a major botanical garden at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia. My colleague Porter and I had made it our mission to get to know every good gardener hidden in the small towns across South Carolina—to learn their plants and country ways, and to spread the word about what we were building. We drove backroads on Saturday mornings, itineraries mostly set up by Porter, looking for the real horticultural history of the state. Not the grand plantation gardens. The other kind. We were kind of lost, way out in the Pee Dee, so I turned the zebra van down the road Porter suggested. “I think that man named Pearl lives down there,” he said. Young, smug, refined-garden-loving me thought this was going to be a waste of time. The tar and gravel road came to what passed for a subdivision in the rural South—a single lane, dead-end road with about eight houses ending in a farm field. (Read more . . .)

Wing + Prayer

“Lola & Her Mother Hen: Luke 13: 31-35,” By The Rev. Robin White

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—May 2026—Let me tell you a story about a mother hen. My beloved friend Chris lives in Ithaca, New York, where she has worked, for years, at the Farm Sanctuary in nearby Watkins Glen. One day, visiting a local feed and farm store during their “spring chick days,” she just had to have a look. Among the 13 little puffs of chick magic in a wire-bottomed cage, Chris was alarmed to see that one of the baker’s dozen was face down and very clearly not doing well. Chris asked to be given the fledgling so she could take him to the Cornell Vet school, but there even the amazing Dr. Ricardo de Matos wasn’t able to save the chick, and instead humanely euthanized the little being. Chris then went right back to the store to purchase the chicks that remained, just six. And so began her journey of raising bantam chickens . . . in her spare bedroom. (Read more . . .)

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

“Storytellers Who Changed My Life,” By Diana Farr Louis

ATHENS Greece—(Hubris)—May 2026—Storytellers have always won my admiration and awe. While I think the world can be divided between talkers and listeners, the men and women who can really hold our attention, spellbind us with their words and tales, are few in number. Naturally, there are plenty of people who fancy themselves as “the life of the party” and who drone on in extraordinary detail about their families, jobs, or opinions until our minds grow numb. But a real storyteller knows exactly how much information to give, how to pace it, how to keep you interested, and when to stop. One reason I admired them so much initially is that I was painfully shy as a child and later as an adolescent. I didn’t much like engaging with people and sought refuge in books. The printed word and world were so much safer. The first person who enchanted me with her well-spun stories was my stepmother, Betsy, who arrived in my life when I was eight, four years after my own mother had died. (Read more . . .)

Imagination’s Favors

“War, Huh, Yeah, What Is It Good For?” By Don Schofield

THESSALONIKI & ATHENS Greece—(Hubris)—May 2025—A few facts, historical and personal: I came to political awareness in the 1970s, in my university years, at the height of the Vietnam War. That’s also when I turned to writing poetry. Iran makes the 29th country the US has either bombed or invaded since 1949, the year I was born. Some, like Iran, more than once. According to Bunk History, “From 1965 to 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, making it the largest aerial bombardment in history.” I didn’t go to Vietnam. At 17 (1967), because I got caught stealing a pick-up truck, the court ordered me to enlist in the Army. I would’ve arrived in Vietnam just in time for the Tet offensive (January 30-31, 1968). But, because of my poor eyesight (20/400), I failed my physical and was classified 4F. Since 1980, the year I moved to Greece, there has been no single year in which the US and/or Israel has not been involved in Middle East military conflicts—bloodshed that frequently impacted friends, colleagues, and students of mine, many of whom are (were) from the countries involved. (Read more . . .)

Close Encounters

“Brother Angelico’s the Man,” By David Havird

SHREVEPORT Louisiana—(Hubris)—May 2026—There was at the far end of the gallery in the Palazzo Strozzi a vibrant, monumental altarpiece depicting Christ’s descent from the cross, but it had already drawn a crowd—it was Saturday, January 17; everyone there had a timed ticket for 10:00—and so my eyes, if not also my wife’s, turned to a smaller but no less vivid painting on the left-hand wall, an altarpiece depicting The Annunciation. Fewer than four months earlier we had given Florence, my wife and I, one and a half days at either end of ten days in Italy (a week of which we spent in the Tuscan countryside). Banners featuring a blond, rose-cheeked Madonna with a placid expression, clad in a blue and gold hooded mantle and reddish shift, her right hand gesturing deferentially toward her similarly blond, curly-haired child-man (a detail, as it turned out, of the Franciscan Triptych, an altarpiece by Fra Angelico)—these hung, without our paying much attention to them, from a massive structure of brownish rusticated stone, the Strozzi palace, a few minutes’ walk from the Duomo. (Read more . . .)

The Hubris Review

“Human Sintering & The Theory of Water,” By Dr. William Ramp

LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA Canada—(Hubris)—May 2026—The text that follows here was sent to me by my editor, Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, in the spring of 2018, eerily coincident with a time in which I fell from a giddy height into deep self-recrimination in the space of a mere three weeks. It’s an excerpt from Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, which Boleman-Herring had admonished all of us here at Hubris to read back then. In a single paragraph, Berry distills two key texts. One, is Dante’s “Inferno,” central to the Roman Catholic tradition, though not in the canon of the Doctores ecclesiae. Its narrative guide is Virgil; for American settlers, long the first among classical writers. The other is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, second only to the Bible, and perhaps the Westminster Catechism or the Psalms and Paraphrases, on the spartan bookshelves of those who armed themselves to settle and make manifest a Protestant fortress in North America. Berry returns to these texts to have a word with the interior drama of the American collective psyche, formed in equal parts of righteousness and fortitude, sin and punishment, and now also disappointment, rage and contempt. (Read more . . .)

Words & Wonder

“Flower Power,” By Kathryn E. Livingston

BOGOTA New Jersey—(Hubris)—May 2026—Every year I eagerly await the appearance of flowers in my backyard. A cluster of brilliant blue Siberian squill is always the first, in late March—I didn’t plant it, and it was years before I figured out what it is—followed by purple and white crocuses and a few jonquils, daffodils, and hyacinths. A little later, in April, the tulips, lilacs, and pear trees blossom. One can’t rush them; they come at their own pace. But it was harder this year to patiently tap my foot in anticipation of these colorful saviors because—despite the welcome light of Spring—the world feels so dark.  Speaking of flowers, when I drive by (or join) the protestors these days I’m reminded of the “flower power” years of my youth. In the 60s when it began all we claimed to want was love and peace. (Indeed, with nary a thought as to how we would survive financially, I married a man who played his clarinet on Manhattan street corners.) (Read more . . .)

Diatribe/North

“Dinocrates & Mount Rushmore,” By Dean Kalimniou

MELBOURNE Australia—(Hubris)—May 2026—“Somewhere in America  . . . backbone of the continent, removed from succeeding, selfish, coveting civilisations and out of the path of greed, an acre or two of stone should bear witness, carrying likeness, a few precious words pressed together, an appraisal of our civilisation, telling of the things we tried to do, cut so high, near the stars, it wouldn’t pay to pull them down for lesser purposes.” Thus mused Gutzon Borglum, the American sculptor who went on to deface the sacred Lakota Sioux site of Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, or “The Six Grandfathers,” with the iconic likenesses of four American presidents. For him, the gargantuan profiles represented the quintessence of American civilization. Etched indelibly upon the lofty heights, far removed from the corruptive and corrosive influences of daily life, they were to remain, for evermore, an imperative, set in stone, for subsequent Americans to follow. (Read more . . .)

Won Over by Reality

“Timecard Humor,” By Tim Bayer, Emeritus Editor

FAIRPORT New York—(Hubris)—May 2026—At my place of work, a “timecard reminder” lands in all our inboxes at the end of each week. Rather than send out the same, flat, “please submit your timecard,” prompt, our administrator includes images to liven up the message—such as the Ron Burgundy reminder, or images submitted by employees. I’ve contribute a few of my own pictures which reflect my idiosyncratic take on timecard-appropriate inspirational messages.  Here’s the first picture to which I added text and sent on to the timecard administrator. This picture above was taken when Emily and I were hiking the Skyline Trail at Mt. Rainier. The Skyline Trial has many beautiful spots where hikers stop to take a break. The chipmunks have learned that hikers carry nuts, granola bars, trail mix and other snacks—and that dropped food morsels may be found near the humans. Over time, the chipmunks have become used to people and have gotten more bold. (Read more . . .)