From the Publishing-Editor of Hubris: Our September/October 2026 double issue opens with David Havird’s magisterial review of Don Schofield’s From the Cyclops Cave: A Braided Memoir, and follows on with eight poems by the American/Greek poet himself, inspired by The Odyssey. Schofield states, “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 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.” Greek/Australian Dean Kalimniou continues the dialogue with Homer (Clement of Alexandria chiming in). From Melbourne, he writes: “Homer is everywhere in St. Clement’s writings. The question 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.’” Two columns from the Hubris Archives come next, the first, by Culinary Editor Diana Farr Louis, relates the delicious history of her Prospero’s Kitchen: Island Cooking of Greece. Louis is followed by William A. Balk, Jr., with his “A Feast for Any Season,” an appreciation of essential culinary texts and their authors. Dr. Jason Page writes after completing a contemporary odyssey: the post-graduation trip undertaken with his daughter K. from Homer, New York to San Francisco and back. Poetry Editor Claire Bateman then introduces us to the poetry of Gilbert Allen. South Carolina horticulturist and award-winning garden designer Jenks Farmer decries the mistreatment of undocumented crop workers, on whose hard labor we all, in this country, depend. Dr. Skip Eisiminger, grandson and husband of German immigrants, writes of collective shame and The Holocaust. Kathryn E. Livingston contributes an appreciation of one very particular cat. And we close with another Archival column by Anita Sullivan, whose profundity I miss daily, and who writes, here: “I like to think we human beings carry inside us—like a sort of Original Virtue—a capacity for the raw metaphor that underlies everything. And metaphor is primary (in a strange mathematics of twos and threes). It is the final and the first, the breakaway, the Form that emerges of its own accord out of tendency, out of strange attractiveness, out of whim.”

Our September/October 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 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 Gilbert 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 . . .)

 

Our July/August 2026 Issue

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 . . .)