The war and the wish, held in one hand

On July 7 the single most magnetic thing on the global feed is Tanabata — millions writing wishes on paper strips and hanging them on bamboo for the star festival. In the same twenty-four hours: a US–Iran war, a funeral of millions, strikes on Kyiv, a missile from the deep, a nation dark. This is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is an epoch marker, and we cannot contain it — a species that has built a nervous system large enough to *witness* every catastrophe on Earth simultaneously, and d ...