#and he's like a real historian if you google his name that's how google define him and he published cool books and all lol | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hemlockyy · 3 years

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And The Saga Continues

By saga I mean me supervising this 'fake RbbSbb' account on twitter because I want to.

also Im going to separate the posts by day, if anything else happens I'll retweet and add it on this one. Tommorow its a separate post.

If you're intrested to see the first bit (two separate days in a post, one in which I found and then kept retweeting what happened after weeks (?) of not checking on it) (! I do reccomend reading the previous one)

so if you're intrested look up the tag #Fake-RbbSbb in my account.

Sooooo as expected our buddy changed his bio to 11, which supports my speculation that it was (obviously) a countdown to Louis' show.

nothing new on the following/pfp/header etc...

They did tweet some things, but I'll touch on that later, first off the likes: It seems they are continuously trying to raise attention towards Rbb (and Rbb only???) being back in two weeks by sending anonymous statements in peoples CCs.

Also they liked this HIV support tweet- and I found that sweet so im also adding it in, because aweareness is key.

aswell as replying back with their usual variation of two emojis:

No sign of Android anywhere, just WebApp™.

Now onto the tweets:

Just like with the 12 they posted yesterday, today they posted an 11. And I got curious to know where abouts they were setting the time to:

If whatever I triod to do here is too complicated (even I dont understand it lmao) basically:

In LA posting time would've been 23:29

In London posting time would've been: 07:29

so if they wanted to (and im speculating this because I did not check) update it on midnight lets say (or close to), then logically the tweet would've come from LA.

Now this thing which then tells us there will be a pattern of when they'll update the countdown

The thing I found weird right, is that they're doing a countdown (supposedly) to Louis' show. So why update on LA time?

Next thing they posted was this:

'Well Meet at the end of the Road' at a first glance you'd guess they're talking about the countdown.

But oh to know who Rudolph Valentino was...

I'll put some intresting quotes I found of him here, you can skip all of this if you want, I'll do a short resume at the end of the indented.

"He was a sex symbol of the 1920s, who was known in Hollywood as the Latin Lover (a title invented for him by Hollywood moguls), The Great Lover, or simply Valentino.[1] His premature death at the age of 31 caused mass hysteria among his fans and further propelled his status as a cultural film icon."

"The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was released in 1921 and became a commercial and critical success" + "For his follow-up film, they forced him into a bit part in a B-film called Uncharted Seas.(1921)" + "Rambova, Mathis, Ivano, and Valentino began work on the Alla Nazimova film Camille.(1921)" + "Valentino's final film for Metro was the Mathis-penned 'The Conquering Power.(1921) "

thats 4 movies in a year!! Talk about overworked- (depending on how long they were)

"After quitting Metro, Valentino took up with Famous Players-Lasky, forerunner of the present-day Paramount Pictures, a studio known for films that were more commercially focused."

"Jesse L. Lasky intended to capitalize on the star power of Valentino, and cast him in a role that solidified his reputation as the "Latin lover"

"In The Sheik (1921), Valentino played the starring role of Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan. The film was a major success and defined not only his career but his image and legacy."

"Famous Players produced four more feature-length films over the next 15 months" + "His leading role in Moran of the Lady Letty(1922) was of a typical Douglas Fairbanks nature" + "Valentino starred alongside Gloria Swanson in Beyond the Rocks(1922)" + "Valentino began work on another Mathis-penned film, Blood and Sand(1922)" + "During his forced break from Rambova, the pair began working separately on the Mathis-penned The Young Rajah(1922)"

15 months 4 movies. and again I will stress the 'capitalize the star power' over there.

Seems too familiar tbh.

"Missing Rambova, Valentino returned to New York after the release of The Young Rajah. They were spotted and followed by reporters constantly."

*cough* *cough* "spotted"

"During this time, Valentino began to contemplate not returning to Famous Players, although Jesse Lasky already had his next picture, The Spanish Cavalier, in preparation. After speaking with Rambova and his lawyer Arthur Butler Graham, Valentino declared a 'one-man strike' against Famous Players.[31]"

About the lawsuit:

"He was also upset over the broken promise of filming Blood and Sand in Spain, and the failure to shoot the next proposed film in either Spain or at least New York. Valentino had hoped while filming in Europe he could see his family, whom he had not seen in 10 years.[27]"

"In September 1922, he refused to accept paychecks from Famous Players until the dispute was solved, although he owed them money" + "Famous Players, in turn, filed suit against him.[33]"

"Valentino did not back down,[33] and Famous Players realized how much they stood to lose." + "the studio tried to settle by upping his salary" + "Variety erroneously announced the salary increase as a "new contract" before news of the lawsuit was released, and Valentino angrily rejected the offer.[31]"

"Valentino went on to claim that artistic control was more of an issue than the money." + "Famous Players made their own public statements deeming him more trouble than he was worth (the divorce, bigamy trials, debts) and that he was temperamental, almost diva-like. They claimed to have done all they could and that they had made him a real star.[33]

"Other studios began courting him." + "However, Famous Players exercised its option to extend his contract, preventing him from accepting any employment other than with the studio." + "Valentino filed an appeal, a portion of which was granted. Although he was still not allowed to work as an actor, he could accept other types of employment.[33]"

Return To The Movies

"Valentino returned to the United States in reply to an offer from Ritz-Carlton Pictures (working through Famous Players)" + "Rambova negotiated a two-picture deal with Famous Players and four pictures for Ritz-Carlton.[37] He accepted, turning down an offer to film an Italian production of Quo Vadis in Italy"

PERSONAL LIFE!!!!

"Valentino once told gossip columnist Louella Parsons that: "The women I love don't love me. The others don't matter". He claims that despite his success as a sex symbol that in his personal love life he never achieved happiness.[62]"

"Valentino impulsively married actress Jean Acker, who was involved with actresses Grace Darmond and Alla Nazimova. Acker became involved with Valentino in part to remove herself from the lesbian love triangle, quickly regretted the marriage, and locked Valentino out of their room on their wedding night."

"From the time he died in 1926 until the 1960s, Valentino's sexuality was not generally questioned in print.[67][68] At least four books, including the notoriously libelous Hollywood Babylon, suggested that he may have been gay despite his marriage to Rambova.[69][70][71][72][73] For some, the marriages to Acker and Rambova, as well as the relationship with Pola Negri, add to the suspicion that Valentino was gay and that these were "lavender marriages."

"Such books gave rise to claims that Valentino had a relationship with Ramón Novarro, despite Novarro stating they barely knew each other." + "These books also gave rise to claims that he may have had relationships with both roommates Paul Ivano and Douglas Gerrad, as well as Norman Kerry, and openly gay French theatre director and poet Jacques Hébertot." + "However, Ivano maintained that it was untrue and both he and Valentino were heterosexual.[24] Biographers Emily Leider and Allan Ellenberger generally agree that he was most likely straight"

like every historian would say: "they were just good friends"

"further supposed evidence that Valentino was gay; documents in the estate of the late author Samuel Steward indicated that Valentino and Steward were sexual partners.[77] However, evidence found in Steward's claim was subsequently found to be false, as Valentino was in New York on the date Steward claimed a sexual encounter occurred in Ohio."

- Via Wikipedia

These are the few quotes from his wekipedia page in which I literally gaped at...

So in short:

Sex Symbol who was an Actor

Got his image enhanced and exploited by his manager.

Constanly Overworked

Relationships used for PR (?)

Thought about leaving his management which led to a 'one man strike' and a lawsuit.

The lawsuit started off because of finantial reasons, but it was revealed it was more because of fucking creative freedom.

Management tried to reason with him, he didn't back down. And they continued to do so before an article of the 'lawsuit' was made public, he didn't accept any.

Management tried to paint Valentino as 'ungrateful' and that they were the reason he was a star.

When other people tried to get Valentino to work with/for them, his management stopped him by "threatening to extend the contract" (?) which prevented him from acting.

His sexuality was never really questioned due to the many relationships with woman he had (one which literally was a lesbian)

Lavender Marriages / PR marriages

After his death, speculation that he dated many men came up.

One even said they did the dEEd, but its impossible because they were both in separate countries duh, right? RIGhT????

The way we can literally compare this with Harry's situation (and maybe Louis' aswell!!!) is literally hurting my mind.

Also adding that @eyupdaisy is helping me a lot, kuddos to her aswell. She found this:

If you search the actual name of the post 'We will meet at the end of the trail' on google, this picture comes up

Which the HT account made a very lovely and subtle connection to it a few days ago

Guess well have to start lowkey monitoring them too? Or maybe just what they interact with the Mr.R acc...

wait- max images reached ;-;

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svartikotturinn · 7 years

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(Reproducing my comment here in its entirety.)

I’ve looked through lots of Nazi Tumblogs for trolling material in my day: you can easily find them if you know what to look for: they don’t tag their posts ‘Nazi’ or ‘Nazism’ or whatever, it’s always stuff like ‘NatSoc’, ‘National Socialism’, ‘1488’, or (if they’re too cowardly to openly say what they subscribe to) ‘traditional/reactionary European’. I think my observations are good story material.

First of all, I’ve found quite a few interesting trends there.

First off, they lie like crazy. They claim that Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote about how he became disillusioned with Africans and said they had the mentality of evil toddlers in African Notebook, that Richard Dawkins wrote about how progressivism not allowing free speech about how humans are naturally classified into races is ‘alarming’ in The Extended Phenotype, and that Taylor Swift has expressed white supremacist ideas, among others: the first two are easily proven false with a simple search on Google Books, the third is obviously false considering she’s good friends with Nicki Minaj. I’ve actually found a post on a Nazi blog that included a quote by Hitler saying, ‘The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.’

Aside from lying like crazy about easily disproven bullshit, they also tend to grossly misread things, either intentionally or because they’re that fucking stupid. One example I’ve seen is an article about a trans woman openly admitting to ‘indoctrinating’ children or whatever, which was posted with a ‘gotcha!’ comment that completely ignored that the article basically said something like ‘I teach kids to be respectful of those who are different, and if you call that indoctrination so be it’. Another article said that legitimizing pædophiles was ‘the next crusade of the left’, completely misunderstanding that the point was about looking at it as an affliction to be remedied rather than a crime in and of itself (as opposed to child molestation). And this is before relying on broken statistics and whatnot, like the time I argued with a Nazi who insisted that California if not the US in general had a non-white majority. Happens all the damn time.

Third thing I noticed was that a lot of their rhetoric had to do with women’s beauty and chastity. ‘NatSoc’ blogs are notoriously rife with pictures of pretty young white women in various states of dress (in traditional European garb) and undress (often with, like, a laurel on their heads or something) in fields and natural scenes and suchlike. (One time I found a blog filled ONLY with pictures like those and jokingly suggested to the admit that he should look into this one chick named Scarlett Johannson; he said, ‘Is this the part where I tell you Ashkenazi Jews are Aryans and you run off with your tail between your legs?’ Apparently, he really took the ‘Neo’ part of ‘Neo-Nazi’ to heart!) The notorious 14 Words (specifically ‘because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth’) are also pretty commonly quoted, as well as horror stories of white women who were abused by Arabs and black men. You never hear about the reverse: extolling the beauty of white men and warning them against going with black women. The truth is, much like the Israeli organization Lehava (who keep talking about women as ‘daughters of kings’, warning against Arabs who seduce Jewish women into their villages and abusing them there), anti-white rhetoric about how white people ‘take [black people’s/Asians’] women’, and the Mongolian Tsagaan Khas (who talk about foreigners making lots of money and taking their women), they see women as some kind of resource they feel entitled to and are terrified of having taken away from them. (Cracked once had an article about a former Neo-Nazi named Frank Meeink who started associating with black inmates, because the Nazis kept talking about his girlfriend being unfaithful; the black inmates congratulated him when she was pregnant. I think that sums it up amazingly.)

Finally, I found out they were a lot more diverse than people give them credit for. Aside from the VERY ‘Neo’-Nazi mentioned above, they vary in terms of economic beliefs (unlike the KKK, who see Socialism as a foreign evil, they are more split on the issue), religious beliefs (i.e. badly interpreted Christianity, badly interpreted paganism, and badly interpreted purely secular ‘science’), and other issues. I’ve even come across a ‘feminist’ blog (NSFW) claiming patriarchy is a Jewish conspiracy, and I’m not entirely sure whether it’s for real or not, and another one saying Nazis and Muslims are natural allies that Jews have set against each other.

I’ve had the most interaction with two particular Nazis on Tumblr.

The first of the two was a Serbian woman. She was an admin on a general anti-SJ blog, which also featured a hardcore Christian who claimed Jews were ‘devil spawns’ or something based on (misquoted) New Testament quotes, an avid fanboy of Assad’s regime (his presence and their defence of Palestinians was justified because apparently ‘Arabs are Aryans’), and other idiots. I clashed with her a few times and talked about how her sense of superiority based on not being ‘a cumdumpster’ had nothing to do with actual respect and everything to do with succumbing to male standards. Then I accused the admins of that blog of subscribing to the ideology just as an excuse for violence; she said that she’d adopted it because of her experience with NATO’s aggression towards Serbia, their mishandling of the Trepča Mines (which she attributed to greed), and deep contempt towards George Soros for his involvement in all of it. I sympathized with her, and we began debating with far more civilized tones.

She talked about how SJ ideology has gone out of control (e.g. the dismay caused by a road named ‘Bangays Way’ named after a historian named Bangay), and how much of it was forced on her, and how she felt like she was being attacked simply because she espoused endogamy to preserve her culture. I agreed with her about the crazier bunch in the SJ crowd, talked about how she used really gross generalizations (apparently she thought Jews could agree on ANYTHING), pointed out some misinterpretations (e.g. that people protesting the road were less ‘THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE’ and more ‘this looks iffy, come on guys’), and pointed out the problems with defining what a culture is. After a short while she said she was sick and occupied so she couldn’t answer, and then she just deleted her blog. I wish she hadn’t, it was getting interesting.

The second one was the guy who posted that Hitler quote, who was also the same one claiming California had a non-white majority. I argued pretty fervently, with citations and everything, and he was apparently genuinely impressed. He sent me a personal message saying that was the first time he was not dismissed by an SJW for his ideology and was actually debated in earnest (albeit with lots of insults) and wanted to have a serious reasoned debate. I agreed, we chatted some, and he explained that he was an EMT who would treat non-white people just fine but still preferred a world where nations were divided into races and had fair fights in armed conflict over territory and wealth.

He wanted the divide to be based on race because, he claimed, races have serious genetic differences based on their evolution in different environments that made them incompatible in terms of living side by side. I asked him for citations (and also my close friend, who is working on his PhD in biochemistry), and he kept stalling on and on (at first it was because he was out celebrating his birthday, then basically just because), and then we stopped talking. (Meanwhile my friend found citations saying that it was overwhelmingly bullshit, and in fact he found an article showing Yoruba people lack a mutation found in white and Asian people that caused aggressive behaviour.)

Eventually I tagged him in a post asking him if he agreed with the harassment Jews in Whitefish, MT over rumours that they were harassing his mother. Eventually we ended up in an argument where he said it was only natural for people to lie and have double standards when it comes to theirs and an opposing view, and that he wanted me to drop dead. I strongly rejected that notion and pointed out how I’ve criticized leftist over and over for their lies; he conceded I was morally superior but he didn’t think that mattered.

In private I expressed my disappointment with him. I told him I’d thought better of him and his interest in having a serious debate; he responded, ‘The Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you.’ The nerve of a guy using ‘Kozak hanigzel’ on a Hebrew speaker from Israel… Man was that disappointing. I blocked him.

At any rate, I blocked him. A day or two later, when I wanted to see if he was swamped with anons for this and getting lots of shit for basically admitting his ideology was indefensible, but his blog was already deleted. I want to believe he realized this himself, that he needed to do some real thinking if a ‘degenerate’ like me proved his moral superior, but I can never know.

These two interactions and some others have led me to wonder if sincere Nazis, who are actually good but horribly misguided people, were mostly women. I wonder.

Ultimately, I feel really sorry for Nazis of the latter kind, and the alt-right crowd in general. From what I’ve seen, they’re really miserable people: they think of love and sex in terms of conquest and keeping what they got (hence the constant talk about ‘cucks’, who are too ineffectual to keep their ‘property’ theirs), not actual human connection. They’re so obsessed with power and maintaining and demonstrating it that they seem to have no concept of genuine compassion: they write it all off as ‘virtue signalling’, i.e. pretending to be virtuous for the sake of some kind of social capital. They’re so bitter they’ve become obsessed with spite, talking so much about ‘liberal tears’ they barely argue their own position. There’s such a deep sense of fear and loneliness and resentment there, and when they don’t scare me, I feel really sad for them.

On the other hand, I’d like to say a few words about anti-Nazis:

The attack on Richard Spencer triggered a whole lot of posts on Tumblr about how punching Nazis is not only justified but morally mandatory (because Nazis could never reform, you see, and were necessarily evil), which I strongly objected to on the grounds that Nazis were a diverse group, with many motivations and backgrounds, and responding to them with violence could be counterproductive in many cases (I cited Lamb & Lynx Gaede, the aforementioned Meeink, and all the KKK members Daryl Davis has dissuaded: all of them converted by peaceful means). I’ve seen people shamelessly call me a ‘Nazi sympathizer’ by some people on that website, and at one point I wanted to take legal action, considering the kind of harassment that accusation could lead to.

The same kind of belligerent attitude is found in the far left as well. Those ‘beat the Fascists where you find them’ anti-Nazis seem to be far more preoccupied with letting out aggression against rivals than actually dismantling their threatening ideology. They’re only marginally better, and also suffer from similar ills (e.g. incessant lying) and some others (e.g. scouting for perceived ideological rivals to unleash aggression on). This is why I’ve pretty much left Tumblr altogether.

#NatSoc #National Socialists #National Socialism #Nazis #Nazism #alt-right #alt-left #Cracked #Tumblr

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realmermaidblog-blog · 6 years

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How to Be a Mermaid

Have you ever dreamed of having a mermaid tail and skimming by means of the water with the fish? Of feeling and looking like a real mermaid, your hair flowing behind you as you swirl and twirl underwater?

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The technical approach to your search can be finished either by putting your profile on the relationship/matchmaking site, by looking by means of posted profiles and contacting those whom you found attention-grabbing, and eventually (the most effective strategy) by doing both and using totally different networks. Nonetheless, most important is to do all that proper!

When you find yourself posting your profile, describe yourself briefly however precisely, i.e. avoid any ambiguities. Present your private virtues, pursuits and life priorities. Your picture must be of high quality, large, recent (essential!) and actually showing the unique (the picture of your self in scuba gear taken from a passing-by motor boat would not give you the results you want, even when that is your favorite one). Additionally, you'll save numerous time for your self should you brazenly listing all character features, habits, etc. of potential candidates, which are unacceptable for you. "Married chronic junky" are quite common rejection key phrases, though, you would possibly assume to be more specific. Phrase of caution, though: if you'll slim down your requirements to somewhat as "I am looking for a model, who can be a role model in life", be careful: your potential match can be repelled by a thought that you're pushed by some inferiority advanced, which makes you too choosy.

Don't be shy, in the event you see a profile, which you really like, contact her or him first. By all means do not send a generic letter. Point out specifics which you like within the profile of this particular person, what touched you, why you're writing to him or her. However, do not let your self to be dragged into a long on-line trade. In case you are not searching for a virtual romance В Израиле нашли настоящую русалку (some folks do, but this is not what we're discussing right here), move to the following step as quickly as doable. Give your telephone quantity. Nevertheless, do not give your telephone number to anyone. Better: open separate cellular phone account for such calls only. This will value you less than changing both your house and cell numbers if you will run into some obnoxious drag.

Earlier than actual meeting, you need to talk to the particular person by a phone: there are a number of reasons for doing that. First, you need simply to listen to a voice. Sometimes this will inform you a lot, it can be complete flip-off, however do not put an excessive amount of into it. I had once a date with a woman who sounded on a cellphone like a drunken previous hag. I nearly hang up thinking that I am a victim of a prank, but natural curiosity gained, so I set the date, time and place for a gathering. One who sounded so badly on the phone in life appeared young and delightful girl, who made all men flip their heads when she entered the restaurant. Truthfully, my jaw dropped down after I noticed her: so much the precise appearance contrasted with the sluggish and squeaky voice which I've heard on the phone. Second, telephone talk may provide you with an idea on vocabulary and, therefore, social position of the individual. One young woman, a buddy of mine, had a week-lengthy trade with a man, who apparently enchanted her together with his writings. They determined to meet, so he referred to as her on a cellphone. When he called, his talk was saturated with so many unnecessary colloquial terms, that she became absolutely satisfied to not pursue this acquaintance any further. Evidently, that the meeting by no means occurred.

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supersaiga · 7 years

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Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig

Oh what a book. What a book! What a book! Read the book. The day after the US Presidential election my uncle and I went to a cafe, and as I walked to the table with the tea and scones every single table I passed was worrying about Trump and what is going to happen to us all. Future historians of our epoch will one day record that in the year 1937 almost every conversation in every country of this distracted Europe of ours was dominated by speculation as to the probability or improbability of a new world war. Wherever people met, this theme exercised an irresistible fascination, and one sometimes had a feeling that it was not the people themselves who were working off their fears in conjectures and hopes, but, so to speak, the very air, the storm-laden atmosphere of the times, which, charged with latent suspense, was endeavoring to unburden itself in speech. I hope I am just paranoid and my feeling of connection with that other time and place is childish.. it is what it is I suppose. What must be shall be. The first chapter was probably the best first chapter of any book I have ever read. Do not read on. Spoilers. Do not even google its name because the google results contain spoilers without you even needing to click a link. And do not read the introduction of the book, because it contains a summary of the entire plot and no real analysis. Never read introductions until afterwards, if they don’t tell you the entire story they will at the very least tell you the ending.

Beware of Pity

Our anti-hero, the ring-tailed fool, dillydallies between two views. To be kind and self-sacrificing, or to be selfish and independent.

Were people really made so kind and happy by seeing others display kindness and pity? If that were so, Condor was right; if that were so, anyone who made a single person happy had fulfilled the purpose of his existence; it was really worth while to devote oneself to others to the very limit of one’s strength, and even beyond. If that were so, every sacrifice was justified, and even a lie that made others happy was more important than truth itself.

Is pity incompatible with love?

Only now did I realize [...] why my pity so enraged her. Obviously she had realized with a woman’s clairvoyant instinct that pity is far too lukewarm and fraternal a feeling, and but a sorry substitute for real love.

From selfless:

Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy; and to make a person happy could never be a crime.

To selfish:

For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.

Perhaps in his selflessness he was dishonest and in his selfishness he was honest. At many points in the book people take an inexplicable liking to him, at one point he even notices and is puzzled himself. If he would only stop and see what a coward he is, or if someone would look past his gentlemanliness and his Aryan eyes and realize what he really is and point it out to him before it’s too late.

Is it a crime to marry someone you don’t love to make them happy?

How often has it been committed?

For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.

Sometimes insightful, now blind:

What a mercy, I thought, that the crippled, the maimed, those whom Fate has cheated, at least in sleep have no knowledge of the shapeliness or unshapeliness of their bodies.

There is something so horrible about this. The man is so obsessed with this person’s disability that he can at no time think of the person without thinking of the problem. And he for some reason assumes that the person is equally plagued by it and never thinks of anything else. He assumes that because he has reduced them to nothing but a condition that this is truly all they are and they are aware of it. I’ve seen people say this book is a-political. Those people are blind! This way of thinking leads down a clear road to the years where 11 million people were killed in concentration camps because they were defined according to one and only one aspect of themselves, ranging from race to chronic illness to sexuality to political belief.

The fact that the object of pity in this book is Jewish, like the author himself, can surely be no coincidence. The Herr Lieutenant is haunted by the idea that his family and friends might find out he is romantically associated with a “Jewess”.

Narrow-minded person that he is, every single moment he is with her he pities her. He never forgets why she is sitting down. When she tries to show him her strength and perseverance, tries to show him that she can, in fact, walk, all he can see is weakness:

She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God.

She is constantly aware of his pity and it is a constant reminder to her of her situation. It destroys her:

A lame creature, a cripple like myself, has no right to love. How should I, broken, shattered being that I am, be anything but a burden to you, when to myself I am an object of disgust, of loathing. A creature such as I, I know, has no right to love, and certainly no right to be loved. It is for such a creature to creep away into a corner and die and cease to make other people's lives a burden with her presence.

On self-deception:

The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at the bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting for us in the next room.

One should not always let the wish be father to the thought. Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called “success” with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it.

On courage:

During the war practically the only courage I came across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of recklessness and even boredom, but, above all, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at, fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking a stand against the mass enthusiasm. It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. Even in the last war he had not met many men at the front who had either unequivocally acquiesced in or opposed the war. Most of them had been whirled into it like a cloud of dust and had simply found themselves caught up in the vast vortex, each one of them tossed about willy-nilly like a pea in a great sack. For the first time in my life I began to realise that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.

Other interesting bits:

It seemed to him to be more important and sensible to become rich than to be regarded as rich one might have thought he had read Schopenhauer’s wise paralipomena with regard to what one is or merely represents oneself to be).

Sometimes one is amazed that the good God should trouble to give the six or seven hundred roofs of a little town of this sort the background of a different sky and a different countryside. -

What a wonderful line. It says so much and so early on about the narrator.

It is only the immeasurable, the limitless that terrifies us. That which is set within defined, fixed limits is a challenge to our powers, comes to be the measure of our strength.

There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.

Love is illimitable, all finiteness, all moderation, is repugnant, intolerable to it. In every sign of constraint, of restraint, on the part of the other it suspects opposition; any reluctance to yield utterly it rightly interprets as secret resistance. And there must have been a trace of embarrassment and confusion in my behaviour, of disingenuousness and gaucherie in what I said, for all my efforts were no match for her alert expectancy.

For a young and inexperienced person almost invariably forms a picture of real life and experience that is a reflection of the world of which he has heard or read in books; before he has experienced life at first-hand he inevitably moulds his ideas of it on second-hand experience. Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us.. I felt like a murderer who has buried the corpse of his victim in a wood: the snow begins to fall in thick, white, dense flakes; for months, he knows, this concealing coverlet will hide his crime, and afterwards all trace of it will have vanished forever. And so I plucked up the courage and began to live again. Since no one reminded me of it, I myself forgot my guilt. For the heart is able to bury deep and well what it urgently desires to forget. So often in fiction, films and TV more than books, people are, in the end, good or bad. This person, oh and I despise him, this person is both. He is so real. He’s insightful at times, but incredibly blind. Kind, but impossibly cruel and selfish overall. Honorable, but despicable. Brave, but as cowardly as they come.

#Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig #Beware of Pity #Stefan Sweig

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tamboradventure · 4 years

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Here Lies America: An Interview With Jason Cochran

Posted: 01/27/2020 | January 27th, 2020

In 2010, I decided to spend the summer in NYC. I was two years into blogging and was making enough where I could afford a few months here. Still new to the industry, NYC was where all the legends of writing lived and I wanted to start making connections with my peers.

It was that summer I met Jason Cochran, a guidebook writer from Frommers, editor, and the man I would consider my mentor.

Though we never had any formal mentor/mentee relationship, Jason’s writing philosophy, advice, and feedback, especially on my first book, How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, has been instrumental in shaping me as a writer. Much of his philosophy has become mine and I don’t think I would have grown to where I am without him.

Last year, he finally published the book he’d been working on about tourism in America, called Here Lies America. (We featured it on our best books of 2019 list).

Today, we’re going to go behind the scenes of the book and talk to Jason on what does lie in America!

Nomadic Matt: Tell everyone about yourself. Jason Cochran: I’ve been a travel writer for longer than I’ve felt like an adult. In the mid-‘90s, I kept a very early form of a travel blog on a two-year backpacking trip around the world. That blog became a career. I’ve written for more publications than I can count, including for a prime-time game show.

These days I’m the Editor-in-Chief of Frommers.com, where I also write two of its annual guidebooks, and I co-host a weekly radio show with Pauline Frommer on WABC. For me, history is always my way into a new place. In many ways, time is a form of travel, and understanding the past flexes a lot of the same intellectual muscles as understanding cultural differences.

So I have come to call myself a travel writer and a pop historian. That last term is something I just made up. Dan Rather made fun of me once for it. “Whatever that is,” he said. But it seems to fit. I like uncovering everyday history in ways that are funny, revealing, and casual, the way Bill Bryson and Sarah Vowell do.

What made you want to write this book? Before I began researching, I just thought it would be funny. You know, sarcastic and ironic, about Americans going to graveyards and places of suffering just to buy lots of tacky souvenirs, eat ice cream, and wear dumb t-shirts. And, that’s still in there, for sure. We’re Americans and we like those things. Key chains will happen.

But that changed fast. For one, that would have become a very tired joke. It wouldn’t carry for three hundred pages. Things clicked for me early on, on the first of several cross-country research drives I took. I went to a place that I wasn’t taught about at school, and it clicked. I was at Andersonville in rural Georgia, where 13,000 out of 45,000 Civil War prisoners died in just 14 months. It was flat-out a concentration camp.

Yes, it turns out that concentration camps are as American as apple pie. The man who ran it was the only Confederate officer who was executed after the war. Southerners feared the victors would hang their leaders by the dozen, but that vengeance never materialized. Not for Jefferson Davis, not for Robert E. Lee—the guy who ran this camp poorly got the only public hanging. And he wasn’t even a born American. He was Swiss!

But that’s how important this place was at the time. Yet most of us have never even heard of it, except for a really bad low-budget movie on TNT in the ‘90s in which all the characters bellowed inspirational monologues as if they thought they were remaking Hoosiers.

So just getting my head around the full insanity of Andersonville’s existence was a big light bulb—our history is constantly undergoing whitewashing. Americans are always willfully trying to forget how violent and awful we can be to each other.

And Andersonville wasn’t even the only concentration camp in that war. There were a bunch in both the North and the South, and most of them had survival rates that were just as dismal. So that was another light bulb: There’s a story in why our society decided to preserve Andersonville but forget about a place like Chicago’s Camp Douglas, which was really just as nasty, except now it’s a high-rise housing project and there’s a Taco Bell and a frozen custard place where its gate once stood.

And did you know that the remains of 12,000 people from another Revolutionary War concentration camp are in a forgotten grave smack in the middle of Brooklyn? We think our major historic sites are sacred and that they are the pillars of our proud American story, but actually, how accurate can our sites be if they’re not even fairly chosen?

What was one of the most surprising things you learned from your research? In almost no instance was a plaque, statue, or sign placed right after the historic event in question. Most of the monuments were actually installed many decades after the event. In the case of the Civil War, most of the memorials were erected in a boom that came a half-century after the last bullet was fired.

If you really get close to the plaques and read past the poetic inscriptions, it quickly becomes clear that our most beloved historic sites aren’t sanctified with artifacts but with propaganda placed there by people who weren’t even witnesses to the event. There was a vast network of women’s clubs that would help you order a statue for your own town out of a catalog, and they commissioned European sculptors who cashed the checks but privately grumbled about the poor taste of the tacky kitsch they were installing all over America.

We’re still dealing with what they did today. It’s what Charlottesville was about. But most people don’t realize these statues weren’t put there anywhere near the time of the war, or that they were the product of an orchestrated public relations machine. By powerful women!

I wrote a line in the book: “Having a Southern heritage is like having herpes—you can forget you have it, you can deny it, but it inevitably bubbles up and requires attention.” These issues aren’t going away.

Places we think of as holy ground, like Arlington National Cemetery, often have some pretty shocking origin stories. Arlington started because some guy got pissed off at Robert E. Lee and started buying corpses in his rose garden to get back at him! That’s our hallowed national burial ground: a nasty practical joke, like the Burn Book from Mean Girls. Dig a little and you find more revolting secrets, like how the incredible number of people buried under the wrong headstone, or the time the government put the remains of a Vietnam soldier in the Tomb of the Unknowns. They pretty much knew his identity, but Ronald Reagan really wanted a TV photo op. So they sealed all the soldier’s belongings in the coffin with him so that no one would figure it out.

They eventually had to admit they’d lied and gave the soldier’s body back to his mom. But if a thing like that happens in a place like Arlington, can the rest of our supposedly sacred sites be taken at face value at all?

It goes a lot deeper. At Ford’s Theatre and the surrender house at Appomattox, the site we visit isn’t even real. They’re fakes! The original buildings are long gone but visitors are rarely told that. The tale’s moral is what’s valued, not the authenticity.

What can visiting these sites teach us about how we remember our past? Once you realize that all historic sites have been cultivated by someone who wanted to define your understanding of it, you learn how to use critical thinking as a traveler. All it takes is asking questions. One of the most fun threads in the book kicks off when I go to Oakland, a historic but touristy cemetery in Atlanta. I spot an ignored gravestone that piqued my interest. I’d never heard of the name of the woman: Orelia Key Bell. The info desk didn’t have her listed among the notable graves. She was born around the 1860s, which was a very eventful time in Atlanta.

So I took out my phone and right there on her grave, I Googled her. I researched her whole life so I could appreciate what I was seeing. It turned out she was a major poet of her time. I stood there reading PDFs of her books at her feet. Granted, her stuff was dreary, painfully old-fashioned. I wrote that her style of writing didn’t fall out of fashion so much as it was yanked down and clubbed by Hemingway.

But reading her writing at her grave made me feel wildly connected to the past. We almost never go to old places and look deeper. We usually let things remain dead. We accept what’s on the sign or the plaque as gospel, and I’m telling you, almost nothing ever reaches us in a state of purity.

I figured that if I was going to probe all these strangers, I had to be fair and probe someone I knew. I decided to look into an untimely death in my own family, a great-grandfather who had died in a train wreck in 1909. That was the beginning and the end of the tale in my family: “Your great-great grandfather died in a train wreck up in Toccoa.”

But almost as soon as I started looking deeper, I discovered something truly shocking—he had been murdered. Two young Black men were accused in rural South Carolina for sabotaging his train and killing him. You’d think at least someone in my family would have known this! But no one had ever looked into it before!

Here Lies America follows their trail. Who were these guys? Why would they want to kill him? I went to where their village used to be, I started digging into court documents from their murder trial. Let me tell you, the shockers came flooding. Like, I found they may have killed him because they wanted to protect a sacred old Cherokee burial mound from destruction. There was this crazy, larger-than-life forgotten story happening in my own damn family.

My experience with that poet’s grave has a happy coda. Last week, someone told me that Orelia Key Bell and her companion are now officially part of the guided tour of Oakland. The simple act of looking deeper had revived a forgotten life and put her back on the record. That’s what visiting these sites can do—but you have to look behind the veneer, the way I do with dozens of attractions in my book. This is the essence of travel, isn’t it? Getting to a core understanding of the truth of a place.

A lot of what you wrote showed how whitewashed many of these historical sites are. How do we as travelers dig deeper to get to the real history? Remember that pretty much everything you see at a historic site or museum was intentionally placed there or left there by someone. Ask yourself why. Ask who. And definitely ask when, because the climate of later years often twists interpretation of the past. It’s basic content analysis, really, which is something we’re really bad at in a consumer society.

Americans have it drilled into them to never question the tropes of our patriotism. If we learned about in grade school, we assume it’s a settled matter, and if you press it, you’re somehow an insurgent. Now, more than any other time in history, it’s easier than ever to call up primary sources about any era you want. If you want to go back to what our society really is, if you want to try to figure out how we wandered into the shattered shambles we’re in today, you have to be honest about the forces that created the image that, until recently, many of us believed we really were.

Do you think Americans have a problem talking about their history? If so, why is that? There’s a phrase, and I forget who said it—maybe James Baldwin?-but it goes, “Americans are better at thinking with their feelings than about them.” We go by feels, not so much by facts. We do love to cling to a tidy mythology of how free and wonderful our country always was. It reassures us. We probably need it. After all, in America, where we all come from different places, our national self-belief is our main cultural glue. So we can’t resist prettying up the horrible things we do.

But make no mistake: Violence was the foundation of power in the 1800s, and violence is still a foundation of our values and entertainment today. We have yet to come to terms with that. Our way of dealing with violence is usually to convince ourselves it’s noble.

And if we can’t make pain noble, we try to erase it. It’s why the place where McKinley was shot, in Buffalo, lies under a road now. That was intentional so that it would be forgotten by anarchists. McKinley was given no significant pilgrimage spot where he died, but right after that death, his fans paid for a monument by Burnside’s Bridge in Antietam, because as a youth, he once served coffee to soldiers.

That’s the reason: “personally and without orders served hot coffee,” it reads—it’s hilarious. That is our national mythmaking in a nutshell: Don’t pay attention to the place that raises tough questions about imperialism and economic disparity, but put up an expensive tribute to a barista.

What is the main takeaway you’d like readers to take away from your book? You may not know where you came from as well as you think you do. And we as a society definitely haven’t asked enough questions about who shaped the information we grew up with. Americans are finally ready to hear some truth.

Jason Cochran is the author of Here Lies America: Buried Agendas and Family Secrets at the Tourist Sites Where Bad History Went Down. He’s been a writer since mid-1990s, a commentator on CBS and AOL, and works today as editor-in-chief of Frommers.com and as co-host of the Frommer Travel Show on WABC. Jason was twice awarded “Guide Book of the Year” by the Lowell Thomas Awards and the North American Travel Journalists Association.

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how2to18 · 6 years

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IN HIS NEW BOOK, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, Richard Sennett does not restrain himself from a little name-dropping. Several luminaries, dead and alive, make appearances. There’s Saskia Sassen, who happens be his wife, and, of course, there’s Jane Jacobs, with whom Sennett jawed at the White Horse Tavern in New York City and visited on occasion during her exile in Toronto.

Allow me to do the same.

Two years ago, I was doing research for an article on Jacobs, whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the seminal treatise in the current back-to-the-city movement. I arranged an interview with Sassen, oft-credited with coining the term “global city.” After generously sharing her thoughts on Jacobs, Sassen asked me quite offhandedly if I would also like to interview her husband for the piece whom, she helpfully explained, was Richard Sennett. And so, I did. I did not know that Sennett was, at the very moment, working on one of the more sprawling, erudite books to be written about the history and future of urbanism in a great while.

Building and Dwelling, Sennett’s 15th book on urbanism, is an intellectual romp that — in just the first four pages — includes encounters with St. Augustine, Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Immanuel Kant, and Nicholas Negroponte. At once trying to build a modern philosophy of cities while acknowledging, as he did most famously in The Uses of Disorder, the inherent messiness of cities, Sennett uses a compelling framework and aspires to an admirable, if elusive, goal. The framework is that of ville and cite. The former refers to the physical entity of the city, and the latter refers to its human element: how people live in, think about, and relate to their cities — hardware and software, for lack of a better metaphor. Sennett’s goal is nothing less than an articulation of how to achieve, or at least think about, the ethical city in the 21st century. It’s no small task.

Sennett takes full advantage of the breadth and vagueness of the concept of “ethics” to discuss seemingly anything and everything that comes into his mind. His title derives from a Heidegger essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Sennett notes, “The absence of commas indicates that these three concepts form one experience.” Thus, parts of Building and Dwelling read like streams of consciousness, in which Sennett leaps from one concept to another and one thinker to another, philosophers and urbanists (some prominent, some obscure) coming and going breathlessly. A mention of Aesop’s fables on one page follows is followed by a description of Songdo, South Korea, on the next. Street life in Medellín gives way to another reference to Balzac, then to William James, and then to Leibniz (“Leibniz zooms out; James zooms in”). Building and Dwelling is exhilarating and readable, but it is also demanding. Sennett seems to assume the reader knows what or whom he is citing and forces the reader to fill in transitions to keep track of the ways that his ideas weave together.

Readers, therefore, might benefit from having at least a casual knowledge of philosophy and/or urban planning. Background knowledge of Heidegger, specifically, helps locate a central thread; Heidegger influences Sennett with an abstract rumination on physical buildings, the act of dwelling, the act of building, and the act of thinking about all three. Heidegger does not so much get at the essence of these things as he does raise questions about their complex relationship to each other and to humanity — much as Sennett does, just with examples from the material world.

City life always wavers along continua that are bounded by unattainable poles, and so dualities run throughout Building and Dwelling. Sennett concerns himself with public and private; past and future; formal and informal; technological and analog; freedom and order; surveillance and anonymity; diversity and homogeneity; democracy and despotism; logic and emotion; local and metropolitan; past and future; speed and incrementalism; and Moses and Jacobs, among many others. His theme of ville and cite recurs frequently, and his title — to which he rarely refers directly — expresses a similar duality of object and experience. Indeed, it implicitly refers to the contrast between the individual in the city, who might inhabit a building and make it a dwelling, and that of the collective city itself, which is a “home” to thousands or millions.

Naturally, the good life lies on different points along the continuum for different people, which is, if anything, the ultimate message of Building and Dwelling. Planners, builders, and urban residents themselves must always seek the right balance. They must respect that the balance can shift, and that it shifts differently for everyone.

Sennett arrives at the idea of an “open city” to express a host of virtues that he believes should permeate the ethical city. Openness entails diversity, neighborliness, evolution, appropriate technology, and novelty. He writes, “Ethically, an open city would of course tolerate differences and promote equality, but would more specifically free people from the straitjacket of the fixed and the familiar, creating a terrain in which they could experiment and expand their experience.” He proposes an appealing way for city-dwellers to conceive of their half-intimate, half-anonymous relationship to each other: “‘Sociality’ names feeling a kind of limited fraternity with others based on sharing an impersonal task. That limited fraternity arises when people are doing something together rather than being together.”

For all of his focus on philosophy, Sennett spends plenty of time in the real world. He travels to the MIT Media Lab, where he ponders the relationship between technology and urbanism. He strolls through Haussmann’s Paris, wondering about the morality of his boulevards. He explores the new South Korean “smart city” of Songdo. He returns to the White Horse Tavern, and he explains how a recent stroke, and its debilitating effects, caused him to rethink his relationship with the city. On that count, Building and Dwelling reads as a kind of coda: Sennett may be collecting all of his loose thoughts in contemplation of his own mortality.

In some cases, Sennett is judicious in how he draws on his encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy and history. In other cases, he seems to stumble onto urban experiences by happenstance and decides to make a big deal out of them. This serendipity includes his visits to Google’s Greenwich Village offices, which he critiques for being an immersive, “open plan” office that tries to keep workers contained and productive and discourages them from exploring the urban bounty that lies just outside. It “derives from the classic company towns of industrial era.” However distinctive this East Coast Googleplex may be, it is surely nothing compared to its real headquarters and probably does not deserve quite the attention Sennett pays it. Goodness knows, there are probably Goldman Sachs drones up the street who work in far longer houses than any Googler does.

At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, an odd character named Mr. Sudhir appears in a chapter about Delhi. He sells used, possibly stolen, electronic equipment in a makeshift public market. The market’s informality fascinates Sennett, as does Mr. Sudhir’s murky status. To Sennett, he represents a midpoint between public and private, official and informal, ethical and unethical. Mr. Sudhir becomes Sennett’s foil, appearing repeatedly, sometimes gratingly, as Sennett wonders what Mr. Sudhir would make of this or that.

Sennett’s strongest, and possibly most concrete, chapter concerns diversity: the Holy Grail to cosmopolitans and a fatal virus to nationalists. Invoking everything from the current refugee crisis in Europe to the original Jewish Ghetto in medieval Venice, Sennett asks questions that few peoples ask until it’s too late: “How do you dwell in a place where you do not belong? Conversely, in such a place, how should others treat you?” Sennett makes a compelling connection between these questions and the built form of a place. He argues that physical homogeneity begets and reinforces ethnic homogeneity, sometimes with disastrous humanitarian and aesthetic results. He writes:

Exclusion isn’t just a matter of keeping out Jews or other Others, it also involves simplifying the look and construction of the place so that the place fits one kind of person, but not others. Mixed forms and uses invite mixed users. Whereas in a stripped-down environment, the more form becomes simple, clear and distinct, the more it defines who belongs there and who doesn’t.

This chilling critique relates to a subsequent conclusion Sennett draws about prescriptive planning: “The master plan divides a city up into a closed system where each place and function relates logically to other places.” Not surprisingly, Sennett has choice words for the great modernist and self-promoter Le Corbusier, whose Plan Voisin called for the demolition of Paris and its replacement with highways and apartment towers. Corbusier also co-wrote the 1933 Athens Charter, the decidedly authoritarian manifesto that codified the aesthetic principles that became the International Style — the signature architecture style of the 20th century. In short, Corbusier opposed urban complexity and, therefore, pretty much all that Sennett holds dear.

With a few exceptions, Sennett’s book is not a prescription for urban planners, however. It includes no practical advice and makes virtually no reference to current planning trends, at least not by name. The dangers of logic arguably reach their apex in so-called smart cities, which Sennett — as much a futurist as a historian — views with equal parts intrigue and skepticism. Referring to smart cities that use technology to dictate city life and surveil citizens, he warns, “By using machines, people would stop learning. They would become stupefied. The prescriptive smart city is a site for this stupefication.” Sennett, though, holds out hope for technology that can “coordinate” urban life, by exposing citizens to new ideas and enabling them to understand their worlds and voice their opinions more clearly than they currently can. To planners who would reflexively adopt new technologies, Sennett warns, “There is nothing better about the past just because it has already happened. So, too, there is nothing better about the new just because it is unlike the past.”

Ultimately, Sennett resorts to an ancient metaphor to explain how planners ought to view cities. He writes: “Cities aren’t farmed today. Instead they are master-planned. The fully grown plant is treated as the plan.” Sennett naturally favors an “organic” approach. To mix metaphors, he observes that well-crafted objects are enduring and repairable. Likewise, “a good-quality environment is one which can be repaired.”

What Sennett does do — probably better than any other scholar could — is pull urban planners out of the daily grind of pragmatism. He offers the sort of intellectual provocation that can make inquisitive planners question just about everything they do and everything they think about cities. That’s not to say that Building and Dwelling will cause anyone to abandon their principles. Rather, it presents a time-out for the reassessment of principles and a reminder that city-building is, to invoke another duality, as much an intellectual endeavor as it is a pragmatic one.

Based in Los Angeles, Josh Stephens writes about urban planning and related topics. He is contributing editor to the California Planning & Development Report.

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Is It Time For Us To Take Astrology Seriously?

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Is It Time For Us To Take Astrology Seriously?

In an April marked by angry eclipses portending unexpected change, the ancient, long-debunked practice of astrology and its preeminent ambassador might be weirdly suited for the 21st century.

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Illustration by Justine Zwiebel for BuzzFeed

Every Tuesday and Thursday from noon until 7 p.m., Bart Lidofsky pins a small plastic name tag to his shirt (“Bart Lidofsky, Astrologer”) and receives customers at the Quest Bookshop on East 53rd Street in New York City. After I wander up to him and introduce myself — I am there to have my natal chart read — he leads me to a little table in the back of the store and pulls a gauzy green curtain closed behind us. “For privacy,” he says.

Quest specializes in spiritual, esoteric, and New Age literature, but also sells crystals, runes, incense, divination equipment, mala beads, essential oils, candles, pendulums, gemstones, and “altar supplies.” It smells like church in here. You can picture the clientele — people who are comfortable pontificating about auras, people who know how to hang wind chimes. Lidofsky has been performing astrological readings for 20 years, and his bio contains a long string of bona fides: He’s a member of the American Federation for Astrological Networking and the National Center for Geocosmic Research, and frequently delivers lectures for the New York Theosophical Society. Or, as he calls it, “the Lodge.”

After we sit down, Lidofsky asks for the precise date, time, and location of my birth, and spends the next 45 minutes determining, in his words, “how things fit together.”

Before I leave, Lidofsky — who wears a robust white goatee and small wire-frame glasses — hands me his business card. It is pale blue, and features a photograph of Saturn alongside all the pertinent contact information. “Feeling lost in a difficult world?” it wonders in extra-large type. “Help is available.”

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Until recently, I thought of astrology, when I thought of it at all, as frivolous and nearly embarrassing — a pseudoscience unworthy of consideration by serious people. I’m sure I felt at least partially implicated via my age and gender: A short screed in an 1852 edition of the New York Times called astrology’s audience “women and girls who are compelled to struggle as a living,” and declared the practice more odious than “the dozen other species of street swindles for which our city is famous.” In the late 1980s, when a former chief of staff published a provocative memoir claiming Nancy Reagan relied on a San Francisco astrologer to, as Time magazine put it, “determine the timing of the President’s every public move,” Ronald Reagan had to publicly insist that “at no time did astrology determine policy.” It was a major humiliation. Even the celebrity astrologer Steven Forrest has acknowledged his field’s dubious image. “I am often embarrassed to say what I do… Astrology has a terrible public relations problem,” he wrote in an essay for Astrology News Service.

But then there was this sense — suddenly, on the street — that astrology had credence. A 2013 New York magazine story claimed that “plenty of New Yorkers wouldn’t buy an apartment or accept a new job without an astral okay.” An occult bookstore opened on a dusty corner of Bushwick and was rhapsodically covered by the Times (its name, Catland, referenced a song by the British experimental band Current 93; its location in Brooklyn indicated a certain kind of culturally conscious clientele). People were talking frankly about their aspects. They knew which planets are in retrograde; they were jittery about eclipses. And it turns out what I’ve been observing anecdotally in New York — among my undergraduate writing students at New York University, in the press, between the otherwise high-functioning attendees of Brooklyn dinner parties — is supportable, at least in part, by statistics. According to a report from the National Science Foundation published earlier this year, “In 2012, slightly more than half of Americans said that astrology was ‘not at all scientific,’ whereas nearly two-thirds gave this response in 2010. The comparable percentage has not been this low since 1983.” While this sort of acceptance isn’t unprecedented, it’s still a curious spike. Astrology is gaining believers, and has been for a while.

In some ways, these numbers jibe with some broader cultural shifts: Whereas an astrological dabbler may have previously glanced at his horoscope in the newspaper while swirling cream into his coffee, there is now a vast and endless expanse of websites featuring complex, customized forecasts, some further broken down into insane and arbitrary-seeming categories (on Astrology.com, for example, you can consult a “Daily Flirt,” “Daily Home and Garden,” “Daily Dog,” or “Daily Lesbian” horoscope, among other variations). There is more access to astrology, just as there is more access to everything: A person can shop around, compare their fortunes, wait to find what they need.

When I speak to a former student, now 22, about the increase — it seems likely it’s at least in part attributable to her and her peers — she describes astrology’s mysteriousness as its most alluring attribute. She reads her horoscope every month, faithfully. Its inherent fallibility, she says, is precisely what makes it fun. For her, astrology is about feeling the strange thrill of indulging something (vaguely) supernatural, but it’s also about getting what she is really after, what we are all really after now: actionable, interactive information. These days, there aren’t many problems Google can’t solve. Except the problem of what happens next.

While folks her age are hardly the first group to feel the draw of the unknown, it also makes sense that a generation that came of age with the whole of human knowledge in its pockets might find the ambiguity of astrology a little welcome sometimes. For people born with the web, information has always been instantly accessible, so astrology’s abstruseness — and, ironically, its promises of clarity regarding the only real unknowable: the future — becomes appealing. This generation’s predicament, as I understand it, has always felt Dickensian: “We have everything before us, we have nothing before us.”

But then I’m reminded, again, that inaccuracy, or, at least, a belief in the fluidity of truth, is at the heart of the present-day zeitgeist: Our news is often hasty and unverified, our photos are filtered and retouched, our songs are pitch-corrected, our unscripted television programs are storyboarded into oblivion, and most everyone shrugs it all off. Astrology might not offer the most accurate or verifiable information, but at least it offers information — arguably the only currency that makes sense in 2014.

In that way, astrology seems perfectly positioned to become the defining dogma of our time.

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The earliest extant astrological text is a series of 70 clay tablets known collectively as Enuma Anu Enlil. The originals haven’t been recovered, but copies were found in the library of King Assurbanipal, a seventh-century B.C. Assyrian leader who reigned at Nineveh, in what’s presently northwestern Iraq. (Some of the tablets are now held by the British Museum in London.) The Enuma Anu Enlil contains various omens and interpretations of celestial phenomena, and accurately notes things like the rising and setting of Venus. According to the historian Benson Bobrick, the Assyrians at Nineveh had distinguished planets from fixed stars and figured out how to follow their courses, allowing them to predict eclipses; they also established the lunar month at 29 1/2 days.

By 700 B.C., the Chaldeans — tribes of Semitic migrants who settled in a marshy, southeastern corner of Mesopotamia — had discerned that the planets traveled on a set, narrow path called the ecliptic, and that constellations moved 30 degrees every two hours. In his book The Fated Sky, Bobrick explains how “the twelve [observed] constellations were eventually mapped and formed into a Zodiac round (about the sixth-century B.C.), and the signs in turn (as distinct from the constellations) were established as twelve 30 degree arcs over the course of the next 200 years.” As early as 410 B.C., astrologers had begun making natal charts, noting the exact alignment of the heavens at the moment of a baby’s birth.

Bobrick eventually suggests that astrology is, in fact, “the origin of science itself,” the practice from which “astronomy, calculation of time, mathematics, medicine, botany, mineralogy, and (by way of alchemy) modern chemistry” were eventually derived. “The idea at the heart of astrology is that the pattern of a person’s life — or character, or nature — corresponds to the planetary pattern at the moment of his birth,” Bobrick writes. “Such an idea is as old as the world is old — that all things bear the imprint of the moment they are born.”

It’s at least hard to untangle the development of astrology from the rise of astronomy, and for a long time, the two fields were essentially synonymous; the divide between the supernatural and the natural wasn’t always quite so entrenched. As Bobrick writes, the “occult and mystical yearnings” of Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo helped to “inspire their scientific work,” and astronomy and astrology remained close bedfellows until almost the end of the 17th century.

Nick Popper, a historian and author who has studied the intersection of science and mysticism, explains the relationship this way: “In Europe before the Enlightenment, for example, most individuals recognized a distinction between the two. Astronomy was the knowledge of the map of the stars and their movements, while astrology was the interpretation of their effects. But knowledge of the movements of the stars was primarily useful for its service to astrology. On its own, astronomy was most valuable as a timepiece.”

For early modern Europeans, astrology was undeniable and ubiquitous, a guiding force in various essential fields, including medicine. “Every noble court worth its salt had an astrologer on consultation,” Popper tells me. “Typically a physician skilled in taking astrological readings. Many brought in numerous people to help interpret significant events. These figures were [frequently] charged with determining propitious dates, anticipating future transformations, and using horoscopes to assess the character of all sorts of figures. This predictive capacity was not deemed a ‘low’ knowledge, as now, but seen as an utterly vital political expertise.”

Johannes Kepler, one of the forefathers of modern astronomy (he determined the laws of planetary motion, which allowed Newton to determine his law of universal gravitation; Kant later called Kepler “the most acute thinker ever born”), wrote in 1603 that “philosophy, and therefore genuine astrology is a testimony of God’s works, and is therefore holy. It is by no means a frivolous thing.” Three years later, in 1606, he declared: “Somehow the images of celestial things are stamped upon the interior of the human being, by some hidden method of absorption … The character of the sky flowed into us at birth.”

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“There are so many misconceptions about astrology, it boggles me.” Susan Miller, arguably the most broadly influential astrologer practicing in America right now, is sitting across from me at a white-tablecloth restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side wearing a dark blue sheath dress, black tights, black knee-high boots, and Hitchcock-red lips. “The biggest is that it’s for women. I have 45% male readers. People just assume that it’s all women. It’s not.”

She is petite and precisely assembled, but not in a grim, bloodless, Park Avenue way. There is something openhearted about her, a vulnerability that borders on guilelessness. I find her instantly kind. We will sit here together for over four hours.

Miller founded a website called Astrology Zone on Dec. 14, 1995; the site presently attracts 6.5 million unique readers and 20 million page views each month. She released a new version of her smartphone app (“Susan Miller’s AstrologyZone Daily Horoscope FREE!”) late last year; her old app was downloaded 3 million times. Miller is hip to the way astrology functions online, having embraced the web from the very start of her career. She is active across most social media platforms, and fluent in the quick rhythm of virtual interaction, often acting as a kind of kooky, round-the-clock therapist. Offline, she employs 30 people in one way or another, has written nine books, and is aggressively feted by the fashion industry, a community in which she functions as an omniscient, beloved oracle.

Miller was born in New York, still lives in the city, and doesn’t have a whiff of bohemian mysticism about her. Instead, she presents as intelligent and detail-oriented, with none of the candles-and-crystals whimsy endemic to New Age bookstores. (A minor concession: Her iPhone, which beckons her often, is set to the “Sci-Fi” ringtone.) She appears legitimately compelled to help people, and offers an extravagant amount of free services to her followers. Of course, “free services” can be a potentially devious vehicle for other, less altruistic pursuits — and Miller does sell her books and calendars on her website, and frequently pushes a premier version of her app featuring longer horoscopes — but it is very, very easy to read and follow Astrology Zone without ever making an explicit financial investment in it. (Miller insists she makes “pennies” from the non-pop-up advertisements on the site.) I believe her when she says she considers her readers friends.

It had started to feel like a colossal waste of energy, fretting over whether or not astrology is “real” — whether or not there are accurate indications of our collective or individual futures contained in the cosmos, whether or not those indications can be massaged into utility by trained interpreters — because the fact is, even beyond our present disinterest in objective truth, reasonable people believe in all sorts of unreasonable things. True love, the afterlife, karma, a soul. Even high-level cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, hinges in part on tenuous scientific presumptions. When I considered astrology objectively — the notion that celestial movements might affect activity on Earth, and that people born around the same time of year share might certain characteristics based, in part, on a comparable environmental experience in utero — it didn’t seem nearly as dumb as, say, waving one’s hands around a crystal ball. Or calling someone your soulmate.

Still, astrology is often (rightly) equated with charlatanism: hucksters peddling snake oil, burglarizing the naïve. As with any unregulated business, there are practitioners who aren’t properly trained, who haven’t done the work and don’t know the math; they will snatch your $5 and spit back some vague platitude about the stars. It makes sense, then, that astrology is so routinely conflated with fortune-telling, mysticism. “People think it’s predestination. It has nothing to do with predestination,” Miller says, forking the salmon on her chopped salad. She is careful, always, to emphasize free will in her readings — when properly employed, astrology doesn’t dictate or predict our choices, it merely allows us to make better, more informed ones. As the astrologer Evangeline Adams wrote in 1929, “The horoscope does not pronounce sentence … it gives warning.” It’s the same idea — in theory, at least — as a body undergoing genetic testing to unmask certain proclivities or susceptibilities: to find out what it’s capable of, to preemptively protect the places where it is softest, most at risk.

Miller has written extensively about the debilitating, unnamable ailment she suffered as a child (“I had sudden, inexplicable attacks that felt like thick syrup was falling into my knee,” she wrote in her 2001 book, Planets and Possibilities), and over lunch, she tells me she was bedridden for weeks-long stretches, and endured bouts of extraordinary, life-halting pain. She describes the problem as a birth defect, but her doctors were mystified by her condition, and routinely accused her of total hysteria. Around her 14th birthday, Miller’s parents finally found a physician willing to further investigate her case, and she spent 11 months in the hospital that year, undergoing and recovering from various vascular operations.

“The other doctors were like, ‘You’re very clever, aren’t you? You don’t want to go to school, and you’ve hoodwinked all of us,’” she recalls. “And you know, my mother and father were on my side. But they were the only ones. I could feel how a prisoner would feel when unjustly accused. It was the most horrible thing. To be in so much pain and to be screamed at!”

To date, Miller has received more than 40 blood transfusions. Although she no longer endures attacks, if she were injured again in her left leg — in a way that suddenly exposed her veins — she could easily bleed to death. As of 2001, there were only 47 other documented cases of her particular affliction on record.

The pain kept her out of high school, but Miller studied from bed, passed the New York State Regents exams, and graduated at 16. Shortly thereafter, she enrolled in New York University, where she studied business. The whole arc is remarkable: a narrative of redemption. I can’t tell whether I find it incongruous or inevitable that a kid who was constantly told her pain was not real grew up to adopt a profession that gets ridiculed, nearly incessantly, for being its own kind of con. It speaks to Miller’s self-possession that she is charitable, always, to her skeptics.

“No astrologer believes in astrology before she starts studying it,” she says. “What I have a problem with are people who pontificate against astrology who’ve never studied it, never looked at a book, had no contact with it. And they criticize it without opening the lid and looking inside.” She pauses. “But I’m not an evangelist.”

Miller is famously available to her readers, particularly on Twitter. The medium suits her: Her dispatches are sympathetic, personable, chatty. Aggressively educated young women, especially, share them in a half-winking, half-sincere way, indulging in astrology’s prescribed femininity and wielding it in a manner that feels almost confrontational. It reminds me, sometimes, of the way women talk to each other about nail polish: as if it were a political act to not be embarrassed by it.

Miller, for her part, spends loads of time answering questions from her more than 177,000 followers, like, “I need to have oral surgery. when should I schedule? Aries w/Virgo rising.” (“Every Aries I know is having oral surgery,” Miller wrote back. “My daughter had it too. Go ahead and have it — think of it as repair work. Good time!”).

Advice like this would be troubling if Miller was not always exceedingly mindful of her influence (she says she would never tell someone not to have surgery or not to get married on a specific day), and it is, in fact, troubling regardless; her readers take her work seriously. She is pestered with inane questions like some sort of human Magic 8 Ball. If there is any delay in the appearance of an Astrology Zone forecast — they are posted, en masse, on the first of the month — people get agitated. The tweets accumulate, and range in timbre from bummed to slightly desperate: “Waking up the first day of the month to find that Susan won’t post for another 24 hours is the worst,” “It won’t officially be spring until Susan Miller posts her March horoscopes,” “This wait on @astrologyzone is killing me,” “Why is @astrologyzone always late? Every other astrology website posts on time but the best.”

Eventually, the forecasts always appear. Miller stays up very late — until 2 or 3 in the morning, most nights — and wakes up at 7 to exercise, screen several news broadcasts (she likes to compare them, to see how certain stories are prioritized), run errands, and, eventually, around 11 a.m., start writing. She generates at least 40,000 words every month for Astrology Zone, and produces detailed horoscopes for Elle, Neiman Marcus, and a slew of international publications, including Vogue Japan.

Anyone who’s ever interviewed Miller has observed that she’s a circuitous, digressive storyteller, and her monthly forecasts are far longer — they’re essays, really — than a typical newspaper or magazine horoscope, which usually contains just a sentence or two of fuzzy wisdom. Miller can be specific in her advice (“I suggest you do not accept a job now, not unless the offer emanates from a VIP from your past. In that case, you would be simply continuing your relationship, not starting a new relationship, and you therefore would be on safer ground during a Mercury retrograde phase,” she cautioned in February), and she calls her work “practical astrology,” which differs, she said, from “psychological astrology.” She wants to be service-oriented. She wants to give people information they can use.

“I can tell right away if you had a harsh father or a critical mother,” she says. “I might mention it. But I’m not going to delve into your childhood and growing up. I think that’s the work of a psychiatrist.” Instead, Miller finds out how certain astrological phenomena have affected a client in the past, and then, when those events are about to repeat, asks them to recall the state of their life at that prior moment. “When I do a chart the first time, there is so much information there. I have to watch your proclivities.”

Miller pulls out her MacBook and opens a program called Io Sprite. She plugs in my birth information, and a pie chart appears on the screen. It contains several concentric circles; the outermost circle is divided into 12 sections, one for each sign of the zodiac. Individual slices contain glyphs representing the sun, the moon, planets, nodes, trines. It is a snapshot of the sky at the moment of my deliverance, and it is the lynchpin of Western astrology.

Besides the placement of celestial bodies, astrologers also consider what they call “aspects” — the relative angles between planets — and use the natal chart to determine an ascendant or rising sign (the sign and degree that was ascending on the eastern horizon at the time of birth; astrologers think this signifies a person’s “awakening consciousness”). The planet closest to one’s ascendant is that person’s rising planet, and is believed to indicate how we approach or deal with other people. Every astrologer will interpret a natal chart slightly differently. Miller compares this to how various broadcasters report the same news, but emphasize or deemphasize certain narratives. She tells me it is important to find an astrologer that I like and trust.

“You have Uranus rising the same way I do,” Miller says, staring closely at my chart. “Your thought patterns are different from everybody else’s. You think they’re the same because you’re living inside of your body, but they’re different. That influences your personality. People will remember you. And at some point in your life you will form a path for people. You will expose something or teach them something that they didn’t know about.” I’m not sure how or if I’m supposed to respond, so I chew on the end of my pen and look up at her like a puppy dog. I want her to tell me everything. Maybe I don’t believe in astrology, or at least not entirely, but I’m also not immune to the lure of whispered prophecies.

Obviously, the personality attributes commonly associated with most signs (and repeated by astrologers) are positive, and if they’re not immediately complimentary, they’re at least forgivable (“secretive,” “stubborn”). In astrology, no one is “strangely shaped” or “sort of dense.” I am a Capricorn, like Joan of Arc and LeBron James, which means, according to Miller, that I’m rational, reliable, resilient, calm, competitive, trustworthy, determined, cautious, disciplined, and quite persevering. “Your underlings see you as a tower of strength,” she wrote of Capricorns in Planets and Possibilities. “And indeed you are.” Meanwhile, I have Scorpio rising at 19 degrees, which means I have “awesome sexual powers” and a set of “bedroom eyes” that, I’m told, will get me “just about anything I want.” Like many people, I find my astrological profile to be spot-on.

The most noteworthy scientific repudiation of astrology was conducted in the early 1980s by a UC-Berkeley physicist named Shawn Carlson. He tasked 28 astrologers with pairing more than 100 natal charts to psychological profiles generated by the California Personality Inventory, a 480-question true-false test that determines personality type. The idea was to figure out if a trained astrologer could accurately match a natal chart to a personality profile. “Astrology failed to perform at a level better than chance,” Carlson concluded in Nature in 1985. “We are now in a position to argue a surprisingly strong case against natal astrology as practiced by reputable astrologers.”

It is a surprisingly strong case, in that I’m legitimately surprised that the astrologers fared so poorly, and then further surprised by my own surprise. I wonder, for a moment, if astrology has become so omnipresent and accepted in America — nearly everyone, after all, knows their sign, and has since childhood — that we’re all unconsciously performing our attributes now. That we have assumed them. This seems bonkers.

I recall Wittgenstein: “We feel that when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.”

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These days, it’s not terribly easy to find a reputable scientist willing to go on the record about astrology. The practice is so heavily disregarded that folks don’t even want to expend the energy required to debunk it. The American Museum of Natural History tells me they do “not have anyone to talk about this.”

I eventually get in touch with Eugene Tracy, a chancellor professor of physics at the College of William and Mary, who studies plasma theory and nonlinear dynamics, and who recently co-authored a new book (Ray Tracing and Beyond: Phase Space Methods in Plasma Wave Theory) for the Cambridge University Press. Plasma theory — that’s heavy. It posits that plasmas and ionized gases play far more central roles in the physics of the universe than previously theorized. It’s also what’s known as a “non-standard cosmology,” meaning it essentially contradicts the Big Bang, and hypothesizes a universe with no beginning or end. I get a little bug-eyed just thinking about it.

Tracy, who has taught high-level graduate courses in physics and undergraduate seminars in things like “Time in Science and Science Fiction,” acknowledges that science and mysticism now sit in total opposition. “The separation between what we would now call science and religion, philosophy and art, is a very modern development,” Tracy says. “The [early] motivation for studying things in the sky was the belief that either these things were gods, or they were the places where the gods lived,” he says.

Tracy and I talk for a while about Kepler, the last great astronomer who maintained faith in astrology; I am interested in how Kepler juggled his confidences. “He believed that astrology wasn’t working, that it demonstrably wasn’t very predictive. But he believed that it was because they were doing it wrong, not because the field itself was misguided,” Tracy says. “He had that scientific attitude: I need good data to build my models on. But his motivation was mystical.”

I finally tell Tracy that what I really want is a succinct debunking of the entire enterprise: I want to know, definitively, that it can’t work, that it doesn’t make sense. He is gentle in his reply. “Newton’s theory of gravity says that everything in the universe gravitates toward everything else. So that means there is a force exerted upon you by the other planets, by the sun, and so forth,” he says. “Now if you ask, ‘Well, the person who is sitting next to me in the room also exerts gravitational influence on me. How close do they have to be to exert the same gravitational influence as Jupiter?’ I’d say depending on where the doctor stood in the room next to you when you were born, [he] exerted the same gravitational influence [as Jupiter]. So gravity isn’t gonna get you astrology. The argument is that there’s something else going on. And that’s where you get outside the realm of science.”

In the beginning — my beginning, your beginning — gravity was everywhere, and the planets were just planets.

When I ask him why he thought people continued to believe in astrology — to cling to a myth — he likens it to our ongoing interest in science fiction of all stripes. “We don’t want to think of the planets as being empty, that there aren’t stories out there. Just like here,” he answers. “We want to fill the world with stories.”

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I have plans to meet my friend Michael in the West Village on a particularly frigid Friday night. Over email, I convince him we should go see an astrologer or clairvoyant of some sort — you know, just dip into one of those tapestried storefronts on Bleecker Street, slip some cash to a woman in a low-cut top. I anticipate resistance, so I tell him we can get a drink first. We meet at a quasi-dive called The Four-Faced Liar, and have 300 beers. I want to see for myself whether astrology — even when practiced in the most pedestrian, mercenary way — can distinguish itself from all your basic soothsaying rackets.

Sufficiently over-served, Michael and I stumble around the neighborhood. (It doesn’t even seem that cold out anymore!) (It is 11 degrees.) Walk-in astrologers in major cities tend to keep bar hours — they are often open until midnight or 1 a.m., at least in New York — and I suspect a decent chunk of their business is derived from rambunctious tavern patrons on the move and in search of one last thrill.

Street psychics obviously command a different clientele than high-end private astrologers (comprehensive natal readings tend to cost between $150 and $200, whereas most people can only stomach shelling out 10 or 20 bucks on a late-night whim), but the questions are often the same; all of our questions are always the same. Speaking on the telephone one afternoon, Miller tells me that people come to her for many kinds of personal advice: love, sex, marriage, friendship, health concerns, career counseling. “This is the most educated generation in history, and they’re reading me because they can’t get a job,” she says. “But they don’t read me just for solving problems. They read me to get a perspective on their life. That’s another misconception,” she sighs. “There is nothing but misconceptions.”

The promise of “perspective” is an interesting way to think about the basic appeal of astrology. It allows us to step back — way back — and get a broad-view portrait of our lives, to have someone say: “This is who you are.” A person could spend her entire life trying to figure that out (which is to say nothing of the subsequent quest — in the unlikely event of a successful self-definition — to have that identity validated). I wonder if part of astrology’s attractiveness doesn’t have to do with its rote assignment of signifiers. All the clues to how a person should be: rational, reliable, resilient, calm, competitive, trustworthy, determined, cautious, disciplined. It feels like a road map, in a way.

Of course, what people really want to know is the future. It’s supremely annoying, not knowing what’s going to happen to you.

Michael and I procure dollar slices on Sixth Avenue and wander over to Houston Street. We find a storefront with a neon PSYCHIC sign. The establishment is called Predictions, and is operated by a tiny Egyptian woman named Nicole, who immediately beckons us inside. Her card says “Horoscopes,” and I inquire about an astrological reading. She is dismissive of the idea. “They read your sign,” she says. “I tell your future.”

The best part of my 10-minute session with Nicole is when she asks Michael to leave, commands me to squeeze a clear quartz crystal in my left hand, and then announces, in succession, that my sex chakras are blocked, that someone bothered my mother while she was pregnant with me, that things other people find difficult I find easy, that I am destined to be with someone whose name begins with “J,” and that I am slightly psychic myself.

Back on the street, I find Michael deep in conversation with two young, dark-haired women who are both contemplating a consultation with Nicole. They say they are going to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket first, and that if they win, they’ll go in to see her. They do not win. I tell Michael how I am supposed to be with Jeorge Clooney.

We turn onto MacDougal and walk past a building with the zodiac painted on the window. The door is locked, but eventually an old woman — toothless, and wearing a pink bathrobe — appears and unlocks it. Despite the iconography decorating her building, she also denies us an astrological reading. “It’s too complicated,” she sighs. “You have to know what you’re doing.” Instead, she reads Michael’s tarot cards while I sit on a chair with a ripped cushion. The television remains on the entire time. “I don’t look at the past,” she says while he shuffles the cards. “That’s for you to deal with.” She proceeds to tell Michael a few things about his future — two to three kids! — but I’m not listening because I’m thinking really hard about nachos. Before we leave, he asks her if she has any ideas for a cool nickname. We discussed this question ahead of time, back at the bar. “Something with a T,” she says. “And an L.” He decides on “Talon” after a brief dalliance with “Toil.” The next morning, I text him the word “TOILET” repeatedly.

If there is a way to ascertain usable info about the future, I am not sure this is it.

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The question of why astrology has endured — why, of all the outlier theosophies and esoteric theories, astrology is the one that’s remained in the public consciousness for thousands of years, the one with a presence in nearly every daily newspaper in America, the one that’s flourishing online — might just be attributable to the endless romance of the night sky. Find a field out in the country, wait until dark, look up: It is a fast and easy way to find yourself cowed. There is something seductive about the stars, about their beauty and their strangeness, about what they imply regarding the smallness of our existence here on Earth. In his book The Fourth Dimension, the mathematician Rudy Rucker wrote: “What entity, short of God, could be nobler or worthier of [our] attention than the cosmos itself?”

Eugene Tracy suggests something similar during our conversation. “I think for most of human history, the sky has been very important to people,” he says. “And now we live our lives without it. We’re surrounded by artificial light.”

Astrology is, in the end, a kind of mass apophenia: the seeing of patterns or connections in random data. Although it resembles a pantheism and sometimes gets slotted as such, astrology has never struck me as a useful stand-in for organized religion — it doesn’t proffer absolution or any promise of an afterlife, nor is it a practicable ethos — and many astrologers (including Susan Miller, who is a devout Catholic) nurture active spiritual lives that have nothing to do with the zodiac. Astrology, unlike religion, is a deeply personalized, nearly solipsistic practice.

When I ask Dr. Janet Bernstein, a psychiatrist who’s worked in all kinds of contexts (privately, in prisons, in hospitals, in New York, in Alaska), if she has a sense of why so many different types of people turn to astrology, she points out that it often only takes one win — one “right” horoscope — to convert a skeptic. “Humans seem to like certainty and predictability in many, but not all, situations,” she says. “Astrology is just one of many systems that promises some certainty and predictability. Medical research is another. Stock market analysis is yet another. What often happens when one prediction in a system is born out is that the entire system [is] accepted.”

Back at the Quest Bookshop, when I ask Lidofsky if his belief in astrology requires at least a temporary suspension of cynicism — a “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”-type of open-mindedness toward wildly unquantifiable truths — he only shrugs. “I don’t see any logical reason why it works,” he replies. “It just does. Aspirin was the most prescribed drug in the world, and no one knew how it worked until the ‘70s.”

Ultimately, I understand astrology’s utility as a (faulty) predictive tool, even if most astrologers prefer that it not be used that way. I also understand its attractiveness as something to believe in: Here is an ancient art �� rooted in the cosmos, the default home for everything divine and miraculous — that promises not only clarity regarding the future, but also a summation of the past. Humans have always been drawn to succinct markers of identity, to anything that tells us who we are.

There is also the assurance of change in astrology: The planets keep moving. The chart always shifts. The forecast refreshes on the first of the month.

One particular story has stuck with me: In July 1609, Galileo discovered that Dutch eyeglass makers had developed a simple telescope, and weeks later, he’d designed and forged his own (improved) version, which allowed him to define the Milky Way as a galaxy of clustered stars, to see that Jupiter had four large orbiting moons, and to reaffirm Copernicus’ heliocentric understanding of the universe. Still, several prominent philosophers, including Cesare Cremonini and Giulio Libri, refused to look through the telescope. Maybe they just didn’t want to see what he saw — didn’t want to challenge one worldview with another. In 1610, in a letter to Kepler, Galileo opined what he called “the extraordinary stupidity of the multitude,” but it’s impossible to say precisely what kept the philosophers away.

I like to think they chose to uphold a private sense of heaven. One that told them exactly what they needed to know.

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