Louisiana recently started executing death-row prisoners after more than 20 years of not doing so (save a “voluntary” execution in 2010, when a prisoner waived his right to appeal and said he wanted to die). John Corley, an award-winning writer who is incarcerated at Louisiana’s Angola prison, reflects on how MAGA politics have re-invigorated the practice of state killing in Louisiana and elsewhere, and what it means for the tenor of life in institutions like Angola:
Dalton Prejean Jr, who is serving time for manslaughter, found Hoffman’s execution particularly painful. When he was ten years old, in 1990, his father died in the penitentiary’s electric chair. “The day it all went down, it was almost like reliving the moments leading up to my father’s execution,” Prejean told me. “At ten o’clock the news reporter announced that Hoffman was dead. My heart skipped. I couldn’t believe they had actually killed somebody. Was what he did so bad that he just couldn’t be allowed to go on living? Wasn’t there anything about him that was redeemable?”
Twice a week, the inmate counsel substitute Gary Boudreaux makes rounds on the five death row tiers. He knows each of the surviving men housed there. “There was no tension on the row because the guys believed the execution wouldn’t happen,” Boudreaux said. “It had been so long, and they have good lawyers. They just didn’t think executions would come back.”
A week after the execution, Boudreaux returned to the row. The atmosphere was “totally different.” The men now knew that Governor Landry “is serious about executing people, and the state will execute people. There’s no doubt in their minds about that any more.”
As General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) and American Rheinmetall display their wares at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual symposium this week, the contractors have delivered their XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle (MICV) prototypes to the Army for testing and soldier evaluation at two locations to meet a slightly altered test program.
The XM30 program is the U.S. Army’s latest effort to replace its fleet of Bradley Fighting Vehicles. As TWZ noted in a recent article, the Army had planned to test a number of the eight prototypes that each competitor is required to provide during a regular rotation at the sprawling National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin in California next spring.
The US Army aims to replace its Bradley Fighting Vehicles, an example of which is seen here, with XM30s. US Army
According to both GDLS and American Rheinmetall, each will now deliver seven prototypes to the Army’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas. There they will undergo a soldier touchpoint and field evaluations, which could wrap up in the February-March 2027 timeframe. No rotation to Fort Irwin is now envisaged.
TWZ spoke with executives from both XM30 competitors and reached out to the Army ahead of AUSA. Geoffrey Norman, GDLS’ director for U.S. Strategy & Growth, said that three of its prototypes are already at Fort Hood undergoing safety checks before being put in soldiers’ hands for evaluation. The company’s offering is called Wolf, which evolved from its Griffin III, which in turn was derived from the ASCOD 2 infantry fighting vehicle.
A prototype of General Dynamic Land Systems’ submission for the XM30 competition, called the Wolf, seen under wraps after delivery to the US Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland earlier this year 2026. GDLS
American Rheinmetall, a U.S. subsidiary of Germany’s Rheinmetall, has put forward a version of the extended Lynx family for the XM30 competition. The company has delivered one of its prototypes to Fort Hood, according to the company’s senior vice president of programs, Jim Schirmer. Another one is at the Army’s Joint Forces Training Center at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, where the company is doing its own internal testing. Its remaining vehicles are being assembled in Slidell, Louisiana.
A rendering of the XM30 version of Lynx. American Rheinmetall
Both companies delivered their very first XM30 prototypes to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in late August, along with an additional hull and turret each for ballistics testing. Over the last month-plus, the Army has gained preliminary experience with the MICVs at Aberdeen.
Early Feedback
GDLS’ Wolf has already put its 50mm cannon into action on the live-fire range at Aberdeen, according to Norman. It has also been put through some portion of automotive functional testing, and Norman says GDLS is getting “good feedback” on both. He adds that the Wolf’s 32-speed SAPA transmission and composite rubber track (CRT) have been well received, with favorable comparisons to the ride-quality/comfort of the Bradley.
General Dynamics Land Systems’ Wolf is based on the Griffin III, an earlier configuration of which is seen here. Griffin III’s main armament was also a 50mm cannon. GDLS
Schirmer says that the Lynx has also received positive early feedback, particularly during a late September demonstration for congressional staffers and Army VIPs at Aberdeen. Passengers praised its two-man crew station layout, the roominess of its six-man squad compartment and its air conditioning system.
Schirmer reflected on the value of greater environmental comfort for squad members who sweltered inside the Bradleys used in Iraq. He recalled that, “When it was 125 degrees outside in Iraq with additional solar loading, inside the Bradley the temperature got to 138 degrees. It actually felt refreshing to step out into the Iraqi air.”
Both prototypes are larger than the 40-ton Bradley with correspondingly heavier combat weights in the 50-ton region. Both feature an XM913 50mm automatic cannon as their main weapon, a welcome increase in firepower compared to the 25mm M242 on the Bradley.
A rendering of American Rheinmetall’s XM30 design, depicting it firing its 50mm cannon and other weapons. American Rheinmetall
Schirmer acknowledged that American Rheinmetall has found some small bugs in its first Lynx prototype at Aberdeen. “We spent a fair amount of time swapping hardware and making adjustments to make sure it was ready [for the VIP event].”
Crew Efficiency and Room for Growth
Both competitors have emphasized the greater efficiency and capacity to add weapons systems and sensors to their MICVs compared with the Bradley. Each has a two-man crew as opposed to the Bradley’s three-man complement. XM30 commander-gunners operate from below the turret as opposed to in it with the Bradley. The new configuration puts a premium on crew situational awareness and task management.
Wolf and Lynx feature side-by-side crew stations for the vehicles’ commander and driver, an aviation-style layout conducive to enhanced crew coordination. Both firms have placed considerable emphasis on intuitive user interfaces with multiple displays and menus with specifically designed symbology and text, as well as ergonomically optimized controls. In addition to higher resolution and longer range gunsight displays, each prototype offers its crew and the squad it carries a 360-degree outside view provided by cameras placed around the vehicle.
A rendering depicting the interior of the Lynx-based XM30 design. American Rheinmetall
“Because we have a reduced crew from the Bradley [which has a commander and gunner in turret] there has to be greater efficiency in how those soldiers execute their tasks. The software and menu logic are very intuitive,” Norman affirms.
Left and right crew positions are identical, so functions can be performed by either crew member. In the Wolf, the driver sits to the left in most cases with the commander on the right. GDLS has drawn lessons from soldier touchpoints with early prototypes of the M1E3 Abrams tank (for which it is the prime contractor), which Norman says shares its graphical user interface with Wolf.
The first early prototype of the next-generation M1E3 Abrams tank. US Army
The Lynx crew compartment features three configurable displays, with a large center display with a common operating picture/map with visual feeds from airborne uncrewed aerial systems (UAS). “You can shoot the gun from the left or right, you can drive the vehicle from the left or right,” Schirmer confirms.
A camera for the Lynx commander’s independent weapons station atop the vehicle with its own sight and machine gun can be pulled up for view by the crew, which can toggle between it and the main weapons sight. Lynx operators have the ability to turn off certain information presentations in their displays for better focus on a particular task.
The effort to improve efficiency for smaller armored vehicle crews was highlighted last week as GLDS announced that it has partnered with Primordial Labs to bring artificial intelligence (AI) voice control to its combat vehicles, ranging from the M1 to the XM30. American Rheinmetall has likewise developed its own AI assistant for Lynx crews, Schirmer confirms. He characterizes it as a “third crewman” helping two soldiers do the work of a trio.
The video below shows Primordial Labs’ voice control technology being used to operate a quadcopter-type drone.
Cooling has become an issue for the Bradley, which, like all armored vehicles, essentially encloses its powerplant and electronics in a box with no airflow. Heat from the drivetrain creates a detectable thermal signature, particularly with the Bradley’s right-front exhaust exit.
Both Lynx and Wolf feature hybrid-electric drivetrains with silent-watch capability, which can temporarily reduce their thermal signatures. Each features rear-exhaust exits, alleviating front-quarter heat plumes.
According to Schirmer, the Lynx cooling stack (which sits adjacent to its powerplant forward in the hull) offers increased cooling for the engine and battery packs while improving the interior environment for heat-sensitive electronics. It facilitates systems growth and greater power consumption.
Wolf has its engine cooling in the rear of the vehicle behind the track. Norman says GDLS specifically engineered its placement so cooling paths to the rear of the hull don’t impinge on passenger space inside. All Wolf systems are designed with a 10 percent growth margin, he adds.
The hybrid drive systems and electronics that both XM30s use will have to resist the increasing threat from adversary directed energy. Electronic attack in the form of tactical electromagnetic pulse, laser targeting of external sensors/apertures, and weaponized electromagnetic interference constitutes a growing threat to weapons systems and basic mobility.
A past rendering of the Griffin III, at left, as Abrams X next-generation tank concept, with cutaways highlighting elements of their hybrid propulsion systems. GDLS
Both contractors expect the Army to stringently test their prototypes’ electromagnetic vulnerability. “I think they’ll nail our vehicles with the best [electromagnetic attack] that adversaries have and if they identify any weaknesses, we will correct those,” Norman says. He points to Aberdeen’s large, sophisticated anechoic chamber as a place where both MICVs will eventually spend considerable time.
American Rheinmetall has its own electromagnetic interference (EMI) requirements for vehicle sensors and communications, according to Schirmer. The Army also has an in-depth understanding of the threats and explicit EMI requirements, he says. “We’re pretty comfortable that our system meets those, but actual EMI testing will take place later in the test program.”
Expanded capacity for exportable power is another growth area for XM30. The prototypes’ hybrid powerplants feature large battery packs that can offer exportable power to potentially help the Army with its serious battlefield circulation of electricity (BCoE) problem. The ever-increasing array of soldier-worn electronic devices, electrically-powered small drones and sensors has created an electricity supply deficit as well as battery weight and availability issues.
Wolf produces “a lot more power than it needs,” Norman asserts. As a result, upgrades to its alternators, starter-generators and high-voltage batteries won’t be needed in the foreseeable future. The exportable power emphasis is on the passengers, he explains.
Wolf’s internal power distribution provides significant charging power to the squad compartment in the back, where each member can charge devices and get access to data. The charge-ports they use are cyber-hardened to prevent plug-in exploits.
External exportable power is surprisingly not a priority for the MICVs, according to the contractors. Wolf can offload power via a standard NATO power port (as can Lynx) and other interfaces, Norman says, but “we’re not seeing XM30s in use-cases where they’re used to power command posts or other things. The emphasis from the Army has really been about having margin on the vehicle for future [system] requirements – directed energy, counter-UAS systems or fill-in-the-blank.”
Counter UAS and Fill-in-the-Blank
A September report from the Congressional Research Service cited a potential XM30 oversight issue for Congress, contending that it is not clear if the MICV will have an organic counter-UAS capability. Given the obvious threat of aerial drones to armor as seen in Ukraine, the apparent lack of a requirement for integrated CUAS appears glaring.
We reached out to the Army’s PAE Maneuver Ground and PM XM30 regarding CUAS for XM30 but received no response as of this writing. Both American Rheinmetall and GDLS believe the Army will undertake its own search and competitive testing to identify a CUAS system for XM30 that it will require the vendors to integrate at some future point.
GDLS’ Norman calls CUAS “fundamental” to the viability of armored vehicles on the modern battlefield. He thinks the Army’s approach of making sure CUAS infrastructure (power/data/physical hookups) is in place on XM30 while evaluating potential systems on its own for rapid integration is wise. He adds that GDLS is working with “expert partners” in the CUAS space to be ready to add the capability.
Intriguingly, American Rheinmetall’s Schirmer says that Lynx already has some counter-UAS capability, which he declined to disclose.
Both XM30s have the ability to launch loitering munitions – Wolf will employ Aerovironment’s Switchblade 300 and Lynx will carry a version of Raytheon’s Coyote Block 3 – but their makers currently have no specific plans for other integrations, though each says it can adapt multiple systems.
A Switchblade 300 seen being fired from a man-portable launcher. USMCAn example of the Coyote Block 3. This particular version is configured as a non-kinetic counter-drone weapon. RTX
TWZ previously noted that the Army envisions XM30s acting as controllers for unmanned ground vehicles. GLDS’ Wolf has an in-house interface to control UGVs (and UAVs) from inside the vehicle, which was demonstrated to the Army over a year ago, according to Norman. Its open software architecture allows for integrating a different control suite if the Army desires.
American Rheinmetall has “not attempted to control an unmanned ground vehicle yet, but the architecture is so similar it would really be just a software modification to get there,” Schirmer says. The company would likely use a mix of its own and UGV provider software.
The Lynx itself can be remotely operated via a tablet that a dismounted crew can employ. While outside the vehicle, soldiers can also remotely use the tablet to see what the vehicle is seeing or to pull up maps for planning, Schirmer explains. American Rheinmetall has yet to finalize and demonstrate the capability, but it appears an appropriate feature for a design that stretches back to the Army’s Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV) program.
Recent Army experimentation with small vehicle-toted UGVs on Bradley suggests a capability that could migrate to XM30. Wolf can accommodate “marsupial UGVs” like the Swambotics AI Fire Ants fitted on a 1st Cavalry Division M2A4 Bradley, but Norman points out that small UGV carriage is not part of the requirements for the first iteration of XM30.
A U.S. Army 1st Cavalry Division M2A4 Bradley IFV was spotted carrying five Swarmbotics AI FireAnt anti-armor UGVs on its side storage racks. Weighing around 27 kg, FireAnt is a low-cost attritable robotic system designed for AI-enabled swarm operations, including ISR,… https://t.co/dbikmUtOeypic.twitter.com/WYIRlLJd9A
American Rheinmetall has not specifically planned for carrying UGVs on its MICV, but Schirmer asserts that if a Bradley can carry them, Lynx certainly can. Whether it may be able to recharge them during transit is a question that will depend on future Army desires, he says.
Fit for Purpose
Given threats from increasingly capable drones and guided anti-tank missiles, questions as to whether XM30 or other armored vehicles remain relevant on the modern battlefield have persisted for several years.
Such concerns arguably drive the discussion of value-added capabilities for XM30 – from advanced sensors and networking/communications to the ability to deploy and control UGVs/UAVs and the potential BCoE benefits of the platforms.
GDLS’ Norman refers to Wolf as “software with a vehicle around it”, noting that GLDS is “continually dropping new software” into its XM30 on a weekly basis to add capability.
Geoffrey Norman, Director for U.S. Strategy & Growth at General Dynamics Land Systems, kneeling beside a Wolf prototype. Geoffrey Norman/LinkedIn
However, American Rheinmetall’s Schirmer reminded us that the traditional armored transport mission is still the overarching role of XM30.
“The purpose of [Lynx] is really to carry infantrymen around the battlefield…to move them faster than they can walk on foot, to protect them in transit from threats – drones, anti-tank guided missiles, from artillery fire – and to [provide] fires support.”
A Lynx-based XM30 depicted in combat in an urban environment. American Rheinmetall
The tension around XM30 survivability versus cost is reflected in the Army’s loose commitment to the new MICV program. Despite having muted fielding of an XM30 by 2029, Brig. Gen. Troy Denomy, Program Acquisition Executive of Maneuver Ground, told Breaking Defense that if no clear winner emerged from the upcoming test and evaluation, “then it may be worth not selecting at that point.”
The ambiguity tees up the question of where a 50-ton armored vehicle fits into the potential Pacific fight that the U.S. military is focusing on. It’s a difficult question for the Army and for the XM30 contractors.
American Rheinmetall’s Schirmer took a stab at answering. He points out that there are large islands and other landmasses in the Pacific (like the Korean Peninsula) where a MICV could be employed. However, he acknowledges that it is less likely to be used in an island campaign.
“It still has a role, though it’s less obvious what that would look like than in Europe or the Middle East.”
With testing and evaluations set to ramp up at Aberdeen Proving Ground and Fort Hood, we may soon learn which XM30 prototype is the Army’s obvious choice.
A heat pump subsidy scheme launched by Ed Miliband just nine months ago is facing cuts to help fund defence as the public continues to reject the technology and the quiet Net Zero rollback marches on.
“This guy is a monster,” Donald Trump said in front of Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive. “And nobody knows him. What a great life! To be a monster and not have to go through this,” Trump continued, pointing at the reporters who follow him everywhere. Pichai stood beside him, waiting to speak with an expression of resigned disbelief. Before the exchange ended, Trump joked about his Indian name: “Sundarrrrr is his name.” When Pichai finally spoke, he tried to play it down: “Hopefully, that will be a better tagline than ‘I’m a monster,’” he said.
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Once, as a young adult in the city, I was walking home after a long day of work. The main street leading to my place wasn’t well lit, with dark stretches between streetlamps. There was a huddle of men under one, some standing around, some lounging against the post. They moved in the orange light, turning as one to face me. Something shifted in the air.
An earlier version of me would have been slower to respond, given them the benefit of the doubt. But after a recent knife-point mugging, I had begun to develop a sort of second skin—a keen, physical sense of danger. I slipped back into the shadows and ran in and out of alleyways. I doubled back, cut across fences, and scaled half walls. I made no sound at all; I made it home. I had made a spiraling maze in real time. They could not find me.
In his essay “From the Tree to the Labyrinth,” Umberto Eco, a lover of labyrinths, explores how we “create and organize knowledge.” Moving away from the restrictive “tree” model, Eco approaches the “labyrinth” model, listing three kinds—a unicursal labyrinth, with only one path to the center and back; a multicursal maze, with many paths, all but one leading to dead ends; and an infinite network of interlinked points, which he calls by the borrowed term “rhizome.”
There are many labyrinths and mazes woven into my memory—verbal, textual, graphical, physical, metaphorical. Tamil kolams, for instance: My mother draws small, perfect threshold patterns at home, and immense, geometrically flawless labyrinths and mazes for events—no outlines, no tools, just her seeing eye and moving hand. When the sky is still dark, she dips folded muslin in wet, ground rice and draws liquid lines on the clean floor. She must draw each bit before the white dries on her hand, which it does almost instantly. Nothing can be erased or redrawn. She must keep moving until the whole kolam is done—the body walking the labyrinth even as it summons it out of nothing, the labyrinth making the world even as it is devoured by little black ants.
Eco’s rhizome model, to its credit, says we may never know everything, but we can keep going. Jorge Luis Borges certainly did, over and over like a modern-day Scheherazade. He wrote The Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel, Funes the Memorious, The House of Asterion, and more, for those of us that love our awful infinities rendered in chewy, fictional ways.
It’s been so long since the mugging and the maze. Those events (and others like them) ingrained hard habits into me. Unless I’m absolutely certain about the safety of the time and the place, I don’t listen to music as I walk. I wear barefoot shoes. I wear my bag cross-body, coax my hands out of my pockets. I note the exits and sit like a mob boss, the door never to my back. But I myself am softer, and I understand the ways of wayfinding a little better now.
When Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula, ruler of the Kingdom of Avadh, moved his capital to Lakhnau (now Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India) in 1775, he likely had no inkling of what was to come—a great famine. The Nawab was an unusual ruler. Forgoing the usual charity routes, he offered his people the dignity of earning wages through excellent work, going so far as to demolish by night and rebuild by day so everyone who wanted work could have some. He built the lavish Bara Imambara, including a marvelous maze of a thousand corridors and half as many identical doorways (and one exit), the Bhulbhulaiya. The Hindi-Urdu root word, bhūlnā, means to forget, to be thus lost, and bhulānā is its causative form. The maze is “that which makes you forget.”
Abhimanyu, warrior prince, has broken into the Cakravyūha, the battle formation of the colossal whirling disc. While still in his mother’s womb, he had overheard his father, the great warrior Arjuna, discuss war strategy with his uncle Kṛṣṇa, and filed the knowledge away in his preternaturally precocious mind. Now the Kurukṣetra War is upon them, and 16-year-old Abhimanyu has found his way to the center of the moving labyrinth. He is a trained warrior, no doubt, but he is alone, fighting seasoned Kaurava generals on all fronts. They have trapped him away from his fellow Pāṇḍavas. They have sunk his chariot, killed his horses, and broken his sword and bow. Abhimanyu raises a chariot wheel above his head. He doesn’t know how to come out. He never heard the end of the conversation.
This heartbreaking story from the Sanskrit epic The Mahābhārata was likely my own mythical introduction to the labyrinth. McConnachie, too, starts with a myth—a Greek mythopoeic myth—but first he runs a little labyrinth on the morning of his own wedding. His essay for Aeon moves lucidly through history, architecture, religion, folklore, games, psychoanalysis, New Age rituals, and more.
P.S.: Don’t worry about Ariadne; she gets to chill with Dionysus. Theseus’s dad, not so great.
Instinctively, we sense that mazes and labyrinths are essentially metaphorical—even if it is not always clear what they represent—which explains why it’s so common to seek the meaning of the maze in myth. According to the ancient Greek story, as retold by the Roman writers Plutarch and Ovid, Minos of Crete demanded a tribute from the city of Athens in the form of seven young men and seven women. They would be imprisoned inside the Labyrinth created by Minos’ brilliant architect Daedalus, and there sacrificed to the Minotaur, a monstrous creature born of the unnatural union between Minos’ wife and a white bull.
The brave and ambitious Theseus gets himself chosen among the Athenians and, on arrival in Crete, seduces Minos’ daughter, Ariadne. She secretly arms him and slips him a “clew” of thread. (This is the old word for a ball or skein of yarn and is, fascinatingly, the origin of the English word “clue.”) Theseus kills the Minotaur, escapes the Labyrinth, runs off with Ariadne, and should return home happily—except that he abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos and then, upon homecoming, forgets to change the color of the sails on his ship as he promised his father he would do if he survived. On seeing the black canvas, the old man drowns himself in the sea.
Speaking of leading people astray, here’s a clip of the third task of the Triwizard Tournament from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Professor Dumbledore counsels the champions: “In the maze, you’ll find no dragons or creatures of the deep. Instead, you’ll face something even more challenging—people change in the maze.”
Adrian Fisher has over 700 mazes across 42 countries to his name, “including one on a skyscraper in Dubai and another that’s now reproduced on Britain’s five-pound note.” He’s also likely the only person to make a successful business out of mazemaking. Twilley profiles Fisher comprehensively, and not a little warily.
Starting with the design of the medieval Christian labyrinth, the most famous of which is in the Chartres Cathedral, France, Fisher slowly included other complex features. “Fisher realized that if he wanted to make mazes he first had to make people want mazes,” Twilley writes. According to Oskar van Deventer, an engineer and creator of renowned mechanical puzzles, he’s the “world’s best maze psychologist,” using what he knows about how people behave “against the unsuspecting solver and even against the suspecting solver.”
In 1980, Fisher was twenty-eight years-old and working for I.T.T., a multinational manufacturing company, where he was responsible for productivity enhancement. He was increasingly drawn to the idea of designing mazes; he’d even formed a company, Minotaur Designs, with a wealthy labyrinthologist and former diplomat, Randoll Coate. But public commissions proved elusive. “At first, I thought it was impossible,” Fisher said. “How do you start? How do you do it?”
Runcie’s dream gave him an idea: Fisher wrote to the letters page of the London Times, briefly outlining the maze’s long history as a Christian symbol and noting that, as in the Archbishop’s dream, a maze’s goal is typically reached not by “pressing toward the center” but, rather, by “returning almost to the edge,” in order to find the proper path. In his signature, Fisher styled himself a “Maze Consultant,” and, before long, this stealth marketing had reeled in a customer, and Minotaur’s first public commission.
Crystals are known for stacking their atoms in repeating patterns in every direction, forming structured unit cells and lattices. But quasicrystals are mad materials. They, too, form patterns, but in non-repeating ways. Physicists exploring their use in carbon capture ended up with the world’s most diabolical maze.
What can live without a brain or a nervous system, eat better than you, navigate mazes, and win scientists not one, but two Ig Nobel Prizes? The answer is a single-celled organism called the slime mold, also affectionately known as the blob.
In the 2000s, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, a scientist at Hokkaido University, scattered bits of a single Physarum polycephalum in a maze, a few dots in a petri dish. The bits grew enough to find each other, and then grew some more to fill the maze. The mold then retracted itself from the dead ends, restricting itself to the most rewarding path—and this was the least it could do. Using its ability to grow up to a meter; its ability to analyze, solve problems, and optimize in real time; and its own slime as “externalized spatial memory,” it “effectively re-created Tokyo’s railway network in miniature as well as the highways of Canada, the U.K., and Spain.”
Catch a glimpse of this incredibly cool mold in action in this WIRED video: Mycologist Explains How a Slime Mold Can Solve Mazes. Looks like Nakagaki will have the last laugh, after all. And if you’ve ever wondered how other animals are so much better at this stuff than us, read Kathryn Schulz’s essay for The New Yorker, “Why Animals Don’t Get Lost.”
Gardeners sometimes encounter them in their backyards—spongy yellow masses squatting in the dirt or slowly swallowing wood chips. Hikers often spot them clinging to the sides of rotting logs like spilled bowls of extra cheesy macaroni. In Mexico some people reportedly scrape their tender bodies from trees and rocks and scramble them like eggs. They are slime molds: gelatinous amoebae that have little to do with the kinds of fungal mold that ruin sourdough and pumpernickel. Biologists currently classify slime molds as protists, a taxonomic group reserved for “everything we don’t really understand,” says Chris Reid of the University of Sydney.
Something scientists have come to understand is that slime molds are much smarter than they look. One species in particular, the SpongeBob SquarePants-yellow Physarum polycephalum, can solve mazes, mimic the layout of man-made transportation networks and choose the healthiest food from a diverse menu—and all this without a brain or nervous system. “Slime molds are redefining what you need to have to qualify as intelligent,” Reid says.
Teenaged Sarah is supposed to be babysitting her infant brother, Toby. But he won’t stop crying, and in a rash moment, she wishes him gone. Villainous Goblin King Jareth obligingly spirits him away to his dark labyrinth, which she must negotiate to save the baby before a terrible fate befalls him. If you’re not convinced you should see Labyrinth, this 1986 classic, know that the Goblin King is David Bowie.
I had some trouble choosing a quote from this retro maze of an essay. Every passage seemed appealingly contrarian, sometimes even to the essay’s own points, every idea poised for intertextual sparring with the other pieces in this reading list (something I secretly enjoy).
Yes, it is gleefully haunted by its own ideas going back and forth and switching back upon themselves, and yes, it will make you question a few axiomatic notions about labyrinths and mazes. But maybe because times have changed, maybe because no one seems to be saying labyrinths are better than mazes or vice versa any longer, some of the arguments may seem a little heavy-handed.
But some, like this one seemingly drawing from Freud/Jung psychological arcana, still sparkle: “The maze is the labyrinth’s uncanny.”
It seems to me that hidden behind contemporary etymological distinctions is an attempt to tame multicursality, by way of denigrating multicursal mazes as merely “childish” versions of more sober, unicursal ones. Multicursality challenges meditative clarity with multiple versions, no clear centers, and a sense of ambivalence and confusion. These complications, however, are the point of the labyrinth. Even if we grant that labyrinth merely designates the one-path New Age labyrinth recycled from the medieval era, the object is still haunted by a misrecognition. For even the medievals retained a sense of the unicursal labyrinth’s ambages—the equivocation at the heart of its windings, which the New Age version does not readily admit. Additionally, the labyrinth that is the legacy of the medieval period is enmeshed in a circuit of analogies to such a degree that it is impossible to map out all its symbolic equivalences and their implications without ending up in the muck of indistinction. This tendency of the labyrinth to connote so much is part of what makes it an antithesis to sureness, rationality, and clarity. Its structure is mystically congruent with the idea of a dark or enchanted forest; it is also a stand-in for earthly conundrum, brain fold, uterine canal, spiritual struggle, or psychosexual journey. Its center: Mary, the alchemical rose, Jerusalem, princess, Minotaur, inner-self, lotus blossom. And of course there are the various rewards that the multicursal maze holds out for its young adepts (pots of gold, pies and cakes, utopian wonderlands of bunnies and lollipops). Labyrinthine confusion is not merely an issue of its tortuous corridors, its solution not merely the cheese in the corner. Labyrinth enfolds into labyrinth across times, cultures, and myths.
It’s the yellow that first holds you down, like the yellow fog in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, like the yellow wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of the same name. There’s something about this sickly yellow, but there’s more.
Backrooms is young YouTuber Kane Parsons’s widely acclaimed horror debut. Failed architect Clark manages a strip-mall furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. During his insomniac wanderings, he stumbles upon a doorway in the store’s basement—the entry to the mysterious Backrooms. (The trailer is a relatively safe place to start before you attempt full liminal dread.)
Nayman’s critical voice stands a little apart from what seems to be near-universal approbation for the film, which he says “exists in its own liminal space between ambitious experiment and fascinating failure.” But he sounds, I must say, somewhat like a parent speaking of his gifted kid—one who could go very far if only he applied himself a little more. What if the kid knows something that others don’t?
[O]ne of the lurking, not so elusive themes of Backrooms—a movie that doesn’t lack for entry points—is the postmodern terror of reiteration without end, the unsettling and melancholy notion of reality as a series of adjoining, subterranean echo chambers, each a slightly altered copy of the last. “Six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented back rooms,” read the original, anonymous, and extremely viral 4chan post that ended up being used as a blueprint by hordes of online architects eager to build their own additions onto a freestanding urban legend; the sprawling, relentlessly subdivisional logic of this online lore, and the fact that anyone could contribute to it at any time, turned the expanse of the Backrooms into a pretty nifty allegory for itself.
Parsons was 16—and going by the online handle Kane Pixels—when he made his first Backrooms short in 2022: a found-footage-style clip created in Blender and After Effects. His innovation was to place the preexisting images into a paranoid narrative framework about a research facility offering egress to another dimension; the first clip centered on an amateur filmmaker who gets lost in the Async complex and chased by an unseen creature.
“In Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, most of the woodblock prints show the famous conical peak, but one shows pilgrims climbing a Fuji that is the very ground under their feet. You can’t see the mountain’s form while you’re on the mountain. There are subjects you can better understand through analogy, context, parallels, the view from the distance, rather than via direct and dogged pursuit.” Solnit expands on the same ideas for Literary Hub in “In Praise of the Meander,” this time “letting nonfiction narrative find its own way.”
Solnit describes one summer she spent on an Icelandic peninsula, “in the company of strangers and birds.”
“Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born,” she says, and goes to the last dark place she could find that summer—a labyrinth called the Path, lit by the faintest lavender-blue light.
Lyrical and more atmospheric than her engaged treatment of labyrinths in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, this essay shows us a gentle way of being we would do well to heed.
A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.
In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no center, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth is an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you’re lost in that you don’t know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course.
The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the center, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it’s not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence.
Labyrinth (Amelia Gray, The New Yorker, February 2015)
In 1922, William H. Matthews published a book called Mazes and Labyrinths in London. Sam Dolbear introduces this classic for The Public Domain Review, offering a selection of beautiful images and the book itself in full. He concludes with a quote from Matthews, which seems to prefigure Eco’s third model and Borges’s predilections: “The boundaries of knowledge are still misty and ill-defined, a circumstance that only gives zest to the subject.”
Dale, reader of “Hellenic myth” and all-round good sport, has organized the Pumpkin Jamboree. It’s a way for the townspeople to have some weekend fun while raising money for the local fire department. Its highlight is always the corn maze. “Only it isn’t a maze this time,” Dale says, “It’s a labyrinth.”
This unexpected turn of events thins the crowd, but it looks like Jim, his friend, might be willing to give it a go. “Now, you go on, Jim. This is my life’s effort distilled. Find out what it’s all about.”
It’s not easy to take a well-worn, spoiler-free myth known since Plutarch and make it sound fresh. Gray has done that here in her short story without a wasted word, and her Daedalus, cornfield architect, is just getting started.
Dale watched them leave, fingering a pumpkin’s thick stem and surely considering his hours of lost work. He starts his mazes a few months beforehand, cutting into the young corn when it’s tall but not yet sprouted, taking a pass first with the tractor and then with the riding mower to pull out the brace roots and tamp the corn down. He draws the maze plans on drafting paper and displays them afterward in his swept-out garage addition—he calls it the Hall of History—with other jamboree memorabilia: the gearshift from the original hayride truck, trotter prints from the winning pigs. We gather around to reminisce about which wrong turn we took and what was waiting for us on the other side.
Knowing what he must have put into it, I thought it was a shame to stand by and see everyone go. The sun was still low in the sky, and it was lonely at home, where the TV had been broken for a week, and the tap water had begun to taste oddly of blood. “I’ll go first,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
America’s elders need more places to live, but even in liberal enclaves that recognize the problem, developers are facing fierce foes: America’s elders. Make it make sense! Charley Locke reports from her hometown of Oakland, California, where boomers are organizing against two proposals that would add 618 market-rate residential units to the city’s senior housing stock:
Many in the crowd had been marching against governmental and corporate overreach for half a century: against the Vietnam draft and the invasion of Iraq; against Wall Street; against police brutality. They’re part of a generational force that’s antiestablishment and suspicious of power. But in this fight, it wasn’t so clear who the establishment was or who had the power. Were these righteous middle-class activists fending off greedy developers who would charge high rents, or were they wealthy seniors prioritizing neighborhood character over ameliorating the housing crisis? Were they once again David, or had they become Goliath?
People are choosing cremation far more often these days. Open-casket funerals are on a steep decline, along with the professions that allow for loved ones to comfortably view their dead for the last time. For Harper’s Magazine, John Semley talks to Anthony Saldivar, Berri Cooper, Danielle Colquitt, and Hannah Bugos, all of whom competed in the Restorative Art Technical Showcase, “the highlight event of last year’s National Funeral Directors Association convention.” These elite undertakers are highly skilled in what’s known as restorative art, the process by which humans disfigured by grievous injury or disease are made to look like they did in life, so that their loved ones can bid farewell to someone they recognize.
Cooper has dealt with several particularly complex restoration cases during her long career. While we chatted, she pulled up images on her phone of a father who’d been burned so badly in an accident that he was, save for some faintly visible protruding teeth, barely identifiable as a person. She was able to perform a full facial reconstruction on him based on photographs, so that his loved ones could say goodbye to someone who was not only recognizably human, but familiar to them. “There’s not a body where I’ve said, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ ” she told me. That includes the mutilated body of a stillborn baby, whom Cooper embalmed and restored at a grieving mother’s request.
The vanishing of any craft is a tragedy to all who prefer the existence of a thing to its opposite, but restorative art represents more than just a niche domain of aesthetic achievement or a macabre postmortem racket. With its disappearance, we stand to lose a whole way of memorializing our dead: one that might be pricey, unnecessary, and even a little absurd, but only out of commitment to the notion that an occasion as final as death is worthy of pomp and circumstance.
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