Lonely Singing

The Singing Tribe

Benjamin George Coles | London Magazine | 19th February 2024 | U

Lump-in-throat-inducing short story about cultural loss. A grandfather tells his granddaughter about a lost tribe within the Guyanese rainforest that communicated only by singing. “I sometimes imagine the moment when they first encountered other people — people who didn’t sing all the time. The profundity of the pity they must have felt. And what about the first member of their tribe to stop singing?” (1,300 words)

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Death, Lonely Death

Doug Muir | Crooked Timber | 19th February 2024 | U

Voyager 1’s original mission was supposed to last three years. Forty years later, it is still going — falling outwards into interstellar space over 15 billion kilometres away. Its legacy includes the now-famous image of Earth as the “Pale Blue Dot”. Expected to die off due to power loss decades earlier, Voyager 1 ploughs on — sending back “gibberish instead of data”. “We thought we knew how Voyager would end” (2,500 words)