When I got home, when I got the camera, when I jumped out onto the fire escape to take a picture, it looked like this. This is all that was left.

But only minutes before, as I rode along Wythe Avenue from Williamsburg to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then most of all just after turning onto Dekalb— See the little bulbous shapes down at the bottom-center, right next to the building? Well, just before I got into my building to run up the five flights of stairs carrying my bike on my shoulder, in that exact spot, there was a beautiful field of mammatus clouds—so named because they resemble the shape of a woman’s breast. The sun was setting, its orange light slipping under the dark cumulonimbus that had just delivered a thunderstorm, illuminating the space between the earth and its cloudy ceiling.

Mammatus clouds are the strangest things, rare as precious rocks. The only other time I remember seeing them was during the summer I spend driving around the West with my book of clouds, looking for every new variety I could find. Here’s a picture from Wikipedia. Pretty close. But not the surrounding mystery of the city.

Why do you slip away before I can trap you, you little animal? Nobody else saw you. Will they even believe me that I did? It was only you, and me, and the moments of life that disappear the instant they happen, leaving us passing things to wonder whether they (the moments) are enough.

Today on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free > Belief section, I’ve got a little essay reprising the story I did in April for The Boston Globe on the new science of the non-religious. There’s already a pretty lively comment thread. Take a look:

Atheists have an image problem. According to a study led by University of Minnesota sociologist Penny Edgell, published in 2006, Americans have a lower opinion of them than homosexuals, Jews, Muslims and African-Americans. They can’t get elected to political office, and most people view them as outsiders. Yet the disdain is comparatively quiet and abstract, rarely erupting into palpable conflict. Part of the reason may be that nobody seems to know who atheists are, including atheists themselves.

I’ve really been enjoying the Belief section lately—highly recommended. Be sure to catch Simon Critchley’s ongoing series on Heidegger’s Being and Time.

A psychologist, an astrophysicist, and, um, a “neurotheologist” take the stage in a Brooklyn art gallery, alongside donation-priced beer, to talk about science and religion. That should about cover the bases, right? Time for some good, scientific answers for a change?

Last night, Brooklyn’s second-favorite online magazine it has never heard of (look out for #1), Gelf, hosted a “Geeking Out” event with an all-star cast: Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Matthew Alper, author of the beloved psycho-spiritual ah-ha journey The “God” Part of the Brain. (I discuss Alper briefly in Search here. He told me at the event that, actually, he’s now “retired” from all this stuff in order to devote himself to screenwriting.) Each got up for a few minutes, glossed over the sexiest points of their latest books (on sale in the back), and submitted themselves to the mercy of questions from graduate students and other young, lost souls.

“I guess it’s because I just turned 31,” said a fellow I spoke to with dusty blond hair and a newfound urge to suss out whether he’s an atheist or an agnostic. […]

I know most of you have been keeping up on your Harun Yahya press releases, but for those who haven’t, you may have missed an astonishing occurrence, which I report on today on Vice magazine’s blog:

You know Iceland? The tranquil little island nation northwest of Ireland that looks like a flying cow without legs? No place had been immediately hit harder by the economic tailspin, its banks having gorged themselves full on a plate of Europe’s most toxic assets. So get this: no other country has a higher rate of belief in monkey-to-man evolution—not one. Coincidence? The man thought not.

For more, rush on over to Viceland.

What does it take to imagine that nonviolent approaches to conflict might be possible? Millennia-old religious traditions? A prophet? Common sense? Certainly the last place one would expect to find it: a race of hardened warriors in a hardened land, where a gun is part of the common attire and tribal feuds last for generations.

Yesterday evening, the Brooklyn Academy of Music screened T.C. McLuhan’s 2008 film—decades in the making—The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, a Torch for Peace. It tells a story desperately in need of being told: the life of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the towering Pashtun leader who worked with Mohandas Gandhi in the nonviolent struggle to rid colonial India of British rule. After that, he worked to dissolve the incendiary lines of cultural and religious identity that marked Pakistan from the beginning. In all, he spent a third of his 98-year life in prison. […]

I was 15 when Kurt Vonnegut blew my mind. Good timing. I had never read anything so fantastically alive as Cat’s Cradle, his apocalyptic story of invented religion in a banana republic. At the time, I had just recently converted from being an obsessive TV-watcher to, inexplicably, an in-over-my-head bookworm. Now, with Vonnegut in hand, I realized I had to be a writer.

In the course of consuming his entire corpus, though, I got stopped with indigestion. I forget which book. But in it, in passing, he says that writers are born, not made. Something to that effect. Promptly, I made sure to read and hate Timequake, decide that his whole dumb, cynical world wasn’t somewhere I wanted to live, and never read him again.

I wanted to be a writer, and I hadn’t really written anything good yet, so my only choice was to conclude Vonnegut was an idiot. An old, depressed idiot who couldn’t even cheer himself up with his own hilarious jokes.

Which brings us, of all places, to Louis Menand’s essay in the June 8th New Yorker, “Show or Tell” (just the other day I, it’s true, I told a writer, in my editorial capacity, “Show, don’t tell”; ugh!). […]

I keep seeing license plates. Only certain ones, only ones from places I’ve lived before. Who knew that Brooklyn had so many cars visiting from Virginia? The other night I saw Rhode Island. And I never see anything else—not Connecticut or Jersey, or Pennsylvania or any other. I certainly never notice New York plates.

The only explanation that makes any sense, though, is that I actually see them all. My eyes catch every plate that’s convenient to see. They send the signal to some quiet corner of their brain, some place where secrets, if necessary, will be kept. There, the images can be processed. The tri-states are filtered out, as are all others that have not been old homes. When a plate switches the nostalgia subroutine, yes, bing, pow, the plate seen becomes a plate noticed. And I’m overcome by the sense that home isn’t so far away and, hey, maybe this is home too.

My grandfather collected license plates. He’d lived in dozens of places, but by the time I came around, his were mainly from Colorado. Once he gave me one or two, and I loved them. I guess I probably got this funny little license plate brain department from him.

The brand new Killing the Buddha book is coming out next month, so we’re going to spread holy doubt and confusion all over New York City on June 29th. Would love to see you all there! Here’s the release:

What do you get when a Buddhist raconteur, a junior high Jewish messiah, and a transsexual cowboy for Christ walk into a bar?

Find out at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City on June 29th when Killing the Buddha, the award-winning online magazine of god for the godless, releases its new anthology, Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith.

The evening will feature an open bar, door prizes, and stories by Paul Morris of BOMB Magazine, Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K., and horse wrangler Quince Mountain.

Drawn from the website created by Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau in 2000, Believer, Beware is a collection of true confessions, skeptical testimonies, and personal revelations of religion lost, found and then lost again. Library Journal in a starred review, says Believer, Beware is “shocking, exhilarating, and never dull…. Highly recommended.” Publishers Weekly describes it as “smart, candid, and insightful…. The voices are refreshingly honest.”

Just the facts, ma’am…

Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker, New York City [Google map link]
When: Monday, June 29, 2009
Time: 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Cost: Free, with open bar

I’ll be presenting a talk called “Living Wilderness” Saturday afternoon at the Bushwick Public Library’s Bushwick Reading Series. 3pm. Discussed are Ivan Illich, Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, and a computer program I wrote in college. There will be slides, thank goodness, ensuring a modicum of eye candy.

First, we invent computers. Before long, we realize that in fact, all along, we have been computers ourselves—as cognitive science all but assumes—carrying hardware and software, responding to inputs with outputs. As all that we encounter becomes transcribable into information, we realize we’ve been living inside a universe-computer. God is no longer a king or a father or mother, but a programmer. “So might a carpenter, looking at the moon, suppose that it is made of wood,” scoffs the physicist Steven Weinberg. But there we stand, and can do no other. These machines have taken on life of their own.

And it isn’t just me. Not even close:

An amazing interdisciplinary panel discussion with:

Clara Jo, Video Artist
Nathan Schneider, Writer/Blogger
An Xiao, Photographer/Poet
Roger Bonair-Agard, Poet

And readings from:
Nicole Steinberg
Parker Phillips
Dan Magers

Plus musical guest Colin Summers.

The event is part of the Arts in Bushwick extravaganza, so there’s really no reason to not at least be in the neighborhood if you live in New York City and have a heartbeat.

If $2 bodega umbrellas are really so crappy, how did mine manage to self-destruct so exquisitely the moment I stepped into the rain today?

“I bow to the economic miracle,” says the narrator in Chris Marker’s film, Sans Soleil. And now I throw it in the trash.

‘I am proud that we Chinese have the capability to worry about our astronaut,’ said Zhou Qing’an, 26, a PhD candidate at Tsinghua University. ‘Just imagine if we were a poor country and had no advanced technology, then it would not be necessary for us to worry about him at all.’

– “China’s New Space Hero Returns,” The Washington Post, October 15, 2003.

In repentance for all of our trash, time to make two rainy-day resolutions:

1. Make something I’m proud of
2. When I’ve got to buy something, and the alternative is available, buy what looks like someone was proud to make

“But what I want to show you,” continues the narrator in Sans Soleil, “are the neighborhood celebrations.”