Five Bullets 4.12.24
Dalí, Civil War, Ukraine & more
Good Morning Everyone and Happy Friday!
It’s a foggy and rainy morning here in New York City. Over the past week we had a solar eclipse and an earthquake! Lately I’m watching Apple TV’s Manhunt series and started re-reading James L. Swanson’s book. Read more about that below.
What’re you reading, hearing and seeing lately?
This week’s Five Bullets:

Art: Melting clocks, Catalonian cliffs, ants, and a dead or dying animal of some kind. Perhaps you can already picture surrealist master Salvador Dalís 1931 painting The Persistance of Memory. But what does it mean? Dalí said that he employed “imperialist fury of precision” in his painting to “discredit completely the world of reality” but didn’t offer an explanation behind one of his most famous works, leaving viewers to infer their own meaning.
Happy Birthday to my father (and avid Circles In Space reader) William Walpole! Here’s some important historical events which occurred on April 12th including 1961 when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in orbit and the start of the United States Civil War in 1861.
Movies: Civil War Alex Garland’s (28 Days Later, Ex Machina) dystopian thriller premieres this weekend. Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura portray journalists travelling to Washington D.C. to interview the president following the start of America’s second civil war. Garland said he wanted to make a film where journalists are the heros.
News: The New Yorker’s Luke Mogelson is back with another dispatch from the frontlines of Ukraine. His writing on the war is some of the best I’ve read. We’ve covered his pieces Trapped in the Trenches and Two Weeks at the Front in previous newsletters.
Science: For Monday’s solar eclipse millions of people travelled to the path of totality. In New York City as we experienced 90% totality the skies grew a bit darker but not nearly as dramatic as the videos from totality locations. In other news, last Friday we had a 4.8 magnitude earthquake! This was the largest since 2011’s 5.8 quake.




Happy Birthday dad! (And also Keith, for yesterday, April 11).
you might like Mind Hunters on Apple +