Call Me Ishmael

Over 300,000 Gay Men Have Died of AIDS. Today Is World AIDS Day and Trump's America Turns a Blind Eye.

There is no creature on Earth quite like the sperm whale—that great leviathan whose very name conjures obsession, vengeance, and the unfathomable mysteries of the deep. A warm-blooded mammal that has mastered a realm we can barely imagine.

While other whales skim the sunlit surface, the sperm whale descends. It takes a breath—a single, measured inhalation—and then it dives. Down past the twilight zone where light fades to nothing. Down into the crushing, lightless world of the bathypelagic zone, sometimes exceeding three thousand feet.

This is not a journey. It is the only way this animal lives.

In that absolute blackness, under pressure that would implode a human lung in an instant, the whale hunts creatures so elusive that humans rarely see them alive. The battle scars tell the story—circular sucker marks etched into skin, evidence of desperate struggles in depths no human eye has witnessed. These are not wounds from the surface world. They are souvenirs from another planet, one that e…