11. The Loneliest Whale in the World
Tonally, this might seem a little out of place, but it’s also the most personally unsettling thing on my entire list. The story of 52 Hertz –a lone, unidentified species of whale whose singularly high-pitched voice has likely relegated it to a lifetime of solitude– is a fairly well-known at this point, and fills a lot of us with disquieting emotion. We’re listening to the sped-up call of a creature that likely has a heart so vast a human child could crawl inside of it, something that has never been seen by human eyes, but whose voice has been drifting across various scientific and military hydrophone arrays for years. Other whales ignore it, or possibly don’t hear it. Still, 52 Hertz keeps swimming, keeps singing, its cries heard as far north as the Aleutian Islands and as far south as the coast of California. No answer ever comes, as far as we know. Something so deeply unnerving, unmooring, about that. Kinship, 52 Hertz. We hear you. You’re not alone.