Letters from Our Readers

Readers respond to Burkhard Bilger's piece about turbulence, Gideon Lewis-Kraus's article on Anthropic, Ava Kofman's story concerning surrogacy, and Katy Waldman's essay about fawning. Burkhard Bilger's recent story about aviation turbulence opens with a dramatic account of a Singapore Airlines flight, SQ321, in May, 2024 (" Buckle Up," March 9th). The plane hit clear-air turbulence over Myanmar's Irrawaddy River, causing it to drop almost two hundred feet in an instant. During the Second World War, U.S. Army Air Forces transport planes confronted the same weather system. Flying from northeast India, over "the Hump" of intervening mountain ranges, to southwestern China, pilots routinely encountered turbulence that dropped and lifted their aircraft not hundreds of feet but thousands.