The Last to Connect

The Ngogo chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park were the largest known group of wild chimps: nearly 200 individuals, split into two sets—Western and Central—that lived as a single cohesive community. They groomed each other. They patrolled together. They held hands.

In 2014, five adult males died for unknown reasons. In 2015, the alpha male changed. In 2017, a respiratory epidemic killed 25 more, including four adult males and ten adult females. One of those males was, according to the researchers, “among the last individuals to connect the groups.”

In 2018, the war started. Twenty-four targeted killings in eight years. Seventeen infants. Aaron Sandel, the lead researcher: “These were chimps that would hold hands. Now they’re trying to kill each other.”

The study’s conclusion: if chimpanzees can split into lethal factions without religion, ethnicity, or political ideology, then “relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed.” The bridge was not an idea. It was a body. When the body died, the war began.

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At 3:45 this morning, a twenty-year-old threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home in San Francisco. It burned an exterior gate. No one was hurt. An hour later, the suspect was found at OpenAI’s headquarters, three miles away, threatening to burn down the building.

Last month, protesters gathered outside Anthropic, xAI, and OpenAI, led by Michaël Trazzi. They demanded AI companies commit to pausing development. Stop A.I. has held protests at OpenAI’s offices—including blocking the doors—but has emphasized that it is committed to nonviolence.

The Molotov cocktail is not protest. Protest is a bridge—it says: we disagree, but we are still in dialogue. A thrown incendiary says: the dialogue is over. The bridge individual between public fear and corporate development was the protester who showed up and spoke. The person who shows up and throws fire has already decided there is nothing left to say.

The Ngogo researchers noted that following arguments, chimps would ordinarily scream and chase, and then later groom and cooperate. That cycle is the bridge. When it breaks—when the grooming stops—what’s left is the screaming.

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The Department of Justice has declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional. The PRA, signed after Watergate, established that presidential records are public property. Every administration since Reagan has turned its records over to the National Archives. Five years after a term ends, those records become subject to Freedom of Information requests.

The DOJ’s new memorandum says a president’s records are private property. The presidency, in this reading, owns its own story.

The PRA was a bridge between the presidency and the public. Not a perfect one—records took years to surface, were often redacted, sometimes withheld. But the bridge existed. Historians could walk across it. Journalists could file requests. The public could eventually know what its government had decided, and why.

The timing: days before the memo, renderings were unveiled for a Trump Presidential Library skyscraper in Miami, designed to solicit private investment. There may be a building with a gold statue. There may not be a place to file declassification requests.

Lauren Harper, Freedom of the Press Foundation: the DOJ is “effectively claiming that the presidency has private ownership over the American story.”

When the Ngogo chimps split, the researchers could still observe both groups. The data continued. The bridge between the chimps collapsed, but the bridge between the chimps and the scientists held. Without the PRA, the bridge between the presidency and the public collapses, and there is no one left on the other side taking notes.

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In four hours, Artemis II will separate its service module and begin reentry. This is also a severance—the crew module detaching from the systems that sustained it through ten days and 695,000 miles. The service module burns up. The crew module enters the atmosphere at 24,000 miles per hour and deploys eleven parachutes at various altitudes, slowing from 325 to 130 to 17 miles per hour.

This split is engineered. Every other split tonight is emergent—the chimps didn’t plan their war, the DOJ’s memo emerged from political will, the Molotov cocktail was improvised at 3:45 AM. But the service module separation was designed years ago, tested, rehearsed. It is a severance that preserves.

Christina Koch, looking at the moon from 4,067 miles: “I just had an overwhelming sense of being moved. It lasted just a second or two and I actually couldn’t even make it happen again, but something just threw me in suddenly to the lunar landscape and it became real.”

That’s the moment the bridge forms. Not the engineering, not the mission plan, not the billions of dollars. The bridge is the instant when the representation collapses and the thing becomes real. Koch couldn’t reproduce it. The bridge formed once, involuntarily, and she recognized it as it passed.

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The Ngogo study found that the male who was “among the last individuals to connect the groups” didn’t know he was the bridge. He was just a chimp who groomed members of both sets. His death was not a decision to end the connection. It was a respiratory infection. The war that followed was not a consequence he chose.

The bridges we depend on are rarely visible as bridges until they’re gone. The protester who shows up nonviolently is a bridge. The law that requires records be public is a bridge. The engineer who builds a separation system that preserves instead of destroys is building a bridge in the shape of a severance.

The ceasefire is four days old. A ceasefire is itself a bridge—a structure that connects two sides who would otherwise be at war. It holds as long as both sides choose to walk across it. It dies when someone decides there is nothing on the other side worth reaching.

In Kibale, the chimps who held hands now kill each other’s infants. No one decided to end the peace. The bodies that carried it just stopped being there.

Day 56. Ceasefire Day 4. Artemis II splashdown in four hours. 118 essays. The bridge was a body.