Geist has been exploding onto the literary scene for ninety-nine issues now. Ninety-nine is also the atomic number of the element Einsteinium (Es) which also exploded onto a scene, albeit a much more literal one. Einsteinium was discovered by a non-Einstein Albert, Albert Ghiorso, in the fallout of Ivy Mike, the first full-scale hydrogen bomb explosion on the Enewetak Atoll on November 1, 1952. It is a soft, silvery metal that one should not eat—a difficult feat anyway because it is only produced in milligrams from large nuclear explosions, any primordial Einsteinium that may have existed having long since decayed due to its short half-life. But if one did eat it, as some rats were made to do in the 195s, the bulk of it would travel to the bones, where it would stay for fifty years; some would travel to the lungs, where it would remain for twenty years; a good portion would be excreted, a minuscule amount would make its way to the bloodstream and a teensy amount would end up in the testicles or ovaries, where, for reasons I cannot fathom, it would remain indefinitely. Einsteinium has an atomic weight of 252 µ, a melting point of 86 degrees Celsius and a yet-unknown boiling point. Einsteinium is not a very useful element, mostly because there is so little of it, but also because unlike, say, Tellurium-128, which can stick around for 7.7 x 1²⁴ years, it has a half-life of just 472 days, so scientists just watch it for that time to see what happens. You’d think a guy like Albert Einstein, whose one hundredth anniversary of having jotted down the equation that would define the universe is being celebrated this year, would get a better element.