It’s become one of the most important rites of passage in the book-publication process—more meaningful to some writers than a book party or book-cover reveal. For many authors, in fact, no book deal is complete until they’ve posted it.
It is the Publishers Marketplace book-deal social-media post, a screenshot of the charmingly retro-looking blurb from a publishing-industry trade website that announces the details of an author selling their book.
It was November 16, 1974—a turbulent time on planet Earth. The cold war was reaching its crescendo, and the world economy was still sputtering from a Middle East oil embargo that was imposed the previous year. The U.S. had retreated from its crewed forays to the moon but was still fighting in Vietnam, and the resignation of scandal-plagued President Richard Nixon was still reverberating. The Beatles had effectively disbanded earlier yet would officially do so before year’s end. (John Lennon’s solo single—“Whatever Gets You thru the Night”—topped the U.S. charts that very day.)
Against that dark background, this first-ever interstellar transmission was both a literal and figurative ray of light. Astronomers had already started eavesdropping on the heavens, hopefully awaiting murmurs from beyond that would break our seeming cosmic solitude. But this was something different—an intentional summons, perhaps an invitation for communion with hypothetical beings among the stars. Sent using a powerful radio transmitter at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, it signaled the start of an age that is still unfolding, in which our rapidly changing technological civilization confronts an uncertain fate beneath a silent sky and grapples with how to present itself.
Like many other cephalopods, two-spot octopuses are masters of disguise. Observations from almost a century ago detail this octopus’ effective camouflaging practice, with one 1937 observation remarking on a wild two-spot octopus’ ability to rapidly alternate between mottled patterns and solid colors. Their colorful “flashing” is enabled by a complex web of chromatophores: These color-changing organs have a distinct pigment sac that sits beneath the surface of their skin and expands and contracts to reveal different hues.
After all, what or who confers “importance”? Our experts do, for one thing. But we also determined it had to do with reach and scale, with the sense that a recipe represented a clear shift in some aspect of home cooking for some significant number of Americans. “American cooking”? Rightly and necessarily a sprawling thing made by immigrants, shaped by the push and pull of assimilation, separatism, and syncretism, utterly dependent on the open migration of flavors and ideas. Last, what even is a “recipe”? There are many excellent dishes from the past century that, upon examination, are innovations rather than discrete entities recorded for replication in the kitchen. Roasted Brussels sprouts, fajitas, chili crisp, and Spam musubi were all nominated and ultimately dismissed for this reason.
Before the railway, the River Thames brought fresh fish into London markets via ice boats. Fish spoil quickly due to enzymes and bacteria, a process that is slowed by chilling. In England, the fishing fleets of Harwich began using ice to preserve fish at the end of the 18th century. The ice, collected in winter and stored in icehouses for several months, was instrumental in securing the time needed to bring fresh fish to urban markets, of which London was the most important. As London’s urban population swelled, so-called “wet” fish became a widely available, but expensive, alternative to cured fish. In fact, the capital was unique among British inland cities in its proportion of fishmongers to butchers, in part due to its size and centrality. In 1842, London had one fish dealer for every four butchers, whereas in Warwickshire the ratio was one to 27, in Staffordshire only one to 44. These relations would soon shift, propelled by the combined effect of urban growth, railways, and trawling.
While successful songwriting partnerships abound, literary fiction created by two or more authors is rare, and short stories produced by two hands are unicorns. Step forward plucky micro-press Scratch Books, which has set out to rectify this situation. Duets is a volume of co-written short stories by some of the genre’s best current practitioners. The results are startling, occasionally baffling, but never less than thrilling.
In a solidly-plotted historical thriller with danger lurking around every corner and intrigue brewing from the lowest dungheap to the highest palace in the land, the realisation that these murders are inflaming existing rivalries to the point where an epic confrontation is almost unavoidable raises the stakes even further. There’s no sign here that the dark and brooding Jonas Flynt’s adventures are running out of steam yet.
What is gout that we are mindful of it? An extraordinarily painful condition, as some of us know from personal experience, gout can feel like your nerves are seeking sweet release through your skin. I had my first attack when I was 28 years old, cycled 20–50 miles a week, ate a mostly vegetarian diet, and rarely drank. A sudden pain in the large joint of my right big toe led me to the doctor. Blood tests led to my surprising diagnosis. This was not the classic 18th-century “old, corpulent, port-and-pheasant” gout but “young, cool” gout, if such a thing exists. I have a modern medical explanation, rich in genetics, but reading Steven Shapin’s Eating and Being: A History of Ideas About Our Food and Ourselves (2024) reminded me that for many centuries, my suffering would have been understood differently. Physicians and laypeople alike saw health and disease as arising from diet and personal comportment, which were tools for managing our natures. Modern clichés like “you are what you eat” are echoes of an ancient and enduring system of care encompassing bodies, diets, and personal identity. Medicine often began in the kitchen, or as Andrew Boorde insisted in his 1547 Breviary of Health, “a good cook is half a physician.”