We have become adept at locating cancer’s physical presence—its corporeal form—but remain largely blind to its character, its behavior, its future. We employ genomic assays and histopathological grading, but many early-stage tumors remain biologically ambiguous. They might be the kind of early cancers that surgery can cure. They might be slow-growing and unlikely to cause harm. Or, most concerning, they might already have metastasized, rendering local intervention moot. Three possibilities—yet we often cannot tell which we’re confronting.
To complicate matters further, false positives abound: tests that suggest cancer where none exists, leading to unnecessary procedures, anxiety, and harm.
Beneath the richness of our world lies a pristine simplicity. Everything is made of a set of just 17 fundamental particles, and those particles, though they may differ by mass or charge, come in just two basic types. Each is either a “boson” or a “fermion.”
The physicist Paul Dirac coined both terms in a speech in 1945, naming the two particle kingdoms after physicists who helped elucidate their properties: Satyendra Nath Bose and Enrico Fermi.
Some of us find relief from what James Rebanks calls our “dark and chaotic world” in physical activities, others in hobbies and various forms of entertainment. Reading is my favorite handy escape hatch, and these days I find stories about people who engage with the natural world and the critters that inhabit it – hares, hawks, crows, octopuses, ducks – particularly soothing. Rebanks’ “The Place of Tides” fits the bill.
Okonkwo astutely captures the awkwardness and insecurities of a young woman from any country or culture starting an independent life as an adult. She also shows how relationships with family members can change when young people reach adulthood and head out on their own.
Among Friends is a bracingly honest and affectingly intimate depiction of abuse, family dynamics and self-deceit. It is sharply observed and psychologically astute, somehow both passionate and dispassionate, and it upends its characters’ lives so ruthlessly and revealingly that it is hard not to take pleasure in a false facade being finally smashed.
This collection might not always have faith in the world that made it, but it tries to. It trusts this place to hold it.
So newspaper history is a tricky genre that must capture the ephemeral and show why it matters. Ian Mayes’s excellent book follows two previous, quasi-official volumes of Guardian history by David Ayerst and Geoffrey Taylor. It begins in 1986 when the Guardian was still a one-section, inky, monochrome paper full of misprints and poor quality pictures, newly threatened by Rupert Murdoch’s move to Wapping and the birth of the Independent. It ends in 1995 with a radically restyled paper, with new sections such as G2 and the pocket-sized TV and entertainment supplement, the Guide.
Collins says that “ultimately photography is about the art of looking” and that’s what this book is really about. How do we look and what do we see?