The surgeon, who has spent 15 minutes gently tearing through tissue, suddenly pauses to gesture ever-so-slightly with his tiny scissors. "Do you see what's on this side? That's nerves." He moves the instrument a few millimeters to the right. "And on this one? That's cancer."
Ashutosh Tewari is the head of the urology department at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He is in the process of removing a patient's cancerous prostate, the walnut-sized gland in the delicate area between the bladder and the penis. This surgery—one of three that Tewari performs on an average day—takes place entirely within an area the size of a cereal bowl. Tewari's movements are deliberate and exact. Just a few wrong cuts could make the patient incontinent or unable to perform sexually for the rest of his life.
But Tewari is making those cuts from 10 feet away. With a robot.
“Not everything can survive translation,” said Shira Greene, when confronted for the first time since graduate school with an Italian manuscript and a blank page. “Hence the age-old notion that she who translates is both translator and traitor to the text: traduttore e traditore.”
Translation is the guiding metaphor through which Rachel Cantor explores themes of love, loyalty, and transformation in her second novel, Good on Paper. Drawing parallels between literary translation and romantic partnership, Cantor dives head first into the “chasm between languages” and the chasm between people, to ask: Can one ever bridge the gap?
It tells a simple story — in the best sense of the word — and tells it well. Unlike thrillers that deal in incomprehensible plots and cheap thrills, this is the believable, focused story of a young man trying to escape the consequences of crime and facing hard choices about love, religion and life itself.
For some women, menopause is no big deal. Some say they barely notice it. My mother, long ago, described her menopause this way: “My periods just started gettin’ lighter and lighter, and my harmones settled down, and then one day … pfft! It was over.”
Not me. Not only did menopause change my life, it changed me.
Complaints about the fashion show system, a monthlong twice-yearly four-country treadmill to see clothes six months before they reach stores, have been around for a long time: Fashion week is too tiring, too old-fashioned, too crowded. But while fashion people have largely complained about the effect the system has on their own lives and jobs and creativity, today’s problems are driven by a force even more powerful than simple self-interest: financial interest.
Which is to say, the buying public.