Welcome to Anywhere, America. The houses are identical, two-story buildings covered in clapboard and pinched in by two swathes of tightly mown lawn. The streets are wide and well-maintained. The sidewalks are after-thoughts, stopping and starting at seemingly random intervals. It doesn’t matter where they go or how wide they are because their use is intrinsically marginal. Suburbs were not designed with the pedestrian in mind.
Despite their seeming ubiquity, suburbs are an experiment, just one answer to the question of how to house and organize humanity. It’s easy to forget how quickly we’ve come to this stage. Three centuries ago, the most common profession by far was sustenance farming. Most people were illiterate village dwellers. Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities while more than 90% of the world’s young adults are literate. In the past 200 years the global population has septupled.
Conterminously with all of these developments has been the largest migration in human history. Not from country to country or region to region but from the hinterlands to the city. The effects of this demographic transformation are difficult to overstate.
“I don’t care if people don’t think feminism is important, because I know it is,” the musician and early Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna says toward the end of “The Punk Singer,” Sini Anderson’s 2013 documentary about her. “And I don’t care if people don’t think late-stage Lyme disease exists, because I have it and other people have it. . . . If they don’t want to believe in it or they don’t want to care about it, that’s totally fine, but they should have to stay out of my way.” She describes an experience common to many sufferers from chronic illness—that of being dismissed as an unreliable witness to what is happening inside her. Since no single medical condition, a doctor once told her, could plausibly affect so many different systems—neurological, respiratory, gastrointestinal—she must be having a panic attack.
But it isn’t only a question of whether or not individual patients are believed. An enigmatic disorder that might have justified a great influx of research money and ingenuity has instead remained stalled and under-investigated, with key players unable to agree on basic facts, such as what it does, how to tell who has it, and what, if anything, can treat it. The standard two-tier test for Lyme, established in 1994, is extremely imprecise, prone to false positives and false negatives. It detects only the antibodies mustered to combat the bacteria, so it isn’t a reliable way to ascertain current, persistent infection. (Whether the symptoms are caused by ongoing infection or are merely an aftereffect of an earlier one is among the most contested questions in the so-called Lyme wars.) The test will give a pass to patients whose immune response has been quieted by antibiotics yet can be triggered by certain antibodies that may be present in non-sufferers.
No doubt about it, middle-aged women are having a moment. Isabella Rossellini was recently reinstated as the face of Lancôme after being fired by the French cosmetics house in 1996 for, she says, being too old (she was a haggard crone of 43). At this year’s Academy Awards, a majority of the best actress nominees were over 40 and the winner, Frances McDormand, is 60. This marked a great leap forward for Hollywood, which has traditionally cast women older than 38 in five roles: crazy mother-in-law, cameo librarian, Shirley MacLaine, lady with a dog at the crime scene or frumpy yet endearing confidante of the hero, a guy who was two years above said actress at college. You could call this the Harrison Ford Problem.
Ageism may well be the last taboo, but keeping it in place is not just male prejudice but the female’s secret dread of losing her youth. Rossellini says that Lancôme told her women dream of looking young. How does it feel to have your sexual currency depreciate that abruptly — and what stock, if any, can replace it? There has been remarkably little good writing about this thorny topic but here, with excellent timing, comes Pamela Druckerman’s pitch-perfect and brutally frank “There Are No Grown-Ups.”
In spite of these occasional infelicities and awkwardnesses, “Circe” will surely delight readers new to the witch’s stories as it will many who remember her role in the Greek myths of their childhood: Like a good children’s book, it engrosses and races along at a clip, eliciting excitement and emotion along the way. The novel’s feminist slant also appeals, offering — like revisions of Medea including Rachel Cusk’s 2015 adaptation of the play or David Vann’s 2017 novel “Bright Air Black” — a reclamation of one of myth’s reviled women. Purists may be less enchanted, bemused by Miller’s sentimental leanings and her determination to make Circe into an ultimately likable, or at least forgivable, character. This narrative choice seems a taming, and hence a diminishment, of the character’s transgressive divine excess.
I often think of a 2016 profile of DeWitt, which noted that she likes to use the phrase "the life of the mind." The journalist wrote that she said it "without irony" — as if it were a little tacky, or a little cute, to do so. Maybe a more socially adept author would be cooler about it, or more self-deprecating. But DeWitt doesn't bother adapting. In her fiction, she uses Greek if Greek is called for, or graphs if graphs are called for. Ideals such as likeability and accessibility seem irrelevant, if not quaint, in the face of her wonderfully irritable intelligence.
I do not and have never really lived in nature. After growing up in a suburb of Chicago and going to college in Columbia, Missouri (pop. 120,612), I moved to Boston. When I look out my window, I see a small parking lot and a dumpster, flanked on either side by recycling bins. I am not sure whether this makes me the intended audience for the pastoral writings of Wendell Berry and Bernd Heinrich or the opposite of it, but I have a great affection for both in any case. Their new books, The World-Ending Fire and A Naturalist at Large respectively, are both career-spanning compendiums of essays on a wide variety of nature and nature-adjacent subjects. Their serendipitous simultaneous publication offers both an opportunity to consider their approaches together. Perhaps more significantly, they also offer a reprieve from the unending drive to refresh Twitter in search of the latest snippet of political news.