Like all the other creatures out there, I will eat flesh. Unlike the rest, I won’t catch the animal that will be my meal. And perhaps unlike them—but who really knows what dolphins think?—I’ll question whether my actions are ethical.
As humans gain an ever-increasing understanding of animals’ ability to think, feel, and experience pain, many of us are asking whether eating meat is morally acceptable. Can you care for animals and also eat them?
There’s a difference between compassion and sentimentality and, after all, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. As I’m grilling steaks later, trying to visualize the cow killed for this meal, I wrestle with the question.
But the arrival of LED lightbulbs – more efficient and durable – the closure of old businesses and a government crackdown on outdoor structures have started to push neon lights out of the streets, and Hong Kong residents are trying to work out how to preserve the unique glow of their cityscape.
When we talk about ruins, we often turn to ancient examples — Machu Picchu, the Acropolis, Pompeii. It takes a certain depth of historical knowledge, along with a leap of the imagination, to picture such ruins as intact, teeming with human activity. Ruined malls, on the other hand, have an immediate and intuitive effect; most American adults have a visceral understanding of what these buildings meant at the height of their influence. Freud described the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar,” which might explain the eerie magnetism of these videos: We remember the aura of magic and possibility with which these spaces were once imbued, but in a dead mall, the aura is sucked clean out, like a living, breathing person reduced to a glassy-eyed doll.
A single female narrator, uninterested in sex, completely focused on work that doesn’t constitute a “career,” is a departure from the norm in Japanese literature as much as it is in English. “I don’t think there’s been anyone, at least that I’ve come across, quite like Keiko,” Takemori tells me, “especially in not even missing having a relationship!” Sexuality as a woman is central to Murata’s work, and her novels often feature a lot of sex — though it isn’t necessarily pleasant. Murata is interested in the bizarre pressures society puts onto women. In her newest novel, out this summer in Japan, she is quite explicit: “She sees society as this big baby factory. When you become an adult you become part of this factory to create more humans.”
I was somehow able to dodge getting my first kitchen burn until the age of twenty-five, and the timing couldn’t have been more on-the-nose: It happened about a month after my dad died, just weeks after I exited my cocoon of grief in that cramped apartment in New Jersey where my mother lived. I returned to New York in a bid to re-assimilate into life as I knew it before my father’s final hospital stay. The city’s surrounding stimuli felt abrasive; I could barely get through conversations without wanting to cry.
I figured an ideal mourning period would have been free of disturbances of my own creation. So much for that.
A story may be things that happened, embellished for interest, but that’s not a book. Many stories don’t get good until the end. Some stories — true ones even — are hard to believe. Other stories are just too short, don’t have enough tension, or frankly aren’t that interesting. The stories we tell that enrapture our friends and families may be extraordinarily boring to those who don’t know us. Those stories are not a book.
This is exposure of a deeper, darker kind than he’s attempted before: exposure of himself, and of his former careful management of his and his family’s stories. Looking for truth in the courtroom sense in Sedaris’s essays has always been a mug’s game, missing the point. Truthfulness, though – emotional, spiritual – he’s always traded on these. And with Calypso, he’s given us his most truthful work yet.
The use of raw potato to treat any ailment. Guard booths and gates. Buying barrels of water during blackouts. Leaving the television on to know exactly when the electricity comes back on. And the graphic news reports, the car bombs, the kidnappings, the ever-present fear in your gut that something terrible could happen to someone you love at any moment.
It’s vividly specific details like these that made me wince in recognition while reading Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s “Fruit of the Drunken Tree,” a beautifully rendered novel of an Escobar-era Colombian childhood. Although this debut novel is inspired by the author’s personal experiences (as noted in an afterword), you don’t need to have grown up in Bogotá to be taken in by Contreras’s simple but memorable prose and absorbing story line.