Back in the summer of 2016, a big earthquake struck northwestern Turkey. That’s not so unusual, considering that the region sits atop a highly active branching fault network that has a history of producing some seriously powerful tremblors.
The strange thing about this particular quake is that it lasted for 50 days, and not a single soul felt it.
A century and a half after Nadar, I arrived in Paris, along with Steve Duncan and a small crew of urban explorers, with an aim to investigate the city’s relationship to its underground in a way no one had before. We planned a traverse—a walk from one edge of the city to the other, traveling exclusively by subterranean infrastructure. It was a trip Steve had dreamed up back in New York: we’d spent months planning, studying old maps of the city, consulting Parisian explorers, and tracing potential routes.
The expedition, in theory, was tidy. We would descend into the catacombs just outside the southern frontier of the city, near Porte d’Orléans; if all went according to plan, we’d emerge from the sewers near Place de Clichy, beyond the northern border. As the crow flies, the route was about six miles, a stroll you could make between breakfast and lunch. But the subterranean route—as the worm inches, let’s say— would be winding and messy and roundabout, with lots of zigzagging and backtracking. We had prepared for a two- or three-day trek, with nights camping underground.
Humans seem to have a capacity for violent aggression as strong as that of chimpanzees and a capacity for gentleness and docility as strong as that of bonobos. “Compared with other primates, we practice exceptionally low levels of violence in our day-to-day-lives, yet we achieve exceptionally high rates of death from violence in our wars,” Wrangham writes. “That discrepancy is the goodness paradox.” Wrangham has been pondering this paradox in the twenty years since the publication of “Demonic Males,” and he has the first draft of an explanation. It is, literally, far-fetched, relying on observations from Siberia, the South Pacific, the Amazon, Tierra del Fuego, and other remote corners of the earth, as well as on the work of archaeologists, paleontologists, psychologists, biochemists, neurophysiologists, geneticists, and others. The clichés about science being a vast coöperative endeavor may actually be true.
Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings—a panoramic, multivocal portrait of his hometown, Kingston, Jamaica, around the time of an assassination attempt on Bob Marley—was a literary reputation-maker, winner of the 2015 Booker Prize, and one the great city novels of the past five decades. Black Leopard, Red Wolf—James’ first major work since then—will strike many as a radical departure: It is the first in an epic fantasy trilogy set on a fictional continent loosely based on Iron Age Africa. The novel is a delirious smoothie of cultural influences and tributes, from Kurosawa films to superhero comics to the seminal work of the 1930s Nigerian writer D.O. Fagunwa, whose Forest of a Thousand Daemons was the first novel published in the Yoruba language. (I’m pretty sure I even caught a whiff of Robert Browning at one point.)
This is an alert, serious, sweeping novel. To hold it in your hands is like holding, to crib a line from Castellani, a front-row opera ticket.