“Why all the middle-aged men, Mike?” my writing professor asked me one afternoon during my junior year of college. She was curious (concerned? baffled?) why, in the two semesters we had spent together, my stories were often about white men twice my age. While my peers wrote about college and high school kids doing college and high school things, I veered toward chronicling the failures and half-measures of middle-aged men. My professor asked whether I had ever thought to write about my own life, my unusual background—my mother is Korean and my father is Appalachian. I remember feeling squeamish at the thought. It had occurred to me, but I wasn’t ready to write about it. I told her maybe I would when my parents had passed on, but that wasn’t the only reason. In many ways, I had never fully felt half Korean, which is an odd thing to say, to be fully half of something. But what I mean is, I identified then as mostly white and Appalachian and my being half Korean, though undeniable in my features, seemed secondary. What seems extraordinary about our lives to others is often ordinary to ourselves. I could see why my professor might see the fertile ground in such stories, but they held little appeal to me.
Around this same time, I came across a short story set in India in a national magazine. I disliked the story and thought that the only reason it had been published was because of its unique setting. It was as if our struggles back home, all the poverty and hardship in Appalachia, were givens, not worth reading about—surely not the stuff of the stories that the New York publishing world seemed to crave. In the late days of the twentieth century, at the small state college I attended in Bowling Green, Kentucky, there was not a lot of talk about agency, representation in literature, or appropriation. I could have been wrong about the exoticism I perceived in that story in the magazine, but I don’t think so. It made me think that if I wrote about my parents, myself, what it had been like to grow up half Korean in a town with an ugly racist past, my stories would be published only for that content and not for their prose. I feared that if that happened, I would be trading on my heritage and exploiting it. So I hunkered down into white male characters and the white male writers who taught me how to write about white men.
In general, psychological and behavioral-economics research has found that when people make decisions about what they think they’ll enjoy, they often assign priority to unfamiliar experiences—like a new book or movie, or traveling somewhere they've never been before. They are not wrong to do so: People generally enjoy things less the more accustomed to them they become. As O’Brien writes, “People may choose novelty not because they expect exceptionally positive reactions to the new option, but because they expect exceptionally dull reactions to the old option.” And sometimes, that expected dullness might be exaggerated.
Knowing that expectations can sometimes deviate from reality in this way could help inform the decisions people make about how they spend their leisure time. “I think the biggest application of the finding is for people to spend more time considering why they prefer a novel option over a repeat option,” O’Brien wrote to me in an email. Doing so could save them time and might make them just as happy. “Before getting caught in a one-hour Google rabbit hole for ‘best tacos near me,’ it might help to consider the possible value of simply returning to the great taco place from yesterday (and trying new things [on the menu]),” he added.
In Tamil, folk stories and fairytales, the sort that grandparents tell grandchildren before bed, often begin, “In that only place…”. In another Indian language, Telugu, stories start “Having been said and said and said…”. In English, of course, it is “Once upon a time…”.
Chitra Soundar, an Indian-British author and storyteller, was thinking about her grandmother’s stories, which always began with the classic Tamil opener, when she asked people on Twitter to share how stories began in their languages.
There’s been speculation for years about the end of the era in which humans can reach the pole. Even back in 2007, expeditioners were already remarking that the Arctic ice was markedly thinner and more treacherous than it was in the 1980s. That’s made it nearly impossible for more hardcore expeditioners to do the “proper” pole trip, in which they ski from northern Canada, Russia, Greenland, or Alaska to the pole, carrying their own gear with no outside support. While there were seven such expeditions between 2005 and 2010, there has been only one since then, which was completed in 2014 by Larsen and his partner, Ryan Waters. After that trip, Larsen predicted they would be the last people to do so. “North Pole expeditions are going the way of the passenger pigeon,” he told National Geographic a year later. In 2017, a pair of explorers tried to prove them wrong, but had to abandon their mission after one got severe frostbite.
A story of cultures in simultaneous conflict and concord, The Parisian teems with riches – love, war, betrayal and madness – and marks the arrival of a bright new talent.
But for all its success, quantum mechanics has one tiny problem: No understands it.
To be more exact, even a century after its birth, no one really understands what quantum mechanics is telling us about the nature of reality itself. That open and uncertain territory is the focus of Lee Smolin's new book Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum.
His fascinating stories have much to say about our shared history and culture: from the waves of invaders, such as the Normans, who shaped the architecture of our cathedrals, to the memorials commemorating dimly remembered heroes, and the ancient and modern artworks celebrating the sacred in life. “Art is absolutely fundamental to a cathedral,” a priest tells him in Salisbury: “It’s what this place is about: moments of creative surprise.”