In 1901, London was still the largest city in the world. It had a population of six and a half million, two million more than New York and five million more than Tokyo. One of the ‘biggest wonders of this glorious Metropolis’ as well as ‘one of the most strangely human sights that the world can show’, according to J.C. Woollan, was the spectacle of all these millions of people being fed. On any given day, Woollan wrote, ‘there are nearly a million people lunching in restaurants within a few miles of the Strand.’ In the evenings, thousands dined in swanky West End restaurants, where a meal with wine might cost an average of a sovereign. But, as Woollan noted, ‘far more Londoners … live each day – and live not at all badly either – on a single shilling each.’ These Londoners visited sausage and pork houses, tea rooms, pie and eel shops and vegetarian restaurants, refreshment rooms and taverns, cookshops in Hackney that sold hot pease pudding and fried fish shops in Clerkenwell where you could buy ‘fish and tatters’ for a couple of pennies.
The spectacle of eating out in London in 2019 is still a ‘strangely human’ sight. Sometimes I find myself at the station on my way home trying to decide between a vegetarian burrito with extra guacamole at Benito’s Hat or a box of Moroccan meatballs at Leon and I think about how many other people across the city are choosing the same thing at that exact moment, weighing the cost against the carbs, deciding on something cold and easy versus something hot and filling, feeling guilty about eating meat, or wondering whether a ‘meal deal’ is a con.
In Berlin, people leave empty bottles lying around, and homeless people collect them for the deposit. On my block, people whose extra possessions don’t rise to garage-sale value sometimes leave them on the curb with a sign saying “Free.” I know a man who habitually discards books as he travels, leaving them behind in public places such as airports and train stations. Is this philanthropy, or is it littering? Is it the friend or the enemy of humanity who gives them his trash?
I grant that what makes a gesture philanthropic is the fact that the item is of use to the recipient, regardless of its value to the giver. And I do fancy myself a philanthropic type—at least I try to be. So why couldn’t I leave the bowl out on the entry table, poised to benefit whoever it might happen to appeal to? The answer is a lesson in the fineness of the line between ethics and aesthetics.
To fight for their survival, said Loida Garcia-Febo, president of the American Library Association, libraries tried to determine what other role they could play. “They invented these amazing new initiatives that are finally launching now,” she said. It took them this long to raise money and build them.
Libraries are certainly having a moment. In the past few years dozens of new high-profile libraries have opened close to home and across the world. And they certainly don’t resemble the book-depot vision of libraries from the past.
On this day 50 years ago, the residents of Abbey Road were probably unaware of just how much they were going to hate the Beatles.
It was on August 8, 1969, that the band snapped the photo that would change Abbey Road’s future forever. The following month they would release an album named after the northwest London street where it had been recorded, and that album’s iconic cover would seal the street’s fate. A photo of the Fab Four crossing the street in tidily-arranged profile made Abbey Road the site of the most famous crosswalk in the world.
In terms of traffic management, it’s been downhill ever since.
Plague, virus, and zombie apocalypse narratives tend to share a few common threads: Often, humanity brings such terrors upon itself; usually, survivors or those with immunity come together in ragtag groups and attempt to find a cure and/or fight their way through to where the other healthy people are; and, almost always, humanity survives — perhaps in drastically reduced numbers, sans modern technology — and must learn to rebuild itself anew. The central metaphor in these narratives tends to be that humanity is really quite an awful, violent species that wars with itself constantly, and that our boundless curiosity and hubris — whether that involves scientific research gone awry or meddling with forces beyond our ken — ultimately lead to our own near-complete destruction.
This metaphor is definitely present in Kira Jane Buxton's debut novel, Hollow Kingdom, but luckily for anyone drawn to its gorgeous cover (it's an eye-catcher, a bright, near-neon green with a black and purple crow staring intensely from behind the white font), Buxton takes a joyfully original approach to apocalyptic fiction. See, instead of us humans being the focal point in the story of our own extinction, it's the plethora of life that we leave behind that takes center stage.
Oisín Fagan’s first novel is a dark and bloody tale, well leavened with bone-dry humour, and with a dramatic climax that has about it the flavour of a Jacobean tragedy (or Kurosawa, for the more cinematically inclined). The medieval Ireland in which the book is set was a complicated and contending mix of native Irish, or Gaels; long-settled English, many of Norman origin; and more recent English settlers. The novel’s action occurs in the summer of 1348, the year the Black Death came to Ireland, causing destruction and chaos to sweep through the island, most of all in the central area of the English occupation. And at that area’s northern edge, in County Meath, is the village of Nobber.
There are a handful of world-stage cities that outsiders assume they not only know but deeply understand — even if they’ve never once set foot there. Subsumed in myth, these boldfaced locations include Paris, New York, London and most certainly Los Angeles.
New Orleans occupies its own specific place in that constellation, says writer Sarah M. Broom. “When you come from a mythologized place as I do, who are you in that story?”
If a little-known language of a remote people dies, should we care? That is the heart of the issue raised by Don Kulick’s “A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea.” While it doesn’t give the reader a neat answer, it will leave you thinking about how cultures everywhere break down and evolve, and the role we unwittingly play in their demise.
This book makes a good case for seeing linguistics as “the universal social science”, one that teaches us not just about language but about how we live and make sense of the world. When we learn how the world is made through words, we also learn to be sceptical of our current iteration of reality and more tolerant of other perspectives. If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived.