On the last afternoon of the symposium, I noticed a man who didn’t look the part of the typical physicist. He had an Old Testament beard crowned by bright eyes, and he wore black jeans and a turtleneck. I tried my line on him, and his reply was so unusual that I remember it exactly. “My approach to research is to ask myself how I would create the universe, were I God. I’ve come to the conclusion that God could never understand calculus or, indeed, the real numbers. But I am pretty sure that God can count.” He showed me a game with an electron and a chessboard. The probability of the electron jumping between any two squares was related to the total number of ways of travelling between them. Through this game, he hoped to reduce quantum physics, concerned with the movement of particles, to a simple matter of counting. I had no idea what to think of this, so I quickly said goodbye, and in my haste, I neglected to ask his name.
Seven years later, as a new PhD visiting Stanford University, I was formally introduced to David Finkelstein, the first person to describe the inner structure of a black hole. In 1958, he had used simple mathematics to describe how something such as light travels near the hole’s surface, showing that the boundary can be crossed only one way—by photons falling in. Because of this, a black hole would appear perfectly black. Today, we call this edge of darkness the event horizon.
Dinosaur research has been steadily expanding in recent years, with new fossil discoveries and ever-improving fossil-scanning technology reshaping the way scientists understand these animals that dominated terrestrial ecosystems for more than 130 million years. But fossils on their own can reveal only so much about bigger-picture questions. Do differences in the head crests of hadrosaurs, say, or the skeletons of stegosaurs, represent evolutions through time, or the difference between males and females from the same time? If changes through time, how long did that evolution take, and what caused the shift? Where on the planet were dinosaurs most prevalent and diverse? Who fell prey to whom, and what type of terrain did these creatures carve their lives through? Unearthing additional fossils won't tell you all these things. The answers, more often, rest in the rocks that surround the bones. And those rocks are, in many cases, not well studied.
Maidment, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, is leading the push to change that, at least for North America’s Late Jurassic. This summer, she and Bonsor teamed up with an international group of paleontologists in a dinosaur dig dubbed Mission Jurassic that aims to excavate new museum specimens and to explore the surrounding sediments for deeper details. They’re working in the Morrison Formation, a suite of rocks that has produced more Jurassic dinosaur bones than any other collection of rocks on the continent. Maidment’s ultimate goal: to develop the first-ever comprehensive chronology of the entire Morrison that maps out how the landscape changed through time and how different fossils fit into it.
Where did normal come from, and why does it have the power it does in our lives, in our institutions, in our world? How did it become like air—invisible, essential, all around us? As Ian Hacking was the first to point out, look up normal in any English dictionary and the first definition is “usual, regular, common, typical.” How did this become something to aspire? How did everyone being the same achieve the cultural force it has?
“Everybody that says they want to work for Disney?” said Robert Brauchler, who was a cast member for 16 years at Walt Disney World in Orlando. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, they say they want to work at the Haunted Mansion.”
The work itself isn’t extraordinary. Like those at any other attraction, cast members (clad here in green polyester tuxedos and dresses) still spend hours parking strollers in the Florida heat or loading guests into ride vehicles. What sets this attraction apart is how workers, acting as the Mansion’s eerie butlers and maids, can melt into their somber, creepy characters as part of the ride’s ghoulish aesthetic.
“If you’re having a bad day, that’s a great place to be working,” Mr. Brauchler said. “I would just stare at people and just not smile. It’d be like, ‘Hey! You work at Disney; you’re supposed to smile!’ No, I’m not. I would just walk away from them, and it’s all part of the theming.”
The term “California cuisine” has always been a moving target. In the 1970s, California chefs gained national attention for their laser focus on seasonal produce, global cuisines, and for lots of grilling, but despite the emergence of some clear figureheads, like Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck, the food never really coalesced into a consistent ideology. For years, some chefs refused to acknowledge that “California cuisine” even existed.
But even without a clear definition of the food on the plate, diners then and now harbor an image of California dining. The concept conjures a place more than a flavor: a table on the patio or by the pool, surrounded by desert plants and minor celebrities, a glass of wine glinting in the ceaseless sunshine. And increasingly, restaurants, both in the state and elsewhere, design their spaces to evoke this scene.
I had a conversation once with the very urbane chef and pioneer of the contemporary British scene, Rowley Leigh. He didn’t understand salads, he said, now that people had started putting things like meat in them. I disagreed: it is wonderful to find meat in a salad, a windfall, a gift from the universe, like putting your winter coat on for the first time that season and finding a tenner.
Anyway, I only name-drop because salad is quite an interesting waypoint in the evolution of cuisine: there is a purist old guard who can innovate like crazy within a dish, but likes to maintain categories as they have always been – salads with the emphasis on “side”, centrepiece dishes rather than small plates. And then there is a modern wave, which likes to throw everything into the same dish, so anything can be a salad, so long as it’s not hot. And even if it is, they will sometimes call it a “warm salad”. I can see the merit in both sides, but am going to come down on the second.
Look around. Choose a commonplace object. A toaster, let’s say. Now imagine that object has been eradicated from your life and the lives of everyone you know. All memories of making toast vanish from your consciousness. You’re no longer even sure what “toast” is. When you see the word “toaster,” you have no idea what it refers to or how it should be pronounced. Now repeat this process with other objects — birds, calendars, flowers, photographs. Poof! All gone. The world begins to empty out and so does your soul.
This is the premise of Yoko Ogawa’s quietly devastating novel, “The Memory Police.” The setting is an unnamed island controlled by a faceless authoritarian government. Our narrator and chief protagonist is a never-named female novelist who is struggling to complete her latest manuscript. Her parents are dead. She lives alone in the house where she grew up. Her social circle is small, consisting of a handful of neighbors, an old man who lives on a decaying ferryboat and her editor, known only as R. “The island is run by men who are determined to see things disappear,” R tells her. “From their point of view, anything that fails to vanish when they say it should is inconceivable. So they force it to disappear.”
“I always thought of writing as holy,” Deborah Eisenberg told the Paris Review in 2013. “I still do. It’s not something to be approached casually.” No one could accuse Eisenberg, who has published five story collections in 33 years, and whose previous book came out when George W Bush was president, of being casual. She says her stories take about a year each to write, which doesn’t seem so long when one considers their humour, their precision and their great intricacy. She writes stories that demand, and reward, revisiting.
Through all the linguistic interpretations and contemporary examples, McCulloch builds an argument that the internet isn’t just changing the way we use language, it’s changing the way we think about it. When the most visible medium for written English was print, our metaphor for language was the book: fixed, authoritative, slow to change. Now that most written English is informal and online, our collective metaphor is shifting to language as a network: fluid, collectively negotiated, constantly altered. Language is, as McCulloch puts it, humankind’s largest open-source project; and the internet makes it much easier for all of us to see, and be, contributors.