It was 6 p.m. in Paris and midday in New York, and Jérôme Bel was peering intently at the computer screen on his kitchen table.
The dancer Catherine Gallant suddenly appeared in the Skype window. “We’re on Governors Island. Shall I show you the view?” she said. Mr. Bel, who is often described as an experimental choreographer, groaned theatrically and said, “I wish I could be there.”
But it was Mr. Bel’s decision not to be in the rehearsal room in New York, where Ms. Gallant was about to run through “Isadora,” his new solo about the modern-dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. He will not be at Ms. Gallant’s performance on Wednesday at the Crossing the Line festival, nor at any other performance of the work in North America. That’s because Mr. Bel decided this year, for ecological reasons, that he would not work in any way that involves flying.
If you grow the same plants in the same field for too many years in a row, the soil gradually loses certain nutrients leached by the repeated crop and your harvest is at risk of being wiped out by invading insects, microorganisms, or other aggressive plants (think Irish potato famine). Ultimately, the soil can become barren. This is why astute farmers either alternate which seeds they plant in varying years so that the depleted nutrients are returned to the soil by the new crop or they let the field lie fallow so that the earth has enough time in between plantings to rest and naturally regenerate what was taken.
Nobody takes pleasure in this humpback’s death. But whales die for all manner of reasons, and when they do, Raverty can only hope they wash ashore on an accessible beach. This particular carcass was spotted two days ago—bloated, belly up, and malodorous—less than an hour’s hike from the Hakai Institute’s Calvert Island Ecological Observatory,* located just over 90 minutes by seaplane northwest of Vancouver. Staff from the institute alerted Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) about the whale and Paul Cottrell, the agency’s marine mammal coordinator, contacted Raverty, and got the operation in motion with logistical support from the Hakai Institute. The necropsy team is rounded out by Taylor Lehnhart, a technician from DFO.
The hell with fascism. The hell with bigotry and paranoia. The hell with fools falling for the lies of charlatans; that’s what fools do. We’re just going to keep on doing what we do: making and consuming art. Supporting the people who remind us that we are in this together. We are each only one poem, one painting, one song away from another mind, another heart. It’s tragic that we need so much reminding. And yet we have, in art, the power to keep reminding each other.
While Julia and I were busy using twins in books and movies to shore up our senses of self, others were likely using us for the same purpose. Some felt the need to explicitly announce which of us they’d identified as being closest to their soul, as if we were options in a personality questionnaire. With the kids at school and our cousins, the answers were erratic: one day I’d be Victoria’s or Jenny’s soul mate, by the weekend Julia would have taken my place. Adults were more consistent, but not much subtler. Nor could they be guaranteed to get it right. I was out for a walk once with a woman of such extraordinary loudness and gregariousness that she often frightened me. “I’m glad we can get some time alone,” she said conspiratorially. “I love Julia, but I have so much more in common with you.”
It’s a lot to carry when you’re just a pair of young girls trying to play with your My Little Ponies in the lounge. Looking back, I can’t remember which felt more uncomfortable: having someone declare themself on Team Julia in front of me or being clasped like a totem to the beating chest of a stranger. Julia and I would have preferred people to do neither of those things and simply take us on our own terms, non-comparatively and non-symbolically. But what could we do? We learned early on that even gracious and sensible people tend to lose themselves around twins.
A lot of the best recent science fiction and fantasy stories are notable for how well they color outside the lines. Disregarding genre expectations and freely borrowing tools from other literary traditions, a slew of writers are reinventing previously hide-bound forms. This is partially a progression of craft, but it’s also possible because of broader cultural phenomena — fantastical tropes, once restricted to a few niche markets, now dominate mainstream media. As a result, storytellers have to do less reinventing of the wheel each time they mix far-fetched elements — even the most general audiences don’t need the lore of vampires or zombies explained to them, so it takes very little narrative lifting to add such ghouls to an unexpected setting.
Tamsyn Muir’s debut novel, Gideon the Ninth, uses more obscure narrative ingredients — if you don’t know what necromancy is, that’s okay — but part of the delight of reading the novel is just how fearlessly it tosses together outlandish ideas with distinct elements from different genres. It’s a space opera about wizards; it shapes itself into cozy mystery; it slides into slasher-horror, then cuts its way free with musketeer-level swashbucklery. Like its eponymous protagonist, Gideon knows what it’s interested in, and that does not include a lot of dry exposition, world building, or backstory. This keeps the prose nimble; because of this, the plot steadily accelerates. At times morbid and horrific, at others times exuberantly gross, Gideon the Ninth is incredibly fun. It’s snarky, inventive, and absolutely revels in sexual tension and swordplay.
There are very few sharp edges in this novel beyond Andrea’s central villainy and I periodically found myself wishing for a narrative that was, if not searing, a little less smooth — though to be fair, the Conroys suffer grief and loss beyond the financial. That said, what I (occasionally) wished for isn’t what Patchett was trying to achieve. The heroes and heroines of fairy tales face mighty challenges but they almost always make it through in the end. In “The Dutch House,” all’s well that ends well — and that’s a pleasure.
The novel’s focus on empathy may open it to charges of sentimentality, but there is little in “The Divers’ Game” to flatter the hope that people have any interest in treating each other well. Ball, instead, conveys a warm pity, or a mediated grace. Though a death closes each section, the last one, unlike the first three, expresses a fantasy of goodness, or even a template for refusal. Or perhaps it simply has the same effect as the girls’ history lecture, with its grisly video, at the end of which, Ball writes, “the lights came on, and suddenly everyone could see one another.”
Sarcasm is a rare and underappreciated mode in science writing, which tends toward wonderstruck lyricism or, when the situation demands it, sober concern. But sarcasm is exactly the tone called for when your subject is centuries of flimsy scientific research designed by men to “prove” that you, and 50 percent of the human population, are inferior. Of all the bracing virtues in Gina Rippon’s Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds, Rippon’s sarcasm is surely the most savory. Rippon, a professor emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University in the U.K., argues that the extent and significance of the biological differences between the brains of men and women have been greatly exaggerated by generations of scientists and, especially, by the popular press. In recent years, developments in her own discipline, particularly fMRI imaging, have been used to bolster pronouncements about the inherent distinctions between the “male” and “female” brain, even when the evidence for such conclusions is rickety. This ticks Rippon off.
Nevertheless, “A Polar Affair” offers a timely illumination of a mysterious and vital ecosystem. Today, Antarctica is under siege from climate change, with its ice and wildlife threatened. The same-sex behaviors of penguins, once deemed too risqué for public consideration, are now viewed as another instance of nature’s variety. This past summer, in fact, two male penguins in a German zoo began trying to hatch an egg together in front of onlookers. Their efforts captivated zoo-goers in Berlin and penguin fans around the world
Gay penguins? In newspapers everywhere? That’s the kind of thing that would have really shocked George Murray Levick.