I’ve actually reread Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life twice in recent months: once, to check it was about the right level to read aloud to my kids, who are nine and six. It was, so then I read it to them. Both times it was equally delightful, and I’m lining it up for a third go now, because I can’t think of anything that would cheer me up more.
Physicists who think carefully about time point to troubles posed by quantum mechanics, the laws describing the probabilistic behavior of particles. At the quantum scale, irreversible changes occur that distinguish the past from the future: A particle maintains simultaneous quantum states until you measure it, at which point the particle adopts one of the states. Mysteriously, individual measurement outcomes are random and unpredictable, even as particle behavior collectively follows statistical patterns. This apparent inconsistency between the nature of time in quantum mechanics and the way it functions in relativity has created uncertainty and confusion.
Over the past year, the Swiss physicist Nicolas Gisin has published four papers that attempt to dispel the fog surrounding time in physics. As Gisin sees it, the problem all along has been mathematical. Gisin argues that time in general and the time we call the present are easily expressed in a century-old mathematical language called intuitionist mathematics, which rejects the existence of numbers with infinitely many digits. When intuitionist math is used to describe the evolution of physical systems, it makes clear, according to Gisin, that “time really passes and new information is created.” Moreover, with this formalism, the strict determinism implied by Einstein’s equations gives way to a quantum-like unpredictability. If numbers are finite and limited in their precision, then nature itself is inherently imprecise, and thus unpredictable.
Postpartum anxiety is the subject of Sarah Menkedick’s searing new book, “Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America,” her second on motherhood. Fear is what she calls “the last major taboo of American motherhood.”
Anxiety is epidemic — over 40 million Americans struggle with the condition, a number that is surely only growing at the moment — but it’s especially pervasive in pregnancy and the immediate postpartum period. Ninety-five percent of new mothers experience O.C.D.-like intrusive thoughts, according to one study Menkedick cites, while another estimates that 17 percent of mothers live with clinical levels of anxiety. The banality of anxiety in motherhood is what makes it so dangerous, especially in a world so filled with fear. Who will bat an eye at a mother who washes her child’s hands raw during a pandemic?
It was Thanksgiving eve, 1972. Mimi, the matriarch of the Galvin family, had labored over a flawless meal for her husband and the 11 of her 12 children who had converged for the holiday. If a stranger had glanced inside their home, he or she would have noted a seemingly idyllic scene, punctuated by the gingerbread house Mimi had made and placed on display ahead of what she’d hoped would be a beautiful night. But it was not to be. For starters, her eldest son, Donald, picked up the dining room table and threw it at his brother Jim, sending the pressed linen, plates and silver everywhere.
“There may have been no better, more precise manifestation of her deepest fears than this . . . that everything good she had done, all the work, all the attention to detail and love, yes, love, for her family was in pieces.” So relates Robert Kolker, journalist and author of “Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family,” his nonfiction rendering of how 12 siblings — half of them schizophrenic — and their parents navigated illness, unspeakable violence and the crushed promise of the American Dream.
Dawn, after the hoped-for downpour.
Droplets beaded in the sage.