If you want to get married in the village of Lithopia, you’ll need to inform the satellites. First, a hovering drone will capture the happy couple embracing, identifying you by facial recognition. The transaction will be recorded, using cryptography, on a blockchain ledger, as a so-called “smart contract.”
Should you purchase a house, a buyer and seller will enact a ritual transfer by rolling around huge 3D-printed coins. The coins contain lithium, secretly mined by citizens to claim ownership of their natural resource. Lithopian society is a model of a polite surveillance state, governed by human gestures, blockchain and lithium.
Not quite a fantasy, and certainly not reality, the conceptual project “Lithopy” is a satire of both a global phenomenon (bitcoin and the distributed-ledger technologies that enable it) and a local one (the current lithium-rush in the Czech Republic to meet Europe’s car battery demand).
Spring is always a busy season for bird-watching, said Marshall Iliff, a project leader at the Cornell lab. “But this year is sort of off the charts,” he said.
At a time when humans are nervously tracking the spread of a virus as it seeps through communities and leaps across borders, new birders are finding relief in tracking the migratory patterns of great blue herons, mountain yellow-warblers or ruby-throated hummingbirds instead.
Before I read, or reread, the 40 stories in the new Everyman’s Library edition of Lorrie Moore’s short fiction, I would have said I was sure I knew which was one was best. Now my suspicion is confirmed. “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” is a stunning, heart-wrenching story about a mother who finds a blood clot in her baby’s diaper, about the circle of hell known as the pediatric oncology ward, and about the process of writing about one’s own tragedies. When it was first published in the New Yorker in 1997, three people tried to fax me the whole thing in one day.
The narrative is relaxed and easy but never gossipy – readers wanting lurid details of the uncomfortable changeover of editorship at Vogue, when Shulman departed and Edward Enninful took over, will be disappointed. However, she does allow a slightly steely tone to creep in when she writes that although few profiles of her are without a mention of her weight, no comment is ever made about his.
Plastic tulips and silk roses
pretend they grow around
my parents’ gravestone.
This Rodinesque
chipped-away-at
demiembodiedness.