There is no cure for insomnia. Like rain, or luck, or mercy, it comes and goes at will. There is “sleep hygiene,” the very wording of which seems to chide the insomniac for dirty habits, and which, more insultingly still, doesn’t help. Watching Samantha Harvey obliterate the advice that’s so often and so smugly offered to the exhausted—“Have you thought about a blackout blind?” “Why don’t you spray some lavender on your pillow?”—is one of the grim pleasures of “The Shapeless Unease,” Harvey’s new memoir about a year spent chasing a basic human need. “Have I thought about earplugs?” Harvey says at one point, echoing a friend. “Maybe that’s my problem, that I don’t think enough about earplugs.”
But, when night falls, Harvey grows desperate; she’ll try anything once, twice, a hundred times. She brews tea. She works on jigsaw puzzles. She smiles, to signal to her brain that she is content, and she attempts to practice “nocturnal forgiveness,” the temporary “letting go of all wrongs and all guilt or blame.” Insomnia turns Harvey into a haggler, she writes, and then into a beggar. “Maybe I can smuggle sleep in,” she fantasizes, flipping onto her stomach. “Maybe the night won’t notice me.” The book is a harrowing portrait of an intolerable problem—although there’s solace, too, in reading about somebody else’s abject 3 a.m.s. (Not that Harvey ever looks at the clock. “I usually know the time,” she writes, horrifyingly, by “the texture of my thoughts as the night abrades them.”)
What happens to the out-of-style clothing we dump in the charity bin? Or the decades of furnishings downsizing empty-nesters donate to the local thrift shop? What follows the surge of self-satisfaction we feel as responsible recyclers, along with the hope that someone else will get a little pleasure from our discarded things? In Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale, the intrepid Adam Minter sets off to find some answers, traveling from his home in Malaysia to interview cleaners, sellers, sorters, exporters, and importers in Japan, India, West Africa, and North America.
As with his first book, Junkyard Planet (2013), which focused on the far-flung fates of discarded scrap metals, Minter, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, does his best to sift sense from dodgy data. But it’s his vibrant sketches of entrepreneurial characters and his dives into obscure industrial histories that make a persuasive case: discarded goods are becoming a big environmental problem.
Richard “Rum” Atkinson was an 18th-century adventurer of the kind you might find in a picaresque novel. The youngest son in a line of Westmorland tanners, he became a merchant and profiteer, a director of the East India Company, an MP, an Alderman of the City of London, a disappointed lover, a slave owner, and the posthumous initiator of the most almighty family feud. He is also the five-times great-uncle of the Richard Atkinson who produced this fascinating, exhaustive work of family history. Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is the story of a morally tangled inheritance, but it is also the story of Richard Atkinson the younger’s obsessive pursuit of Richard Atkinson the elder.
Better takeout was thriving in DeKalb County,
but the school system hadn’t caught up,
its languages unable to support the Greek bakery,
dim-sum parlors, or lox-and-bagel shops.