What happened? Why do we live in the Anthropocene and not a world resembling Planet of the Apes? We share around 99 percent of our DNA with our great ape cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos. So, what makes us different from our closest relatives that gives us our staggering capacity for reproducing and surviving?
As an evolutionary anthropologist, these questions have led me to live and study among the Yucatec Maya of Mexico, the Pumé hunter-gatherers of Venezuela, and the Tanala agriculturalists of Madagascar. My research, combined with genetic data and other studies, offers clues to what developed in the deep past that has made humans so successful—for better or for worse.
In the sixth story in The Cat and the City, “Chinese Characters”, a teacher of Japanese tells her American student: “Characters shift meaning when placed alongside others, so it’s important we focus on the relationships between them. No character truly exists in isolation, and there’s always a story for even the most complicated or simple of characters.” She is talking about kanji, the characters used in written Japanese, but what she says is equally true of the cast of this unusual novel, who skim across each other’s lives having the narrowest of misses and the most profound impacts as they follow their own trajectories across Tokyo.
Books that are likely to endure can often feel strikingly timely on arrival. Set in the Ukrainian town of Kirovka in the 1980s and starring a set of characters who live in the same block of flats, Maria Reva’s enthralling debut of interlinked short stories achieves the double effect of timelessness and timeliness. The emotional impact of this book is cumulative. This is partly down to her mastery of the form: the stories are connected by a unity of place, time and relationship. More importantly, they are brought to life by Reva’s handling of darkness and light.
Messrs Sandbu and Sperling both combine a basic support for free markets with a fear of their power. It is precisely because incentives are so potent that competitive forces must not be allowed to go haywire, as when firms gain an edge by reclassifying their workers as contractors, or by moving to tax havens. Such races-to-the-bottom define many of the policy failures of recent history.
And both books highlight the moral blind spots that many liberals and economists think have been exposed by the era of globalisation (and perhaps by the pandemic, too). Clarifying those problems, and finding solutions that avoid compromising too much on freedom and free markets, is crucial work.
They’d try to find the hem first,
the beginning of that lace-fine calyx that
sometimes ran deliciously
from shoulder to waist in a continuum