But despite those advances, over the past half century, no one has ever directly detected a single particle of dark matter. Over and over again, dark matter has resisted being pinned down, like a fleeting shadow in the woods. Every time physicists have searched for dark matter particles with powerful and sensitive experiments in abandoned mines and in Antarctica, and whenever they’ve tried to produce them in particle accelerators, they’ve come back empty-handed. For a while, physicists hoped to find a theoretical type of matter called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), but searches for them have repeatedly turned up nothing.
With the WIMP candidacy all but dead, dark matter is apparently the most ubiquitous thing physicists have never found. And as long as it’s not found, it’s still possible that there is no dark matter at all. An alternative remains: instead of huge amounts of hidden matter, some mysterious aspect of gravity could be warping the cosmos instead.
I have always been drawn to breasts, the beauty of their curves. In fourth grade, I dressed for picture day with a bathing suit top under my shiny marbled blue shirt, so I could appear to be wearing a bra. My chest was as smooth as a winter pond, and my belly puffed out the way children’s do before they grow into their frame. When I was in sixth grade and my breasts were just mosquito bites, I tried to convince my mother to let me get a bra. My mom called them buds and would comment on my friends’ new growth: Liz has buds now. Though I cringed at the word, all I wanted was for them to blossom on my own body. Finally, my mother deemed it appropriate (or got sick of my nagging) and bought me a training bra at Old Navy—a simple white cotton thing with two triangles and elastic straps, in a size S. I was pleased. Mostly I wanted kids at school to see the outline of the straps under my shirt.
As a young girl, I always had a hunch that I would get cancer. One night at my dad’s house, a year or so after I got my first bra, I touched my new breast tissue and thought for sure I felt a lump. My father was more composed than most in his role as single father to a daughter; he did not make a fuss or bring undue attention when he asked teenage me if I needed to get tampons at the grocery store. When I got my period, he bought me a poster of Orlando Bloom as Legolas, my first big celebrity crush, as a gift to mark the occasion. Still, that didn’t make it easy to ask my father to check the lump in front of the his-and-hers sinks of our upstairs bathroom. I have effaced the specifics of that moment. I don’t remember what season it was, or which direction I looked, or if his hands were hot or cold, if he wore his glasses or took them off. Of the moment we stood in front of that bathroom mirror and cinnamon-red countertop, all that remains is his assurance that I needn’t worry.
“Friends and Strangers” is a big novel with big ideas. Sullivan sets out to cover a lot of terrain, from systemic inequality and the true definition of privilege to the bizarre social doctrine of dorm life and the politics of suburban book clubs. But where this novel shines brightest is in her patchwork of spot on minutiae, her honest rendering of what happens behind closed doors.
In 1947 the nation was shocked to hear that British troops in Egypt were wearing pants made out of old flour bags. The war was over, we had won, and yet here were our boys wearing scratchy, dusty undercrackers. Five years earlier this might have seemed like a gesture of patriotic making-do, but now it just seemed shoddy. The war services secretary assured the House of Commons that he would be looking into the soldiers’ pants immediately.
In this brilliantly original and deeply researched book, Emily Cockayne sets out to show how the meanings of material reuse zigzag wildly according to context. There is something honourable about aristocrats handing down the family silver; something worthy about a green-minded family rummaging through a car boot sale; something pitiable about a rough sleeper investigating the contents of a public rubbish bin.
Tokyo Ueno Station, written by Yu Miri and translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles, lays bare the depth of sorrow for those society deems too pitiable to even see. While the poignancy of the novel is palpable, its refusal to look away actually softens the blow, as there is little joy to weigh it against. Still, Tokyo Ueno Station is a beautiful look at life too often unobserved, and one whose resonance only seems to grow by the day.
a woman precedes me up the long rope,
her dangling braids the color of rain.