I’ve come to realize I’m very much a writer of the sentence. Since my phrasing is plain and spare, I didn’t always think I was. Long, rich, complicated sentences in which a surprise is hidden – I thought the ones who wrote them were the real sentence writers. And they are; I love to read them. But I see now that I hide things in my sentences too. I thought because I write slim books, I was already working within the smallest unit possible, which is a unit I like, where I write best. Now I see that sometimes my focus gets even smaller, and that I am not always writing a sentence to tell a story, exactly, but simply to be in the space of a sentence, to make things appear in it, to see what is possible.
This might not sound like the secret to interstellar travel, but if that small lurch can be sustained, a spacecraft could theoretically produce thrust for as long as it had electric power. It wouldn’t accelerate quickly, but it could accelerate for a long time, gradually gaining in velocity until it was whipping its way across the galaxy. An onboard nuclear reactor could supply it with electric power for decades, long enough for an array of MEGA drives to reach velocities approaching the speed of light. If Woodward’s device works, it’d be the first propulsion system that could conceivably reach another solar system within the lifespan of an astronaut. How does it work? Ask Woodward and he’ll tell you his gizmo has merely tapped into the fabric of the universe and hitched a ride on gravity itself.
Sound impossible? A lot of theoretical physicists think so too. In fact, Woodward is certain most theoretical physicists think his propellantless thruster is nonsense. But in June, after two decades of halting progress, Woodward and Fearn made a minor change to the configuration of the thruster. Suddenly, the MEGA drive leapt to life. For the first time, Woodward seemed to have undeniable evidence that his impossible engine really worked. Then the pandemic hit.
I saw my 8-year-old son go over a waterfall.
At this point, before I tell you more, I need to tell you that he’s fine. Because when I tell this story, I can see people’s faces contort as they conjure up horrible outcomes. After all, falling off a waterfall seems like a thing you wouldn’t walk away from unscathed—like a thing you might not even survive. But it wasn’t a huge fall.
In “The Deepest South of All,” Grant, a veteran travel writer whose books have ranged from East Africa to the Sierra Madre, plunges headfirst into this unique city of 15,000. “Natchez is as deeply Southern as it can possibly be,” says Grant, 56, over the phone, “but the more I got to know it, the more it seemed like a distillation of America, especially around the issues of slavery and race.”
Still, he covers just about every other theorist of time with grace and wit, explains why time speeds up when you’ve got a fever and slows down when you think you’re in danger, and he even finds the time to talk to everyone from city traders to truck-drivers about their very different experiences of clock-watching.
As a text about good design, “What Can a Body Do” models its subject. It has well-made sentences and an elegant structure. (The book radiates out thematically, from “the limbs of the body . . . to furniture, to rooms and buildings, to the public realm of streets, and finally to the clock.”) But Hendren’s project also has a kind of deep beauty that is neither separable from design nor fully accountable to it. Some molecular-level harmony obtains when writing seems so committed to being both interesting and humane. Chapters splurge on context and thrum with anecdote, especially as Hendren, the mother of a child with Down syndrome, threads her own experience with disability into her reporting.
The airplane inside us was running out of pretzels
We took the drugs in the morning so we could see at night
All day clinging to ghastly seaweed on the naked internet ocean
We thought, okay, neglect equals geography