Ha Jin evokes the China of Li Bai as a refraction of our own moment; Li Bai’s country before the An Lushan Rebellion was “much more open than the China of our time,” but its economic inequities will be brutally familiar to anyone in today’s Shanghai, Delhi, London, or New York. Li Bai was an egalitarian, which made him beloved in the local taverns but anathema at court.
When Fariha Róisín was 12, the idea for what would eventually become her first novel came to her in a dream. She didn’t have all the words for all that she wanted to say, but she started anyway.
Now, at 30, and with a body of poetry, personal essays and other writing that has delved deep into her own experiences with abuse, violence and shame, her book, “Like a Bird,” was published by Unnamed Press this month.
We know that dying stars can make black holes. But perhaps black holes were also born during the Big Bang itself. A hidden population of such “primordial” black holes could conceivably constitute dark matter, a hidden thumb on the cosmic scale. After all, no dark matter particle has shown itself, despite decades of searching. What if the ingredients we really needed — black holes — were under our noses the whole time?
“Yes, it was a crazy idea,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a cosmologist at Johns Hopkins University whose group came out with one of the many eye-catching papers that explored the possibility in 2016. “But it wasn’t necessarily crazier than anything else.”
Indelicacy, though, is a thing of real delicacy, with a fine, distilled quality to the writing, every word precisely chosen, precisely placed.
All About the Story has obvious value for anyone looking to understand the ways news has changed in the past five decades. Some of those lessons are not intentional. Downie ultimately illiustrates, through both his difficult ethical and editorial decisions and his occasional blind spots, that however much we want it to be "all about the story," it is also, inevitably, about the people who tell the story.
When crocheting a poem
be sure to be awake
Do not use Siri
She is forever asleep
Twenty thousand bees pursue
a Mitsubishi,
their queen trapped inside.