It was the very swiftness and uncritical enthusiasm with which Americans embraced an “easy” technological solution to a complicated problem that suggests that we are becoming increasingly comfortable with technosolutionism, and not just during times of crisis. Such acquiescence seems understandable at such times, when uncertainty prevails, but as we continue to struggle to find our bearings, it is worth considering the significant choices we have already made with regard to technological problem-solving, and begin to contend with the consequences.
Oh, hello, nice to see you, have a seat — let’s stress-eat some chips together. Let’s turn ourselves, briefly, into dusty-fingered junk-food receptacles. This will force us to stop looking, for a few minutes, at the bramble of tabs we’ve had open on our internet browsers for all these awful months: the articles we’ve been too frazzled to read about the TV shows we’ve been meaning to watch; the useless products we keep almost impulse-buying; the sports highlights and classic films that we digest in 12-second bursts every four days; that little cartoon diagram of how to best lay out your fruit orchards in Animal Crossing. Eating these chips will rescue us, above all, from the very worst things on our screens, the cursed news of the outside world — escalating numbers, civic decay, gangs of elderly men behaving like children.
“That Old Country Music,” the title of Kevin Barry’s new book of short stories, refers not to American country and western music but to “old-style” unaccompanied Irish folk singing. At the center of the book is a story about a heartbroken middle-aged song collector from Dublin who goes in search of a folk singer named Timothy Jackson, reputed to know songs “from deep in the 19th century. . . . Songs that nobody else had now.”
Sadeqa Johnson's new novel, Yellow Wife, is a harrowing tale of the life of an enslaved woman in Virginia, beginning in the 1850s. A challenging read but beautifully told, this thought-provoking page-turner is also surprisingly uplifting. And at its core, Yellow Wife is also a story of motherhood and the sacrifices a mother will make to protect her children — no matter how those babies come into the world.
I can’t account for Monroe, Michigan, in 1969
Or the unearthed Chippewa bones on the hot, sloped