Towards the end of 2020, a year spent supine on my sofa consuming endless internet like a force-fed goose, I managed to finish a beautifully written debut novel: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, which comes out next month. And yet despite the entrancing descriptions, I could barely turn two pages before my hand moved reflexively toward the cracked screen of my phone. Each time I returned to the novel I felt ashamed, and the shame only grew as I realised that, somehow, though the story was set in the present, and involved an often long-distance romance between two young people with phones, it contained not one single reference to what by then I considered a hallmark of present-day humanity: mindless scrolling through social media.
I came late to Allie Brosh’s “Hyperbole and a Half” — later than the outspoken fan Bill Gates and numerous enthusiastic writers for Psychology Today — but when I fell, I fell hard. (I even bought the calendar.) A selection of Brosh’s autobiographical word-and-image stories from her blog of the same name (which she began in college while procrastinating for a final), “Hyperbole and a Half” made me laugh harder than anything I could remember.
The Hare gives us an important, comprehensive picture of the stages of a woman’s learning, suggesting, that over time, teachers will be rejected, new ones sought, and the student might herself become a teacher. The need to adapt, however, to be on guard, to figure out new methods of surviving will be life-long, the way it is for an animal in the wild, hyper-conscious of its vulnerability.
Zadra and co-author Robert Stickgold’s fascinating new book, “When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep,” steers a reasonable and broad-minded course between the many interpretive whirlpools that have swallowed previous explorers of dreams. Though they tour a broad range of contemporary research and theorizing, they ultimately propose that a primary function of dreaming is to detect and dramatize the possible meanings of information latent in memories and associations that we rarely access while awake.
When wild elephant females reunite after a separation, they greet each other with great ceremony. The elephants flap their ears, bellow and place their trunks in each other’s mouths. The temporal glands next to their eyes may stream liquid, a sign of high arousal. And in “the ultimate expression of sheer, elephantine joy,” the animals then let loose with bladder and bowels.
With this description in “Wild Rituals: 10 Lessons Animals Can Teach Us About Connection, Community, and Ourselves,” elephant scientist Caitlin O’Connell kicks off an engaging tour of rituals in the animal kingdom. O’Connell defines a ritual as “a specific act or series of acts that are performed in a precise manner and repeated often,” often requiring intense concentration.
I sip my coffee. I read the news.