Five minutes into our first call, Melissa Broder makes good on her reputation for having no filter. In a slightly shaved down, back-mouthed Philadelphia accent, she says that even though her agent “cut about 50%” of references to the clitoris in her new novel, “Milk Fed,” she still had to apologize to the sound tech monitoring her audiobook recording. “I know it’s Monday,” she told him, “I’m really sorry. It’s 11 a.m. and you’ve heard the word … like, 30 times already out of my mouth.”
Books aren’t holy, and declaring in capitalized, weirdly baroque curse words that you don’t like certain popular or well-regarded ones isn’t particularly scandalous or interesting. They are, after all, just books. Some are great, some are middling, and six of them are by Chelsea Handler.
It is a highly controversial way of thinking about nature and Naeem, a professor of ecology at Columbia University, often relies on humour to explain it. It doesn’t mean that fungi are about to unionise and charge humans for decomposition services, he assures me. Although, if they did, it would get expensive. We would be in even bigger trouble if the trees started to charge us for oxygen. Really, he says, ecosystem services are meant to help us understand that plants, animals and intact ecosystems are worth more to humans alive than dead.
What would you say was the most revolutionary new artistic medium of the 20th century? Cinema? Color photography? Video, installation, sharks pickled in formaldehyde?
I want to suggest to you that it was something simpler, more low-tech. Something you probably did in elementary school — and do now, by pinching and swiping your phone.
How strange my lack of faith must seem to you.
I see the way your god provides a cradle for your grief;
how lovely to be certain that the ancient story's true.