“Harriet” is a network of fibers fastened to a black board in a case pushed up against a wall. At the top, there appears to be a brain, plump and brown, and a pair of eyes. Scan your own eyes down and you’ll encounter an intricate system of skinny, brittle cords, pulled taut and painted startlingly, artificially white. The outline is recognizably human—there’s the impression of hands and feet, the hint of a pelvis, the suggestion of a rib cage—but it is slightly fantastical, too. The way the cords loop at the hands and feet, it almost appears as if the figure has fins. Elsewhere, the fibers look shaggy, like chewed wire, as if electricity is shooting from the margins of the body.
This is a human medical specimen, in the spirit of an articulated skeleton. But unlike that familiar sight, it represents the nervous system, a part of the body’s machinery that most people have trouble even imagining. Some who stand before “Harriet” wiggle their fingers and toes, as if trying to map the fibers onto their own bodies and make the sight somehow less abstract.
What parts of yourself do you consider to be your “true self”? When you act in certain ways, which actions are in alignment with your true self, and which contradict your true self? Remarkably, not only do most people believe in a true self, they answer these questions in the same way. They consistently say that their true self is the parts of them that are fundamentally morally good.
But though this finding has been repeated many times, the true self is an example of a “folk intuition." It almost certainly doesn't exist. What we know from neuroscience and psychology doesn't provide evidence for a separate and persisting morally good true self buried deep within. Yet that makes the true self, and the fact that so many of us have this belief or bias, all the more intriguing, Strohminger said.
I’m not criticizing people’s enjoyment of fast food or a cheap snack — I’ve written plenty about that and even hosted a web series dedicated to it. But as we shake off a year of pandemic brain fog and barrel toward a return to indoor dining, independent restaurants continue to face challenges. Rising food and labor costs, pandemic-related expenses (additional training, PPE, outdoor dining tents and propane heaters), high delivery-app fees, and new competition from ghost kitchens and low-overhead pop-ups make climbing out of the COVID hole that much more difficult.
Eating in restaurants should be more expensive. It’s worth it.
The art historian Alexander Nemerov is a seductive writer. While his colleagues labor over bulky manuscripts weighed down with extensive footnotes, Mr. Nemerov, who teaches at Stanford, approaches his chosen subject, American art and culture from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, with an essayist’s craft (and maybe craftiness). He’s a great believer in the curated fragment, the revelatory glimpse. He likes to look closely at a few select objects (often photographs) and reveal their panoramic implications. Some of the books that he’s written over the past 15 or so years (“Wartime Kiss,” “Summoning Pearl Harbor,” “Icons of Grief”) amount to compact zeitgeist readings: “Wartime Kiss” is subtitled “Visions of the Moment in the 1940s.” Now, in a book about the painter Helen Frankenthaler, he’s at it again, zeroing in on what he describes as critical moments in her life and career during the 1950s, when she established herself as an artist. I’m sympathetic to what Mr. Nemerov is doing. Why can’t the part stand in for the whole? The danger is that we make too much of too little. The details may become portentous.
Death and misery were once the only imaginable outcomes for a lesbian or bi woman in fiction, but that isn’t so today. What if she could create her own world? Plain Bad Heroines is that creation: in this novel, everything that happens, happens between women. I’m not even sure there’s one conversation between two male characters – whatever the reverse of the Bechdel test is, Danforth defiantly flunks it. Her novel is beguilingly clever, very sexy and seriously frightening.