Such is the writer’s fear of being described as boring, that we rarely ask what exactly such criticism might mean. Does it mean that the book doesn’t move forward quickly enough? Or that it is full of minor details which do not seem to be relevant to the story? Or possibly that the characters don’t interest us or that they lack ‘agency.’
Recently, I have started to ask whether the meaning of ‘boring’ has changed over time? I suspect that it has. In fact, it seems to me that the very concept of a boring book might be relatively modern. In my teenage years I accepted that some books — or sections of books — were boring.
“You just have to stay loose,” he said. “Go with the boat, the flow, loosey goosey.” It was my first day on the job as a raft guide in training on Wisconsin’s northern border, and Jack was offering me last minute advice. I think he sensed my rigidity during the morning’s run down this same stretch when I wedged both feet up to my ankles between the raft’s inflated thwart and floor, let go of my paddle, and clung to the gear bag. This afternoon I was determined to do better. Find the flow. I nodded and took a deep breath of the cedar trees and river rocks, looked ahead at the horizon of the waterfall where the river disappeared except for a spray of sunlit mist rising from “the tongue”—a river-wide V, our point of aim, three thousand cubic feet of water per second folding itself into a ten-foot drop before erupting over boulders and ledges for an eighth of a mile.
“Go with boat,” I reminded myself. “Loosey goosey.”
I owe $17,345 on my student loans. When I graduated from Michigan State University in 2014, my debt was $26,456. I have all my payments set to autopay so I don’t have to look at the money being funneled out of my bank account. I am making progress, but progress is slow. When I began working for a public radio station in Michigan, the starting salary was $30,000, which felt great. The year before, I worked as a member of Americorps VISTA, a national volunteer organization which pays its workers at the poverty level of wherever you’re placed enabling “you to live very frugally, like the community you are serving” according to their website. I’d skirted by during the program because I’d put my loans into forbearance and was housed in the dorms of the community college I’d been working for. But, as I began juggling a car payment, car insurance, student loans, and rent, $30,000 started disappearing at an alarming rate.
The request came in late on a Thursday afternoon to restaurant owner Steve Chu. One of his customers had terminal cancer, and her son-in-law wondered if it would be possible to get the recipe of her favorite broccoli tempura entree so he could make it for her at her home in Vermont.
Chu, 30, specializes in Asian fusion cuisine and is the co-owner of two Ekiben locations in Baltimore. He read the email on March 11 and instantly knew that he could do better, he said.
Gina Nutt's Night Rooms is a collection of biographical essays in which memories and movies — mostly horror ones — merge to create a narrative that explores identity, body image, fear, revenge, and angst.
Jumping between past and present with ease, Nutt slashes to the center of issues like motherhood and depression and ultimately emerges as the quintessential final girl of her own film.
The fact is that a lot of people do a lot of apologizing for the seemingly simple acts of eating enough food or for eating food they like — basically apologizing for their very human needs and desires. As registered dietitian Alissa Rumsey, explains in her new book, “Unapologetic Eating: Make Peace with Food and Transform Your Life,” dieting and food restriction is also restricting our lives.
Sherry Turkle is a professor of science and technology at M.I.T. who has written many books arguing that our obsessive devotion to devices is destroying the empathy upon which all civilized behavior depends. We are, she fears, in danger of producing an emotionally sterile society more akin to that of the robots coming down the road. Now Turkle has written a memoir, forthrightly called “The Empathy Diaries,” in which she seeks to tell the story of her own formative years and how she became the distinguished social theorist that she is today.
What was it about Los Angeles in the early 1970s that attracted so many creative people? It had always been a mecca for film. But now it drew young musicians, who felt free to experiment. Some wanted to escape the dirty decay of New York, which was on the brink of bankruptcy. Los Angeles offered not just sunshine and cheap housing, but something more elusive, and more explosive: hope that the social and political activism of the previous decade was yielding fruit.
In her new volume, When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story Of The Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered The Way We Watch Today, Armstrong uses her impressive analytic and research skills to unearth some much less-explored ground. Women Invented Television focuses on four women in particular—Gertrude Berg, Irna Phillips, Hazel Scott, and Betty White—who all, in individual ways, helped create the TV landscape still expanding today.
“My Penguin Year” is more than one book: it’s both the story of how remarkably difficult it is for emperor penguins to survive, and the story of how remarkably difficult it was to film their struggle. Made more complicated by the fact that, to fulfill his penguin dream, for 11 months Lindsay McCrae would have to turn his personal life upside down.
Science, in Rovelli’s estimation, is not about certainty; it is informed by a radical distrust of certainty. What is real? What exists? Helgoland, beautifully translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, is the beginning of wisdom in these things.
In her ambitious and impressive new book, Freedom: An Unruly History, the political historian Annelien de Dijn approaches this massive subject from the standpoint of two conflicting interpretations of freedom and their interactions over 2,500 years of Western history. She starts her study by noting that most people think of freedom as a matter of individual liberties and, in particular, of protection from the intrusions of big government and the state. This is the vision of liberty outlined in the opening paragraph of this essay, one that drives conservative ideologues throughout the West. De Dijn argues, however, that this is not the only conception of freedom and that it is a relatively recent one. For much of human history, people thought of freedom not as protecting individual rights but as ensuring self-rule and the just treatment of all. In short, they equated freedom with democracy.
I burned everything, even
The art, so called. Don’t panic.