But then, mid-indignation, Huxley stopped himself. His tone changed from strident to reflective. It seems to have dawned on him that this business of seeing and being seen, of contesting narratives describing the same place, like a Venn diagram at war with itself, is not extraneous to the idea of travel, but in fact strikes at its very essence. "In the traveler's life," Huxley wrote, "these little lessons in the theory of relativity are daily events."
The sense of affront Huxley felt that day in Mumbai, as travel forced another idea of history upon him, is particularly relevant to the moment of reckoning we find ourselves in today. From Seattle to Brussels, from Cape Town to Bristol, England, statues are being torn down and major institutions renamed, some representing racists and slavers (King Leopold II, Woodrow Wilson, Edward Colston), others depicting figures more typically thought of as heroes (Gandhi, Winston Churchill, George Washington). History, with a capital H, is alive as never before.
Theroux turns 80 in April. For a generation of backpackers now gone gray, the tattered paperback accounts of his treks through China, Africa and South America were a prod to adventure, bibles of inspiration under many a mosquito net. He has a new novel out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April, “Under the Wave at Waimea,” and his best-known book (and his own favorite among them), “The Mosquito Coast,” has been adapted into a television series starring his nephew, Justin Theroux, also set to premiere next month.
If this seems like a moment to take stock of an intrepid life and an almost extreme output of writing, Theroux does not see himself as anywhere near done. Before Covid-19 struck, he had plans to go to central Africa. He is deep into another novel and finishing up a new story collection. He himself can’t seem to keep track of the number of books he has written: “Fifty-something maybe?” (It’s actually 56.)
Ishiguro’s book is fiction, but his suggestion that a new type of literature may be on the horizon is not. In May 2020, the San Francisco–based start-up OpenAI first publicly described its new language-processing software, which writes remarkably well. Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, or GPT-3, is one of many recent advances in AI demonstrating that machines can do many basic and not-so-basic forms of digital labor. In turn, AI’s capacity for creativity—one of those supposedly sacrosanct human attributes—is becoming more and more of an existential sticking point as humans learn to live alongside intelligent machines.
Ziaulhaq Ahmadi sits on the floor of his small, one-story house, a brown, mud-walled compound at the end of a dusty alley in Aqa Saray. Surrounded by vineyards, fruit trees, and snow-capped mountains, the village is a half hour’s drive north of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. With great gentleness, he taps on what looks like a sealed mud bowl until it cracks open.
At 243 pages, in a relatively easygoing font size, Tracey Thorn’s latest book doesn’t look like a particularly subversive tome. Inside, though, is quiet fury, with ramifications well beyond what is, at a glance, a narrow milieu.
Thorn found fame as half of Everything But the Girl in the 80s and has since published a celebrated series of memoirs and nonfiction books. Here, she turns her clear-eyed candour to dissecting her long friendship with Lindy Morrison, an Australian musician, now 69, who played drums in a band called the Go-Betweens.
We all wear clothes. Until recent decades, some American communities had economies based on the manufacture of cloth and clothing. We wear or make clothing without an understanding of its history or its economic impact on our society.
Virginia Postrel is an award-winning writer whose works include “The Substance of Style” and “The Power of Glamour.” Now she has produced a fascinating history of the textiles with which we express our style and glamour.