An event as large and devastating as the Covid pandemic was always going to attract a rush of authors seeking to uncover the story behind the decade’s biggest story. Leading the pack – not for the first time – is Michael Lewis, the man with an unerring knack for finding narrative gold in the most well-mined territories.
Albert Einstein first spoke of gravity in terms of bends in space-time in his general theory of relativity. Most theorists assume that gravity actually pushes us around through particles, called gravitons, but attempts to rewrite Einstein’s theory using quantum rules have generally produced nonsense. The rift between the forces runs deep, and a full unification of the two grammars seems remote.
In recent years, however, a baffling translation tool known as the “double copy” has proved surprisingly adept at turning certain gravitational entities, such as gravitons and black holes, into dramatically simpler quantum equivalents.
My first attempts at feeding insects to friends and family did not go down well. “What the hell is wrong with you?” asked my wife when I revealed that the tomato and oregano-flavoured cracker bites we had been munching with our G&Ts were made from crickets. “Hang on, I’m vegetarian!” cried our friend – which prompted a slightly testy discussion on whether insects count as meat, how many thousand arthropods equate to one mammal and considering almost all industrial agriculture involves the mass slaughter of insects, what’s the difference?
Notes on Grief is a moving account of a daughter’s sorrow and it is also a love letter to the one who has gone. Adichie wants him back; she wants to rescue him from death and to tell him once again how much she adored him. She is saying don’t go and she is saying goodbye and she is also saying sorry – for the writing of grief is to acknowledge an ending and, thus, as Jacques Derrida had it, as soon as you write, you are asking for forgiveness.
Most memoirs are about resolving an identity crisis of some kind. And this is an extreme one. Born to a mother from Okinawa and a father who was a US soldier, Elizabeth Miki Brina grows up in New Jersey and Fairport, New York, faintly aware of her history but unable to really assimilate it for years. As a child, she clings to her father, to Beverly Hills 90210, to Chuck E Cheese dinners, to Aerosmith cassette tapes; she cuts up her mother’s kimonos and, as soon as she is old enough, dyes her hair blond. She wants blue contact lenses but her parents draw the line at that. Even at the age of 18, when she starts to say the words “half-Japanese” out loud, she is not able to explain “what Okinawa is”, the place where her mother was born and raised.
Zeno sent
his arrow flying
endlessly from point
to point along its arc