But that equality of loss would soon change. Deaton showed that the great escape was accompanied by another trend, which is now known as “the great divide.” In the past couple of centuries, as changing conditions increased life expectancies within wealthy nations, average life expectancies in poorer ones—the ones bearing the brunt of imperialism, resource extraction, and disease imposed by the wealthy—got shorter. Eventually, average lives lengthened around the world, narrowing the gap, but they still lengthened substantially more for some people, in some places, than for others. “Of all the forms of inequality,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said in 1966, by which time the divide was entrenched, “injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman.” Even in modern American cities, people born into poor neighborhoods can expect to live as many as thirty years fewer than people who are born in affluent ones across town. And that was before the covid-19 pandemic further widened our existing gaps.
Beauty. What is beauty? Beauty is that which gives aesthetic pleasure. Beauty is both subjective and objective—subjective because it is “in the eye of the beholder” but objective in that “pleasure” is something you either experience or you do not. If a building isn’t giving people pleasure to look at, then it is not beautiful, because beautiful things are things that you want to keep looking at because seeing them brings joy.
“The Plot” has a tantalizing quandary at its core: Who owns a story? Should one man’s life unravel if he helped himself to a yarn that belonged to someone else? Especially if that person never spun it into anything and is now dead?
Rachel Cusk is one of the last great novelists of contemporary life for whom the internet seems to barely exist. An occasional glimpse at Facebook or use of a smartphone aside, Cusk’s characters hardly seem to inhabit anything like the modern world, technologically speaking. (In her latest novel, Second Place, characters communicate by handwritten letter.) While these figures walk around what is in many ways a recognizably contemporary London or continental Europe, their lack of recourse to the internet and their uncolonized-by-technology headspaces mark them out as creatures living in a different century.
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Notes on Grief, the lament composed to honor and process the death of her father during the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic, one of our century's most gifted artists of language makes visceral the experience of death and grieving. In poetic bursts of imagistic prose that mirror the fracturing of self after the death of a beloved parent, Adichie constructs a narrative of mourning — of haunting and of love.
The Life of Music is at its lively best when Kenyon’s own passions are laid bare: his affinity with early choral music, his love of Purcell, his irritation at the conservative aesthetics of the philosopher Roger Scruton, his belief, above all, in the power of music to unite individual and community. With its myriad threads of history and argument, the book is an open dialogue between past and present, composer, performer and performance.