Before there were books, there were stories. At first the stories weren’t written down. Sometimes they were even sung. Children were born, and before they could speak, their parents sang them songs, a song about an egg that fell off a wall, perhaps, or about a boy and a girl who went up a hill and fell down it. As the children grew older, they asked for stories almost as often as they asked for food.
The children fell in love with these stories and wanted to hear them over and over again. Then they grew older and found those stories in books. And other stories that they had never heard before, about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole, or a silly old bear and an easily scared piglet and a gloomy donkey, or a phantom tollbooth, or a place where wild things were. The act of falling in love with stories awakened something in the children that would nourish them all their lives: their imagination.
It’s a good time to be dead—at least, if you want to keep in touch with the living. Almost a third of Americans say they have communicated with someone who has died, and they collectively spend more than two billion dollars a year for psychic services on platforms old and new. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, television: whatever the medium, there’s a medium. Like clairvoyants in centuries past, those of today also fill auditoriums, lecture halls, and retreats. Historic camps such as Lily Dale, in New York, and Cassadaga, in Florida, are booming, with tens of thousands of people visiting every year to attend séances, worship, healing services, and readings. And many people turn up not every year but every week: there are more than a hundred Spiritualist churches in the United States, more than three hundred in the United Kingdom, and hundreds of others in more than thirty countries around the world. Such institutions hardly represent the full extent of Spiritualism’s popularity, since the movement does not emphasize doctrines, dogmas, or creeds, and plenty of people hold spiritualist beliefs within other faith traditions or stand entirely outside organized religion.
The surging numbers are reminiscent of the late nineteenth century, when somewhere between four million and eleven million people identified as Spiritualists in the United States alone. Some of the leaders back then were hucksters, and some of the believers were easy marks, but the movement cannot be dismissed merely as a collision of the cunning and the credulous. Early Spiritualism attracted some of the great scientists of the day, including the physicists Marie and Pierre Curie, the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, and the psychologist William James, all of whom believed that modern scientific methods, far from standing in opposition to the spiritual realm, could finally prove its existence.
It is hardly naïve, but rather willfully obfuscating to skirt politics in all of these discussions. Glaringly, nowhere in the film, which reflects on the life of a white British man, from the interwar period to the present, does Attenborough mention colonialism and its devastating and enduring effects on global communities and on the environment, nor does he — despite remarking on Indigenous ways of life — address the ecological effects of settler colonialism, the many wars waged by imperial powers, the use of napalm and Agent Orange in wars that destroyed vegetation and took countless lives.
Food trucks — kitchens on wheels, essentially — are flexible by design and quickly became a substitute during the pandemic for customers who couldn’t dine indoors and coveted something different than their mainstream carryout options. That, in turn, has delivered a new client base to add on to an existing cadre of loyal followers. In a very real sense, food trucks are vehicles for equality in the post-pandemic world.
In her wrenching debut novel-in-stories, Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia meticulously weaves a mesh of parallels between Latinx mothers and daughters.
This unignorably strange collection of stories evokes warring responses of admiration and disgust in the reader: Taeko Kono is a writer who puts the toxic into intoxicating. The selection, written between 1961 and 1971, is a brave choice for one of the launch titles in W&N’s new list of modern classics.
Are the early 00s distant enough to be considered a bygone era? If so, journalist Paris Lees’s What It Feels Like for a Girl is a work of archaeology. She drags up the bones of cheesy garage tracks, green backlit Nokia phones, Bacardi Breezers, Gap jeans, retired slang, Nike Air Max trainers and Walkmans, pulling you into a world of pre-internet nostalgia. This ketamine-laced coming-of-age memoir, rife with nicked wigs and puppy love, fluctuates between the debauched and the humdrum; from gay bars to call centres, Debenhams to crown court, sex in toilet cubicles with “dirty old men” for a tenner to warming up treacle pudding and custard. The details of Lees’s formative years, when she lived life uncomfortably as a boy called Byron, is a rare portal into the British trans experience.
He stirs sugar into black, watching white crystals
transluce. He rolls a cigarette, crimping a white tip