In times like these we have to rue that Britain has only a paltry tradition of political assassination. This, I’d propose, is not a mark of civilisation but of timidity and the eschewal of realpolitik. To overcome our squeamishness, we might gainfully study this breathless race through two thousand years of special pollarding, which might have been more aptly named ‘Assassination: A Handbook’, for it is, among much else, an inventory of means and methods: blades, blunt objects, poisons and toxins, guns and ammo, shots from motorcycles, bombs, defenestration and plump cushions.
Sinéad O’Connor has written a memoir called “Rememberings,” and if you think you know what to expect, you’d best brush up on your Yeats.
Just after 6 a.m. on a recent Monday, Calista McRae is in downtown Manhattan, walking a digressive loop through the morning mist from 4 World Trade Center to 1 World Trade Center to Brookfield Place and back around. McRae is 34, with a springy and fast step, and she will repeat this journey until 9 a.m. and return nearly every day during the spring and fall bird-migration seasons. She’s carrying two shopping bags, the larger of which is a FreshDirect tote printed with images of fruit and the phrase “This Summer, Life Is Peachy.” As we walk, we hear a little rustle coming from the big bag. “That’s a good sound,” she says.
McRae is one of about 30 New York City Audubon volunteers who search for injured and dead birds in the city’s commercial centers. They are part of the group’s Project Safe Flight, tallying injuries and fatalities and documenting particularly dangerous spots. In doing so, McRae and others rescue birds that have collided with tall buildings’ reflective glass surfaces — tending to the injured, scooping up the dead. A few minutes earlier she had come across a black-and-white warbler on the ground, stunned but alive, and that’s the source of the noise in her tote. She’d gently put it into its own tiny brown-paper bag — smaller than a lunch baggie — and then closed it with a miniature black binder clip. “The bags are breathable,” she explained. The little paper bags are then put into a larger paper bag and stowed in the FreshDirect tote to minimize shock and stress. Rustling means a bird is weirded out by the bag, but weirded out means alive, McRae said.
It was March 2020, and restaurants across the country were shutting down, setting up takeout windows, or doing whatever they could to absorb the shock of COVID. But it was Chuck E. Cheese, of all places, that had the foresight and steely clarity to see not just what the new era required, but what it permitted. With much of America suddenly interacting with restaurants through delivery apps, the food industry had been transformed into e-commerce, and the arcade better known for its ball pits than its food was free to invent a new identity: “Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings.”
Hernández's book The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease weaves together family memoir and investigative journalism to come to terms with the disease that ultimately killed her aunt. Through piecing together her own family's story, the history of Chagas, and the stories of other patients' illnesses, Hernández raises damning questions about which infectious diseases get attention and whom we believe to be deserving of care.
The label of pseudoscience has been applied to everything from ufology and eugenics to the pursuit of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster (or cryptozoology, to use its scientific name). What do we mean by pseudoscience and why in our techno-scientific age are such fringe ideas still so prevalent? These are the questions Gordin seeks to answer in this brief (some 128 pages) yet fascinating book.
We always think we are
listening from a distance —