There is something better than reading alone, I’ve discovered, and it’s reading side by side with friends who don’t judge you for wanting to hit “pause” on socialization and disappear into a book. In ninth grade, I struck up a tenuous friendship with two of the other kids who’d also come in from different middle schools. One, a rangy athletic type with a host of popular older siblings, quickly found her place in the upper echelons of the high-school caste system and promptly forgot me; the other, a quiet comedy nerd and fellow bookworm named Jazmine, is still my best friend to this day. Our history is long and complex, made up of old SNL clips and hastily chugged, illicitly obtained Smirnoff Ices and endless subway rides from the Bronx to Manhattan, but I knew we had reached a point of no return, friendship-wise, when we began to read together.
About a decade ago, the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, who died suddenly last year, at the age of fifty-nine, and the archeologist David Wengrow began to consider, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, how they might contribute to the burgeoning literature on inequality. Not inequality of income or wealth but inequality of power: why so many people obey the orders of so few. The two scholars came to see, however, that to inquire after the “origins” of inequality was to defer to one of two myths—roughly, Hobbes’s or Rousseau’s—based on a deeply ingrained and deeply misleading fantasy of the human career. The product of their extended collaboration, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”, is a profuse and antic account of how we came to take that old narrative for granted and why we might be better off if we let it go.
“I don’t know much about whales. I have never seen a whale in my life,” says Michael Bronstein. The Israeli computer scientist, teaching at Imperial College London, England, might not seem the ideal candidate for a project involving the communication of sperm whales. But his skills as an expert in machine learning could be key to an ambitious endeavor that officially started in March 2020: an interdisciplinary group of scientists wants to use artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the language of these marine mammals. If Project CETI (for Cetacean Translation Initiative) succeeds, it would be the first time that we actually understand what animals are chatting about—and maybe we could even have a conversation with them.
On the eve of the Day of the Dead, Maria Santiago stood in the back of a moving pickup truck with her hair whipping through the air, heading toward the agave fields that her father had owned in this small town outside Oaxaca City.
She meandered through the plantation with her mother and brother-in-law, avoiding the prickly plants, to collect small yellow flowers for their altar.
These stories have a series of common themes: immigration, resilience and a second chance at starting something new with family.
Oliver Wang, a professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach who studies the ways in which food culture plays into Asian American lives, uses the word “intersection” when he talks about the phenomenon. “You have these American-raised children of immigrants who recognize the new landscape for food as a profession, and [you] bridge this to a more traditional form of filial piety,” he said.
Ms. Tomalin’s goal here is not a monumental biography of record. Instead, she focuses on the first half of Wells’s life, and limits her scope to the books he produced between 1895 and 1911—which she maintains represent his best work. She is certainly not the first to argue that Wells’s later work—with the exception of his autobiography and the enormously popular “Outline of History” (1920) and “A Short History of the World” (1922)—was not up to the caliber of his early efforts.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World is one of the more important books about climate change to have been written. Much of the literature to date feeds the appetite of readers who are already interested in the issue, but this book by Katharine Hayhoe, an internationally renowned climate scientist, could result in a massive expansion of interest in the subject.
Late afternoon slants, illuminates
the worn, white husk of hive and gleams
like an incubator bulb on the oval of an egg.