I’m not going to tell you what the hostess said to Emily Ratajkowski. Instead, I will tell you this: We are having lunch at a restaurant. We consult the restaurant’s menu, which boasts many items. Ratajkowski, a model who first became famous for appearing naked in a music video, orders something. I, who have never been in a music video but have been naked many times, also order something. We remark casually on the restaurant’s ambience, noting its proximity to various locations. I turn on my recorder. Each of us is wearing clothes.
We are here to talk about Ratajkowski’s new book, “My Body.” In it, she reflects on her fraught relationship with the huge number of photographs of her body that have come to define her life and career. The book’s marquee essay, “Buying Myself Back,” which describes how Ratajkowski ended up purchasing a print of her own Instagram post from the appropriation artist Richard Prince, was published to great notice in New York magazine last fall. Ratajkowski also wrote that the photographer Jonathan Leder sexually assaulted her in his home after a photo shoot when she was 20.
In March 2021 the American Historical Review included three video games in its review section, a first for the self-proclaimed “journal of record for the historical profession in the United States.” All three games selected for review are installments of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which takes as its central conceit a centuries-long struggle between two shadowy organizations: the Templars, who seek to control and manipulate humanity for their own ends, and the Assassins, who champion human freedom and creativity and are usually (though not always) cast as morally superior. Throughout the franchise players are tapped by one or both factions to hunt for powerful artifacts called Pieces of Eden, each of which was hidden or lost long ago. Finding these artifacts requires accessing the past by means of a fictional technology called the Animus, which generates lifelike, interactive virtual-reality worlds from ancient DNA samples taken from the remains of long-dead witnesses to the Pieces of Eden’s fates.
Despite the fantastic silliness of the in-game time-travel logistics, the promise of historical accuracy has been a major selling point of Assassin’s Creed since the eponymous first installment in 2007; since then Ubisoft, its publisher, reports having sold more than 155 million units of the franchise, which has grown to include a total of twelve main games (the most recent being 2020’s Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, which takes place mostly in Viking-age England). “Assassin’s Creed is steeped in historical fact,” a video-game reviewer for IGN writes of the first game in the series, which is set primarily in the twelfth-century Holy Land. “Were it not for the ‘anomalies’ that flitter around characters”—part of the sci-fi wrapping—“you would have little reason to ever question that this is indeed what these cities and people looked like centuries ago.”
Though it receives less attention than the climate crisis, food security, energy consumption, demand for industrial commodities, biodiversity loss or ageing populations, urbanisation is implicated in all of these. It is among the exemplary phenomena of a wide-ranging crisis of intensification – the growing risk, you might say, that humanity will default on its carbon debt – whose scope we are just starting to appreciate. As we’ll see, perhaps more than any other component of the intensification crisis, urbanisation is tied to the question of what it means to lead a good life, not to say to the rubrics of value that govern our economic behaviour.
I gravitate toward crime fiction and domestic suspense novels because they’re embedded with instructions on how to navigate a life. I write about grief and trauma to gain insight into the psychology of people faced with what I fear most. Perhaps also in hopes I can learn how to protect my family and myself.
Set in a bookstore, narrated by a bookseller whose former life in prison was turned around when she discovered books and began to read “with murderous attention,” “The Sentence” testifies repeatedly to the power books possess to heal us and, yes, to change our lives. It may be that, as Tookie argues, “books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.” But that harsh judgment notwithstanding, there are books, like this one, that while they may not resolve the mysteries of the human heart, go a long way toward shedding light on our predicaments. In the case of “The Sentence,” that’s plenty.
The coronavirus pandemic is still raging away and God knows we’ll be reading novels about it for years, but Louise Erdrich’s “The Sentence” may be the best one we ever get. Neither a grim rehashing of the lockdown nor an apocalyptic exaggeration of the virus, her book offers the kind of fresh reflection only time can facilitate, and yet it’s so current the ink feels wet.
The Sentence: It's such an unassuming title (and one that sounds like it belongs to a writing manual); but, Louise Erdrich's latest is a deceptively big novel, various in its storytelling styles; ambitious in its immediacy.
As in her novels, many of the stories in King’s first collection of short fiction, “Five Tuesdays in Winter,” are preceded by loss and ignited by desire — the pursuit of which often hinges upon its articulation, the ability to find the “words for all that roiled inside you,” as the protagonist of the title story, a reticent used-book seller, puts it.