On my walk home from acquiring the books, through the low winter fog, the rapidity and sureness of this exchange — knowing that another young woman from here would have Didion’s writings on hand and at the ready — struck me as some flesh-and-blood example of just how fused the author’s legacy had become with the particularities of the Golden State, the ones she spent her entire life chronicling. I recalled a well-known passage from the middle of Where I Was From , where she dispassionately examines the inherited, and slightly brutal, regional conduct: “If my grandfather spotted a rattlesnake while driving, he would stop his car and go into the brush after it. To do less, he advised me more than once, was to endanger whoever entered the brush, and so violate what he called ‘the code of the West.’”
Here she tells the journey of her son, Christopher, nicknamed “Tophs,” from confusing doctor appointments during his infancy to his uneasy equilibrium as an active, differently-abled boy. “This Boy We Made” blows up the stale formulas of trauma memoir, implicating us in Harris’s most intimate and terrifying moments, and those of her family, with candor and cool precision. Her book also serves as an allegory of sorts: a Black woman grapples with enduring racial disparities in health practices and outcomes, the stark divides both in and out of clinical settings.
Volcanoes need a new agent. Whenever an eruption starts somewhere on Earth, we’re barraged with news of destroyed buildings, closed airspace, evacuated people and, at worst, injuries and deaths. These extreme impacts do happen during some eruptions, but as any volcanologist would remind you, volcanoes spend most of their lives not erupting. Yet these geologic wonders are still painted as villains in the media, in movies and in books. Robin George Andrews might be that agent volcanoes need to change their public persona, as his new book, “Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About Earth and the Worlds Beyond,” tries to rehabilitate their image and set them as vital features on and off the Earth.
My father threw his language overboard,
a bag of kittens, waterlogged mewling:
small hard bodies.
The more you read about the history of the emotion, the more convinced you might be that disgust is the energy powering a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, from our never-ending culture wars to the existence of kosher laws to 4chan to mermaids. Disgust is a bodily experience that creeps into every corner of our social lives, a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls.
Few people counted down to anything until the 1960s and 1970s—and yes, that included the new year. Celebrations and midnight kisses on December 31, of course. Countdowns, no. How, then, did countdowns go from almost nonexistent to ubiquitous in the latter half of the 20th century? And why are we so drawn to them now, especially to mark one year’s end and another’s beginning?
After seeing the letters, I couldn’t shake this question. What if Eliot’s illness hadn’t kept him home, what if he’d eagerly accepted the invitation and shown up at the Woolfs’ house in Sussex for the weekend, as he had several times before? Would his presence at Monk’s House — sometimes an irritant, always an interest — have mattered if Woolf’s most recent depression were as strong as during her previous suicide attempts in 1913–’15? Or what if Eliot had quit smoking, which exacerbated his bronchitis, or ignored his doctor’s advice and headed to Sussex anyway?
In Britain, food writing by “minority groups” – and here I’m talking about Indians, because that’s my own background – almost always gives a central role to those “heirloom family recipes” handed down the generations from mother or grandmother. When I started writing about food 20 years ago, an editor even joked that I would have to “invent a grandmother”. It was already a cliche a generation ago, but now this problematic pursuit of “authenticity” through appeals to a mythic matriarch is simply done to death.
Maybe the masterpiece is the decade itself, so ambiguous and ironic. Schnabl also leaves enough room for an old romantic like me to believe that the masterpiece is love. She keeps us guessing right until the end when, in a genius move, she changes the question entirely.
Sun on my face and the train slips
into the tunnel. Dim reflection confronts.
No country but America could have produced Joan Didion. And no other country would have tolerated her. Think about it. Born in 1934, and gone this month, eighty-seven years later, Didion came of age during Stalin’s reign, at a time when South Africa was instituting apartheid, when India and Pakistan were almost drowning in the aftermath of Partition. Would Mao’s China have welcomed her? Or England—the country of saying the opposite of what you think so as not to cause offense? Not likely. Plus, she didn’t like England. “Everything that’s wrong here started there,” she told me once, when she was thinking of cancelling a trip to London. “Also, so obsequious,” she added. “ ‘Yes, Miss Didion. No, Miss Didion.’ ” Beat. “And they don’t mean it.”
Global in mind but a small-town girl at heart, Didion stayed close to home because she was, first and foremost, a writer, and she was interested in what constituted an American voice. Including her own. She loved Norman Mailer’s, especially the laconic, Western tone he adopted in his 1979 book “The Executioner’s Song,” which she, in a Times review of the book, called a voice “heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down.” I think she was drawn to V. S. Naipaul’s pessimism-as-style, too, less because of what it sprang from—the displaced Trinidadian with race and class envy—than because Naipaul’s unwillingness to hope, viewed from a certain angle, mirrored Didion’s own fascination with failure. Indeed, she could never quite reconcile herself to the fact that her country rarely grappled with, or acted on, its own principles.
Background noise typically doesn’t bother me. Directly beneath my apartment, and audible through many holes in the floor (it’s an old building) is a warehouse that does a brisk traffic in cabbages and soybean oil. I’ve long been able to mentally delete the whirring of forklifts and stacking of crates. But the sound of a human scream is — perhaps for evolutionary reasons — difficult to tune out.
I didn’t come to Stoic philosophy as a result of the construction site, but the site did offer an ideal beginner’s challenge: a persistently annoying but not materially threatening situation that was completely outside the bounds of my control.
Writing about food every single week of this year challenged me and changed me. It has made me accountable — accountable for pushing outside of my comfort zone and trying new things, accountable for making sure the things I eat are good enough to tell others about. It has made me really consider the way my food looks, not for the sake of pointless Instagram perfection, but as a humble means of making a little bit of beauty in an often ugly time. It has also made me accept — nay, embrace — my apparently permanent lowered expectations regarding my own cooking. Good enough is good enough, and I'm all in.
Turkish novelist Ayşegül Savaş has a gift for creating likenesses of life bathed in light. Her calming, serene prose delights in the visible. Here is the opening of White on White, Savaş’s alluring new novel: “Mornings, the apartment expanded with light. Light flitted across the walls and curtains, streaked the wooden floorboards, lay dappled on the sheets, as if a luminous brush had left its mark upon my awakening.” The unnamed narrator wields that luminous brush to paint their surrounding world.
In adamant clarity, in an acrylic cube,
the one called phasma or ghost, difficult to see
on its native bark, compels and says I am,
repels and says I am. Which camouflage is which?
She was an individual, not an icon, with interests and fascinations and aspirations she could not always fulfill. She wrote, as all writers do, for the art and for the money, using the materials at her disposal as best she could. Sometimes I think of those ghost books — on LSD and Linda Kasabian and Patty Hearst — and wish I could read them, but in fact we already have the necessary parts. What else did she need to say about the 1960s that isn’t in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album”? How do we improve on the magnificence of those books? Indeed, it is their elusive fragmentation that gives them their weight, their gravity, by evoking the author’s wary interaction with her times.
Late at night, creating something recognizable out of a shapeless mound of Play-Doh gave me the greatest sense of satisfaction I’d felt in years. This was how I had imagined my artisan life. And, unlike my academic pursuits, clay was something that didn’t need to be perfect, given how little was at stake. Unlike an experiment, or even another, more permanent art form, Play-Doh required no advance planning or skill or discipline. If the skull I molded wasn’t quite right, I could roll it back into a ball and start over, and then again until I was happy with what I’d made — an approach I was too afraid to apply to the rest of my life. With Play-Doh, I started to practice courage, building myself up to eventually leave what I perceived as the security of academia and begin anew.
Andreades’s writing has economy and freshness. “Brown Girls” reads as much like poetry as it does like a novel, which is another way of saying: Don’t arrive here expecting a good deal of plot.
Beside the fountain’s troupe of sun-bleached rubber ducks,
in the gardens, under a shade sail,
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.
Alysa Auriemma tells a running joke about how, for years, people have clamored for Geno Auriemma’s daughter to write a book — expecting that if she did, it would likely be a memoir detailing what it’s like to have one of sports’ legendary champions as your father or offering an up-close-and-personal look at nearly four decades of greatness.
Next month, she’s finally publishing a book. But if you’re holding your breath for something related to her dad or basketball, you’re out of luck.
In recent times I’ve made it a mission to highlight a category of English that linguists fondly call “orphaned negatives”. These are the words that inexplicably lost their mojo at some point in the past, becoming a sorry crew of adjectives that includes unkempt, unruly, disgruntled, unwieldy and inept. Yet previous generations had the potential to be kempt, ruly, wieldy, ept and – most recently thanks to PG Wodehouse – gruntled. Some were even full of ruth (compassion), feck (initiative) and gorm (due care and attention). Now is surely the time to reunite these long-lost couples. It may not work for everything – there is no entry (yet) for “shevelled” or “combobulated”, but Mitchell airport in Milwaukee has gloriously provided its passengers with a “recombobulation area” in which to release some of the tension of air travel.
There is an assumption that the more scientific the approach to predictions, the more accurate forecasts will be. But this belief causes more problems than it solves, not least because it often either ignores or excludes the lived diversity of human experience. Despite the promise of more accurate and intelligent technology, there is little reason to think the increased deployment of AI in forecasting will make prognostication any more useful than it has been throughout human history.
This is a place that celebrates itself as a village du livre, a “book town.” Its public lampposts and trash cans are adorned with bibliophilic hieroglyphs.
But what happens when the main attractions become less attractive? This is the challenge the village du livre must now confront.
“Life is changing, but nothing is dying,” said Anne Laffut, the mayor of Libin, the municipality where Redu sits. “Everything is evolving.”
While the sense of hearing may not be any more important or privileged than sight, and while it is possible to live a rich life without it, “we have abundant evidence to trust that sound is a force shaping our minds.” Ms. Kraus’s greatest triumph is in making the invisible visible, in vividly rendering those vibrations of air through the medium of her words and reminding us to pause and listen.
Despite losing the dining table to it
for weeks, our family stays
with the puzzle, teetering plates
I could see the branches reflected in the surface of the table
It was snowing in the Appenzell, it was snowing in Denver
The air had that purple light in it at night
It was snowing on the windy Blue Ridge plateau
My phone is full of photos taken on quarantine walks. Messages written by sidewalk chalk prophets. Dozens of rocks laid carefully around the base of a tree, all painted brightly with inspirational phrases: Sometimes you need to let things go. This too shall pass. Garden gnomes in sunglasses gathered in a tiny beer garden. And so many trees, their beautiful bodies rooted in something deeper than this unknowable moment. Branches reaching, exhausted, determined, elegant. I’m fascinated with the delicate shadows that dance below them. Picture after picture of dark veins sprawled across cold gray cement, swaying in the wind. Bold and black when the sun was high. Faint and gray when she was hiding. Temporary beings at best, erased with each sunset, and never born the same the following day. But more alive than any creature caught breathing. I’ll stand there staring for minutes at a time as if this were a secret language I could learn. Or maybe one I used to know.
I really don’t know why I ran 12 marathons in a year or whether I learned anything from the whole deal. But I’m not searching for those answers. Even though I don’t live in a world where “the morals of despair,” as Dylan sang, prevail, I still don’t subscribe to anything other than being the architect of my own nothingness. When someone asked me why I went through all that effort and trouble, all I thought was, Because it seemed like the wrong thing to do.
For some people, the objects of a life, identifying heirlooms, remain a physical source of comfort, even a necessity, holding the past together in one coherent place. For the rest of us, these objects and places live only in memory’s imaginal realm. They can no longer be turned in the hand or searched for evidence. They are ghosts. Immigrants or refugees, we live like survivors of flood and fire, with the clothes on our backs and whatever possessions a new life affords us. Still, even when we deny their necessity, the lost things call out to us. They are the future as well as the past, emblems of the final letting go.
It is my father himself I would rather have kept. Maybe that is why people hang on to old things from the past — because they can. The fact that I could not only reminds me, quietly, daily, what those things mean.
Invoking the gods always runs a risk; one thinks of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, inviting his demon killer to dinner. Nevertheless, Aucoin perceives the danger as essential for his artform, and the Boston native, still only 31, has contended with it well enough to win a Macarthur “genius grant.” His own originals start with “Crossings,” 2015, derived from Walt Whitman’s poetry and first performed at Harvard, the composer’s alma mater. But his true home is the one he described, in the first sentence of his first book, as “another planet.” Aucoin dwells in opera, participating at every level from joining the chorus to founding his own American Modern Opera Company — the acronym for which, he stipulates, is pronounced as in “running amok.”
In “The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera,” Aucoin also provides his Company’s definition of opera: “the medium in which art forms collide and transform one another.” For shouldn’t a winning performance please both ear and eye, both break the heart and lift the spirits? Shouldn’t a true maestro “combine all these elements” in what Wagner called a “total work of art?”
In “The Second Mrs. Astor,” best-selling author Shana Abe draws an intimate portrait of John Jacob Astor IV as seen through the eyes of his second wife, Madeleine Force Astor. This is historical fiction at its finest.
My mother and I spent an afternoon unfurling my lola’s apartment a few days after she died, back in 2017. In her closet, my grandmother had stored a big cardboard box with an address in Manila written on the side in thick marker. Inside the box were neatly arranged cans of food, bags of rice, drugstore makeup, and clothes she had bought on sale. Some of the items were labeled with our relatives’ names, and the package was left open in case anything else needed to be added as she went about her days.
Sending a filled-to-the-brim box to the Philippines each Christmas was a treasured routine my lola had settled into long before I was born. But instead of mailing it that year, she had been waiting until she could ceremoniously take it back home herself. Transporting it to the airport would have been physically impossible for such a small and aging woman, but I imagine that she viewed hand-delivering gifts to the children and grandchildren she hadn’t seen in years as evidence of her love. What I didn’t know then was that this beloved tradition of sending or bringing home oversize care packages, called balikbayan boxes, had started as an authoritarian regime’s effort to stem the Philippines’ economic crisis in the 1970s.
Romantic comedies are enjoying a renaissance, and Glass energizes the genre with a zaftig, feisty protagonist who is unapologetic about her love of all things geeky. If you’re a fool for a friends-to-lovers trope and a slow-burn, hilarious romance, “The Love Con” won’t disappoint.
"Essays Two" may not be light reading for the general interest reader, but for all its erudition it's always accessible, comprehensible, and even fun. Davis is a literary treasure.
Sometimes I’ll suddenly remember the power
of her house, and of the approach to it,
down the narrow, extreme-curve-to-the-
right street, opening onto the
In “The Private Library,” Mr. Byers goes to the heart of why physical books continue to beguile us. Individually, they are frequently useful or delightful, but it is when books are displayed en masse that they really work wonders. Covering the walls of a room, piled up to the ceiling and exuding the breath of generations, they nourish the senses, slay boredom and relieve distress.
The celebrity cookbook is a curious genre: its essential premise is that a person who is famous for something other than cooking can, on the basis of that fame, also teach us how to cook. At the same time, it’s a tried-and-true publishing gambit: Gwyneth Paltrow and Stanley Tucci are following in the footsteps of Sophia Loren, Patti LaBelle, and, fabulously, Liberace.
My favorite celebrity cookbook addresses this disjuncture right in the jacket copy. A note from the author confesses, “I’ve always wanted to write a cookbook. There’s just one problem. Moi doesn’t cook … moi eats!” It’s the unmistakable voice of Miss Piggy.
It was at this book stall that I found my first gay book. No, not found, but discovered, for it felt like something that landed serendipitously in my hands, a gift and a weapon, a fount of secret knowledge, something born out of the unknown. What book was it? It could have been Paul Monette’s Afterlife, or Neil Bartlett’s Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall – it could have been either, or something else entirely. There, at the very bottom of a stack, tucked out of sight, where the covers scraped the filthy floor, were these books. And there, on the back covers, as I carefully read every word, were the words I didn’t know I needed until I read them. A secret . . . pretended to be the same as everyone else . . . to come out . . . a gay. I noted the prices on the front inside page of each book – all the same – and put them back neatly, spines aligned, nothing out of place.
Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid are all known for vividly chronicling the lives of Black women. Glory Edim’s decision to compile their works in “On Girlhood,” a compelling anthology that also includes contemporary writers such as Amina Gautier and Alexia Arthurs, results in a literary master class.
For Sophie Calle, art is provocation. This applies to both the artist and her audience. In a career spanning more than 40 years, she has blurred the lines between observation and intrusion, documentary and narrative, producing books, films, installations, interventions. “The Hotel,” her most recent work to appear in English, represents a case in point: It’s a book that records an ongoing process of surveillance, in which Calle “was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed, through details, lives which remained unknown to me.”
And after resisting the idea as long as I could, I have to confess that his book, even with the inside-joke title of “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli” (an improvised line in the movie), captured me with its joyful energy, extensive research and breathless enthusiasm.
King writes acutely, and sometimes heartbreakingly, about her developing sexuality, the cues she took from pop culture about how to make herself more desirable for consumption and how the models of sex positivity from the era (think Samantha Jones in “Sex and the City”) left out so much, which she would discover on her own in painful ways.
The palm-sized, egg-shaped toys, with black and white pixelated screens and a handy keychain, were a self-contained universe—one that included happy moments and melancholy ones alike.“I remember, very clearly, standing in the kitchen when my sister found out that her Tamagotchi died, and just how traumatic that was for her,” Bunda says. Players quickly learned to modify their games, extending their virtual pets’ lives by removing the toy’s batteries or using pencil graphite to trigger a debugging signal.
“Judy and Steve met on the most gorgeous day of the summer.”
I have recited this sentence, or a longer variation of it, to my wife, Judy Wilson, thousands of times. Additional sentences always follow, and together, they form the longest-running love letter of our four decades together.
While Keegan dedicates Small Things Like These to "the women and children who suffered time in Ireland's Magdalen laundries" — horrific asylums run by Roman Catholic institutions for most of the 20th century, ostensibly to reform "fallen young women" — her compact, crystallized narrative does not train its gaze on these victims or the nuns who imprisoned them within high walls "topped with broken glass," but instead on Bill Furlong and his harrowing quest for meaning.
This is truly a scrumptious treat of a book, like a fancy tea all laid out with silver spoons and floral-painted cups and one of those tiered stands for the little cakes and crustless sandwiches. The 19th century historical fantasy wherein magic is a layer over the already complicated strata of society is a fairly common genre, from Mary Robinette Kowal's Shades of Milk and Honey series to the more recent The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk, among many others. And I'm pretty much guaranteed to enjoy them all. Give me a slow burn romance and a retreat to a country house and I'm a happy reader. That said, it can be hard to make the genre feel fresh, and that is where A Marvellous Light pleasantly surprised me.
As Berger wrote in a 1979 essay about a (completely fictional) nude by Frans Hals: ‘Stories arrive in the head in order to be told. Sometimes paintings do the same.’ What happens when writing on fictional objects begins to resemble art criticism? Does modern fiction’s aversion to describing art speak to a more generally held doubt in writing’s ability to ever achieve the (apparently) direct representational power of a work of art? Or does telling stories offer us as good a way as any for talking about art?
“I reject the notion that we’re running out of ideas,” says David Krakauer, the president of the Santa Fe Institute. “You suggest that the problem is invention. But I see no evidence that people are less ingenious. I see the problem as moving their genius into the world. The problem is the second stage of Schumpeterian innovation.”
What exactly does that mean? It means that the fault is not in our minds, but in our markets.
I’m going to keep that habit up, but I’m also going to relish my exceptions, too. Those are the moments I can read like I did as a kid, when I read by flashlight under the covers, devouring books I couldn’t tell you anything about the next day. It reminds me of the pure, escapist joy of really losing yourself in a book, which is something I never want to lose.
Wanda M. Morris' All Her Little Secrets is a carefully constructed thriller wrapped in a narrative about racism, gentrification, and being the only Black person in an all-white environment.
It's also a story about how we can move away from home and try to change who we are, but we're almost always unable to escape the past.
Fagan once again examines the way people are affected by unhealthy spaces. Having survived the state care system that bounced her among dozens of homes, she writes about placement and displacement with an arresting mix of insight and passion.
The birds in a V-pattern
and the denuded tree with a dozen mighty branches
Take us back, little time machine, with your bleepings and your flashings; take us back to crusty old London in the late 1650s, so we can clap the electrodes onto the sleeping head of blind John Milton. Let’s monitor the activity in the poet’s brain. Let’s observe its nocturnal waves. And let’s pay particular attention as his sightless eyes begin to flick and roll in deepest, darkest, dream-friendliest REM sleep, because it is at this point (we presume) that the spirit whom he calls Urania, a nightly visitor with a perfect—not to say Miltonic—command of blank verse, will manifest before his unconscious mind and give him the next 40 lines of Paradise Lost.
An acquaintance of mine, a comedy writer, once admitted to feeling disappointed that she hadn’t won any awards or recognition for her work, even though she also admitted not having done much to deserve it. We were listening to music at a local venue with a destroy fascism sign on the wall, and I remember thinking mockingly about the irrationality of my artsy friends. But when I started to tell the story to a publishing colleague during a lunch date in the park the next week, I realized that I too was living with the same quiet and ever-present disappointment—the sense that everyone around me was climbing some indescribably crucial ladder, without having much memory of why we had started climbing or what it was we hoped to find at the top. I complained, to myself and sometimes to others, that I hadn’t yet had any promising conversations with publishers who wanted to buy my book, despite the fact that I hadn’t spent much time thinking about what my book even was and had certainly not written any of it.
It begins with the violins — orderly and baroque. The choir rises. The audience rises. And before you know it, the concert hall, church, rec center or school auditorium fills with the triumphant sound of one of the most beloved musical works of the season: Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus.
Over the next four minutes (and change) the choir will repeat the word hallelujah 48 times, but the audience and musicians never seem to tire of it. Credit Handel’s vibrant melody, but also the almost mystical power of that combination of vowels and consonants.
When you talk to people about Jell-O, associations vary. One friend thought of hospitals: Why do they feed sick people a bowlful of sugar? My mom asked if Jell-O was making a comeback, citing Costco’s premade Jell-O shots. A lot of people mentioned the 1950s. No one said “yum.”
Nonetheless, I informed my mother that yes, Jell-O is indeed making a comeback.
A prolific novelist and essayist, Hustvedt has established a reputation for writing across the fixed borders that separate science from the humanities. Her last collection of essays, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, pursued its subject down intersecting paths of personal reminiscence, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature and the visual arts. Sometimes her cerebral approach can seem dry and extravagant, but now Hustvedt has combined the lively and tactile with more wide angled philosophical questions about perception and reality. Mothers, Fathers, and Others sifts a wide range of memory, experience and disciplinary perspectives into essays that bring into focus the profound contradictions of motherhood. These contradictions, Hustvedt asserts, are eclipsed by the cultural idealization of mothers as the model of self-sacrificing nurturance.
Smart about sexual desire and the ease of analyzing — but the difficulty of escaping — familiar gender roles, Sea State offers a close up view of the white, working-class resentments that helped fuel both Brexit and the Trump presidency. As a journalist, Lasley commits the cardinal sin of getting involved with one of her subjects; but as memoirist, her transgression saves Sea State from the tone of faintly anthropological distance that books about the working class often have.
But there are more poetic reasons, too, why Dr. Darwin’s old garden provides a good entrée to his son’s work. Gardens civilize our relationship with nature, but only barely so; there’s always the serpent of surprise lurking somewhere in the shrubbery. Ms. Piesse’s “The Ghost in the Garden,” with its many asides, intensely personal stories, and sometimes delightfully unrelated material—she includes a blurry photograph of an old gate that wasn’t the one she was looking for—offers a radiant literary analogue for such botanical unpredictability. But the book also directs us to a more fundamental parallel.
“Let’s Get Physical,” Danielle Friedman’s fact-packed but bouncy new book about women and exercise in 20th-century America, catalogs many such material curiosities: vibrating belts, Suzanne Somers’s ThighMaster, Get in Shape, Girl! toy sets. It also maps less obvious signposts on the long road from a sedentary standard for the fairer sex — they didn’t call boned bodices “stays” for nothing — to today’s sometimes punishing ideal of regular vigorous activity. Tampons, for example, which came to market in the 1930s but didn’t become widely popular until the 1960s, when they were marketed to the “active woman”; and jagged Vidal Sassoon coifs — “Without having to worry about ruining their carefully crafted bouffant hairdos,” Friedman writes, “women could move their bodies in new ways.”
Ghost stories are about seeing. If their earnest intention in simplistic terms is to scare, then that fear first and foremost arises from witnessing. Seeing becomes séance in tales of the supernatural. In the history of the literary ghost story, several writers have taken the form to its zenith through terrifying temporal lapses of perception. Those glimpsed stories of M.R. James’s or those witnessed horrors of Charles Dickens; all stories in which the act of seeing becomes the spine of the narrative.
With this in mind, it’s clear to see why several of the strongest ghost stories of the last two hundred years or so have found their way onto screens in various forms. With the act of seeing so pivotal to their narrative arcs, there is an obvious visual quality within them that renders their potential for screen adaptation irresistible. It could almost be argued that the most adapted of writers and their stories are those that convey this visual terror most effectively.
In One Friday in April, the writer Donald Antrim recounts his attempted suicide, subsequent cycles of hospitalization, treatment, and recovery. “I believe that suicide is a natural history, a disease process, not an act or a choice, a decision, or a wish. I do not understand suicide as a response to pain, or as a message to the living ... I see it as a long illness with origins in trauma and isolation, in deprivation of touch, in violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging,” he states at the outset. With this credo, and in other ways, Antrim announces that we’re about to read a remarkable document of the medicalization of culture. Doctors are of course trained to view every problem through the lens of disease. But what happens when artists do the same?
Aside from writerly hubris, what exactly justifies, in other words, this unwieldy book, which runs nearly 600 pages, breaking Eggers’s made-up rule of maximum length? I’ll show it does two things tech critics like me can’t do, and the absurdists haven’t quite managed either.
As Africa bears the brunt of the Covid pandemic’s severe consequences for safari tourism, resulting in an explosion of poaching caused by the collapse of visitor revenue to support vital wildlife frontline defence, we can look back to a time when journalists and conservationists were putting their lives at risk to highlight the illegal ivory trade wiping out Africa’s elephant herds.
If I’m honest, a foal pulled chest-level
close in the spring heat, his every-which-way
coat reverberating in the wind, feels
akin to what I imagine atonement might
Exploring shared trauma through the matrix of storytelling ranks among the noblest imperatives of narrative art. So perhaps the novelist or filmmaker will eventually emerge that’s capable of convincing me that the story of our shared misery could be something other than miserable.
However, I suspect that the artist in question will need considerable distance from these early, ugly days. In other words, by the time this person comes along, I’ll be long dead, and so will you, and Upsilon variant 7.31 will be tearing through the Arctic fishing village of New Detroit.
There was no way my father, 92 and with stage 4 metastatic colon cancer, could wait in the 40-minute line for what we knew would be his last meal at Katz’s Deli, so we dropped my sister off and went to park. Miraculously, after a single circling, we found a parking spot a block from the famous deli’s door.
Allow me to begin with the title. Amoralman is written as one word, so a mere addition of either one space or two produces polar opposites: Amoral Man. A Moral Man. Derek DelGaudio spends much of his highly readable book showing us an essentially decent man grown dangerously dependent on the safety net of secrecy and the lure of bending reality. It is no coincidence that his book’s title toys with the alphabet as if it were a guilefully shuffled deck of playing cards. And those spaces he plays with? They are the invisible parts of the title, as unseen as the secretive mechanics of any successful magic trick.
But it would be a mistake to read the title as referring to Lacenaire the Sinner, and Dostoevsky the Saint. Rather, each of us has the capacity for goodness and for cruelty. It is this fundamental insight by which Dostoevsky elevates the story of Lacenaire the unrepentant murderer into Raskolnikov the divided heart, who “might murder not because he was so evil but because he … wants to do good”, and whose actions turn out to be a mystery even to himself. Published 200 years after Dostoevsky was born, The Sinner and the Saint is not just a fitting tribute to one of the great works of world literature, but a dazzling literary detective story in its own right.
“You either slingin’ crack rock, or you got a wicked jump shot,” the Notorious B.I.G. lamented on his 1994 rap album “Ready to Die.” The line depressingly argued that prospects for young Black men in urban America were so circumscribed that the only way out was the illicit drug trade or growing at least six feet tall and becoming one of the lucky and talented few to play professional basketball.
“I’m Possible: A Story of Survival, a Tuba, and the Small Miracle of a Big Dream” tells the story of how Richard Antoine White found another way: classical music.
It’s one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy: Based on multiple observations of stars and galaxies, the universe seems to be flying apart faster than our best models of the cosmos predict it should. Evidence of this conundrum has been accumulating for years, causing some researchers to call it a looming crisis in cosmology.
Now a group of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope has compiled a massive new dataset, and they’ve found a-million-to-one odds that the discrepancy is a statistical fluke. In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.
Budding novelists are advised not to edit, or even look back at their work; instead they should just keep moving forward with a whopping word-count as their main goal. This “quantity not quality” approach is not entirely dissimilar to the advice writers such as Stephen King give: just get the damn thing on the page and worry about making it good later.
Now I am about to become a debut novelist, I decide to plan it in depth as soon as I’ve taken my two children swimming, sorted the food shop, found my mum a birthday present … oh god, it’s 1 November already …
Neale's inner poet roams free in the shorter work, while in the longer stories her natural inclination for wordplay and subtle rhyme tends to be more hidden, like gems awaiting excavation.
If you’ve never thought about the Middle Ages, or assumed it was too distant to be relevant, this book is a good place to start. Jones has a knack for gripping detail and vivid evocation. I’m not likely to forget the Viking warrior Rollo, whose henchman flipped the Carolingian king Charles the Simple onto his backside so he could kiss the royal foot without kneeling in obeisance. I enjoyed with grim recognition the extended story of 14th-century professors in Paris trying to distance themselves from Philip IV’s smear campaign against the Templars, the military order that had gained too much power for his comfort — but not so far as to lose favor with the king. Jones writes with drive and energy (despite some lazy chestnut phrases). And he makes medieval characters seem as shrewd, loutish or heroic as ourselves.
In the slanting drift of afternoon, even as
night begins to fall, made patterns of thought
The current scene is nothing new and utterly different. Independent restaurants have staked out Rose Avenue as their home, and have been part of the community in the way that a franchise outlet or chain cannot, essential to the street’s personality. Longtime local residents were drawn to the neighborhood for the same reason—for the non-franchise experience—and were loyal to the restaurants that shared their point of view. Over time, a community grew up around places that felt like incarnations of the street’s soul. A pervasive live-and-let-live attitude verged on an imperative, as residents and businesses who wanted a broader range of experience accepted the fact that it might not all be easy fun. People experiencing homelessness have settled in Venice for decades, in part because nobody was going to roust them, which was part of the neighborhood ethos. Life went on, and part of it happened in restaurants, where regulars bumped into other regulars, and an unhoused person might pick up a job or a free meal.
It’s not like that anymore. Restaurateurs were on thin ice even before the pandemic, and the smart ones proceeded cautiously. Many didn’t have the time to grab a cheap lease on an empty block and wait for it to catch up, but they also couldn’t afford a more established, high-traffic location. They looked instead for the middle ground, a street with enough potential customers to make economic sense, but not so settled as to be out of their fiscal league. They looked for someplace like Rose Avenue.
Wah! Six slices of bread for breakfast: Sng Mui Hong was unusually hungry. She knew what that meant. The spirit of her father, dead these past 25 years, was with her, and he was starving. Not that Ms Sng could see her father—she never had been able to see ghosts—but she could sense his presence: a heavy weight on her shoulders or a yawning pit in her stomach, hungry for white bread.
She was grateful he had shown up today. Torrential rain had fallen that morning, the drops hitting the zinc roof of her house like a hail of bullets. The open drains slicing through the village had clogged with twigs and leaves, as usual, and Ms Sng had to clear them. She did not thrill at the prospect. At 69 she was not as strong as she used to be, and her knee was giving her trouble. It was not as if the tenants would complain if she left the drains blocked. But clearing them was just what she did, what she had always done. The bread, and her father, would give her strength.
When it came to building big, the Romans clearly knew what they were doing. Nearly 2,000 years after they were constructed, these two enormous and technically astounding structures have withstood earthquakes, floods and military conflicts, long outlasting the empire that spawned them and becoming physical embodiments of the enduring influence of Roman culture across the globe.
This is the season of seeking friends’ faces, retrieving memories, and exchanging kind words, in places drenched in light and joy. It’s the season to celebrate people in train stations enacting scenes of meeting and departure, and to acknowledge our feelings of estrangement at home and away. It’s the season to celebrate the glow of slick sidewalks after rain, the emptiness of deserted roads on winter nights, and the sense of solitude.
Yes, this is the season . . .
Tice Cin’s debut novel, Keeping the House, opens with a dramatis personae, and much of the novel’s wit, precision, and vivid detail is prefigured by that somewhat archaic convention. The lines Cin chooses to sum up her characters are amusingly varied: some receive boring biographical details (ages, professions, sibling relationships), while others are described in terms of their preferences and tendencies. Ayla, who holds on to glamour wherever she can grasp it, “washes up in high heels.” Her mother, who goes searching for the past in her evening meals (literally), is described as “green-fingered.” A long-suffering shopkeeper “always gets pickle juice in his moustache.” One personage, in a wink to the fourth wall, is summarized thus: “Crucial side character.”
An author’s appearance is rarely relevant to a review of his work, but in the case of the Swiss novelist Peter Stamm, a facial feature might provide a clue not just to his new story collection, “It’s Getting Dark,” but to his entire oeuvre.
It is winter but
the poets are still coming.
While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage boys
in the parking lot: Aiight, one says, Besaydoo, the other returns, as they reach
for each other. Their cupped handshake pops like the first, fat, firecrackers of summer,
As a youth, Hinson held the company, now known as Alcoa, in high regard. His family moved to Badin (pronounced Bay-din) in the 1940s to seek jobs at the plant. The Hinsons had been farmers, and Alcoa offered a lucrative and stable alternative to sharecropping. Black acquaintances from other parts of the country remarked on the presence of indoor plumbing in the Hinsons’ Alcoa-owned home, and Hinson grew up longing to work at Alcoa like his father and uncles. He started there when he was 19 and stayed for nearly 33 years.
“I thought Alcoa was the guardian savior,” he said.
Hinson, now in his 70s, is an affable, friendly man, wearing a t-shirt from a seafood restaurant in the next town over. He’s prone to such phrases as “if I can’t make you smile, I’ll leave you alone.” But talk of Alcoa darkens his mood. Years ago, Hinson saw a collection of obituaries kept by Valerie Tyson, another former Alcoa employee, outlining the causes of death for his friends and colleagues at the plant: cancers and breathing-related diseases.
I am desperate for touch. I am a drug addict. I cannot wait for the hairdresser to wash my hair.
Walking through Soho is Dionysian largess, it’s like the last two years haven’t happened, like it was all a fever dream and we’ve abruptly woken up sweating on one another. I still give way on the pavement.
If a picture were still worth a thousand words, we’d know more than enough by now about Vivian Maier, the so-called photographer nanny whose vast trove of images was discovered piecemeal and not fully processed, in all senses of the word, after her death at 83 in 2009, just as the iPhone was going wide.
The saga of HBO is an exhilarating example of what driven, innovative, creative people can accomplish with confident, ample funding in the cutthroat world of mass entertainment.
Each season, my brother does not call.
I am central to a kind of aching desert,
my abundant arms scribbling his name
in a single, severed wire. My right eye
Wood is a masculine substance.
Witness the Arts and Crafts movement,
the men at the helm of it.
Witness, for that matter, this room:
Now on the cusp of 50, Bissell has learned not to obsess over the things he fretted over in his youth. “I just don’t really think about capital L literature anymore. I write because it pleases me and I write stuff that I would want to read and I don’t really think terribly much about how other people think of me. I think that’s a healthy place because you realize when you get older that people aren’t thinking about you terribly much anyway.”
Inhabiting the minds of people who care a great deal what others think of them became a way of working out what Bissell calls the “residual shame” of falling short of some impossible standard. “Part of the goal of growing up as an artist is making art that makes you happy and brings you satisfaction, stuff you can feel proud of — even if it’s for-hire work. And the rest of the career stuff, where you slot into the contemporary literary reader’s pantheon of important writers, is beyond your power to determine.”
Restaurant operators like me are still not okay. There are exceptions, of course. Some restaurants are full, you can’t book a table, and they have enough folks working for them. I call those unicorn restaurants — and I am so happy for them. But I can look at a restaurant that might have a full dining room right now, and I see it in those operators’ eyes: They are so exhausted, and they don’t have the staff. Either they can’t afford them or they can’t find them. They aren’t okay.
I think people might have changed, too. Maybe people are not making as much money, or they can’t dine out as much. A lot of people have really enjoyed cooking at home. A lot of people are acclimating to ordering takeout. If restaurants were a priority for someone before, it’s quite possible that they’re not a priority now.
From the beginning, Harrison wrote about two primary and intertwined themes: pleasure and death. The pleasures of Harrison’s writings tend to the Hemingwayesque, and are set largely in his native Midwest: hunting, fishing, hiking and generally being outdoors; cooking, eating and drinking; sex, women and conversation. Sometimes the pleasures are more reflective, more mental than physical; in all the talk about women, for instance, one senses that for Harrison the talk was half the fun, and the wanting often mattered more, or was more satisfying, than the getting.
The book’s hybrid of ethnography, journalism and disclosure might have been disastrous in the hands of someone without Lasley’s candor and style. Instead, “Sea State” accomplishes what many memoirs do not: It organizes a messy life with a clear vision.
Paul Freedman’s Why Food Matters opens with a lament on the lack of intellectualism – indeed, discourse – around food and drink. They are considered “eminently compatible with conversation, just not worthwhile as its objects”, and he puts this down to three things: “materiality, necessity and repetition contribute to the apparent banality of food”. While repetitiveness might well put off a passing intellectual, the same way housework is such a turn off for economists in the Adam Smith tradition, arguably materiality is the main block.
The day the world shut down, Emily St. John Mandel was no better prepared than anyone else. Like so many people free-falling through March 2020, Mandel pulled her daughter out of school, battened down the hatches at her Brooklyn home, and descended into blindsided shock. Then, something strange happened: suddenly, invitations to write essays and op-eds poured into her inbox. Readers tweeted at her in droves, with some informing her that Station Eleven, her 2014 novel about a ravaged world rebuilding after a global pandemic, was becoming their Covid-19 life raft; others announced that they were staying the hell away from it. Throughout it all, the eerie refrain: “Station Eleven predicted the future.” When life suddenly, terrifyingly resembled her fiction, the literary world was desperate for Mandel to make sense of it all.
Humanists cannot win a war against science. They should not be fighting a war against science. They should be defending their role in the knowledge business, not standing aloof in the name of unspecified and unspecifiable higher things. They need to connect with disciplines outside the humanities, to get out of their silos.
Art and literature have cognitive value. They are records of the ways human beings have made sense of experience. They tell us something about the world. But they are not privileged records. A class in social psychology can be as revelatory and inspiring as a class on the novel. The idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.
Alison Roman approves of creamed greens, knobby lemons, and iceberg lettuce. She’s a slicer of onions, not a dicer; a “ride-or-die corner person” when it comes to lasagnas and cakes. She doesn’t sift flour, soak beans, or peel ginger. Instapots are a no, as are runny dressings, tomatoes on sandwiches, apples as snacks, and drinks served up. Breakfast is savory. Naps are naked. Showers are “objectively boring” and inferior to baths. The thing to do, according to Roman, is to start the water, put on a towel, and head back into the kitchen. The amount of time it takes to fill the tub is roughly equivalent to the time it takes to tear up a loaf of stale bread, for croutons fried in chicken fat.
“You either like my style or you don’t, you’re into the vibe or not,” Roman told me, in October, sitting on a low-slung moss-colored velveteen chaise longue in a corner of her apartment, in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill. She had moved in a few months earlier, having outgrown a smaller nearby apartment and its snug, Internet-famous kitchen. FreshDirect bags that she had used to haul her belongings were still visible in a corner. The bones of the new place were industrial chic: exposed pipes, a brick wall painted white. Roman had added hanging plants, a rattan Papasan chair, and a modular sofa she got from Joybird, giving the loft-style living area a seventies-folksinger energy.
Pulling the book off the shelf, she hadn’t noticed that it was missing a barcode or that it was lighter than one might have expected for a hardcover of its size. She did, however, notice a couple of zines tumbling to the floor. She remembers thinking, bookmarks—or that someone might have slipped the photocopied booklets of self-published art and writing between the shelved books.
Without pondering their origin further, she placed Handpicked Tours on her cart and wheeled it back to her desk to check it for outdated information. When she finally opened it, she was astonished: a library within the library revealed itself.
They had water. They suckled canteens,
wiping their mouths with the backs of their wrists.
When I say they, I mean for days all I saw
were walking lampposts. Then, them: a crowd in red shirts,
It is almost certain that you recently interacted closely with an invisible giant, as the Harvard landscape ecologist Richard T T Forman has described it. Others have called roads ‘the single most destructive element in the process of habitat fragmentation’, declaring that ‘Few forces have been more influential in modifying the Earth than transportation.’ Yet you probably didn’t even notice. An expansive feature that snaps the globe but is effectively invisible: the vast network of transportation infrastructure – all the railways, canals but also, most significantly, roads. Roads are everywhere, forming an almost inconceivably complex system, an endless, ever-expanding, interconnected grid that facilitates the movement and exchange of people and goods over vast areas. This colossal structure is probably the greatest ever cultural artefact, a requirement and precondition for human development. For us, roads are essential connectors, linking places and purpose. But almost everywhere these networks have been imposed with scant regard for the landscape in which they occur.
I made my wife cry the day we brought home Musa, our newborn baby boy. I wanted to be a “good dad” so badly that I spent the final months of the pregnancy deep in baby strategy. Every night, I read from The Happiest Baby on the Block out loud so I could retain it better. I practiced its swaddling techniques on our couch pillows. I also studied Your Baby’s First Year, a new-parent almanac by the American Academy of Pediatrics for how a baby grows, poops, and sleeps. I downloaded simplified diagrams to help me keep track of how much and how often Musa would do those things during the early essential weeks.
When my boy got home and he didn’t eat, poop, and sleep exactly as predicted in those books, I lost my cool. I fully panicked.
Can we blame tech superstars like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos for what happens on their platforms? What happens when a great idea takes on a life of its own? These are questions at the heart of Tahmima Anam’s latest novel, “The Startup Wife.”
Assembly is a slow-motion tragedy, all the weight of four hundred years coming to bear on one woman and the heartbreaking clarity with which she narrates exactly what that feels like. It is a story of failure inside success, slipping and falling even while continuing to ascend, and all the ways capitalism, racism, and misogyny inflict violence on the self.
Matthew Aucoin happily wrestles with multiple impossibilities in this highly personal book. In vivid, granular detail, he explores composers and operas he loves, from Claudio Monteverdi in 17th-century Italy to contemporary British composers Harrison Birtwistle and Thomas Adès. He also highlights the process of writing two of his own three operas: Crossing, a work about Walt Whitman dating from 2015, and Eurydice, which premiered in February 2020 at the Los Angeles Opera and made its Metropolitan Opera debut this fall.
The overlarge seas. Salt pressing
the blue. Still, some sparrows.
The sky. The tumbling relief of sky
in the after-winter seasons. Words,
their bright shattering. The wars,
I’ve been volunteering for about a month with Capital Caring Health, a hospice and advanced home-care organization that works throughout the Washington region. This is my second time working alone as a vigil volunteer, and despite weeks of training, I’m nervous. Should I talk to her? Should I not talk? Should I hold her hand? Some volunteers sing. Some pray. A pastor friend recommended some Scripture (I’m not religious), but the woman’s roommate, who’s quite alive, asks a nurse to turn on the TV, and an episode of “Martin” blares. Should I shout proverbs over the sitcom zingers and Geico ads? And what if she opens her eyes? What if her last image on Earth is a strange man in a mask?
So I sit quietly. The dying can feel our presence, I’ve been told. That’s the mission here. To be a compassionate human being. To provide family members — in this case the woman’s devoted daughter — with a break from their vigil. To make certain someone is here if she needs something. To ensure that she won’t feel alone and, most important, that she won’t die alone.
This is what I can tell you about standing dangerously close to the crater of an erupting volcano: The heat is unbearable, and so is the thought that the wind might change suddenly, steering the colossal river of fire and half-molten rock straight at you. The magma consumes everything in its path. Sizzling and crackling like old joints, it seems almost alive.
There has been a change in my life that is massive and boring, miraculous and quotidian. After decades of failing, flailing, and frustration, I am on medication and in therapy for ADHD. My brain is finally beginning to work properly, and the biggest breakthrough is the smallest: now I rinse the last dish.
The pay was pitiful; they had to work 16 hours a day. It was a challenging, tedious job, but Jessup kept at it for decades and survived the sinking of the Titanic. She was called “the unsinkable stewardess.” In April of 1912 she was one of 23 women who worked on that ship. She was told to climb into a lifeboat to show passengers that it was safe. She escaped with an abandoned baby in her arms who was eventually reunited with its mother. Later on, Jessup outlived the pounding from torpedoes by various ships. When the iceberg destroyed the Titanic, the White Star line stopped all the crew’s wages. It’s the lesser known information that makes this book fascinating reading.
Contemplating Mount Greylock, at 3,500 feet the highest peak in Massachusetts, Philip D’Anieri is very clear that neither he nor it “rate in the pantheon of mountaineering.” Because of his own lack of know-how, and water, he must cut short his ascent and retreat before the sun goes down.
“More comfortable spending time in a library archive than a backcountry tent, I am a day-hiker only,” concludes D’Anieri, who teaches architecture and regional planning at the University of Michigan, in “The Appalachian Trail: A Biography.”
I’ll spread my arms to the wind,
it blows my hair
wild, as a hurricane.
I’ll start with a place, a Paris apartment in Montparnasse, and a date, 23 December 1936, and a gift from one writer to another of his corduroy jacket which, from the point of view of the recipient, may have had a few traces of whale blubber attached to its lapels. The generous donor was the American writer Henry Miller. He thought his visitor, George Orwell, on his way to Spain to fight in the civil war, would benefit from its warmth through the Spanish winter, though he pointed out that it was not bulletproof. The present, Miller said, was his contribution to the loyalist anti-fascist cause.
The encounter between the two men (the American was almost 45, the Englishman 33) had been well smoothed in advance by Orwell’s positive review of Miller’s novel, Tropic of Cancer, which was followed by a collegiate exchange of letters. The meeting presents us with a tableau vivant and source for the heart of Orwell’s celebrated essay “Inside the Whale”, published in book form just over three years later in 1940 by Gollancz. Despite a fair degree of mutual admiration, these two writers had much to disagree about. Henry Miller, self-exiled, strenuously bohemian, a cultural pessimist, hedonist, tirelessly sexually active – or tiresomely, as second wave feminists would point out through the Seventies. He had a profound disregard for politics and political activism of any kind. As a writer, he was, by Orwell’s definition, “inside the whale”. Such political views as Miller had were naive and self-regarding and light-hearted. In a letter to Lawrence Durrell he wrote that he knew he could head off the rise of Nazism and the threat of war if he could just get five minutes alone with Adolf Hitler and make him laugh.
Hazzard distinguishes her perspective on office life by giving particular attention to the initial hopes of her characters—to make a difference in the world, to have a fulfilling career. Their optimism never lasts for long, but unlike in many contemporary workplace novels, Hazzard’s protagonists are not already completely inured to their situations when readers first encounter them. Instead, we follow along as their depressing professional experiences nudge them toward self-understanding and hard-won realism, which often does more to entrench them within the Organization than to excise them from it. Observing these transformations is akin to reading a bleak, adults-only version of a bildungsroman; the distinctly rendered moral educations of Hazzard’s characters affect us all the more because of our cultural familiarity with the mundane inner workings of office ecosystems. Even so, Hazzard’s writing remains dynamic, and full of detailed intimacy; rather than relying on ambient absurdity for humor, she employs precise, merciless descriptions—of inert, strangely sympathetic bosses; of colleagues who wield pettiness as the weapon of egotism; of love affairs and friendships compressed by the pressures of bureaucratic life.
Maier’s story may be singular, but it follows a familiar arc: the overlooked or misunderstood genius whose true gifts earn acclaim only after death. She now joins the ranks of some of our most beloved artists—Emily Dickinson, Peter Hujar, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Amadeo Modigliani, John Kennedy Toole, Jonathan Larson—whose fame has been enhanced by having lived fameless lives. In the world of art, we appreciate quality, but we are suckers for stories of runaway posthumous success. They are the ultimate underdog tales, at once tragic and triumphant.
The first time I was painted by Hannah Meehan, she spent some time arranging me into a pose that would work for her.
First, she told me to relax, to find a position that was comfortable, because we’d be going for a few hours.
I sat in the yellow armchair in the middle of the small studio in the attic of her house. I crossed and uncrossed my legs – first at the knee, then at the ankle. I folded my hands in my lap while she watched me.
So when my future husband rang my doorbell a month later (we had been set up to meet casually by friends who I guarantee did not see what was coming), I answered with a belief that I would be fine no matter the result but also, for reasons I didn’t yet understand, a pounding heart. I had only seen a few Instagram photos of Luis, and my first impression was that he looked like a vampire Lord Byron. About 20 minutes into our date he told me he didn’t drink, and I asked why. “Do you really want to get this intense?” he asked. “Always,” I responded.
Assuming the role of a peripatetic tour guide, Henry Gee in “A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth” takes the reader on an exuberant romp through evolution, like a modern-day Willy Wonka of genetic space. Gee’s grand tour enthusiastically details the narrative underlying life’s erratic and often whimsical exploration of biological form and function. En route we encounter some of the oddities and peculiarities that this process — guided by a blend of chance and evolutionary election — has thrown up.
‘Looking for the Good War” is a remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words some 350 pages later. It is a stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war, written by an English professor who teaches Homer, Shakespeare and Styron to future officers of the U.S. Army. Elizabeth Samet is a professor of English at West Point. Her classroom high above the Hudson River must be a lively spot.
In March of 1998, I was the new deputy science editor of The Times, and my doomsday audience was small but elite: The Times’s top editors. I had been on the job for only a month. Nobody really knew me. My direct boss, the science editor, had taken the week off, leaving me in charge.
And so, late in the afternoon on March 11, I walked into the 4:30 news meeting where editors pitch stories for the next day’s front page and announced that we had a late-breaking story by the distinguished reporter Malcolm Browne. “It’s a pretty good story,” I said. “It’s about the end of the world.”
Standing on a rocky outcrop on the north-western tip of the Yemeni island of Socotra, the only signs of life that I could see were shoals of fish undulating beneath me in the turquoise water. To the west, the horizon shimmered pink over the ocean, a phenomenon caused by the dusty Arabian atmosphere. From the east rising towards the north, jagged granite peaks framing 80m-high sand dunes fell away into the shallows.
In the far distance, I noticed a tiny figure in the surf. I asked my guide and island expert Matteo Zanella who it was. "That is Ellai and this is his home. I will take you to meet him tomorrow." I looked around perplexed. Aside from our makeshift camp, I saw no evidence that anyone else had ever lived here.
Despite the heavy subject matter – in addition to abortion, Park writes about HIV, a parent’s declining health, and a series of devastating heartbreaks – the book is buoyed by wit served at the hard-and-fast pace of the K-pop dance hits that Young loves so dearly. Hur, the book’s translator, manages to preserve that rhythm in English through a flawless, breezy millennial vernacular that veers artfully between slang like “dickmatized” and poetic ruminations on “the taste of the universe” within the span of a single chapter. The delicious, unbridled joy in Park’s depiction of queer Korean life is revolutionary and fun as hell to read.
The Veiled Throne is not an easy book. Not a coddling one. It's not the most fun book of the trilogy to read. But with the way it finds its balance in the series, it might be Liu's most interesting.
Asserting that “our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation” in “The Hill We Climb,” inaugural poet Amanda Gorman urged the nation to account for its history to heal the future. This kinetic idealism now blooms in “Call Us What We Carry,” her new collection of poems, as she explores why.
Mr. Seth argues that if we are to understand consciousness better, we would do well to stop going after the easy or hard problem. Instead he poses the “real problem” of consciousness. It requires that we explain “why a particular pattern of brain activity—or other physical process—maps to a particular kind of conscious experience, not merely establishing that it does.” His general answer to the “why” question is that our minds are prediction machines, making informed guesses not only about the world but about what is going on in our own bodies. As he puts it: “The entirety of perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that remains yoked to the world through a continuous making and remaking of perceptual best guesses.”
I watched the grey whales breaching
and spent a morning on a crater’s rim.
Once, I heard an eastern screech owl screeching
in the autumn forest, cool and dim.
While literary backchannels have always shared negative book reviews, dreaded one-star Goodreads reviews now keep authors up at night, adding to that feeling that everyone can witness (and contribute to) your public failure. Plus, no one likes being the center of a Twitter pile-on, even when it might be ultimately deserved. We’re all waiting for someone to tell us we’ve written something that failed — and we’re all anxious about how devastating the consequences might be.
Which is why, perhaps, the author Kathleen Hale has become a representative for a worst-case scenario of what can happen when someone writes something that has been deemed “wrong.” But Hale’s story is not just about a singular personal disaster — it also speaks to the nature of criticism today, so-called cancel culture, and the growing power of Goodreads, especially for emerging genre writers.
There are many reasons why the popularity of the personal narrative has displaced that of fiction. Two of them, I think, can be traced to the demise of modernism and the occurrence of the Holocaust, each in its own way having contributed heavily to the developing hunger for “true stories.” So long as modernism, which dominated the arts in Western culture for a century and more, held sway, the novel was revered as the literary genre. But as the twentieth century wore on, the ability of a fictional narrative soaked in the emotional disconnect of an ungrounded voice speaking from the middle of nowhere gradually but steadily lost the power to make readers experience their own lives while reading. The alienated voice in literature became the cliché of the century, and novel writing slowly began to lose its cachet.
“I was texting my husband saying, ‘Justin Bieber is singing to us,’” Ms. Bagozzi said, laughing. “You could’ve knocked me out of my chair.”
The result of the call was Timbiebs, a limited-edition line of doughnut holes in flavors dreamed up by the pop star and Tim Hortons’ in-house chef, which includes chocolate white fudge and birthday cake waffle. They hit restaurants in November.
March 13, 2020. The first words of Jodi Picoult’s novel strike dread, or at least trepidation. Do we really want to relive those disorienting, soul-crushing first days of the shutdown felt around the world?
“Wish You Were Here” doesn’t shy away from the devastation of COVID-19 — but it’s simply the springboard, born of Picoult’s enforced isolation, for a tale of self-discovery.
Generations is confessional: Clifton doesn’t shy away from unflattering memories of her father in a fury over her mother’s shaking “fits.” And it has elements of the bildungsroman, following Clifton as she becomes the first member of her family to go to college (there are those unbelieving repetitions again: “I was soon going away to college,” she writes. “I was going to college”). But above all it belongs to a tradition of American self-writing that’s optimistic in its vision of, and hope for, equality.
“Women in the Picture” mounts a sensitive and probing critique of the motifs, the preordained poses and affectations of the female figure in art. If feminism aspires to render itself obsolete, McCormack’s project too yearns for a future when critiquing such postures — the flayed victims, the temptresses and the sexless “mammies” — will no longer be necessary. For now it is.
Why is it that making sweeping generalizations about people on the basis of gender, race, sexuality or nationality is unacceptable, but stereotyping them based on arbitrarily defined “generations” is totally fine? Millennials (roughly, those born between 1980 and 1995) have been demonized as narcissistic snowflakes who spend so much on avocado toast that they cannot afford to buy property. Baby boomers, meanwhile, are selfish, technophobic sociopaths who have stolen younger generations’ future. And so on. What is the reality behind such stereotypes, and is there any merit at all in seeing the world through a lens that is generational?
In a slim, engaging volume, Edward J. Renehan Jr. chronicles the dark proceedings and argues that the explanation for their current obscurity is itself an interesting story. “Deliberate Evil: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, and the 1830 Murder of a Salem Slave Trader” describes the brutal killing of 82-year-old Joseph White, its influence on writers including Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, and the subsequent efforts of the families involved to erase the episode from historical memory.
You can sense Robert Caro’s disappointment after he asks a group of CUNY Newmark Graduate School journalism students if they’ve seen a typewriter before and nearly every hand shoots up. The typewriter he is standing over is a Smith Corona Electra 210, a model practically synonymous with him. It is—no surprise—no longer being made. Caro has several backups, which he scavenges for parts, but is down to 10. If, that is, you don’t count the one that has now become a museum display and, at the same time, a kind of metaphor for Caro himself.
The typewriter also marks Caro’s first lesson to the 20-odd graduate students who are crowded around him. Caro, the most influential biographer of the last century, is leading them through selections from his archive, which has recently gone up as an exhibition at the New York Historical Society. It is likely the first permanent public exhibition of an archive devoted to a living author in the country. (Everyone, it should be noted, was vaccinated and masked except for Caro—his bifocals fog up—and this was late October, before micron.)
“When I was six years old, I tried kimchi at the United Nations school,” said Yoon. “I liked it; in Cameroonian cuisine, our food isn’t usually spicy, but we do always have a pepper paste which is super spicy that is always on the table. My mum ate a lot of spice, and as a child, I knew how to take spice early in life. Kimchi is served on the side of all the meals of Korean cuisine, just like the African pepper.”
What she didn’t know at the time was how much this small encounter would eventually stir up a passionate interest in Korean cuisine as an adult. Yoon has led an interesting life. As a daughter of a diplomat, she moved to America from Cameroon at six years old. As an adult, she’s had a variety of interesting jobs ranging from television host to cultural activist. Now, she’s the author of a new memoir, The Korean: Single and Obese: Then Kimchi Changed Everything! A deeply personal book, it tells the story of Yoon’s unique connection to Korean cuisine and how it literally saved her health.
It was a twist of fate that would shift the course of “Sea State,” the book Lasley ended up writing about her six-month stay in Aberdeen. What she’d intended to be a purely journalistic endeavor became something else — an investigation-memoir hybrid, infused with the details of an affair that threatened to derail her both personally and professionally.
The emotional center of this book is a mother’s love for her son, and whether that is enough to be triumphant over addiction. This is not a process novel revealing the daily grind of recovery, but instead an emotional experience driven by motherly love. Bright Burning Things contains few surprises, but the prose is clean and crisp, the narrative moves steadily along, and ultimately appeals to our desire to see the story through.
Our holiday stories are so cloyingly flavored with sugar plums that Claire Keegan’s Christmas novella tastes especially fresh. At the opening of “Small Things Like These,” one immediately senses that Keegan is breathing something vital into the season’s most cherished tales, until, as gently as snow falling, her little book accrues the unmistakable aura of a classic.
Whereas “The Hill We Climb” was a celebration of what with effort is possible, Gorman’s newest work, the poetry collection “Call Us What We Carry,” redoubles back on what ails us in the first place. The objects of her gaze are America’s refusal to own and atone for its history, the ominous changes to our climate and the coronavirus pandemic and its politicization. Gorman’s words read like that of Lady Liberty in a pointed argument with white supremacy or of the ultimate public defender trying to release us from captivity: “There is no one way to count who & what counted most to us in that dark.”
It’s nice to meet you pheasant, says
the pheasant, or he would if he
were not stone-dead with his
two feet tied together by a
We are not inclined to think of the book as technology. Indeed, it seems utterly foreign to our modern conception of tech, an antique thing in an age of silicon and diode light. But make no mistake: bound, linear text is a technological medium, as is the medium upon which it’s based — the phonetic alphabet (if we accept Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media as “an extension of the central nervous system.”) However, unlike other mediums, the book requires our participation — and by that I don’t mean our concentration, but rather our active involvement in its creation. What the needle is to the polyvinyl disc, or the projector to the celluloid strip, we are to the printed page––we are the instrument, the player, abstracting images from the text and spinning them in our heads.
The only writer I can think of who treats literature this way is Tom McCarthy. One of the preeminent avant-gardists of our time, McCarthy is literature’s Tesla, a writer for whom text is code and storytelling is transmission, a signal emanating from some indescribable airspace. Much of this is outlined in McCarthy’s essay Transmission and the Individual Remix (subtitled “How Literature Works”), in which he describes the acts of writing and reading as an antenna/receiver relationship. Literature is merely our method of broadcast, as we pick up on and modulate past signals — “their cadences, and echoes, their pulses, codas, loops” — and re-transmit them. What we think of as “tradition” is thus a kind of alternating current, shuttling back and forth between sources at various voltages and amplitudes. All creation, McCarthy argues, is synthesis: poets and novelists are like DJs, who sample and patch in order to create something new (a process he describes as “plugging literature into other literature”). Everything is constantly in flux, as voices overlap and tropes are encoded, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Homer to Joyce.
Mall death is self-evidently symbolic. A mall emptied of everything that made it what it was captures the imagination—which is why there are fascinating YouTube channels dedicated to the phenomenon, and evocative photographs of the sad heaps of naked mannequins and empty aisles and tattered EVERYTHING MUST GO banners fluttering in the dark. But symbolic of what? A dead mall, while eerie and odd and an urban eyesore, is strangely difficult to interpret. Tempting to see it as an Ozymandias-like portent of the collapse of capitalism, but it’s surely not, or not quite: Capitalism is thriving even if most of those living under it aren’t.
Whittling the ecological impact of buildings down to their electric bill makes a strong environmental case for new construction, which tends to have tighter fitting windows, central air conditioning, and other state-of-the-art systems. Once you consider the impact of construction itself, however, the argument for preservation gets stronger, in spite of your drafty windows and oil-burning furnace.
From the moment I opened that day’s bag and arranged its contents on my cutting board, I slipped into forty minutes of not thinking about the pandemic. Everything was so neat, so organized, and with such a clear projected outcome. It was a brief period when I could create some kind of order in the middle of all the upheaval, and before long, I became something entirely new—not just a person who cooked but someone who enjoyed it.
If the male writer’s goal is to neither render judgment on his female characters nor reduce them to stereotype, “is there anything left?” It’s a telling question for both subject and author, the former trying to do the women he loves justice, the latter attempting, for perhaps the first time, to work in a sincere, rather than satirical, mode.
Pacifico finds his answer in a kind of wistful reportage, striving not to interpret these women but simply to portray them.
How closely can we know the minds of others? In Aysegul Savas’s novel “White on White,” the narrator, an unnamed graduate student, moves to a European city to study the cathedrals in neighboring towns and plumb the medieval imagination. The narrator is researching depictions of Gothic nudes, an unusual topic, we’re told; the figures that decorate cathedrals and illuminate manuscripts are usually clothed, their garments rich with symbolism. But the lack of existing study is a draw. “I wanted to research an ambiguous topic,” the narrator says, “whose greatest challenge would be one of consciousness: to view the naked human form as medievals did.”
Hustvedt takes solace again in absence: her mother’s amputated breast, a wound both psychic and physical. Her mother’s desire to show her what is missing, and Hustvedt’s eagerness to look, is the basis of their intimacy — and for Hustvedt, in these essays, it is the basis of knowledge and feeling.
By affirming this link between memory and water, between body and country, Gorman points to the importance of remembering what came before us. Like water, memory ebbs and flows, and like a country, our body responds to the current.
Small, not especially
sensuous, not the kind
of shape to give one
power, not a flower,
Utah is often portrayed as a political and cultural monolith, whose Latter-day Saint majority helped Mitt Romney hold Barack Obama to less than 25 percent of the state’s vote in the 2012 presidential election. But there have long been divisions within Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, often called Mormons), as highlighted in a recent Washington Post Magazine feature on the rise of a liberal faction within the church.
Nowhere has this schism played out more viciously, and at times violently, than in the fierce 150-year-old rivalry between Utah’s two largest newspapers.
Boiling pasta in a pot of salted water is an operation that to a lot of people seems obvious, but in the history of cooking there is very little that is obvious, or maybe nothing.
I’ll allow myself a personal memory. Some time ago, some American university students, whom I had asked to indicate what products they perceived as “typically” Italian, allotted first place to water. Right then and there, I thought they meant mineral water or bottled water, of which Italians are some of the world’s greatest consumers. They explained to me, instead, that they were thinking of water for boiling pasta (not coincidentally, they had put salt in second place, which should have clued me in).
I am not ready for Christmas yet. I cannot force myself to barrel into festivities and holiday cheer. I need to take a minute. I need a season to notice, reflect on and grieve what we collectively and I individually have walked through this year (and the past few years, really). I need to take stock of where I am and how I got here.
Blum, an anthropologist at Notre Dame, argues that grading “promotes a deleterious focus on an appearance of objectivity (with its use of numbers) and an appearance of accuracy (with its fine distinctions), and contributes to a misplaced sense of concreteness.” In other words, it is pedagogical theater. Blum opposes this approach to a “nondogmatic” pedagogy that understands how teaching and learning comprise “a multidimensional, human set of interactions” that cannot be reduced to any standard practice or algorithmic certainty, to any instrumental or managerial approach.
Whenever I listened to an English radio play as a child the sound effects included a spoon endlessly circling bone china. English characters were always going out and coming in, but mostly they stayed inside and drank tea, even in the grisliest true-life murder dramatizations. Our plots unfolded in small rooms. It’s an English thing; neat little houses, inclement weather. Agatha Christie was particularly obsessed with egress. ‘It was a fine old library with the only other door leading out to the pristine tennis courts.’ And as we tended not to point guns at each other, our fictional killers generally dismissed firearms in favour of doctored pots of chutney, electrified bathtubs and poisoned trifles. They escaped without leaving footprints and relocked doors with the aid of string.
When so much time is spent inside it’s hardly surprising that we start thinking about elaborate ways of killing someone. Our crime novels may be domestic but are definitely not ‘cozies’. Endings are bleak, murderers admirable, victims deserving of their fate.
Apart from technology, it is hard to think of any aspect of daily life which has changed so radically in one generation as the way we eat. For a child growing up in the London suburbs in the 1970s with parents who were open to the new culinary influences from the continent and beyond but in a cash-strapped, unconfident, British way, food was both a comfort and a terror.
The first thing to know about “Sex Cult Nun,” and to get out of the way, is that the lurid title doesn’t remotely capture the flavor of Faith Jones’s thoughtful, carefully recounted memoir. Not to imply the book is not disturbing. There are many images you will wish you could forget, and descriptions of sexual mores and practices that call into question basic human values. But there are no nuns, and Jones’s life was anything but chaste, though not by choice.
Whitman means to tell us, You are not alone. His boat-ride reverie culminates in his poem’s final lines: “We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also, / You furnish your parts toward eternity, / Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.” That should come as a comfort whether you live in Brooklyn or anywhere else.
My father’s hands were roped with scars
from burns at work. He had trouble
bending his fingers. The ache.
It was another perfect spa-blue morning in Beverly Hills when Mark Hoppus, a pop-punk legend, accidentally told the world that he had cancer. This was back in late June, and Hoppus had just taken a photo of himself strapped into a chemotherapy chair, an image he wanted to share. But being woozy from the Benadryl and cocktail of cell-destroying drugs, his clumsy fingers made haptic contact with the wrong cluster of pixels on his phone. Thus the photo—the caption read, “Yes hello. One cancer treatment, please”—was transmitted not to his green circle of “close friends” on Instagram, but to his entire following of more than 1 million. A tragicomic oopsie.
And then, a mess: First in the form of a concerned text from his manager, asking if he meant to do that. Then the radio stations started calling. And then a fire hose of frantic text messages from friends Hoppus hadn't yet told. He quickly took down the post, but the genie was out of the bottle.
I already keep a list of what I’ve read, but what if I kept track of how many books I brought into the house on any given month? Perhaps it would be interesting. Or at least telling. Maybe it would be an effective way to convince myself to buy fewer books. (It was not.)
This lasted for about two weeks, at which point I realized I’d already ordered three or four books and not added them to the list, and that adding books to a list brought nowhere near the sense of satisfaction that adding them to my purposefully disorganized to-be-read shelf provided. But I kept thinking about it. We make lists of books we’ve read, lists of the best books of the year, lists of books to give people at the holidays, to recommend. What does a year’s worth of books bought but not yet read look like?
Across the western United States, the seeds are in high demand. Over the next 20 years, the U.S. aims to plant billions more trees in order to restore millions of acres of scorched forest and help offset planet-warming carbon emissions. In the West alone, some 10 million acres of recently burned land are waiting to be replanted. In the past few decades, however, the number of skilled seed collectors in the U.S. has been dwindling, though it’s not clear by how much, since the work is seasonal; it’s also gruelling, for not much pay. Fewer collectors means fewer seeds, and ultimately, trees.
The self-care industry is annoying, the concept is elusive, and waking up at the same time every day will improve your life in clear ways. Every critique of self-care—that it glorifies consumption, promotes self-absorption, and represents an individual retreat from public life—is true. Unfortunately, you still have to take care of yourself.
Near the end of “Around the World in 80 Books,” Mr. Damrosch pays tribute to “Stuart Little,” the children’s book by E.B. White. The story of Stuart, a clever mouse who insists on living at human scale, is a fable of sorts about what literature can do. Through their gifts of imagination, the books Mr. Damrosch celebrates allow us, like White’s hero, to be just as large as we need to be.
Amazon’s online store has surpassed Walmart, making it the largest retailer outside China. By delivering essentials and luxuries to those stuck at home during the pandemic, it helped many people navigate a bleak moment. Shipping times that used to be measured in days are now counted in hours. It is one of the few companies valued at more than a trillion dollars.
For all that success, however, Amazon is under pressure from many directions.
I am privileged to say I haven’t faced too much fear in my real life. I had a very stable upbringing, loving parents shielding me from any sort of true, desperate want. There has been one consistently tricky obstacle, though, a certain monster that I have battled with time and time again. And with irony so deliciously absurd it would fit neatly into ancient mythology, it’s something that requires me to stay alive. Food. Food has been my greatest source of fear.
Sure, buffets aren’t considered fine dining by any means, but eating from one meant more to me than just observing hot curries sizzling in tin trays under heating lamps. Buffets represent an amalgamation of the American dream, along with its promises of variety and free choice. The mostly-family owned establishments who offered buffet options were opening a window into their culinary world to a range of eaters—from the timid to the adventurous—providing a chance to explore and experiment without intimidation. For myself, eating at an Indian buffet was my chance to connect with half of my ethnic heritage while also enlightening new friends and family to the dishes of my father’s side.
On the marsh-bound causeway to Chincoteague Island on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, cars and their drivers seemed to float across the still waters of Queens Sound. As I made my way across, I thought of how, in centuries past, skiffs drifted through the region’s bays, channels and coves in search of shellfish. Back then, before fish-farming became popular, the land itself functioned as a sort of natural pier for its residents who wrangled clams and oysters and terrapin, as thick as treasure, from beds in the brackish water.
Lisa Harding’s second novel, “Bright Burning Things” is moving — humane and emotionally scrubbed raw — as a depiction of Sonya’s journey to the bottom of the bottle and (after her father’s intervention) her desperate efforts to claw her way back to sobriety to regain her life.
Whether by disposition or by strategy, Greta Garbo was the most elusive of movie stars. In the 80 years since she gave her final performance, “I want to be alone” (a line she spoke in “Grand Hotel”) has become the thing for which she is best remembered — more than her talent, probably more than her beauty and certainly more than her movies, of which even a lot of cinephiles would have trouble naming five. Her professional legacy is lean: Even the two famous slogans associated with her — “Garbo Talks!” for her first sound picture, “Anna Christie,” and “Garbo Laughs” for her most enduring (let’s just say best), Ernst Lubitsch’s “Ninotchka” — herald deviations from the norm. This is not the Garbo you know, they say: the silent Garbo, the unsmiling Garbo, the enigmatic Garbo. Impenetrability is an odd quality for a performer to make her signature.
So it’s fitting that “Garbo,” Robert Gottlieb’s ardent and wise investigative portrait, sometimes reads less as a methodical account of a life than as a biography-mystery, a hunt for a quarry that the author, a veteran editor/writer/obsesser/pursuer who ran (at different times) Knopf and The New Yorker, understands is likely to remain just out of reach.
You know that feeling when you’re playing Jenga, and the blocks are stacked remarkably high, and then someone bumps the table? And as the tower wobbles, everyone just watches in wide-eyed panic, willing it to stabilize with a desperate, silent prayer: Please don’t fall, please don’t fall.
I can only assume that’s how it felt last month, when technicians were working on NASA’s new space telescope and a very important clamp suddenly unclamped, sending vibrations coursing through the entire instrument. Officials didn’t provide details about the mood in the room at that moment, but it must have been something along the lines of Oh no, oh no, oh no. This particular Jenga tower is a $10 billion telescope, and NASA has been playing the game for 25 years, carefully arranging piece after piece to produce one of the most sophisticated scientific instruments in human history.
Volcanoes all over the world make their own magic. Eruptions at the bottom of the oceans grow shimmering cities of glass. Lakes of molten rock pool at the top of the glaciated Mount Michael, a volcano hiding on an island just shy of Antarctica. Vertiginous tree canopies full of wild animals embellish the steep slopes of Arenal, a volcano spiraling into the clouds in Costa Rica. Wine grapes coat the flanks of Etna, the Roof of the Mediterranean, while its peak coughs, simmers, and sizzles as a thunderstorm of its own design dances in the night above. Lava flinging itself out of the sea 600 miles south of the Japanese mainland is, at this very moment, piecing together one of the youngest islands on Earth. The lava of Kawah Ijen, a volcano in Indonesia, glows blue and purple at night as the sulfur inside bursts into flames. And not too long ago, just outside of Tokyo, two lifelong friends scrambled up a frozen throne of flame to reach a gate lingering far above the clouds.
A week before my thirty-first birthday party, I punched a wall. Not thin plaster; cement. I was angry so I punched it a few times. I wanted but failed to break my hand. I wanted to break my hand so I could go to my next doctor’s appointment (the eighth in three months) and have something to show. “Look. It’s broken. Fix it.”
The party was small, my husband’s idea, immediate family only. My two-year-old nephew peed on our brand-new rug, after which we ate mussels and home fries, neither prepared by me. I lost control of my neck muscles at the dining table, head lolling, and everyone pretended not to notice, except my mother who kept a tight, panicked grip on my thigh. Later, after cake, I maneuvered around the living room using the walls for leverage because my legs refused to carry my slight frame without support.
The Singapore bubble had indeed formed as promised. I still had my Singapore Airlines ticket for mid-December and even Alan Joyce was sounding happy about international travel prospects. I had been double vaccinated months earlier. What could go wrong?
Omicron had other ideas, of course.
It’s impossible to read those opening lines without wondering whether this sly and witty author is prompting us to reflect on how we might remember him — a bit of a tease since he surely knew his works would be impossible to forget.
With “Rock Concert,” Myers brings his interview-based approach to a topic so sprawling that it had the potential to breach the barriers like the crowds at Woodstock. Clearly the author had to make some rules: He steers away from sex and drugs, favors mainstream rock and ends the show in 1985.
Self-publishing in print has always had its advantages for writers: greater artistic freedom, direct engagement with audiences, the ability to speak directly to a community of readers without meddling editors, an affordable way to see their ideas come to fruition. Digital cookbooks are no different, and there are often huge advantages to producing a cookbook on a smaller scale, especially since DIYing a digital book has never been easier with plug-and-play graphic design software.
Independent recipe creators do face many of the same challenges as publishing houses in convincing readers to pay for digital downloads (plus a handful more hurdles unique to self-publishing). But for some, self-publishing digital cookbooks can be a significant source of income, at least enough to offset the costs of running a website and stocking a pantry.
Contemporary art is currently dominated by painting and sculpture, by traditional materials and old ways of making. Companies outside of the art world, meanwhile, are using digital technology to remake timeless masterpieces as evanescent gimcracks, as projected tourist attractions and animations. But few artists are doing what Rousseau and his peers did: accepting the realities imposed by new technologies — in their case, photography — and breaking the old ways apart to create something new. An artist with the spirit of Rousseau might appreciate the potential of this new medium and want to make art for the metaverse and the wider public.
Not all deaths are created equal. In February 2020, the world began to panic about the novel coronavirus, which killed 2714 people that month. This made the news. In the same month, around 800,000 people died from the effects of air pollution. That didn’t. Novelty counts for a lot. At the start of the pandemic, it was considered unseemly to make comparisons like these. But comparing the value of human lives is one thing the machine of modern civilisation does relentlessly, almost invariably to prioritise and absolve the rich – when, for example, the global supply of Covid vaccines is apportioned primarily to the highest-income countries, or when the cost of natural disasters in Bangladesh is measured against the impact of sea-level rise on Miami Beach real estate, or when Joe Biden’s onetime economic adviser Lawrence Summers proposed that Africa, as a whole, was ‘vastly underpolluted’, and suggested that ‘the economic logic behind dumping a whole load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable.’
Is it better to interpret art or to make it? Which is the more constructive act, which the more potentially destructive? Although “White on White” can suffer from too much control at times, Savaş’ restrained style is a statement in itself, minimalist on the surface but more textured than what first meets the eye. Through it, the author questions the validity of the self, whether fully clothed or supposedly exposed.
Yes, too much of “All About Me!” is self-congratulatory — if Brooks isn’t praising himself, he quotes others praising him — and, yes, recounting plots and casts for his films comes off as superficial. His memoir works best, which is more often than not, as a look back in laughter from a man who isn’t through trying to make us gasp for breath.
The dance begins again – the
seasons turn and Earth strips off
her veil. Summer will have her
wealth, florals and gold, to weave