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.