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.