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,