The whole phenomenon is of particular interest to me for two reasons. The first is that I adore the Classics, and my extensive reading is a major part of my personal identity, so I always have to restrain myself from weighing in.
And the second is that I never did the reading in high school. The last book I remember opening for high school English was Pride and Prejudice in 10th grade, and it was so dull that I threw it across the room and finished my essay using CliffsNotes. For most of college, and even grad school, I didn’t read any of the required texts.
Sour’s a bizarro cue, a signal reliable neither for toxicity nor for nutrition. Really, it’s just a rough proxy for low pH, the presence of acid—the citric in lemons, the acetic in vinegar, and the like. “We don’t need sour to live,” Ann-Marie Torregrossa, a taste researcher at the University at Buffalo, told me. “It’s a weird sense to need.” It has been so scientifically neglected that Rob Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, considers it something of a “missing taste,” the gustatory litter’s forgotten runt. No one really knows for sure, Dunn told me, “what it’s all about.”
What I’d felt was the ancient power of art to make a puddle of us. “E.T.” led me into a love affair with being made to cry among strangers in the dark. I almost typed “being reduced to tears,” except where is the reduction? Crying for art is an honor, an exaltation, a salute. It’s applause with mucus and salt. I’m not the only person who lost it at “E.T.” It was the No. 1 movie of 1982. And what I presume we all experienced was a willingness to give ourselves over to the ridiculous beauty of a story about feeling everything.
You could argue that “Very Cold People” is a version of what Parul Sehgal, writing in this magazine, called the trauma plot. Ruthie’s halting narration and lack of affect suggest a girl caught within a net of pain; the task of the book is to unmask each node, or victim, in the net, moving suspensefully inward. But “Very Cold People” adds nuance by investigating how substitution and silence can be misguided acts of love, not just symptoms of damage.
Hofmann presents love—that whirlpool, whirlwind, and wandering emotion that makes life worth living and also ensures future anguish—in its many shades from Eros to Agape. His explorations—like the mythologies—aren’t cherubic, instead embracing both darkness and light. These poems are earthy and multisensory: “Every desire I had I wanted enacted— / on the beaches, in bathrooms, in train stations.”
This book is, on one level, a history of information science, but it’s also a history of reading and writing and everything those actions entail — communication, learning and imagination, as well as competition, anxiety and no small amount of mischief.
The Conservatives’ birthday gift to the BBC, which is 100 this year, turns out to be culture secretary Nadine Dorries’s promise to abolish the licence fee, the funding mechanism that has allowed it to flourish as an independent institution beloved, trusted and envied across the world. Reading David Hendy’s The BBC: A People’s History in light of this latest attack on the corporation is a sobering experience. The author himself clearly feels the clouds gathering, and at times cannot banish an elegiac tone from his prose.
If you’ve ever wondered whether the law is an ass, look no further than Guilty Pigs. This detailed book explores a wide range of ways in which the law and animals intersect, from the ancient Irish Bechbretha (or ‘bee law’), to medieval murder trials for pigs and wolves, to 16th Century French winegrowers seeking punishment for green weevils, to legal wranglings about the use of police dogs in evidence and searches, to recent court case discussions about animals’ right to the copyright of their images.