The joy of browsing isn't so much in the satisfaction of reaching your desired destination but in the cultural detours you discover along the way.
Roughly 99 percent of the people living in the United States and Europe see only a dim approximation of stars in the night sky, nothing close to the bright firmament that our ancestors witnessed before humans harnessed electricity. The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness, the study that reported the findings, also found that 83 percent of the world’s population cannot see a naturally dark sky because of the light emanating from cities.
Armed with those statistics, I found myself again looking skyward last October, this time lying face up on a long stone slab at Arches National Park in Utah. Surrounded by strangers, I was trying to locate the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters, and our nearest spiral galaxy, Andromeda. My first trip in two years since the pandemic required a destination that felt new and otherworldly. As it turns out that is Utah with its biblical terrain and preternatural cobalt sky, a sky that also happens to be ablaze with stars at night.
Eleven years ago, when Heather Mair, a sociologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, began a survey of female curlers in the Northwest Territories of Canada, she found something she had not expected: Many of them said curling had helped with their mental health.
It pushed them to go out during the darkest months of the year, when the sun barely crosses the horizon and people withdraw into their houses. For women who curled, withdrawing was not an option, because the team depended on them.
At its most intriguing, Flight Risk is a novel that explores internal and external conflicts: a brown girl in a white and black world. A girl from an impoverished background now clad in cashmere and jewels. The story slowly reveals itself, in snapshots and asides, and Castro respects the reader’s ability to make connections and inferences. We read on, eager to know who is that child in the photograph, why Isabel’s mother was incarcerated, and what so utterly severed her relationship to her hometown and kin that she kept most of her past hidden from her husband. Even with the dazzling view from a penthouse in Chicago, her damage and trauma can’t withstand the pull of her secret past in the hollers of West Virginia. We read on, riveted, to the end.
Admittedly, there is something thin about “Life Without Children,” a certain degree of repetitive emotions and scenarios — almost a quality of having been written at great speed before time runs out on all of us. But that very thinness seems suited in some way to the unimaginable period of isolation and confinement Doyle is writing about, a period to which he imparts a sense of poignancy and glimpses of happiness, of grief and loss and small moments of connection that make it less surreal and more a part of the daily vicissitudes through which we must make our way, or perish.
Famous philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Paul Sartre may have massively shifted our discourse on the meaning of morality, but they are certainly not known for having succinct or approachable writing styles. Creating an overview of their massively influential yet arguably quite boring works that is an easy, enjoyable read is no simple task. Despite these odds, writer and producer Michael Schur somehow manages to craft a beginner’s guide to moral philosophy that is equal parts humorous, relevant, and educational with his debut book “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question.”
Nicolson, a polymathic author and historian, has written books on subjects from seabirds to the King James Bible. In his latest, he operates in a tradition pioneered by Annie Dillard and upheld by the likes of David Haskell — closely observing a discrete patch of earth (or sea) and taking it as his muse. “No need for binoculars or special stalking skills: Go to the rocks and the living will say hello,” Nicolson writes.