So this is my resolution as I trudge from this dark place: to speak out more. Not to engage in callouts, or scolding, or eye rolls, which are not my style, but to express my own deep ambivalence, my own point of view on subjects that matter to me. Not because anyone asked for it, but because this is the career I’ve chosen, and if I’m not doing that, then what are we doing here? I suspect I will lose followers (I don’t have that many), but perhaps I will gain self-respect, which I’ve been sorely lacking lately. That might be why I’ve so desperately sought the validation of people on Twitter I’ve never even met. I still wanted it both ways: the respect and admiration of strangers without the hard work of earning that respect. I wanted people to love me without really knowing me, which isn’t love. It’s projection.
Bilingual street signs have hung over the bustling streets of the city's oldest Chinatown for more than 50 years. They are the product of a program from the 1960s aimed at making navigating the neighborhood easier for those Chinese New Yorkers who might not read English.
These signs represented a formal recognition of the growing influence of a neighborhood that for more than a century had largely been relegated to the margins of the city’s attention. But as the prominence of Manhattan’s Chinatown as the singular Chinese cultural center of the city has waned in the 21st century, this unique piece of infrastructure has begun to slowly disappear.
The question of which of these people and events, if any, are historical has captivated scholars for centuries, and though there’s little conclusive evidence that any scene happened as Homer described it, he invested his characters with such vitality and complexity that it can be hard to remember that much of the story is likely made up. His epic, based on centuries of oral tradition, plays out among the ships in the harbor, inside the walls of Troy, and on the plain in between—perhaps a stone’s throw from where I now stood in the parking lot. It was there, according to the legend, that the Greeks, led by “god-like” Achilles, confronted Priam’s son Hector and his Trojan force. With its stirring descriptions of martial pageantry, its dramatic accounts of close combat, its heroic but flawed characters, its sacrifices, betrayals, grieving lovers and parents, and its powerful descriptions of loss and human suffering, the Iliad shaped Western literature through millennia. “Poets must sing the story over and over again, passing it from generation to generation, lest in losing Troy we lose a part of ourselves,” the British actor and scholar Stephen Fry wrote in his recent best seller Troy.
With Fry’s words ringing in my ears, I entered the site, which is administered by the Turkish government, through a gate reserved for researchers, skirted the giant Trojan horse, and followed a path to a barnlike building crammed with boxes of animal bones, broken fax machines and other detritus. This was the headquarters of Rüstem Aslan, the current head of excavations at Hisarlik, the modern Turkish name for the area, and the first Turkish citizen to serve as chief archaeologist since formal digging began, in 1870.
It is also inevitable that over time, many of our memories of these difficult years will fade. As a neuroscientist who studies memory and memory disorders like Alzheimer’s, I find this fact — perhaps counterintuitively — comforting. I have come to understand, through new research, that there is a danger in remembering too much and that forgetting is not only normal but in fact necessary for our mental health.
“The Love of My Life” is a classic example of the “I married a stranger” domestic suspense plot — with a twist. Usually, the partner with a secret triggers suspicion in us canny readers early on. (That Maxim de Winter guy is too aloof, too insistent on having his own way to be without a tangled past.) But, Emma Merry Bigelow, the enigmatic heroine of Rosie Walsh’s “The Love of My Life,” seems so funny, warm, compassionate and kind that we readers root for her — even though we learn fairly quickly that she’s living under an assumed name and harbors a host of other secrets, something her adoring husband, Leo, doesn’t know about. Walsh just may have written the first domestic suspense novel in which the deceitful spouse is also a genuinely nice person. Maybe.
It’s a modern mystery why Charlotte Mendelson, one of the funniest writers in Britain, isn’t a bestseller (though she has just been longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction). Her new novel is so devoid of secondhand sentences that it’s quite possible she spent all nine years since its predecessor polishing her jokes and turning phrases round until they shine.
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond was reading the Bible one day, and she got to a part about the Temple of Solomon that made her pause.
There were some drapes in the temple that were blue.
"And I was wondering why that was significant," says Brew-Hammond. So she started researching, and learned an interesting tidbit about a species of snail.
Philbrick presents an excellent story replete with details about Washington’s travels, and he compares those with the details of today’s traveler. The prose entertains and compels the reader to forge on just as Washington did aboard his favorite steed, Prescott.