“It’s just what I know, so there’s no point in changing,” says Dean Coombs, the man running the machine. Coombs, 70, is publisher and editor of the Saguache Crescent, the weekly for Saguache, Colorado, a hamlet of around 500 souls high in the Rocky Mountains. The Crescent goes to press every Tuesday. It costs 35 cents at the local gas station and town thrift store, and you can snag a copy for free at the 4th Street Diner and Bakery. An annual subscription can go for as little as $16. There are 360 subscribers. Each week, Coombs produces 400 or more copies using a Mergenthaler Model 14, which his family purchased new in 1920. It’s the last linotype-produced newspaper in the United States—and perhaps the world.
Kakuni translates to “square simmered” in Japanese. It’s pork belly cooked in a trinity that’s largely synonymous with the country’s cuisine: sugar, sake and soy sauce. The most expensive ingredient is time. But cooking kakuni is wildly simple: After frying your pork lightly for color, you simmer the meat until it’s soft to the touch, rendering most of the fat. This allows the base ensemble to imbue your meal with silky, molten flavor. For all of its simplicity, the dish is wildly consoling. You’re just as likely to find it chalked across the menu board of a bar as in the weeknight rotation of somebody’s home.
Sometimes, though, you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle — not necessarily because it’s a great novel qua novel, which you can’t know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions. You’ve entered elite head space of one kind or another. Jennifer Egan’s new one, “The Candy House,” is one of these novels. It makes you feel a bit high, drugged, and fitted with V.R. goggles, almost from the start.
In pop culture, female androids and artificial intelligences tend to be sexualized and treated as potential partners (“Ex Machina,” “Westworld,” “Her”). Male androids, in contrast, are super strong and hypercompetent (The Terminator series, Ultron, “Bladerunner.”) The title story of Kate Folk’s new collection “Out There” gleefully rewires those gendered tropes. The story is about blots — male AIs designed to look like handsome heartthrobs, ingratiate themselves and steal women’s data. The perfect artificial man is not a muscled savior. He’s a friendly exterior concealing a nefarious plot to seduce you and rob you of your self.
Focused almost wholly on the first half of Wells’s life, Tomalin’s brisk new study, The Young H.G. Wells, reintroduces this would-be titan of reason, the mustached precursor of Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tomalin shows Wells’s difficult path through illness to security, his consistent attention to left-wing politics alongside science, and his appetite for pleasure, once security came. It might not disrupt the picture earlier critics give of Wells the tireless rationalist, who wanted everything (even sex) to make sense. And yet—set beside Wells’s own fiction—it might. Wells became famous not just because he showed a prodigious faculty for reason, an energy for explaining, a passion for science, though he would not have risen without those qualities. His work and his life—especially the first half—also spring from the power in imagination, from the wish (which his characters share) to escape from this life, to discover something more.
“I have loved my father and I have feared him, and I have lain awake in the dark late at night worrying what it means to have half his genome inside me, but I have never understood him. Sometimes I have felt that if I could just reach down far enough into myself, I would find the answers: what he wants, what he fears, what he loves.”
With these words, Maud Newton sets the course for her debut memoir, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation. With these words, she enters the prism of family. Before she is done, she will have examined many ideas — about ancestry across cultures and across time, on genes and individuality, and from the philosophical world that underpins how we think about ourselves. She will have built a perspective on today’s internet-inspired genealogy and what it can mean in our lives.
where M is the mass of my brother’s body
falling after he pulled the trigger.
And here we are, bound to Earth’s pull
downward. His knees hit the floor first.