What I didn’t know then was that, even as I ambivalently placed the overhead film on the projector, the concept of the tree of life had begun to wilt. Four decades on, it’s morphed entirely.
‘That whole abstraction of evolution as being a tree, we always knew was a little inadequate,’ Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the book An Introduction to Population Genetics (2013), told me by video call. ‘But now we know it’s really inadequate.’
According to Islamic tradition, ashure – which is frequently dubbed "Noah's Pudding" – was prepared as a celebratory dish by the prophet's family after surviving the great flood and washing up on Mount Ararat, on the fringes of what is today the north-eastern borderlands of Turkey. Legend has it that this cornucopia of a dessert, which usually includes around a dozen different grains, fruits, nuts and legumes, was concocted by combining whatever ingredients were still left on the Ark.
The resulting dish is mildly sweet, rich and savoury with notes of fruit. When prepared hot, ashure takes on a comforting consistency resembling porridge; when served cold it congeals and takes on more of a custard-like texture.
In the history of everything, there have been two Big Bangs.
One happened 13.8 billion-some years ago, and it created the universe.
The other one happened in mid-20th-century Southern California, and it created Fast Food America, a universe of its own, with a constellation of burger-and-burrito chains, all composed of the basic elements of salt, fat, sugar and pleasure.
Fifteen-year-old Mungo shows the kind of vulnerability that makes people want to cradle him — or crush him. He’s the tender Scottish hero of Douglas Stuart’s moving new novel, “Young Mungo.” It’s a tale of romantic and sexual awakening punctuated by horrific violence. Amid all its suffering, Mungo’s story makes two things strikingly clear: 1) Being named after the patron saint of Glasgow offers no protection, and 2) Stuart writes like an angel.
Speculative fiction often uses the future to decode the present. Here, Mandel folds the past into the mix, as well, creating a speculative universe where each plotline’s ending doubles as a trapdoor back to another plotline’s middle. And this mix of old and new doesn’t stop with her funky timeline. Although Sea of Tranquility is set largely in the future and adorned with sci-fi flourishes, it raises old questions about how we can make meaning.
Following a superb stylist like Mandel is like watching an expert lacemaker at work: You see the strands and later the beautiful results, but your eyes simply cannot follow what comes in between. As in her best work, including “Station Eleven,” she is less concerned with endings than with continuity. In “Sea of Tranquility,” her vision is not quite as bleak, but it is as strong — I won’t say prophetic — as ever.
Sea of Tranquility is a tale of retrospects, of foresights, of the same moment layered on top of itself like repeated musical notes and of quotes that echo across time.
One of the many wonderful things about “Atomic Anna,” a book about Chernobyl, yes, but also about comic books, the power of math, finding one’s truth, and love, both biological and found, is the core group of women who ground it. We shift from Anna to her daughter, Manya — renamed Molly in America — who has grown up in Philadelphia with adoptive parents, refuseniks whom Anna helped to escape Russia. Then there’s Raisa, Molly’s daughter, who rivals her biological grandmother in terms of mathematical genius and spirit. We peer into their lives and trajectories as Anna moves through time, trying to figure out how to set things right and how to convey her needs to her loved ones, even as things inevitably change when she touches the past. The novel is masterfully plotted — one has to imagine an enormous whiteboard was involved as the author charted out what any given move might set in motion, each outcome with its own stack of connected dominoes.
David Hendy, in his thorough and engaging new book, “The BBC: A Century on Air,” writes that you can’t understand England without understanding the BBC. It occupies, he says, “a quasi-mystical place in the national psyche.” It’s just there, like the white cliffs of Dover.
They knock on cupboards & ribs,
steal mothballs from the wardrobe’s dim corners
& patch them into their wings.
They scream when the kettle boils.