The food writer works with a short deck: of all the senses, taste has the fewest descriptors. (The great late restaurant critic Jonathan Gold used to tease me for calling too many salads “juicy,” and I teased him for overusing his iconic phrase, “shatteringly crisp.”) But one does eternally seek a juicy new angle, a [shatteringly] crisp new lede. Thus, Dana is so thrilled to learn her dinner companions are polyamorous—not because she’s personally titillated, but because she the term will enliven her write up: “The word polyamorist, with all its frisson, was like a jewel plopped in my lap,” she says, and starts composing first sentences: “I was at dinner with the polyamorists when… .”
A good guest doesn’t pretend they live in someone else’s home, they acknowledge their status and appreciate their temporary dwelling. In the queue, when I stopped evaluating from a place of certainty—whether of false objectivity or burdening judgment—and began reading with curiosity, my standards for the substantial and the transformative in my poems, the poems of others, and in myself, were both raised and expanded.
I am a lifelong lover and obsessive consumer of all kinds of genre fiction in many mediums, from the original Star Trek series to yakuza and samurai films, from JG Ballard’s sci-fi nightmares to PG Wodehouse’s sparkling farces. But if there is one genre form that attains a kind of Platonic perfection, the genre of genres, I believe it has to be the mystery, specifically the detective story.
Yet now, for the first time in more than a half-century, scientists are in the throes of changing the definition of the second, because a new generation of clocks is capable of measuring it more precisely.
In June, metrologists with the B.I.P.M. will have a final list of criteria that must be met to set the new definition. Dr. Dimarcq said he expected that most would be fulfilled by 2026, and that formal approval would happen by 2030.
It must be done carefully. The architecture of global measurement depends on the second, so when the unit’s definition changes, its duration must not.
There was no impending sense of doom. There was no shift to the wind, or darkening of the clouds. No lightning, no thunder. In this little patch of Hell Creek, Montana, all is as it ever was as far as the dinosaurs are concerned. But more than two thousand miles away, a chunk of extraterrestrial stone more than seven miles across just slammed into the Earth. In the hours, days, weeks, and years that follow, the consequences of the impact will wipe out about 75 percent of all species on the planet. This is how the end of the world starts.
If New Yorkers are unflappable, impervious and stoic on the sidewalk, we are raging, delighted, terrified, dancing, sobbing messes in the subway tunnels. How unsurprising, then, that the subway should be a pool of our collective pain amid the pandemic. The platforms are often a display of the frustrations of the unhoused and unemployed. The anxieties of those living without economic, emotional or medical support. The fears of immigrants and Asian and other nonwhite populations who find themselves scapegoats yet again.
A History of Dreams integrates two main stories within a complex plot: a friendship story of women’s bonding and the sisterhood intertwines with a story of societal change due to political oppression.
The title is layered. The dreams refer not only to the protagonists’ aspirations for education and professional lives – torn asunder by the political machinations of an increasingly authoritarian government; but also to the night-dreams experienced by those who have drunk their bewitched potions. The reference to history incorporates the lineage of witchcraft; as well as the fictional importation of factual European history through the rise of the Nazi party in ‘sleepy Adelaide’, where ‘nothing happens’.
Attorney Emma Averell is experiencing the worst round of sleeplessness ever in the tense “Insomnia,” British author Sarah Pinborough’s gripping psychological domestic thriller. It’s not the lying awake night after night that bothers Emma. It’s that she fears she’s following a pattern set by her mother — insomnia resulting in a psychotic breakdown just before she turned 40.
Whoever said that university politics are vicious because the stakes are so low probably never served on a ministerial search committee.
Michelle Huneven’s delightful new novel “Search” reveals the inner workings of just such a committee. It takes the form of a comic memoir-with-recipes by a restaurant critic and food writer enlisted to help pick a senior minister of her progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California.
Jacobs’s love for puzzles is infectious, and it’s not hard to understand why. Puzzle people draw us in with their monomania. “I’m a sucker for people who are passionate about something,” Jacobs notes, “regardless of how silly that passion might seem to others.” He shows us how you can even cherish puzzles that you don’t have the patience (or skill) to solve.