In recent weeks my world has been tainted by a break-up… I've ended a month-long relationship with Billy Connolly, the much-loved Scottish comedian – via my audiobook app. I've spent hours listening to Billy reading his life story – his comedy, his music, his love of digestive biscuits, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do without his lilting Scottish tones. It was the same with past audio-based chums: Dave Grohl, Peter Frampton, Barack Obama, Roger Daltrey. And where would I be without comedian Bob Mortimer, with his relatable life story and tips for carrying "pocket meat"? (…For those who don't know who or what Bob Mortimer is, "pocket meat" is more innocent than you think.)
A little over a century ago, anyone looking out over the water on the eastern edges of Amsterdam on a clear day would have seen Dutch fishermen hauling their nets from the sea. Today the view is very different – more than 200,000 people now live in a spot that was once covered by the waters of the IJsselmeer, an inland sea created when the opening into the North Sea was cut off by a long dyke in the 1930s.
The settlement created where water once lay is Almere – the newest city in the Netherlands, growing from non-existence in the 1970s to the country's eighth-largest city today. If Atlantis was the ancient city myth says disappeared beneath the waves, Almere is the modern riposte, risen from the sea. And it has done so as perhaps the world's most experimental city, realising differing expressions of the concept of "design for living".
Yet despite their best efforts, the scientists were unable to recover nearly 5% of the Christmas Island rat’s genome. Many of the missing genes were related to immunity and olfaction, two highly important functions for the animal. “It’s not just the irrelevant stuff that you’re not going to get back,” Gilbert said. “And so what you’ll end up with is nothing like what went extinct.”
Though the results from Gilbert’s group are new, in many ways they underscore something that many scientists have understood for a long time. “The biggest misconception about de-extinction is that it’s possible,” said Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
For all its open sky, “The Lioness” better resembles an Agatha Christie locked-manor-house mystery, with bodies falling like clockwork, than a gripping survivalist yarn.
Where Bohjalian one-ups Christie (with apologies to the grande dame) is in his character development, going beyond the primary question (what do these Russian mercenaries want with their kidnapped Americans?) to explore the psychology of the survivors. Each chapter alternates real-time drama with backstories that may or may not overlap. The result is a puzzle along two axes, interconnecting individual survival stories with a larger, much more sinister game afoot.
This is a comedy that takes the tragedy of immortality seriously. It flips the fear of oblivion on its head to meditate on the terrifying suspicion that “the abyss of eternal nothingness was just a pipedream.”
If Limón sometimes looks too hard for the bright side, it’s because she acknowledges the darkness everywhere. It’s only when a poet pretends that the mysteries of the unspeakable can be solved with words, that language can and should take the uncertainty out of the questions, that poems fail. Limón, though she is sometimes guilty of optimism, has no such illusions.
A line, a lip, a like-
ness reclaimed