There was a time, not so long ago, when things were perfect for the children up at the bright-faced house, at the edge of London. Heaps of toys in the nursery, an enchanted garden that rolled on for ages, and there were always buns for tea. Mother forever merry, forever there. But then Father died, or was imprisoned for treason, or his business partner absconded to Spain with their money, and the family had to abandon all the best old things and perhaps even the beloved house altogether, being reduced to a dank, crumbling cottage. Mother, too, was soon indisposed—dead or shut up in a room writing stories for pay—which left the children to a crotchety aunt or a kindly old gentleman friend. Mostly it left them to their own devices, unsupervised and largely unschooled, to seek their lost fortune together, with the aid of a time-travelling mole, say, or a sand-fairy who granted wishes. A form of reclamation awaited at story’s end: the return of the family’s comfort and prospects, perhaps even the return of Father.
These are the furnishings of the English writer E. Nesbit’s stories for young readers, and, book after book, she rearranged them with enough invention and emotional intelligence to become one of the most celebrated children’s authors of the Edwardian decade. H. G. Wells wrote to Nesbit, regarding her book “The Phoenix and the Carpet,” “I knock my forehead on the ground at your feet in the vigour of my admiration of your easy artistry.” In his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” C. S. Lewis wrote that Nesbit provided the older members of her audience with “more realistic reading about children than they could find in most books addressed to adults”; he also plucked his famous wardrobe from Nesbit’s story “The Aunt and Amabel.”
You might know that some sets of numbers are infinitely large, but did you know that some infinities are bigger than others? And that we’re not sure if there are other infinities sandwiched between the two we know best? Mathematicians have been pondering this second question for at least a century, and some recent work has changed the way people think about the issue.
If you have ever called the Windy City home, you no doubt have strong feelings about which pizzas do (and don't) deserve to be anointed bona fide Chicago-style. I'm not here to offer hot takes; I simply want to declare that the Chicago-born pie I hold dearest is tavern-style — a.k.a party cut, a.k.a the circular pizza with cracker-thin crust that's inexplicably cut into small squares.
The way in which we present ourselves to the world is not always the way in which we see ourselves. That gap widens when it meets the constant memory of violence.
In her second poetry collection Intimacies, Received Taneum Bambrick comes to terms with that gap in her life — understanding how she has protected herself from the burden of a traumatic past by simply daring to remember it.
At its best, Internet for the People strikes a happy middle ground between technical history and polemic. Tarnoff addresses the Internet as a technology in the Heideggerian sense, as a product and mediator of social relations: “that setting upon that sets upon man.” Readers will likely walk away from this book with a heightened familiarity with an entire realm of relevant literature. And while Tarnoff’s presentation of the Internet’s origins may seem bleak at times, he is ultimately optimistic about the direction of its possible evolution in the years to come.