Three years later I published my second book, a novel. My original beloved editor came back to the publishing house to run a new imprint. I was sent on a small book tour of Cape Cod, where my novel took place. This was the first time I met them, the book dealers, men who showed up with bags of books for a writer to sign, the dust jackets folded into mylar covers. I’m a former public librarian; I have always loved a mylar cover, nearly to the level of kink. The dealers brought with them my new book, The Giant’s House, but they also had copies of Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry. Hardcover; the book hadn’t made it into paperback, wouldn’t for some years.
“It’s a first edition,” the book dealers told me proudly, and I had to break it to them: “They’re all first editions.”
For all their ferocious gravitational abilities and their unholy exotic natures, black holes are surprisingly simple. If I give you two black holes with the exact same mass, charge, and spin, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. If I swapped their places without you looking, you wouldn’t know that I did it.
This also means that when you see a fully formed black hole, you have no idea what made it. Any combination of mass squeezed into a sufficiently small volume could have done the job. It could have been the ultra-dense core of a dying star. It could have been an extremely dense litter of adorable kittens squashed into oblivion.
As long as the mass, charge, and spin are the same, the history is irrelevant. No information about the original material that created the black hole survives. Or does it?
"The interesting feature of Newton's laws, which wasn't appreciated till much later, is that they don't distinguish between the past and the future," says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, who discusses the nature of time in his latest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. "But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don't have any photographs of the future."
The problem is not confined to the centuries-old theories of Newton. Virtually all of the cornerstone theories of physics since then have worked just as well going forward in time as they do backwards, says physicist Carlo Rovelli of the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, France, and the author of books including The Order of Time.
When people think of Maine cuisine, they tend to think first of clams and lobster. Never cared for clams myself; they always looked to me like snot in a shell. Lobster is tasty, but I ate too much of it as a kid. My mom was on a perpetual budget, and she’d buy day-old (or two-day-old) lobster at the IGA in Lisbon Falls. Some of those bugs were still moving, but not that many. She made lobster rolls, and there was often a pot of lobster stew simmering on the stove. She’d hide it in the oven if someone came visiting because, in those days, lobster stew was “poor food.”
When I think of Maine cuisine, I think of red hot dogs in spongy Nissen rolls, slow-baked beans (with a big chunk of pork fat thrown in), steamed fresh peas with bacon, whoopie pies, plus macaroni and cheese (often with lobster bits, if there were some left over). I think of creamed salt cod on mashed potatoes—a favorite of my toothless grandfather—and haddock baked in milk, which was the only fish my brother would eat. I hated it; to this day I can see those fishy fillets floating in boiled milk with little tendrils of butter floating around in the pan. Ugh.
At the entrance to the Planet Word museum in Washington, D.C., stands a remarkable sculpture designed to resemble a weeping willow. However, instead of leaves, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s tree has tiny speakers drooping from each branch that play 360 different spoken languages, creating a deliberate Tower of Babel, a cacophony of voices that immerses visitors in our shared human need for expression.
When you finish Celeste Ng’s stunning new dystopian novel, “Our Missing Hearts,” you’ll understand why this sculpture comes to mind. The simplest way to put it without spoiling anything is to say that at the core of Ng’s narrative — a 12-year-old boy’s epic quest to find his missing mother — is the all-important question of how we communicate.
Parents of youth hockey players sometimes joke that, thanks to the sport’s intense early-morning weekend schedule, we belong to the International Church of Hockey. And in “The Winners,” the third installment in the hockey-centric Beartown trilogy, Fredrik Backman takes competition, friendship, politics and town rivalry to appropriately biblical proportions.
“Through much of history, there was no clear distinction between philosophical ethics and ‘self-help,’” writes Kieran Setiya early in “Life Is Hard.” Ancient philosophers were interested in what makes a good life and a just society, and in the virtues it takes to pursue both — but these central questions of human thriving now occupy the margins of the modern academic discipline. A professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Setiya is neither stranger nor enemy to arcane scholarly investigations. But in this book, he searches for “a philosophy that can speak more intimately to life,” one that will address the struggles just about all people face.