The status of dance in American culture is deeply paradoxical. Concert dance is one of the most elite art forms imaginable. The demands placed on professional dancers are so punishing that those of us who live outside this spartan vocation may struggle to understand the labor involved. Dancers are, in the words of the choreographer William Forsythe, “Olympic-level athletes” whose aim is a perfect synthesis of athletics and artistry. This takes years of training and enormous sacrifice—and for what? An audience composed of a sliver of the urban intelligentsia; a career butterfly-like in its brevity, inevitably cut short by age or injury.
And yet: Dance is also spontaneous, elemental, universal. Cave paintings show that humans have been dancing since at least the Stone Age. Some scientists, having observed that chimpanzees occasionally sway and clap while listening to piano music, believe that the desire to dance predates humanity. Psychologists have argued that group dance supports social bonding. Anthropologists, meanwhile, have found expressive or ecstatic movement at the core of many religious rituals: healing rites, initiation ceremonies, funerals, weddings, preparations for war. Dance returns us to the earliest mysteries of human creation. It is one of our fundamental arts.
When the waffle maker arrived, I experimented with various recipes, always making far too many for two people to eat. Clearly, we needed more mouths to feed—and owning this ridiculous thing provided a great excuse for having people over—so we decided to open our home on Saturdays to anyone who shared our desire to bask in the good vibes of others. We circulated a sign-up spreadsheet to close friends, friends of friends, coworkers, former students at the college where I taught, far-flung pals who might be passing through New York, fond acquaintances. We promised to provide waffles and eggs and to introduce them to delightful strangers.
I recently came into possession of a good spork. It doesn’t matter how this happened, only that now in my cutlery drawer there is a spork many times heftier than those wrapped in plastic to accompany lunch at day camp. And I am finding that at many meals, I don’t want to eat with anything else.
In her superb new story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste, Toni Ann Johnson follows the Arrington family, starting in the not-so-distant world of 1962. From there, via parents Phil and Velma and daughter Maddie, we travel through the ’70s, ’80s, and up to 2005, along the way visiting the Bronx, West Africa, and New Jersey, but always firmly anchored in uptight Monroe, in Upstate New York. Each story is an emotional journey through the complexity of an upper-middle-class Black family attempting to live their lives in a virtually all-white community. The stories create an emotional resonance that continues to thrum long after the reader has finished the book.
American writer Jennifer Egan’s fascination with human reactions to technology sits at the heart of her novel “The Candy House.”
Told in a dizzying array of narratives and styles, “The Candy House” is an exploration of our interconnectedness, but also our desire for real connection.
Fatima Ali was a rising star. A celebrity chef featured on the reality contests Chopped and Top Chef, Ali aspired to open the eyes and mouths of American diners to Pakistani flavors. But in 2017, at the age of twenty-nine, she was diagnosed with sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, and soon after passed away in 2019. She wanted a legacy connecting cultures through her food. Facing death, she chose to spend her time working with Tarajia Morrell on a final memoir, Savor: A Chef’s Hunger For More.
Brooks is a nimble and elegant writer, letting his argument unfold, showing us how fiction can do two seemingly incommensurate things at once: It allows us to get “caught up” in the world that it creates, while it also stimulates our capacities for “understanding and reflection.” He ends with a chapter on the decidedly nonfictional realm of the law, where stories are often viewed as “suspiciously emotional” — too likely to be irrelevant or prejudicial — when in fact the law relies more on storytelling than even its most august arbiters would like to admit.
“Seduced by Story” turns out not to be the condemnation of narrative that I thought would follow from Brooks’s complaints in its early pages, but rather a potent defense of attentive reading and its real-world applications. Literary criticism, here to save the day! This may be a sneakily self-serving story on his (and my) part, but that shouldn’t make it any less true.
Progress in economic thought comes in three stages; first they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they ask you to write a quirky book explaining your ideas to a mass audience. Ha-Joon Chang has been working hard at providing an alternative to neoliberalism for two decades now, ever since his book Kicking Away the Ladder pointed out that low taxes, free trade and deregulation simply wasn’t the way that most rich countries had developed. Now he’s reached the summit of the profession; a fun little book of essays (some of them extended and expanded versions of columns for FT Magazine), restating the case against the Washington consensus through the medium of recipes.
On its brittle vine, my grandfather’s voice
ripened with stories he thought forgotten.