“Ricky” would rocket all the way to No. 63 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and no further — but the fact that it had charted at all still felt like a sign.
“I think that very day I gave my notice,” Yankovic says. “I said, ‘Well, maybe I should be full-time Weird Al, see how this thing pans out.’”
When asked when being full-time Weird Al started to feel like a viable career, Yankovic, who just turned 63, says, “I think about three months ago.”
With a book in one hand and a crayon in the other, I have played with words and pictures for as long as I can remember. Advertising and design was a natural fit, and I enjoyed a career as a creative director with respected national clients. An opportunity for our family eventually prompted a move, and I left agency life for freelance work and more time with my kids. I also began to write and illustrate picture books, and in early 2011, I became a bookseller in a storied independent bookshop in Neptune Beach, Florida. One rainy Sunday afternoon, in a lull that followed an especially strong rush of customers and friends, a colleague and I surveyed the resultant disarray. Small stacks seemed to cover every square inch of the shop. Books waited to be gift wrapped, to be mailed, to be returned to the shelves, to be reordered, or to be sorted for returns. Advance copies from publishers balanced on boxes, pending a spot on the cart. Everywhere, genres mingled together: science fiction mixed with business, histories with mysteries, and so on—and we laughed as we read titles in their random arrangements.
Where does a consciousness end and the rest of the world begin? Where is the line between inside and outside? Between life and not life? Between the parts of the universe that are conscious and those that are not? Between you and not you?
I’ve been a Toronto-based food writer for more than a decade, and there’s one project I’ve always wanted to do but never got around to (so far). I’ve wanted to map out this city of almost six million people through dumplings. My map would show the different enclaves and communities based on where all the pierogi places are versus the locations of the wonton soup restaurants or all the manti spots.
Toronto is the perfect city to create such a map: a metropolis that has evolved to be one of the most diverse culinary destinations in the world, thanks to waves of migration resulting in cuisines from disparate parts of the world commingling with each other. This place is a mix of cooks practicing centuries-old techniques learned from previous generations, innovators sharing new creations in the age of TikTok, and cooks embracing their third-culture cooking—combining what they learned from their parents with the new flavors and methods that come from living in a city where a roti spot, a sushi restaurant, and a souvlaki joint can all be found in a single plaza.
Urban dwelling comes with an unspoken pact that sensory intrusions will inevitably punctuate your life. Car alarms and the screeching, rumbling “L” pierce the air at all hours; neon signs rudely blink into apartment windows; rows of dumpsters assault passersby in the thick August heat, while sudden changes in the wind’s direction may bring friendlier wafts from the Blommer Chocolate Co. building.
If you’ve ever lived above a restaurant, these encroachments may even take on rhythms by which to set your days and nights.
Some of you are thinking, Ewww, no way. But open your hearts to the truth: spiders are among the most fascinating creatures on earth, and great neighbors to boot (goodbye, mosquitos!). With climate change putting them in danger, they could use a few new friends.
So instead of writing what I wanted to write, I turned to crosswords. My fascination had morphed into a curious admiration: I didn’t just want to solve them; I wanted to untangle how they were created. I had to understand how it was possible that someone could ever make something so brilliant, and so I started trying to make my own.
Perhaps the most painful moment following the death of a loved one is the split second after you reflexively pick up your phone to give them a call, or the instant after you tuck away an anecdote to share the next time you see them. These are the moments when the finality of death—previously ephemeral, almost unbelievable—finally registers.
For most people, anyway. Some, though, find themselves suspended between here and there, between the unthinking action and the devastating realization that follows. You might even spend years of your life treading back and forth between these two poles. This is the emotional realm in which The Furrows, Namwali Serpell’s knotty, prismatic sophomore novel, resides. The book traverses many genres and points of view, but it is primarily concerned with exploring one of the most enduring human impulses: the inability to accept death as the last word on a loved one’s life; the desire to hold on, to imagine, to desperately dream that the end is not the end.
“The Song of the Cell” is part history lesson, part biology lesson and part reminder of how science itself actually proceeds—the valleys of silence, as he calls them, where all is busy work with no strong theory to knit everything together, punctuated by moments of insight about what the connecting principles are.