David Letterman, 20 years later, still thinks about the interview. “It was the only time in my talk show history that I did anything like that,” he says. “I’ve never sat down and talked to anybody on television where we both understood they were about to die.”
For half a century Arecibo was the mightiest telescope on the planet. One thousand feet wide, it listened to radio signals from the stars — as well from pulsars, planets, asteroids and more — for any hints of intelligent life, potentially Earth-killing objects and insights into the mysteries of gravity and space-time.
The demise of Arecibo also punched a hole in the pride and the economy of Puerto Rico, which has repeatedly been hit by hurricanes, earthquakes and widespread electrical outages. Since 1963, when the telescope was founded, generations of schoolchildren in the territory have trooped through the hills to a sci-fi setting: a gigantic, concave antenna, set like a mixing bowl in a mountain valley, with 900 tons of radio receivers suspended above it. There, young students could rub elbows with renowned scientists at work and be inspired by science, particularly astronomy. Many grew up to be astronomers themselves.
A humble virus, the Dead Sea, oil pipelines, Wonder Woman, a voodoo doll, Escherichia coli, the concept of freedom, monsoons, ‘extinct’ languages, and tectonic plates. All are real. All are active. And, in their own way, these and myriad other nonhuman entities are actors, enrolled in the production of our world. We’re still in the opening paragraph, but this is where Bruno Latour might have stopped us to make a slight correction: the production of worlds.
Back in the ’90s, when it was still socially appropriate to scare the pants off your kids and their friends on Halloween, many of us remember attending a party or two with a “Dead Man’s Body” buffet: In the popular party game, we were encouraged by adults to stick our hands into bowls of increasingly gross-feeling stuff for a spooky sensory experience. There were the peeled grapes meant to feel like eyeballs, the dried apricots passed off as dismembered ears, and most terrifying, the bowls of cold, limp spaghetti tinted with food coloring to look like bloody guts.
And perhaps it’s that root, the squick imprinted on our brains as we touch that clammy pasta, that makes spaghetti the scariest food. Or at least the scariest-looking food. Sure, one could say that other dishes, like those dead birds on a plate that were trending at fancy restaurants in 2019, have more intrinsic appeal for terror, but none have the same universality as spaghetti. We’ve all eaten it, we’ve all felt it, and because of that familiarity, noodles are often used in horror movies to make the audience feel a range of emotions, from nausea to outright fear.
But how did we get to this point where ghosts-as-sheets were accepted as the classic way we both picture ghosts and dress as them? Here's a closer look at the history behind the bedsheet ghost, including its early depictions, rise to popularity and significance today.
I got talking to a woman called Charity who held the world record for the longest river journey by pumpkin boat. I’d never heard of anyone paddling in a pumpkin before, but once the idea was in my head, I had to try it. Within a few weeks, Charity’s 15.09-mile record was beaten by a man in Minnesota who completed a 25.5-mile voyage. If there’s one thing I’ve never lacked, it’s optimism, and I decided that with the right pumpkin, I could do better.
Many fiction writers lament the solitary nature of their work, but perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way. “The Lemon” marks the arrival of S.E. Boyd, a pseudonym cooked up by its three authors, the journalists Kevin Alexander and Joe Keohane, and the editor Alessandra Lusardi. Drawing on Alexander’s background reporting on the hospitality industry, and tapping into a fascination with chefs’ lives that has only been stoked by the TV drama “The Bear,” this poised and playful debut novel is a sly satire on foodie culture and the modern hype machine.
About halfway through “Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin,” Peter Orner invokes Terrance Hayes’ “To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation With the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight.” By this point we know enough about what we’ve been reading to recognize the parallels between Orner’s project and Hayes’ work of biography-as-criticism-as-autobiography. Like its predecessor collection “Am I Alone Here?,” a 2016 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, “Still No Word From You” is a book of conversations: Orner in dialogue with other books, Orner in dialogue with himself.