Robert Frost was afraid of the dark. He was scared of storms and petrified of prowlers when he penned an iconic poem about the darkest night of winter.
I think of this as I drive through the foothills of the Green Mountains in South Shaftsbury, Vt., en route to the red-gabled stone house where the blue-eyed poet wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in 1922, about a traveler who halts his horse to watch the snow fall.
Edgar Allan Poe was a remarkably versatile writer who ventured across many fields of interest. He was an editor and literary critic. He penned the first detective stories in the style readers recognize today, making him Agatha Christie’s spiritual ancestor. And, of course, he wrote what are perhaps the most iconic horror stories in the American literary canon. What’s less known about Poe is that he was also an enthusiast of the sciences, and besides dabbling in physics and cryptography and incorporating them into his work, he also wrote a book about seashells.
Already a hit in the US, where it has been compared to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Katy Hays’s debut novel is about tarot, obsession, academic jealousy and Renaissance magic. This subject matter will intrigue many and discourage others. I was initially in the latter category, but it turns out that Hays is a writer who can skilfully navigate the narrow territory between suspense and melodrama.
An archive is both a living and a dead thing; it is the record of a person's life, left behind after they die, but it also changes shape constantly as it is developed and leafed through by researchers. This sort of doubleness haunts Elizabeth Hoover's debut, "The Archive Is All in Present Tense," as if the author were constantly driven to show us the ways in which these planes collide as the book takes on the roots of selfhood as a research project.
But I finally have good news to share. I have a positive case study—and we can learn from it.
Here’s the surprise: This company has been a failure at digital media, and has succeeded by embracing the most antiquated technology of them all: the printed book.
That’s quite an achievement. So let’s look at the turnaround at Barnes & Noble.
In the Tarot, the Star card represents the gift of hope, though the naked figure on the card is most often depicted emptying two pitchers of water in the void of night. This visual trope is hundreds of years old, having been replicated by makers of the Tarot since the mid-seventeenth century. In Arthur Waite’s deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith (1909) and now a standard among Tarot readers, the figure on the Star card drains one vessel into a rippling pool, the other vessel onto a grassy bank. Seeking to reconcile the card’s image with the card’s most simplistic meaning, I consider how the process of emptying might be hopeful, how draining one’s resources might inspire optimism. How can a void be perceived as a gift?
At the start of his latest book, “In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility,” the philosopher Costica Bradatan notes without chagrin that when we consider our origins and our ultimate fate, humans are not very impressive. We are designed to fail, he emphasizes, and death is the framework for all our attempts to make something of ourselves. In a previous book, “Dying for Ideas,” he considered how philosophers across the ages wrestled with mortality. In “In Praise of Failure,” he looks at how various thinkers — Seneca, Mohandas Gandhi, Simone Weil, Emil Cioran, Yukio Mishima — detached themselves from an obsessive drive for worldly success by reckoning with failure and death. Bradatan wants us to grasp how striving to succeed prevents us from dealing with our mortality and hence from living a more meaningful life.
In fiction, New Year’s Eve almost invariably proves a fiasco. Often it is tainted by doom or despair. In George Eliot’s novel “Silas Marner”, it prompts Squire Cass, a minor aristocrat, to host an opulent dance. His son Godfrey’s estranged wife, Molly, travels there, intending to expose his shabby behaviour, only to collapse en route and die in the snow. It is the date when Hans Christian Andersen’s little match girl (pictured) freezes to death in the street, ignored by revellers, and when the title character in Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” weds the dogmatic hypocrite Angel Clare. In Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Looking Glass”, a young woman falls asleep on New Year’s Eve and perceives a future so haunted by death that, when she wakes, the dream seems to have cast a pall over her whole existence.
After all, fighting a pandemic of severe pneumonia is what the ICU does best: even as so many patients could not be saved, still others made their way through the most arduous phase of this illness and survived, some with many years ahead of them. Each time that happened, I experienced the opposite of burnout—I was energized by the realization of just how miraculous intensive care medicine could be. Some of these patients I have followed up with, many months later, in my outpatient clinic, and while their lungs have not always fully healed, their lives are full and underway. In a strange sense, Covid showed us what the ICU was made to do. But today, as we envision health care in a post-pandemic world, we need to grapple more honestly with another reality; the ICU has a dark side too.
It’s light, as I said, for all the weightiness of its subject — but entertaining, nonetheless. And even so, Eliza reflects, “life had turned out to be more complex than even she, in her business, had expected.”
“We must live in the future we hope to make,” a character says at one point. Crewe is writing from that future; the book is cleanly contemporary in style. By doing so, he reminds us that the future we uneasily inhabit is almost as conflicted in its attitudes to sexual freedom as the late 19th century. He also reminds us how dangerous it is to reduce human life to manifestos. Lives and experience demand richer forms of storytelling, and this is just what Crewe has given us.
“Only connect!” Margaret Schlegel declares throughout E.M. Forster’s “Howards End,” a mantra that doubles as the novel’s epigraph and a theme the literary eminence mined across his career, amid the twilight of the British Empire. The spirit of Forster broods over Tom Crewe’s lyrical, piercing debut, “The New Life,” which lends a contemporary urgency to an exploration of same-sex intimacy and social opprobrium.
Rudyard Kipling has been called the most controversial writer in modern English literature. Sometimes I suspect that Roald Dahl must run him a close second. Still, in the end, our dealings as readers aren’t with authors, all of whom are flawed human beings, but with their books. Our lives would certainly be poorer without Dahl’s tender portrait of the love between a father and his son in “Danny the Champion of the World” or the inspiring fairy tales of “The BFG” and “Matilda.” Even the critic Kathryn Hughes, who once called Dahl “an absolute sod,” concluded, quite rightly, that “despite so many reasons to dislike him,” he nonetheless remains “one of the greatest forces for good in children’s literature of the past 50 years.”
In between the sunlit shallows and the dark, deep ocean lies an inky realm where few people have ever been. Stretching from about 30 to 150 metres, the mesophotic zone (meaning “middle light”) is an awkward depth. It lies just beyond the reach of regular scuba divers and it’s usually what aquanauts inside multimillion-dollar submersibles merely glimpse as they plunge deeper.
However, a new generation of scientists is pushing the limits of diving to discover the secrets of this ecological zone. “There’s so much to see, and everything seems new,” says Erika Gress from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. “It’s like a different world.”
For the first time, however, one of Disney’s marquee characters — Mickey himself — is set to enter the public domain. “Steamboat Willie,” the 1928 short film that introduced Mickey to the world, will lose copyright protection in the United States and a few other countries at the end of next year, prompting fans, copyright experts and potential Mickey grabbers to wonder: How is the notoriously litigious Disney going to respond?
Every year, around 1 or 2 a.m. on Jan. 1, Joline O’Leary drives home from a big New Year’s Eve party. Before turning in for the night, after the Champagne and fireworks, she eats a bowl of tteok guk, a humble Korean soup of beef broth boiled with thinly sliced, oblong ovals of tteok, or rice cakes. O’Leary, whom I met on a recent trip to Honolulu, is a fourth-generation Korean American. For her, this ritual is the first thing she likes to check off her list for the new year. “It’s good luck,” she said, “and I appreciate the tradition.”
Over the course of a dozen novels, readers of Elinor Lipman’s fiction have come to expect charm and clever high jinks. Her latest, “Ms. Demeanor,” carries on this tradition while adding a potent dose of wry social commentary. In case you haven’t guessed, the title is a pun on the legal term for a crime less serious than a felony, as well as a synonym for deportment. This nimble wordplay sets the tone for Lipman’s comedy of manners, which is sprinkled with female misbehavior.
One by one, astronomers marched to the podium and, speaking rapidly to obey the 12-minute limit, blitzed through a cosmos of discoveries. Galaxies that, even in their relative youth, had already spawned supermassive black holes. Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that might harbor habitable planets.
[...]
Between presentations, on the sidelines and in the hallways, senior astronomers who were on hand in 1989 when the idea of the Webb telescope was first broached congratulated one another and traded war stories about the telescope’s development. They gasped audibly as the youngsters showed off data that blew past their own achievements with the Hubble.
The sound is inescapable. Wherever you are in Taiwan – be it three beers deep at a city bar, floating in the Taiwan Strait, or hauling yourself up a mountain – you’ll still hear the tinny, off-key classical jingle, and it will trigger a Pavlovian surge of panic: I have to take the bins out.
In the last few decades, Taiwan has transformed itself from “garbage island” to one of the world’s best managers of household trash, and it’s done so with a soundtrack. Armies of yellow trucks trundle through the streets five days a week, blasting earsplitting snippets of either Beethoven’s Für Elise or A Maiden’s Prayer by Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska.
I had never considered Vegas a town lacking in anything. I had come for a few days this past fall, dutifully overloading my senses and depleting my wallet every time I left my hotel room. But at a dinner one night with a large group of colleagues, I heard the first rumblings of discontent, and unfulfilled wishes. "You wouldn't," the woman next to me at our table asked the waiter gently, "just happen, by any chance, to have Coke?" He shook his head. She'd already guessed as much.
"Am I tripping or is everything here Pepsi products?"
“Have you eaten yet?,” a familiar Chinese greeting, might be the title of this book, but for the author and director Cheuk Kwan — and for almost every restaurateur he interviews in his tour of Chinese restaurants across 15 countries and five continents — food is only the entry point. Because “running a Chinese restaurant is the easiest path for new Chinese immigrants to integrate into the host society,” Kwan writes in his memoir-cum-travelogue, “there’s no better way to tell the story of the Chinese diaspora than through the stories of Chinese restaurant owners.”
My grandmother cored them
with a serrated knife
with her hands that had come
through the slaughter -
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a science fiction writer in possession of a convention panel must be in want of a question as to where all the genre’s optimism went. Many born during the inception of cyberpunk (like me), have no recollection of a time when science fiction was inherently optimistic. But there is another genre that does optimism by default and is often ignored because it has traditionally been written by and for women: romance. As bell hooks wrote, “Male fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape.”
Romance is optimistic purely because it believes unwaveringly in the possibility of growth, change, happiness, and pleasure—often in the face of poverty, illness, trauma, hate, or mainstream values. Mr. Darcy does wrong and owns up to it. Lucy Honeychurch realizes her desires are valid. Anne Shirley gets over herself. “Without change, you don’t have a romance novel,” says bestselling author Sarah MacLean.
The profound therapeutic benefits of connecting with nature and spending time outside are well known. But in winter? When it’s cold, gloomy and everything looks dead? In fact, especially in the winter, when we are susceptible to fatigue, illness and seasonal low mood. And actually there is plenty of life, beauty and wonder right outside our doors, if we look closely.
Come and take a short walk with me in my nearest wild patch – an urban cemetery, a common environment across the British Isles.
Wilson’s tone throughout the poems, as the pandemic and lockdown deepen, is one of aloof attentiveness: life goes on. There’s no haranguing or shrill political sloganeering, nor is Wilson a conventionally confessional poet. He usually writes with rhyme and strict attention to meter, but here there’s a new and engaging conversational looseness. He digresses and shares domestic news like a chatty neighbor. His wife gives him a haircut. His kids watch Duck Soup. Wilson reads Matthew Arnold.
Notes From Another Los Angeles, edited by the scholar Anthony Fontenot, is the first book devoted to exploring the communal developments that Ain believed in deeply, with a focused look at each of the projects he constructed. While the scale of his plans was often thwarted, Ain made four such communities in Los Angeles during his lifetime, of all of which still stand today. “He could have done large commercial buildings,” a former associate of Ain’s observed, “but his heart was in social housing.” Ain stated that he wanted to address “common architectural problems of common people,” and the best way to do this, in his view, was to design small homes on shared lots that were cooperatively owned.
More than a thousand poetry books appear in this country each year. More people write poetry in this country—publish it, hear it, and presumably read it—than ever before. Let us quickly and loudly proclaim that no poet sells like Stephen King, that poetry is not as popular as professional wrestling, and that fewer people attend poetry readings in the United States than in Russia. Snore, snore. More people read poetry now in the United States than ever did before.
To end a holiday concert at Montréal’s symphony hall earlier this month, superstar conductor and five-time 2023 Grammy nominee Yannick Nézet-Séguin led his hometown orchestra, two soloists, a massive choir, and the Taurey Butler Trio in a rousing performance of one of Québec’s most beloved holiday favorites: “Glory, Alleluia.” As in “Glory, Glory, Alleluia.” Yes, that very American tune—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—set to seasonal French lyrics.
Why, every Christmas, do so many people endure the mess of dried pine needles, the risk of a fire hazard and impossibly tangled strings of lights?
Strapping a fir tree to the hood of my car and worrying about the strength of the twine, I sometimes wonder if I should just buy an artificial tree and do away with all the hassle. Then my inner historian scolds me – I have to remind myself that I'm taking part in one of the world's oldest religious traditions. To give up the tree would be to give up a ritual that predates Christmas itself.
As a child in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Oryan Cumaraiah-Misso remembers excitedly readying himself in front of a handheld meat grinder to crush cashews. It was his part in his family’s annual tradition of preparing a 60-year-old recipe for Christmas cake that had been passed down for generations. Christmas cake – a moist, decadent treat filled with nuts and fruit – usually kicks off the holiday season on the island nation, and for immigrants in the US, has become a way to preserve traditions from back home.
Not much is known about the inner life of mushrooms, but we can guess at the presence of a sort of subterranean sociality from the extensive networks of underground filaments that link individual organisms to a vast community of plants, tree roots and other fungi. Although the mushroom’s cap and stalk are its most obvious features, they are only the visible signs of a deeper life — the way that the tip of an iceberg hints at the bulk obscured below, the white and black keys of the piano represent the hidden strings full of unstructured, potential sound. Or the way that certain novels give the impression of being animated by a force that has little to do with their ordered combination of words. Instead these narratives seem to orbit their own expression: They exist beyond language, above it, or maybe even below it — who could say of something as elusive as story precisely how or where it eludes?
There's a great clear balloon inside me
so forget my innards, the muriatic acid
In Lapland, just inside the Arctic Circle, you can visit Santa Claus at any time of year, because that’s where he lives. No doubt this requires a plentiful supply of Santas (I hope nobody under the age of seven is reading this), some of whom may be graduates of a course in Santa Claus studies you can take at the University of Lapland. Like Santas everywhere, you need a generous girth, a certain facility with the ho-ho-hos, a lack of lurid facial tattoos and no history of paedophilia. I once saw such a generous-girthed image of Santa Claus in a shop window in Beijing, at a time when a newly modernising China was getting to grips with Christmas. The fact that he was pinned to a cross suggested that they still had some way to go.
Andrew Parker, an English inventor, artist and zoologist at the University of Oxford, thinks color is not a thing. The world’s best colors, he says, come not from pigments or dyes, but from materials arranged into crystalline nanostructures that scatter light into “structural colors.” And when the $36 billion color industry—which is focused on dyes and pigments—takes notice, Parker think, we will have hues far richer and more dazzling than the comparatively drab tones that surround us today.
I love cooking with Mom. Food is a big thing in our family, but my cooking and so much of how I think about it comes straight from her. She's a better, more intuitive baker than I am by a long shot, so when I found a cookie cookbook that blends science and creativity, I timed my review testing to line up with a trip home to see her.
The End of Nightwork is a novel rich in provocative and timely ideas, yet seductively readable. While the fashionable narrative method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company. And despite the novel’s complex philosophical and theological underpinning, its characters are always vividly alive. There’s a rare originality here, and a willingness to take risks, that promises great things.
In this generous, sprawling work, the Spanish historian and philologist Irene Vallejo sets out to provide a panoramic survey of how books shaped not just the ancient world but ours too. While she pays due attention to the physicality of the book – what Oxford professor Emma Smith has called its “bookhood” – Vallejo is equally interested in what goes on inside its covers. And also, more importantly, what goes on inside a reader when they take up a volume and embark on an imaginative and intellectual dance that might just change their life. As much as a history of books, Papyrus is also a history of reading.
After we leave New York, I read a book about how to not
let the internet destroy my brain. I think
the answer is to have been raised in California,The life of the editor Bob Gottlieb, at a spry 91 years old, is nowadays largely limited to a single room on the second floor of his East 48th Street townhouse — by choice, not necessity. He can bound up Second Avenue just fine to the diner that he considers an extension of his home, where the waitress knows he takes his chocolate milkshakes extra thick. But everything he needs, his library and his pencils, is right here, so why go farther? To receive guests like this one, he didn’t even have to put on shoes or tame the gull’s-wing sweep of his silver hair. Burbling away in a leather club chair in his book-lined office (they are arranged according to a system, he says with a point to his head, that’s “up here”), with piles of more books on the floor and in the corners, beneath giant MGM publicity posters of Marion Davies, Clark Gable, and Norma Shearer from the early 1930s, he is a man in his element. “I don’t want to go anywhere because there’s nowhere I want to go,” he says in his fluty register. “My life is very calm, just the way I like.”
One of these miracles is the mountain guide who has been following our footsteps to the summit. He makes an emergency call as soon as he realises the tracks have abruptly disappeared close to the cliff’s edge. I spend at least five hours unconscious in the deep snow amassed by the wind at the bottom of the cliff before a rescue helicopter flies me to a hospital in the city of Sion, 40 miles away.
I come close to freezing to death, but the doctors are amazed by how little damage my body suffers from the fall. No vital organ has been injured. My legs are unbroken, my skull intact. The diagnosis is a broken wrist, a broken vertebra and several broken ribs. Erhard is dead. The helicopter also transported the body of the man I loved. He was found lying in the snow next to me, still tied to my waist. I never realised that he had been right there, within touching distance.
It is not the last time I will fall.
Almost everything was as usual at the Sbarro in Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan on Saturday night — the rumble of the 1 train could be heard and the aroma of greasy pizza was thick in the air. But something out of the ordinary was taking place at the pizzeria, part of a chain typically disdained by New Yorkers: a night of erotic readings.
“To be clear, this is not at all ironic,” said Matt Starr, one of the event’s organizers. “We wanted to take something that people typically do or read in private and bring it into a public, shared setting.”
From the demon who appears as a fearsome figure hurling stones, gouging out valleys and heaping up hills, or as a sinister black-clad huntsman with his fiery-eyed hounds howling across Bodmin Moor, to ideas about how a woman’s wit is better than a man’s when it comes to besting the lord of darkness, Harte takes his reader on a devilishly entertaining tour of England and its richly storied landscape.
At a time when humanity is destroying natural abundance and failing to understand its own diversity, a book like Imbler’s is a valuable gift. Their creativity and candour bridge the empathy gap by demanding imaginative participation. We are invited into unseen worlds where the survivors of 4bn years of evolution and all the messiness of life “glitter, together, in the dark”.
For White Rock historian Derek Hayes (Iron Road West) the impressive, laudable result was Incredible Crossings. A wealth of absorbing photographs alongside an enthused chronicle about an integral part of the province’s “critical infrastructure” that millions have passed over everyday but might not give much thought to, Hayes’ handsome book offers innumerable reasons to pay closer attention to bridges — not to mention, tunnels and inland ferries — in all their assorted shapes, colours and sizes.
The little karaage, one of the most popular snacks in Japan, is a delicate and intricate version of fried chicken that is a staple across the country. This delightfully crunchy treat is so beloved that every year, hundreds of thousands of people vote in a country-wide competition to determine which karaage shop serves the best ones. While shops from massive metropolises like Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka should be dominating any large-scale contest, it's shops from one small town, Nakatsu City, located in the Oita prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, that typically garner the most awards.
The rest of the iPhone video documents my mother’s bustling kitchen on the eve of the big holiday meal. My other son is eating Cheerios, but my father and sister are making the family version of kartoffelklösse, the German potato dumplings my sister and I have cherished since we were kids. She’s dropping rounded balls of a simple dough — boiled potato mash, egg, salt and flour, kneaded together and then rolled into spheres the size of shooter marbles — into a stockpot of simmering water. My father is tending the boil with an old enamel skimming spoon, pulling the dumplings from the water once they float to the top and (in the classic family test of doneness) “wiggle-woggle” there for a bit.
At one point I pan to my mother, seated by the window. “Mom, what are you doing?” I ask, in faux-documentary mode.
“I’m cool as a cucumber,” she says, not participating, looking amused.
Off-camera, my sister laughs. The joke is that she’s not at all cool.
So this is both a mystery story and a coming-of-age tale, narrated from the dual perspectives of mother and son, Avani and 18-year-old Nik. The Things That We Lost travels back and forth between Avani’s adolescent years as a British Indian in 1980s London, and Nik’s experiences as a mixed-race young man in post-Brexit Britain. Decades apart, their experiences are mirrored: not much has changed in the racial prejudice they encounter.
Since the earth began, 4.5 billion years ago, there has been a cycle of night and day – a cycle harnessed by the rhythm gene. The cycle is broken by artificial light. Every living thing has a timetable. The timetable is a fundamental element of us all. Disrupting a fundamental element has fundamental consequences.
Eklöf, in a book composed of forty-three very short, accessible chapters, each of which could be read as a free-standing essay, illustrates many of those consequences, building a compelling case against our colonial expansion into and trashing of the night. He tells us about clownfish, whose eggs will hatch only in the dark (no dark, no clownfish); about moths that use the moon for navigation and are disastrously disorientated by bright lights; about insects being drawn in vast numbers to cities and the consequent effects on pollination; about newly hatched turtles, programmed to head west to reach the sea, scuttling instead towards the promenade; about the birds you’ve heard singing in the middle of the night, whose reproductive cycles go haywire in the perpetual day; and about coral reefs imperilled because the synchronous release of the eggs and sperm of coral organisms is dictated by the cycles of the moon, which is now often outshone by LEDs. When it comes to humans, Eklöf looks at the association between artificial light and sleep deprivation, obesity and depression, and between night shifts and (particularly hormone-related) cancers.
One season my stomach shrank
from staying in bed for months
so hungry. When bears hibernate,
Every year, starting in November, I love seeing memes of Mariah Carey’s iconic holiday song start popping up in my social media newsfeeds. Sleigh and tubular bells. White fur trim. Mariah Carey dressed sort of like Mrs. Claus. While I’m not much of a fan of the song, I appreciate that people are excited to listen to the music they’ve been missing for eleven months. It’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” season.
But, really, I’m more of a Pogues girl. Even though the Irish punk band’s Christmas classic, “Fairytale of New York,” gets less love online, it instantly launches me into the holiday spirit. Writing in Maclean’s in 2018, journalist Stephen Maher proclaimed it the best Christmas song—a bold and incorrect assertion, as there are tons of best songs. But it is an excellent song. Its protagonist spends Christmas Eve in a New York City drunk tank—a particularly appropriate way to spend the holidays if we want to get traditional about it.
This controversy cuts to the core of who is worthy to memorialize and how past human accomplishment should be balanced with modern standards of social justice. And it echoes a heated debate among historians over presentism, which is the tendency to use the moral lens of today to interpret past eras and people.
Perhaps her recent encounters with online bureaucracy could be fodder for her next book.
The poet Robin Coste Lewis’s second collection, the exquisite “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness” (Knopf), is a book about how the dead do not stay dead. Not only because the author believes, or wants to believe, that she can awaken the deceased with her pen—“I am trying to make the dead clap and shout,” she writes—but because those who are gone are determined not to stay put. Not in the heart, and certainly not in memory.
Magazines are curatorial projects, filtering and contextualizing culture through the personal tastes of their assembled editors and writers. Lorentzen told me that people tend to think of the work of editors “in terms of quality control”—fixing copy errors and trimming sentences. In fact, he added, “They’re more valuable in terms of creative generation and the thinking through of ideas.” The loss of Bookforum’s lightly worn seriousness, its nurturing of personal style, and its tolerance for polemic leaves behind a more staid literary life. Panovka told me, “It’s a really bleak landscape, with things folding every five seconds. But it’s also a great time to start a magazine.” She added, “It’s always a terrible time; it’s always a great time.”
Recording my dreams brought patterns into focus. Twice in one week, I dreamed of doors: In one, I was crouched behind a door, hiding from an old high school classmate who was trying to enter, straining to peer down at me through a small glass window. Just a few nights later, I dreamed that I was inside a house with a glass door that I had locked to prevent a former boss from entering. Finding that she couldn’t get in, she turned away, hurt and confused. But suddenly the situation reversed itself. I was the one trying to get inside the house, and it was my boss — whom I could see through the same glass door — who was locking me out.
AI will require a more subtle application of these principles. By and large, anthropomorphism and anthropofabulation distract us from seeing AI as it actually is. As AI grows more intelligent, and our understanding of it deepens, our relationship to it will necessarily change. By 2050, the world may need a Jane Goodall for robots. But for now, projecting humanity onto technology obscures more than it reveals.
But there is something else. Context disappears inside of an airport. Often, I am confused when I navigate my way through an airport; even when it is associated with the city that I live in, it is still not on my everyday commute. The architecture of the contemporary airport is so specific and yet so alien, so wholly and completely an architecture of borders, that even to step inside of one renders a person immediately unfamiliar, especially to themselves.
Every mom has her own individual insecurities and perceived shortcomings. What’s truly universal is the need to be kinder to ourselves and other moms. As she wraps up, Grose encourages readers to stop trying to live up to some fanciful, preposterous standard, and instead channel that energy into fixing the structural problems that hurt so many families. We need to be screaming on the outside to achieve a more practical ideal: paid leave and affordable, quality child care for all.
America is saturated with old books, congesting Ikea Billy cases, Jengaing atop floors, Babeling bedside tables. During months of quarantine, book lovers faced all those spines and opportunities for multiple seasons of spring cleaning. They adore these books, irrationally, unconditionally, but know that, ultimately, if they don’t decide which to keep, it will be left to others to unceremoniously dump them.
And so, despite denial, grief, bargaining, anguish and even nausea, the Great Deaccession commenced.
Cormac McCarthy has long presented himself as a man of simple appetites. When Richard B. Woodward caught up with him in 1992, for a rare profile that ran in The New York Times Magazine, McCarthy was living an austere life in a cottage behind a shopping center in El Paso and eating his meals off a hot plate or in diners.
That sounded about right. Diners — which he sometimes calls cafeterias or lunchcounters or drugstores — are all over the place in McCarthy’s fiction. They’re homes away from home for his drifting men and women.
Over the last 70 or so years, declaring death has gotten progressively messier. Scientific advances such as ventilators and life support have made it harder and harder to find the line between being a person and being a body. Now, mind-blowing experiments in pigs, and the development of a souped-up life-support system called OrganEx, are reinvigorating a decades-old debate about how our lives end. While OrganEx is not yet available for use in humans, it was able to reverse some of the cellular changes associated with death in pigs. What does that mean? In studies, when pigs were hooked up to the system after being dead for an hour, they looked lifelike, their hearts restarted, and they even moved. But were the pigs still dead? And if a treatment like that ever makes it to humans, what happens to the next Jahi McMath?
Oceanix builds on past ideas regarding urban expansions into waters, but approaches it from a new angle. The idea is to build mobile parts that create a closed-loop, sustainable system and society — complete with energy creation, waste management systems and housing.
Yet floating city projects like Oceanix have a controversial, libertarian-leaning cousin: seasteading. While floating city projects like Oceanix rely on the support of the host country, the decades-old concept of the seastead aims to create self-governing, independent statesdeep in international waters — where no nation's laws apply.
When Magdalena Perrotte arrived in the U.S. from France in 1982, she had a secret stashed in her purse—a large jar, filled with a precious golden liquid. “I had it carefully wrapped in a scarf, as well as some raw milk cheeses and cured saucisson—French ingredients you couldn’t buy in Florida,” Perotte, a former owner of Orlando institution Le Coq au Vin, recalls. “I became an expert at hiding food from customs officials.”
Four decades later, Perrotte still uses the same smuggled broth in her cooking. She boasts that this magical elixir, lovingly concocted by her mother in her Normandy kitchen, “is older than Taylor Swift.”
We’ve all mistaken overexposure for intimacy, but after traversing three decades with haunted journalist Billy, the protagonist of Woody Haut’s new novel Skin Flick, I’m worried that the reason I felt so close to him was solely because he wouldn’t stop talking the whole time. The more I read every waffling, pragmatic, devil’s-advocate thought Billy had, the less my imagination could ignite and assist the slow-burning mystery that Haut has constructed; Skin Flick was an otherwise riveting narrative that was hard to put down.
Hunger takes many forms. While Viola becomes fascinated with London's suffragette hunger strikers, her husband, Edward, and her lover, James, come closer to starvation with each mile in their journey to the South Pole.
Flipping between a harrowing polar exploration and a woman's struggles for independence in 1910, “Terra Nova” hinges on the motifs that connect the two storylines: art, hunger and guilt.
Look, now: Buried amid this summer's beach reads, your Grishams and Hilderbrands, is a literary treasure. Alec Wilkinson's keen-eyed, beguiling new memoir, "A Divine Language," recounts how, in his 60s, he confronted the ogres of his adolescence: algebra, geometry, calculus. A longtime contributor to the New Yorker, Wilkinson had been, like many of us, a mathphobe: quadratic formulas and differential calculus were all Greek to him. But he saw the numbers (and letters) on the wall and wanted to know what they meant.
This book should be “read” twice. First, just look at the nearly 250 images, each one on a separate page, bordered in black. The only notation on the page is the location and the date. This encourages you to study each photo intently. When done, read the explanations for each photo in back to gain insight into what you have seen.
Whatever moral or economic or land-use injury the enclosed shopping center inflicted in the past, the buildings are here now, and Gruen’s hope that they would become exemplars of high-minded urban planning—which has remained dashed ever since the permits for Northland’s airport-like loop for buses and taxis got lost in the mail—could still be fulfilled. As Lange observes, “Any travelers in the world of dead malls must ask themselves whether they are prepared to fight to put people back into the gutted buildings, or if they merely intend to pick over the aesthetic bones.”
I try to live my life,
drink my coffee slowly,
do what дедушка says:
Several years ago, the writer N. K. Jemisin got an e-mail from the voice actor Robin Miles. Miles had just been hired to narrate the audiobook of Jemisin’s new novel, “The Fifth Season,” about the inhabitants of a continent called the Stillness, and she had some questions. How do Sanzeds, midlatters, and Eastern Coasters usually speak? How do you pronounce Essun, Damaya, and Tonkee? “She wanted to know exactly what kind of accents to use at certain places, and where characters were from within their countries,” Jemisin told me recently. There were words in the book, Jemisin admitted, that she had never even said aloud. She usually struggles to read her work after it’s been published; she tends to think about what could have been better. “I kept just saying, ‘It’s a fantasy novel! It doesn’t matter how they’re pronounced. They’re not real!’ ”
But, later, after listening to the finished audiobook, Jemisin recognized that the soundscape was an important part of the world she was building. While working on the sequel, she often reminded herself, “I need to think about what this character sounds like.” After Miles narrated “The Fifth Season” and its sequels, Jemisin asked her publisher to hire Miles for her subsequent books. “She’s as serious about her art as I am about mine,” Jemisin said.
Reading the early works of established, revered writers always reminds me of looking at a baby’s face: how it seems impossible to know the ways that visage will sharpen and emerge, how mushy it is, sometimes indistinguishable from others—but also, when looking back at photos once the baby is grown, how difficult it is to imagine that face turning into anything other than what it has become.
The French novelist Marguerite Duras’s second book, The Easy Life, which has just been translated into English for the first time by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, might not be much of a draw by itself. The thrill of reading it comes from seeing all of the ways Duras was already the writer she would spend the next 50 years becoming, from recognizing how the interests she cultivated throughout her career were already in progress.
Yesterday, I was standing in front of my desk, piled high with books I had checked out from the library or received for review, trying to decide what to read next. I shifted from foot to foot and gave myself a pep talk. “Pretend you are a normal reader. You’re just picking whatever book looks interesting. You can read whatever you want.”
-record scratch-
You’re probably wondering how I got here. Why am I not a normal reader? What does picking out something to read feel like such an intimidating task that I need to psych myself up and put myself in the right headspace? Well, we start with a kid who loves reading, and we end with an adult who has built their life around books to the extent that reading has become a minefield of expectations and guilt.
I have never needed proof that a novel about an unhappy marriage can be the most capacious kind of book. But if I did, I could find it in abundance in the pages of “Scatterlings,” the South African writer Resoketswe Manenzhe’s debut, a novel that is at once exquisitely intimate and globally ambitious.
We were all searching for something
you’d enjoy, my mother says of the opioid void
I’d become, and I could hardly walk,
but it was my birthday.
It's never been easier to know what time it is. NIST broadcasts the time to points across the country. It's fed through computer networks and cell phone towers to our personal gadgets, which tick in perfect synchrony. Humanity's ever-improving agreement on the time smooths communication, transportation, and lubricates our economy.
But time has another side to it, one that the clocks don't show.
"A lot of us grow up being fed this idea of time as absolute," says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire. But Prescod-Weinstein says the time we're experiencing is a social construct. Real time is actually something quite different. In some of the odder corners of the Universe, space and time can stretch and slow – and sometimes even break down completely.
In the decades that followed, totes have grown from a journeyman staple to a ubiquitous literary trophy on the streets of many major cities as well as on Instagram and TikTok. Concerns about single-use plastics over the past few years have undoubtedly fuelled the demand. But there’s also a mystique to the tote. It has gone on to inspire high-end designers: you can now own leather or cowhide versions by Prada, Hermès, or the Row. “The tote bag fits a larger trend of the democratization of fashion,” Dicky Yangzom, a cultural and economic sociologist at New York University, told Vox in 2022. “Similarly to utility wear in fashion with the rise of the jumpsuit, this wasn’t designed for mass fashion. It was more geared toward people who do more manual work, right? So all of these categories are shifting.” Yangzom says that tote bags, having moved past their humble origins, are here to stay.
There was only one office that appeared empty, with a company placard that was blank. The door to that office was emblazoned with the numbers 1233 in white. When I peered in, I saw no one, no furniture, nothing. It was a small room that might have been a reception area once, with brown carpet that appeared at least a decade old. There were two closed doors adjacent to each other, one of which had a sign that read employees only. An ominous white camera blinked on the floor in the far corner, likely a deterrent for grifters and interlopers.
“What’s the white stuff in the tea?” I asked.
“It’s popcorn. Brown rice popcorn. We call tea ‘cha.’ This is genmaicha. Brown rice tea.”
Just like that, I had learned my first new word of Japanese. The tea tasted mildly bitter, with a slightly gritty mouthfeel. The pleasant aroma was rich from the brown rice, and as I inhaled deeply, my hangover eased a little and I thought about the crazy 24 hours I had just been through.
The novels’ political concerns—power, class, money and gender—resound deeply, but differently, in China. The authoritarian climate inhibits discussion of such issues in social media or even in person. “The perspectives and views I have on social topics are often not shared by my friends,” says Haiyan Miao, another 20-something fan from Hangzhou. “I find it futile to start that kind of discussion.” She was introduced to Ms Rooney’s fiction on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), a lifestyle and social-networking app, and was soon hooked. Ms Zhong reckons the characters’ eloquent debates leave Chinese readers feeling both jealous and inspired.
As Alice de Sturler leafed through her used copy of Agatha Christie’s “The ABC Murders” last month, she was shocked to discover a compelling mystery not on the pages, but between them.
Tucked halfway through the novel was a piece of paper folded in two. In red marker, someone had sketched a well surrounded by flowers. A smattering of stains suggested the card was well loved.
Some people live more history than others: born in Heidelberg in 1895, the German literary giant Ernst Jünger survived a stint in the French Foreign Legion, the rise of the Third Reich, two world wars, fourteen flesh wounds, the death of his son (likely executed for treason by the SS), the partition of Germany, and its reunification, before his death at the remarkable age of 102. Perhaps no historical rupture had a greater influence on his thinking, however, than the rise of industrialized warfare across both world wars. A soldier as much as a writer, Jünger memorably declared in his diaries in 1943 that “ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians.” Articulating the consequences of this transformation became the central obsession of his work.
Jünger’s fascination with the ways in which technologically driven projections of power would reshape traditional civilian life and geopolitics has secured his legacy as an unignorable diagnostician of the modern epoch. He is today to industrialized warfare what his contemporaries Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer were to the rise of mass-produced culture: all three drew connections between technology’s assault on the inner life of the individual and fascism’s weaponization of the mob. Yet while Kracauer and Benjamin, prominent voices of the Weimar socialist left, denounced fascism from the start, Jünger was very much a man of the right. Though he continues to be widely read, his significant literary achievements can be contemplated only with ambivalence. He remains one of Germany’s most celebrated and controversial writers—by far the most interesting ever to have emerged from the interwar right.
A few weeks ago, at a high school in Westchester County, New York, five Latinx members of the staff, including me, were planning a staff Christmas potluck feast in the faculty lounge.
Everyone shouted out dish suggestions as the group’s youngest teacher, Emily Fernandez, a Dominican woman, scratched them down on a sheet of paper: pernil, tamales, buñuelos. Flor Ruiz, a teacher from Colombia, added excitedly, “Yo voy a hacer arroz con Coca-Cola.” Emily stopped writing and looked up. “It is rice cooked in Coke with raisins,” said Ruiz. “It is served in Colombia, especially around the holidays and on Nochebuena.” Jimmy Calero, the school’s vending machine stocker who grew up in the city of Cali, chimed in to back her up. “Claro que sí! They do that all over the coast,” he said.
By stretching the comprehensibility of language, playing with surrealist imagery, and experimenting with formal conceits, Ma’s collection explores how fiction might respond to pressing questions of contemporary politics. As Namwali Serpell reminds us, “the novel does not guide or imitate readers’ moral values; it unsettles them.” Bliss Montage invites us to consider that fiction could be less invested in solutions and more curious about unmooring. When I finished reading Bliss Montage, I felt disoriented, adrift in a sea of indeterminacy — which is exactly why I wanted to turn back to the first page and read the collection all over again.
A century ago, a man with a double life published one of the most celebrated, anthologised and dissected poems in English literature. TS Eliot spent six days a week at the offices of Lloyds bank and crammed the business of poetry and literary criticism into the evenings and Sundays. This allowed him to write The Waste Land, a densely allusive work that drew on Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Jacobean tragedy, tarot and the Upanishads to create a dazzling portrait of both the ruins of postwar Europe and the inner alienation of modernity. But it was not, as Matthew Hollis’s captivatingly exhaustive “biography of a poem” demonstrates, a work conceived or executed in isolation; and chief among Eliot’s enablers were his wife, Vivien, and his fellow poet and indefatigable literary fixer, Ezra Pound, who looms almost as large in the book as does Eliot himself.
It’s waiting on the bureau, as if you’ll come
and nose into the desiccated smell
of your old age and unwashed hair that leaked
into your cabled cap and headphone cuffs,
I think about murder a lot.
No big surprise, since I write murder mysteries for a living.
But I’ve been thinking about murder for a lot longer than I’ve been writing it. Since I was old enough to pull a well-thumbed paperback off my grandmother’s bookshelf.
The son of communist parents, Michéa saw the party as an extension of a more primary social unit. Friendship patterns have always served as a useful indicator for broader social trends, and writers at Vox were quick to apply the data to political analysis. The researchers invoked Hannah Arendt’s dictum that friendship was the best antidote for authoritarianism. At the end of 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt postulated that a new form of loneliness had overtaken Westerners in the twentieth century, leading them to join new secular cults to remedy their perdition. “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” she claimed, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.” The conclusions were clear. As Americans become lonelier and more isolated in the new century, the same totalitarian temptation now lurks.
All across Italy, as Parasecoli tells me, food is used to identify who is Italian and who is not. But dig a little deeper into the history of Italian cuisine and you will discover that many of today’s iconic delicacies have their origins elsewhere. The corn used for polenta, unfortunately for Pezzutti, is not Italian. Neither is the jujube. In fact, none of the foods mentioned above are. All of them are immigrants, in their own way — lifted from distant shores and brought to this tiny peninsula to be transformed into a cornerstone of an ever-changing Italian cuisine.
thing I do, but it’s the thing I’ve done the most,
and now that I can glide through a supermarket
“Rolling Stone really took a John versus Paul approach to the universe — and they were on John’s side — but everyone wanted to know where you stood,” says Kozinn, who was 15 at the time. “I was a John guy.”
Not anymore.
Kozinn went on to cover music for the New York Times; over the decades, during which he wrote about the Beatles and even got to interview Paul McCartney, he evolved. He has just spent eight years working with Adrian Sinclair on “The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969-73,” the first of four planned tomes, exhaustively detailed, examining the songwriter’s post-Beatles life and career.
The loss of Bookforum is a tragedy, and probably a completely unnecessary one. We need a culture that talks (and argues) about books. Books make us smart, and being smart (which is not synonymous with being credentialed or having a high “IQ”) is crucial if the members of a democratic society are going to make good governance decisions. As book reviews disappear, so does intelligent public discussion about history, politics, and culture.
Connell, who died in 2013, is in part to blame for his own obscurity. More than just camera-shy and subdued, he avoided anything that resembled a traditional career, and—writing almost always on spec, without a contract—was uninterested in developing a literary brand.
Bernadette Mayer was the greatest minor American poet of the 20th century, and the 21st too, in which she has become less minor. There are other contenders, of course, many—but Mayer is mine.
"Bet you can't run a marathon" or "bet you can't learn a second language" or "bet you can't quit drinking soft drinks." Most of the time the voice is my friend, but sometimes it leads me astray. Once it had me doing a sleep experiment that sent my mind into meltdown. That's probably the worst thing the little voice told me to do.
The second worst? Cold showers. Please allow me to tell you why I've been taking nothing but cold showers for the entirety of 2022.
Morimi’s trick is to wrong-foot his reader, denying us the pleasure of branching fates, and instead using each iteration to poke at the narrator’s unreliability — the ways he shunts blame, ignores his own damage, blinds himself to Ozu’s sneaky charisma, eschews the pretty good in pursuit of the perfect. In his final run-through, the narrator discovers that he is alone in a labyrinth. Whenever he tries to exit his bedroom, he enters the exact same room, laid out with the exact same straw mats, that titular “tatami galaxy.” His psychic despair has been given architectural form. His escape, after 80 days of wandering, is a treat better left unspoiled, and impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t yet walked the ever-deepening grooves of this cyclical novel. Rest assured it offers an emotional and expository release valve for all of Morimi’s meticulous repetitions. Under all the technical whirring of “The Tatami Galaxy” is that old pang, familiar to anyone who has ever been an adolescent lump in a tiny room, aching for something rosier than the contents of a mini fridge. There is no time loop quite like self-pity.
Show me your teeth. Can you lift your arms?
Try to smile. Close your eyes. Swallow.
In one of the oldest poems in English literature, there is a beautiful moment when a lone sailor, battling against stormy winter seas and his troubled soul, describes how birds have replaced human company for him on the ‘ice-cold way’ – an admission that carries both comfort and sardonic misery. His entertainment is the ‘swan’s song’, men’s laughter is now ‘the gannet’s sound and curlew’s cry’, and the warming tonic of mead is echoed in the ‘gull’s singing’. Where ‘storms beat stone cliffs’, a white-tailed sea eagle yells with the roar of crashing waves. The Seafarer not only provides us with one of our first ornithological references in the English language, but also, most powerfully, the earliest written description of birds evoking place, being associated with a distinct landscape. This poem is not alone, however, in suggesting to us how birds could inspire a feeling for place more than 1,000 years ago. There are other glimpses, beyond the realms of poetry. We need only look around us, at real places. Hidden in the names of towns and villages are the ghostly traces of birds conjuring powerful identities for people in the landscapes and settlements of early medieval England.
Grief insinuated itself across generations of my family. It had lived in my dad’s childhood home long before it lived in mine. My dad’s father, my grandfather, had his own sad backstory. He had been in and out of jail for bootlegging, and his money problems led him to burn down his car-repair garage for the insurance money. A sympathetic local sheriff tipped him off that the authorities were onto him, so my grandfather gathered his family and prepared to flee their home in Redwood Falls, Minn. My dad, then 10 years old, had minutes to decide what was important enough to save. He rushed to the pigeons he had hand-raised from eggs to fluffy chicks to imprinted pets, shooing them into the darkness from the coop he’d built, knowing they’d likely die.
That story always haunted me. “That’s so sad!” I’d wail. But my dad laughed when he told it, a wry expression on his face. If there was a fine line between tragedy and absurdity, my dad drew it where he pleased. When life dealt blows — like when his aging mom got cancer or his aging dad drove his car through an office building — he made remarks that would have seemed brittle from anyone who lacked his softness. “Oh well,” he’d say, making eye contact that I’d feel in my chest. “We’ll all be dead in 100 years, anyway.” These conversations happened in private, maybe in his two-seater sports car on the way to a museum or when he walked alongside me, teaching me to ride a bike. In these moments it was like we were in cahoots and Grief was the odd one out.
Do I want to live to be 100? Do you?
I thought I did. I mean, why not? I envisioned a relaxing old age of books, movies, great-grandchildren, gossiping with the other elderly folks. The longer we can put off death, the better, I figured.
But these days, I wonder.
Despite the foreboding topic of environmental disaster, the novel rewards readers with peace and solace after persevering through a series of tragedies that feel too close to home. “The Light Pirate” is a symphony of beauty and heartbreak, survival and loneliness. Combined, it’s a haunting melody of nature.
Alternately smitten and sober-minded, this beautiful book, filled with bright wood carvings, is not a dry, cerebral genealogy but a living lineage. Without romanticizing the fraught and fragile fellowship, it celebrates the making of poetry in community — stirring all comers into co-creation.
The paper’s cheeky, truth-dealing obits have inspired a cult readership. The books that collect them, with titles devoted to “Rogues,” “Heroes and Adventurers,” “Naval Obituaries,” “Sports” and so on, are oddly uplifting, better than edibles, to tuck into before bed.
The latest Telegraph collection is titled “Eccentric Lives.” It’s a book about oddballs and joy-hogs and the especially drunken and/or irascible, and it may be the best yet. The English journalist Jessica Mitford, in her letters, said that the slogan for her funeral would be “brevity followed by levity.” The Telegraph seems to abide by similar rules.
Lebowitz still calls herself a writer, even though she hasn’t published a new book in years. Buoyed up by the success of Pretend It’s a City, last year her publishers repackaged The Fran Lebowitz Reader, which combined her two books of essays, for British readers. It reveals its then twentysomething author as an astute social observer – Nora Ephron, with added spikes – and a master of pared-back prose. “There is no such thing as inner peace,” she wrote. “There is only nervousness and death.”
Lebowitz says that she hasn’t given up on the idea of returning to writing, though, given the success of her speaking tours, she is not feeling any pressure. She and her editor have this routine when they’re out together: she will introduce him by saying, “This is my editor” and he will quip: “Easiest job in town.” He once told her that she had an “excessive reverence for the printed word”, which she thinks hit the nail on the head. “I am a psychotic perfectionist when it comes to writing, which makes it very hard,” she says. “It’s a combination of that and the fact that if I’m not the laziest person that ever lived, then I’m certainly among them. Writing is really hard and I’m really lazy – and talking is easy for me.”
When he first returned from space, William Shatner was overcome with emotion. The actor, then 90 years old, stood in the dusty grass of the West Texas desert, where the spacecraft had landed. It was October 2021. Nearby, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who had invited Shatner to ride on a Blue Origin rocket, whooped and popped a bottle of champagne, but Shatner hardly seemed to notice. With tears falling down his cheeks, he described what he had witnessed, his tone hushed. “What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,” Shatner told Bezos. “It’s extraordinary. Extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this.” The man who had played Captain Kirk was so moved by the journey that his post-touchdown remarks ran longer than the three minutes he’d actually spent in space.
Shatner appeared to be basking in a phenomenon that many professional astronauts have described: the overview effect. These travelers saw Earth as a gleaming planet suspended in inky darkness, an oasis of life in the silent void, and it filled them with awe. “No one could be briefed well enough to be completely prepared for the astonishing view that I got,” Alan Shepard, the first American in space, wrote in 1962, after he’d made the same trip that Shatner later took.
Sparkling fresh white snow is the most naturally reflective surface on Earth. When algal blooms take hold, they darken the snow, which then absorbs more heat and melts more quickly. This can create a feedback loop: As temperatures rise and more snow melts, the snow algae—which needs nutrients, light and liquid water—flourishes and expands. The algal bloom alters its own habitat, and appears to alter the surrounding habitat in the process. Just over half of the total runoff in the West comes from snowmelt, but the extent to which snow algae contributes to melting isn’t currently included in standard snowmelt models. These scientists hope that their work can help us better understand the role it plays as the climate changes.
Using subtext and omission, Ferrada trusts that the reader will fill in the gaps and reach their conclusions. The bare prose builds intrigue and suspense, which results in a page-turner of a book. This is my favorite kind of book, the kind I wish to write, that leaves space for the imagination and invites the reader to conjure their own meaning. For this reader, that meant contemplating what it means to live in true freedom and the resulting awareness of another’s subjugation. With the surge in hate crimes against those that do not conform, Ferrada’s novel feels more urgent than ever.
Death stalks the pages of this posthumous collection but despite such darkness, there are moments of levity and clear, precise use of language from a writer who strove for perfection.
But Leland Bardwell (1922-2016), despite her dedication to her craft, may have felt that her artistic life was not a success. At least, that is what her son deduces from a story entitled ‘The Final Dinner Party’.
This year marks the centenary of modernism’s annus mirabilis. For many, that means T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses—both first published in book form in 1922—perhaps along with the first English language translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. These books are in different genres and disciplines—poetry, fiction, philosophy—but all of them wed experimental literary aesthetics with highly abstract intellectual projects. All invoke myths to represent immense aesthetic and intellectual challenges: each tells of an arduous journey, that could, if successful, be redemptive, even transformative. Each text has its hero, but in each case the hero is also—or really—you. You, the reader, are challenged to find your way through these depths and heights and broad, rough seas. The journey is perilous, filled with traps as well as marvels. Should you succeed, your home may look different by the end; you will be changed too.
You walk into your favorite coffee shop. You greet the familiar barista, who knows your daily order. You say “Hi, I’ll have the”—wait, I can’t figure out how to write the next word. You know, “the usual,” but shorter. Hip! Casual! I’ll have the … uzhe. I mean, the yoozh. The youj?!
Why does this shortened form of usual, which rolls off the tongue when it’s spoken, cause so much confusion when we try to write it down? When I offered my Twitter followers 32 different options for spelling the word, nobody was fully satisfied with any of them. Youge to rhyme with rouge? Yusz as if it’s Polish? Usjhe in a desperate hope that some letter, somewhere, would cue the appropriate sound? The only thing everyone could agree on was that all of them felt weird.
Outside the walls of The New York Times, making a book into a best seller can become quite a convoluted endeavor. And despite The New York Times’ claim that the paper doesn’t make its data sources public “to circumvent potential pressure on the booksellers and prevent people from trying to game their way onto the lists,” everyone I spoke to argued that attempts to game the list are as frequent in book publishing as new Danielle Steel novels.
Child’s effort now seems almost old-fashioned. Over the past few years, the “no-recipe” recipe has flourished, assuring home cooks that there is no ghost of an exacting chef lurking behind them, forcing them to follow the rules. These instructions, and schools like Held’s, instead emphasize imprecise measurements, cooking things until they feel right, and trusting your own tastes. Which is great. But as I’ve cooked more of these not-recipes, I’ve realized they have left me feeling like I haven’t learned anything, and have started returning to more precise, researched recipes. I’ve found that it’s through recipes that I’ve become a better cook. And that rather than erode my sovereignty, they give me the power to improve my own.
Drawing from Korean folktale and Chung’s expertise as a Slavic literature professor, the narratives here shamble and ooze across a porous divide between highbrow absurdism and lowbrow jump scare. The balance changes from story to story, and sometimes the genre conventions feel too pat, as genre conventions will. But the more predictable moments set you up to miss a crucial step and fall right into the abyss when Chung gets weird.
It’s a delicate little song and dance it’s performing, saving all the punchlines for the absurdity of living a life where we are all hyper-aware of the bad things happening, but none of us has outlets for creating change. It would be easy to make jokes about naïve idealism and wokeism as a religion, or turn his character into a right-wing crank. Instead, Repila charms and amuses, giving us all a moment to laugh at ourselves for thinking we could bring down centuries-old systems of control with a tweet. There are no easy answers in The Ally, but there are some good jokes.
Conveyed to English-language readers in the seamlessly poetical renditions of the author’s regular translator Megan McDowell, these curiously addictive, tightly wound stories are as compelling as they are alienating. Schweblin’s tendency to understatement, forever flirting with entropic decline yet never entirely capitulating to it, makes her latest work an original and provoking contribution to the literature of unease.
and it’s nice this way, talking food, health, our various educations.
You’re quick they grin, lift full trays. Their approval
is nectar to me.
Maybe everyone is walking around thinking something abstract & ontological
like The existence of others as a freedom defines my situation
The rise of the smartphone has made it easy to pretend you’re not a tourist. A befuddled backpacker with a clunky camera on his neck and a guidebook on the table, holding a map upside down? Not something you see so much these days, because the functions of those objects have all been absorbed by our handsets.
If you want to feel like a local in a new city, however, it’s time to pick up a book again. Specifically, an architecture guide. Don’t let the name turn you off; there is no jargon in these tall, narrow paperbacks. Sure, they’ll tell you who designed which structure. But more often than not, they answer a more fundamental question that I find myself asking every time I’m in a new place: What is that thing? Why was it built, and when, and for whom? Providing this context is the core purpose of the architecture guide, and it unlocks a deep sense of where you are.
Yet all this – the dedication to a free and suitable space for news and discourse, the emphasis on independence, openness and civility – contains perhaps the biggest lesson the history of the coffeehouse can impart. The coffeehouses fundamentally served their customers because, whether in 18th-century London, 19th-century Paris, early-20th-century Vienna or elsewhere, theirs was a fiercely competitive market. Typically, the establishment of one coffeehouse was followed by many more nearby, all competing for an extremely mobile clientele. Some advertised the superior quality of their coffee, but this was secondary (the coffeehouse addict Pepys did not even like the taste of the drink) to the much more existential competition to offer the most convivial and lively environment for reading and discussion.
Now here’s something you don’t come across every day: a mash-up of a Western, a serial-killer mystery and a feminist-inflected tale of life in a bordello. But Jane Smiley’s “A Dangerous Business” is all that — and, amazingly, it works.
The Belovéd is here, at his old desk, in the dark wood attic of the mind—
A starling sits in a chair, a student who brought a poem, learning love’s mind.
Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?
“This here is a fir that would be classified as a Charlie Brown tree,” Greg Williams declared, of a spare little cutting of balsam fir. “But prune it severely the first year and you can make a good tree.” Williams was demonstrating some of the knowledge that goes into tending a Christmas-tree farm. He broke a few needles off the fir, releasing the cough-drop intensity of their scent. He showed me the latent buds on the branches; they looked like little thimbles. Those were the spots to trim back to, Williams explained, as he clipped the branch with shears. “But that pruning strategy doesn’t work for a pine,” he said. He picked up another plausible Christmas-tree candidate, a white pine. “With this, you shear the tree when the new needles are half the length of the old ones.” He had two different sets of shears, but told me that many people prefer to simply use a long knife. “That’s faster,” he said. “But you have accidents. You use that and you’re going to have a slit boot, or stitches, or a dog with an injury.”
A big and bold book, but essentially a quick read because of an excellent flow and pace. Fierce and shocking but also darkly comical. The Michael Keenaghan I have always known. There is a filmic quality at work here. Could easily be the next Gerard Johnson movie. London is Dead is the title, but this debut novel is alive and kicking.
So don’t be fooled by the cheeky peach emoji on Radke’s cover. Despite her sporadic and careful sense of humor on the subject, the author’s account of the female butt is in many cases a narrative of physical suffering: from the tightly cinched waists of the Victorian bustle to the later “confinement” of diets that “demanded masochistic self-control, or even self-harm,” the “Buns of Steel” fitness craze of the 1980s to the risk of fatal embolism during Brazilian butt lift surgery.
Christmas falls on a Friday — the long week
of labor and waiting is gray with dull light,
For four years in the Seventies, my father moonlighted as a session musician and live performer in Nashville, while also teaching English classes at Fisk University. He was a conga player trained on the beaches of Chicago’s Lake Michigan, but arrived in Nashville in 1970 as a newly minted professor, the first in his family to finish college. My mother, my sister, and I moved with him. A few nights a week, he and his band would play psychedelic jazz at Exit/In and other spots, or on recordings of country and folk albums by artists who heard him in local clubs. What he found in Nashville was a meeting of desires: a city with a music industry that was booming and almost all-consuming; a Black community that had become fragmented and somewhat wrecked, but was still producing great music; and within himself, a desire for joy in the face of an eight-year marriage that was in trouble.
Anyone in magazines knows what it takes to wrangle a famous person for a photo shoot. There are weeks of phone calls, green-room demands, issues of timing and availability and vanity. So what happens when you want 72 celebrities for one image? Therein lay the challenge for this issue’s cover photograph by Pelle Cass, who’s known for his multiple-exposure composed images, shot from one spot and then set down, digitally, into one frame.
Kare rice is for celebrating, and kare rice is a current for living, but mostly kare rice is for lunch. Seasoned lightly (or heavily), served alongside accouterments (or solo), the dish is wildly accessible. It can be cooked by the most experienced chefs or beginners just finding their way in the kitchen. It’s a meal that can exist in the background of your weekly revolutions, or as the marquee event of your evenings. Kare rice holds the imprints of a cook’s hands and influences, yielding delicious results regardless of whose stove it’s bubbling from.
For a writer who spurns the conventions of punctuation, Stella Maris feels a lot like a full stop, a parting pronouncement on the whole sordid human experiment. It’s the second McCarthy novel to be published this year – a companion volume to The Passenger, released in late October. After 16 years of literary silence, McCarthy has produced a drought-busting, brain-vexing double act: first, a nihilistic vaudeville; now, its austere twin.
More than a few scientists have blithely sauntered across this metaphysical minefield as though it were safe terrain. They claim that science has proved that free will is an illusion and say that’s all there is to it. Psychologist Kennon M. Sheldon is a different kind of trespasser on philosophers’ turf, arguing that free will is real after all. Yet his metaphysical claim, which occupies the early chapters of “Freely Determined,” is treated perfunctorily and is in any case irrelevant to what the rest of this fascinating book has to say.
The heart won’t make its point.
Why not let you go out into the sun
where blossoms burst
and rush like oxycontin?
I know how it sounds to suggest my boyfriend dumped me because he’s scared I’ll become like Nora Ephron. You’re thinking: that’s what you’re going with? Or maybe: what’s her name?
Banning wrote, "Only 2 people came to my author signing yesterday, so I was pretty bummed about it. Especially as 37 people responded 'going' to the event. Kind of upset, honestly, and a little embarrassed."
But that night, instead of taking down what she wrote, she stared at her tweet in shock as a mass of authors, including some of the most renowned novelists in the world, replied with their own experiences of low turnout.
I call myself a spiritual materialist. As a scientist, I’m a materialist. Not in the sense of seeking happiness in cars and nice clothes, but in the literal sense of the word: the belief that everything is made out of atoms and molecules, and nothing more. Further, I believe that the material stuff of the universe is governed by a small number of fundamental laws. Yet I have had transcendent experiences. I’ve made eye contact with wild animals. Looking up at the stars one summer night, I lost track of my body and felt that I was merging with things far larger than myself. I feel connected to other people and to the world of living things. I appreciate beauty. I’ve experienced awe. Of course, all of us have had similar feelings and moments, like the birth of a child or watching a solar eclipse. Although these experiences vary widely, they have sufficient similarity that I’ll gather them together under the heading of “spirituality.” So I’m a spiritual materialist.
Many people associate spirituality with an all-powerful, intentional, and supernatural God. I respect such beliefs. But my concept of spirituality does not require them. It is my view that all human experiences, including spirituality, are compatible with a fully scientific view of the world, even while some are not reducible to zeros and ones. I believe not only that these experiences are rooted in material atoms and molecules but also that they can be explained in terms of the forces of Darwinian evolution.
Despite the foreboding topic of environmental disaster, the novel rewards readers with peace and solace after persevering through a series of tragedies that feel too close to home. “The Light Pirate” is a symphony of beauty and heartbreak, survival and loneliness. Combined, it’s a haunting melody of nature.
Exuberant, cinematic, immersive, elegant and witty — with a dash of darkness — it is, as someone says of one of its characters, “quite the little bon-bon.”
Looking back at the decades Hollywood studios operated with a self-regulating production code, famed director Billy Wilder said that “[t]here are times when I wish we still had it because the fun has gone out of it, the game that you played with them.” The Oscar-winning filmmaker continued, “We had to be clever. In order to say, ‘You son of a bitch,’ you had to say, ‘If you had a mother, she’d bark.’” Fans of Old Hollywood know exactly what Wilder was getting at. In a famous scene in one of his best films, Double Indemnity (1944), an insurance salesman is aggressively flirting with a married woman, to which she replies, “There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff.” Those who lived and breathed this rich and complex history, and who survived to tell the tale, are featured in a new, nearly 800-page volume, Hollywood: The Oral History, edited by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, essential chroniclers of Tinseltown lore.
Pound on the window when you see sun,
pet a dog who is lying in the rays, do not
"I've always had a healthy respect for the feelings that children have," says Dragonwagon, "so in the story the little girl asks the questions and her mother answers them in a way that is not condescending. It's funny. Sometimes it has some wisdom in it."
Dragonwagon was in her mid-20s when she first published Will It Be Okay?— a time when she says she was much more the child in the story than the adult. Now 70, Crescent Dragonwagon has written more than two dozen children's books, as well as novels, cookbooks and poetry.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Dragonwagon says she felt like she needed something to do. She and her husband started reading children's books out loud every night.
Astra Magazine, Spiegelman said, was “both unusual and exciting, a glamorous and subversive literary project, a breath of fresh air and hope.” And then it was over, leaving fewer places in the United States to publish and read new fiction. Its short existence offers insight both into what is possible for a literary magazine to accomplish and into the tenuous place such publications occupy in the American publishing landscape.
Few artists boast a style and subject matter so singular that three separate specialists would use the same word to describe them: “strange.” Yet that’s exactly what happened when Smithsonian magazine asked a trio of scholars about Dora Maar, a 20th-century French photographer and painter whose oeuvre in many ways defies explanation. Almost all of her artworks capture a certain uncanniness in their surroundings, bringing to light the strange in the mundane.
One of Maar’s most famous works—the 1936 photograph Père Ubu—is a perfect example of this phenomenon. It’s the kind of art that requires repeat viewings, all of which yield something new. There’s something inscrutable about the subject’s scaly body, its one slightly open eye, its barely outstretched claws and its ear flaps clouded by shadows. The viewer is left to question whether the figure is alien or something found in nature; they want to know more, but at the same time, they’re slightly disgusted, says Andrea Nelson, an associate curator at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C. Donors gifted a print of the Surrealist image to the museum in 2021.
They told me there were a lot of monkeys. And, of course, I’ve seen the pictures from previous years.
But when I found myself amidst a ravenous troop of long-tailed macaques in a mad, The Hunger Games-esque dash to stuff their faces with as much food as possible, I was absolutely astounded. I had never seen so many monkeys in my life. Let alone ones that are the guests of honor of a lavish feast.
Romance novels are rarely surprising. It's usually obvious from page one who is going to end up with whom. Heck, sometimes you don't even have to open the book — it's all right there on the cover. But being surprised is not why we read them. Like so many things in life, it's the journey (and, yes, the romance!). And that's where Emily Henry's "Book Lovers" will grab you.
Maybe one day I will learn how to live
without, without her and her, and she and
It began decades ago, with a few hardy pioneers slogging north across the tundra. It’s said that one individual walked so far to get there that he rubbed the skin off the underside of his long, flat tail. Today, his kind have homes and colonies scattered throughout the tundra in Alaska and Canada—and their numbers are increasing. Beavers have found their way to the far north.
It’s not yet clear what these new residents mean for the Arctic ecosystem, but concerns are growing, and locals and scientists are paying close attention. Researchers have observed that the dams beavers build accelerate changes already in play due to a warming climate. Indigenous people are worried the dams could pose a threat to the migrations of fish species they depend on.
Anton Hur’s nimble translation manages to capture the tricky magic of Chung’s voice — its wry humor and overarching coolness broken by sudden, thrilling dips into passages of vivid description. Even as Chung presents a catalog of grotesqueries that range from unsettling to seared-into-the-brain disturbing, her power is in restraint. She and Hur always keep the reader at a slight distance in order for the more chilling twists to land with maximum impact, allowing us to walk ourselves into the trap. Like the woman in “The Frozen Finger,” who follows an unknown voice into darkness, we go willingly with Chung, even as part of us already suspects we are being led to our peril.
Napoleon was the butt of other Gillray drawings. As Tim Clayton shows us in “James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire,” the French emperor—and menace to peace—was depicted as a tinpot tyrant. In a Gillray illustration playing off “Gulliver’s Travels,” a puzzled George III peers through a telescope at a tiny Napoleon standing in an angry pose on the king’s outstretched hand. The French generally come in for rough Gillray treatment. In another drawing, Parisian revolutionaries appear as cannibals.
These works capture Gillray’s style, juxtaposing vulgarity with literary allusion and extravagant caricature with sharp draftsmanship. Mr. Clayton’s well-researched and lavishly illustrated study makes a strong case for Gillray as the creator of a genre of graphic art—and as a forceful commentator. The artist’s caricatures shaped how the public saw politicians and royal figures, not to mention socialites and literary celebrities. Today’s political cartoonists quite properly credit Gillray as a major forerunner.
Curtis was a renowned photographer who spent decades pursuing a project titled “The North American Indian,” a 20-volume series documenting Native Americans across the continent during the early 20th century. His trip to Alaska was the final journey for the final volume, and it produced more photos than could be included. Now, thanks to the Curtis Legacy Foundation and Coleen Graybill, the wife of Curtis’ great-grandson John Edward Graybill, more than 100 of these mostly unseen images can be found in “Unpublished Alaska,” a wonderful addition to any library of Alaska history.
Two months of meat and grain and only one thing
happens at a time. Only time happens, we drink
A woman has been working on her book, a young adult fantasy novel, for hours. At some point, she gets the familiar itch to check her email: She can’t think of what to write next. She stares at the screen. She’s lost her words. She could bang her head against the wall, or maybe turn to a favorite book for inspiration, or lose her momentum to distraction. But instead she turns to an AI writing tool, which takes in her chapter so far and spits out some potential next paragraphs. These paragraphs are never quite what she wants, though they sometimes contain beautiful sentences or fascinating directions. (Once it suggested a character sings a song, and also generated the lyrics of the song.) Even when these paragraphs fail, they make her interested in the story again. She’s curious about this computer-generated text, and it reignites her interest in her own writing.
With the advent of high quality computer-generated text, writers suddenly have a half-decent writing buddy who at least wants to do what they ask (even if it doesn’t always succeed) and has no desire to take any credit. Never before could writers get paragraphs of fluent text on a topic of their choice, except from another writer. (Ghostwriting may be an appropriate analogy for these writerly use cases of AI.) This is posing questions to writers everywhere: Which parts of writing are so tedious you’d be happy to see them go? Which parts bring you the inexplicable joy of creating something from nothing? And what is it about writing you hold most dear?
As long as people have been buying gifts for the holidays, they have been buying books. Books offer infinite variety, are easily wrapped, can be personalized for the recipient and displayed as a signifier of one’s own identity. They are, in many respects, the quintessential Christmas — or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or other December celebration — gift.
This has held true since the very beginning of Christmas as we know it today — a domestic holiday typically celebrated indoors, with family, that prominently features the exchange of presents. “They come in greater numbers every day,” The New York Times reported of the increasingly crowded shops in 1895. “The people who are buying books, the people who are thinking of buying books, and the people who are wondering if there is anything more satisfactory in the world of Christmas delights.”
Around 73 million years ago, when the sediment was laid down, the world was warmer than it is now, but the region would have been even further north. While today this part of Alaska gets a few hours of twilight each day during the winter, back then it was plunged into total darkness for four months of the year, from October to February. It regularly dipped below -10C (14F), with occasional dustings of snow.
And yet, hidden within this silty seam are the last remains of a bizarre epoch in history – tiny bones and teeth, mere millimetres across, that belonged to the offspring of giants. This is where thousands of dinosaurs made their nests, and the unhatched foetuses that didn't make it are still there to this day.
"It's probably the most interesting layer of dinosaur bones in the entire state of Alaska," says Druckenmiller. "They were practically living at the North Pole."
But Wilson is more interested in how art and imagination operate on his characters—and by extension, himself. Above all, he’s alert to their liberating potential. Like the offbeat figures he writes about, he is caught up in a repetitive cycle of processing difficult events on the page: His fiction is like a set of nesting dolls, the themes and preoccupations of one story feeding into the next, alike in their contours but wonderfully unique in their particulars. If that sounds like a writer in a rut, go read Wilson’s books. You’ll discover one-of-a-kind worlds opening up.
Only a mystery writer of great stylistic range and moral depth could handle the demands of such a shifting — and potentially sensitive — story as this one. Fortunately, as she proves once again, Penny is all that and more.
Great to see you, man. Can you believe Kevin is finally getting married? That’s awesome that you’re a groomsman. How have you been, by the way? Wow. Your mindfulness company employs twenty full-time coaches now? Insane. You’ll be a millionaire by forty. So cool.
Me? Nothing new. Still living the dream. Same job as before. Yeah, marketing stuff. And I’m still writing. Well, trying to. Uh, and I grew a mustache and shaved it off. Too much grooming. Look, I’ll level with you—absolutely nothing is going on with me, and I couldn’t be happier.
There is something about churning through books that induces envy and even admiration, never more than at this time of year when piles of finished tomes are splashed across social media. Bragging rights seem to go to those who have read lots of books and read them quickly – how many times have you seen someone boast about finishing 10 books in a year? What about five?
But there is power in reading slowly, something the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li tells her creative writing students at Princeton University. “They say, ‘I can read 100 pages an hour’,” she says. “But I say, ‘I don’t want you to read 100 pages an hour. I want you to read three pages an hour’.”
When Roswell Schaeffer Sr. was 8 years old, his father decided it was about time he started learning to hunt beluga whales. Schaeffer was an Iñupiaq kid growing up in Kotzebue, a small city in northwest Alaska, where a healthy store of beluga meat was part of making it through the winter. Each summer, thousands of these small white whales migrated to Kotzebue Sound, and hunts were an annual tradition. Whale skin and blubber, or muktuk, was prized, not only as a form of sustenance and a trading commodity, but also because of the spiritual value of sharing the catch with the community.
Now, nearly seven decades later, Schaeffer is one of only a few hunters who still spends the late weeks of spring, just after the ice has melted, on Kotzebue Sound, waiting for belugas to arrive. Many people have switched to hunting bearded seals, partly out of necessity: There simply aren’t enough belugas to sustain the community anymore.
It doesn’t set out to diagnose all our political and social ills or make sense of our moment. It tells one small story and tells it well. But it’s also very smart and very funny, a slangy, brainy, expletive-laden, occasionally touching pleasure to read from the first page to the last.
The result is a tranquil yet compelling meditation on life and death, darkness and light, from a reliably thought-provoking novelist.
In the colorful “Young Bloomsbury: The Generation That Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression in 1920s England,” Nino Strachey explores a place and time when queer life blossomed, thanks in part to a learned, middle-aged vanguard that orbited around Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. For the older members of the Bloomsbury circle, Nino Strachey credibly contends, interacting with even more radical young people affirmed the progressive social and aesthetic transformation the elders had begun. For Young Bloomsbury members, the connections provided a surrogate extended family when their families often looked askance at the emerging group’s life choices — sexual, artistic and otherwise.
This book measures 25cm by 21cm. It is elegantly designed, with beautiful photographs printed on hefty paper. The publisher is the Royal Institute of British Architects, which also produces books such as “Inspired by Light” and “The New Country: City Style for Rural Living”. It even smells nice. It is a lovely book on the distinctly unglamorous subject of British council estates.
How we exist in the world
depends on how we describe it.
Have I always been in the world?
No, I’ve been autumn in the middle of August.
The “weak novel” has been with us for a long time. The weak novel is ubiquitous. Indeed, it is possible that no novel exists without its allegedly weak(er) cousins and that no novel is without its own moments of weakness. In this reading, weakness is not a bad thing. Rather, weakness, specifically literary weakness, is enlivening, challenging, and generally has the effect of compelling the reader to move, as we say, outside their comfort zone. Weak novels cause us to attend to fiction as strategy rather than as entertainment. Tristram Shandy is a weak novel. It is a novel that only weakly consents to participate in the conventions of genre, that is always about to—and sometimes does—fail to be a novel at all. This is, I want to show, an important quality for a literary work to have—the quality of weak identification, or even total disidentification, with its own type or genre. This effort, rather than being destined for failure, is in fact fundamental for the flourishing of the novel form.
In an experiment that ticks most of the mystery boxes in modern physics, a group of researchers announced on Wednesday that they had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole.
Physicists described the achievement as another small step in the effort to understand the relation between gravity, which shapes the universe, and quantum mechanics, which governs the subatomic realm of particles.
There are cheeses with fuzzy rinds such as Camembert, and ones marbled with blue veins such as Cabrales, which ripens for months in mountain caves in northern Spain.
Yet almost all of the world’s thousand-odd kinds of cheese start the same, as a white, rubbery lump of curd.
How do we get from that uniform blandness to this cornucopia? The answer revolves around microbes. Cheese teems with bacteria, yeasts and molds. “More than 100 different microbial species can easily be found in a single cheese type,” says Baltasar Mayo, a senior researcher at the Dairy Research Institute of Asturias in Spain. In other words: Cheese isn’t just a snack, it’s an ecosystem. Every slice contains billions of microbes — and they are what makes cheeses distinctive and delicious.
Among the high-rise apartment blocks of Vaise, one of Lyon's newer quartiers (districts), I stepped into a little restaurant where time seemed to have stood still for 100 years. From the outside, Les 4G, a Lyonnais bouchon (traditional restaurant), looked much like the nondescript cafe-cum-tobacco shops that can be found in most small French towns, but inside the decor was as warm and inviting as a country pub. The red gingham tablecloths matched the chequered napkins, which were neatly stored in shelving units along the wall with brass plaques indicating each owner's name – regular clientele who had their own napkin stored for them.
As I sat down, sandwiched between jolly retirees Pierre-Loïc Delfante and Jean Paul Pillon, I realised that I was the youngest in the group by more than 30 years. The cheese delivery had just arrived, and the chef was unpacking brown paper bags containing soft balls of cervelle de canut, an unappetising name that translates as "silk workers' brain" but looks like cottage cheese. Delfante filled my glass with a crisp white wine from Beaujolais. It was 9:00 in the morning.
I remember you, baguette. I made thousands of you.
That’s one of the nice things about being a baker (which I was, for a few glorious years): You’re as ancient as Egypt, but you’re also Andy Warhol in an apron, mass-producing your art object. Baguettes in glowing dozens, repeating editions and series of baguettes, out of the great oven and onto the metal rack. How do they look? How do they sound? A field of grain right before the harvest will give off an audible creak or tick of readiness, as the loaded stalks gently grate against one another. At the other end of the process, the cooling baguettes sit on the rack and crackle with contentment. With completion.
Smiley re-creates a world in which women — whether wives, daughters or prostitutes — are coerced, their movements constricted, their opinions dismissed, their very existence under threat. In this respect “A Dangerous Business” achieves the goal of all worthy historical novels: opening a window to the past, forcing comparisons to the present, raising unsettling questions about how much has really changed.
“So how was it all, this 80-year-old-life?” he asks himself in a letter to his brother, toward the end of the book. “A total porridge really, with love of family the one abiding, triumphant discovery.” Genuine as it evidently was, that love of family masks a jumble of paradoxes. Declarations of enduring love for his wife, Jane, stand alongside confessions of multiple infidelities. But nobody would expect the creator of George Smiley — the master spy in the body of a bank manager — to be straightforward. Indeed, those of us for whom his work has been a lifelong source of complicated pleasure wouldn’t have it any other way.