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.