In September 1798, one day after their poem collection Lyrical Ballads was published, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg in the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the previous few months preparing for what he called ‘my German expedition’. The realisation of the scheme, he explained to a friend, was of the highest importance to ‘my intellectual utility; and of course to my moral happiness’. He wanted to master the German language and meet the thinkers and writers who lived in Jena, a small university town, southwest of Berlin. On Thomas Poole’s advice, his motto had been: ‘Speak nothing but German. Live with Germans. Read in German. Think in German.’
After a few days in Hamburg, Coleridge realised he didn’t have enough money to travel the 300 miles south to Jena and Weimar, and instead he spent almost five months in nearby Ratzeburg, then studied for several months in Göttingen. He soon spoke German. Though he deemed his pronunciation ‘hideous’, his knowledge of the language was so good that he would later translate Friedrich Schiller’s drama Wallenstein (1800) and Goethe’s Faust (1808). Those 10 months in Germany marked a turning point in Coleridge’s life. He had left England as a poet but returned with the mind of a philosopher – and a trunk full of philosophical books. ‘No man was ever yet a great poet,’ Coleridge later wrote, ‘without being at the same time a profound philosopher.’ Though Coleridge never made it to Jena, the ideas that came out of this small town were vitally important for his thinking – from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of the self to Friedrich Schelling’s ideas on the unity of mind and nature. ‘There is no doubt,’ one of his friends later said, ‘that Coleridge’s mind is much more German than English.’
On a breezy winter day in Hawai‘i, a team of researchers from Whale Trust Maui watched as a group of humpback whales cavorted around their boat. The wind-rippled ocean surface distorted the view through the ocean–air interface, but one whale repeatedly swished its fins at the surface to produce a vortex that flattened the chop, creating a smooth spot where it placed its eye to look up at the scientists. Photographer and researcher Flip Nicklin, having never seen vortices used in this way, dubbed them “whale windows.” At the end of the encounter, the whale used a different method to construct the window—it blew a perfect air ring from its blowhole, much like a smoker puffs a smoke ring, which again smoothed the surface. Then, as before, the whale turned its head and looked up, meeting the researcher’s eye. Was the whale using a bubble as a tool?
Growing up as a Haitian American, January 1 has always been more than just the start of the new year for me. As a child, waking up on New Year’s Day, I practically floated through the air to the aromas of soup joumou, or Haitian pumpkin soup, resting in one of the decorative bowls my mother reserved for the annual tradition.
Every New Year’s Day, Haitians around the world consume soup joumou as a way to commemorate Haitian Independence Day. On January 1, 1804, Haitians declared independence from French colonial rule following the Haitian Revolution that began in 1791. Soup joumou is a savory, orange-tinted soup that typically consists of calabaza squash—a pumpkin-like squash native to the Caribbean—that’s cooked and blended as the soup’s base. To that base, cooks add beef, carrots, cabbage, noodles, potatoes and other fresh vegetables, herbs and spices.
“My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday”: the famously deadpan opening of L’Étranger (The Outsider) by Albert Camus. Love Me Tender starts in a similarly affectless mode, with an even more shocking declaration: “I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be different from other kinds of love. Why we shouldn’t be allowed to stop loving each other.” A son can lose interest in his mother, but for a mother to sever relations with her son is sacrilege.
The word “terrorist,” or some variation thereof, shows up six times on the opening page of V.V. Ganeshananthan’s “Brotherless Night.” To be bludgeoned this way by such a poisoned piece of political taxonomy is to be reminded that for those fortunate enough to wield it, “terrorist” is a word that cleanses nuance: It suggests that there are good and bad people, and the bad ones are irredeemable enough to warrant a fixed label.
But the author’s sophomore novel — after “Love Marriage” in 2008 — isn’t really about terrorism or terrorists. It’s about all the ugly little human complexities those words are designed to obliterate, about what it means to have a much less straightforward relationship with violence and the people responsible for it.
On Jan. 7, 1978, Silvia Morella de Palma gave birth to her son Emilio. The event is noteworthy because it took place at Argentina’s Esperanza station in Antarctica. It was a gesture to remind the world that Argentina still considers the area hers. In response, Chile sent three pregnant women to bases they ran.
This is just one of the fascinating things you will learn about our largest continent in these pages. The authors had planned a physical exhibition on Antarctica, but COVID changed that to this book. Many of the 100 items highlighted are scientific instruments or tales of early explorers like Ernest Shackleton. It’s the others that intrigued me most.
The book’s subtitle is The Making of a Modern Conductor, and at least half of its almost 300 pages are given over to explaining how the shy but gifted girl who always thought she was too nervous to appear in public made it to the podium. It was a strikingly traditional route that many 20th- and even 19th-century conductors would recognise: singing in choirs, learning the organ, getting a job as church organist, which led to conducting the choir; acting as a rehearsal pianist for opera companies, which led to the offer of actually conducting a performance.