I–. I can’t. I shot my eyes down. I really, literally can’t, I muttered, I mean I only have a debit card and I don’t have that much money on there right now.
K. tossed her hair around her face. I’ll pay for it now, she said. You’ll pay me back.
It’s your wedding dress, she said. We found your wedding dress. It’s so perfect!
In the middle of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, a park ranger carefully placed a wooden nightstand on the ground. She attached a sign she made:
“Take a poem, leave a poem.”
Since the nightstand’s debut there last month, amateur poets have filled it with more than 100 handwritten poems.
In 2012, researchers at England’s The Open University tested the strength of a 2x2-stud Lego brick using a hydraulic press. The brick held up a staggering 950 pounds of force before failing. That strength, in theory, could support about 375,000 other bricks, or a tower just over two miles high. They’re also adept at resisting shear (sliding) forces; the stud-and-tube design locks the pieces in place to keep them from sliding side to side. But tensional (pulling) force is the block’s structural weakness: Under tension, they begin to separate, and the structure collapses.
If you think about it, it's a little strange that a single country in the heart of the Mediterranean developed a culture with hundreds of pasta dishes, up and down the peninsula, that characterize its cuisine more than anything else. In the end, pasta is just one way of eating a dough of water and flour: bake it, and it's a pie, flatbread or pizza; dip it in boiling oil, and it's a fritter (plain or filled), but boil it in water, and you've entered the vast world of pasta.
Definitions are not set in stone, however, and that is why, for the first few centuries of its existence, pasta was not considered a culinary category unto itself. The circumstances of its birth are also rather hazy, and although we know that Sicily was a center of production for dried pasta as early as the twelfth century, the thread of its origins gets lost somewhere back in Classical Greece and the Near East.
The desire for spices such as pepper drove European expeditions eastwards, to cut out the middlemen who brought them overland. Ultimately, the desire to own and amass riches from these spices and similar goods drove colonialism. The unknown “east” became known and ownable. In a sense, those first pepper-filled ships marked a turning point, a period when the western world shifted, after which there was no going back.
The tension between the immediate and the imagined or remembered is what makes this novel work, with Berne striking a satisfying balance between what happens, what it might mean, and what’s needed to go on. The past may be past, but its significance has yet to be determined. The possibilities are endless.
This is a book about cats: famous cats, religious cats, cats in mythology, the cats of artists and authors, and, naturally, Cosslett’s own cat Mackerel, adopted as a kitten in the spring of 2020. It is also a book about lockdown – the pain, grief, terror and occasional unexpected joy of those pandemic months. It is about Cosslett herself: her childhood in Wales caring for her autistic brother, her time in Paris, and the traumas that she acknowledges have shaped her life. And it is a book about motherhood, or rather, the complex, knotted, contradictory concept of motherhood as seen through the eyes of a woman in her early thirties desperately trying to work out what she wants.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession” contains one inconsequential detail that fully captured my attention: Luxurious mid-century gyms were famous for their plush carpets. Can you imagine the accumulation of sweat? The disgusting way the soaked fibers aged?
The primary concern of “Fit Nation” is the way that exercise culture has matured as badly as a carpeted gym floor. Petrzela’s cultural history combines an academic approach with an activist’s urgency, aiming to “strengthen us to fight for a better path forward, at the gym and in the world.” Her book is structured chronologically, with reminders of long-faded exercise fads (the ThighMaster) and the origins of exercise mainstays (running). All the while, it promises to work through the contradictions in America’s current relationship to fitness. Key among them: Why has fitness culture become so influential when, as the book reports, just 20 percent of people in America work out regularly?
In bygone centuries aristocratic love was not merely a thing of passion but a complex and courtly game, played with knights and bishops, in which the most dazzling figure might be the queen—but the most important was the king. Anne Boleyn forfeited her head not merely because she failed to produce a male heir but also, argues Sarah Gristwood in “The Tudors in Love”, because she had lost at the game of courtly love. For it, like chess, was played until one side or the other was routed.
I don’t like being photographed. When we kissed
at a wedding, the night grew long and luminous.