Yes, I worry about the future. And Japan's future will have lessons for the rest of us. In the age of artificial intelligence, fewer workers could drive innovation; Japan's aged farmers may be replaced by intelligent robots. Large parts of the country could return to the wild.
Will Japan gradually fade into irrelevance, or re-invent itself? My head tells me that to prosper anew Japan must embrace change. But my heart aches at the thought of it losing the things that make it so special.
As a kid, Josh Ku often went to Taiwanese restaurants in Flushing, Queens. A highlight of these family trips was zhajiangmian — a bowl of thick, chewy fresh wheat noodles covered in a savory-sweet pork-studded gravy and showered with chilled cucumber shards. Tossed together, the noodles were not soupy but not dry, hot yet cool, texturally all over the place, and impossible to stop slurping.
Years later, when Ku opened Win Son, a Taiwanese American restaurant in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg, he put lamb zhajiangmian on the menu. Consisting of thick noodles, gamey lamb, and a sauce accented with spices like cumin and mint, it was nothing anyone had ever seen before, but that was perhaps the point. Ku and Trigg Brown, Win Son’s co-owner and chef, ran the dish through an American lens, reinventing the classic for a new audience in a new place.
So many books, so little time. If that’s true, all the more reason to implement a “Life Is Too Short” list. It is not a failure to acknowledge what we will not do. (Barring shocking reversals of fortune, I’m never going to Sesame Place and I see no reason I’ll ever find myself in outer space.) Far from scary, there is comfort in knowing that, as long as we live, and as much as we read, we will never, ever run out. No hoarding required.
Batuman’s decision to set The Idiot in the era of the nascent internet illustrates what it has done to how we communicate. It has trained us to be hyperselective in our word choices—to look for the perfect keyword that will bring up the response we desire: to make the troll go away, to get the commenter who is clearly wrong to shut up. To fit our bon mots under the 280-character limit. To win someone over, or to feel like we have won.
Meghan Gilliss’ debut novel “Lungfish” dramatically transports the reader to an isolated island, the wind whipping and the waves crashing as life rages. Tuck, the novel’s female protagonist, becomes symbolic of the sacrifices many women make to protect the people they love most. With grit, determination, and perpetual hope, it’s a story that hits hard and requires readers to ask themselves how much they’d give to make themselves whole.
Brookshire unpacks our complex relationships with some of the world’s most irksome and irritating creatures: Those that usually do not directly harm us, but that invade our space and “harm our stuff,” as she puts it. Inspired by encounters with Kevin and other animals — from aggressive turkeys to Froot Loop-loving lab mice — “Pests” is Brookshire’s attempt to “find out why we call some animals pests, and some not.”
Today I stole from Kroger. Didn’t mean to.
The checkout robot said, repeatedly,
“Place the item in the bag.” The bag
grew full and overflowed with groceries,