My first impression was not awe or majesty or surrender or consumerist bliss. It was confusion. For a surprisingly long time after I arrived, I could not tell whether or not I had arrived. There was no security checkpoint, no ticket booths, no ambient Ghibli soundtrack, no mountainous Cat Bus statue. Instead, I found myself stepping out of a very ordinary train station into what seemed to be a large municipal park. A sea of pavement. Sports fields. Vending machines. It looked like the kind of place you might go on a lazy weekend to see a pretty good softball tournament.
There were some buildings around, but it was hard to tell which of them might or might not be Ghibli-related. In the distance, the arc of a Ferris wheel broke the horizon — but this, I would discover, had nothing to do with Ghibli Park. I wandered into and out of a convenience store. I saw some children wearing Totoro hats and started to follow them. It felt like some kind of bizarre treasure hunt — a theme park where the theme was searching for the theme park. Which was, in a way, perfectly Studio Ghibli: no pleasure without a little challenge. And so I headed down the hill, trying to find my way in.
Her family worried about the move. They asked whether it was a good idea to make a radical life change involving great financial risk. High admits she had her moments of doubt. The GoFundMe she launched was trudging along with the help of friends and family. And last summer, Eso Won Books, a prominent Black-owned bookstore in South Los Angeles, announced it would close its store. High, who frequented Eso Won, wondered what the closure might mean for a new bookstore with a similar focus.
“There was that initial fear,” High said during an interview at her bookstore — which still sat empty in late January, save for a few tantalizing books by the window. “And then it was like, OK, but we have to keep showing up, and we have to bet on our community of readers and people with curious minds. I’m confident that those people are here in this area and beyond.”
Alternate histories have long been a staple of my comfort reading diet. When the going gets rough—the future looks uncertain, the present unstable—I have always been happy to decamp to a hypothetical world. But I’m tricking myself when I think it will be a great escape. These books’ imaginary times always bring me firmly back to reality. They change how I see real life, help me articulate what I haven’t been able to name. They remind me that history may seem inevitable in hindsight, but the future is still undefined.
We, as audiences, are told that this makes these characters more dynamic. It’s a sort of postmodern reinterpretation of what a hero or a villain is, in an effort to create more complex stories. But what if we’re losing, in the process, coherent characters and storytelling with real stakes? If no one in your story plays by the rules, can you even claim to have any in the first place?
More troubling, seeing as how so many genre entertainment properties right now are owned by large monopolies and distributed via a never-ending string of in-universe spinoffs and sequels, at what point do we have to admit that perhaps there are more cynical financial reasons at play for never defining your characters? A traditional hero’s journey or your classic villain’s downfall requires some kind of ending to remain believable. But antiheroes, it seems, can stream forever.
Iridescent rainbow orbs bursting into tangerine spun sugar. Pearly spheres of goo. Sorbet corn dogs leaning into one another with matching bouffants. Bright yellow blackberries. A bunch of Mr. Blobby’s babies. Golden goblets overflowing with effervescent honeycomb. Opalescent spherules in crinkled sweet wrappers. Amaretti flecked with flakes of soap. Honestly, go and check it out if you don’t believe me.
These intricate structures—netted, patterned, striated, globed—were, I learned, the fruiting bodies of myxomycetes, the scientific name for slime molds. Slime mold is a common name which is an attempt to describe organisms that defy simple categorization. For a while, it was thought they were fungi, so they were once classed as such (hence, myceto-, meaning fungus). But they are not fungi at all, and they live much of their lives like an animal.
Forget archaeologists and their lost civilizations, or paleontologists with their fossils—astrophysicist Heloise Stevance studies the past on an entirely different scale. When astronomers catch a glimpse of an unusual signal in the sky, perhaps the light from a star exploding, Stevance takes that signal and rewinds the clock on it by billions of years. Working at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, she traces the past lives of dead and dying stars, a process she calls stellar genealogy. “There’s a lot of drama in the lives of stars,” she says.
On August 17, 2017, astrophysicists witnessed two dead stars’ remnant cores, known as neutron stars, colliding into each other in a distant galaxy. Known as a neutron star merger, they detected this event via ripples in spacetime—known as gravitational waves—and light produced by the resulting explosion. This marked the first and only time scientists had seen such an event using gravitational waves. From those signals, they deduced that the neutron stars were 1.1 to 1.6 times the mass of the Sun. They also figured out that such collisions create some of the heavier natural elements found in the Universe, such as gold and platinum. But overall, the signals presented more puzzles than answers.
For fans of Siri Hustvedt and Claire Messud, Charmaine Craig’s third novel, “My Nemesis,” is the spiky little feminist page-turner you’ve been waiting for. Spiky little feminist page-turner? When’s the last time you saw those four words in a row? I can explain. But first, some sense of the plot.
To say “The Laughter” is just a campus novel is to vastly undersell it; it’s also the story of America’s changing cultural landscape and the major political and philosophical shifts needed to uplift and protect the marginalized. This is a smart and hilarious book not just for anyone who wants to laugh at the absurdity of academia, but for anyone who wants to become a better person by doing it.
Ultimately, the narrative force in “The Applicant” comes not primarily from Leyla’s precarious status under the Fiktionsbescheinigung, or even her impending choice between the inconstant life of an artist and the stability offered by her lover. It comes from a quieter uncertainty. “What do I want?” Leyla asks herself, over and over. “What do I want that I can get and won’t turn me into a Thérèse Chevalier, a Jeanne Dielman, my mother?” Leyla may not know the answer. But by the end of “The Applicant,” we can rest assured that she means to find out.