To (politely) sum up the current consensus: Gloves reduce your sense of touch, increasing the likelihood that you might accidentally tear a page, smear pigments, dislodge loose fragments — or worse, drop the book.
And whatever their associations with cleanliness, cotton gloves attract dirt. They also tend to make hands sweat, generating moisture that can damage a page. Rubber gloves, while moisture-proof and generally better fitted to the hand, are too grabby.
As someone who spent years perfecting his body, Schwarzenegger has always been attuned to the nuances of decline. Paul Wachter, a friend and business partner, first met him in 1981, when Wachter was about to turn 25. “Arnold said, ‘Once you hit 26, it’s all downhill with the body,’ ” Wachter recalled. “He said, ‘You can still be in shape, but the peak is over at 26.’ ”
Schwarzenegger isn’t afraid of death. “I’m just pissed off about it.
Growing up as the adopted Korean daughter of white parents in a predominantly white community, I discovered early on that my presence was often a surprise, a question to which others expected answers. I soon learned how to respond to the curiosity of teachers at school, strangers at Sears, friends who had finally worked up the nerve to ask Who are your real parents? Why did they give you up? Are you going to try to find them someday? I told them the same story my adoptive parents had told me: My birth parents were unable to take care of a fragile, premature baby. They believed that another family would provide me with a better life. And so I was adopted and became my parents’ beloved only child—a “miracle,” they called it, evidence of God’s goodness. When your family is formed by divine will, who are you to question it? To wonder about the family you never knew?
The truth is that I’m often bored and certainly don’t have enough to do. There are places I could go to wallow in oldness with other people suffering the same predicament, but I can’t face that. Instead, there is a perpetual inner argument between what I like to think of as my superego and the voice of my defeated younger self. The first tells me in a firm voice, and rather witheringly, that I must not only swim forty lengths a day but the lengths must be swum according to a routine, alternately crawl and backstroke, and the backstroke evenly divided between the use of both arms moving simultaneously and then separately. The other, weaker, voice tells me that by far the more grown-up and sensible course of action would be to swim fewer lengths and not every day and/or to lie to myself about how many I’ve done. It also mutters that I could swim all the lengths on my back, which is much easier, and that I could even indulge my lurking wish to spend longer in bed in the morning reading the Guardian and listening to the Today programme than I already do.
Alex North's The Angel Maker is one of those tense, gripping narratives that walk a fine line between horror, mystery, a detective story, and something dark and enigmatic that lives in the shadows between those genres.
“IN A LIFE I never had I was a brave cosmonaut and I navigated the stars I’d always watched curiously.” From the opening pages of her 2019 memoir Voyager: Constellations of Memory, Nona Fernández spurns the conventions of the form, opting instead for a wider, more visionary lens. As Fernández accompanies her mother to the doctor after a string of mysterious fainting spells, the scan of her mother’s brain illuminated on the hospital monitor prompts a starscape to spring to life in Fernández’s mind, initiating the book’s voyage through space, memory, and imagination.
Wilson challenges notions about nature in cities, noting in his introduction that New York contains more species than Yosemite National Park. Rethinking the relationship between cities and nature requires taking a closer look at the cracks in sidewalks, vacant lots and backyard gardens.
I surrender to stop signs,
storms, that loose screw
in the window casing, grime
defiling the grout. I acknowledge