The first home I remember is the one we lost. It is startling and vivid in my memory, the way that childhood sensations are. The rounded corners on each step of the wooden staircase, on which I bruised my shins. The pink enamel bathtub in my parents’ bathroom, where my father once submerged me in scathing purple water to calm a massive outbreak of hives after being bitten by an ant. The rough terracotta tiles of the roof I’d climbed out onto from my bedroom window one evening, to the alarm of the family across the street who spotted me sitting out there calmly in the twilight.
We lost this home when I was nine. In hindsight, the signs were clear. For years, our family holidays had been to destinations that featured casinos: cruise ships, Genting Highlands, Las Vegas. In my earliest memories I see my father standing before the dark television screen glowing with red and green numbers, stock market indices ticking up and down, up and down, as promising as Christmas itself. Another time, he gave me Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar to read, a story about a gambler who, through intense meditation, masters the ability to see through playing cards and predict the future, then uses his powers to make a massive fortune in casinos. My father believed he was a kind of Henry Sugar, gifted with the power of a sixth sense. Before school exams, he would run through elaborate mantras and visualization exercises with me. Our minds, he explained, could bend reality, if we only tried hard enough.
And yet, to stand there, beside her grave, was to feel afresh the presence of a life that had somehow fused itself with mine. When it comes to writers, it is often their work that moves us: words we wish we could have written ourselves if we had the patience or talent to do so. At other times, it is their lives, the heroism as captured in biographies or biopics for the particularly famous, and that dogged intent to put text to the hazy stuff of life. Or we might relate to the circumstances in which they grew up, finding their tribulations very similar to our own. Like many others, I have long admired the work of Sylvia Plath and have found in it a deep affinity; in The Bell Jar (1963), the first of her works that I read, I found the neurotic ambition of my girlhood entirely justified and felt much less alone for it—as have countless other high-achieving young women, I’d later learn. A few years after reading the novel, I reveled in the unapologetic honesty of Plath’s journals, which spurred me to record my own life with a similar candor and attention.
](https://slate.com/business/2023/03/wordle-hint-clue-guides-why-why-why.html), by Luke Winkie, Slate
Sam Hill, an editor at the technology website Digital Trends, has penned 647 articles about Wordle. Each of them follows the same basic format: Hill offers a series of clues pointing toward the solution to the New York Times’ daily puzzle, targeting the Google queries of readers who find themselves stumped over their morning coffee. Wordle is a robust, left-brained deduction game; it does not lend itself to creative hint construction, or smug, crossword-ish puns. But Hill always finds a way. In a post this week, Hill writes that the answer begins with the letter H, and that, contextually speaking, the mystery word is related to nouns like “speed” or “urgency.” Scroll down, and Hill gives the answer outright. (It’s “HURRY.” One of those vexing double-consonant solutions.) This is not the most invigorating part of Hill’s job. Nobody in the media aspires to write hundreds of bespoke Wordle guides, day after day after day. But Hill approaches his duty with monk-like discipline, because the traffic is just that good.
For a city supposedly frozen in time, all this adds up to some undeniably dramatic changes, of which bicycles are only the most visible. A car-choked capital is transforming before our eyes, the dream of urbanites around the world who are eager to reassess the automobile’s dominant role in the city. The question posed by these changes transcends the daily debate over bicycles and cars. It is nothing less than this: Who is the city for?
The Füde Dinner Experience is hosted by the artist and model Charlie Ann Max. For $88, and after Ms. Max has approved the applications, guests come together to enjoy, according to the website: “a liberating space that celebrates our most pure selves, through plant-based cooking, art, nudity, & self-love.”
Put another way: It’s a naked vegan dinner party with a bunch of strangers.
To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren't an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.
Coming at life this way definitely entails tough choices. But it's liberating, too, as you slowly begin to grasp that you never had any other option.
Once, before fairies were neutered into tiny winged princesses by sentimental Victorians and the Disney corporation, they came in many forms, a few of them ugly and frightening. Some folklorists believe that these traditional fairies—who liked to whisk people away to other, often subterranean worlds—were in fact representations of the dead. The stories in White Cat, Black Dog are tales about this kind of fairy, the ghosts of our past and of our future—a reminder, like the billionaire’s sons, of the limits on our time in the sun. Their melancholy is potent, but that only makes them more beautiful.
The specific homage to Bradbury’s atmosphere is remarkable enough, but this is more than a pastiche: memorable plot and characters, flashes of weird horror that aren’t there so much to scare you as to gesture at a larger and wilder universe, and repeatedly grounded with moments of gritty reality.
Matthew Zapruder’s new memoir “Story of a Poem” isn’t just about a poem. It’s also the story of a writer, a father, a husband, a son — and this story has a plot twist: The author’s young son is diagnosed with autism.
Writing about himself in third person, Zapruder poses the question that lives at the heart of this book: “What is the relation between making poems and learning to be the father of this atypical child?”
There is a beauty to this, even if it doesn’t quite answer the question of how to rein in all the godlike powers we have already unleashed — not infrequently in our attempts to make the world more hospitable to our desires and amplify “the richness of actual life,” at least as it is enjoyed by humans. But perhaps it comes down to recognizing what we share with other creatures. Blandly optimistic statements about human potential sound less inspiring than an unflinching recognition of our limits. “One is responsible to life,” James Baldwin wrote. “It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”