My parents didn’t understand my job. At least, not in its entirety. If asked, they might tell people that their daughter was a writer. They were both avid readers who read my first book and many of my stories; once, when I visited them, I found a newspaper article I’d written stuck to their refrigerator door. On visits, they would occasionally see me working—that is, staring at my computer screen, typing a bit, and staring some more, wrestling with a draft for hours or days. They might be interested in what I was writing, but sometimes it was difficult for them to see it as Work, and they would often mistake it for volunteer labor, a hobby, like the hundreds of stories they knew I’d written growing up. The editorial process, my entire career in publishing, seemed nebulous to them, mostly invisible labor—until I sent them something I’d written that had been published, something they could see and hold and read for themselves.
The cosmos seems to have a preference for things that are round. Planets and stars tend to be spheres because gravity pulls clouds of gas and dust toward the center of mass. The same holds for black holes — or, to be more precise, the event horizons of black holes — which must, according to theory, be spherically shaped in a universe with three dimensions of space and one of time.
But do the same restrictions apply if our universe has higher dimensions, as is sometimes postulated — dimensions we cannot see but whose effects are still palpable? In those settings, are other black hole shapes possible?
Every Easter, a brood of volunteers in Bessières, a small town in southern France, collects 15,000 eggs — not to dye them pastel colors or even hide them for children to find. Early on Easter Monday morning, they will crack open the prodigious pile, add two pounds of salt, a pound of pepper and a bucket of herbs, then whip it all up in massive pots. Another team, sporting tall chef’s hats, plops a dozen gallons of duck fat into a 13-foot-wide frying pan that weighs more than a ton and, wielding huge wooden paddles, stirs up a humongous omelet.
But the thing is, our friendship didn’t have much to do with writing books. This though both of us were writers, and taught in the same program. Most of the texts and emails I received from him—I’ve spent a great deal of time rereading this posthumous work—are clips of his favorite songs from YouTube, with a few sentences explaining why he was sending this song now—or not. “Bad Lip Reading from the NFL” was sent without comment. He sent Morgan James covers of anybody. Off-the-cuff truths: “Syllabus writing is a hateful operation.” It feels like every third email was a link to an obituary, as we were both fanatics about great obituaries, especially those written by Anne Wroe, of the Economist. “I admire her prose so much,” he wrote. “So clear, graceful, and smart.” Since he was not an avid sleeper, in the morning I’d wake up and find six, seven, eight emails from him, and as many texts, sent at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, and half of them, again, music videos. I imagine other friends could say the same. The rest were jokes or plaintive cries in the night, the sort of lamentations suitable for the darkest hours. The last email he sent me was on Aug. 25, three days before he died. It came in at 3 a.m. and was a link to Gloria Estefan singing “Reach.” And he wrote, “I will sweep my heart off the floor and get on with it.” I never responded to that email, hoping that the sun would lighten things up. He never said what had happened to his heart.
It has a unified mission that is easy to sum up: This is a book of retellings, and Link isn’t shy about that. Following each of her story’s titles is a second, parenthetical title, alerting the reader to the traditional folktale she retells. But true to form, each story takes a different approach to retelling.
Now, she’s back with “Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry and Hope,” a history — and defense — of the grand humanist project, from the first stirrings of the Italian Renaissance to today’s debates about technology, artificial intelligence and transhumanism.
That might sound big and, well, blobby. And even Bakewell acknowledges, in characteristically understated — and British — fashion, that the whole subject can be “gently foggy.”