It’s no secret among TV executives that the younger people who once stayed up past midnight to watch David Letterman drop objects off a five-story building are not tuning to this generation’s cadre of late-night hosts in the same way. Changing habits like those described above make decades-old late night shows such as “Tonight, “Late Show” or “Late Night” less easy to monetize — and, if executives aren’t careful, less alluring to keep putting on the air one evening after another.
What makes a good alien in a story? It’s that delicious double vision of strangeness and plausibility, the feeling that if you strain or squint, you can not only believe in them, but embrace their existence for a moment—like trying to understand a shape in four dimensions, like trying to understand what it’s like to be a bat. A good alien lives in a thoroughly imagined world, and helps us see our own world fresh. They help us understand ourselves more richly, but they’re also rich in their own right.
The reason I couldn’t come up with a good answer to “What’s your favorite alien,” I realized, was that my favorite imagining of an alien isn’t from a work of sci-fi, and doesn’t take place on a spaceship or another planet. My favorite aliens once lived on earth.
Something has gone wrong with work. On this, everyone seems to agree. Less clear is the precise nature of the problem, let alone who or what is to blame. For some time we’ve been told that we’re in the midst of a Great Resignation. Workers are quitting their jobs en masse, repudiating not just their bosses but ambition itself—even the very idea of work. Last year, as resignation rates appeared to plateau, the cause célèbre shifted to “quiet quitting.” This theory holds that what truly distinguishes the present crisis is a more metaphorical sort of resignation: a withdrawal of effort, the sort of thing that is called “work-to-rule” when undertaken by a union. This supposed rebellion against extortion has served as fodder for familiar right-wing complaints about entitlement. The most optimistic commentators on the left, however, have assimilated these hypothetical phenomena into a vision of revitalized working-class self-activity. The AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler has boasted of “labor’s great resurgence.” Even the New York Times, in its own milquetoast fashion, has acknowledged the prospect that, “after decades of declining union membership, organized labor may be on the verge of a resurgence in the U.S.”
I am exhausted by ramen hacks. Every time I open TikTok or look at Instagram, I am bombarded with different ways to upgrade a bowl of instant ramen. I’ve added peanut butter, I’ve added mayo and egg, I’ve added a slice of cheese. And while all those “hacks” are tasty, they don’t manage to eclipse the soul-satiating nature of a basic-ass bowl of instant ramen.
Live life on the edge of the menu. Take a flier on the oatmeal cream pie at a crab shack, the vegan risotto at a steakhouse, the quesadillas at an underground Champagne bar. Just because a restaurant is known for one thing doesn’t mean you can’t order something else. If it looks good to you, get it. Often you’ll be rewarded for your transgression.
I celebrated, as I do, by taking a day off from my work and walking deep into the desert. I’m partially immunized, living in solitude, but imagining a renewed social life. Tomorrow, I’ll get my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Today, though, I walked miles into the desert, not looking for bighorn sheep or trying to scare up ravens or scanning for bear prints. I was after arches, the second largest concentration of sandstone arches outside of Utah’s Arches National Park — and few people at this time of year visit the lesser-known formations. Situated in wilderness in western Colorado, it’s quite a distance to travel in a day, but with good weather I made the round trip in about 10 hours. Later in the season, a dirt road is opened, a slice into the wilderness, and folks can drive their four-by-fours within an easy stroll. I prefer to travel on foot, close to dirt, vaulted by sky, my rhythm the rhythm of human evolution. We humans evolved to walk. So, I walked and dawdled and walked and dawdled and walked some more, the world in motion as I moved through it. There must be a mathematical equation for such double movement, earth spinning, human walking, both tiny blips in the cosmos. I doubt it can be expressed as a constant.
Study of a new language often begins with words presented as opposites: “heat” and “cold,” or “quiet” and “loud.” You know you’ve progressed in your comprehension of that new language when other words disrupt the neatness of these initial pairings, when the word “quiet” arrives with some mental noise, echoing against other possible choices, “inaudible” or “unsaid,” that might be more precise.
In “Greek Lessons,” Han Kang’s unnamed narrator finds the echo of words like this, in her mind, so overwhelming that she’s lost the ability to speak. She decides to take a course in ancient Greek to see what might be possible in a language other than her native Korean, in which she can “taste bile at the back of her throat” at the mere thought of “arranging a word or two.”
Kira McPherson’s debut novel, Higher Education, is an ode to many things. It examines queer longing, complicated friendships, and the pleasure and pain of growth in your early 20s.
Step from an airplane, and it’s now ritual to boast how cruelly you’ve suffered. Seats that won’t lean back or seat backs that intrude. Violent seatmates. Starvation from tiny bags of pretzels. Crying infants. Lost luggage. The indignities pile up. Yet we forget that for almost the entirety of human existence, simply to leave the safety of hut or castle was to risk not inconvenience but violent death. “Travel,” after all, comes from the word “travail,” and nowhere was that truer than when humans crossed oceans on wooden ships. It is almost impossible for the contemporary mind to fathom the conditions and the peril. Passages that took months — years, often — in leaking, wet, unheated vessels packed with unwashed people that sailed blindly into gales and hurricanes, with no privacy, no weather satellites or GPS, no fresh food, and no Gore-Tex, surviving on bug-infested dried meat and bread. And that’s if all went well.
When things went wrong, they often went very wrong, and David Grann’s “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” is a sea story in which everything goes wrong over and over — and over — again. Reading it is like living one of those anxiety nightmares in which you’re just trying to get to that job interview, but you’re lost and your teeth are falling out and, wait, when your car dies you realize you’re naked, and then you’re attacked by flesh-eating zombies.