Fortunately, there are many establishments that managed to adapt and stay afloat by keeping up with the times. Independent bookstores, though struggling to keep up, managed to get by, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Barnes & Noble has seen a resurgence by taking advantage of BookTook trends: When something blows up on BookTook, the bookstore chain stocks them in their stores and puts “As Seen on BookTok” tag on displays.
That’s just one way to be sustainable, but with all the challenges that the book industry currently faces, how will the future bookstore look like? Hybrid? Digital? Something else? I asked some bookish folks what they think.
John James Audubon, dead for 172 years, has been in the news again. Disturbing facts known to his biographers—that, for example, when he kept a store in Henderson, Kentucky, he enslaved people—have gained new currency, although the National Audubon Society has, for now, held on to its name. For many, Audubon has become synonymous with an activity—call it science, ornithology, natural history, birding, love of the outdoors—that has, for the longest time, excluded people of color.
Such reconsiderations are timely and important. In the foreword to Audubon at Sea, a new anthology of Audubon’s works about aquatic birds that I coedited, the artist and activist Subhankar Banerjee describes the reconsideration of Audubon’s failings as “part of a vigorous and necessary debate about a shared, sustainable future.” Those continuing to argue that the National Audubon Society rebrand itself—the way local chapters and a regional association of naturalists have already announced they will—do so in the hope that such a gesture would spur greater diversity among nature enthusiasts. Given his seemingly no-holds-barred killings of birds, some would argue that Audubon has always been an awkward fit for a conservation society anyway. That said, the founders of the Audubon Society and its local chapters never sought to honor the man but the fragile beauty of the birds he depicted.
We think about the passage of time through our terrestrial experience of unidirectional motion through space – our metaphors of time are almost all grounded in the way our bodies move forward through the environment. Given this fact, how would an octopus, who can easily see and move in all directions, conceptualise time? Current research methods may be able to take us only part of the way toward an answer, but it’s far enough to consider a radical possibility: if we became more like an octopus, could we free time, metaphorically speaking, from its constraints? Could we experience it as multidimensional, fluid and free?
I could regale you all day with stories about people I’ve met at dinner parties and clung to like a baby koala. Dinner parties bring people together. There’s just something about having dinner and drinks at a friend’s house that is 1,000x more memorable than going to a restaurant. So as a believer in the power of dinner parties, I spent my mid-twenties attending as many as humanly possible.
But then, as my friends and I got busy with careers, dating lives, families, and general garbage, the dinner parties got further and further apart. One day, I was sitting on the couch feeling unsettled, thinking about what had shifted, and it became really obvious. I knew what I needed. Enter Friendsday Wednesday.
“We turned our mattress to face Stephen King instead of Charles Manson,” Sridej said when I poked my head inside.
The New Earth isn't an easy book to write about — it's elusive by design. What is this novel, that talks to and about itself, that asks unanswerable questions? The closest answer might be: It's a modern epic that takes an unsparing look at family and national dynamics that nobody really wants to confront. It's ambitious and magnificent, the rare swing for the fences that actually connects.