In 1991 an academic debate spilled out of ivory towers and into the popular imagination. That year, Serge Renaud, a celebrated and charismatic alcohol researcher at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research—who also hailed from a winemaking family in Bordeaux—made a fateful appearance on 60 Minutes. Asked why the French had lower rates of cardiovascular disease than Americans did, even though people in both countries consumed high-fat diets, Renaud replied, without missing a beat, “The consumption of alcohol.” Renaud suspected that the so-called French paradox could be explained by the red wine at French dinner tables.
The French paradox quickly found a receptive audience. The day after the episode aired, according to an account in the food magazine the Valley Table, all U.S. airlines ran out of red wine. For the next month, red wine sales in the U.S. spiked by 44 percent. When the show was re-aired in 1992, sales spiked again, by 49 percent, and stayed elevated for years. Wine companies quickly adorned their bottles with neck tags extolling the product’s health benefits, which were backed up by the research that Renaud had been relying on when he made his off-the-cuff claim, and the dozens of studies that followed.
“I’m going to die here, alone,” I think. In the past, I never had thoughts like this. I was all swagger: Back when I lived in Jerusalem, I ran on isolated trails in the forest almost every afternoon. But since filing for divorce in August, I’ve become fearful of being alone. And being in Alaska — with its vastness, the way it dangles, lonely, at the edge of the continent — has only magnified those feelings.
I try to catch up with the women, but I’m tapped out, No. 12 in a field of a dozen. I worry: What if everyone finishes and goes home? I don’t have my phone; there will be no way for me to call for help.
And then I ask myself: Why did I come all the way to Alaska on the advice of a total stranger, to chase something I’m not even sure I believe in — an astrological event called a solar return?
The subtlest of time capsules, “Happy Place” resonates with our shared losses from the past few years. The only Happy Place any of us can count on, Henry seems to argue, is one another. And if your other has a “smoky velvet voice” and a “cut-glass profile,” well, so much the better.
With her latest contemporary romantic comedy, Emily Henry wanted to ‘write a book that would be a warm and cozy escape’ for readers. ‘A miniature happy place’ in book form, that not only brings people joy but reminds them that they deserve it too. And this book really does all that and more. It’s a happy place made of paper and words; a story populated with so much friendship, love and wisdom that you finish it feeling like you’ve lived a whole life with the characters.
Killing Thatcher is a deftly constructed narrative punctuated by dramatic moments that often seem determined by the fickle hand of fate as much as by rigorous planning, intelligence gathering and dogged adherence to a cause. At its centre are three figures: the bomber, Patrick Magee; his target, the British prime minister; and, looming in the background, the ghostly figure of the republican icon , Bobby Sands. In 1981, it was Thatcher’s absolute intransigence on the issue of political status for IRA prisoners that had led Sands and nine others to start the hunger strikes that led to their deaths. And it was Thatcher’s apparent callousness in the face of their protracted ordeal that was a determining factor in the IRA’s decision to attempt what many pragmatists in the movement thought impossible – the assassination of her and several of her cabinet ministers.
My name means earth. Means first.
It is the smallest unit of matter, a building block,
held together by almost unbreakable forces.
He carried me into the kitchen to get a glass of water
He reached for a cup in the sink filled with dishwater