Some of artificial dyes’ biggest dangers, then, may not even be entirely inherent to the chemicals themselves. Foods that need a color boost tend to be the ones that experts already want us to avoid: candies, sodas, and packaged, processed snacks, especially those marketed to children, points out Lindsay Moyer, a CSPI nutritionist. Colors so exaggerated, so surprising, so unnatural inevitably tempt kids “to reach out of the grocery cart,” Moyer told me. Dyes, once cooked up by us to mimic and juxtapose with the natural world, have long since altered us—manipulating our base instincts, warping our appetites—and transformed into a luxury that the world now seems entirely unable to quit.
The unification of time and space radically changed the trajectory of physics in the 20th century. It opened new possibilities for how we think about reality. What could the unification of time and matter do in our century? What happens when time is an object?
At old-school slice shops like John’s that are still open today, the secret to longevity is a combination of tradition and reinvention. Regardless of how they made it this far, the future of these businesses hangs in the balance. Their fate lies not just in the skillful navigation of a changing industry, but in the willingness of the next generation to carry the torch, or, in this case, the Bakers Pride deck ovens. Every time a family calls it quits, the city loses more than a great slice of pizza: It cedes a living piece of its history to the vast, unknowable past.
It is not surprising then that Ten Planets is a peculiarly uncomfortable short story collection. These 20 bizarre tales by Mexican-born writer and political scientist Yuri Herrera, first collected in the original Spanish as Diez Planetas in 2019 and now newly translated into English by Lisa Dillman, are rarely longer than a handful of pages. Their characters have ambitions, anxieties, and misgivings about their lives, but we barely get to know them before we reach the end of their story. And yet the stories are formulaic too: this is very much fantastic fiction, although narrowing the genre further would be somewhat tricky. The collection employs many of the fantastic tropes that have become part of our shared culture—aliens and monsters, rebellious technology, spaceships leaving a condemned, decaying earth—except even these tropes are confused, short-circuited. Ten Planets’ tapestry of situations and characters feels familiar—until Herrera, time and again, pulls the rug out from under our feet
The word “haunting” is often used to describe our interaction with the past. To write about the past of your own family – the people who in so many ways define us – is to be haunted in a very personal way. Why did our ancestors do what they did and how does knowledge of that affect our relationship with them, with their memory? Anam – André Dao’s debut novel that won a Victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished manuscript – is a vivid, complex book that never shies away from the spectres that haunt.
The locusts’ hum, at first, was like a line of flame;
then the air burst into reds, silver-edged
and filled with mouths like snapping scissors.