This may seem like a minor change to most readers — or perhaps a long overdue one — but the use of courtesy titles has divided newsrooms and journalism schools for decades.
In our age of planetary unravelling, mourning has become a crucial disposition. It is one that allows us to acknowledge and grieve loss, but also to create or revive connections with more-than-human others. In that way, mourning becomes a form of resistance that pushes against human exceptionalism. It reminds us that we share the world with many other kinds of beings, and that these beings also have their own ways of grieving. But the space shared with other species is complicated. We are not just together in the same world, we are tangled up in each other’s lives. Other species live on and in us, they change us, and we change them, too: we breed them, farm them, mutate their genomes, eat them, research them, love them, and kill them. Increasingly, human action is leading to their extinction. Should we not mourn them, too? Acknowledging the relations that sustain or undermine life and death in multispecies worlds means also learning to practise ‘multispecies mourning’.
Maybe if I’d stuck with slow eating, I would have lost some gassiness, choking risk, or weight—but also, I think, some joy. There’s something to speed-eating that can be plain old fun, akin to the rush of zooming down an empty highway in a red sports car. If I have just an hour-ish (or, knowing me, less) of eating each day, I’d prefer to relish every brisk, indecorous bite.
I’ve been a writer all my life. But these days, my role as an innkeeper occupies me almost as much as fiction. I never intended this, but introducing travelers from all over the world — particularly those from the United States, the country of my birth, whose State Department website has posted warnings about travel to Guatemala for years — has become a central concern of my life.
In the end, the novel concludes, we will make all the same mistakes, vote for all the wrong people or ignore the opportunities at hand even when we vote for the right ones. History muscles its way back, an unthinking, unfeeling set of forces that proves more difficult to repair — let alone reverse — than death itself.
“The Late Americans” is a worthy addition to the genre, not because anything much happens but rather because Taylor is indeed a beautiful writer. His tautly constructed sentences are as concrete and vivid as the poems that the hapless Seamus adores.
Pochoda writes with insight and empathy about women pushing back on the violence perpetrated against them — and also, conversely, their shame at their inability to act. She’s also a keen observer of life among the city’s undomiciled citizens (to use Pochoda’s preferred term), whether through the eyes of Lobos, looking for her ex, or Florida, who finds refuge and wisdom among them while on the run from the law and the relentless Diosmary.
It all starts with Jack, the guy who goes gunnin’ for the man who stole his water and somehow avoids execution because the executioner has better things to do with his time. As Alex Pappademas writes in his wry, playful but deeply incisive new book, “Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors From the Songs of Steely Dan,” “Jack is both the first Steely Dan protagonist and the archetypal one. He’s a loser strapped to the karmic wheel, forever slipping out of one trap set by his own dumb desires and into another one, rescuing doom from the jaws of salvation.”
This might be news to the casual listener of “Do It Again” (1972), who perhaps just likes the easygoing groove and that wandering sitar solo. But “Quantum Criminals” wasn’t written for that listener. This is a book for Dan obsessives like me, who treat every track like a cryptic, jazzy short story, a Raymond Carver joint with crazy chord changes. We pore over the songs and the albums through infinite listens, enraptured by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s music and perhaps more puzzled by their words than we’d care to admit. Who are Chino and Daddy G. (“My Old School”)? What is that Hoops McCann guy up to (“Glamour Profession”)? And, is there gas in the car (“Kid Charlemagne”)? OK, that one actually gets answered. Yes, there’s gas in the car.
Long before climate change threatened the very existence of the Colorado River, two women botanists set off with a group of amateur boatmen to record the plants that lived along what was then the most dangerous river in the world.
In “Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon,” science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny draws on the diaries of Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter to trace their 43-day sojourn in the summer of 1938.