From ghostlike particles, astrophysicists have pieced together a new map of the galaxy we live in.
For now, that map of the Milky Way is blurry and incomplete. But as more data is gathered, it will become clearer and will help illuminate galactic convulsions like the expanding remnants of exploded stars, providing clues to mysteries that are difficult to solve with only observations from conventional telescopes.
Early in Lorrie Moore’s new novel I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, the protagonist, Finn, notes that while white schizophrenics are allowed relative freedom in New York, “black schizophrenics huddled under blankets and cardboard on sidewalks against the façades of skyscrapers. Pieces of paper rolled into jars with scrawled writing facing outward: I am not homeless. This is my home.” It’s the only time in the book the unusual title is ever specifically referenced, and, of course, the title itself is slightly more mysterious and open-ended. That moment soon flashes past in the cavalcade of Moore’s narrative, but it turns out to be something of a touchstone for the central characters, none of whom ever seem completely at home as living creatures on planet Earth.
In a scene in the 2022 movie Tár, a Juilliard student declares to his professor: “As a BIPOC pan-gender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it impossible” to play or conduct the German composer—in part because of the 20 children he obliged his two wives to bear. It is a caricature of woke excess: There has been no serious attempt to cancel Bach for living in the era before birth control. The response from the professor, the film’s protagonist Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), is a caricature of power: She launches into a semi-coherent rant, insulting the student and extolling Bach’s greatness. At one point, the two sit together on a piano bench while Blanchett tries to demonstrate the value of Bach, playing the opening of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and crooning that “there’s a humility in Bach, he’s not pretending he’s certain about anything. Because he knows it’s always the question that involves the listener, and never the answer.” The film is clever, and her arrogance only sharpens the knife. The viewer feels the despair of a closed system—both sides are right on their own terms, and both are loathsome.
An alternative, more hopeful view can be found in the musicologist Michael Marissen’s new book Bach Against Modernity. In Marissen’s telling, Tár’s misty portrayal of Bach as a great liberal humanist is wrong. Her characterization sounds okay—questioning is one of our toothless pablum virtues—but it’s hardly true of Bach. Marissen, a professor emeritus at Swarthmore, takes issue with a dominant trend in Bach scholarship to present the composer as “one fantastic modern liberal” and instead portrays him as a pre-modern religious person whose beliefs, by our standards, were extreme. Not only did Bach have answers, he had biblical certainties. In this sense, to portray his music as “questioning” is absurd. Marissen’s joyfully rigorous, often funny critique is a lesson in scholarship and in lost opportunities—to understand Bach’s music, first and foremost, but also to grapple with the genuinely illiberal aspects of the composer’s work.
One glimpse of social media can feel like peering into a monetized confessional booth. “A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Space, Naming Complex Trauma,” by literary scholar Noreen Masud, offers readers a counterpoint to that atmosphere of abundant divulgence.
My gift—bow carefully splayed
by the lady at Dillard’s, ribbon pulled
so tight its thin satin hardly makes
a crease—placed at the pile’s edge.
Words on breath, they dance so light,
Like whispers on a winter’s night.
The translations reflect a wide range of possible interpretations of this short passage. Is Hector harshly scolding Andromache for offering advice about the war, despite her gender? Or is he treating her with gentle pity? Is she worried only about her husband’s death, or is she also concerned about her own imminent enslavement and their baby’s slaughter? Are her concerns valid? Does the warrior risk his life despite his love for his family, or because of it? Why must men fight? Why must women weave? How strange, or how familiar, is the society of the poem?
Each of these translations — along with dozens more — suggests a different understanding of the central themes of courage, marriage, fate and death.
But most people who knew my home knew us by our rivers. The Nueces, Frio, Sabinal, all minutes away from town, are three of our most popular and striking in their spring-fed glory. They are as changeable as Texas weather. They can move from swift currents and shallow, rocky runs to dark, deep swimming holes flanked by trees and cliffs. We would go there on hot days. We would rent cabins for graduations and anniversaries, or to take out-of-towners. We knew—and still know—the spots and crossings just for us locals, where four-wheel drive is best, where a drive or a walk along the shifting rocks may be necessary in our blistering summers to find those pools of water tucked away. Fourteen months ago, you may have heard of us for a variety of reasons, or you may not have heard of us at all.
I am from Uvalde.
We were known for our rivers once.
The claim that telescopes across the planet have seen signs of a “gravitational wave background” has sent a thrill through the astrophysics community, which has been buzzing for days in anticipation of the papers that were unveiled late Wednesday. The discovery seems to affirm an astounding implication of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity that until now has been far too subtle to detect.
In Einstein’s reimagined universe, space is not serenely empty, and time does not march smoothly forward. Instead, the powerful gravitational interactions of massive objects — including supermassive black holes — regularly ripple the fabric of space and time. The picture that emerges is a universe that looks like a choppy sea, churned by violent events that happened over the course of the past 13 billion-plus years.
The journey of the cook and the recipe is the rare epic that does not end. Despite the efforts of the convenience economy, we will continue to feed ourselves until either the food is gone or we are. Until then, the recipe and its wake will continue to sustain us and teach us, to lead us through our days and desires in the kitchen. Like the hero at the end of a journey, the recipe returns to us changed—cooked!—but then bravely repeats its course, setting back out into the kitchen, its evolution marked by the rosy fingers of dawn and the greasy fingers of the cook.
Every year, Eid al-Adha catches me by surprise. Unlike my ancestors, I do not have a conscious connection with the moon. I could not tell you where we are in its cycle. I do not know how its light moves through space, where it goes. Except for the occasional Muslim holiday, my time is no longer organized by a community of people looking above.
I find out when Eid is because my parents shoot me a text. And then it’s an opportunity to look up from the daily hustle. It’s a reminder, if not a suggestion: Maybe the schedule I think about every day isn’t the most important one. Maybe I’m also on another calendar, on a different timeline. In a different year entirely. I have all day to think about it.
“Slave State” is a devastatingly detailed, urgent and somewhat regretful confirmation of an inconvenient truth: Far from being the place where everyone got an equal chance, California embraced slavery from the outset and used it to become the most prosperous state in the union. That boosterish tale of California’s endless possibility turns out to have been built with sweat, oppression, coercion and genocide. It was precisely California’s openness, Pfaelzer posits, that allowed greed, cruelty and hypocrisy to run amok, and it is this bitter irony — not the orange groves or Mediterranean climate — that makes us (that fraught word) exceptional.
This is the story of California not as a free state but as a land of proliferating startup businesses, accelerated by the Gold Rush of the 1840s but by no means starting there. Wave after wave of resource extractions — by the Russians, the Spanish, the Americans — required quick and ready labor, which meant plundering and exploiting human beings so that they may plunder and exploit the environment in the name of profit and dominance. “As such,” Pfaelzer writes, “this is an American story.”
“There’s no love like a little boy’s love for his mother,” Heidi Julavits keeps overhearing in her new book, “Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years.” “I’m in a time loop,” she thinks, as she navigates the terrifying current of losing one’s baby to childhood, and then, even more bewilderingly, to the gendered trappings of boyhood.
Good criticism, like good art, does not leave the world intact. It, too, provides a shimmering new place where we can live and look.
One year she sat at the television weeping,
no reason,
the whole time
We speak of things like ships, cities, and even the earth itself as female, yet men are so often the ones confidently plodding through these spaces in literature (and in the corporeal world), conquering them as they would a female body. Even if we’ve progressed enough as a society to move past the laws that kept women in nineteenth-century Paris from safely walking the streets at night, meant to keep them indoors so as not to be confused with prostitutes, we still differentiate between the male and female streetwalker. We still tend to wonder if women can even wander Paris at night, if all cities aren’t just a little too dangerous for women to walk through alone. But women walk the streets even when the dialogue can’t catch up to them; I saw them on the Metro, their shoes often the first thing I noticed. From black heels to teal New Balance trainers, there were no assumptions I could make about the person wearing them except that she chose her footwear with purpose, for comfort or style. Walking in Paris is not an afterthought.
In the very early morning of July 12th, Treischmann finished her records and registered them with a file clerk in the building’s basement. Then she headed upstairs to go home. In the stairwell, she bumped into three fellow interns who were also on their way out, and mentioned the faint difference in the air. The group decided to investigate, and continued climbing the central stairway.
When the students opened the door to the third floor, the air seemed thicker. They kept going. The fourth floor was murkier still, the fifth even worse. Trieschmann never considered turning back. She has always loved adventure; she used to go scuba diving in ocean caves. Something interesting was happening, and she wanted to know what it was. So she and her colleagues climbed one more flight of stairs, to a door that opened into the sixth and top floor. She remembered that this was where the older military records were kept, the ones from World War I, World War II, and Korea, but she hadn’t been up here since orientation. Now, as she pulled open the door, she saw the cardboard boxes neatly stacked on metal shelves as far as the eye could see.
They were on fire.
Human power is what defenders of wilderness often fear, since we might use it to destroy — even as some of them rely on the same power in trying to preserve an idealized notion of the wild, and by spilling blood, no less: the massacre of rats to restore the tortoise. What underlies this paradox is the romantic ideal of wilderness without humans. But imagining us outside of nature is the same mistake as imagining us as having limitless mastery over it. In both cases, nature is our opposite, like a foreign land, rather than the home whose threshold we naturally cross when we tend the garden and till the soil.
If electricity was magic, then Edison was its chief magician, at least according to the press. He was the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” a reference to his New Jersey laboratory, as well the “Napoleon of Science,” the “Genius of Menlo Park” and the “New Jersey Columbus.” He was almost certainly America’s greatest inventor. But he was also one of the country’s canniest self-promoters, forging close personal relationships with journalists who could be trusted to write adoring, if not always strictly accurate, copy.
In El Reno, a small industrial town just west of Oklahoma City on Oklahoma's portion of Route 66, Sid's Diner is hopping during lunch. With the sharp smell of crisping onions and burger grease in the air, most of the diners in the joint are munching down on a sandwich that was born out of poverty but made famous by love.
Adam, the second-generation owner at Sid's Diner, taking over from his father Marty Hall, is working the flat iron grill. He presses the patty of beef mince made juicy with a mess of sweet onion slivers onto the searing heat. As meat cooks to a nice crispy crust, he flips the burger onion-side down, letting the grease and the grill cast the magic of caramelisation.
I’m sipping a bitters and soda in an empty hotel bar — empty but for the mixologist, who’s pouring himself one finger, very deftly, of Pernod, then concealing it down by the sink. Soon my long-lost friend arrives, and the two of us will stay here at the bar for the evening. He looks around to make sure no one is listening — it’s clear as a bare stage. He warms to his story: a brother in trouble, red-pilled and creeping around at sinister rallies. I offer some cautions, some questions. Very naturally, we touch on my bad health. Which, as it happens, is why we’re talking here in a hotel bar. And why we’ll be here for hours to come, no plans to move on later to someplace brighter, or hipper, or darker — nowhere to see or be seen.
“The Imposters,” Rachman’s fourth novel, is a spiritual sequel to his first. It too features nearly stand-alone stories of an international cast that intertwine in surprising ways. It’s also about writers and the writing life. But if “The Imperfectionists” had the spirit of a wide-eyed college junior at a study-abroad program, “The Imposters” evinces the disappointment and cynicism of the program’s midcareer chaperones, who took these jobs because they too were once moved by the experience but have since grown bored — and therefore resent their open-minded charges.
As usual, Doiron creates an array of colorful, well-drawn characters, writes in vivid, graceful style, and accurately portray investigative procedures — this time including the handling of underwater crime scenes. He spins his tale with enough twists and turns to keep readers guessing until the end.
This might sound like a raunchier version of a sitcom — “Will & Grace” with a soupçon of “Sex and the City” — but O’Donoghue has something more sophisticated in mind, hidden beneath the shagging and banter. “The Rachel Incident” recalls the fiction of both Sally Rooney and Anne Tyler as the author interrogates the dynamics of power, from academia to publishing houses to bedrooms.
Ultimately, The Crying Room is a reflection on and celebration of love, a powerful and compelling novel that cements Shirm’s position as a writer to be reckoned with.
The air restless with insects
and suddenly lavender, a smothered laugh
down a corridor.
A tree drops fist-sized pinecones
There’s a familiar refrain from an older generation speaking to a younger one: Why isn’t there any good music these days? It’s often posed like that, as a question, and accompanied by an insincere request for the younger to show the older something good. I can expect to hear it every holiday when I hop between gatherings for each of my parents, extended family, and my partner’s family. They all seem to imply that I am the resident musical expert and might hold an answer as to where the good music is, but that’s not what any of them mean. They all want affirmation that their era — the ’70s or ’80s — was the true peak of culture. None of them see parallels to complaints about synthesizers or rock and roll from their own parents.
Not enough is written, in this critic’s estimation, about how our eliminations are described and theorized, and loved and loathed, in fiction and poetry. Their “here we are again” inevitability adds chaos, comedy, disgust, shame, irony, urgency and anguish to narrative. They drive action. They are life, as much as sex is life — maybe more so, because people’s sex lives dwindle but this need does not. Fiction that avoids or denies feces, Milan Kundera has written, is kitsch.
What is the point of communicating if no one is willing to hear you—if people talk over you, negate you, subtract you from whichever room you’re in? Lucy Ives’s latest novel, Life Is Everywhere introduces us to the protagonist, Erin Adamo, on page 40, lets us spend some time with her, then directs our attention to the contents of her bag for 250 pages before returning us to her life. By the time Erin enters the story, we have already read a 14-page history of botulinum toxin and spent a while in the perspectives of substitute professor Faith Ewer and Faith’s nemesis and co-teacher, Isobel Childe. So when Erin first appears, we expect her to recede again, which is what everyone else expects of her.
But Erin lingers, irritating several characters throughout the book. No one seems to enjoy contending with her presence. They want her gone as quickly as possible, or to be someone else, or a blank slate to reflect the self-affirming story of their own superior intelligence, worldliness, style, etc. When Erin visits her parents, they’re furious that their guest is Erin and not Erin’s husband—but they’re also delighted to have an emotional punching bag. Characters are repeatedly enraged by Erin’s lack of presence, which just makes them want to squash her flatter, into nothing. How can Erin possibly communicate if she is negated every time she tries? How could anyone?
In Joanne, the author gives us a sympathetic protagonist and an observant narrator who is attentively attuned to the natural landscape: the storm clouds above the lake resemble “bright florets of cauliflower” and the sky is ignited by “the apricot fire of sunrise”.
Through the prism of the claustrophobic Kettle Lake, Hurtubise, with poise and insight, traces how her characters are haunted by their pasts and devastated by the pain of loss.
“Raw Dog,” however, becomes clever and most interesting as Loftus reflects upon society, relationships, and why the hell she came up with this idea in the first place, which was partly due to COVID. She’s funny, sincere, and all too willing to share what hot dogs can do to a human body in both the literal sense as well as the psychological sense as her relationship with her boyfriend slowly erodes to nothing more than a “we have to drive back to L.A. together at some point so we are stuck in this hot dog hell limbo until that time arrives. Did the dog poop again? It’s your turn to clean it up.”
I watch the winding creek.
There’s a body
knows how to catch light.
Branding is in the eye of the beholder and to be an author in 2023 is to live and die by the internet. That's just the reality of the industry. With publishers putting more pressure on authors to move copies and connect with their audience – to build a platform – there is only going to be continued pressure on authors to not only produce good work but to be able to market it on an almost expert level. So for a seasoned author like Gilbert, with literary stature and prominence in the field, pulling a book is not going to hold the same consequences as it does for other authors that might not have built the kind of brand power yet as Gilbert.
My book "A Flat Place" is about the flat landscapes of Britain and Pakistan, and my intense, fascinated love for them. Flat landscapes aren't a popular thing to love. The bare expanses of prairies, fenlands, wheatfields and marshes can seem boring, bleak, even frightening. Their horizons have no landmarks to hang on to: nothing to orientate yourself toward. That's why we hate them or fear them, mostly, in Western culture. It's hard to find the point of them, in a very literal sense.
But I love them in the same way that I love stones and bones. They are hard, inert, inscrutable. Busy being themselves, in a way I can't stop watching. Because they have no landmarks, I can't grab onto them — can't orientate successfully toward them — and so I could look at them forever.
With little said beyond glances and nods, we took up our perch on the curved corner of the long, white marble bar, next to a woman wearing her swimsuit and a towel. "Sorry I didn't have time to change!" she told her companion before ordering a margarita. (Somehow the unspoken rules of dining room attire don't carry the same weight in the bar.) My friends and I spent the next few hours taking the "All Day" part of the restaurant's name a little too literally: sipping low-octane cocktails and slowly noshing on crispy tempura eggplant and slabs of sourdough with butter and house-cured ham. The conversation meandered in the relaxed sort of way it only does on vacation.
One Saturday out of the blue my father announced that it was time for me to ride my bike downtown on my own. My mother was against it. My father spoke on behalf of children worldwide when he said, “Vicki, this is how they learn.”
He was in the front yard wearing tan pants, so he must have been on his way to work. I had my bike on the grass.
“This sidewalk will take you downtown,” he said, pointing at the thin strip of concrete in the grass.
Williams has crafted a layered narrative celebrating a heroine who embodies verve, pluck and courage. Ultimately “The Beach at Summerly” is an ode to a season and a feeling. If our summers past represent a paradise lost, as selves that once were, or might have been, then in Williams’s pages we may briefly recapture the delicious freedom we used to feel when the days became longer and warmer, and we were young and in love.
The era of New York City as a municipal ruin — a period stretching from the late 1960s to the early 1980s — has remained a source of fascination in American culture for so long that it seems to be fulfilling a mythic need. For one thing, New York run amok is the template for the current hysteria, a kind of wish in some quarters, that posits America’s cities as unspeakable hellholes. But to think of it only politically is to deprive this wish of its full power as a metaphor — 1970s New York as a kind of dark id rising to the surface, throwing off sparks like punk rock and hip-hop, hastening civilization’s collapse. Of course, the very idea of a repressed wish is a Freudian concept, and this primal fear of and fascination with fallen New York can seem an extension of a fear of and fascination with all the shrinks (and Jews) running around within it.
It is this gritty, out-of-control (and cheap!) New York that is the principal setting for Alexander Stille’s wonderful and troubling new book, “The Sullivanians,” about a renegade psychoanalytic institute that evolved into a kind of urban commune and then into a frighteningly insular and sadistic cult that held its members in its grip for two generations.
While American children had once commonly enjoyed the freedom to run around outside with minimal adult interference, they began to spend more time indoors where their parents could watch them. When they did go outside, they were more often accompanied by a grown-up; unstructured roughhousing and roleplaying were replaced by supervised play dates or carefully shepherded trips to the park. Kids began to spend more time in organized activities, like dance or sports, and less time in the kind of disorganized milling-about familiar to generations past.
The reasons for this shift were many: fears of kidnapping, stoked by a series of highly publicized cases; an increase in the length of the school year; parental anxieties about children’s futures in a time of growing income inequality and economic insecurity. The result was a 25 percent drop in children’s unstructured playtime between 1981 and 1997, setting in motion a pattern of less freedom and more adult surveillance that historians and child psychologists believe continues to this day. “All kinds of independent activities that used to be part of normal childhood have gradually been diminishing,” said Peter Gray, a psychology professor at Boston College who studies play.
What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.
The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage.
Hype springs eternal in medicine, but lately the horizon of new possibility seems almost blindingly bright. “I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “And I can say that throughout that period of time, I’ve just never experienced what we’re seeing over just the last five years.”
A Nobel laureate, Doudna is known primarily for Crispr, the gene-editing Swiss Army knife that has been called “a word processor” for the human genome and that she herself describes as “a technology that literally enables the rewriting of the code of life.” The work for which Doudna shared the Nobel Prize was published more than a decade ago, in 2012, opening up what seemed like an almost limitless horizon for Crispr-powered therapies and cures. But surveying the recent landscape of scientific breakthroughs, she says the last half-decade has been more remarkable still: “I think we’re at an extraordinary time of accelerating discoveries.”
At its best, Bellies is as deep as it is chic, propelled by the good intentions dropped between different wavelengths, a sensitive study of the challenge of moving past judgment towards perception.
The story’s maneuvering through time and space provides a roundness to the Tran women, allowing readers to see aspects of, and similarities between, each character that they keep from one another. Each woman withholds truths from the rest of her family in an effort to protect them, but that impulse is also what prevents them from being there for one another.
In “Planta Sapiens,” Paco Calvo, a philosopher of plant behavior, and his co-author, Natalie Lawrence, present the idea that flora are intelligent — that is, capable of cognition. In Calvo’s opinion, people pay more attention to animals than plants and this may explain why some of plants’ remarkable abilities have been overlooked. Our evolutionary history may also shape our reduced attention to the subject; plants are, after all, unlikely to attack people.
There is the dream of the writer’s life, and there is the reality. We may always want to escape from the world as writers, but the truth is, the work of writing is often embedded into our everyday lives—and inextricable from it, both in process and in theme. If we can create in and amongst mess and chaos, then we’re doing something right.
If an alien life form landed on Earth tomorrow and called up some of the planet’s foremost experts on lactation, it would have a heck of time figuring out what, exactly, humans and other mammals are feeding their kids.
The trouble is, no one can really describe what milk is—least of all the people who think most often about it.
Most of us would kill for the chance to have one last goodbye with a lost loved one. What if you had that chance? Could even spend a whole road trip with them, revisiting all the ways your lives had intersected?
In Lorrie Moore’s first novel since 2009’s A Gate at the Stairs, the author explores—and blurs—the fine lines between the dead and the living. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home asks questions about grief and depression with death as the platform.
In his 1950 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, William Faulkner said, “I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” The title of David Gessner’s new book, “A Traveler’s Guide to the End of the World: Tales of Fire, Wind, and Water,” suggests a 21st-century update of Faulkner’s dictum: Man will prevail but might not endure.
A veteran writer on the environment, Gessner evokes the havoc resulting from human-caused climate change by taking us to a host of melting, blazing, flooded or desiccated places, including the Mississippi River Delta; his hurricane-prone hometown of Wilmington, N.C.; the Colorado River, in the throes of becoming Colorado Creek; Miami, New York and other coastal cities vulnerable to what geology professor Hal Wanless predicts will be “an eight- to ten-foot sea level rise by the end of the century. Maybe eleven to thirteen.”
It’s no secret that humans use their hands, as well as their voices, to communicate. But while countless volumes have been written about the world’s spoken and written languages, gestures appear to have been given short shrift. And so Susan Goldin-Meadow’s new book, “Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts,” comes as a welcome attempt to close the gap.
Last summer, with the momentousness of a gender-reveal party and the exuberance of a ticker-tape parade, the United States Army announced its first combat-ready bra to the world. They called it the Army Tactical Brassiere (a.k.a. the A.T.B.). Conceived four years ago, the garment is still being tinkered with, but one day it will be a wardrobe staple for all women in the Army. David Accetta, the chief public-affairs officer for the research division developing the undergarment, the DEVCOM Soldier Center (“DEVCOM” stands for U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command), told Army Times that, if the brassiere is officially approved by the Army Uniform Board, “we would see that as a win for female soldiers.” Ashley Cushon, the project engineer of the team working on the item, assured me that it would “reduce the cognitive burden on the wearer.” And a military Web site reported that the A.T.B. would improve “overall soldier performance and lethality.” Gadzooks! Yes, it’s flame-resistant, but what else can it do? Shoot bullets? Hypnotize the enemy? Turn its wearer invisible?
I decided that I needed to try on The Bra. Full disclosure: there is no undergarment in the world that would gird my loins enough to prepare me for combat. I shy away from quarrels; I am afraid of bear spray. Clothes and gear, however, are another story, and, surprisingly, we owe many of the things that we wear and use every day to the military: beanies, cargo pants, T-shirts, trenchcoats, and aviator glasses—and can we agree that sanitary napkins count as gear? Duct tape, Cheetos, and Silly Putty all have military origins.
History demonstrates that many of the greatest breakthroughs in math involve making connections between seemingly disparate branches of the subject. These bridges allow mathematicians, like the two of us, to transport problems from one branch to another and gain access to new tools, techniques and insights.
As Amber Escudero-Kontostathis lay in bed, it felt like someone was taking a razor-thin scalpel and delicately slicing into her legs.
The 28-year-old fundraiser eased into her fuzzy black-and-white slippers to get ready for a doctor’s appointment, and with each step, her feet felt like giant blisters threatening to pop under pressure.
“Sometimes, the slightest thing will set them off,” she said, gingerly tapping her foot.
The exact allure of late-night cooking is difficult to adequately describe, but I think for me — at the core of it all — is this feeling that it is somehow more indulgent than cooking in the daylight.
Not all nighttime cooking is glamorous, of course. Ask anyone who has worked in a restaurant kitchen or had to pull together dinner after getting off a second-shift job; but often, one's reasons for getting out the olive oil and frizzling garlic at 2 a.m. are a little more compelling. Perhaps someone is coming in from somewhere interesting. Or they stayed in with someone interesting.
Helen Ellis has built a literary career around charming humor, if charming is a euphemism for polite TMI. She presents as a sweet southern lady, but, bless your heart, she also talks about sex, kink, and all the things genteel housewives might find taboo. Her latest collection, Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge, doesn’t stray far from this formula, with the addition of more recent events like the global pandemic.
“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual,” Virginia Woolf wrote on 17 February 1922, when she had just turned 40. Her diary is full of pain: deaths, losses, illness, grief, depression, anguish, fear. But on every page life breaks in, with astonishing energy, relish and glee. The diary is an unmatchable record of her times, a gallery of vividly observed individuals, an intimate and courageousself-examination, a revelation of a writer’s creative processes, a tender, watchful nature journal, and a meditation on life, love, marriage, friendship, solitude, society, time and mortality. It’s one of the greatest diaries ever written, and it’s excellent to see it back in print.
The first traffic jam in U.S. history, Jackson Lears tells us, occurred in February 1913. The cause? A crush of New Yorkers jostling for seats at a lecture (in French, no less) by the celebrity philosopher Henri Bergson. His topic was the élan vital, the notion of a dynamic life force, a “current sent through matter” that “transcends finality” and animates the world. It is Lears’s topic, too: the play of what he calls “animal spirits” across several centuries of American thought. The phrase captures a recurring desire to meld the material and the ethereal, body and soul, self and universe against powerful countercurrents in religious, scientific and commercial culture.
The “pursuit of vitality” will strike few as an obvious framework for U.S. history. But it is the perfect quarry for Lears, who has spent his distinguished academic career excavating the spiritual and psychic substrate of American modernity. His prior forays into the “weightlessness” of bourgeois reality, the salvific promise of the marketplace, the allure of the lucky strike and the drive for national regeneration converge in this wide-ranging account of precisely how, when and why Americans contemplated an animated world.
Four years ago, British author E.L. James was at her holiday home in Cornwall, England, when she started to feel strange. “I rang my husband and said, ‘I don’t feel great — come home now,’ and he found me sitting in the chair in my study,” James says. “I was trying to measure my pulse rate, and it was through the roof, and I couldn’t remember where I was. He thought I’d had a stroke.”
She had transient global amnesia, a temporary loss of memory. She didn’t know who the British prime minister was or anything else about the previous seven years. Her mental clock had rewound to 2012 — a year she and her husband, Irish screenwriter Niall Leonard, call the “Great Madness.”
My father had suffered a massive heart attack earlier that year; his job wasn’t waiting for him when he recovered. My mother had just survived the first of many bouts with cancer — and had been laid off. No income, no insurance, eking out a living on dwindling unemployment: We plowed up the extensive lawn and planted rows and rows of vegetables we could can and preserve. My first experience of gardening was a lesson in scarcity and sustenance. It would be years later, in adulthood, that I would also discover the joy.
When I next approached the garden plot, it wasn’t for food security but succor of a different kind. I am disabled; I am autistic and have a connective tissue disorder that causes problems for my mobility. Gertrude Jekyll, a 19th-century woman who designed more than 400 gardens, once said, “A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.” I needed just such things, myself, for I couldn’t trust my own body and hadn’t learned to accept new realities. Still, I’d always been a willing student. Maybe I could find my way by investing in the soil — a new way of digging in, different from those sweltering summers when I could still move nimbly between rows of beans and corn. And so I wondered, what would disabled gardening look like? More importantly, how would it feel?
I’m a food writer living in Los Angeles, so I decided to buy a pickup truck.
The history of literature is, in no small part, the history of love stories. And with all due respect to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, the greatest romantic stories nearly always end unhappily. Their pleasure is inseparable from their pain.
Pain and pleasure do the tango in the engrossing new novel Kairos, the story of a love affair set in East Germany right before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's the latest book from the East Berlin born Jenny Erpenbeck, the 57-year-old writer and opera director who I fully expect to win the Nobel Prize sometime in the next five years. A grownup writer for grownup readers, Erpenbeck has an unsurpassed gift for showing how our ideas, passions and choices are shaped – and reshaped – by passing time and the ceaseless transformations of history.
As a plane awaits permission from air traffic control to land, it will trace a certain path in the sky — a period in suspension called a “holding pattern.” Jenny Xie’s debut novel, also called “Holding Pattern,” unfurls a similar period of in-between, with the protagonist Kathleen Cheng back in her childhood home in Oakland, Calif. Here she’s stagnant — fresh off a crushing breakup and preparing for her mother’s upcoming wedding, unsure if she wants to continue her graduate program back in Baltimore but not certain where else she’d want to land.
This is a strange and beautiful book, and when you try to catch it in your hands, it dissolves.
As Johnson shows, recipes can focus our attention productively on some unending conditions—the need to be fed, the duty to feed others, the hope that our translation from ideal to real, or from art to hunger, could be permanent and perfect rather than temporary and approximate. Since the forms of our negotiation with such premises guide our good-enough flourishing, Johnson’s book is both invitation and example. “In the cuisine,” writes Hortense J. Spillers, “contradiction comes home and is not unhappy.” As Small Fires accepts contradiction, and makes it interesting, it shows us an honest and artful rejection of inevitable unhappiness.
Cassidy presents the facts of history and science, but he also leaves room for plenty of okay-but-what-ifs and the kind of debates you’d have with your friends over a kitchen table and a cold glass. You’ll learn a thing or two — and you’ll love every second of it.
That makes “How to Survive History” extraordinary fun for smarty-pantses, history buffs, fun-fact lovers and science geeks who’ll surely want s’more.
I used to think that
I chose books, based on what
I wanted to read.
I went to Baltimore and fished a ginger ale out of a bowl of melting ice and sat by the bed. My father, dying, came in and out of stillness. He couldn’t hear well, so my brother and I yelled a stream of non sequiturs: “Remember when you ran that marathon?” “Ivy is doing a ballet recital!” “We love you!” I reminded him that he had wanted me to put all his writing online. “I’m going to do that!” I said. He looked straight at me—a last moment of connection—and brightly lit up. “That’s great!” he said. (Or something along those lines. His teeth were in the bathroom.)
What is it about places where the lost things go that bring us back again and again? Part of the reason is that, undoubtedly, this is something we can all relate to on a personal level. We’ve all lost something in the past that we really regretted, and in many cases, still miss — particularly beloved childhood toys, which are often the first things found by heroes who reach the places where the lost things go. When characters in stories find their own lost things, it takes us back to possessions — and people — that we may have lost in the past, and makes us wonder if, somehow, they’re still around somewhere. But our fascination with lands of lost things doesn’t stop there. Like the possessions found in them, there’s much more to lands of lost objects than meets the eye.
Clémence Michallon’s assured debut, “The Quiet Tenant,” is an expertly paced psychological thriller that follows three female characters, each compelled and controlled in different ways by the same man.
Hope and history don’t actually rhyme in any known human language, past or present. However, Sophocles’ words (carried over into modern English) resound for many people, reverberating against our own great longing. They provoke in modern readers what Heaney, in the same translation, calls a “double-take of feeling” — that moment when actors in a distant play become “self-revealing” — that is, when they become figures by which we come to know ourselves.
Heaney translated the poetry of others in large part to discover this self-revealing double-take. Among the most important things that we learn in Marco Sonzogni’s newly collected “The Translations of Seamus Heaney” — an immense and informative gathering of the late Nobel Prize winner’s translations — are the ways that Heaney, as translator, thought less of carrying over the so-called literal, and more of finding the pitch and resonance that help an audience receive a poem.
This sense of haunting, finding moments of fellow feeling through illness, even when your experiences only momentarily correspond, is familiar to me. Reading A Matter of Appearance, I found myself underlining hungrily, littering the margins with exclamation points of recognition and copying lines into my notebook, where Wells’s words now keep company with those of David Wojnarowicz and Audre Lorde, Emma Bolden and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I like to think that this process of fragmentation and collection is invited by the text itself: A Matter of Appearance continually spurs itself towards the collective. “My fundamental task is not to claim the tragic for myself,” Wells writes, “but to acknowledge those who make up the world of the sick; to create a space out of words for us to convalesce in together.” I can’t think of a better literary project than carving out a room for shared convalescence. At the same time, I find myself wondering whether this project might offer more than rest, whether convalescing together could lead us to modify, or even do away with, the conditions that produce this unevenly shared fatigue.
How we manage people’s competing claims to ownership of places is one of the great questions for the world in the 21st century. As Rural shows, the British countryside is a good example of how not to do it.
A watermelon is a fish from a garden
she said and laughed
She had a wide-brimmed straw hat
and sat at the table in the yard
The physicality of pinball, like that of all arcade games, is the tech's blessing on shared social spaces. Its glorious heft unapologetically loud and bright, a cabinet demands due accommodation for spacious human joy and creativity.
As Smith says, it's a "meshing of physics, bringing it into technology, using it to tell stories and bring them into a physical space."
The first Batman felt like a long-fought victory for a cultural underdog, one you could partake in no matter how recently you’d joined the fight. But what do you celebrate when you’ve already won—when, like Bruce Wayne, you’ve been so effective you’ve wiped out the reason for your own existence? All that’s left is the victory lap, and the search for worlds still left to conquer.
Displaying our problems to visitors has made me think how Los Angeles — even with its history of civil unrest and corruption, poverty and racism, earthquakes and fires — often gets measured against a tradition of cheery propaganda promoting a West Coast paradise. Nineteenth century travel writers likened L.A. to the Holy Land, and the cliché of the California dream persists, despite those who say the promise of abundance and fresh starts is dead, and the dream, a nightmare.
Over the past few years, I’ve been researching and writing a book called The Long View, about why our sense of time is malleable – how it can be foreshortened without us realising and how to lengthen our perspectives. Unlike the vast majority of other animals, we have a remarkable ability to manipulate time in our minds. Scientists call it “mental time travel”: as you read these words, you can transport your perspective into the past and stitch together those memories into a tapestry of possible futures.
However, that does not mean our timeviews cannot be coloured, swayed or even diminished. Every day, we are exposed to a barrage of temporal stresses: shortsighted targets, salient distractions and near-term temptations. When these combine with the psychological habits we inherited from our ancestors, a longer perspective can recede from view.
In the 19 years since my book “The Island at the Center of the World,” about the Dutch settlement that preceded New York, came out, I’ve changed the way I think about the history and geography of New Amsterdam, which occupied the southern tip of Manhattan Island in the 1600s.
The Chicago-born poet, novelist, short-story writer and sometime professor of creative writing has developed a small, strange, acclaimed body of work over the past quarter-century, featuring two novels, two collections of poetry marked by jazz-solo plays with language and a book of short stories. Now he’s adding a new story collection to that catalog: “Fat Time and Other Stories.” In Allen’s fashioning, Black experience is never subject to conventional parameters of time and space, and his magic realism, instead of being performatively exuberant or purposefully provocative, is plainly unsettling and disturbing.
This is a hard act to follow, but Key bravely chimes in again: “Plenty will read this book and say, ‘Lo, this is why I choose to remain single.’” Key hopes you’ll walk away with another message, a trite but true one — that relationships are hard work, and that imagining your divorce is an important step in staying married. Also, maintaining a sense of humor.
Ultimately, through this deft and engaging recounting of OK’s rise to utility, stability, and ubiquity in the English language (and, in many ways, across the globe), McSweeney tells of the insuperable human spark for linguistic creativity, one that technology both drives and fosters. And yet, with the rise of AI-powered writing tools such as Chat-GPT heralding, it seems, a new era of communication, we are right to wonder in what ways that spark might evolve and endure. No doubt new words will continue to appear daily in our languages as OK first did in English one Saturday in 1839. But will these new words all be human, or do the machines want to play, too?
This sort of aimless strolling is conducive to savoring, to finding joy in the moment, a practice that some social scientists have found can be cultivated and may help lead to a more fulfilling life. In “Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience,” the scholars Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff describe savoring not as mere pleasure, but as an active process that requires presence and mindfulness. It’s “a search for the delectable, delicious, almost gustatory delights of the moment,” as they put it.
Legal marijuana notwithstanding, true New Yorkers have long prided themselves on resisting certain Californish things. Malls. Cars. Cults.
Maybe that’s why the astounding story that pours forth from Alexander Stille’s new book “The Sullivanians,” about hundreds of people who got sucked into a very peculiar live-work situation on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for decades, isn’t better known.
was the same summer he met my mother.
He and Uncle Max, home from college,
At a time when so much of the world has been measured, so many arguments settled — tallest mountain (Everest), largest ocean (Pacific), most venomous snake (western taipan) — the question of which river is the world’s longest remains, somehow, tantalizingly beyond our reach. What appears at first to be a basic geographic query, a matter of cold science and hard numbers, has instead morphed into a cartographical dispute that has divided the scientific and exploration communities along the fault lines of national identity, units of measurement and even personal pique.
Chain-Gang All-Stars is an ambitious novel by a determined author. Most novelists who want to address hideous social conditions imagine what might happen next and let the damaged characters and grim circumstances do the work. Adjei-Brenyah certainly does this. But via footnotes, he adds messages from history, contemporary and otherwise, to his tale of a world in which the treatment of people convicted of murder is even worse than what incarcerated men and women face in this country. And America leads the world, at least among allegedly democratic nations, in imprisoning its citizens. One such footnote makes that precise numerical point. Another footnote refers to the real life inhumane treatment of three men, Albert Woodfox, Robert King, and Herman Wallace, who all spent decades in isolation before two of them were released and one of them had died.
The God of Good Looks represents a vibrant, nuanced, and entertaining view of Caribbean culture, a perspective that transcends both trauma and pure escapism. At the sweet spot between popular entertainment and literature, it's riveting and transportive — a summer read with bite.
If you have ever lived in Florida, wintered in Florida, or even vacationed in Florida, you will appreciate the humor Barry finds in the state. And even if you haven’t been there, you’ll enjoy a good laugh at its expense.
Yet despite the connection readers feel to Moore’s heroines, her writing maintains a careful distance, epitomizing a formal rigor that never confuses the use of the personal for artistic effect with the confessional. Moore will not confess. She mines the events and characters of her life, not in search of closure or catharsis but to bend and shape them to her artistic purpose.
Her new novel, “I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home,” her first in 14 years, is a stylistic departure that finds her stretching her voice to explore the surreal borderlands of grief. An experiment jumping between the 19th and 21st centuries, it strays from the contemporary world she’s a master of portraying. Chronicling a road trip taken by a mourning man and the walking, talking corpse of his dead lover, it leaps into the fantastical in a way Moore never has before. But like all her writing, “I Am Homeless” uses elevated, often dazzling language to evoke a complex emotional state. Like all things that dazzle, Moore’s language can illuminate, and it can obscure — sometimes it can even hurt your eyes. Moore seems to find all these effects equally useful.
As both a surfer and lifeguard, Luke knows what the ocean is capable of. Just a week before the Eddie, one of his childhood best friends, Kala Grace, had an almost-fatal accident at nearby Pipeline. Luke saw Kala dragged out of the ocean, concussed and bleeding, and it was Luke who put the oxygen mask on his friend’s face. Throughout the frenzy, what everyone remembers is Luke remaining calm and focused.
Luke, by the way, is known as “Casual Luke.” In Hawaii. Which is like being called “Neurotic Matt” on the island of Manhattan. The nickname came to be after a really good day out in the water, when Luke was just shredding wave after wave. The surfer Mason Ho told Luke that he was “casually causing casualties.” But any of Luke’s friends will tell you that it stuck because he’s especially humble and chill. For this reason, sometimes they also call him “Laid-Back Luke.”
The stakes in Brandon Taylor’s fiction are always high – strikingly so, given these are campus novels. Lovers and gods are cruel; life’s beauty is dangerously close to being unbearable. Early on in The Late Americans, graduate student poet Seamus pictures his cohort as living in a dollhouse: “It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives … in an exhibit called The Late Americans.” Are our lives spectacles? And how can we continue to live when pain is both ubiquitous and mundane? The answer comes in bodily connection, but physical encounters may result merely in the transfer of pain.
Can a film be cursed? Or is it the system behind the film — Hollywood and all its many shades of corruption — that’s toxic? It’s a central question of Craig Russell’s excellent, engrossing historical horror novel, one that explores the symbiosis of power and evil in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Whatever it meant to be a Floridian while I was growing up is no longer accessible as an identity. Too many beautiful places have been drained dry, or buried beneath concrete. That’s what happens when the population of your home state explodes almost sevenfold in your lifetime.
Anne Hull conveys the loss starkly in “Through the Groves,” her new memoir: “Almost nothing in Florida stays the way it was. It’s bought, sold, paved over and reimagined in a cycle that never quits. The landscape I saw through my father’s windshield as a child has been so thoroughly erased I sometimes wonder if I made it up.”
Bathed in a golden light, she looks out from a photo resembling a fashion magazine spread with a commanding stare, surrounded by massive teddy bears. Instead of yellow curly hair, she wears thick, afro-textured, honey blonde locs.
This is the Goldilocks of CROWNED: Magical Folk and Fairy Tales from the Diaspora by husband and wife photographers Kahran and Regis Bethencourt. The two have reimagined familiar stories with photographs of Black children and, occasionally, new plot points, in an elaborate book of 141 photos.
But it wasn’t happening after two breaths, or four, or ten. Maybe because of my deteriorating state, I didn’t have the capacity to panic. My seven-year-old, Nick, was watching the cartoon Wild Kratts that Saturday morning, appropriately oblivious. My husband George was bringing my ten-year-old, Mia, home from her soccer game. I phoned him from the floor with a brief, passive-aggressive update along the lines of: “Don’t worry, but just so you know, I’m about to pass out.” Then I handed Nick my cell, instructing him to call 911 if I drifted out of consciousness. Nick had never been given responsibility over a phone, never mind a human being, but he had seen movies featuring kid heroes, and his rigid posture made clear that he was psyched.
The spinning started about ten minutes later—gentle at first, then increasingly turbulent. By the time George burst through the door, I felt like a stuffed animal tossed into violent ocean waves. The floor was folding and churning, and as he walked directly toward me, he seemed unflappably graceful, capable of performing ballet on a battleship.
My dad is a paradox. Growing up, he blubbered at videos of soldiers reuniting with their children enough times for me to know he had feelings. But to ask him what exactly those feelings were was useless— it would have been like asking a magician to reveal the secrets to his tricks. In the most difficult years of my life, his reluctance to unpack emotion became essential. I craved privacy throughout high school, but found total solitude daunting. My brain barked too loudly. I needed a companion. Someone willing to talk, but never insistent upon it.
I needed my dad.
I’ve cooked at least one recipe from each chapter and am hard-pressed to choose a favorite. Contenders include the showstopper roasted beets, citrus, labneh, zhoug; the smoky, chewy, lemony zucchini and freekeh salad with za’atar, halloumi; and the salade ‘gratinée’ with roasted fingerlings, red onions — another fast sheet-pan meal where crisp potatoes are topped with “robust” dressed greens and grated Gruyère, then quickly broiled until the cheese melts and the greens are just softened: Now this is a recipe truly greater than the sum of its parts.
“Vegetarian Salad for Dinner” contains about 80 well-tested recipes. Its range and complexity are wide, even a little awe-inspiring. But the directions are easy to follow, the techniques educational and enriching, and the results always well worth the time required to produce them … so long as you don’t let those chickpeas take over your life.
“We have a compulsion to tie food to place,” Anya von Bremzen writes in her new book, but that compulsion, it turns out, has more to do with myth and marketing than with historical fact. “National Dish” is the story of her quest to understand why certain foods, like pizza, ramen and tapas, are adopted as symbols of their places of origin.
Hayden White, who died in 2018, was perhaps the most important theorist of history since the 19th century. A 2022 anthology edited by Robert Doran, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature and Theory, 1998–2007, showcases his critical output from the turn of the century. From “The Burden of History” (1966) to the most recent pieces collected in this volume, one can see that White was a consistently intelligent and engaging postmodern advocate for thinking about history as a form of imaginative reconstruction that could either constrain people or inspire their liberation. Like his late-in-life Stanford colleague Richard Rorty, White was an ironic anti-foundationalist—a thinker eager to undermine the ways that we moderns have found new gods to worship or essences to piously respect. The idea of an “arc of history bending toward justice” is such a god, and the notion of a core, permanent identity is such an essence. Both Rorty and White were iconoclastic. While the former tended to remind us that we didn’t need these new idols, the latter wanted us to smash them on the way to creating something radically new.
Old magazines are cheap time machines, archaeologies of collective desire. Find a print issue, specialist or popular, preferably more than 20 years old (though 10 may do the trick), and read it from cover to cover. You will execute no deep dive, vanish down no rabbit hole; your reading is instead a lateral slice through a culture, class or milieu. A few years ago, while writing a book about great sentences, I went looking for photo captions that Joan Didion composed in the 1960s during her time at Vogue. I found these perfectly formed, uncredited fragments, but also Didion writing about a new museum in Mexico City — “One comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities” — and other high-toned pieces: Hardwick reviewing movies, articles on Alberto Giacometti and Günter Grass. There were fashion photographs by Gordon Parks and William Klein. I confirmed what I suspected about the aesthetic sophistication of midcentury American magazines and their readers.
Here’s a little secret about Steph Catudal’s memoir, “Everything All at Once,” which chronicles her husband’s harrowing skirmish with lung cancer in 2020: The book’s even-numbered chapters were written years ago, long before Tommy Rivers Puzey, Catudal’s ultramarathon-running spouse, developed a hacking cough that gave her a bone-chilling sense of déjà vu. It had to be Covid-19, right? Wrong.
Those even-numbered chapters are sections from Catudal’s unpublished memoir about losing her father to lung cancer when she was 14. He had the same cough.
At that point, the Rim Fire — which started below Highway 120’s Rim of the World Vista lookout — seemed controllable. Then, on Monday, August 19, two days after the first spark, the wind changed direction and the fire escaped the narrow canyon, quintupling in size in a single day. It would eventually burn 257,314 acres of forest, making it the third largest in California history to that date. Emerald would be arrested and confess to starting it; a grand jury would indict him based on evidence that he’d set a small campfire to burn some trash and let it escape his control. Two years later, in 2015, after coincidentally timed deaths torpedoed the government’s case against Emerald, the charges against him would be dropped.
Looking back now, a decade later, the Rim Fire feels like a prelude to disaster — a cleared throat ahead of an End Times scream. After 2013, California entered its megafire era. What had been a generational burn in Tuolumne County began to tumble down the list of California’s largest wildfires — it was leapfrogged in 2017 and in 2018, and five more times in 2020, and again in the summer of 2021. After a relatively quiet 2022 fire season, a rainy 2023 has forecasters predicting a later, but possibly more intense fire season. And what had seemed like a West Coast problem has enveloped the rest of the country this week — as wildfires rage through Canada’s forests, the skies above the North East have been stained yellow and the air made thick with smoke.
In the years to come, whenever my work seemed dull and uninspiring, or the vagaries of funding forced me down an unwelcome path, or – worse – the NIF was in the news, my mind would turn back to that moment and ask: ‘What if?’ Imagine if I were at that other job in that other state thousands of miles away. Imagine a different life that I would never live.
Then again, perhaps I had dodged a bullet, who knows?
“Will I live to see its end?” your mother asks.
She is sixty-nine years old and lies in the hospital room where she has been marooned for the past eight years, shipwrecked in her own body.
“It” is the story that you are now writing—this beginning you have yet to imagine and the ending she will not live to see.
Crucially, throughout, Viren reflects on the relationship between truth and facts, and how facts can "tell different stories depending on who is picking them out and placing them in a narrative line." This layer of rumination on lies, honesty, and nonfiction storytelling takes the essay beyond a rehashing of wrongdoing and into a deeper exploration of how easily fact and fiction can blur — a topic that should matter to us all.
“It fucks you up,” one of my writing students said to me. They meant all the no’s from agents and editors in response to their submitted work. And it can. Zero question. Still, I had to remind them that you can’t personalize it. Rejection in the writing business is inevitable; but I qualified with, “or maybe don’t personalize it for long, not too long.”
I never use that line about needing a thicker skin because it’s their sensitivity to language and living, to all the nuance and feeling in and around them, that compels them to do creative work in the first place. But rejection can be more useful than they know: it tests a writer’s resolve to keep at it, to find their voice, their own authority about that voice, and over time it strengthens their own capacity for yes.
As a result, there will be voices and stories we won’t and can’t hear. “We are not going to hear from poor people,” said McNicoll. They’re too busy hustling multiple jobs, they’re tired, they don’t have the resources to buy the mental space to write. This means that the stories we do hear will be told by certain specific voices: those who can afford to tell stories, whether those stories are their own or others’. In a later conversation with me, McNicoll noted she had been able to operate as a writer making less and less money because she had other jobs and because she had a husband with a full-time job.
McNicoll pointed out that, while you often don’t hear poor people telling their own stories, in their own words, you do still get stories about poor people. But those stories are often told from the point of view of those who haven’t lived the life, who don’t have lived experience being poor. The stories they tell are, she feels, either largely aspirational or cheerfully affirming, and only rarely do they grapple with what it means to be poor, with details about the struggles and the joys, the daily grind of life.
Before I dedicated my life to taking pot-shots at the nature of the universe—I mean, before I became a science fiction writer—I was a frightened child. Death scared me, but living was the constant terror. My father told me I had chosen this. I had come to him in a dream before I was born and begged to be guided by his wisdom in my current life. My fears multiplied: I screamed in the pizza parlor at the feel of the melted cheese sliding down my throat. I could not breathe under the bright lights of the hardware store, asphyxiated by free volatiles of fertilizer and fresh paint. I closed my eyes because I could not bear my awareness of my own blinking eyelids. I started to wet the bed again. I would only sleep with my sister. My father spoke of demons, malevolent creatures who would enter your soul and whisper tortured, impossible things. Was I a demon? He told me I was evil. I did not feel evil, but I did feel—everywhere—wrong.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic partitioned us all into “essential” and “nonessential” workers, a similar intuition has taken hold that work just isn’t working—and with it, the same divergent understanding of what “resignation” really means. If 2021 was the year of the Great Resignation, 2022 was the year of quiet quitting: the former defined by record rates of outright job-quitting (most pronounced in the service industries), the latter by a disengagement more akin in name and substance to Thoreau’s “quiet desperation.” Who better than Thoreau, then, to help us rethink work and leisure as the receding pandemic and the looming prospect of automation continue to reshape our understanding of both? In their new book Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living, the philosophers John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle offer a Thoreau for our own fraught moment, rooted in what they convincingly describe as the central place of work in Thoreau’s philosophy and life.
“Reproduction” uses “Frankenstein” as its foundation to conclude with a science fiction story of its own, but what is more powerful about the book is how it captures the life-changing experience of pregnancy and birth. “Perhaps, I thought, that’s what it is to be a pregnant woman in this country,” the narrator writes. “To be the last man, setting off in his ship to find a new country.”
James has pulled off something special in this ingeniously constructed novel. By creating characters who steadfastly refuse to become plunder themselves, she has produced an inspiring work of beauty sure to leave its mark on readers.
While reading “What an Owl Knows,” by the science writer Jennifer Ackerman, I was reminded that my daughter once received a gift of a winter jacket festooned with colorful owls. At the time I thought of the coat as merely cute, but it turns out that the very existence of such merchandise reflects certain cultural assumptions about the birds: namely, that they are salutary and good.
Owls can also carry more negative connotations, depending on the context. In some places they are associated with wisdom and prophecy (the goddess Athena and her owl); in others they are considered portents of bad luck, illness and even death. As it happens, the existence of owl-inspired merchandise is a useful indicator of human-owl relations in a given society. Ackerman, who has written several other books about birds, recounts a surprising story of rapid cultural transformation in the Serbian town of Kikinda, where owls were at one time considered such an ominous sign that people would harass or shoot them. Over the course of a decade, an educational campaign persuaded the townspeople otherwise. A tree full of owls is now something to show off instead of cut down, and each November, schoolchildren write poems and artwork dedicated to the birds.
Although I resist
Sometimes haiku will not do
The poem demands more
I’d gotten into the habit of locking my door before going to sleep. Stories of murders were dominating the local news at the time; two girls about my age whose bodies and bones had turned up by a lake not far from where I lived. It wasn’t clear or logical, even to me, what protection locks were supposed to afford: both victims had been killed while out jogging during the daytime, not snatched out of their beds, and the attacks had taken place along a nature trail and not in a quiet suburb. Still, the steady drip of stranger danger messaging I’d absorbed over the last decade or so meant that any new threat could be absorbed by osmosis and incorporated into the faceless, ever-present figure of the Kidnapper. In this context, my door-locking was less practical than ritual, one that brought me some inchoate sense of safety and wellbeing, like a psychic sugar pill.
I passed the better part of the afternoon jabbing and scraping a straightened paper clip into the hole in my doorknob, waiting for whatever happened inside locks to happen. At one point, nearing defeat, I asked my stepmother if we could go to the hardware store to buy a lockpicking kit. There’s no such thing, she said firmly. I frowned; I was sure I’d heard the phrase before, but it was true that the more I turned the words over in my head the more implausible they sounded. A box full of tools purpose-built for break-ins? That you could just buy like it was a candy bar? Surely that couldn’t be right. But then I heard a click, and I felt the door give way, and suddenly the question was moot, and I allowed it to submerge itself in the lower depths of my subconscious for another decade or so.
I wake early each morning, before the kids, to write and see the real city—my private Brooklyn curving in on itself, the prose poem of citywide snow removal and garbage pick-ups, geese migrating over Kings County rooftops in V-formation. The humor, the horror, the wonder. How to chronicle it all? I don’t feel like it’s actual writing unless I burn out my computer, smoke puffing from its mechanical gills, in the same liminal state of system overdrive I find myself in daily. So I sit behind my smoking MacBook Air, a woman with a story to tell.
We do not read the Bible as it is meant to be read. Theology always risks leading us astray by elaborating its own discourse, with the biblical texts merely as a point of departure. The presence of poetry in the Bible is the key to a more pertinent and more faithful reading.
There are many poems found in the Bible. We know this, vaguely and without giving it too much thought, but shouldn’t we be rather astonished by the role of poetry in a collection of books with such a pressing and salutary Word to express? And shouldn’t we ask ourselves if the presence of this writing—so much more self-conscious and desirous than is prose of a form it can make vibrate—affects the biblical “message” and changes its nature?
There is probably no such thing as a place for everyone. But the diner has been considered a model of culinary democratization in the American public consciousness since its earliest days as a horse-drawn food cart selling sandwiches and coffee. At the prototypical American diner, the story goes, workers and students and the unemployed could all rub shoulders with one another, as long as they had a few cents for a meal. Diners have become synonymous with these other images — the working class, the small-town community center, a place for “real” Americans free of frills and ostentation, and most of all, a place for “everyone.” For politicians and celebrities, or anyone looking to (as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul tweeted last year) “meet the most interesting people” over eggs and iced tea, this is what is being evoked. Such that it doesn’t matter whether diners, in their current state, are actually those things.
Restaurant owners — like Redding of Thai Diner, Samuel Yoo of NYC’s Chinatown-influenced Golden Diner, and Sofia Baltopoulos of the Tasty vegan diner in Philadelphia — are beginning to expand the definition of what a diner can be. But the survival of diners has long depended on their association with this down-home, ordinary imagery, where folks from different walks of life can put aside their differences and find common ground over sandwich platters. Can there ever really be a place where “everyone” is welcome? How much of the diner is a myth?
On a surface level, I suppose I was just hoping for anything other than corporate monotony. But on a deeper level, I think I wanted to find a place of independent character and ideally someplace old, where people had been eating for decades. I wanted a restaurant that had survived a changing world and somehow wore its years gracefully but honestly. I hoped for patrons with weathered faces, and a server who’d committed a crime two states over, or maybe dated Bob Dylan in the ’60s, or fought in a war that no one remembers. The toast would come with margarine and the soda with chipped ice in a 32-ounce plastic cup, but the coffee would come in a 6-ounce mug with endless refills of varying temperatures. I wanted a steak that begged to be smothered in A-1 Sauce, maybe served as an open-face sandwich that really just means “on top of a slice of sourdough toast.” I’d order the soup of the day, no matter what is in it. I knew that I would rather fast for the next 4½ hours than eat a Deluxe McCrispy.
Open The Library of Broken Worlds to just about any page and you will find rich storytelling that ranges from the practical (every food detail is a delight) to the explosive, from the intimate details of Freida’s life to the story of how her world came to be. Johnson layers myths on histories on gods on planets, and it feels as if there’s enough world—or worlds—here to sustain countless more tales. But this one alone is a feast, artful, imaginative, and unmatched.
There’s a well-known bit of literary advice, often misattributed to Vladimir Nabokov, that goes like this: The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then, once he’s up there, throw rocks at him. This maxim is sound, so far as it goes. But it doesn’t say what should happen if the character dies and comes back to life as a tree — or at least a treelike variety of zombie.
This is what happens in Lorrie Moore’s fluky, fitfully funny and folk-horror-adjacent new novel, “I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home.”
Her latest novel is of course about dead people and therefore has a plot, and yet Moore manages to pack in a civil war-era legend, a brother’s final moments in a hospice, and a road novel in less than 200 pages. I Am Homeless is a triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination. For Moore, death doesn’t necessarily mark the end of a story.
But at its heart, “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women” is much more than a story about a pioneering doctor. It’s a tale of enduring friendship and the effect it can have both in the moment and centuries afterward.
In the early twentieth century, psychologists began exploring a new frontier—a science of subjective experience that would link body and mind in systematic ways. Advocates of this emerging science, whatever theory they espoused, strained for complete illumination of hidden depths. The ambition itself was not novel: mystics in many traditions had sought union with the deity in contemplative practice; Calvinists and Pietists had encouraged constant scrutiny of the soul for evidence of salvation or damnation. What was new in the early twentieth century was the belief that emotional depths could be measured or at least described with scientific precision. The project animated professional strategies for the systematic understanding of mental life and its connections with physical life. Everyone agreed that mind and body were linked; the question was how. Did mind influence body, or the other way around? Or did the two realms interact in subtler ways?
It’s an evocative phrase—“the last public space.” It’s one I heard over and over while reporting this story, often invoked as a kind of badge of honour. For the library CEOs who need to justify their budgets to unsympathetic city councils, the phrase emphasizes the importance of their institutions: like the “last old-growth rainforests” or “the last Galápagos tortoises,” “the last public space” sounds like something we should probably spend some money to preserve.
Most people understand that trees and forests play an important role in reducing climate change — that’s one reason there are so many popular efforts aimed at planting trees. But what many people don’t understand is that not all forests are alike, and that using our forests to mitigate climate change is a lot more complicated than just planting more trees.
It turns out the age and composition of forests makes a big difference in what role they play in preventing wildfires and storing carbon. Old growth forest is the best at both, but there is very little old growth left in either the western or eastern United States.
In a sense, West is a book of ghosts—not the white-sheeted apparitions of the popular imagination but specters of the past that flicker imperceptibly in the present, shaping our lives in ways we cannot grapple with until we recognize them.
As Theise writes, perhaps too optimistically but very reassuringly: “Complexity comforts us, revealing, unequivocally, unavoidably, that however separate and alone we might feel, each one of us is — in each and every single moment — a pure expression of the entire living, conscious universe. Nothing separate, nothing left out, but true, pure, and complete, just as we are.” The sheer density of Theise’s insights occasionally makes them difficult to parse, but time spent reading this slender work offers a compelling retreat into the exhilarating and oddly reassuring world of complexity.
Being a Black critic in a time of exceptional art made by Black people has immense rewards and myriad risks. “Wannabe,” the debut essay collection from Aisha Harris, a co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” is at its best when engaging with those risks and the thorny questions of her profession. In what ways does identity inform a critic’s work? And should it?
Because I have an English poem
in my lap, of green-wooded sex,
I think somehow I must try
to find a mother’s want in me.
Please, dear human friend, go away
from this gore of shyness
Did the West Antarctic Ice Sheet completely collapse during the latest interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago? It’s an important question for climate scientists, but geology was giving them no answers. So they turned to genetics instead.
The story is not only about a plane crash and a rescue, it’s also about love, loss, hope, trust.
The writer Sarah Viren became renowned as the victim of a false narrative when, in 2020, she published an article in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Accusations Were Lies. But Could We Prove It?” In it, she told how, the previous year, her wife, Marta, was accused of sexual harassment and became the subject of a Title IX investigation at Arizona State University, where both women are professors. Eventually the accusations were proved to be the work of a malignant competitor who was attempting to shove a boulder into the middle of the couple’s career path.
Now Viren has written the strange and wonderful “To Name the Bigger Lie,” a memoir that includes this awful tale. But the book is not the one that readers of the original article might expect. The subtitle promises “a memoir in two stories”; doubleness is a crucial theme. The book is preoccupied with twinned phenomena and dual perspectives. It’s a book for our times, when singular truths seem less certain with each passing day.
In its finest moments, "1964: Eyes of the Storm" affords music lovers with vivid images of John, Paul, George and Ringo as they embark upon an unknown world where everything is still possible, including failure and the potential for slipping into the recesses of an unforgiving history. But as we devour the photos in McCartney's book, we know this simply isn't true. McCartney's images find the Beatles reveling in the moment, with nary a glint in their eyes about the artistic heights that their most unusual future portends.
As I typed this, striking Writers Guild of America members were skipping the picket lines in New York City because of poor air quality, after smoke drifted down from wildfires in Canada. It was a grimly perfect backdrop to read “Burn It Down,” a new book about the pervasive moral shortcomings of Hollywood by the longtime entertainment reporter and critic Maureen Ryan.
It’s a strange gig, editing pages for Berlin’s English-language print monthly. We assume our readers know a few German phrases — many have lived here for years — but we cannot assume fluency, obviously, otherwise we’d be publishing in German, or indeed not at all. Using bits of local language in our pages avoids repetition and adds colour; it also helps generate a sense of community — this isn’t just some anglo mag, it’s a mag for Berliners, auf Englisch. It’s a rather ironic way for me to pay the bills. I did German history at university; I moved here to inhabit the land of Goethe, Neu! and Judith Schalansky. And here I am now, making my living — as an editor, occasional translator, anglophone critic of German literature — in the cracks between the languages, materially reliant on the existence of thousands of Berliners and Berlin-watchers who don’t speak the national tongue.
One of my favorite dishes to eat while growing up was budae-jjigae, which literally means “army base stew” in Korean. Typically, the stew’s bubbling broth fuses traditional Korean flavors—the spice of gochugaru, the earthiness of mushrooms, the pungency of kimchi—with an unlikely yet essential addition: Spam.
I once wondered aloud to my mom: “Is Spam Korean? How did it get in here?”
In a literary career spanning five decades Allende's storytelling walks a lyrical romanticism on roads imposed by social and political turmoil. This story is a fable joined by today's hard news. In her latest novel, Allende disrupts the mainstream narrative about our southern border. She discovers something in Nogales, via El Salvador and Vienna: the human capacity for hope and decency in the midst of despair.
The Wind Knows My Name is a tale of two child immigrants--- a boy who escapes Nazi occupied Vienna in 1938 and a girl who escapes military gangs in El Salvador in 2019. Allende's narrative commingles past and present, and follows their migrations to the United States and the day when the immigrant from Vienna — Samuel Adler — and the refugee from El Salvador — Anita Diaz — finally meet.
Still, many music lovers, especially those with scant formal knowledge of music, long for written descriptions that can take them inside a piece, explain how it comports (or not) with the prevailing styles of the time, and account for how the music makes them feel. That’s what music critics try to do, without going too far, indulging in historical generalizations or turning all philosophical.
The British poet Patrick Mackie shows no such trepidations in his erudite, ambitious and elegantly written “Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces.” He presents Mozart as a kinetically restless, socially observant musician constantly in dialogue with his culture and his times — the age of the Enlightenment, in all its idealism, revolutionary fervor and entangled contradictions. Mackie’s assertions about the ways Mozart’s identification with his era come through in the music are intriguing and insightful, even when overly sweeping and, at times, too speculative.
“Say Anarcha” is an important book and deserves to be widely read, especially by those in medicine. I challenge any Sims supporters to read it and continue to defend his ethics. At a certain point, Hallman reveals that Sims was inspired partly by his contemporary P.T. Barnum, the greatest showman on earth. This makes perfect sense, because in many ways Sims was the original American medical huckster.
I walked, I talked, I carried beers. I didn’t apply for 'real' jobs. I always said, soon, soon, things like this cannot last forever. I thought I’d get too tired to keep waiting tables, I thought if I waited much longer I’d lose the chance to get a ‘real’ job, in publishing or media or who knows what industry. I knew I couldn’t wait tables forever, though I certainly never thought I would be stopped by a global pandemic.
The job at that bar was the best job I’ve ever had, in concert with the life I’d always wanted—publishing my writing, running a literary magazine, having several close circles of friends, living in the city I’d always dreamed of. I loved my apartment and I had the money to do things like get facials and use ClassPass. I took vacations and went to literary awards or friends’ book launches and plays and fancy dinners, and one night when I was sad I bought a pink suit, and then I felt better. Waiting tables gave me a life I didn’t think I’d be able to attain for myself. I was a lackluster student in high school and I went to a small college in a strange town where we didn’t get grades. I’d never gotten a response when I applied for a job, an internship, or even a volunteer opportunity in the arts. Waiting tables felt like the bane of my existence, but it also gave me access to everything I loved. I didn’t see any of it coming. Where do I begin?
“Entangled Life” has turned Sheldrake, who is 36, into a kind of human ambassador for the fungal kingdom: the face of fungi. He has flown to the Tarkine rainforest in Tasmania to shoot an IMAX movie, narrated by Björk, that is screening this summer. Shortly after his London talk, he was scheduled to leave for Tierra del Fuego, where he would join a group sampling fungi on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), a conservation-and-advocacy organization founded by the ecologist Colin Averill and the biologist Toby Kiers. Sheldrake described the trip as part of the group’s effort to map the global diversity of mycorrhizae, which help plants and trees survive, and to establish protections for fungi. (In the United States, just two fungi, both lichens, are protected under the Endangered Species Act.)
I’d come to relish night hiking. In this and many ways, forest activism awakens the senses. Traipse across miles of moonless nights on labyrinthine logging roads, with fifty pounds on your back and an injunction on your head (Kurt already had one; mine was coming), on roads patrolled by armed, territorial security squads, and your senses do push-ups. Climb a thirteen-foot-diameter tree in the middle of the night and you’re running a marathon. Do it enough and the trees start talking to you.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is one of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have ever read. On one level, it is a love story, or rather a story about the loss of love. It begins with a woman, Katharina, hearing about the death of her former lover. Boxes of his papers are delivered to her apartment, and when she finally sits down to open them the past rises before her like a pack of playing cards thrown into the air.
The book then moves back to their first meeting, tracing step by step the contours of a relationship that is not only intellectually and emotionally complicated in itself, but whose difficulties are compounded through its relationship to the collapse of East Germany. Katharina and Hans meet in East Berlin in 1986, and they live out the disintegration of all their hopes and dreams, personally and politically, throughout the course of the novel.
Writers from abroad were astounded by the sheer amount of ice that could be found in the country. When Charles Dickens visited the young republic in 1842, he gawked at the American “icehouses [filled] to the very throat” and “the mounds of ices” that Americans ate in hot weather. (Interestingly, ice doesn’t appear much in the English novelist’s work, either as an element or as metaphor.
Perhaps that’s because, after this first visit, he wrote American Notes for General Circulation and the spent twenty years wanting nothing to do with Americans—not because of their obsession with ice, but because of what he saw as their obsession with money.)
The seventh point on the waiver I had to sign was “Please do not throw or toss food into anyone’s mouth, plate, etc.” I felt cheated: This was the implicit promise of Benihana — Japanese Steakhouse and Place Where I Would Learn How to Flip a Shrimp Into My Friend’s Mouth. But I signed, and my apprenticeship began.
I can’t remember the first time I went to a teppanyaki steakhouse, but like many Americans, I have an obsession with this specific form of dinner theater: A chef expertly flips his spatulas (it’s always a man), tosses steak, and makes a flaming volcano out of stacked onion rounds before a willingly captive audience of diners seated around an impossibly hot slab of metal. When I was a child, it felt like the circus to me. In adulthood, with the addition of tiki drinks and sake bombs, it’s become a campy indulgence, its invitation always prefaced by an OMG wouldn’t it be fun? In that way, it’s also become a bellwether of camaraderie: If you think it wouldn’t be fun, or if you think you’re too good for the restaurant Tyrese has in his backyard, you’re not good enough for me.
One of environmentalism’s great challenges is not scientific but literary. The forces rendering our world uninhabitable can seem catastrophically intangible. How, then, are we to overcome our imaginative incapacity and conjure up their terrors and imminent dangers? “It has been suggested that one reason so many of us are attracted to disaster movies … is because they offer ways to visualize, and perhaps prepare for, such events ourselves,” writes journalist John Vaillant in “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World.” His book appeals for much the same reason — but the cataclysms for which it prepares us are not fictions.
This book walks a very delicate path very well. It shows a working class which was multifarious. The references to Covid somehow fit, in terms of indoors, outdoors, freedom and entitlement. There are – a modern phenomenon – snapshots and old photographs, but these do give a sense of transience. The recent past sometimes seems long ago. I do not know if unpolemic is a word, but I admire that Smith has written something which does not reduce the world to easy answers but revels in its difficulty.
On 9 October 1911, Franz Kafka, then 28 years old, wrote in his diary that he didn’t expect to reach the age of 40. At the time of this entry, he was not yet stricken with the tuberculosis that would lead to his death in 1924, shortly before his 41st birthday. What afflicted him at that time, making him doubt his longevity, was harder to pin down. Perhaps due to this very indefiniteness, it provided raw material for his aesthetic imagination.
The first rule of wellness food is: it shouldn’t look like food. You might recognize some elements of the food as food, but there should be plausible deniability—they could just as easily be not-food. Those zucchini ribbons could be part of a floral arrangement. The raw cacao might be mulch; the kelp appears freshly plucked from a reef. It’s key to avoid any association with consumption. These dishes can and should be savored, as one might savor the feeling of a spring breeze across the skin.
The taquito! It’s a tiny dream in a tortilla — simplicity incarnate, endlessly amenable. Hardly as ubiquitous as its sibling the taco, and slightly less elaborate than the sauced enchilada, it can come smothered in queso fresco and lettuce, if that’s how you’d prefer it, or unadorned in a paper wrap, or spread atop smoking pastel plates.
Robert Selby’s The Kentish Rebellion is a rare feat of poetry: a book-length sequence of forgotten history, conveyed in a mosaic of events and personages, cinematic in its high-definition detail, and daringly anachronistic in ways that make pertinent the past. As a playwright as well as a poet, I find myself contemplating the dramaturgical elements at play in a collection that invokes the three-act structure of stage and screen: a “Prelude” of nine poems, setting the scene and lighting the fuse; an “Interlude” that does not serve as an interval in the theatrical sense but as an escalatory immersion in the mind of a murderous fanatic; and a third-act eruption of the Royalist rebellion in the county of Kent in England in 1648. This dramatic structure constitutes the book’s compelling, propulsive engine.
In her new memoir, “George,” Frieda Hughes rarely mentions her famous parents, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. But their absence — in life and art — underscores this poignant and often funny story about, of all things, her relationship with a magpie.
Yes, a magpie. That loud, often destructive animal many consider a pest — and a close relation to the crow, a bird that, perhaps coincidentally, was the subject of a collection of poems by Ted Hughes (“When Crow cried his mother’s ear/ Scorched to a stump”).
One of the store’s grandest items, a 16th century marriage bed, has inspired See’s 12th novel, “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women.” Based on the history of a young noblewoman, Tan Yunxian, who receives training as a physician from her maternal grandparents, the novel depicts Lady Tan inheriting the large, intricate bed from her mother. Such beds, which featured numerous “rooms” and compartments, also had space at the foot for a servant’s sleeping roll.
See and her cousins would play in and around the bed, which still resides at the family store. “At the end of the day, three of the four brothers and my great aunt, who all worked there together, would sit in an alcove right off the front door and have a drink and snacks and tell stories. They were pretty incredible storytellers, and they had a group of artist friends who included Tyrus Wong and Benji Okubo, and everyone was always trying to one-up each other.” These long afternoons did more than spark See’s interest in Chinese culture — they meant she was part of that culture.
Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing computer terminal (similar to an electric typewriter) connected to an IBM 360 mainframe located across campus in New York state. Almost none of them had ever used a computer before, let alone a computer-based information retrieval system. Their hands trembled as they touched the keyboard; several later reported that they had been afraid of breaking the entire system as they typed.
The participants were performing their first online searches, entering carefully chosen words to find relevant psychology abstracts in a brand-new database. They typed one key term or instruction per line, like ‘Motivation’ in line 1, ‘Esteem’ in line 2, and ‘L1 and L2’ in line 3 in order to search for papers that included both terms. After running the query, the terminal produced a printout indicating how many documents matched each search; users could then narrow down or expand that search before generating a list of article citations. Many users burst into laughter upon seeing the response from a computer so far away.
Traditionally, a chef in a fine dining establishment didn’t have to worry about being watched. While cooks at lunch counters and street stalls whipped up meals in full view of paying customers, at finer establishments the work was obscured. Perhaps a customer could glimpse the line through a swinging kitchen door, but the peace and civility of the dining room was sacrosanct.
The opening of Spago in 1982 changed all that: Its open kitchen concept, which displayed chef Wolfgang Puck and his team grilling fresh tuna or sauteing crimini mushrooms, was half of the reason you went. Since then, the trend has infiltrated the restaurant industry at all levels: Not only have fine dining restaurants come to embrace the open kitchen, but fast-casual eating is all but defined by the act of watching your Chipotle burrito or Cava bowl being made to your specifications. No matter where you are, you can watch the kitchen action, which changes everything from how a line cook must approach their job to how designers create restaurant spaces. And most importantly, how all of us wind up approaching how we eat.
It's convenient to slot Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans, along with his debut novel Real Life, into the campus novel category.
But his latest book is more than this. It evokes Milan Kundera's astute observation in Immortality that the pursuit of a meaningful calling in today's world is nearly impossible due to the burdens of history and sociopolitical barriers to access.
“Is fire alive?” the journalist and author John Vaillant asks early in his new book, “Fire Weather.” I rolled my eyes, even as Vaillant ticks off a dozen lifelike characteristics — it grows, it breathes, it travels in search of nourishment — because the answer seemed so obvious: No. Of course not.
Some 300 pages later, the question didn’t feel quite so ludicrous.
The way we dress is a fundamental expression of identity: Garments function as indicators of aesthetic tastes, cultural values and social status. For Anne Sykes, an Englishwoman who documented her wardrobe nearly 200 years ago, her clothes are her legacy.
“The Dress Diary” paints a vivid portrait of 19th-century life through the lens of this personal sartorial history. Its entries are not composed of words, but rather, pieces of fabric — over 2,000 textile fragments in a bound album, which, after a stint in a Camden market stall and decades in storage, came into the possession of the fashion historian Kate Strasdin. Instantly, she knew she had found something extraordinary.
But in what sort of situation might a plant experience surprise? In “Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence,”Paco Calvo, writing with Natalie Lawrence, emphasizes that we must ask questions of this nature if we are ever to understand plants’ awareness and their subjective experiences of the world. Calvo asserts that plants do take in the “mismatch between expectation and experience” that amounts to surprise.
In her new book North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac, Carolyn addresses her students directly, reminding them that this is what academia, or at least literature, can be: a platter of gifts, a realm at once generative and gentle. “Eat the mythical foods,” she writes, “discuss poetry and Greek mythology and Italian renaissance paintings, the whole world yours and all its jeweled fruits.” Graduate school opened those horizons up for us, at least in those early days, and Carolyn seemed more prepared than most to receive the instruction.
In my new book, American Childhood, wherever I could, I tried to pick pictures and artifacts that gave insight into what the child saw, to look at life through the eyes of children—that is, not the childhood as imagined by adults, nor childhood as remembered by adults looking back on their own pasts. But while that is an interesting idea to contemplate, it proved to be an impossibly neat and ultimately unrealistic filter, since in most cases, adults took the pictures I included.
Try though we might to elicit it from them, children do not have the expressive skills to communicate what they are experiencing. Actually, let me go over that again. Try though we might to elicit it from them, we adults, by being adults, have lost the special sauce that lets us see and hear and respond to the expressive gestures that children are making all the time.
Out in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 100 kilometers off the northwest coast of Africa, lies an archipelago known as the Canary Islands, created millions of years ago by intense volcanic activity. The biggest and most populated island, Tenerife, rises from the deep-ocean floor to a series of peaks, one of which is the third-largest volcano in the world. Tenerife’s interior highlands are a moonscape, while its coastline of lava rock and sheer cliffs is pounded by surf. In contrast to most of the island’s stark geology, north of the island’s capital, Santa Cruz, is a long crescent-shaped beach of soft yellow sand, with groves of palm trees and a calm bay created by a long breakwater. This is Playa de las Teresitas, a magnet for northern European tourists craving winter sun.
But most of the people sunbathing on Teresitas are likely unaware of what lurks in the shallow waters lapping the shoreline. The bay—engineered and less than 10 kilometers from the Canaries’ second-largest city—is a surprising haven for pups of one of the world’s most critically endangered fish: the angelshark.
Key to the book’s success is the breadth of generational experience that Murray’s imagination seems so smoothly to inhabit. He’s convincing whether he’s writing about the sexual recklessness of a midlife crisis, awkward schoolboys hunched over their consoles or teenage girls out on the lash. And he’s also a demon plotter – tying up any number of dangled threads in a nail-biting finale centred on Dickie’s involvement with a doomsday prepper encouraging him to build an underground bunker.
There are not too many whys either in Daniel Finkelstein’s powerful and beautifully written new book, which tells the story of how his Jewish parents lived through the Holocaust, as European civilisation was ripped apart by nazism and communism in the 1930s and 40s.
Finkelstein, a Times columnist and member of the House of Lords, isn’t trying to explain why these utopian ideologies arose. His preoccupation is on the who and how: “…how the great forces of history crashed down in a terrible wave on two happy families; how it tossed them and turned them, and finally returned what was left to dry land”.
Species discoveries can be joyous occasions, but not in this case. Eastern African forests have nearly disappeared in the past century, and neither bee species has been spotted in surveys conducted in the area since the 1990s, notes the entomologist Michael Engel, a co-author of the discovery paper who recently moved from a position at the University of Kansas to the American Museum of Natural History. Given that these social bees are usually abundant, the people looking for insects likely hadn’t simply missed them. Sometime in the past 50 to 60 years, Engel suspects, the bees vanished along with their habitat.
“It seems trivial on a planet with millions of species to sit back and go, ‘Okay, well, you documented two stingless bees that were lost,’” Engel says. “But it’s really far more troubling than that,” he adds, because scientists are recognizing more and more that extinction is “a very common phenomenon.”
Just to give you one early measure of this often wonderful book: it contains a tour de force chapter about paruresis or ‘shy bladder syndrome’; that is, the inability to urinate in public places of any kind. The fact that Adam Gopnik (who suffers from the condition) works this material into a rumination on how and why we master skills like drawing, driving, baking, boxing, and more tells you about his agility as a writer and a thinker. A phobia, he says, is “a kind of black-mass parody of accomplishment, a memorial to anti-mastery that, tragically, to the one enclosed within, looks more impressive than the positive kind”.
How do we accept the world for what it is, when nothing seems acceptable? Therein lies the trick of this novel, its slow magic wrought through small, accumulative moments. We sit in Tom’s consciousness and experience his own hardship softening, but never in the way we expect. This is a testament to Dubus’s talents. Every guess I had, even when — especially when — I thought I knew where the story was going, was wrong. Dubus kept surprising me, as did Tom.
Some of the most iconic and treasured pieces of art are the works from Tiffany & Co. At the end of the 19th century, these creations slowly entered the world, rousing the dreams of a new art movement while catching the cautious eye of conservative critics. Tiffany’s glass mosaics and various creations portrayed a different and breathtaking genre of artistic talent.
But what about the lives of those workers who labored under this genius? What did they think as they helped to assemble the works that would captivate the world?
In the early ’90s, shortly before he helped think up Snopes, the first (and favorite) website for fact-checks, and way before he was banished from the very thing he’d helped build, David Mikkelson was quite a character on message boards. He wasn’t looking for love necessarily, but it found him nonetheless.
“A lot of people thought it was made up,” said Dr. Brusatte, a professor at the University of Edinburgh. “They thought it was filmmakers trying to do something crazy.”
Far from crazy, feathered dinosaurs have become a well-established fact, thanks largely to a trove of remarkable fossils that have been unearthed in northeast China since the mid-1990s. Now Dr. Brusatte and other paleontologists are trying to determine exactly how feathered dinosaurs achieved powered flight and became the birds that fly overhead today — an evolutionary mystery that stretches more than 150 million years.
Many of the visitors who do venture here stay at one of the few lodgings in town: the World Famous Clown Motel. It’s hard to miss. A pair of 20-foot-tall wooden clowns surveil the parking lot. A pink and powder-blue post topped with a brightly lit juggling clown beckons motorists in (or warns them off). Known as “the scariest motel in America,” it’s said to be haunted. It may well be.
I came here in January, wanting to learn more about why America — my adopted home for 16 years — so strangely and uniquely fetishizes its brutal past. Nowhere is this more true than in the American West, and nowhere have I seen it better epitomized than in Tonopah.
True progress requires reckoning with the past. A plethora of recent books has revealed a much more complex story than that which many of us were taught — one of hidden figures and once-marginalized peoples whose contributions shaped our world. In “Into the Amazon,” the journalist Larry Rohter delivers an exhaustively researched account of yet another vital, challenging character generally unknown to the English-speaking world.
But in between The Shining and The Stand King published a book that complicated that image and, perhaps more than any of those others, foreshadowed the extraordinary career that was to come: Night Shift, a collection of those works from the pages of publications like Ubris and Cavalier, written back when he was a hungry comer. The tales in Night Shift are well-crafted and preternaturally fluid works of storytelling, with a master’s sense of structure and suspense. They also are the earliest evidence of King’s greatest gift: his twisted and seemingly inexhaustible imagination.
Yet, Scream did not tell me about anything called “film studies”—at least not right away. Instead, the film champions a celebration of pop-culture authority outside the university. The fanboy’s objects of expertise, mode of delivery, and “insider” audience are positioned as a rebellious, resentful resistance to the oppressive posture of the intellectual. Scream was written by Kevin Williamson, who used his exhaustive familiarity with the horror films of the 1980s to write a new one. Williamson might have been aware of film studies as a discipline (he had transitioned to screenwriting while studying at UCLA) but Scream is notably silent on its existence. This ostensibly democratic politics was noted by the late, great film critic Roger Ebert, who wrote that the film “is self-deconstructing”; he explains that deconstruction “is an academic word. It means saying what everybody knows about the movies in words nobody can understand.” Ebert was being derisive, but he had delivered an item of importance to me: the “academic word.” Reading and rereading his review over a dial-up connection, I slowly understood that the study of films was not only for fanboys in the movies—maybe it was already happening.
A cover is all about disclosure. A cover may encase a book but its purpose is to encourage readers to pry open its pages. A cover is as much an invitation as it is a revelation. This I’ve long understood in the abstract, but it wasn’t until the design proofs for my own came in that I realized just how literal that would feel. With its warm orange-yellow hue staring back at me, The Male Gazed cover was an arresting reminder that I’d written an entire book about desire and masculinity (there was a male torso on full display asking you to lust after it) filtered through my own experience (there was that “taught me” line in the magenta-colored subtitle right atop my own bolded name). All of this gave me pause: if every cover is a promise, I realized that what I’d be asking of my readers was precisely the kind of welcome ogling my prose dissected through its many chapters. On a more frivolous note, that image of a shirtless man wearing only a chain around his neck made me uneasy for a wholly different reason: I knew close friends would inquire whether, narcissist that I can sometimes be, I had posed for my own cover.
A quarter-mile below the ocean’s surface, in the borderless realm of the midwater, two blue-green orbs illuminate the inky black. They glow for a few seconds then disappear. When they return, it’s for the same duration. The same disappearance. It’s a signal, a message, the morse code of an ancient language of light.
Wait … healthy doughnuts? Surely not. Everyone knows that doughnuts are deeply unhealthy. That’s the whole point. Take away the sugary glaze and oily smoosh of dough and what are you left with? Nothing. You’ll have to prize our sugared rings from our caramel-coated fingers. Some things are too sacred to give up.
Or maybe we don’t have to. A shake-up of food rules in the United Kingdom has sparked a new kind of doughy disruption: the quest for healthy confectionery. Or, if not healthy exactly, then at least much healthier than the fried goods currently on offer. The winds of change are blowing, and they smell a lot like delicious steam-baked dough.
So: a well-told novel of crime and detection. There are plenty of them on the market. What sets this one apart, what gives it both grit and texture, is its unerring depiction of small-town rural life and the uneasy (and sometimes violent) interactions between Charon’s white and Black citizens. Sheriff Crown finds himself in that gray area between, with a foot in both worlds. The novel gets mighty down-home Southern gothic in places — gay men passing for straight, the illegitimate child of an interracial relationship, backwoods snake-handling Jesus-shouters — but Cosby keeps his eye on the story and the pedal to the metal. He stays firmly focused on Titus, and on the town of Charon itself. For me, the reality of the locale and the people who live there lifted this story up and made it sing.
If the #EscapeTheCorset protesters are engaged in “a general strike against aesthetic labor,” as Hu so wisely writes, what exactly are their demands? Most striking laborers do not aim to abolish the workplace but to reform it. How can beauty be rewritten so that it frees rather than fetters? What will women ask for when at last they have a chance to negotiate for better terms?
By removing the human perspective from the narration, “Open Throat” proposes a deceptively simple equation that exposes us for who we are: vulnerable, reckless beings who worship “green paper,” talk into wires and have rendered the natural world unlivable. More important, the novel introduces a tender, unforgettable protagonist. Though many readers will label “Open Throat” unconventional, this act of ravishing and outlandish imagination should be the norm, not the exception. At its best, fiction can make the familiar strange in order to bring readers and our world into scintillating focus. “Open Throat” is what fiction should be.
Maybe it's because so many of us were separated from one another during the height of the pandemic, or that during that time we grew accustomed to socializing less, working from home and staying in — but it seems people are craving connection now more than ever. Rowley's “The Celebrants” is not only a reminder of that, but a salve. Treat yourself, read this book, and call an old friend.
Notes on Her Color is not only a debut novel by Jennifer Neal, but also a musical composition. Each word is a note carefully considered before being etched onto the page with the hope of bringing art to life and feelings to the surface.
A memoir that celebrates as much as it grieves, rages and broods, Jane Wong’s “Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City” charts its author’s progress from the casinos of New Jersey to the college dorms of Upstate New York, to Hong Kong and Iowa and finally Bellingham, Wash., where she now teaches creative writing at Western Washington University. Composed of 12 linked essays separated by shorter, lyrical interludes on topics ranging from cyberfeminist search engines to dragon fruit to “guts,” the book catalogues the highs and lows of the literary life, turning over, at length, the joys of acceptance, the ache of rejection, the ecstasy of professional recognition and the sting of casual racism in the field. It reminds readers to treasure the fruits of their labor, as well as the support systems that make success possible.
Historians are in the business of digging stories out of the archives. But in “My Hijacking,” published June 6 by Harper, Hodes also goes digging through her own recollections. The book is the story of a dramatic and politically charged event, but also an exploration of trauma and memory, the relationship between our older and younger selves and the connection between personal experience and capital-H history.
Consider what Rudnick offers almost without comment: the comparatively rare opportunity to spend decades watching two men navigate love. Like so much of the author’s work in other media — the play “Jeffrey,” the film “In and Out” — “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” seems less interested in serving as a gay museum piece than as a filigreed statement.
Turn your gaze, it beckons, and you’ll see we were more than simply here; we made this place beautiful.
The book is by turns affirming and hopeful, and heartbreaking. It includes stories of those who have learned to cope with difficult experiences and those who have found pride in their identities, as well as those who have experienced homelessness, discrimination and early death. It is an intense read. But Scott’s vivid voice, which threads a friendly authority throughout the multiplicity of stories and research, makes this essential book remarkably approachable.
The question one bumps up against these days, when reading about any of the multitude of environmental crises hurtling toward us, is an old one: What is to be done? Also: Will this book/movie/video/blog/podcast make a difference? The Gyllenhaals, longtime journalists (and bird lovers), want their book to be a wake-up call, and I hope it is. People need to know that the animals they live closest to, apart from their own pets, are in dire need of our help.
Despite the stakes, “A Wing and a Prayer” is no jeremiad. The authors tour the country in their refurbished Airstream, and like the retirees they are, calmly and competently report their observations.
He’s not so absorbed in the life around him
That he never looks up on clear nights
To admire the starry face of the sky.