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?