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.