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.