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