“There’s a point in the movie where the Kens are riding invisible horses from their beach battle to the Mojo Dojo Casa Houses,” Gerwig told me — a Mojo Dojo Casa House is like a Barbie Dreamhouse, but for Kens — “and I think to myself, every time: Why did they let us do this?” It was late May, less than two months until the movie’s theatrical release, and Gerwig was putting in long hours on finishing touches, shuttling between postproduction facilities in Manhattan. Still, the very fact of the movie’s existence continued to puzzle and delight her. Why did they let her do this?
The answer seems so obvious now. Mattel, Warner Brothers and the producers let Greta Gerwig make “Barbie” so that exactly what is currently happening would happen. So that the fizzy marriage of filmmaker and material would break though the cacophony of contemporary life and return a retirement-age hunk of plastic to the zeitgeist. So that Mattel, in particular, could rocket-launch its grand ambitions to become a proto-Disney and announce the activation of its entire intellectual-property back catalog with a fuchsia splash. So that Barbie stans and Barbie agnostics alike would find themselves bombarded by paparazzi snaps of Margot Robbie, as Barbie, and Ryan Gosling, as Ken, dressed in matching, radioactively vivid Rollerblading outfits — plus “Barbie” trailers, #Barbiecore TikToks and wall-to-wall Barbie tie-ins. They wanted Gerwig, with her indie bona fides, feminist credentials and multiple Oscar nominations, to use her credibility to make this multibillion-dollar platinum-blond I.P. newly relevant, delivering a very, very, very pink summer blockbuster that acknowledges Barbie’s baggage, unpacks that baggage and, also, sells that baggage. (The designer-luggage company Béis now offers a Barbie collection.) They wanted Gerwig to burnish Barbie. But why, exactly, did Gerwig want to do that?
It is through the ritual of cooking and eventually writing—the two are very closely related for Johnson—that she begins to see the recipe as a text every bit as worthy of serious attention as other forms of academic study. Drawing on the work of feminist scholar and activist Silvia Federici, Johnson proposes that “in writing about the recipe, I am writing about a form of knowledge that is often denied the status of knowledge,” work that, like much women’s work in the home, has often gone unacknowledged. Keenly aware of the assumptions that have informed so much writing about food, Johnson seeks to restore cooking to its rightful place as a form of knowledge—one through which pleasure, desire, and resistance can be expressed.
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Naturally, Johnson begins to draw parallels between the many ways of translating an epic poem and the making and unmaking of a recipe. In other words, she sees recipe writing as a mode of translation: from the act of cooking—the carrettieri making their tomato sauce, for example—into the pages of a cookbook, which tells its own kind of story. Then the recipe enters a second act: from the cookbook into another kitchen where it has “infinite potential translators.” The recipe is neither the origin nor the final form of the dish. It allows for endless interpretations, which if you’re cooking the same thing over and over can be liberating.
For decades, scientists, engineers, and dreamers have worked to develop technologies that can radically expand our presence outside the Solar System. But they all face one enormous challenge: the brain-breaking enormity of the cosmos. Sustained interstellar travel is simply beyond the means of our technology, and any reasonable projection of anything we’ll develop over the next few generations.
Thankfully, that doesn’t mean our space dreams are dead. We’ll have to learn to love the one we’re with and stop looking beyond to impossible frontiers and instead turn our curious eyes and minds to the wonders and mysteries of our own Solar System.
Earth, in most renderings, is a smooth sphere with a glossy complexion—a blue marble, as pictures snapped from space have shown us. Earth scientists know that’s not exactly true. Earth, in fact, is an ellipsoid, a little bit squashed at the poles and fat around the equator, not to mention speckled with mountain ranges. And then you have the geoid people—the ones who think of Earth less as an imperfect sphere and more as a lumpy potato.
There are twenty-five words typed on the card on the wall, five rows of five, all nouns: “Ball,” “Tree,” “Dog,” etc. I read the words out loud one by one, first unaccompanied, then along with a metronome at 80 beats per minute, then again at 100. I read the first and the last word of each line at 80, then the second and the second-to-last. Now I hold an identical card and read all twenty-five words, alternating between the card in my hand and the card on the wall. At 80. At 100. I read the first word of each line on the card in my hand and the last on the card on the wall. At 100. Again, backward. I read the words on the card on the wall along with the metronome standing on a mat that throws my feet off balance. Now I focus my vision on the word in the center of the card on the wall: “Dog.” I shake my head back and forth along with the metronome, at 80 beats per minute. Dog. Dog. Dog. The tempo increases to 100 again. The word comes in and out of focus. Dog. Dog. Dog. Thirty seconds. Finally, I stop. I sit down and close my eyes.
Ideal summer reading, “Goodbye Earl” is the kind of story you want to tell all your friends about because the content is heavy enough to need to vent it out, but the narration is light enough to merit gossip. Cross-Smith’s incredible, easy voice will make your skin crawl one moment and give you goose bumps the next, then smooth out your frazzled emotions with a contented, sunshiny vibe two pages later.
What do you do when your writing career lasts seven decades but you haven’t said everything you once thought about saying? If you’re John McPhee, you crack open your notebooks and give fans a taste of the stories you never wrote.
I’d Rather Not is a slim volume of autobiographical essays in which Skinner sets out in episodic fashion, some of the trials and (mis)adventures of his life, but this is no misery memoir that wallows in self-pity, with a rousing morale at the end that champions resilience atop a scrap heap. Mercifully free of existential angst, he’s amiable and charming, able to make you both commiserate with and laugh at his misfortunes and missteps.
The scariest thing about the heat-infused future, Goodell notes, is that we don’t treat it with the respect and concern that it deserves. When the heat rises, plants, animals and people die. But the coronavirus pandemic has showed just how much death and destruction a society can accept. Suffering and death “will become part of what it means to live in the twenty-first century,” he writes. “Something we accept.”