It was 15:37 (GMT) on a Thursday afternoon when we officially ran out of ideas. The request from the editors had been bouncing around for a couple of weeks: We need to write about the clocks going back. We’d groaned and tried to ignore it, but it kept resurfacing. Like time itself, the need was eternal.
If you’re not in the digital publishing business you might not know this, but people absolutely love reading articles about the clocks changing. They are routinely among the biggest performing stories on the site, and perhaps the purest distillation of how web traffic works in 2023: Find something that people are Googling and write about it so that when they Google it, they’ll click on it.
The human eye can perceive about 1 million colors, but languages have far fewer words to describe those colors. So-called basic color terms, single color words used frequently by speakers of a given language, are often employed to gauge how languages differ in their handling of color. Languages spoken in industrialized nations such as the United States, for example, tend to have about a dozen basic color terms, while languages spoken by more isolated populations often have fewer.
However, the way that a language divides up color space can be influenced by contact with other languages, according to a new study from MIT.
It is a mystery how things come to belong to us and even more why from certain things it is impossible to part, but I see now, thinking back on that time, that the sofa provided, for me, a kind of liminal space, a place that marked, that autumn, where I was—in between things—between being the daughter of my father who despite our periods of estrangement had towered over my childhood, a man who was soon, so mysteriously, not to be; the sofa, with its plucked-out embroidery, like a bench in a train station waiting room, where I sat, turned to stone, waiting for a silence to reverberate.
If ever there was a book fit to be called American Pastoral, this is it. Daniel Mason chose instead for his title, the plain monosyllables, North Woods.
The novel takes place at a “yellow house in the north woods” and it is through these two phenomena, the habitation and the forest, that the story of modern America is told.
Hunter’s new book, “Hot Springs Drive,” tells the story of two women — Jackie Stinson and Theresa Linden — and the events that lead to Theresa’s being killed in the garage of her suburban home. Their story, although one not uncommon in the genre, is uniquely told through a combination of lovely prose, relentless character study, and a twisting combination of lust and tension.
London this early September, where I read and am writing about Lindsay Turner’s The Upstate (2023), is oddly verdant—obscene, almost, in its greenery. The summer was wet; where last year’s drought heralded an unprecedented false autumn, our abundant plane trees turning prematurely brown and brittle in the wake of our first-ever 40-degree day (104 Fahrenheit), the city today is “a rainbow of green” to quote Turner’s poem “A Bad Spring.” With its record rainfall, we’ve had what might once have blithely been called “a bad summer,” except that in 2023 no one really knows what that looks like, or means, anymore; only that nothing feels right. While I’m writing this, a last-gasp heat wave has descended on the city and our skins are warm again, but I can’t stop thinking about the four ill-omened lines that comprise Turner’s “Superstition”: “red sky whenever / whatever the weather / red sky at all times / will all the rhymes fail.” We are, as she writes in “Poem,” “in the teeth of the forces we made.”