Cassie Bongiovanni’s favorite way to show people just how little we know about the seafloor is to open the mapping software on her computer and strip the world map down to what we do know about the seafloor. “You can see why this whole mapping thing is important,” she said with a laugh as she showed me the process one day over Zoom. “Because there’s nothing here! This is why. This is the big picture. There is no big picture!” The effect was startling. In an instant, the map went from a rich three-dimensional tapestry of underwater mountains, trenches, and canyons to flat, white nothing. That was especially true in deep waters outside national jurisdiction.
One of the most enduring mysteries within archaeology revolves around the identity of Punt, an otherworldly “land of plenty” revered by the ancient Egyptians. Punt had it all—fragrant myrrh and frankincense, precious electrum (a mixed alloy of gold and silver) and malachite, and coveted leopard skins, among other exotic luxury goods.
Despite being a trading partner for over a millennium, the ancient Egyptians never disclosed Punt’s exact whereabouts except for vague descriptions of voyages along what’s now the Red Sea. That could mean anywhere from southern Sudan to Somalia and even Yemen.
Just off Australia’s largest container port lies a sickle-shaped neighborhood with a scent so distinctive that passing taxi drivers will sometimes roll down their windows for a whiff of the rich and unmistakably beery aroma.
That smell, officially recognized by the City of Melbourne last year for its “intangible cultural heritage,” emanates from a nondescript, brick factory on a corner lot in this industrial district, known as Port Melbourne. Every vessel of Vegemite, the spread beloved in Australia and not so much outside it, has for the past 80 years begun its journey here.
More so than many of the plot points that tend to get recycled from situational comedy to situational comedy, it shines a really direct light on the gap between the messy chaos that can be real life and the image of a “perfect” holiday sold to us year after year, as well as the hidden domestic labor that makes up the ample space in between. Typically, it’s also done in such a way that the message is — well, digestible in 30 minutes or less.
About halfway through Lydia Davis’s latest collection – that is, in the 74th of 144 stories sardined into just 368 pages – a woman shows her husband the story she’s been working on. He doesn’t like it, telling her “there was no beginning, no end, and no plot”. Let’s hope he doesn’t read the other 143.
Besides a glimpse into book-selling, this book is likely to spark a greater conversation on burnout and a hyper-competitive work culture, with snappy quotable bits that tap the zeitgeist of the overworked.
Reading while hungry is not a predicament known to Dwight Garner, because, as he tells us in “The Upstairs Delicatessen,” his winning new book, he cannot read without also eating, and, as a book critic for the Times, he reads quite a bit. The association between these two sustaining pleasures began long ago, during his boyhood in West Virginia and Florida. Garner takes a good hard look in memory’s mirror and tells us what he sees: “a soft kid, inclined toward embonpoint, ‘husky’ in the department-store lingo, a brown-eyed boy with chafing thighs.” Riding his bicycle home from school beneath the blazing Gulf Coast sun, “sizzled crisp and pink with sweat,” he sounds fairly edible himself.