Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their usage.
“We don’t really know how many books it is,” says Michael Adams, a lexicographer and chair of the English department at Indiana University Bloomington. More than 1,500 boxes, with vague labels such as “Kripke documents” or “Kripke: 17 books,” arrived at the school’s Lilly Library on two tractor-trailers in late 2021. The delivery was accompanied by a nearly 2,000-page catalog detailing some 6,000 volumes. But that’s only a fraction of the total. In summer 2023, the library hired a group of students to simply open each box and list its contents. By the fall, their count stood at about 9,700. “And they’ve got a long way to go,” says Adams. “20,000 sounds like a pretty good estimate.”
There is no reason and no way to keep politics out of art, or artists out of politics. But these are different realms, and the values of one can be inhospitable—even deadly—to the values of the other. Climb down from the ivory tower, traverse the frontier, approach the crossroads, but be aware that artists can perish there.
Why isn’t the universe boring? It could be. The number of subatomic particles in the universe is about 1080, a 1 with 80 zeros after it. Scatter those particles at random, and the universe would just be a monotonous desert of sameness, a thin vacuum without any structure much larger than an atom for billions of light-years in any direction. Instead, we have a universe filled with stars and planets, canyons and waterfalls, pine trees and people. There is an exuberant plenty to nature. But why is any of this stuff here?
I want to tell you where aliens come from — not which galaxy or dimension, but rather how humans, over the past few centuries, have come to conceive of extraterrestrial life. But before we start, we must briefly note that there are already a few very good reasons to be sceptical of recent reports of encounters with alien beings. This is not at all to say that such beings do not exist, but only that the presumptions behind reported encounters almost always reveal a strong terrestrial bias: an inability to imagine the real conditions, imposed by the universe itself, on any potential interstellar voyage.
But the birds’ attachment to us now seems to be transforming into a liability. With the birds facing more dangers in the natural world, their need for human-made homes has grown. At the same time, experts told me, fervor for building and maintaining martin birdhouses appears to be waning, especially as those most enthusiastic about the practice continue to age and die. The martins’ dependence on our structures is, at its heart, a dependence on our behavior. Their precarious housing situation is now many experts’ “No. 1 concern,” Grisham told me—and it threatens to hasten the species’ decline.
“Oh, you want to know how you can support disability justice? MAKE SOMEONE A POT OF SOUP!” my friend William Maria Rain, a true disability justice OG, yelled at the audience at a disability justice panel at the D Center at the University of Washington, circa 2014 or so. Someone had probably been wringing their hands during the Q&A and timidly asking, “Um, what’s a good way to help the disabled community?” William made the answer very plain: You help disabled people by making sure we’re not dying of starvation in our apartments.
The only problem with Michael Cunningham’s prose is that it ruins you for mere mortals’ work. He is the most elegant writer in America.
Admittedly, elegance doesn’t carry much cachet these days when Important Novels are supposed to make strident social arguments that we already agree with. But in the presence of truly beautiful writing, a kind of magic vibrates off the page.
Where should we look to find women in history: to their global movements, their local meetings, their lives, or their ideas? In her new book, Jenni Nuttall departs from these familiar approaches, instead mining women’s past through vocabulary about their sex. A nimble treatment of history that blends lexicographical analysis with personal reflections, Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words makes the case that “women’s words”—in their specificity, their peculiarity, and their ambiguity—reveal new dimensions of long-ago eras and shed useful light on our own time.