In “The Parenthood Dilemma: Procreation in the Age of Uncertainty,” (Astra), Gina Rushton portrays her own ambivalence toward becoming a mother—and the ambivalence among millennial and Gen Z women more generally—as the result of a complex and extremely familiar interplay of factors. These include not only climate anxiety but also financial constraints, the demands of work and career, health risks (and the gross racial disparities that go with them), sexism (and the racism that compounds it), and a persistent imbalance in the division of domestic and emotional labor in heterosexual partnerships. Rushton, a writer on reproductive health who is based in Australia, had resolved to remain child-free. Then, one day, she found herself in an emergency room, in the throes of excruciating abdominal pain, signing a consent form to allow a doctor to remove one of her ovaries. “I don’t want kids, you know I don’t want kids,” Rushton kept telling her boyfriend and her mother, and yet she was saddened and panicked by the prospect of her fertility being compromised. (In the end, the ovary was saved.) She felt free in her choice until, all at once, it no longer seemed hers to make.
We might enjoy a hard puzzle but abhor a puzzle with pieces missing. Today’s consciousness science has more pieces than it did 25 years ago. But there is reason to think that key pieces are still missing, turning an intellectual puzzle into an intractable problem. To see why, we have to revisit the assumptions that launched the field of consciousness research.
The problem is that everyone in Paris basically seemed to think more nature was good. But no one ever actually said what meant by “nature” in the first place. What they meant by this term was, I guess, what most people mean by it: green things, trees, parks, birds, open space, clean air. This was never actually said, though, and so I was left wondering. We’re all convinced that there’s something wrong with contemporary city life. We’re equally all convinced—I think—that much of what’s wrong has to do somehow with an absence of nature. And that absence seems to go in two directions. On the one hand, there’s not enough natural stuff in cities—too few trees, not enough otters. On the other hand, a kind of unnatural way of living has taken hold among city people—too much sitting in air-conditioned buildings, too much concrete, too much stress and speed. All of this, I think, is fairly uncontroversial.
The bricks are made of what is known as qu—which sounds like “choo,” but with a lovely softness—a sort of coral reef teeming with desiccated microorganisms, enzymes, moulds and yeasts that will spring into action in the presence of water, ready to unleash themselves on all kinds of foods, especially those that are starchy. The Japanese, who learned about qu from China, call it koji ; it’s sometimes translated into English as “ferment.” When awakened, all these microorganisms will magically transform cooked beans, rice and other cereals, unravelling their tight-knit starches into simple sugars, then fermenting the sugars into alcohol, meanwhile spinning off a whole aurora of intriguing flavors. It is qu that converts soybeans into soy sauce and jiang. Qu is the catalyst for fermenting alcoholic drinks from rice, millet and other cereals, as well as grain vinegars. It’s no exaggeration to say that qu is one of the keys to what makes Chinese food Chinese.
Obviously, this occurred long before our current world where every film ever made is at your fingertips with algorithmic suggestions that make actual DVDs seem like a quaint and dusty relic akin to a gramophone. And it was quaint and dusty. You used to put all of the films you wanted to see into a list that Netflix dubbed the “queue.” Even at the time the word was redolent of some Victorian past in which each film waited decorously in line to be seen — such a calm, orderly concept. Its Britishness called to mind a magical Mary Poppins who would keep everything neat and tidy.
But the queue quickly became much more — a kind of running commentary on the state of my life. Much like books, the number of films I wanted to see far outran the number of films I had time to watch. But the beauty of Netflix was that it could keep track of all of those films for me until the queue itself became a kind of biography of the various phases of my life.
I’m not saying I deserve a life of ease. But I worked hard to earn my retirement, dropping giant chunks of my salary into company and government pension plans throughout those forty years. It’s time for the famous social contract to hold up its end of the bargain and take care of me, the way it did my father before me, to deliver on the idea that retirement is my right after a life of work and the promise that I will have the time and means to enjoy it.
Except none of that happened. The year since my retirement party has not been a dreamy passage to a welcoming future but a nerve-shattering trip into the unknown. My debt is swelling like a broken ankle; my hard-won savings may or may not be sucked into the vortex of an international market collapse. Can I keep my house? Who knows? The macroeconomy is messing with my microeconomy. The future keeps shape-shifting. And none of the careful planning I put into my retirement is going to change that.
“This Is Salvaged” is a collection of short fiction united by a singular question: In a world defined by estrangement, where do we find communion?
Though she never had the opportunity to describe all her sadnesses to her grandmother, it was her grandmother’s model — her love of the written and spoken word, and her unremitting support — that brought Savage to the book in which she finally unburdens herself. “Writing was how she communicated with God,” she explains. “Like Granny, I feel closest to God when I am writing.”
Being a gamer is not a cost of entry into “Critical Hits,” which emerges as a fresh deviation from stale debates about ludology, or the status of games as art, or the status of writing about games as some trite negligibility. Here instead is an array of arguments for how games structure our behavior and perception of the world around us. Lennon and Machado have emboldened a discourse on how we are learning to live among games in thought and deed, at the very least, one player at a time.