This is not a Hallmark movie. There are plenty of people who want to move on from the past and with good reason. Not everyone is drinking chardonnay around a fire pit with their third-grade bestie. But, for so many, legacy friends know the backstory and the current story; there’s an automatic shorthand that makes reconnection — and ego-bursting — easier.
Cutting irony and whimsical imagination and linguistic acrobatics all have their place, but don’t underestimate the elemental power of a story that takes the reader inside the mind and heart of a good and decent man caught in a helpless situation. It’s valuable to see how Tom gradually comes to terms with how his life went irrevocably askew for reasons that were both under his control and not, which is the anxious balance of how life is really lived.
Happy endings (or beginnings) don’t make for good fiction, as the Indonesian writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu knows well. But Pasaribu doesn’t want to give readers sob stories either, especially about their chosen subject: queer life in Indonesia. Instead, their debut collection, Happy Stories, Mostly, is written in a playful, tragicomic tone. The 12 stories in the book document the difficulty of queer lives, especially of gay men, in modern Indonesia. The plots may be propelled by tragedy, but no one—gay or straight—is reduced to or defined by trauma. Pasaribu treats their characters like friends, to be listened to and laughed at in equal measure. Even when the stories are sad, as they often are, Pasaribu refuses to give readers a front-row seat to gay suffering.
I’ve never set foot on sea ice, but thanks to Dominic Pingushat of Arviat, in Nunavut, Canada, I have a sense of what it feels like. “You can walk on sea ice without falling, although it will be moving like flexible plastic,” Pingushat tells us, explaining that the surface below one’s feet “moves like a wave when you walk on it, like a large plastic fabric.”
Pingushat’s words are found in one of the numerous thumbnail essays accompanying a short but beautiful collection of photographs of Arctic sea ice by Paul Souders in the book “Siku: Life on the Ice.” The images reveal a world of remarkable color, of ice illuminated by the sun, the moon, the sky and the sea. The brief stories accompanying these pictures come from people who have walked on that ice, driven snow machines, hauled sleds, hunted upon it, and sometimes encountered mishaps. For the Inuit who are Indigenous to the region, the seemingly alien frozen seascape that Souders captures so vividly is home.
Part of the problem is that the way we talk about climate action tends to emphasize nature and the nonhuman world. We think of organic produce as the “green” option and cotton tote bags as more “natural” than plastic alternatives—but when we really look at the numbers the benefits are much less clear. A hulking, high-tech nuclear power plant hardly conjures up images of bucolic hills, but nuclear energy is one of the safest and cleanest ways of producing electricity. Jumping on a crowded, dirty underground train might not bring you any closer to nature, but mass transit is one of the greenest ways to travel.
Maybe it’s time to drop the vibes-based approach to environmentalism for something a little more robust.
Burns frames the novel around a gruesome discovery in the attic of the Presbyterian church: Summoned to fix a leaky roof, the brothers find a decomposed body hidden under old choir robes. Every narrative needs a situation as well as a story (see Vivian Gornick on this matter), and Burns proves the point. Her whodunit and motive feel unimportant and, at times, unnecessarily confusing. But “Mercury” is a character-driven novel; the point isn’t the plot, but what the people enacting it reveal about themselves.
Read this as a comment on the essential human condition; perhaps even as an unlikely vehicle for escapism to a time when these cases were, at least, not a quotidian fact of public existence. Can we ever truly know what a writer has in mind? For this reader, what Cockayne has actually written is a history of that most devalued currency — privacy.
Though neither a scientist nor a professional musician, he engages thoughtfully with the world of sound in all its forms. The result is a remarkably absorbing and often charming work that may leave readers with the urge to tune in to the myriad sounds around them with renewed awareness.
When Haoran Chen immigrated to the United States from China in the early 2000s, the then-preteen grappled with the challenges of cultural assimilation and exploring his own gender identity. It wasn't until he stumbled upon the mesmerizing lyrics of Sammi Cheng's "Shocking Pink" that the transformative power of Cantopop revealed itself. The vibrant celebration of individuality in the lyrics resonated deeply with Chen's journey of self-discovery.
"Don't worry about being in the darkness / You are the brightest pink in the night / Even if you are different from the crowd, try your best to shine,” the lyrics write. Written by well-known lyricist Wyman Wong, an LGBTQ+ activist, the song became a lifeline for Chen navigating doubt and uncertainty about his identity and sexuality in his new home.
A dining infrastructure with universal omakase would make us all better, more well-rounded eaters, and I’m sure our chefs would be relieved to simply cook what’s good rather than churning out the same uninspired popular dishes over and over again.
This novel is equally delicate, intellectually and emotionally, and equally bold in its formal arrangement.
Consider the foregoing points of data as raw materials: Wiman’s great editorial talent, the range of his reading, his curatorial gift for creating a literary conversation, the depth of his grief and suffering, his plucky gifts as a writer. Smelt them into a single alloy, and you might have something that looks like his latest book, Zero at the Bone. The uniquely conceived collection of 52 essay-like fragments touches on weighty themes—life, literature, God, and language—while ultimately offering a stay against despair, a subject Wiman knows better than most.
Nonetheless, Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and philosopher who wrote the popular book Free Will (2012), insisted not only that free will is an illusion but that the concept “cannot be made conceptually coherent.” Consider it a challenge: “No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom.”
Kevin J. Mitchell answers exactly this challenge in Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. A neuroscientist and geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, Mitchell sets out to rescue our intuitive sense of agency from a cloud of obfuscation. Yes, he says, free will exists. It is neither an illusion nor merely a figure of speech. It is our essential, defining quality and as such demands explanation. “We make decisions, we choose, we act,” he declares.
Most people who ponder these things take a different view. They think the universe could in fact have been different. They think it’s puzzling that it turned out the way it did, with creatures like us in it. They are tempted by the idea that the universe has some point, some goal or meaning. In Why?, Philip Goff, professor of philosophy at Durham, argues for “cosmic purpose, the idea that the universe is directed towards certain goals, such as the emergence of life” and the existence of value.
I’m not convinced, but I’m impressed. Why? is direct, clear, open, acute, honest, companionable. It manages to stay down to earth even in its most abstract passages. I’m tempted to say, by way of praise, that it’s Liverpudlian, like its author.
Ernest Becker was already dying when “The Denial of Death” was published 50 years ago this past fall. “This is a test of everything I’ve written about death,” he told a visitor to his Vancouver hospital room. Throughout his career as a cultural anthropologist, Becker had charted the undiscovered country that awaits us all. Now only 49 but losing a battle to colon cancer, he was being dispatched there himself. By the time his book was awarded a Pulitzer Prize the following spring, Becker was gone.
These grim details may seem like the makings of a downer, to put it mildly, and another downer is the last thing anyone needs right now. But there is no gloom in “Denial,” no self-pity, not even the maudlin wisdom today’s illness memoirs have primed us to expect. A rare mind is at work, and you get to hang out in the workshop. Writing against the hardest stop of all, Becker managed to produce “a kind of cosmic pep talk,” as the literary critic Anatole Broyard put it in The New York Times.
In her fascinating new book, “The Age of Deer,” Erika Howsare considers the role deer have played in the creation of an American mythology — and how that mythology nearly led to the animal’s complete disappearance from American land. By 1900, deer had been harvested to near-extinction for their hides and their meat. States including Kansas, Vermont and Ohio had no deer at all. Fewer than 100,000 remained. Today, it’s estimated that 30 million of them live among us — enough to threaten native environments such as Catalina Island, where a controversial eradication plan is under debate.
Fluctuations in American deer populations reflect a deeper human story. “What we can say with certainty is this: for thousands of years, people and deer existed together,” Howsare writes. “And after Europeans arrived, deer nearly went extinct. Surely there was a difference not just of action, but of mind. Those deer population graphs track numbers of animals, but they also map human thought.”
Imagine a story of sex, drugs and secrets inside Downing Street. A story about a political wife accused of meddling, and a resignation honours list mired in scandal. And no, it’s not the one you’re thinking of. This is the irresistible tale of Marcia Williams, political secretary and “office wife” to the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, and if it were the plot of a thriller it would seem too wild to be true.
When Scott Frank was a child, his father, Barry, bought a small Cessna airplane, and on weekends the two of them would fly. This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, in Los Gatos, California. Barry was a Pan Am pilot, and he believed that in some lines of work, as Scott later put it, “fear is your friend.” Upon reaching an altitude of two miles, Barry would say, “Scott, if I had a heart attack right now and you had to land the plane, where would you land?” Scott would scan the horizon for a break in the trees, his heart pounding to the rhythm of the ticking clock Barry had imposed: The plane is going down. Scott was a sensitive child with a vigorous imagination, and these impromptu exercises in flight instruction were slightly traumatic. He never learned how to fly a plane himself. Instead, he became one of Hollywood’s most prolific and successful screenwriters.
Still, industrial automation did not entirely abolish handicraft. It seems hyperbolic to claim that large language models will swallow up literature. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine in November, the literary agent Andrew Wylie said he didn’t believe the work of the blue-chip authors he represents — Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Bob Dylan, among many others — “is in danger of being replicated on the back of or through the mechanisms of artificial intelligence.”
Since his job is to make money for human authors, Wylie is hardly a disinterested party, but history supports his skepticism. Mass production has always coexisted with, and enhanced the value of, older forms of craft. The old-fashioned and the newfangled have a tendency to commingle. The standardization of mediocrity does not necessarily lead to the death of excellence. It’s still possible to knit a sweater or write a sestina.
It’s comforting to hear a handful of film critics I respect say that they’re actually hopeful for the future of movies and moviegoing, but it has struck me that someone has yet to identify one of the main attributing reasons for this mass return to theaters. The Movie™ may or may not be back, but the movie musical certainly is! Quite a few of the most-anticipated and most-successful films this year are musicals, but oddly, the marketers behind these films tried to hide their musical nature from potential audiences until tickets were bought and butts were in seats. This wasn’t just the year of the musical, no—it was the year of the stealth musical.
“Music,” Victor Hugo once noted, “expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” Perhaps as a result, the artform stands, as Jeremy Eichler argues in his absorbing and eloquent book Time’s Echo, as a singularly potent force for channeling collective memory and memorialization.
Since the end of World War II, no scientific animal name has caused more of a stink than has Anophthalmus hitleri, a designation that describes a rare, amber-colored carabid beetle that dwells in a few damp caves in central Slovenia.
The problem isn’t the genus name, Anophthalmus, which denotes that, like other cave beetles living in perpetual darkness, this one has no eyes. What many zoologists find appalling is the species name, hitleri, which an Austrian bug collector bestowed upon the beetle in 1937 in homage to Hitler in spite of the leader’s ruthless and racist actions, including the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 and the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, with the Holocaust still to come.
All my life, whether I was stocking shelves at Trader Joe’s, going to pretty awning-laden Manhattan sports bars to watch the Aaron Boone–era Yankees lose another heartbreaking playoff series, or inhabiting my current mode of powerhouse hip-hop critic and amusing lifestyle writer, I’ve had a fraught relationship with money—particularly with not having enough of it, and not knowing how and where to spend it when I do. My family has always risen and fallen in class status: intermittent trips to Miami, a yawning apartment at the end of Riverside Drive that was replaced by a small spot in Riverdale. The fact is that, most of the time, my money comes from white institutions and is spent in white neighborhoods. An ex-girlfriend, whom I will always love dearly, used to tease me by calling me a 1970s Black man: “Your ideal mode of conversation is cocaine, Scorsese, Spike, Black–Jewish relations, the Knicks, Ghostface, and a white woman,” she once said. Not wrong.
Reading “Alice” will provoke strong reactions from any reader, but don’t decide what you think until it’s all over. After a gentle start, this book goes gangbusters, then has a completely unexpected and ingenious ending. It’s almost as if Blakley-Cartwright invites us to participate in a thought experiment — how the hell is this going to turn out? She gets the prize for the winning solution.
“We have too readily accepted the stereotype of supremely violent Mongols who conquered much of Eurasia with stunning ease,” Marie Favereau writes in “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World” (Harvard). Her work joins other recent volumes—Kenneth W. Harl’s “Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization” (Hanover Square), Anthony Sattin’s “Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World” (Norton), and Nicholas Morton’s “The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East” (Basic)—in a decades-long effort to overhaul narratives about the barbarity of the nomad, and especially Mongols. These works advance a kind of steppe restoration. Instead of blood-drunk man-beasts, we meet crafty administrators who supported debate, commerce, and religious freedom. Yes, they overran cities, but state formation often demanded it. And, yes, they enslaved, but so did lots of societies, and many were much crueller.
The American chestnut was, as the writer Susan Freinkel noted in her 2009 book, “a perfect tree.” Its wood housed birds and mammals; its leaves infused the soil with minerals; its flowers sated honeybees that would ferry pollen out to nearby trees. In the autumn, its branches would bend under the weight of nubby grape-size nuts. When they dropped to the forest floor, they’d nourish raccoons, bears, turkey, and deer. For generations, Indigenous people feasted on the nuts, split the wood for kindling, and laced the leaves into their medicine. Later on, European settlers, too, introduced the nuts into their recipes and orchards, and eventually learned to incorporate the trees’ sturdy, rot-resistant wood into fence posts, telephone poles, and railroad ties. The chestnut became a tree that could shepherd people “from cradle to grave,” Patrícia Fernandes, the assistant director of the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, told me. It made up the cribs that newborn babies were placed into; it shored up the coffins that bodies were laid to rest inside.
But in modern American life, chestnuts are almost entirely absent. In the first half of the 20th century, a fungal disease called blight, inadvertently imported from Asia on trade ships, wiped out nearly all of the trees. Chestnut wood disappeared from newly made furniture; people forgot the taste of the fruits, save those imported from abroad. Subsistence farmers lost their entire livelihoods. After reigning over forests for millennia, the species went functionally extinct—a loss that a biologist once declared “the greatest ecological disaster in North America since the Ice Age.”
Now Earth’s oceans are no longer unique. They’re just strange. They exist on our planet’s sunlit surface, while the seas of the outer solar system are tucked beneath ice and bathed in darkness. And these subterranean liquid oceans seem to be the rule for our solar system, not the exception. In addition to Europa and Enceladus, other moons with ice-covered oceans almost certainly exist as well. A fleet of spacecraft will explore them in detail over the next decade.
All of this raises an apparent paradox. These moons have existed in the frosty reaches of our solar system for billions of years—long enough for residual heat from their creation to have escaped into space eons ago. Any subsurface seas should be solid ice by now. So how can these moons, orbiting so far beyond the sun’s warmth, still have oceans today?
To celebrate our anniversary, my partner and I dine in a trendy London restaurant in Hackney with a Michelin star – my first time in such a place. A crispy little bonbon is introduced to us simply as “Pine, kvass lees and vin brûlé.” I watch my partner light up, the flickering candle in her eyes, as the waiter sets the thing down. The impact of the aroma has already registered on her face. With her first bite she is transported to her childhood in Massachusetts. “Gosh,” she gasps, closing her eyes as a New England virgin pine forest explodes in her mind. When she blinks open, returning to the here and now, she looks at me guiltily. I take a bite and wince. No coniferous wonderland for me. Just unpleasant bitterness, confined very much to the tongue.
I am pleased for her, truly. I’m a magnanimous guy. But from that moment on, the whole evening is a bit of a spectator sport and, by the end of it, I have a feeling that she is even playing her enjoyment down, muting her reactions, as if to say, “You’re not missing out.” She finds some dishes prove more successful than others – the sweetness of cherry, an umami-rich mushroom – but I am missing out: on the nuances, the emotions, the memories. The smell.
What makes a Christmas poem? It could be a drift of snow or some evergreen trees, a box of candy canes or the baby Jesus. The best-known poem attending to the holiday is probably “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” also known as “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with characters such as quiet mice, clattering reindeer, and toy-toting Santa Claus. My favorite poem of the season is the prologue to the Gospel of John, although it lacks stables and mangers and swaddled babes. “Christmas poem” is a capacious category, occupied by a wide range of poems and populated by a startling variety of poets.
I was reminded of this when I finally tracked down a copy of a book I’d long heard about but never read. “American Christmas” was first published in 1965; I now own a copy of the second edition of the anthology, published two years later, with some additional poems. The book is not only a what’s what of Christmas—its weather, rituals, trimmings, origins, and meanings—but a who’s who of poetry: W. H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and dozens more. Christmas turns out to be an excellent subject for a collection of poems: as a theme, it is more specific than “spring” and less obvious than “grief,” but like those two it is widely shared and regularly recurring, and seems to call for something more than prose.
Inherent to the definition of giving something a second chance is that that person or thing has failed you once before. But these books — my favorite books — had never failed me. In fact, they did quite the opposite. Looking back, I can now only appreciate the magnitude with which certain books have genuinely changed my life.
So why was I so averse to giving these great books a second chance, if they had never failed me in the first place?
In December 1818, the poet Shelley, with his wife Mary and stepsister-in‑law Claire Clairmont, climbed Vesuvius. Starting from the village of Resina (modern Ercolano), they stopped off at the hermitage of San Salvador where an “old hermit” offered refreshments. In a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley described the ascent to the cone, whose “difficulty has been much exaggerated”. On the summit he surveyed with awe “the most horrible chaos that can be imagined … ghastly chasms … fountains of liquid fire”. The passionate poet confronting the essence of the sublime seems the acme of Romanticism.
John Brewer’s entertaining social history paints a rather different picture. By the early 19th century the climb to the summit was more well-organised tourist experience than daring psychic journey. True, Vesuvius drew admirers from all over Europe, and even the Americas, as a crucible for both science and art. Friendships and professional partnerships were forged in its shadow, reputations won and lost, discoveries made and debated. Less impressive than Etna, but much more accessible, it inspired paintings, poems and novels through the Romantic era and beyond. But a host of the lesser-known also trooped to the summit, scorched their shoes and drank themselves silly. It is these figures Brewer brings back to life.
Little wonder then, that, read now, the lucid logic of Termush feels more like lucid dreaming, imbued with a new relevance in which unseen monsters creep through the same rooms as the narrator, studying his movements. The stark deficiencies of emergency management become hyperreal because of the overlay of self-inflictions in our modern times. For Termush—unlike some vintage classics, cult or otherwise—has waxed, not waned, in relevance. The accuracy in the calm description of becoming undone by disaster, and the anonymity of place and character, ensure the novel’s timelessness. It’s a curious book in this regard, with its dispassionate prose that eschews, in large part, the sensory detail of taste, touch, and smell, yet gets to the heart of living through such a situation. At that heart is the disconnection that occurs, laid bare by a certain level of detail—or lack of detail. Amid the banal recitation of procedure and the understated but sharp satire about privileged people, such a strong sense of feeling about the world rises from these pages.
It wasn’t until 1929 that Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov first traced the apple genome back to Kazakhstan’s Tian Shan mountains. However, says Spengler, Central Asia’s entire mountain belt was likely flourishing with close relatives of Malus sieversii at one point. Together with his colleagues, Spengler—an affiliate of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany—has found apple seeds in archaeological sites across Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, supporting not only the working theory that these wild apple forests covered much of this region in the past, but also the idea that the ancestors to the modern apple actually originated in these more southern peripheries, where the higher temperatures were more in tune with their growing habits. Over thousands of years, they made their way north into Kazakhstan, adapting to the area’s long, cold winters. It’s these patches of fairly dense woodland that remain, mixings of wild apples alongside feral varieties and interspersed with walnut trees and fruits like pears and apricots. While the exact number of Malus sieversii is unknown, the bulk remaining in Kazakhstan grow freely and untamed, though threatened by encroaching development.
October 7, 1897, was a celebratory day in New York City, unless you happened to be one unfortunate tomcat. On that date, the United States Post Office Department completed the first test of the city’s pneumatic tube system, which used compressed air to send cylindrical containers filled with mail through a series of underground networks. The first mail tube took three minutes to cover the 7,500-foot round-trip journey from the main postal building to the New York Produce Exchange; inside, it held a Bible wrapped in an American flag, as well as copies of the U.S. Constitution and President William McKinley’s inaugural address. Other test shipments on that initial day were more creative.
The holiday season is a good time to stop and consider all of the unnoticed labor that makes a book possible. These people, along with my favorite writers, have my gratitude for the pleasure they’ve brought me this past year, even if their work doesn’t always get the appreciation it deserves.
All my life, I’ve had the sense of being an outsider, watching other people as if through a pane of glass. This feeling has often been a source of pain; I’ve wanted so much to be as bound to a place as others, as certain of my beliefs, as trusting that the language I speak belongs to me.
In 2006, the scientist, artist and community organizer Keiko Honda seemingly had it all. She held a prestigious research position at Columbia University in New York. She was happily married to a successful financier and had recently given birth to a cherished daughter, Maya. And then she suffered a sudden onset of a rare neurological condition known as transverse myelitis, (TM). This acute inflammation of the spinal cord left her confined to a wheelchair for life. Accidental Blooms, Honda’s recently published memoir, tells the moving and impressive story of her recovery and the new life of community, art, motherhood, and service she made for herself after her move to Vancouver in 2009.
For all the imaginative pleasure we take in the reassuring smallness of Moray’s shop, when it comes to actual shopping, we choose more and more of Mouret. After rejecting the small store in favour of the department store, we rejected the department store in favour of the shopping mall, and the mall in favour of Amazon. We willingly move deeper and deeper into a world that doesn’t feel like home, that maybe never will. And it is Zola who offers us a front row seat to the opening act of this drama, a chance to watch the new world rising from the ashes of the old, a chance to come to terms with the creatures that we have become.
While you can buy the hairy carnivorous plant at garden centers, and even Walmart, Venus flytraps only grow in the wild in one place on Earth: the wet longleaf pine forests of the Carolinas, boggy areas where scientists estimate about 880,000 individual plants remain in just 74 colonies. A few years ago, Moore, who now runs a flytrap conservation nonprofit, got her hands on a confidential report commissioned by her old agency revealing some of the plant’s last remaining wild clusters.
One of them was in St. James Plantation, a retirement community in Southport, North Carolina. This was a gated community, an apologetic real estate agent told us when we arrived at the property’s front office in October: Unless we were there for “real estate purposes,” he said, we weren’t allowed in. Moore, 76, wearing khakis, a long-sleeve periwinkle T-shirt with a luna moth on it, and socks that read “CRAZY PLANT LADY,” explained that we were on the hunt for flytraps. “They’re disappearing fast, and we want to keep them,” she told the agent in her Texas accent, adding that this county, Brunswick, has more wild flytraps than anywhere else in the world. It is also among the top 10 fastest-growing counties in the country.
Based on entirely anecdotal evidence, it seems like most bookish children go through an Egyptology phase. Author Isabel Ibañez certainly did, and now she has written a gift to those of us who tried to write our names in hieroglyphics in fifth grade. What the River Knows, the first novel in the Secrets of the Nile duology, is narrated by another young person obsessed with Egypt, nineteen year old Inez Olivera. Though Inez is a high society Bolivian Argentinian heiress living in 1884, her craving to learn everything she can about pharaohs and their tombs is warmly recognizable.
The typical question to ask about Bill Gates is: what happens when the boss from hell decides to save the world? A new book suggests there is a deeper and more interesting one: what does Bill Gates want from human life?
A snowy winter in New York City brings with it a kind of magic. The air goes crisp, then bitter, and fragile snowflakes sift down in the early dark, silvering the trees and blanketing the sledding hills in the parks. After the first big snow, children and adults alike rush out to make snowmen, creations that delight passersby for the next two frigid months, until the snow finally thaws. When I took my older son, then a toddler, out for his first-ever sledding session, he squealed with awe at the crystalline world before him, shouting, “It looks like Frozen!”
Today he’s 5, and I doubt he remembers what sledding feels like. It’s been more than 650 days since Central Park, where snow is measured daily, got more than an inch of snowfall at one time; last winter, the park got just 2.3 inches in total, less than one-tenth the normal amount. In early December, Brooklyn saw a few anemic flurries, and my son told me excitedly that his friends had tried to build a snowman during recess. But there was nowhere near enough material to work with. They settled for “a pile of snowflakes.”
Years ago, my professor would make his architectural history students prepare for seminars by pinning large sheets of paper to a noticeboard. Each had finely printed plans and elevations on them. Over the week, I’d stand in front of those sheets for at least an hour looking at the various drawings, as instructed. Back in class, students took turns to explain what exactly the drawings represented, determining the building’s appearance from the drawings alone and describing how a person might move through the space as if we were there. Those well-spent hours were among my favourite during my degree; the language of drawing was a catalyst to my imagination, creating worlds beyond what words could ever do.
In learning about this language, I realised that we know remarkably little about how it developed, as if it arose fully formed in the 13th century, since no single drawing can be linked to a specific building project until that century’s end. This baffled me. How could monuments like Durham Cathedral, the renovated basilica of Saint-Denis outside Paris (the genesis of the Gothic style), and all the High Gothic churches in northern Europe have been made without something so simple as a drawing? Visually communicating the appearance of a building seems a natural thing to do – an easier way of planning.
People often fear that such transformations will require sacrifices. In the short term, change is difficult, and addictions are powerful. But in the long run, it is a huge sacrifice of our personal and societal well-being to continue down the business-as-usual path. Sustainable well-being can improve the lives of everyone, and protect the biodiversity and ecosystem services on which we all depend. In the coming year, let’s continue to build the shared vision of the world we all want, and accelerate progress towards it.
I was walking in Venice with poet Tom Laichas when he showed me a hard-to-describe object protruding from the strip between sidewalk and street. It was about the size of a fire hydrant, made of cement and decorated with faded hippie hieroglyphs.
“If you unearth it, you get to some pre-Easter Island god,” Laichas imagined.
I ache for the world but naturally I’m mostly watching the Me Movie, where balance and strength are beginning to ebb and, on the surface, things are descending into grandma pudding. (One morning 10 years ago, my young grandchild asked, “Nana, can I take a shower with you, if I promise not to laugh?” I repeat: 10 gravity-dragging years ago.)
What can we do as the creaking elevators of age slowly descend? The main solution is not to Google new symptoms late at night. But I also try to get outside every day, ideally with friends. Old friends — even thoughts of them — are my ballast; all that love and loyalty, those delicious memories, the gossip.
Makhene concocts her grim tales with the right blend of history and story. Political exposition comes in slivers of dialogue, action and scenery; you must work to grasp her cues and references. Her stories – soaked in the languages of Soweto (isiZulu, Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana, Afrikaans) and studded with important facts, names, dates and local political lore – often seem like a challenge to the unversed reader. “Can you move over to where I am?” she seems to ask, in the manner of Toni Morrison. Do you care to fully inhabit the world and worldview of my characters?
Root around in the alphanumeric soup of the U.S. visa system for long enough and you’ll discover the EB-1A, sometimes known as the Einstein visa. Among the hardest permanent-resident visas to obtain, it is reserved for noncitizens with“extraordinary ability.” John Lennon got a forerunner of it, in 1976, after a deportation scare that could have sent him back to Britain. (His case, which spotlighted prosecutorial discretion in immigration law, forms the legal basis for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.) Modern-day recipients include the tennis star Monica Seles and—in a tasteless bit of irony—the Slovenian model Melania Knauss, in 2001, four years before she became Melania Trump. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services requires applicants to fulfill three of ten criteria for extraordinariness or, alternatively, to provide evidence of a major “one-time achievement.” “Pulitzer, Oscar, Olympic Medal” are the agency’s helpful suggestions. Of a half million permanent-residency visas issued in the fiscal year 2022, only one per cent were EB-1As.
One went to Mangesh Ghogre, a forty-three-year-old man from Mumbai, whose extraordinary ability is writing crossword puzzles. I first met Ghogre in 2012, in Brooklyn, at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (A.C.P.T.), an annual speed-solving contest in which crossword writers like Ghogre and me take over a Marriott hotel, playing Boggle, trading puzzle ideas, punning compulsively. I entered the ballroom grumbling because high-school baseball practice had made me late; just then, Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times puzzle and the tournament’s organizer, was announcing that Ghogre was, by a few thousand miles, the person who’d travelled the farthest to be there.
In May 1916, the explorers set off for land, battling violent winds, currents, and ice floes. They rowed until their bodies were ragged. Soon they began seeing things: “resemblances to human faces and living forms in the fantastic contour and massively uncouth shapes of berg and floe,” Shackleton wrote in his account of their survival, South. During a 36-hour trek over mountains and glaciers, with two crew members, Shackleton wrote, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.” Inspired by Shackleton’s account, T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Wasteland,” “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”
Who indeed? Now, cognitive scientists have taken up the quest to explain the mysterious third. The felt presence of an unseen person, they have found, results from breaks in the neural connections that normally link expectations and actual experiences. During extreme conditions, or when the connection is broken and actions don’t meet unconscious expectations—a sign of land, a rescue team—our brains feed our minds a phantom substitute.
But at the event this month, none of the guests seemed to operate under the illusion that they’d reinvented any wheels. And “glorified library” actually described the ambience well: Seating included antique armchairs, deep sofas and velvety settees; flickering votive candles emitted an amber glow; hot toddies and beer were available. There was live piano music. A faux fire faux-burned cozily against one wall.
Bookshops & Bonedust is even more of a delight than its predecessor/sequel. Taking place two decades before Legends & Lattes, Baldree’s second book is a meaty slice of Viv’s backstory, so fully realized that it can be read as a standalone. Certainly, there are references that will be more fun for a fan of Legends, namely the origin of the sword Blackblood and a contentious early relationship with the gnome Gallina, but someone who’d never heard of Travis Baldree would still enjoy this adventure.
Evidence suggests that writing was invented in southern Iraq sometime before 3000BC. But what happened next? Anyone interested in this question will find How Writing Made Us Human by Walter Stephens both an enjoyable and stimulating read. It offers what it calls an “emotional history” of writing, chiefly referencing academics and writers in the western tradition.
But beware: this isn’t a book on caregiving or advice-giving. It’s a delightful, heartbreaking, tearful, surprising collection of profiles of everyday people in their own words, people who go with the flow and deal with tomorrow when it comes. Yes, you’ll find advice here but it pales in comparison to the presence that Wallace’s subjects and their families exhibit.
This powerful book is great for someone with a new dementia diagnosis; it proves that life’s not over yet. It’s likewise great for a caregiver, gently ushering them toward grace.
In that respect, he was like at least 10,000 Jews who hid in Holland and managed to live by pretending not to exist. At least 104,000 others — many of whom also sought refuge, but were found — ended up being sent to their deaths.
But Bloch’s experience was different because, in addition to sustenance and care, his helpers brought him pens, glue, newspapers and other printed materials that he used to produce a startling publication: his own weekly, satirical poetry magazine.
As a woman who lives in a big city, comes from a small town, and whose name could reasonably be shortened to “Merry,” Hallmark virtually promises that I should be meeting cute throughout the month of December. In reality, there’s arguably no less sexy time of year. I don’t know how you celebrate the holidays (or don’t), but my main event is a week of shopping for things no one needs, eating enormous quantities of everything, and sitting around the house with my parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. I see an exhausting number of people, but I am related to nearly all of them. Still, the prevailing genre of holiday film isn’t “family,” it’s resolutely “kissing.” What’s going on?
I have a theory.
You might think that having a positive attitude about the nothing-pill is what transforms it into a something-pill. Perhaps OLPs are a sort of meta-placebo, a testament to how much we believe in our power of belief. But the real driving impulse for many patients who enroll in clinical trials isn’t positive expectation. It seems to be a more uncertain emotion: hope.
Since the mid-2010s, cookbook author Ali Slagle has published some 360 recipes for “The New York Times’” Cooking section, many of which have topped annual reader favorite lists for their simplicity and indubitable craveability. One of her most beloved recipes, for Thai-inspired chicken meatball soup, drew over 13,500 ratings (averaging five stars) and almost 700 comments. Amid all the praise, criticism, helpful notations and humorous color, Slagle’s voice is notably absent. Indeed, she almost never responds to comments on her recipes — and not just to avoid trolls.
There is a lot that is terrible about Alzheimer's, no doubt. But for three weeks that Christmas, I got to see the joy on mom's face as she beheld a Christmas tree for the first time over and over again, and it never once lost its power to astonish.
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is the kind of debut novel for which the word “audacious” was created. A story about work, and the absurdity of work, it is told by an unexpected narrator, and told in such a way that you know the end on the first page but you still have no idea what’s coming. People like to describe novels like this as a critiques of capitalism, and this is true, but it’s also too vague. This kind of novel is about what work will ask of you, and what you will give it, and whether it is possible to succeed at work without selling your soul and selling out the people around you.
“North Woods,” the fifth novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, has become one of the fall’s most acclaimed books on the strength of its innovation as a sweeping and stealthy historical saga. But it is also another tree-stuck story: Set in a patch of a Massachusetts forest, it follows the fate of multiple residents of a house across nearly three centuries. Some familiar themes of the genre apply: The tragedy of environmental devastation, the beauty of the natural landscape, nature’s stubborn capacity to endure well past human folly. But because Mason’s novel operates in such a robust variety of styles and voices, it is — perhaps more than its arboreal literary brethren — an unusually spectacular showcase of the various powerful responses that nature provokes in us, from wonderment to utter derangement.
Stevenson has carefully crafted another excellent locked-room mystery that not only follows all the rules of Golden Age mysteries, but, with narrator Ernest at the helm, also contrasts the genre with the messiness of reality.
This is largely a story about Reed, who was a restless artist, a canny songwriter and — quite often — a surly jerk. But some of the book’s most compelling passages describe Reed’s difficult and all-too-brief partnership with the equally intense Cale, a classically trained musician from Wales.
Writers not only don’t work alone: they can’t. The key proxy for a vibrant book culture is the little packs they form when things are going well. A literary work of art begins long before the fateful confrontation with the blank page, in the whole life we’ve lived to know what to put upon it. And only a life full of friends among the living and the dead is conducive to the production of real art. Of course a writer is always their irreducibly individual voice—but how do you think they first learned to sing with it? In honing it against the voices of others just as invested in questions of beauty, in histories of forms; in digging up the neglected works that always ought to have been classics, and treating them as such amongst ourselves; in ruthless mutual critique, becoming accountable to one another as editors and collaborators; in mockery and contempt for what’s bad, and throwing the occasional wrench into the machinery of the establishment.
Whoever writes about the living must be careful, because they can defend themselves, if necessary with the help of the courts. Whereas for the dead the opposite is true. When you write about them, you must be careful because they are at your mercy. The only thing protecting them is your sense of what is appropriate.
Could this global recognition of African literature be a compensatory gesture for all the historical sufferings inflicted on the continent by the (Euro-American) countries from where these awards are administered? Does it even matter that most of the winners of these awards are Africans living abroad?
It is this last question about the diasporic circumstances of African writers and writings that interests me. Whether one is referring to the lived transnationality of African writers or the diasporic nature of their writings, there seems to be a debate among critics about the prospects of reading contemporary African literature as diasporic literature.
Some say that history begins with writing; we say that history begins with clothing. In the beginning, there was clothing made from skins that early humans removed from animals, processed, and then tailored to fit the human body; this technique is still used in the Arctic. Next came textiles. The first weavers would weave textiles in the shape of animal hides or raise the nap of the fabric’s surface to mimic the appearance of fur, making the fabric warmer and more comfortable.
In our gastronomically obsessed age, these are pleasurable not because of the recipes — though many contain a few perfunctory ones — but for their often humorous explication of how to be a good host, or as was far more common back in the day, hostess. They are replete with chafing dishes and towering candelabras, billowing chiffon sleeves and conversational pointers. And culinary shortcuts, a la Eleanor Roosevelt serving hot dogs to the king and queen of England: The Joy of Not Cooking.
Listening to books was not the same as reading them. But whereas before, I had taken the value of written and audio books as mutually exclusive, I began to entertain the idea that maybe an audiobook was its own thing. I began to recognize the disparagement of audiobooks—whether open or implicit—as a certain kind of ableism. The written word is seen as a default, and any translation of it, as with my dyslexic students, was a mark of inferiority.
The point is everything else: the almost unimaginable unworldliness of the situation. Six imprisoned professionals are speeding around the world at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They circle the Earth sixteen times a day, and thus daily witness sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets (“the whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes”). A gigantic typhoon can be seen gathering over the western Pacific and moving toward the Philippines and Indonesia; this event, from the godlike vantage of the I.S.S., is important but also irrelevant, no more than a vicious corkscrew of distant cloud cover on that faraway blue marble. The real point of “Orbital” is the demonstration of how a writer might capture this spectacular strangeness in language adequate to the spectacle. And how she might do so with fitting surplus, in ways that surpass the more orderly permissions of journalism and nonfictional prose.
At the end of this consummate biography, Wullschläger describes Monet in despair, fearing he will die “without having achieved anything I like… because I am seeking the impossible”. By then, however, many of his contemporaries had long recognised the enormity of his achievement. He was responsible for a new conception of landscape; not just recording a place but also painting time, not just depicting his own sensations but disinterring the memories of the viewer. When Proust wrote, “There has to be someone who will say to us, here is what you may love; love it,” Monet was that man.
While Tim Marshall’s previous works have firmly established him as a prominent authority on the politics of geography, in this new book he enters uncharted territory: an appraisal of the geopolitical dynamics and consequences of space exploration. In a series of earlier books Marshall considered the impact of geography on the possibilities and limitations of the projection of national power in some of the world’s political hotspots. The Future of Geography breaks new ground by probing how major world powers’ activities in space may come to shape the future of world politics in (until recently) ways which could not have been envisaged.
And, if you’ve ever received books as a gift, you’ll know what a high-wire act this can be. Book preference is a nuanced, highly specific thing. To return to my dad, he likes the sort of fantasy books that come with illustrated maps at the front. But that isn’t to say he likes all fantasy books that have illustrated maps at the front. One year I tried to buy him exactly this sort of book, and discovered that he only likes a very narrow band of fantasy books with illustrated maps at the front. Stray out of his comfort zone, even by a millimetre, and you may as well have bought him a Mills & Boon for all the good it will do.
Last time I had a first week at university, I successfully shaved a balloon covered in shaving foam without popping it, for which I won shots at the local nightclub, possibly jelly. It is 20 years later, and I am having my first week at university again. This time, I am 41. I am sticking a very strict and detailed timetable to my fridge, making plans for who is going to walk the dog on which days and desperately trying not to say anything that makes me stand out as a late millennial, such as “I used to write all my essays by hand,” and “Wow, literally everything’s online,” both of which came out of my mouth very early on. There are no jelly shots. I am horrified to find that I am constantly on the verge of letting an “in my day…” slip out. I don’t smoke, but I find that in my head, I am always sucking hard on a metaphorical cigarette, hoary with age and experience.
"I love to touch them, I love to feel I am with them when I have those things in my hand. They are also a wonderful social history.
"I love the handwriting, and the fact that I can see what they ate in those times."
The Oneg Shabbat archive was a secret project of Jewish prisoners in the Warsaw Ghetto to record their histories as they awaited deportation to Nazi death camps during World War II. Lauren Grodstein has used this historical fact as the basis for her mesmerizing new novel, “We Must Not Think of Ourselves.”
By excluding what readers might otherwise assume to be a main ingredient, the wordless picture book heightens the flavors of what remains. Whenever I’ve read these books with my kids, I’ve noticed how they (and I) become more attuned to all the other decisions an artist is making about shapes and color palettes, panels and negative space.
Perhaps that’s the bitterest extreme of the irony: the sense in which the ransomware attack violates the very premise of libraries themselves. Libraries exist to connect learners with knowledge. Full stop. That’s what has been destroyed: not the stuff, but the connections, the fascia.
All that changed in 2017, when the alarm sounded twice on 19 September. Once for the memorial and commemorative evacuations, and then again, two hours later, for a devastating magnitude 7.1 earthquake that killed more than 300 people and levelled dozens of buildings. For the survivors, the coincidence begins to create profound temporal disorientation. How, survivors ask each other, could this be happening again? How could the two most devastating earthquakes in Mexico City’s history strike on the same date?
This year I was so happy. I was happy for the main reason that I think people have been happy throughout human history, which is that I fell in love. At least that’s why stories tend to tell us that people are happy—happily ever after, and all that. When people asked how I was, I found myself saying, so happy, almost involuntarily, and then feeling a little ashamed, like maybe I was boring them. The thing is that other people’s happiness is often boring. All happy families are alike, and all that. I read a line in a short story in the recent Fall issue of The Paris Review, in fact: “We were happy on the road, and happiness can’t be narrated.” This felt true to me, and I also wanted to argue with it. Yet whenever I did, the terms seemed to slip away from me—what was happiness, anyway, and what did it mean to narrate it? And was I really so happy, when in fact lots of things in my life were going wrong, when as always there were days when I woke up listless or anxious, despite some undercurrent of feeling like I was terribly, almost frighteningly happy? Could there be such a thing as a narrative of happiness, and—here, I was thinking selfishly—what might it tell me?
Just as the original Oulipians insisted that by tightening the rules, you liberate the literature, so the text is a metaphor for O’s own journey. Speaking from the confines of the words in the play, she finds out who she now is and so, perhaps, becomes free. Griffiths has paved a way out and it’s an open road: “this is not the end, by no means the end. I have a long way to go from here.”
“Should I be allowed to make this said?” Blake Butler writes in his new memoir, “Molly.” By the time he asks, it’s too late. He has already written more than two hundred and seventy pages; no turning back now. The question of allowance, of permission to expose, bubbles beneath so much writing, but it is at the very heart of memoir, where the people are real, and so are the consequences. How to tell the truth about other people, especially people we love—and why? What do we owe to others, and what do we owe to ourselves?
The central ironic insight, ultimately, of a book claiming to explain how fantasy “works” is that fantasy is not one singular thing, and it is certainly not something that one person in a single book can presume to explain the workings of. While Fantasy: Some of the Ways It Works would have made for a less snappy title, it might also have more accurately reflected Attebery’s rather modest ambitions. It may not offer the final word on fantasy, but the great strength of Fantasy: How It Works lies in the way it draws on and showcases a lifetime of careful reading of and thinking about the fantastic, marking another invaluable addition to fantasy studies.
Listen is not an ordinary book about music. Michel Faber makes that clear from the start. “This book will not do for you what other books about music will do for you,” the novelist declares. It “will not help you bond more securely with the artists or genres you’re already bonded with”, and “will not confirm your cleverness or good taste”. Instead, Faber says, he is interested in bringing his readers closer to understanding why they relate to music at all.
At twenty-six, in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched, I found myself driving a red Subaru Outback—the color was technically “claret metallic,” the friend who’d lent me the car had told me, in case I ever wanted to touch up the paint—on Highway 12 in Utah. I was heading to the East Bay after a painful breakup in New York. I remember, wrongly, that I was listening to a book on tape, a work by a prominent linguist, as I moved through the alien landscape, jagged formations of red rock towering against a cloudless sky.
Consider the metaphorical association of argument and war, the linguist says in my memory, the way we speak of “attacking” or “defending” our “position.” If we frame an argument metaphorically as armed conflict then we will think of our interlocutor as an enemy. But what would happen, the voice asked me as I gripped the wheel with both hands, tense from fifteen hours of continuous driving, having pulled over only for gas and Red Bull and granola bars and Camels since departing Omaha, where I’d napped and showered at the childhood home of a college friend—what would happen if we shifted the metaphorical frame and thought of argument as a kind of dance, as a series of steps undertaken with the goal of mutual expression, satisfaction, even pleasure?
"Our big problem now is the peeling of the surface of the rock," he says. Panels of images that have survived since the middle of the last ice age are flaking off the cave walls at an alarming rate. The hard, crusted surface of the cave walls, on which the ancient people painted, is breaking off from the powdery white limestone underneath in a process called exfoliation.
Archaeologists working in the caves have speculated on the causes. Perhaps it's the pollution from nearby cars and trucks, the heavy-breathing visitors who change the caves' microclimate or the changing weather patterns ushered in by climate change. But researchers also wonder whether local industry is at fault, particularly the dust and vibrations produced by mining companies that blast open the karst cliffs, digging for limestone.
Chimpanzees and other large primates, for instance, are so intelligent and personable that they blur many of these boundaries. But since we are so closely connected evolutionarily, it is easy to tacitly view them as way stations toward the human apex, impoverished versions of ourselves rather than somebody in their own right. There is, however, nothing else remotely like an elephant. (Its closest living relatives are sea cows — dugongs and manatees — and the hyrax, an African shrewmouse about the size of a rabbit.) As such, it presents the perfect opportunity for thoughtful reconsideration of the human difference, and how much that difference really matters.
This is a story about stories—who tells them, and who they’re about; if the tellers are telling the truth, and if the subjects can ever have power over the tellers. And what power lies within the reader’s hands? When you are witness to a beautiful lie, do you have an obligation to find the truth? Reid grapples with these questions of art and artistry, legacy and literature, love and power, abuse and survival, and so much more in their dazzling novel, A Study in Drowning.
I decided to write about Los Angeles before I ever moved to Los Angeles. That I didn’t know this at the time makes me want to re-imagine my relationship with the city now as something latent, something protean. Unsurprisingly, it all began and ended with noir, a style of writing Los Angeles more or less invented, going back to Raymond Chandler and the woefully misremembered Paul Cain. I had become a deep reader of the genre in my 20s, and, as all writers are readers in emulation, I began to think about writing a hard-boiled fiction of my own. The appeal of that sort of book, then as now, felt palpable: an “axe for the frozen sea within us,” to borrow Franz Kafka’s term.
Mass plantations are not the environmental solution they’re purported to be, Crowther argued when he took the floor on December 9 for one of the summit’s “Nature Day” events. The potential of newly created forests to draw down carbon is often overstated. They can be harmful to biodiversity. Above all, they are really damaging when used, as they often are, as avoidance offsets— “as an excuse to avoid cutting emissions,” Crowther said.
Maybe the famous croissant and its ugly American stepsister, the doughnut, can coexist. If there’s one thing the French know, it is food, so I’m confident they’ve got this.
Now, onto more pressing matters. I wonder how you say “Chocolate Iced Custard-Filled” in French?
Voices in the Dark paints a vivid picture of rural life without shying away from its challenges – isolation, stretched resources, farm succession and the harsh environment.
Emily Cockayne’s “Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters” is full of the very odd things that people do by means of unsigned mail. The anonymous letter, Cockayne points out, creates an asymmetrical relationship, an imbalance of information — I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am — that is unsettling and confers a kind of power on the sender.
The book’s central image—of a person stuffed inside a hidden compartment in the car—is less subtle but surprisingly effective: it gets us thinking about tech in a way that’s refreshingly visceral, the human driver producing a “queer feeling” to rival that once produced by their absence. And it’s not terribly far off from reality.
“There’s nothing scarier than [someone saying], ‘this book is not going to sell with that cover,’” Strick says. “So any initial love kind of gets pushed aside.”
She was crushed (as are the people who still reach out to her to this day to ask where they can get the complete set). But the whole episode underscores a larger fact that I’ve come to believe after writing about book covers for years—killed covers are often where you can find the really great stuff. The surprising work. The refreshingly genre-breaking, exciting, unfiltered output that nudges the field toward its next evolution.
Poetry can act only as a physical charm. It’s made up of a host of details that cannot be distinguished instantly. If this were not the case, then it would be impossible to expect anyone with concerns of their own to venture into the labyrinth of a style, to explore its every recess, and to lose themselves in it.
When you order a pair of sweatpants online and don’t want to keep them, a colossal, mostly opaque system of labor and machinery creaks into motion to find them a new place in the world. From the outside, you see fairly little of it—the software interface that lets you tick some boxes and print out your prepaid shipping label; maybe the UPS clerk who scans it when you drop the package off. Beyond that, whole systems of infrastructure—transporters, warehousers, liquidators, recyclers, resellers—work to shuffle and reshuffle the hundreds of millions of products a year that consumers have tried and found wanting. And deep within that system, in a processing facility in the Lehigh Valley, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.
Could there be a more fitting tribute to a person—especially to a writer—than seeing that connection, light and dark, and putting it all down on paper? I’d urge anyone upset about the idea of this gorgeous, sad memoir—as I admit I was at first—to read the book. You certainly can’t be more upset that this book exists than Butler himself is. He writes that he has tried to accept that “chaos felt more like home to her than happiness,” that “her higher highs could only fund the lower lows, continuously preserving her grim worldview with the idea that anything not rotten to its core must be a lie.” And then he adds: “But how about you go ahead and try and get that through your head about your partner, the central pinion in your life?”
In November 2021, Mahbuba arrived in Chicago amid the wave of refugees who fled Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul. Like most of the tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated and relocated to the United States, Mahbuba’s family had ties to the American military and staying in Afghanistan put all their lives at risk. After a month in a military base-turned-refugee shelter, Mahbuba and her family landed in Chicago, a city — and world — completely unknown to them.
But for Mahbuba the change was hard twice-over: Not only was the girl new to the city and country, she had arrived without any formal language. Mahbuba was, in other words, doubly displaced.
How Mahbuba transformed over the following year captures the singular alchemy that comes with finding language; the power in knowing and naming things. Her story also reflects the difference that just a few people — including public school teachers and aid workers — can make, despite limited resources. Because of the lengths a few Chicagoans have been willing to go, an Afghan girl is finding her voice and a new start.
It may not have come as a surprise to those familiar with Lewis’s work that ‘Bruce Le Catt’ was not the pseudonym of an astute critic, but of Lewis himself. The playfulness of Lewis’s writing is well known: for instance, the paper ‘Holes’ (1970), co-written with Stephanie Lewis, is a dialogue between two characters, ‘Argle’ and ‘Bargle’, on the ontological status of holes as found in Gruyère, crackers, paper-towel rollers and in matter more generally. Nevertheless, the attribution of the 1981 paper to a cat seemed to cross a line. It may have been playful, but it was also deceptive, hence the retraction.
Lewis was not the only 20th-century philosopher to publish using an invented persona. The contents page of the book Explaining Emotions (1980), edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, features the essay ‘Jealousy, Attention, and Loss’ by one Leila Tov-Ruach, listed on the Contributors page as ‘an Israeli psychiatrist, who writes and lectures on philosophic psychology’. Some readers might have noticed that this is a rather unusual name – a pun on laila tov ruach or ‘goodnight wind’ in Hebrew – and might have had their suspicions confirmed by the fact that there is no discernible trace of this psychiatrist elsewhere on the medical or academic record. Indeed, as an erratum on the University of California Press website drily notes, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and Leila Tov-Ruach are indeed one and the same person.
Science has never been faster than it is today. But the introduction of AI is also, in some ways, making science less human. For centuries, knowledge of the world has been rooted in observing and explaining it. Many of today’s AI models twist this endeavor, providing answers without justifications and leading scientists to study their own algorithms as much as they study nature. In doing so, AI may be challenging the very nature of discovery.
But most research has centered on transparent wood as an architectural feature, with windows a particularly promising use, says Prodyut Dhar, a biochemical engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology Varanasi. Transparent wood is a far better insulator than glass, so it could help buildings retain heat or keep it out.
But five centuries or so before the popularity of coffee as a hot beverage, a mysterious ingredient began to appear in Arabic books on medicine and botany. The descriptions of this ingredient were very similar to our familiar coffee. However, instead of bunn, it was called bunk, and rather than drinking this ingredient, it was mostly used for cleaning and freshening the hands.
The lesson for readers is not necessarily to wake up to signs of totalitarianism knocking at our doors, but to empathize with those for whom it has already called.
It’s the thought that counts, we say of gifts, and with books, well, there’s a whole lot of thought—six hours? twelve?—required to truly appreciate one. If it was a sweater, Dear Friend could immediately try it on to check the size, then later wear it once in my presence, good and settled. Even if the sweater was all wrong, in style or material, I wouldn’t object to its being exchanged. It’s a nice sweater, but it never changed my life.
With the book, I’m giving Dear Friend, I hope, much more than a gift.
Imagine setting aside a wheel of cheese at your wedding. What would it look like if it were served at your funeral?
If you were lucky, it would look like one of the wheels in Jean-Jacques Zufferey’s basement in Grimentz, Switzerland: shriveled and brown, pockmarked from decades of mite and mouse nibbles, and hard as a rock. You’d need an axe to slice it open and strong booze to wash it down. This is the rare cheese you don’t want to cut into when it’s aged to perfection. A fossilized funeral cheese means you lived a long life.
By finding such vivid forms to express the variously fast and slow violences plaguing the residents of Natoma, Fire in the Canyon hammers home how, in Ada’s words, “[t]his is a new situation we’re all in. We need to adjust how we do things.” Now, the question becomes exactly how to adjust, especially when so much time and effort (literally the stuff of hundreds of pages) might ultimately amount to nothing. Gumbiner offers no answers—only urgency. If one thing’s for certain, it’s that, like the damage smoke does to the lungs, crises of this kind will only build over time.
Harvey’s purpose, as a novelist, isn’t to teach the science of space travel. She does provide intricate detail about, for instance, how the station’s drinking water gets recycled from everyone’s urine, or how “the wide-awake, always-awake station vibrates with fans and filters.” Yet these elaborations — note the words “recycled” and “always-awake” — have less to do with the machinery of the station than they do with the orbiting minds of the humans on board.
Vogler hasn’t called her book Stuffed to signal the amazing array of facts she has gathered – though on this score it is, indeed, brimful (I’m in awe of her reading). The word can mean utterly screwed as well as swollen-stomached in the post-buffet sense, and thanks to this it’s entirely apt for a study of British food in good times and in bad.
The ocean has a way of upending expectations. Four-story-high rogue waves peak and collapse without warning. Light bends across the surface to conjure chimeric cities that hover at the horizon. And watery wastelands reveal themselves to be anything but. So was the case for the scientists aboard the USS Jasper in the summer of 1942. Bobbing in choppy seas off the coast of San Diego, California, acoustic physicist Carl F. Eyring and his colleagues, who had been tasked with studying a sonar device the navy could use to detect German submarines, were sending sound waves into the deep. But as the echoes of their tests came reverberating back, they revealed a puzzling phenomenon: everywhere the ship went, the sonar detected a mass nearly as solid as the seafloor, lurking about 300 meters or more below the surface. Even more mysterious, this false bottom seemed to shift over the course of the day.
People had their theories—shoals? faulty equipment?—but apart from registering the anomaly, scientists let the mystery slide. (There was, after all, a war on.) It wasn’t until 1945, when oceanographer Martin Johnson dropped nets into the Pacific to take a closer look, that the culprit was definitively unmasked: a vast cloud of marine animals, most smaller than a human hand, that moved from the deep ocean to the surface and back every day.
I’m a 43-year-old lapsed Catholic who has doubts about any kind of afterlife, let alone a magical pet bridge. And yet, in that awful day when I put down my best friend, and in the weeks that followed, I almost believed my father, and pulled the image of Annie and Sam frolicking in a field across me like a shawl protecting me from the bitter cold of grief.
The staycation, a word Merriam-Webster has traced to World War II advertising, lost any remaining stigma during pandemic lockdowns, with the air suddenly clear of traffic pollution and birdsong audible in one’s own backyard. In The New Yorker last summer, the philosopher Agnes Callard laid out a “Case Against Travel,” prompting a flurry of avid, even angry, rebuttals and calls of “clickbait” from people who enjoy going to unfamiliar places, some pounded out indignantly from the road.
And now lands “Airplane Mode,” by Shahnaz Habib, a lively and, yes, wide-ranging book that interrogates some of the pastime’s conventions and most prominent chroniclers.
Because Doom remains a brilliant, thrilling game experience. It is so pure, so focused. Not a single pixel is wasted. “Today, playing Doom at full speed, it’s [still] one of the fastest games you can play,” says Romero, who is currently working on Sigil 2, a spiritual successor to the original Doom series. “You still get an amazing experience, even better than when we released it, because it’s a little smoother. Doom is still very fast, very challenging. It doesn’t matter what the resolution is … it’s all gameplay.”
In our 15 years of marriage, I’ve seen my husband cry a handful of times. Once, sitting on our balcony in Chicago over a few beers, on the eve of the move that eventually brought us to Seattle. Certainly when he lost his parents. But one moment, back in 2013, caught me completely by surprise.
We kept the lights off in my hospital room at Swedish Medical Center so our newborn son could sleep, uninterrupted, in his clear plastic box. I was ready to take him home—ready to take a proper shower, cut off my hospital bracelet, and tackle this new life with a tiny baby in the mix. My husband, Seth, brought our new infant car seat up from the parking garage. He’d already proved himself a worthy parental partner, hoisting my leg over his shoulder to assist with some of the gnarlier moments in labor. Now he practiced tightening the seat’s straps one more time. But the hospital wouldn’t let us go without one last test.
As writers we try to reflect humanity back onto itself. Book people should ape the real thing or else how on earth will readers know them, recognize them as human, engage with them, love or despise them?
This is a fractal story told through the fracturing of rules by a mature writer, summed up best by a character who says: “There were no happy endings, just endings. And then more endings. And that was if you were lucky and there was no final ending.”
It reminded me that life’s hardest moments — the ones in which we come face to face with death — teach us that life is a gift, one we need to savor every day.
To make his case, Fitzgerald, a professor of medical humanities and social sciences at University College Cork, Ireland, dabbles in both history and science, assembling a vigorous argument against the orthodoxies of urban green spaces and their presumption of unalloyed goodness. Given ample scientific research suggesting the benefits of urban parks — and the psychological comforts of nature itself — Fitzgerald’s battle is entirely uphill, but he relishes every bit of it.
We’re all striving for a work/life balance. It’s not hard to find someone ranting about how we all work too much and let the office rule our lives. Yeah, no kidding. We pulled away from that I-live-at-the-office mentality during the pandemic. Now, some in charge want us to find our old work clothes, get back in our cars, fight traffic, and head back to our cubicles. I work for myself and I’m an excellent boss when it comes to work hours, work attire, long lunches, and breaks for tv streaming. I’m lucky. Many people aren’t. Maybe that’s why, if you mention a trip to an island, an exclusive resort, or a mountain cabin people ask questions. Add in a private yacht or a fancy house and you’re inviting jealousy. Talk to a mystery/suspense/thriller writer and you’ll get a very different response.
My love of garlic started when I was young. I can instantly recall the garlic butter my mother and her mother were so fond of making to dip just about anything—from rolls to artichokes—into. And while the combination of garlic and butter is nearly as perfect as that of peanut butter and chocolate, the rice dish at David’s house was the first time I remember garlic playing such a central role in a meal, besides being a condiment or something slathered onto a piece of bread.
The problem arose when we moved to a neighborhood an hour north of the city after a year, a place where me being white but Jewish made me an ethnic abnormality in the WASPy Chicago suburb. Nobody there ate good food, and everybody walked around their homes with shoes on. I longed for the place I used to live, and especially for the garlic rice that I couldn’t even ask my mom to make because I had never asked David what it was called. I spent the next 15 years of my life seeking the answer.
In the past few years, I’ve learned there are others like me, and no one is louder about good desserts being “not too sweet” than the Asian American diaspora. Perhaps you’ve seen a meme about how calling a dessert “not too sweet” is something almost every Asian American has heard from their relatives, and how it’s the highest compliment an Asian person can give a dessert. Or maybe you’ve seen that it’s the name of multiple Asian bakeries and pop-ups. The phrase is not just a marker of taste, but one of identity. For a dessert to be Asian, it must be “not too sweet.” And to be Asian, one must like it that way.
The most refreshing thing about this collection is that it doesn’t try too hard to defend itself against the notion that games are fun. Of course they are. So is reading books, but most people would describe reading as a productive pursuit. Gaming, to many, is a waste of time – because it is what, too enjoyable? As the novelist Tony Tulathimutte writes, “I could wax poetic about how games and novels offer vivid vicarious experiences and broaden your world-view by putting you in the minds and roles of other people, but that’s disingenuous. I read and play games because I want to and because nobody is making me stop.”
Critical Hits is an exciting, original and rich collection. It made me want to read more, to write more, and – I admit without shame – to play more.
Alligators aren't cute. They don't inhabit places that are comfortable for outsiders to visit and they are often seen, as Renner points out here, as a "nuisance." However, they deserve the same love, respect, and protection as any other animal that has been in danger before and could be in danger again. Gator Country is an invitation to give them just that, and it contains everything people might need to feel informed. Renner's debut is self-assured and full of poetry, and it will change Florida in the eyes of everyone who reads it.
We are drawn to the horrific with good reason. We understand that, in our soft mammalian bodies, evolved from predatory primates, we are at risk of accident and violence. We know loss and grief. Even hamsters exhibit self-preservation, but presumably they lack our foreknowledge that all creatures tread the edge of the abyss. One of the quirks of Homo sapiens, however, is that we get a thrill from the abyss. Perhaps its proximity fires up our primordial synapses. In a world of stationary bicycles and decaffeinated coffee, of streetlights banishing the ancient night, do we miss that shiver down the spine?
The shiver is not new. The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries celebrates how the nineteenth century added a modern twist to the ancient theme of bloody murder. Gradually, the suspenseful race of pursuers hot on the trail of a culprit began to entwine toward the denouement with a parallel story of how they gathered and deciphered clues. This narrative updating wed venerable kinds of epic stories, such as quest and vengeance, to the sense of mystery formerly limited to supernatural narratives. The Gothic cobwebbery festooning many early crime stories—much of which now looks as silly to us as a haunted fairground in Scooby-Doo—met the fresh new idea of legal justice. Although there are occasional earlier examples of crime-solving, the murder mystery as we think of it nowadays centered upon a detective figure interested at least in the conservative notion of the restoration of “order,” and at best in the liberal ideal of justice. The genre could not have evolved before modern notions of a codified legal structure and organized police—ideally a commitment to evidence versus torture, clues versus accusation. In every society, of course, the evolving system has been structured to protect the dominant group, so corruption and bigotry polluted each system. But at least there was beginning to be a system.
In seventeen years it will be the 200th anniversary of Monet’s birth, yet he might still be the best way to introduce someone young to art – and not just modern art. This is partly because of what he didn’t paint. He didn’t do historical or religious subjects: no need to know what is happening at the Annunciation (let alone the Assumption of the Virgin) or what Oedipus said to the Sphinx or why so many naked women are attending the death of Sardanapalus. He never painted a literary scene for which you need to know the story. None of his paintings refers to an earlier painting. He was the first great artist since the Renaissance never to paint a nude. He painted portraits but it didn’t matter (except to him) whom they were of. You don’t need to know the history of art to appreciate a Monet picture because he wasn’t much interested in the history of art himself (though he revered Watteau and Delacroix and Velázquez). He had even less interest in the science of visual perception. His art was secular and apolitical.
Grandmama didn’t wear her Sunday best, or even her Friday best, to Jr. Food Mart on date night with Ofa D. She’d drape herself in this baby blue velour jogging suit sent down from Mama Rose in Milwaukee. Grandmama was the best chef, cook, food conjurer, and gardener in Scott County. Hence, she hated on all food, and all food stories, that she did not make.
But Grandmama never, ever hated on the cuisine at Jr. Food Mart, our favorite restaurant that served gas.
There are foods I don’t associate with a specific memory so much as with the act of remembering. If all my favourite breakfast foods were laid out before me—smoked salmon and capers, ful mdammas, soft goat cheese and honey—I would reach for labaneh and zaatar first. As ubiquitous to the Lebanese breakfast table as buttered bread is to others, labaneh and zaatar are extraordinary in their simplicity, a constant, evergreen staple. When I feed friends a morsel of labaneh and zaatar on whole wheat pita, I’m not offering them a relic of my childhood so much as an invitation into the fullness of my family—a piece of who I am, and who I’ve been, when I’m at home: a daughter, a sister, an aunt.
Labaneh—or labneh, depending on one’s dialect—is what happens when you strain the whey out of yoghurt. A thick, creamy spread possessed of a beautifully fermented tang, it’s first salted, then made pillowy by folding in lashings of olive oil. I only speak Arabic with my family, and I only eat labaneh when my mother gives me some; in fact I’ve only made it once, last month, under my parents’ roof. Labaneh, like language, is something I receive with gratitude and love and a little guilt; it’s not something I produce reliably myself.
I’d never tasted or even considered the boozy, spiced mixture of mincemeat before, but Smith’s headnote conjured up a dad-and-daughter moment that soothed me even as I longed for it. And in a moment when every inch of kitchen countertop was already covered in cookies and the necessary accoutrements scattered about, Smith had sold me: I was craving mincemeat.
Let’s sidestep such impulses as we do the noisome ginkgo berries that litter the sidewalks. Let’s poke around in these ruderal lives. What primes someone for this work? What comes of being in such close contact with one’s own consciousness—one’s own taste, limitations, deprivations? Not just a life of the mind but a life in the mind, perpetually observing one’s own responses. Margo Jefferson, in her memoir “Constructing a Nervous System,” calls this observing self Monster, and makes it a character. Monster mocks, Monster annotates, Monster will not be appeased.
At 12.30pm on that December day, just before they were due to break for lunch in Gävle, Beldt’s phone rang. It was one of his colleagues. Furuvik Zoo is only open to the public during the summer, but on that December morning, there were still 35 people on site: administrative staff, zookeepers attending to the animals and contractors renovating the amusement park, known as the Tivoli.
“Don’t come to the park today,” she said.
He thought he couldn’t have heard what she said next correctly. He asked her to repeat herself. “And then,” Beldt told me, “I just remember everything going dark.”
As a kid, I spent all my summer and winter holidays in my parents’ hometown of Methana, a small Greek peninsula with an active volcano, beautiful beaches, and a wild, windswept sort of nature. It’s just a couple hours from Athens, where I lived with my family the rest of the year, accessible either by car or by boat from the bustling Piraeus port. For years we didn’t own a car, so the only option was the sea. Every December, immediately after school closed for the holidays, we would take the early-morning ferry to Methana, where my grandparents on my mother’s side would be waiting for us. Those weeks around Christmas and the New Year were my favorite time of year, and for decades — while my grandparents were still alive, anyway — I never spent the holidays anywhere else.
I would argue that Jonathan Raban and Seattle share that mysterious bond — the magic of a writer finding their ideal place in the world. This is not to diminish Raban’s talent — he would have been a world-class writer no matter where he decided to make his home. His keen observational eye, wry sense of humor, and brilliant ability to prize apart the nonsense and find the tiny seed of truth at the heart of any situation were unique among his peers.
But it’s impossible to read “Driving Home: An American Journey,” Raban’s wide-ranging essay collection published by Seattle’s own Sasquatch Books, and not recognize it as a love story between a gruff Englishman and the verdant beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
A former colleague of mine used to say that central to doing philosophy is the practice of reading slowly. I recalled the saying later when I came across this passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein: “This is how philosophers should greet each other: ‘Take your time!’” Taking one’s time, lingering, what some philosophers call “tarrying,” is crucial to doing philosophy well.
Why is this? There are several reasons. Philosophy is supposed, among other things, to go deeper than appearances, to see what’s behind or beneath them. Relatedly, philosophy is supposed to be critical, not accepting what immediately presents itself but instead asking whether what presents itself is actually true or just or morally decent. Yet again, philosophy often involves following the thought of other philosophers, thought that itself can be elusive. (Reader-friendliness, unfortunately, is rarely counted among the virtues of philosophy.)
Reuben and Peggy’s jobs are not top secret in the way top secret jobs usually are. They don’t have guns, for example – and the grey conference table they sit at is much the same as you’d find in any office in the UK. They even have LinkedIn profiles that tell you their job titles. But this is where things get odd: search the name of the company they work for – a name I have agreed not to print – and you’ll find little information about the work Reuben and Peggy do. You could click through every page on their company’s website and leave with no idea that it creates the most beloved crisp flavours in the world.
Reuben and Peggy are not their real names. Reuben is a snacks development manager and Peggy is a marketer, and they work for a “seasoning house”, a company that manufactures flavourings for crisps.
While some cases can be solved easily, computer scientists struggled for nearly half a century to develop a comprehensive understanding of the problem. Now, in a series of breakthroughs over the past few years, they have firmly established exactly how complex that problem can get.
In “The Infinite Loop / El lazo infinito,” Oneyda González asks readers to listen and to think. This translated collection gracefully intertwines Spanish and English, creating an infinite loop of dialogues between languages, pages, people, and words.
The story — an unsettling dystopian parable — was stylistically daring, relentlessly dark and more emotionally taxing than anything he’d attempted before. He thought it would never get published. But when he sat down in his Dublin home and typed out the novel’s opening passages, he couldn’t stop.
“The damn thing had its own momentum,” Lynch said. “It just sucked me in.”
Scientists have dubbed this enigmatic animal the Cross Seamount beaked whale because it was near the Cross Seamount—an underwater mountain off southwestern Hawai‘i—that they first heard its calls in 2005. Since then, scientists haven’t been quite sure what to make of it. Some think the whale might be a known species—maybe it’s actually the poorly understood ginkgo-toothed beaked whale, an animal understood mostly from strandings. Or maybe, McCullough suggests, it’s a previously undiscovered one: “I’m not taking it off the table,” she says.
The truth is, nobody knows for sure. But McCullough wants to find out. She and her colleagues recently combed through nearly 20 years of recordings of the whale. Like a new fan going through a band’s back catalog, they listened closely. The recordings have convinced biologists the whale is a type of beaked whale—a relative of other deep-water dwellers like the Cuvier’s beaked whale and True’s beaked whale. But its behaviors differ from its cousins.
The “world famous” descriptor is a bit of a running gag in the community of Langlois (which locals pronounce either as “Lang-less” or “Lang-loyce”). The story goes that in 2014, community members were trying to get the speed limit along U.S. 101 lowered through town. But the Oregon Department of Transportation questioned whether tiny Langlois had enough of what they called “road culture” to encourage drivers to slow down.
So, a committee of locals decided to drum up some “road culture,” and they installed signs along the highway that read “Welcome to World Famous Langlois.” Surely that would get drivers’ attention.
When finishing a novel, there is an introspective sweet spot before publication and after the final edits get turned in, when, in a quiet anxious period, I’m forced to look at my creation, to try and understand what I have done, to remember how this thing was formed. An important question for any journey: what do I think, now that it’s over?
Stripped down to the barest narrative elements of character and event, Davis’ flash fiction requires the reader to actively engage in the production of meaning. We are forced to fill in the blanks to find some sense of resolution or satisfaction.
Naoise Dolan’s second novel, “The Happy Couple,” is a study not of love or romance but of the motivating force of self-delusion.
One year before the U.S. Civil War ended, an embargo had brought the southern ice trade to a halt, causing the region’s chefs, bartenders, nurses and doctors to lose access to the northern ice they’d come to rely on for preserving food, making drinks and healing bodies. Without ice, the South was suffering.
What they didn’t know was that 20 years before the war began, a relatively unknown doctor living in the port town of Apalachicola, Florida, had found a way to bring ice to the South that didn’t depend on shipments from the North. Against all conventional scientific thinking of the day, the doctor, John Gorrie, had discovered how to make ice himself. His ice-making machine would eventually change how Americans use and think of ice. It made ice possible during ice famines — winters that weren’t cold enough to effectively freeze lakes and rivers — and even in hot summers. A direct line can be drawn between Gorrie’s mechanical ice and air-conditioning, modern refrigeration and state-of-the art medical treatments such as therapeutic hypothermia and cryosurgery, which uses ice crystals to freeze tumors.
These cookbooks might play an important role in the transition to sustainable diets. It’s one thing—and certainly a useful thing—for scientists and international organizations to tell people how diets need to change to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. It’s another to bring the culinary path forward to life in actual dishes and ingredients. And recipe developers and cookbook authors, whose whole shtick is knowing what will feel doable and inspiring in the glow of the refrigerator light, might be the ones to do it.
French author Mathias Énard, winner of the Prix Goncourt and nominated for the International Booker prize, begins his new novel by quoting the Buddha: “In our former lives, we have all been earth, stone, dew, wind, fire, moss, tree, insect, fish, turtle, bird and mammal.” The central conceit of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is the great “wheel of suffering” through which the souls of all living things are reincarnated in a new form immediately after death. Murderers, for example, come back as red worms slithering “cheek by jowl” under a dank shower tray in a rundown rural annexe rented by an anthropologist who is writing a thesis on “what it means to live in the country nowadays”.
Hannah Masury, for a brief time, was a pirate. At least, according to the mysterious manuscript that shows up on Professor Marian Beresford’s desk, brought by a bright-faced student excited at the possibility of finding the treasure that Hannah left behind.
Novelist and historian Katherine Howe embarks on a dazzlingly fun historical fiction, “A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself: A Novel” — aptly named given the way it tests the boundaries between reality and imagination.
What distinguishes toxic falsehoods from sustaining fictions? And which of the two flourishes in the wilds of the internet, where hoaxes thrive and doctored images abound? In “A History of Fake Things on the Internet,” computer scientist Walter J. Scheirer proposes that much of what has been disparaged as “misinformation” is best considered under a different rubric: that of art. “Haven’t creative art forms like the novel always challenged the truth in some way?” he provocatively asks. “Why turn away from new innovations in storytelling simply because they provide an outlet for folks intent on making things up?”
It was perhaps the biggest news story of 1909. Or perhaps it’s better said that there were two competitors for the biggest news story of 1909, both of them seeking the same headline. Arctic explorer Robert Peary returned to civilization that summer, having spent more than a year making his third attempt at reaching the North Pole. He was famous across America and Europe for his tireless quest to be the first person there, and on April 6 of that year, or so he claimed, he had reached it. For a man with a singular obsession, it was his moment of greatest triumph.
There was only one problem. Days earlier, Frederick Cook, another polar explorer of some note and the man who claimed (falsely, it subsequently turned out) to have scaled Denali in 1906, had also emerged from a lengthy foray into the Arctic. He, too, claimed to have reached the planet’s northern axis, reporting success a full year earlier. For Peary, it wasn’t just a crushing blow. He was fully convinced Cook’s claim was false. For American newspapers, the dispute was an even bigger story than the attainment of the pole itself. Editors and journalists took sides. So did their readers. What followed was a media-driven culture war.
I do believe that books carry everything, by which I mean, they carry our heritage, they carry our ideas, they carry who we are. They are us. This is why I cannot get rid of a book, because it feels like a death, to get rid of a book. I know and realize that these feelings I have verge on the irrational, but I own them (the feelings; the books).
The fluidity of the line, mixed with the effects of kava, plunged me into a state of wonder. The technique reminded me of the classic challenge to draw a complex figure with a single stroke, without lifting one’s pen or going over the same line twice. It also called to mind a “Eulerian graph” in mathematics, which involves a trail that traverses every edge exactly once while starting and ending at the same point.
As I considered these ideas, an intern approached me and whispered, “Where is the mathematics in this drawing, teacher?” Though he could not have known it, that remark would go on to shape the next six years of my life, including my doctoral work on sand drawing. One question particularly inspired me: How were such drawings created?
“I think art is what makes us human,” says Dr. Clara Nellist, a particle physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. “Pure scientific curiosity … I compare it to art.”
It’s this human curiosity, this pursuit of art, that drives Dr. Nellist, who helped develop the pixel detector for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC.) In her everyday work, she doesn’t see a demarcation line between art and science. Trying to understand the world around you, just for the sake of understanding it, is art.
“Where did all this come from? How did it all get started?”
These are the questions that Dr. Nergis Mavalvala asks about the universe. It’s not the meaning-of-life stuff in the traditional sense, but more of how everything around us came to be. These are the questions we all have, but for Dr. Mavalvala, finding the answers is her life’s work. It’s why she became a physicist.
Roland Allen loves notebooks. Why wouldn’t he? He is, after all, a writer. In his new study, delightfully subtitled A History of Thinking on Paper, he declares: “If your business is words, a notebook can be at once your medium – and your mirror.” Paul Valéry was at least as devoted to his notebooks as the symbolist poetry for which he is best known. He awoke early each morning for half a century to write in them, amassing 261 books in total. “Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.”
What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger. When it comes to nature’s toxins, they might even save your life (or at least blunt the sting of its finality). The distinction, as the evolutionary biologist Noah Whiteman explores in “Most Delicious Poison,” is all in the dosage.
Today there are about 9.4 million dairy cows in this country, generating more than 25 billion gallons of milk per year. If much of this staggering output is the consequence of a misguided belief in the virtue and necessity of lifelong milk consumption, and if our kids don’t want to drink milk, and if many immigrant communities don’t want to drink milk, and if adults generally would prefer a seltzer, beer, or oat-milk latte, then a reckoning is surely in store to wipe the mustache off our face.
Now Britain is filled with marvelous food from all over the world (including France). Without David, there would be no Ottolenghi, no Jamie Oliver, no Fergus Henderson and his nose-to-tail take on classic English food… but wait! Does the existence of “classic English food” mean there was interesting food in Britain all along?
This is the problem with attributing a food revolution to a single person. Elizabeth David taught the British readers of the 1950s that there was a wonderful world of food beyond the English Channel. But it was Jane Grigson who taught them to appreciate what they already had. Or, as Grigson wrote in the introduction to the 1979 edition of her 1974 book English Food, “English cooking — both historically and in the mouth — is a great deal more varied and delectable than our masochistic temper in this matter allows.”
Morality is objective, but it neither requires nor admits of a foundation. It just kind of floats there, along with the evaluative realm more generally, unsupported by anything else. Parts of it can be explained by other parts, but the entirety of the web or network of good and evil is brute. Maybe you think that’s weird and even worthy of outright dismissal. I once thought the same thing.
Eating now is a complex process wrapped in fear, burdens, and only occasional joy. I’ve often related to the phrase “the personal is political,” and my experiences with food, while deeply personal, are political. In fact, many of my issues with food are rooted in centuries of colonialist food practices that have displaced Indigenous food sources, polluted the land and water, and enforced racist, ableist, sexist, and classist hierarchies.
Every place I inhabit enriches my life and makes me feel like a child again, wondering about all the daily differences I notice. Regret comes only when I think of our stuff in storage. I wish I’d gotten rid of more when I had the chance.
But as Wasson’s narrative builds, something that he asserts early in the book — that “Apocalypse Now” is “the paragon of Zoetrope-style filmmaking” — begins to make more sense. Every great Coppola film, Wasson says, is essentially an autobiographical exercise that unfolded in real time. “Apocalypse,” in which Coppola manufactured an expensive jungle war to reflect his own tortured, high-stakes artistic process, is the apotheosis of the filmmaker’s method, but it’s hardly the only example.