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.