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.