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?