I ran my hands over it to flatten its creases. It showed an area totaling just 20 square kilometers, a tiny place. The map was divided into 400 individual grid squares, outlined in light blue — a single square kilometer each. I could comfortably walk the perimeter of any square in about an hour.
Each week, I decided, I would explore one of those squares in detail, doing my best to see everything there, to walk or cycle every footpath and street, and to learn as much as I could along the way. I wanted it to be serendipitous, not governed by my preferences. I hoped to see things I would not ordinarily come across. I decided to treat everything as interesting. The late Terry Pratchett once gave a lecture on “the importance of being amazed about absolutely everything,” which felt like a fitting mission statement.
What do you call a galaxy without stars?
Earlier this month, radio astronomers announced that they had discovered the darkest galaxy ever not quite seen, a cloud of hydrogen gas resembling our own Milky Way galaxy in many respects, such as its mass and rotation, but with no stars that anyone can discern.
The day of the title is a composite of three days: a morning in 2019, a locked-down afternoon in 2020, and an evening in 2021, when it is possible to travel and gather again. On 5 April in each of these years, Michael Cunningham takes his samplings, or specimen hours, minutely observing the lives of the people he finds in a Brooklyn apartment. A quarter century after The Hours, with its three Mrs Dalloways in different times and cities, Cunningham returns to a solidly tripartite structure across which contrasts and connections build. And he returns, with undiminished faith, to the project that united modernists as different as his heroes Joyce and Woolf: the effort to articulate the vast inner lives of a few unexceptional people on a single day.
Ultimately, Karam’s book illustrates in vivid detail—in just 200 pages, intricate yet in accessible prose—the vivid trapped existence of refugees, of how they begin to live outside time and space, of how the world seems not to see or acknowledge their past or their presence, while denying them a future.
The psychological underpinnings elevate “No One Can Know.” Marshall shows myriad sides of each character while adding plausible misdirections, keeping the reader off-kilter.
In his new book, Filterworld, Kyle Chayka demystifies how these all-powerful social-media algorithms have replaced human tastemakers to become the primary lever (and dictator) of global uniform culture. He calls these interconnected, expansive networks of algorithms on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok “Filterworld,” which prescribes what we watch, read, listen to, where we eat and even travel to.