Let’s imagine for a second that Judy Rodgers had a perfectly ordinary senior year at Ladue High School, just outside of St. Louis, eating supermarket vegetables and pizza covered in processed cheese. Afterward, she would have gone to Stanford to study art history and then to law school and a distinguished career in the foreign service, because Rodgers, in addition to being a planner, was smart and thoughtful about details.
Maybe she would have had one special dinner at Chez Panisse during college and dropped in at other Michelin-starred restaurants during her various postings around the world. But she never would have tasted her own roast chicken at San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe, and she never would have written down the recipe in 4 1/2 meticulously detailed pages. And innumerable home cooks across the English-speaking world, myself included, never would have learned to make their own perfectly roasted chickens, and the world, in this one small but important way, would be a sadder place.
In 1979, in a fascinating paper, physicist and feminist Evelyn Fox Keller somewhat snidely lauded the “ingenuity” of physicists in developing the Many Worlds Hypothesis: “this hypothesis demonstrates remarkable ingenuity in that it manages to retain both the confidence in the object reality of the system, and its literal correspondence with theory. Of course, a price has been paid – namely the price of seriousness.”
Maybe in the better branch of the wave function I’m heading to there won’t be so many haters.
With all these data, astronomers are making the first exact maps of the Milky Way: locations of stars in three dimensions, plus a record of their motions made by repeatedly imaging them over time. The result is a deep, high-resolution movie of a few billion swirling stars that helps to reveal not only the galaxy's structure but also its surprisingly tumultuous history, along with the histories of its stars and the galaxy's means of making more stars. It's “the single largest increase in astronomical knowledge in, like, forever,” says Charlie Conroy of Harvard University. “It's been shocking.”
If you require a neat, linear plot, beware. “Held” manipulates history and narrative with the same promiscuous verve that Lidia Yuknavitch demonstrated in her spectacular 2022 novel, “Thrust.” But even as these various storylines grow more elliptical, they become more evocative, the cumulative effect of Michaels turning profound issues over in her hands.
Alphabetical Diaries is a book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in “our brain” – a telling phrase for a work that burrows so deeply into a single psyche that it transcends the personal, as if emerging from one collective, neurotic consciousness. Then again, this book is “about” nothing – like life, it is not “about”, but just is. In many ways, it is a gimmick, a game. But its playfulness is profound.
“Get the Picture” is one of the funniest books I’ve read about New York’s contemporary art scene, even if I disagreed with some of its conclusions about how best to approach and appreciate art.