I am standing on the sand at Scheveningen, The Hague’s most famous beach resort, in the act of niksen, the Dutch term for doing absolutely nothing. I try not to think about whether I am really doing nothing if I am standing on a beach. Maybe I should be sitting down? But then I would be sitting down. How do you niksen properly? Being effortlessly aimless next to me is Olga Mecking, the author of Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing. In the three years since the book was published, she has become the Netherlands’ go-to authority on doing sod all. I suddenly remember there is a pancake house back on the promenade. Does eating pancakes count as doing nothing, or is it too much like doing something? Maybe I am not cut out for niksen.
The schism turned out to be even more catastrophic than either side could have imagined. It left Tran without the peppers he needed to meet the ever-growing demand for his sriracha. Since he lost Underwood’s chilies, his massive factory in Irwindale, Calif., has operated sporadically, at a fraction of its capacity. For the first year after the split, Huy Fong got by on stockpiled mash and Mexican chilies, which were cheap because of a glut. But supply has often been spotty since then: In the first half of 2023, Huy Fong had no chilies at all.
Underwood, meanwhile, faced financial ruin: The vast swaths of land that he had purchased or leased to grow jalapeños couldn’t be planted without a buyer. He was locked into 25-year leases on much of the land he had expanded into, and he didn’t have cash on hand to pay his own suppliers. He took out loans, sold some parcels, and laid off 45 workers.
Both businesses lost millions. The two men became bitter enemies—and they offer sharply contrasting accounts of what went wrong.
Considering his writing routine, it should come as no surprise that Sims’s latest story collection, the excellent Other Minds and Other Stories, is preoccupied with the way technology has interrupted our lives. In “Unknown,” a man is driven to the brink by the repeated calls from a mysterious unlisted number. In “The Postcard,” the narrator blindly follows the directions of his GPS, eventually walking into a waking nightmare. In “Portonaccio Sarcophagus,” a character wanders through his mother’s neighborhood on Google Street View hoping to see her face though all he finds are the app’s faceless creatures.
In someone else’s hands, these might be little more than typeset urban legends, the stuff of 2000s-era AOL email chains, but Sims renders them as something both terrifying and mesmerizing—part existential horror, part philosophical exploration.
In a novel about identity, where the layers of assumptions and misconceptions are slowly peeled away to reveal a long-lost sense of self, we never learn our main character’s name. She remains anonymous and yet familiar. “Maybe you think you know her,” Sweeney writes in the opening pages. “Or you know her type.” Perhaps that’s the cleverest thing of all in this sharp and timely story. It could be any one of us.
In a book so focused on the tendency for humans to ruin and destroy, it serves as a reminder that maybe all but our most lasting damage are impermanent in the long run—a bleakly hopeful idea to propel readers through Colanzi’s more chaotic tales of destruction to follow. The collection strikes an overall tense tone with small notes of this sort of existential optimism, as people continue to reach and fail in a world of nuclear power and toxins, and yet the world persists.
With this story for adults, Link is wending her way through an old-growth forest of fantasy novels that stretches from “Harry Potter” to “The Chronicles of Narnia,” adventures in which a small group of young people must confront a dark challenge and a maniacal adversary. But she’s also cutting her own distinctly Linkian path by following the struggles of modern-day teens as they figure out who they are and who they love in an unstable world shimmering with deception.
But once in a while, you find someone from history who seems to have been on the right side all along. Annie Besant (1847-1933) was such a woman, and is the subject of Michael Meyer’s A Dirty, Filthy Book. An early trade unionist, a preacher of “free thought”, an anti-colonist, a campaigner for women’s rights, and, crucially, an early advocate for birth control; Besant was a one-woman revolution. Or, as Meyer puts it, “a badass, a battering ram, a woman who inspired the next generation of social reformers”.
Kershenbaum no doubt sees Why Animals Talk as a book about biology. I prefer to see it as a humble, genial, scholarly, impeccably clear meditation on our own Umwelt. He challenges us to consider that there are ways of being in the world other than ours. Our old instinct is right: if we learn how to listen properly, animals really can tell us something significant about the world that we wouldn’t know without them.