“White people love feeling guilty,” James announces, even though few of the white people in the novel seem much troubled by their consciences—so which white people is he talking about, exactly? Knowing Everett’s impish propensities, it’s impossible to read James—among other things, a litany of atrocities visited upon Black characters, set in the past—and not wonder if he’s still needling gullible white readers about what we expect from Black novelists. If he’s mocking us, well, he’s earned that right. Maybe he’ll even win a Pulitzer.
Perhaps the Collatz conjecture will be determined true or false in the coming years. But there is another possibility: perhaps it truly is a problem that cannot be proven with available mathematical tools. In fact, in 1987 the late mathematician John Horton Conway investigated a generalization of the Collatz conjecture and found that iterative functions have properties that are unprovable. Perhaps this also applies to the Collatz conjecture. As simple as it may seem, it could be doomed to remain unsolved forever.
When you open your TikTok “For You” page, it might feel like you’ve entered a time warp back to 2020, when, during the most uncertain days of the pandemic, many folks began baking their own naturally leavened bread as a sort of emotional survival mechanism. Today, although the threat of COVID-19 feels less immediate for many of us and there are no yeast or flour shortages, sourdough is once again having a moment in the sun.
The publication of Until August, a new novella by Gabriel García Márquez (translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean), ten years after his death could be seen as a betrayal. His sons acknowledge as much. They admit in the book’s preface that Márquez himself, after working on this manuscript through memory loss near the end of his life, finally declared, “The book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”
And yet it does seem to work. His novella, a small work of under 120 pages, is a mature story about laying tough truths bare: an older woman dealing with age, death, and love confronts the naked truth of her life and her own self.
A novel with the title “Martyr!” arrives on the scene preloaded and explosive. The word is fraught, even more so now than when the book’s author, the Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar, chose it. There’s humor in the exclamation mark, but there’s something else, too. It signals that Akbar is fascinated with words in action, words that someone has reached for in a state of excitation, like joy or deep grief. The shouter of “Martyr!” bears something within him which he is determined to force the word to express. But the title’s punctuation ironizes or undercuts this intention, as if to suggest that language signifies in ways that are impossible to control. In “Martyr!,” Akbar plays this struggle—the struggle to make words mean what you want them to mean—for laughs, but he’s also deadly serious.