Simone Gorrindo, whose new memoir, “The Wives,” details her life as a military spouse, had an important motivation for writing her book. “When I got to Georgia,” — Fort Benning, the Army post in Columbus where her husband was stationed — “I was 28, an adult with my own education and career. I was one of only a few spouses who didn’t have children. In New York, everyone asks, ‘What do you do?’ In Georgia, that was not something I was asked. Instead the question was, ‘Where are your children? How many children do you have?’ It was an upending time for my identity. I had to figure out who I was.”
In later editions of The Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, as one of the “few” people who had understood that species change and evolve, before Darwin himself.
Now a new book will attempt to shine a light on the French naturalist’s extraordinary achievements and groundbreaking ideas, which date back to the 1740s. “Buffon was one of the very first people to postulate the change of species over time,” said Jason Roberts, author of a new book, Every Living Thing, which will be published next week, on 11 April. “He did not call it evolution – that word was coined later – but he was one of the first people to talk about it and suggest there was some kind of system.”
“Anyone can enter our championship, even if you’re five years old,” explains Nevins Chan Pak Hoong from the sidelines, appointed by the World Cube Association to oversee the competition. A speedcuber himself, he has been involved in organising the competitions for nine years. “It’s very wholesome. You could be sitting next to someone who was a world record holder,” he says (someone later tells me Chan Pak Hoong is, quite secretively, exactly that). Really, though, no one else matters. It’s about beating your past self again, and again, and again.
I am a serious newspaper food columnist. I am not tempted by the next viral pastry trend. I will not spend money on something simply because it is larger or smaller than it should be, or a hybrid of two things I like.
Also me: I spent an hour in traffic to drive to a bakery in Koreatown because someone I follow on Instagram posted a video of a “flat” croissant.
Don’t get me wrong. My breakfast order was delicious; not only was it airy verging on lofty, it was sourdough, strongly so. I’d gladly make a sandwich with it, maybe even deflate its loft into a bagel/panini hybrid. It could be croutons once it’s stale. I’d buy it again.
But it is not a bagel. Squishy, hole-less — it’s the end of the world as we know it. And I do not feel fine.
At its core, eating intuitively is anti-diet, meaning that it pushes back against “the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently.” However, that message often gets flattened by both critics and adherents, especially on social media where it is often positioned as a movement that greenlights eating past the point of being comfortably full. Anti-diet messaging is now also being twisted by major food companies who see it as an opportunity to cash in.
Yet stasis, implacability, mark Joan Didion‘s 1970 novel as surely as change. Its defining motif — in the form of freeway cloverleafs, coiled rattlesnakes, daily routines and calendrical rhythms — is the spiral or loop, and with it she paints the picture of an industry in decay, saturated with copycat movies, predatory men, hacks and hangers-on. Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of Didion’s portrait is not the ruthless precision with which it renders the film business then, but the clarity with which it corresponds to the film business now. If you have ever had your agent dodge a meeting or encountered a unit publicist running interference on a scoop or been a third-string guest at an exclusive party, you have already lived out a scene from “Play It As It Lays,” which is to say that the broken Hollywood it depicts is decidedly our own. Its only real anachronisms, to today’s eyes, are Maria’s snobbish swipe at TV writers and the $1,500/month rent on her house in Beverly Hills.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares?” There is no more quotable novel about Hollywood than Carrie Fisher’s roman à clef, “Postcards From the Edge.” Fisher’s sentences bristle with caustic, self-effacing humor. Outside of her forays into that galaxy far, far away, that brand of sharp deadpan comedy is perhaps what the former Princess Leia would become best known for. And in her debut novel, the actress-turned-writer makes great use of her enviable way with words.
Most notably, Towles’s characters hit the page like fully sculpted marble: frank in their behavior, obdurate in their morality and, by and large, very good-looking. In his newest work, “Table for Two,” a collection of six short stories and a novella, Towles thrives at the crossroads of form and technique. There’s not enough room for a character to really mature in 30-odd pages; luckily, Towles doesn’t need them to.
Nonetheless, the task Eli Friedlander sets himself in his ambitious new study Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History is to transform Benjamin’s reputation from that of a philosophizing writer to that of a capital-P Philosopher. As Friedlander acknowledges, resistance to the idea of Benjamin as a philosopher (rather than a cultural historian or literary critic) is “understandable” given the sheer variety of his output, which ranges from essays on Proust and Baudelaire to pieces on Mickey Mouse and toys, as well as “radio plays for children and an endless number of reviews of books.” Philosophy typically becomes more accessible when we’re able to tie a thinker to a particular theory or idea, and, as Friedlander observes, Benjamin’s astonishingly wide array of writing can, for many, prove “just too much.” The main aim of Friedlander’s book, then, is digestion: he sets out to reveal “a ‘Benjaminian’ philosophy” by arguing that the overriding theme of Benjamin’s work is humanity’s relationship to nature.
“Somehow” is classic Anne Lamott, with passages that beg to be highlighted, mulled over and shared with friends and loved ones.