Though the OED is published by Oxford University Press, it is, in many respects, the spiritual and intellectual opposite of an elite university. For one thing, its admissions policy is quite forgiving. The dictionary is not reserved for an elite fraction of the English language. With some exceptions—dirty words, for example, were suppressed for many years—all words are welcome because the OED was conceived “with an impartial hospitality,” as Richard Chenevix Trench, future Anglican archbishop of Dublin, said in his 1857 lectures to the Philological Society, which led directly to the founding of the OED.
At the bar, I worked with a few people who had passed through Big Sky, and I’d heard about it as the epitome of these forces: great skiing, awful housing, billionaire indulgence. I had never been there; the $260 peak-season lift ticket was an obstacle for someone on a journalist’s salary. Even so, I began to poke around; I wanted to see the place that the New York Times dubbed “the future of skiing.”
And Big Sky stands apart for other reasons. The obvious distinction is the Yellowstone Club, a private resort hidden in the mountains above the community that Justin Farrell, a professor of sociology at Yale and the author of Billionaire Wilderness, has described as “the pinnacle, or inevitable telos, of the trajectory of extreme wealth concentration in the United States.” The club is one of the most exclusive institutions on the planet. Guards watch its gates, and Google Street View doesn’t show its streets. It has its own ski mountain, a fire department, and a restaurant overseen by a celebrity chef; people who have worked inside describe thirteen-thousand-square-foot homes and sharkskin bar tops. The club’s members reportedly include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and Warren Buffett. As of 2019, new members put down a $400,000 deposit and paid about $44,000 in annual fees, according to Mansion Global. Those with the means can buy property on the club’s land, and sources note that sale prices can be well north of $20 million. Current and former employees insisted on anonymity, fearing retaliation from an institution that employs a private security force.
For a book to be good – really good, keep it on your shelf for ever good – it has to be two things: fun and a stretch. You have to need to know what happens next; and you have to feel like a bigger or better version of yourself at the end. Airport thrillers are almost always fun; much contemporary autofiction is just a stretch, largely because it’s very hard for a book in which not much happens to be a page-turner. What a thrill, then, to come to Kaliane Bradley’s debut, The Ministry of Time, a novel where things happen, lots of them, and all of them are exciting to read about and interesting to think about.
If Nicholas Rombes’s first novel, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, relies on descriptions of unseeable movies, supposedly by Deren, Lynch, Jodorowsky, etc., for its vertiginous coloring, The Rachel Condition bravely pushes into the things themselves: letters, reports, memoir, a strange genre novel, and annotations. Lacking the connective tissue of narrative cogency, and in their method more like video art than feature films, the texts force the reader into a reflexive state rather than a transportive one. What am I looking at now? What am I responding to?
Then, again, the author of Sipsworth, Simon Van Booy’s latest fiction, is a master of original stories full of deceptive simplicity. Here he creates with humor and poignancy a surprising and heartwarming tale about loss and love, seamlessly integrating details of Helen’s past into the present-tense narrative. Sections are named for days of the week, the weather always omnipresent -air crisp, “sky so blue it seems painted.” “Large puddles wear patches of fallen leaves.”
Women of means in Europe and the United States, including Becker, dominated botany in its earliest history. At this inflection point in the mid-1800s, men attempted to professionalize and “defeminize” the field, Zimmerman writes, moving science from the home into the laboratory and intentionally marginalizing women. The structures and expectations that came to define science workplaces were created at that time. Zimmerman uses this example to show how her experience as a 21st-century botanist is still influenced by these structures, at the same time that natural history — the foundation of all biological sciences — is on the decline. For women in the field, it’s a double whammy.
Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life is the most comprehensive biography of the singer to date, and aims to make the case for her importance. Gabriel—whose previous book, Ninth Street Women, was a joint biography of the painters Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell—has corralled an unimaginable amount of material and spoken to many of Madonna’s closest friends, though not to Madonna herself. She argues that Madonna’s greatest significance is social—her support of people of color, gay rights, and women’s liberation in a hidebound industry—rather than artistic. The singer is a “lightning rod,” Gabriel says in her prologue, “an irritant, sometimes even to her fans.” But, apart from maybe the Dreyfus Affair, do controversies last?
I’ve always been a sucker for buildings-that-might-have-been and this book looked right up my street: promising a massive global survey of weird and wonderful structures that didn’t make it beyond the drawing board.