One of the earliest surviving accounts of tree houses comes from, of all people, first-century philosopher Pliny the Elder. In his Natural History, published around 77 to 79, Pliny recounts a story about the Roman emperor Caligula, who appreciated the bounty of nature despite his tyrannical reputation. Pliny writes that Caligula was so "impressed" by a large plane tree that he had "benches laid loosely on beams consisting of its branches" within and held a banquet, calling it his "nest." Though Pliny’s story is only a few sentences in an expansive text, it neatly summarizes the lingering fascination with the tree house: It marries the sublimity of the natural world with architecture. Caligula was so struck by the plane tree that he didn’t just want to observe it; he wanted to inhabit it.
Over 1,000 years before the internet and smartphone apps, Persian scientist and polymath Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī invented the concept of algorithms.
In fact, the word itself comes from the Latinised version of his name, “algorithmi”. And, as you might suspect, it’s also related to algebra.
It could be said that I owed this very kind of wondering to him—to the metaphysical ambiguities and bewildering turns of novels like Moon Palace (1989), in which an orphan resembling Auster accidentally discovers his lost father, and Leviathan (1992), in which a man recounts the coincidences that led a friend to a grisly death. In particular, I owed it to his New York Trilogy, a stylized, philosophical, and metafictional treatment of the detective novel.
In his moving depiction of out and closeted LGBTQ+ characters struggling with their relationships, traumas and the precariousness of their own freedom, McKenna has created a tender portrait of contemporary queer London.
At a time when institutional life is collapsing, when the pandemic privileged family over friends, when work expands in ways that leave many too exhausted to socialise, Nelson demonstrates what it means to dedicate yourself to a cohort with seriousness and strenuousness.
Ray’s a Laugh is not just a document of a family’s struggle with poverty and addiction, but a complex and deeply human narrative of what it is to be trapped in cycles of love, neglect and self-destruction.