Today, we know that there are most likely billions of rocky planets circling their stars at just the right distance for life, not too hot and not too cold. But before Kepler-62, although astronomers had found planets in Goldilocks zones, they’d done it a different way, using the wobble technique, which gave them an idea of the mass of the planet but did not let them distinguish between rocky planets like Earth and uninhabitable small gas balls like Neptune. Scientists believed that warm, rocky planets like Earth existed, but it was by no means a certainty.
The astronomers involved in the Kepler mission discovered the two worlds circling Kepler-62 via the transit method instead. When a planet travels across our line of sight, it alters the amount of the bright stellar surface we can see. By observing the decreases in the star’s light, we can determine a planet’s size. Any planet for which we know both the mass and the radius is a rocky world if it is smaller than about two Earth radii. Kepler-62 e and Kepler-62 f were such small planets.
Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month. I had only recently finished his massive novel 4321, using an approach I learned from my wife to preserve momentum on very long books. (It is almost 1,100 pages.) By taking up an audiobook alongside a physical volume and alternating between the two as circumstances require, the reader can keep a story going without getting stuck. The only downside is the tricky business of finding one’s place while jumping back and forth between media. Auster narrated his own audiobook version of 4321, so I had been listening to him talk quite a bit before learning he was gone.
My infant is six months old, the age when US-based pediatricians, nutritionists, and social media influencers unanimously say that babies should begin eating solid food. How they should be eating is a more divisive topic. Are you in the baby-led weaning camp, the old-is-new method of letting children pick up pieces of solid foods to bring to their mouth on their own? Or do you purée, preferring the peace of mind of fewer airway obstructions? Just a couple of decades ago, spoon-feeding powdered rice cereal was deemed by heath care experts to be the best way to introduce foods other than breast milk or formula. Today, whether mashed or cut into tiny fist-length spears, avocados are increasingly recommended as not just one of the first but THE first solid food for babies, by everyone from books to apps to social media influencers. The fruit’s status as a food that is mild in flavor, rich in nutrition, and not a common allergen has recently made it a quintessential kids’ food across the United States, ensuring new generations of avocado eaters for years to come.
Of course, let’s be clear: Hot dogs are not a prime protein choice. That said, they also inherently contain a certain iconography and nostalgia. Take for example the magical allure of a NYC hot dog cart: the steam, the sauerkraut, the relish, the gigantic jugs of ketchup and mustard, the soft, pliable, warmed rolls.
So to place hot dogs in a “fine dining” context has an inherent high-brow-low brow dichotomy that many have enjoyed tinkering with in recent years, at both high-end restaurants, mom-and-pop stores, hifalutin hot dog carts and more.
Flavor chemicals can be found in whole foods, like fruit, vegetables and meat. But food scientists can also play with them and find new ways of deriving them to help companies create processed foods like dill pickle-flavored potato chips or cherry soda — or, as it happens, barf-flavored jelly beans. Those distinctive or innovative taste profiles typically come from both natural and artificial flavors. But what actually are they? And how do they line up with the “real” thing?
What I did know was this: Every time I went to a bar, I sat on a stool. There were dozens or hundreds, maybe thousands of stool possibilities—every week, some new bar was opening with some concept (“Italian-American-inspired!” “The living room of downtown Manhattan!”) for which stools had been selected, presumably by an expert. Everything else about the bargoing experience has been endlessly elevated, twisted and riffed upon—it is a prime time to be a drinker in America! But is it, I wondered, a prime time to sit?
You don’t need to be a gardener. Your “garden” could be the things you cook for dinner. It could be the squirrels, pigeons, and skunks you see on morning jogs. I mean the impulse that leads people to take a photo of the same tree, every day for a year. Focus a small thing that doesn’t feel like a story—until you have seven years of it, and it is. Your children will thank you.
Either way, this is fizzier and more effervescent than her previous stories, in a way that’s delightful and precisely what you want to be reading in the month of July – whether you’ve been inspired by the novel to take it to a beach on Prince Edward Island (Fortune should win a medal for services to Canadian tourism, seriously) or just shivering in the chill of an over air-conditioned cubicle (when the boss isn’t looking).
Is that too much darkness for anyone to contemplate and get their head around? Jacobsen has done that work for us. Our duty is to accept that it’s better to know the truth about what may happen, what the darkest outcome might be, than to keep pretending that post-nuclear Los Angeles would look anything like it does in “Fallout.”