The question of Yoko Ono’s marriage to John Lennon sits like a water buffalo at the center of any conversation about her eight decades of work as an artist. It is oversized, hairy, imposing, impossible to ignore, tricky to get around. Do you tiptoe past it, slink away from it, or approach it head-on?
As anyone who has given Ono’s fascinating career consideration since the late 1960s—when she and Lennon became pop culture’s Heloise and Abelard—can tell you, the conversation tends to run along a squeaky axis that begs extreme opposite conclusions: Did Ono’s marriage to the world’s biggest rock star make her career or ruin it? Did that relationship afford her a level of fame almost unimaginable in the art world or bury her efforts under an avalanche of celebrity, gossip, and entertainment-world triviality?
What I expected to find upon opening Anna Noyes’ debut novel, was a story of sisters, a story of myths and traditions, a story brimming with nature and mystery. While all this is here within the pages, I found so much more brewing beneath the surface: how we understand one another, what we know to be true versus what we wish to be true, and, perhaps most importantly, what it means to be a woman who has been told what to believe her whole life.
While driving through a neighborhood that endlessly replicates clone homes or traveling a city where once bustling factories have shuttered their industry, one might wonder who designed these domestic dystopias and apocalyptic sites. In Horror in Architecture: The Reanimated Edition (2024), Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing provide an answer: modernity did.
Acknowledging plants’ agency could rid science of this vestige of the past, and, Schlanger wagers, bring about a new paradigm, one that integrates nature with humans and acknowledges the agency of all life. “Plants will go on being plants, whatever we decide to think of them,” notes Schlanger. “But how we decide to think of them could change everything for us.”
The language of paradigms and paradigm shifts is ubiquitous except among the people most familiar with its source: historians and philosophers of science. Once upon a time—let’s say the late 1960s—a reference to “paradigm shifts” primarily signaled knowledge of Thomas Kuhn’s historicist approach to the philosophy of science. Kuhn’s 1962 classic, transformed our understanding of scientific change and has become a foundational text for historians, philosophers, and social studies of science. It is nonetheless unusual these days for anyone who studies science professionally to invoke the term “paradigm shift.” The concept has become completely unmoored from the term.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in other words, is one of those books that everybody knows but doesn’t read, or reads once and shelves. On rereading my copy, neglected since a first-year graduate seminar in the history of science over 25 years ago, I was struck by Kuhn’s insistence on the power of historical research to puncture idealized claims of scientific progress. Paradigms and normal science? Sure. But the truly radical idea here is that outsiders—in this case, historians—can offer better insight into the inner workings of a profession than the practitioners themselves.