Coffee replaced tea as the U.S. drink of choice around the time of the American Revolution. From the moment patriots tossed chests of tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773, drinking coffee—and boycotting tea—became a sure sign of loyalty to the cause of independence. Pretty soon, the country was obsessed: By the 1830s, coffee consumption was outstripping tea by five to one. In 1832, Andrew Jackson replaced army alcohol rations with coffee, in hopes of energizing the troops and reducing instances of drunken insubordination. By 1860, the U.S. was importing six pounds of the stuff each year for every man, woman and child in the country—and at the outbreak of the Civil War, Americans were drinking twice as much coffee as they were 30 years before.
But the war introduced a problem for the Union’s coffee drinkers. The sudden demand for more coffee as a crucial army provision combined with the blockade of the Southern ports created a crisis. What the Union could import was hardly enough to keep its army supplied, let alone to caffeinate Northern civilians in the manner to which they’d become accustomed.
How might we value the provincial as much as we value the cosmopolitan? What would it take for the phrase “he is so provincial” to have the same affect as “he is so worldly”? Roy is trying to show how cosmopolitan the provincial can be—that the local has embedded within it a world, and that provinciality is a better alternative to nationalist fervor.
We grow estranged from our younger selves at our peril. This warning sits at the centre of Lucy Foulkes’s excellent and insightful new book, Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us. Making space for the pain, mistakes and even trauma from the past is essential for our self-perception as adults, even if it may seem safer to edit them out. You also may miss the pleasure and fun of it too.
No century demonstrated this as much as the 17th century, in which the imperial powers of Europe began to extend their reach to all parts of globe, conquering everything in their path. Often described as the Age of Reason, it was a period in which human intellectual achievement made some of its greatest advances.
But British historian Paul Strathern claims it was undermined by a “far murkier world of instinctive impulse and dark irrational drives”.
All serious tennis players – from gods such as Agassi to college players like I was at the time – have to grapple with isolation. For people who are comfortable with it, pro tennis can be a refuge: they find it behind a hotel door, with headphones on in a far-flung airport and, above all, inside the white lines of the court. The downside is that the victories are often private, too. When you remove the headphones, there is probably no one around to talk to; and even if there is, you probably don’t speak the same language. We were a strange cohort: sharing courts, canteens and coaches around the world but remaining ultimately alone.
The greats in tennis often become known by their first names – Roger, Rafa, Serena – but the rest of us are known by a number, our world ranking. To a greater extent than in any other sport, world ranking determines who you play, where you play and how much money you make. Tennis players have a deep and lasting relationship with their highest ranking. (Mine was 129.)
Heinrich von Kleist, the German writer, once said that looking at a seascape by Caspar David Friedrich was like having your eyelids cut off. You were staring directly at death, at the loneliest center of the loneliest void. What could be better than that? A visitor to Friedrich’s studio, Helene von Kügelgen, suggested that the same painting would be less frightening if he put a sea monster in it. Anything to mitigate the loneliness. “Indeed, a thunderstorm would have consoled and delighted me,” she said. It was as if Friedrich had uncorked a drain at the bottom of the canvas and let everything vital spill out.
I am hopeful that years of conversation about the need to prepare well for death – medically, communally, and spiritually – translate into a sober and realistic assessment of the medical facts and a willingness to allow me to return to the very low-tech dust from which I came.
This is why I love Thoreau, because the revelation for him is not God but experience. This means that metaphor is not just an always-failed route to locating the divine-beyond-the-world, but is rather the direct route into the world itself. The imitative impulse isn’t a feint, a back door to God, but the realization that several things are true at once: meditating on an apple isn’t a way to reach Emerson’s God; the apple is the apple and it is also God, which also just means you and me.
Lillard’s story is about unmasking, yes, unlearning all the things she was taught before she was diagnosed autistic, but it’s also a story of not fitting in with one’s own family, of being poor and vulnerable, of abuse, and queerness, and art, and all the ways we try to bend ourselves to make life easier. Most importantly, it can be a guide on how to unbend, forgive ourselves and come into our own.
During sobremesa, plates are cleared, sweet treats are set, drinks are replenished, and digestifs are brought out serving as fuel for conversations, ranging from lighthearted to deep and emotional. The chatter often lasts longer than the meal and eases into the next activity or preludes bedtime, depending on the dining time.
Feelings of joy, conviviality, pleasure, and affection emanate across the table, turning the necessity of eating into something much more enjoyable.
When it’s really working, the short story is, word-for-word, the most satisfying of the literary genres. A successful short story has all the punch of a great lyric poem, with the narrative frisson we associate with a good novel. Happily for readers, Kelly Sather’s Small in Real Life, winner of the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, offers up nine strong stories, each one a little miracle of compression and surprise.
Forsyth is an assured writer who knows her stuff when it comes to myth, a storyteller who can draw the reader in with quiet confidence. The outsider coming to power; the thrill of a magical assist; the familiar rhythm of being taken on a journey that leads you there and back again – it’s an alluring opportunity to leave behind the worries of reality for a while. But you may find simple comfort isn’t enough.
Shrewdly framed by Ricks’s introduction and notes, On the Novel and Journalism proves unexpectedly heartening: the much-maligned Victorians offer good company; we need not feel we are alone in our present “culture wars.” Setting Stephen down, I even imagined that 150 years hence someone might read a collection of the writings of some protagonist of our own ill-tempered debates and conclude that we had a great deal more in common than we supposed.
Relax: you’re probably not making as many mistakes as you think you are. So says eminent linguist Geoffrey Pullum’s breezy guide to grammar – or, at least, to his own version of it, as previously laid down in mammoth academic treatises.
Each time it appeared that a publication had figured out a repeatable way to attract web traffic, everywhere else would follow suit: jockeying for the top search hit for “what time is the Super Bowl?”; aggregating viral tweets; competing to be the first to post clips from Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (before The Awl went bottoms up, John Herrman facetiously congratulated each week’s winner).
Yet, with Game of Thrones, the attention was sustained for nearly a decade — a crucial one, when a number of digital media properties emerged and the legacy print magazines saw the writing on the wall. No one knew where the industry was going, but everyone agreed Game of Thrones was a good way to garner traffic.
All simulations are ultimately constrained by their creators’ assumptions: They are self-contained universes ticking along to preprogrammed logic. They don't necessarily reflect anything fundamental about the world as it is, much less how we may want it to be. When SimCity players have occasionally stumbled on stable equilibrium states—the closest thing to a “win” in this non-game—they have laid bare the biases hidden in Forrester's equations. An artist named Vincent Ocasla, for instance, created a city with a stable population of 6 million. The only catch? It was a libertarian nightmare world. It had no public services—no schools, hospitals, parks, or fire stations. His dystopia had nothing but citizens and a concentrated police force populating an endless plain of one bleak city block, copied over and over.
These are strange love letters, for sure. And the history behind them is even stranger; examples of the world’s first computer-generated writing, they’re signed by MUC, the acronym for the Manchester University Computer. In 1952, decades before ChatGPT started to write students’ essays, before OpenAI’s computer generated writing was integrated into mainstream media outlets, two gay men—Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey—essentially invented AI writing.
As it turned, it revealed its shell, allowing me to run a palm over its rough surface. Floating there in the deep, I was forced to engage in the world as it was; to simply see and breathe. In this age of constant noise and distraction, it felt like a divine act to be put on mute. We pulled back and the turtle swam on. It faded gently into the infinite blue oblivion.
The tonal and formal variety in the collection is deft and delicate and does not sugarcoat the anxieties and economic pressures of immigration, which also lead to a world full of complexity and vivacity.
As Cue the Sun! reveals, something like reality television has been with us for longer than we might expect—about as long as the TV set has been a mainstay of the American living room. The story of its invention, then, is in part the story of how television workers were making the forerunners of reality TV long before anyone would call it that, and how at every step along the way, innovation was entangled with ambivalence, uncertainty, and, sometimes, exploitation.
To understand the full implications of Wigner’s idea, scientists have dreamed up an observer that comes much closer to the original friend, albeit one that borders on science fiction. Howard M. Wiseman, director of the Center for Quantum Dynamics at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues imagine a futuristic “friend” that’s an artificial intelligence capable of humanlike thoughts. The AI would be built inside a quantum computer. Because the computations that give rise to such an AI’s thoughts would be quantum-mechanical, the AI would be in a superposition of having different thoughts at once (say, “I saw a flash” and “I did not see a flash”). Such an AI doesn’t exist yet, but scientists think it’s plausible. Even if they can’t carry out the experiment until the distant future, just thinking about this type of observer clarifies which elements of objective reality are at stake, and may have to be abandoned, in resolving Wigner’s paradox.
Maybe it’s a matter of developmental psychology; in the middle of life, I find myself becoming a nostalgist of childhood wonder. (These days I feel it mostly in my dreams.) Or maybe it’s civilization itself that’s outgrown its wonder years. We start out with the marvels of the ancient world—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes—only to arrive, in our disenchanted era, at Wonder Bread. Any way you slice it, wonder is ever vanishing. Still, I suspect the occasional sighting of this endangered affect has something to do with why someone like me continues to write poems in the twilight of the Anthropocene. Of course, William Wordsworth said all this more eloquently and in pentameter verse, too. Maybe poetry is a faint trace of wonder in linguistic form. By following that trace for the next hour or so, I hope we’ll come a bit closer to wonder itself.
Compared with the at times insane banality of 2016’s Widening Income Inequality, with its Christmastime model train “Chuff-chuffing to their death […] many Jew-Jews” and air-conditioned daydreaming, So What (2024) is streaked with actual sadness, even if “Everyone thinks I am the finest and couldn’t be finer,” which Seidel displaces onto morning jackhammers and Manhattan’s all-hours ambulances. The man who can hardly be googled in anything but a suit seems almost mortal here, a creature of parents and experience, though the fond looks backward have a tendency to be their own joke.
As a rule, Stewart’s books emphasize that you need not own land, reside in the deep woods or trek to remote wilderness locations to deepen your relationship with nature; indeed, many of the most compelling stories in The Tree Collectors are based in urban spaces, backyards, and other surprising places.
From these interviews, Nussbaum fashions a compelling oral history, transforming the scattered highs, lows, and tipping points of a genre constantly in flux into a cohesive exploration of the invention, evolution and importance of the modern reality show.
Everybody poops, including astronauts. In fact, the first picture Neil Armstrong ever snapped from the surface of the moon shows a jettisoned waste bag that may well contain poop. The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites, which are still sitting there to this day: a celestial reminder that wherever humans go, we bring our shit with us.
Some 17.1 million insects traverse the Pyrenees every fall alongside her, according to a new study co-authored by William Hawkes, a researcher at the University of Exeter who studies the mass migration of insects. That journey is part of an even more stunning global migration: Trillions of insects take to the skies each year for the long trip from mating to birthing grounds, collectively exceeding all known terrestrial and aerial migrations both in abundance of individual creatures and biomass.
Tracking a villain through a wilderness is something of a staple for crime novelists who set their stories in America’s remaining wild areas. [...] However, it would be difficult to find one more suspenseful or with more startling twists than “Pitch Dark.” As always, Doiron’s characters are well-drawn, and his cold, rain-drenched setting is so vividly portrayed that readers may find themselves shivering.
So, you think you know McDonald’s, huh? It makes sense. The global fast food purveyor is among the most ubiquitous chains on earth. Its golden arches are an avatar of American capitalism. Big Macs, Quarter-Pounders, McFlurrys — what’s not to know?
But author Gary He is determined to show you a side of the eatery you never knew existed. And since he happens to be an award-winning photojournalist he’s doing so in expressive detail with a colorful new coffee table book entitled McAtlas.
We may soon view the 20th-century celebrity profile as a faded artistic medium, like big band music or custom silverware. This collection does a service in preservation, while creating an immensely good time for readers who are interested in cultural figures from the recent American past—those who once commanded outsize attention and now inspire only quizzical looks from most under the age of 40.
Who needs weight training when you’re carrying around “The Power Broker”? My biceps are ripped. My neck muscles are bulging. One very specific muscle in my back is sore, but it is also toned. It’s not just a vanity thing—I’m also getting very strong. You have something that weighs 2.9 pounds that you need picked up? Brother, I am your guy.
And yes, you may emerge from all that writing slightly stiff from sitting, a few pounds heavier from all those brownies, or in the best shape of your life because you went running every two hours to work out your plot. But you will indeed emerge and, when it’s all over, the best person to reward you is you: That’s the hardest part. Go take a bath, buy yourself some flowers, make yourself a cake. You got this far. And soon you’ll need to start the rewrite.
Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel is a clever, funny yarn that breathes fresh air into time-travel novels, postcolonial narratives and romance stories alike.
As the founder and guitarist of new wave icon Blondie, Stein is not interested in romanticizing what once was. Instead, he searches for a deeper meaning in life’s minutiae, such “little things” as a collection of handwritten notes left in a fence on the corner of Houston and Bowery, the image of a wine glass shattering atop a speaker at a Wall Street bar, and a vision of a group of girls in their school uniforms walking along a dirt road in Europe. Stein claims of the latter that “the fleeting temporal image has maintained space in my head forever.”
It was a banner day in the history of American libraries — and in Black history. On May 25, 1926, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired the celebrated Afro-Latino bibliophile Arturo Schomburg’s collection of more than 4,000 books, manuscripts and other artifacts.
A year earlier, the library had established the first public collection dedicated to Black materials, at its 135th Street branch in Harlem. Now, the branch would be home to a trove of rare items, from some of the earliest books by and about Black people to then-new works of the brewing Harlem Renaissance.
Given that it includes venoms from Australian tarantulas, a Brazilian caterpillar and the lethal funnel-web spider, it might even be considered the most deadly library in the world. But researchers like King and Walker aren’t interested in venoms’ ability to kill.
They want to use it to heal.
As an aspiring medical doctor and avid Doctor Who fan, I found myself wondering about the anatomy and physiology of the Time Lord cardiovascular system. How are the two hearts connected, and how are the heartbeats regulated? How does the Doctor survive centuries without developing age-related heart disease? How could a dual cardiac system have evolved? I had to find out. Unfortunately, Time Lords are difficult to study because of their small population and tendency to show up for appointments in the wrong century. So to answer these questions, I analyzed data on cardiac incidents from 13 seasons of Doctor Who (2005 to 2023), pored over the cardiovascular literature on humans and other species, and consulted various experts in these and related fields. Through my extensive studies, I have developed what I think are plausible answers to my questions about the Time Lord’s two hearts.
The title of Hannah Regel’s assured debut novel presumably alludes to Angela Carter’s description of the potter Michael Cardew as “the last sane man in a crazy world”. Two of Regel’s three female characters are aspiring ceramicists. Neither achieve Cardew’s fame. The Last Sane Woman is a study in artistic endeavour, disappointment and envy.
Fairy tales take both evil and goodness quite seriously. In other words, they are truthful. As Madeleine L’Engle claimed, “The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs, but in truth.” And in their embrace of truth, fairy tales wrestle with darkness and end in triumph. But are we willing to tell children the truth by reading them fairy tales, as Flannery O’Connor did to her playmates? It seems that these days we are more comfortable if we alter them either by softening the darkness in the story or, as we see in much young adult literature, rejecting the possibility of happily ever after.
The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But this aspiration was undermined when they considered a square with sides of length 1, only to find that the length of its diagonal couldn’t possibly be written as a fraction.
The inability of empirical sciences to figure out why and how matter gives rise to the experiences of consciousness has recently rekindled an interest in panpsychism. So have developments in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics.
In ways sometimes delightful, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, he uses the inexplicable mystery of the mountain to show that our own lives are every bit as inexplicable and mysterious as any magic mountain. His story starts with an earthquake, and builds down to an entrancing whisper.
Robert Thorogood’s understanding of human nature and keen eye for hilarious dialog permeate this clever mystery novel, as the Marlow Murder Club once again set out to trap a cunning killer while solving their own far less life-and-death—but just as personally important—problems.
Marcelo Gleiser, a distinguished scientist and world-renowned thinker, has always given his books a strong interdisciplinary slant. The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future (2023), however, is unique, because its purpose is to help us understand not only how the world is but also how it should be. Indeed, as the book’s subtitle suggests, Gleiser uses his wide-ranging interdisciplinary reflection on the evolution of science to derive a political “manifesto” (in the broadest and noblest sense of the term) addressed to all the inhabitants of “Earth, the planet that makes our story possible,” to which, as to a person of flesh and blood, the book is dedicated.
As Valosik charts the evolution of women swimmers as both performers and athletes, the specter of the mermaid—a hypersexualized figure with supernatural allure—looms large over both trajectories. Along the way, Valosik interrogates the porous boundary between sport and spectacle, a thin line that women’s swimming, in particular, has always navigated. A competitive synchronized swimmer herself, Valosik balked when she learned that the use of goggles is prohibited while competing, on purely aesthetic grounds: “Are we athletes first or are we performers?” she wonders. “Is what we are doing a sport or is it entertainment?”
This isn’t a historical survey of gardening, much less a practical guide, so much as an inquiry into the idea of the garden — its history and poetics, its relationship to sex, imagination and power.
Extreme precipitation is a sign of how fundamentally humans have managed to alter the workings of our planet. The first rains on Earth fell several billion years ago, covering the once-molten surface with seas where life eventually emerged. Even now, as scientists search for signs of habitable worlds beyond Earth, they follow the water because they understand that it turned this little ball of rock into a paradise for life. But by burning fossil fuels for about 250 years—no time at all, on the scale of our planet’s history—humans have turned a cosmic wonder into a weapon.
When Sydney hosted the 2000 Summer Olympics, an unlikely hero emerged: an unofficial mascot known as Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat. Introduced by comedians, it helped to kick off a wave of love for a critter not always adored by human Australians. Over the centuries, the native marsupial has been eaten in stew and maligned as a pest. Now, it’s a focus of conservation and animal welfare efforts.
The first time I studied English, I was thirteen. I hated it. I listened to the teacher read out loud an inane list of words. “Though,” “raw,” “knight.” The pronunciations required gymnastics my French tongue seemed unable to perform.
I truly learnt to speak English in Berlin. I was eighteen, working in a hostel and living with an Irish man fifteen years my elder who dated an Italian woman. We’d go for beers, chatting in the only language possible, English—him never speaking slower, me gathering new words as fast as I could, motivated by my upcoming exchange year in California. I had even heard that in the U.S., you could take writing classes. Two of my novels had been published in France and I was excited: soon, writing would be back at the top of my priority list.
“Baseball revolves around failure,” McCullough writes in his new book, The Last of His Kind: Clayton Kershaw and the Burden of Greatness. “It is designed to break the heart of the fan, but it breaks the will of its participants first. Failure touches every player.” It’s a meditation on futility that gives readers a glimpse of the pain and frustration they’re about to absorb through inky osmosis. McCullough goes on to say that players fail for all sorts of reasons: skill, temperament, their bodies breaking down. The fortunate ones, like Kershaw, are still touched by catastrophe: “For those, the cruelty of the game is often not that they failed. It is that there were so many days when failure seemed so unlikely.”
Over the past 30 years an industry of academics has been busy queering Shakespeare, and it is their work that provides the building blocks for this highly readable book. Tosh’s ambition is to present this rich material to a general readership, imagined here as consisting of the thousands of passionate enthusiasts who flock to the Globe each year, expecting to be educated and entertained in equal measure. It’s an expectation that he meets magnificently.
I first learned about Lucy Grealy in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. Grealy had written a book with a title that Jamison had, while an English student at Harvard in the early 2000s, imagined using for her own memoir: Autobiography of a Face. The fact that Jamison had not heard of Grealy’s 1994 hit suggests that it had, within just a few years of its publication, fallen into relative obscurity. Autobiography of a Face—which chronicles Grealy’s disfiguring childhood cancer and reconstructive facial surgeries—was, upon its release, a bestseller and the subject of interviews with Terry Gross, Charlie Rose, CNN, and the Today show. It was a sensation then and is a painfully resonant work in our image-obsessed, plastic surgery culture now.
And its legacy has been enriched by the literature it’s inspired—from Ann Patchett’s 2002 memoir of her friendship with Grealy to Jamison’s 2014 meditation on beauty and identity. Autobiography of a Face is ostensibly about isolation but has in fact become part of a larger story of literary collaboration and the boundaries between artists, friends, and their work.
One of the more curious aspects of Darwin’s trip to the Falklands relates to the warrah, a wolf-like creature and the sole terrestrial mammal inhabiting the isolated archipelago. How did the animal get to the islands in the first place, and could its presence in the Falklands hint at unexplored history?
I was eager to explore such questions recently, when I retraced Darwin’s travels in the South Atlantic. Flying to the Argentine coastal city of Puerto Madryn, I linked up with the Darwin 200 Initiative, a scientific expedition on the high seas. I then sailed aboard the tall Dutch ship Oosterschelde, as we made our way to isolated islands en route to Port Stanley. Unfortunately, the crew and I were not able to observe the warrah: the animal which had so intrigued Darwin went extinct due to overhunting in 1876, some forty years after the scientist had departed.
To my mind, the world is split into people like my sister and people like me: Rememberers and Forgetters. My friend Sarah is a Forgetter. “A few years after a period ends, it disappears,” she says. “Save for a few especially emotional moments, there are entire swaths of my life that are blank.” My friend Henry is a Forgetter too. (Henry and Sarah are both pseudonyms.) “Whenever I’m reading an interview where someone is talking about how they got to where they are, they’ll drop these anecdotes, and I’m like, What? I don’t have anecdotes like that,” he says. When I asked a friend at work about her memory, she said, “I guess if I picked, say, the summer after sixth grade, I could remember what books I was reading, which friend I was hanging out with most, the time she cut my hair, what math exercises I did, and what I was doing on the computer. You can’t?” Rememberer.
This didn’t seem to be a particularly useful distinction until a year ago, when a family friend died. The friend and I didn’t see each other often, so I had only a few memories of her along with a general sense that I’d loved her very much. My sister, who saw her as often as I did, told me she was flooded with memories after her death, that reliving them felt haunting and exhausting. I wondered if this meant she felt much sadder. Of course, memory and selfhood are intrinsically tied; there are entire schools of thought dedicated to the subject. But it seemed as though our capacities for memory — hers, teeming; mine, not so much — might mean we experienced the world differently.
I like a good burger as much as the next girl. This past weekend at a family cookout, I indulged in a damn good one. But each delicious beefy bite brought with it a bitter aftertaste. You see, I’m an environmentalist hell-bent on making daily choices that support a healthy planet. And beef, I’m sure you’ve heard, has a hefty environmental impact. According to Project Drawdown, switching to a plant-based diet and reducing food waste are by far the top two high-impact personal climate actions we can take.
The great strength of Private Rites is that it never commits to an apocalyptic vision, even as the world it depicts becomes cartoonishly apocalyptic. In the final, astonishingly moving pages, the narrator affirms her commitment to dailiness in life and in art. “Better to hold one’s hands to whatever warmth there is, to kiss and talk and grieve and fuck and hold tight against the whitening of the sky.” Is it possible both to be responsible in the face of the largest challenges and to honour the tiny possibilities for grace in love? Armfield stages this dilemma with great vitality.
There are many pieces of this portrait of motherhood, and at times Sandwich feels as cramped as a summer cottage. But that density is necessary to provide the full picture: of successful motherhood, of terminated motherhood, the beginning, the end, the in-between. Newman’s success is in delivering this treatise through an entertaining summer read, relatable to anyone who’s had a summer beach vacation.
“Parade” ultimately reveals itself to be the work of the same genius of the “Outline” trilogy and “Second Place,” one of the most exacting, terrifying novelists working today. “Parade” is either a guide or a warning. How thrilling not to know which.
One of the nation’s few environmental economists, Ando, a professor at The Ohio State University, tries to put a price tag on animals and ecosystems to make sure they’re adequately valued in our modern economy. Protecting nature from the many threats it faces, such as deforestation and climate change, can be expensive. Ando’s goal is to make sure the benefits of those protections are not overlooked.
In fact, there’s a simple scientific explanation: The mysterious mechanism that powers the Ouija board is called the ideomotor effect (pronounced “idio-mo-tor” or “id-ee-aah-meh-ter”), and it’s basically a way for your body to talk to itself.
The ideomotor effect is an example of unconscious, involuntary physical movement — that is, we move when we’re not trying to move. If you’ve ever experienced the sudden feeling of jerking awake from sleep (known as the hypnic jerk), you’ve experienced a more abrupt version of the ideomotor effect: your brain signaling your body to move without your conscious awareness. The obvious difference is that the ideomotor effect happens when you’re awake, so the reflexive movements you make are much smaller.
All week, I’ve lived off mysterious packages like this one, handed over by cafés, takeaways, and restaurants across London. Inside is food once destined for the bin. Instead, I’ve rescued it using Too Good To Go, a Danish app that is surging in popularity, selling over 120 million meals last year and expanding fast in the US. For five days, I decided to divert my weekly food budget to eat exclusively through the app, paying between £3 and £6 (about $4 to $8) for meals that range from a handful of cakes to a giant box of groceries, in an attempt to understand what a tech company can teach me about food waste in my own city.
To be memed is to be remembered, and the movie theaters know that.
But I’m ready for the day when taste and texture take precedence over visuals. Or at the very least, the day when people who want a dense pastry do not turn to croissant dough. Danishes are right there!
The five stages are as much a metaphor for grief as shattered glass, despite the common tendency to take them literally. For many people, this metaphor is effective for making sense of grief. For me, however, shattered glass is a more meaningful and helpful metaphor. It captures a profound insight well put by the philosopher Mariana Alessandri in her book Night Vision (2023): ‘Grief puts us in touch with a basic fact: surviving hurts.’
Anyone who has looked out an airplane window while flying between the Americas and Asia has no doubt marveled at the vast expanse of water and the relatively few specks of land that dot the ocean, particularly in its northern and eastern regions. Christina’s Thompson’s Sea People successfully answers the questions: “How did anyone ever traverse and survive, much less thrive, in such a potentially hostile environment? And where did these people come from?”
O’Hagan got the idea for “Caledonian Road'' while wandering the National Portrait Gallery one day nearly ten years ago. He was decompressing from a tumultuous attempt to ghostwrite Julian Assange’s memoir—Assange ultimately lost interest—when he saw a tall, elegant man speaking about a Vermeer painting. He was being questioned by a younger man wearing a backpack. “He was very intelligently challenging this man on his notion of civilization, or his notion of culture, and a light went on in my head,” O’Hagan told me recently. (In the novel, Campbell strikes up a friendship with a student named Milo Mangasha, an “ethical hacking” devotee.) This became the seed of the novel: the undoing of a “self-satisfied, liberal gentleman of a certain sort,” O’Hagan said. “There’s a kind of liberal fallacy, that we think if we hold the right views, and vote the right way, and mind our language, that we are somehow protected from young people thinking we’re in the wrong.” He mentioned Labour politicians who send their kids to boarding school, and diehard fans of the National Health Service who, when something goes wrong, go private. “These hypocrisies, these contradictions, are manna from the gods for a novelist.”
Something horror movies have always understood is how fear is a granular phenomenon, one whose most powerful vehicle is not the antagonist, but the onus he creates in the consciousness of the pursued: the woman whose survival depends on her never becoming paralyzed with terror, but also never relinquishing it entirely.
This was an equation to die for. That became clear when I turned up at Stephen Hawking’s 60th birthday celebrations in Cambridge in 2002. Reminded of his mortality by a hip-cracking collision with a wall in his motorised wheelchair a few days earlier, ‘aged 59.97’, he declared in his well-known synthesised voice: ‘I would like this simple formula to be on my tombstone.’
The year 2024 marks the 50th birthday of Hawking’s formula, which is a milestone in scientific theory and reveals a truly shocking aspect of black holes. After his death in March 2018, aged 76, the formula was engraved in stone in Westminster Abbey, and his office and its contents donated to the nation in lieu of inheritance tax. Sifting through Hawking’s personal possessions, my colleagues at the Science Museum in London have uncovered evidence of the formula’s profound influence: it featured on papers, written bets that Hawking made, mementos, even a silver beaker presented to him by the producers of the Hollywood biopic The Theory of Everything (2015).
Should we welcome a new kind of commercial product that will allow some people – mostly rich ones – to have healthier, happier and cleverer children? And should you – the reader – seek out such a product for yourself? Should I?
What makes the legendary Chicago hot dog so good? It’s the snap of a Vienna Beef, Jeff Greenfield, the owner of the classic Chicago establishment Redhot Ranch, told the New York Times a few years ago. It’s not just Vienna Beef: Sabrett and Sahlen’s also consider snap their signature. For some hot dog fans, myself included, snap is key to the hot dog experience. That springy feeling that accompanies each bite signals the rush of flavor and delicious fat that will follow, and snap, like crackle and pop, is simply an appealing sensation.
So when the Chicago-based vegan food brand Upton’s Naturals began working on its own hot dog in 2018, “snap was so important to us,” says Natalie Slater, the company’s director of sales and marketing. “We felt like vegan food shouldn’t really be graded on a curve anymore — that we shouldn’t say, this soy dog’s pretty pretty good for a vegan hot dog,” Slater says. “We wanted to make a hot dog that was just good.”
Crack open the latest Booker Prize winner, or mass market paperback, or your history textbook, or portal to any world you wish to escape to. This experience of reading alone together is growing more popular among readers because it provides a measure of accountability and chance to socialize and tailor the experience without the usual pressures.
For a writer who has declared his intention to write books that are difficult for his readers, that challenge their expectations and discomfit them, what the reader largely gets in James is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn that is more surprising if you’re reading the books side by side than if you’re just reading James by itself.
There are sprouts of life, even profitability, on the landscape of print media and magazines, cratered by the pixilated bombardment of the digital age. High-end niche periodicals are popping up, but the trend might be most evident in a burst of small-batch, independent outdoors magazines like Adventure Journal, Mountain Gazette, Summit Journal and Ori. They are crowding into quiet spaces of narrow lanes — climbing, surfing, skiing, running and the like — where quality is key, advertising is minimal and subscribers are faithful. Most do not put their content online; this is journalism meant to be thumbed through, not swiped past.
The magazines are sometimes oversized and increasingly matte finished, filled with edge-to-edge photographs and literary heaves. They can cost $25 or more per issue. They are meant as much for the coffee table as the shoulder bag — designed to be collectible, not disposable.
Behind the mystery of the first ascent of Earth’s tallest peak lurks another conundrum, one to which Mallory’s own answer still echoes through the decades. Beyond vainglory, what was drawing these men toward the roof of the world? A year or so before his disappearance, while Mallory was on a fundraising lecture tour in America, a persistent New York Times pressman asked him a question he’d been subjected to many times before: Why climb Everest at all? An antic Mallory answered: “Because it’s there.”
It is strange to consider that a laconic retort should become the most famous explanation for the human urge to climb mountains, if not for all exploration. However, wittingly or not, Mallory’s words captured an enigmatic allure which, in the decades after his disappearance, would only grow. The summit pyramid that was once Mallory and Irvine’s alone is today a lodestar for modern thrill-seekers, some of whom pay tens of thousands of dollars to endure the annual traffic jam beneath the Hillary Step, even though cold probability suggests that some of them will never return.
Christopher Isherwood spent much of the first half of his life writing fiction that was based closely on his own experiences in England and Germany, and much of the second half expanding, revising, and interrogating those original accounts. On the face of it, the whole endeavour looks like solipsism on a grand scale; for Isherwood, it was an attempt to rid himself of false impressions and distorting influences so that he could discover and then accurately represent his authentic self, in particular, his identity as a gay man. Parents, friends, lovers, sex-chums and spiritual advisers were all subjected to his objectivising gaze (“I am a camera”), and all were enlisted in his process of self-discovery – something that was evidently rewarding as an end in itself, and which has also turned out to be powerfully influential for younger generations of writers.
As of now, the world still generally favors those who stay silent, who shut up and eat. Pass me the listán negro, let me drink to a better world, one where the righteous fight at dinner parties and everywhere else, with ever-increasing imagination and force.
If you feel like everything keeps getting worse and your quality of life is increasingly compromised by annoyances great and small, I’ll wager that started in the early 2000s, around the time retailers introduced self-checkouts on a wide scale.
On the other hand, DRILL is a deeply upsetting and freakishly humane piece of literature, especially for anyone who has survived religious trauma. It’s as if Scott takes the ominously stridulating intensity of William S. Burrough’s curse letter to Truman Capote and transforms it into a primal and very personal work of mourning.
The story of why Mattoo quit her job as an agent to pursue a career in writing has as many twists and turns as her literary debut, the memoir “Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones” — a Kashmiri phrase meaning something “so rare and precious that the listener should question its existence.”
This delightful graphic biography of the writer George Sand originally came out in French in 2021 – and now I’ve read it, I understand completely why SelfMadeHero has finally published an edition in English (the translation is by Edward Gauvin). Deftly written by Séverine Vidal, and wittily illustrated in black and white by Kim Consigny, it’s both a pleasure and an education: until now, Sand has always been a bit of a blind spot for me, a figure whose name is only familiar at all thanks to her appearances in books by other people (in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own she sits alongside Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot as an example of a woman who had “to veil” herself by using a male pseudonym).
This new book about kiosk design exemplifies how the internet transformed interest in ultra-niche aspects of contemporary design into moderate-sized cults. In the hands of a skilled photographer, fading styles, forgotten movements and long-overlooked designers can all be given a second wind in the digital era. Perversely, this has also led to a modest but significant uptick in design publishing, as the market for this kind of imagery becomes algorithmically assisted.
“Eat your vegetables if you want to be big and strong” is something I can still hear my grandmother saying clearly in the back of my head whenever I sit down to have a meal without any greens. But I did eat my vegetables, and I am neither a big man nor a strong one. I’ve returned many jars of pickles to the grocery store rather than admit that I just couldn’t open them.
To say the potato was hefty wouldn’t do justice to the absolute behemoth that was laid into the to-go tray — barely fitting, with cheese and meats pressed against the lid as if they had been fighting for freedom the moment the container was clamped shut. As soon as I opened it, I was greeted with the aroma of barbecue beef, sauce, cheddar, and butter that would have made the Lone Star State proud.
Horror Movie takes place in a reality in which several, frequently contradictory, things can be equally and forcefully true all at once. In Horror Movie, this duality concerns the precise events that take place within the movie and with the lore surrounding it versus the reality that other characters involved know to be true. The inherent tension in these contradictions ratchets up over the course of the novel as the events spiral toward their inevitable, gut-wrenching conclusions. Tremblay’s juggling of three narratives—the Thin Kid’s past, his present, and the script—is equally intense. Landing the climax of a horror plot is one of the most challenging literary feats, and Tremblay has to stick the landing three times over. Somehow, remarkably, he manages.
Kimble’s new book City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways tells the stories of people who reopen infrastructural conversations that might otherwise seem closed. Where Caro plotted the rise of a single logistical maestro, Kimble profiles the chorus of residents, activists, and experts waging generational fights for the future of Houston, Dallas, and Austin, Texas. The result is at once a compelling inventory of what people have sacrificed for vehicular speed, an instructive primer on who makes what go where in urban space, and a call to rethink our reliance on highways in light of their environmental impact.
Ultimately, Ban’s work showcases how architecture can be both veil and shelter. The former relies on the translucent and ephemeral, whereas the latter is all about raw materiality. In a world where basic shelter is the most valuable commodity of all, this approach pays instant humanitarian dividends, as well as provide a vital revaluation of how to make the most of materials in an age of finite resources.
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The threat of a disastrous event is always lurking in low Earth orbit, frustratingly unpredictable but worryingly persistent. It’s not unlike the major earthquake that is expected to rock California in the coming decades. In the orbital landscape, the “Big One” could come in the form of any number of scenarios: collisions between satellites, the intentional shooting-down of a spacecraft, a nuclear event. But the outcome of such a seismic event in orbit is the same. A tremendous burst of fast-moving shards, indiscriminate in their destruction, will whiz through Earth’s jam-packed coating of satellites, threatening to tip the world below into a new reality.
A “Big One” in space would be a strangely quiet event. We would not see the swaying of the infrastructure that makes so much of our modern life possible; instead disaster would manifest right in the palms of our hands as our smartphones suddenly struggled to work. Satellite technology provides communications, GPS, and even an accounting of time to people, businesses, and governments around the world. If it fails, power grids, agricultural functions, shipping routes, and banking transactions could quickly falter too. New missions to restore technological normalcy would launch into a more perilous environment, one that may be too dangerous for astronauts to traverse. In the worst-case scenario, a hypothetical phenomenon called Kessler syndrome, space could become so overpopulated that collisions lead to a cascade of even more collisions, rendering low Earth orbit nearly impossible to navigate.
Cafeterias – where workers put food on customers’ plates for them – took off in the United States soon after Henry Ford invented the assembly line. The two are kin, but instead of a car rolling past stationary workers, the diners slide their trays down the line to receive a slice of prime rib, chicken fried steak or even trout almondine. A diner can watch as somebody on the other side scoops up green beans or squash casserole at one station and another tongs cornbread muffins or yeast rolls onto your plate. It’s an assembly line at its finest, a monument to the idea of early-20th-century progress. The cafeteria made dining more efficient while maintaining the quality and variety of foods that paying customers expected.
In Sugar Land, Texas, Luby’s and “cafeteria” were synonymous. I’ve since learned that my friends from other parts of the South have their own Platonic ideals: Cleburne, Furr’s, Piccadilly, Golden Corral. When you share a childhood cafeteria with someone – and especially if you’re both passionate about the Jell-O squares or the yeast rolls – you bond. It is an immediate connection.
So even though I’m a wee little sport climber, mockable in all ways, I still apply too much idealism to Everest to quietly accept the theme-park images that flow off the peak each spring season. Given the mountain’s understandable allure, I don’t want to begrudge people who want to go suck oxygen in high places, but I wish that their well-publicized “climbs” weren’t cheapening the accomplishments of the truly talented, die-hard alpinists who are still out there doing very cool new things on the world’s highest peaks—especially since the mainstream media seems to have so much trouble distinguishing between the two.
OK. I’m done.
The FTC’s action is the latest battle in a longstanding war over market power in food retailing. It raises some perplexing questions about which neither courts nor economists who specialize in competition have had much to say. What if blocking the union of two giants benefits other, even larger giants? Should antitrust law be used to improve labor unions’ bargaining power? And what, exactly, is a supermarket?
“When you’re spinning around while being pulled to the ground, it’s hard to know exactly what’s happening. I was in my own world. All I was thinking about was how to get out of the situation. I felt oddly calm.
“I do remember seeing the ground coming towards me really quickly and I thought to myself: ‘This is going to hurt.’”
There is something very heartening, touching even, about a travel writer who still finds his own country so full of fascination, so rich in moments of discovery as well as things to deplore, no matter how many years roll by.
What do we truly value in a writer of fiction? Is it moral guidance, political instruction? Is it an ability to capture a collective mood or identity – in the manner of a “national novelist” – or articulate the concerns and character of a particular cohort: the “voice of a generation”? Is it, as DH Lawrence has it in “Why the Novel Matters”, an ability to foster our “instinct for life”? The lesson of Martin Amis seems to be that it’s language above all else.
The Prison Mirror is one of the oldest prison newspapers in the country, running since 1887. Publications like this aren’t common, but in an era where many journalism outlets in the free world are struggling to thrive amid scores of layoffs, journalism behind bars is actually growing.
From our current perspective, the existence of irrational values does not seem too surprising because we are confronted with this fact at a young age. But we can only imagine what this realization might have prompted some 2,500 years ago. It could have turned the mathematical worldview upside down. So it’s no wonder that there are so many myths and legends about its discovery.
The following week, we’d lost about half the original crowd. A week after that we had six people. And then, by the fourth meeting, when I arrived with the booze and the books, it was just one guy waiting for me. His name was Michael.
The Uptown Local shows Leadbeater embracing Didion’s maxim – even if it involves painfully recounting his own fractured life. Through expressive and exposing prose, he charts parallel journeys – one spiritually flourishing in Didion’s private home, the other emotionally unravelling thanks to his home life – that never reconcile in the end. The final lesson offered is Leadbeater’s own addendum to Didion’s famous words: sharing our stories, both of suffering and of joy, is what truly keeps us living.
This is setting up the troubling precedent that some apps are holier than others: Is iMessage sinful? Do I need to mention Candy Crush in my confession? Does Slack walk in the light of the Lord?
When I first came to New York City as a twenty-four-year-old writer with one published short story to my name, my friend Scott, who had already published a book and was writing for Harper’s, brought me to a party that was being thrown by a fact-checker at The New Yorker who was gaining some renown for her ability to make connections in the literary world. “She has a Rolodex,” Scott told me.
A hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four years, Audrey and Gary Revell stepped out their screen door, walked down a ramp, and climbed into their pickup truck. Passing a cup of coffee back and forth, they headed south into Tate’s Hell—one corner of a vast wilderness in Florida’s panhandle where the Apalachicola National Forest runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, they turned off the road and onto a two-track that stretched into a silhouette of pine trees. Their brake lights disappeared into the forest, and after about thirty minutes, they parked the truck along the road just as daylight spilled through the trees. Gary took one last sip of coffee, grabbed a wooden stake and a heavy steel file, and walked off into the woods. Audrey slipped on a disposable glove, grabbed a bucket, and followed. Gary drove the wooden stake, known as a “stob,” into the ground and began grinding it with the steel file. A guttural noise followed as the ground hummed. Pine needles shook, and the soil shivered. Soon, the ground glowed with pink earthworms. Audrey collected them one by one to sell as live bait to fishermen. What drew the worms to the surface seemed like sorcery. For decades, nobody could say exactly why they came up, even the Revells who’d become synonymous with the tradition here. They call it worm grunting.
At Clownchella, I expected circus-variety clowns, red noses and big shoes. I had figured that the history of clowning had reached its terminus; from ancient Greek mimes to commedia dell’arte, Charlie Chaplin to Bozo to Krusty (my personal favorite). The clowns most relevant to our times seem to be the old-fashioned scary ones, the Jokers and the Pennywises. But I’d heard that Los Angeles has a diverse and burgeoning clown scene that’s innovating the form. Independent teachers are developing their own clown pedagogy, nurturing a new generation of performers and borrowing from European clowns, who, apparently, are way ahead of the curve. This summer, Hannah Levin, the host of Clownchella, and some other LA clowns are traveling to Étampes, France, to study with the French clown and pedagogue Philippe Gaulier, who for the past fifty years has taught clowning using methods like mask play, Greek tragedy, and the study of Chekhov, all with the goal of finding the clown within. The clowns here take silliness very seriously. Standing outside the Elysian, I watched as the goats jumped around and let out cute little bleats.
Writing in the early 2000s, intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb lamented the conflation of what was fundamentally a course on historiography with a course on historical methods that she had endured as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Instead of reading and discussing other historians, she had received an education in the nuts and bolts of the profession. Her assignments focused on seemingly rudimentary exercises involving primary and secondary sources, such as determining the time the sun rose on a specific day during the French Revolution (and why it mattered), or fact-checking every source cited in a few pages from a notable work of history. "It was a painful experience," she noted, "but also an exhilarating one."
As Himmelfarb understood it, history fell somewhere between an art and a science: It was "a craft that was patently not infallible but that did aspire to high standards and could be tested against those standards." Her training as a historian inculcated in her an enduring respect for the "hard evidence" that forms the bedrock of the field. It also set her apart from the political scientists, sociologists, and journalists constituting the neoconservative intellectual community that she and her husband, Irving Kristol, built and called home.
For years, I had a vision of how I’d celebrate a major milestone in my life—that milestone being the sale of my first novel. The vision goes something like this: It’s the afternoon, and I walk into a bar. A mix of blue-collar guys and a couple of businessmen, three or four Manhattans deep before they head back to Westchester to resume their John Cheever existence, occupy the stools. I post up at the bar, slip the bartender a Ben Franklin, and give a grandiose speech about accomplishing my dream. Then I buy everyone a round of drinks. I am sharing an intimate moment with strangers by practicing a lost art: buying a round.
But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—are killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans. If dining space keeps dying, the U.S. might not have a chance to get it back.
I always assumed I’d be a father. I like kids, and they tend to like me, too. Not having them had never occurred to me. Talk about a potential deal-breaker. After all, as Emily said, “You can’t have half a kid.”
We turned to therapy. Once a week, we trudged downtown to a couples therapist in Greenwich Village, who taught us to listen to each other and argue with decorum. I knew Emily couldn’t give birth because she’d suffered from Crohn’s disease and ensuing complications since her early twenties, but I thought she might still be able to parent. Now in her early thirties, she explained that even before her illness she’d never wanted to be a mother.
Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie is a peculiar horror novel that takes a refreshing look at the haunted film subgenre, while also eliminating the line between novels and movie scripts.
Dark, surprisingly violent, and incredibly multilayered, this narrative is a superb addition to Tremblay's already impressive oeuvre that shows he can deliver the elements fans love from him — while also constantly pushing the envelope and exploring new ways to tell stories.
In this author’s highly original voice, language writhes into new, ultra-sensual imaginings and leads us into an uncanny world where the familiar is made strange.
We like to frame the world in stories, and we tend to think they should progress logically. Yet the butterfly shows us otherwise. It reveals that, much like our own realities, a story can dissolve into goo in the middle and end up as a completely different animal. And in that, it is also a microcosm for so much of science as a whole. Sometimes we get exactly what we expect. But much of the time, we don’t. Science has a way of ensuring reality intrudes, whether we like it or not, and ultimately that’s a good thing. It helps us evaluate our lives in the context of the world that is, not amid the false worlds we are prone to construct.
In a new preprint paper—which, for context, is not peer reviewed, and is more of an editorial or set of observations than a theory or study—mathematician Kevin Buzzard is grappling with a simple idea from coding that becomes a “thornier concept” when translated into math: what does the equal sign actually mean? And what does it not mean?
To choose to be a parent is a strange thing: It is to choose to become inalienably vulnerable. People say children give you a kind of immortality because you live in the memories of those who love you, or maybe they carry something of you, something of the things that you cared about and loved, in their own practices and actions. But there is another, less comforting, kind of death-transcendence in parenting. When you have a child, you bind your fate, how well things fare for you, with that of another being as infinitely vulnerable as you. This means that when you die, even if all goes well, you die with your own fate still unsettled, up in the air. That, too, is a kind of immortality.
Somehow, neutrinos went from just another random particle to becoming tiny monsters that require multi-billion-dollar facilities to understand. And there’s just enough mystery surrounding them that we feel compelled to build those facilities since neutrinos might just tear apart the entire particle physics community at the seams.
It’s a book that grabs and keeps your attention. Who doesn’t want to hear the end of a story that opens with a baby shower featuring a cake shaped like a big penis? Stuffed with laughs, it’s also filled with sharp insights about celebrity, social media, and what modern success even means.
The contemporary world of botany that Schlanger explores in “The Light Eaters” is still divided over the matter of how plants sense the world and whether they can be said to communicate. But, in the past twenty years, the idea that plants communicate has gained broader acceptance. Research in recent decades has shown garden-variety lima beans protecting themselves by synthesizing and releasing chemicals to summon the predators of the insects that eat them; lab-grown pea shoots navigating mazes and responding to the sound of running water; and a chameleonic vine in the jungles of Chile mimicking the shape and color of nearby plants by a mechanism that’s not yet understood.
Schlanger acknowledges that some of the research yields as many questions as answers. It’s not clear how the vine gathers information about surrounding plants to perform its mimicry, or what exactly that ability says about plants’ ability to sense the world around them. And not all of the research is equally sound—the pea-shoot study, for example, performed in 2016 by the ecologist Monica Gagliano, who has written about communicating with plants while taking ayahuasca, is particularly controversial, and a replication effort was not successful. But an increasing number of scientists has begun to ask the question that animates her book: Are plants intelligent?
A trove of tens of thousands of internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs provided exclusively to WIRED by anonymous sources sheds new light on Titan’s development, from its initial design and manufacture through its first deep-sea operations. The documents, validated by interviews with two third-party suppliers and several former OceanGate employees with intimate knowledge of Titan, reveal never-before-reported details about the design and testing of the submersible. They show that Boeing and the University of Washington were both involved in the early stages of OceanGate’s carbon-fiber sub project, although their work did not make it into the final Titan design. The trove also reveals a company culture in which employees who questioned their bosses’ high-speed approach and decisions were dismissed as overly cautious or even fired. (The former employees who spoke to WIRED have asked not to be named for fear of being sued by the families of those who died aboard the vessel.) Most of all, the documents show how Rush, blinkered by his own ambition to be the Elon Musk of the deep seas, repeatedly overstated OceanGate’s progress and, on at least one occasion, outright lied about significant problems with Titan’s hull, which has not been previously reported.
The burgeoning field of plant science has become a rich playground for profound questions that have beguiled Western philosophy since Plato: namely, what is mind, where does it extend, and how? Who has mind, and how do we know? While scientists increasingly agree that many animals are sentient, doubts remain about our vegetal kin. For many, plants remain a limit case in the types of beings we are willing to concede experience life with the richness humans do, or whose experience we can meaningfully study.
When it comes to biological superlatives, we typically focus on individuals: The largest tree in a forest, the oldest organism on the planet. After visiting the Hoh Rainforest, however, I began to wonder about superlative communities. What are the oldest existing ecosystems on Earth, and what can we learn from them?
Clete may be masquerading as a whodunit, an action thriller that pits flawed good against implacable evil for a soul-satisfying wallop. But it’s more than that: It’s Beat poetry, suffused with sadness and longing for all those sunsets now gone.
The novel’s strength lies in its balance of seriousness and lightness, and it’s a mark of Elkin’s success that her somewhat abrupt conclusion to Anna’s story nonetheless feels hard-won.
Morgan Talty has followed up on the success of his prizewinning story collection “Night of the Living Rez” with a poignant first novel that explores the charged question of what constitutes identity — family or tribe?
Unlike fellow action stars (and Planet Hollywood partners) Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, Willis had range, bopping from blockbusters to comedies to character roles and back again throughout his career. And he did it all with a refreshingly human touch. As Sean O’Connell writes in his new book, “Bruce Willis: Celebrating the Cinematic Legacy of an Unbreakable Hollywood Icon,” Willis showed “that heroes didn’t need to be chiseled from marble to prevail.”
There is a good case to be made that Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the single most famous work of history ever written in the English language. Published in the auspicious year of 1776, Gibbon’s first volume of Decline and Fall landed to instant success and acclaim. Its first print run sold out, necessitating an immediate second printing. It has been in continuous print ever since. The success of the books made Gibbon a literary and intellectual celebrity in his own time and landed Decline and Fall on the syllabus of every university in the English-speaking world. Well into the twentieth century, Gibbon was regarded as the authority on the Roman Empire. To be educated was to have read Gibbon.
But while the impact and influence of Decline and Fall is almost impossible to overstate, we are not here to prove Gibbon wrote a uniquely significant work of history. He obviously did. We are here to ask whether Decline and Fall holds up. Is this a work that still deserves the power of authority it immediately wielded? Does it command attention and respect from the foremost practitioners of the historical discipline today? Should parents and teachers consider it a reliable guide to the Roman world to assign students in the twenty-first century? The short answer to all three of these questions is … no. Absolutely not. On all three counts.
Readers who opt in by picking up his latest, And Then? And Then? What Else? will get to spend 200 pages and change frolicking in Handler’s mind as he struggles to figure out what it really is. It’s a bit of a genre-buster, this book, a sort of memoir in which he’ll do infuriatingly vague things like talk about his time in college without naming where he went (Wesleyan, if you’re interested), describe in detail how he writes while shying away from the writerly phrase process, and lean in to a tradition of many before him, from Didion to Orwell, from David Foster Wallace to Zadie Smith, examining the peculiar compulsion that leads anyone to put words together, thereby, perhaps, helping you do the same.
Today, the fecundity and majesty of the high seas revealed by Challenger are being destroyed before scientists have had a proper chance to explore their wonders, marine biologists warn. “Our vast, deep ocean is incredibly fragile and its greatest threat is us,” the science journalist Olive Heffernan states in this comprehensive and disturbing investigation of the avarice and lawlessness that now afflict our ungoverned oceans.
The trees’ twisted crowns are evidence of the forest’s scrappiness: A black spruce seed riding the wind in 1728—the year the first Danish explorer crossed the Bering Sea between Asia and North America—might have found purchase in the rocky till revealed by retreating glaciers. When ice turned Captain Cook back from the Arctic Ocean a few decades later, the sapling would have just been bearing its first cones. A century later, when the United States purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in gold, the slow-growing tree might only have reached 30 feet. By the time the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act created the sprawling system that now manages many of these forests, the aging spruce might still have been a spindly perch for some of the billions of birds that wing north as the days lengthen.
These flocks have thinned in recent years. One in three of the birds that used to make the arrowing trip have disappeared. The boreal forest, meanwhile, is now teetering. As temperatures rise, the permafrost that supported its roots is thawing, drowning whole stands. Many of its trees have been logged, and development has plowed through its muskeg, destroying the habitat that more than half of North America’s birds rely on. The majority of Alaska’s bird species are now at least moderately vulnerable to extinction.
We may be living in a doughnut. It sounds like Homer Simpson’s fever dream, but that could be the shape of the entire universe – to be exact, a hyperdimensional doughnut that mathematicians call a 3-torus.
This is just one of the many possibilities for the topology of the cosmos. “We’re trying to find the shape of space,” says Yashar Akrami of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid, a member of an international partnership called Compact (Collaboration for Observations, Models and Predictions of Anomalies and Cosmic Topology). In May, the Compact team explained that the question of the shape of the universe remains wide open and surveyed the future prospects for pinning it down.
So, in April, I gave up my headphones for a month, in the pursuit of greater awareness of my surroundings and my relationship to my headphones – which is dependent, to say the least. They were intricately linked to my daily routine. Taking the bins out, exercising, washing dishes, writing, eating lunch, trying to sleep. The only time I lived without them was when their battery died. It was never – and I mean never – by choice. The anxiety that followed, until I was able to charge them, should have been enough to tell me that I was, at the very least, habitualised.
It is angry, wry, at times merciless, and I wish there was more of it, but only because I like her so much. This is a character that truly lives.
Questlove, the accomplished musician, filmmaker and author, most recently of “Hip-Hop Is History,” is no doubt aware that his title cuts more than one way. It indicates both that hip-hop is a significant musical genre and that some of its significance is located in the past.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I began to see fatphobia everywhere in American fiction. It did not come all at once, but little by little. I saw it when I was in graduate school and a man turned in a story where a boy looks at a fat girl and thinks not all humans are made in God’s image. I saw it at a bookstore where the bookseller recommended me a novel about a fat man whose life consists only of sad drudgery until an “inciting” incident. Huh, I thought, to the feeling rising inside of me. That’s my life they’re talking about. My image.
I am a novelist and a fat person, and the feeling came again this past March when I saw several writer acquaintances sharing a list The Atlantic put together of 136 works that define the Great American Novel. But while the list highlighted characters of diverse races, ethnic backgrounds, gender identities, and sexualities, those with disabilities were virtually absent. And by my count just one of the selected novels was substantively about a fat person. In the introduction, the list’s authors characterized their mission as selecting works that “accomplished ‘the task of painting the American soul.’” But what about the American body?
The world’s most famous cat seems to be everywhere—and nowhere. It appears on cartoons, T-shirts, board games, puzzle boxes, and glow-in-the-dark coffee cups. There’s even a gin named after the celebrity animal—boasting “a strong backbone of juniper.”
But its origin story is almost as mysterious as the scientific principle it was enlisted to illustrate. While Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger concocted the conceit of the cat, he was not the one who popularized it. The fictitious animal only really entered wider public consciousness after American science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin published a short story called “Schrödinger’s Cat,” 50 years ago. It was just one of dozens of works published by Le Guin, who died in 2018 after a long and celebrated career.
Today, nearly three-quarters of everything Americans consume is processed, packaged, shipped, and stored under refrigeration. In the century since Chicago’s banquet, the so-called cold chain—the shipping containers, trucks, warehouses, ripening rooms, tank farms, walk-ins, and fridges through which food moves from farm to table—has transformed what we eat, where it’s grown, the layout of our cities and homes, and the very definition of freshness. But perhaps its most remarkable imprint can still be found in how our food actually tastes, for better and for worse.
I’m fascinated by interruptions. Things are running along one way, one sort of conversation is ongoing, reality is like this not that and then suddenly—everything changes. There’s a further question of when interruptions are admissible, even welcome, and when they are forbidden. My story in the latest Spring issue of The Paris Review is about a dinner party that gets interrupted. The interruption is bad news for the host (an imaginary Icelandic philosopher called Alda Jónsdóttir) and bad news for the person who does the interrupting (another imaginary philosopher called Ole Lauge). But it’s even worse news for a beautiful poached salmon, minding its own business at the center of the table.
Valérie Perrin's novels have been enormously popular in her native France, and it's no wonder. Forgotten on Sunday, her third to be translated into English, evokes something of the heartwarming whimsy of the 2001 movie, Amélie, which gets a shout-out in the book.
A recurrent theme in Perrin's novels is the life-changing magic of friendships across generations. Her latest is narrated by a charming misfit, a 21-year-old nurse's assistant at a retirement home in her tiny village. Justine Neige is so interested in her patients' lives that she often stays after her shift to hold their hands and talk to them. She announces on the second page: "I love two things in life: music and the elderly."
For all its socially conscious and contemporary twists and turns, this unashamedly emotional novel is working on a very deep level, striving to embody in its storytelling the assertion that, regardless of culture or sexuality, in the end – and in the beginning, and in between – only love matters. In this endeavour, it triumphantly succeeds.
Our morning priorities show us what we value. And what we value right now, it seems, is trying to keep our harrowed minds and bodies together, and to still give as much as we can of ourselves to the work our world demands of us. What more can we manage in a single morning’s work?
It is fitting that it be Cusk who should write a book that itself provides a resounding answer to questions about the philosophical potential of art. She has spent a career exploring and redefining the boundaries of narration and point-of-view in fiction while simultaneously demonstrating the ability of the novel to contain socio-cultural commentary within its artistic composition; in other words, uniting varying threads of her books within a coherent compositional goal that manages to be as precise as it is ambitious.
Rachel Cusk has always been dubious about the relationship between telling and being. Parade, her seventeenth and most recent book, opens on an artist named G, who, “because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down.” His “discovery of inversion” is so stunning that he is showered with plaudits, and even his wife, when she starts to feel overwhelmed, “simply inverts her surroundings and instantly feels a sensation of peace.” By painting the world right side up, your brain fills in blanks and makes assumptions; upside down, ambiguous shapes and shadows reveal themselves in their true form. Cusk, it seems, is familiar with the opposite game too—self-knowledge requires some critical distance.
At once a touching narrative about family and a gritty story about alcoholism, dementia, and longing, Fire Exit is a novel in which past and present are constantly on the page as we follow a man's life -- while it also entertains what that life could have been.
But “Espresso,” frankly, belongs to the summer of 1982. Pretty much every musical idea in America’s Pop Song of the Moment can be traced back to an entire genre of music that, in its own time, was resoundingly rejected as “not pop enough” by radio and MTV. Ironic indeed that so much pop in the past couple of years, whether it’s Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk!,” Dua Lipa’s Barbie soundtrack entry “Dance the Night,” or Doja Cat’s SZA team-up “Kiss Me More,” derives from this musical movement that never even had a name of its own.
This is not a case of an underground style finally edging into the mainstream, like punk did in various forms in the 1990s. This particular case is a cold case. A RICO case, even. It’s about the people who decide what pop does and doesn’t sound like—or, more to the point, what pop looks and doesn’t look like. And after all these years, it still makes me mad.
“Noise” is a technical term. It isn’t defined by volume or source, but rather as unwanted sound that interferes with an important acoustic signal. Sound travels four and a half times faster underwater than in air, and the right sound under the right conditions can cross seas. For many aquatic animals, while other senses—sight, taste, smell, touch—are often diminished in water, sound becomes enhanced. Just as animals evolved to live in certain temperatures, or to eat certain foods, they also evolved in what may be called certain soundscapes. In recent decades, however, these soundscapes have begun to change.
Globally, shipping noise in the ocean has doubled every decade from 1960 to 2010. Piercing sonar, thudding seismic air guns for geological imaging, bangs from pile drivers, buzzing motorboats, and shipping’s broadband growl can also disrupt natural soundscapes. Such human sounds are not universally problematic, but they become noise when they’re unwanted. And while noise can cause acute injury and even death in marine mammals—for example, by sending animals fleeing to the surface from great depths too quickly—it also impacts communication, mating, fighting, migrating, and bonding in subtle and wide-ranging ways. Underwater, acoustic space is valuable, and noise is a trespass.
The mourners went through the back of the old building and made their way kind of rowdily upstairs to the second floor, where Matt’s office used to be. It was now a utility closet. The layers of dust and old cardboard boxes stood in opposition to how lively a room it had been, Matt sitting beneath a bulletin board with the stories he’d printed out haphazardly and ideas for the newspaper written here and there and magazines flayed over the desk, before he became more organized later on. They lingered a few minutes in the office where Matt once defended his wardrobe choice of black button-down short-sleeved shirt with sparkly silver pinstripes, where Matt encouraged students individually or in groups to visit and chat, to shoot around ideas. Matt with his laptop open; Matt arguing about the ’80s hair band Savatage so much it was hard to figure out if he was joking when he said, This is real music; Matt buzzing on coffee and the adrenaline of having written his first big piece for SB Nation Longform about horseshoes (but “not really about horseshoes,” if anyone asked), never believing that he could do this kind of journalism until he hosted a panel of longform writers in 2012 and they encouraged him to try. It turned out to be an example of one of the lessons he tried to impart to his students, that stories never go the way you think they’re going to: The piece was supposed to be about the man everyone expected to compete for the world horseshoe title, but then the man essentially choked. “Feet of Clay, Heart of Iron” turned out to be a story about a guy who was losing his grip.
There is an enormous amount of invisible work that is done in publishing. Adding a standard credit page would not be an answer to the various and copious labor problems in the industry, but it could be a nice (and cost effective) start in making publishing staff feel more valued.
In Landau’s novel, many things can be true at the same time. A summer trip can be a lavish vacation and a frightening trial. The fulfillment of a man’s artistic fantasy can be traumatic for his family, and the time a woman needs to complete her book project may require “hooking up” her children to their iPads until they are “transformed into glassy-eyed drones.” A child can be alive and dead at the same time, in the same mind. The world can be unjust, and one’s position in it unjustly elevated, and yet that same person can be a valorous survivor, continuing on despite a deep, soul-rending wound that deserves sunlight and air.
The whole point of a slow novel is that you do care, that you feel the project moving toward something, even if you cannot quite see what that something is. And meanwhile, all around you, life continues to demand trips to the grocery store and hours of child care. You battle outbreaks of norovirus, rat infestations, catalytic converters stolen—then stolen again just hours after the new one has been installed.
The misuse of “Born in the U.S.A.” has been so blatant that it’s distracted us from its message. As Nietzsche put it, “The text has disappeared under the interpretation.” The misinterpretation is so glaring and has gone on for so long that it’s still a punch line.
Rachel Cusk’s repeated attempts to exterminate the novel while still writing one are genuinely impressive. Ten years ago, frustrated by what she called the ridiculous act of “making up John and Jane”, she wrote Outline, followed by Transit and Kudos, a compelling trilogy in which the narrator, whose biographical circumstances seem to match Cusk’s, reveals almost nothing about her life or feelings, and instead recounts the monologues of people she encounters. In an interview in 2018, after the publication of Kudos, Cusk told the New Yorker:“I don’t think character exists any more.” She then wrote Second Place, about a detached, Cusk-like character who opens her glorious marshland home to a destructive artist. And now there’s Parade, an icy thought experiment in which an unnamed narrator, whose scant biographical details map Cusk’s, moves between nameless European cities, visiting exhibitions and thinking about artists.
The endorsements plastered across the cover and inside pages describe it as everything from clever, witty, charming and wonderful, to brilliant, thrilling, comedic, whimsical, off-beat and a new classic. And every single one of those endorsements is correct. This is a book full of so many themes, so many charms, and so many insights. It truly is the sort of book that can truly be appreciated upon multiple rereads.
A hilariously chaotic insight into modern dating culture, Experienced is an ode to the beauty of queer love stories.
Sometime in the mid-to-late 2000s, Cone was flipping through an issue of Rolling Stone magazine when he saw an advertisement for a $99 lifetime subscription to the magazine. He was already paying something like $19 a year for his subscription, so he signed up right away. After that, every new issue showed that his subscription would, in fact, expire—but not until 2059.
“I would always joke to people that Rolling Stone knows when I’m going to die,” Cone told me, chuckling about the absurdity of it. “Because when I’m 86 years old or whatever, will I expire first or will the magazine expire?”
At 51, Cone is still very much alive. But, in early May, he received an email that informed him that his lifetime subscription was, in fact, ending—at least in its current form.
There are a lot of terms for thoughtful cooking: “intuition,” “Old World,” “cooking with love.” Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s was the best. She called it “vibration cooking.”
This was also the title of her first cookbook, published in 1970, and she describes vibration cooking in the book’s second, very often quoted paragraph: “And when I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I can tell by the look and smell of it.” She encourages her readers to follow their own tastes and instincts: “Do your thing your way. The amount of salt and pepper you want to use is your business. I don’t like to get in people’s business.”
In the past month, millions of people have found themselves stumbling through the contorted and catchy syllables of a song about, of all things, a woman named Barbara and some rhubarb-loving barbarians who drink beer while getting their beards barbered. In German.
Or more rightly: Rhabarberbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbier.
It is a novel that makes profound and singular and visible private experiences often considered askance in American fiction, when they are considered at all. The effect is of a kind of openness, a nuanced patterning of shadow and light. “I wanted,” Kwon says, “to bring to what I was writing every ability I have as a writer and to say this, too, is literature.”•
When someone we love dies, many of us find ourselves coexisting within two very different worlds – one, the corporeal world of human existence, the other, the ethereal world of ghosts and the afterlife. Heartsease, by Kate Kruimink, skilfully explores both these worlds with paradoxical lightness and depth, sensitivity, and a hilariously rendered idiosyncrasy that is often particular to sibling relationships.
As with Chandler’s books, however, the main attraction of the Easy Rawlins novels is the superb prose. Mosley’s dialogue, much of it straight out of Watts and Compton, is pitch perfect, and some passages have the sensuous rhythm of a basement slow dance.
Yet these days, I also wonder if I was also drawn to this book for the ways in which many of these lonely characters work to keep themselves alone. Walton announces on the first pages that he has no friends, then immediately sets out on an expedition to the uninhabited north pole. Victor throws himself into work to fill up with intellectual activity the crevices left empty of human interaction, though in doing so, he withdraws himself from human interaction and thereby makes for himself more crevices to fill. “I’d just really rather stay home and finish reading my book,” I’d announce regularly to my parents throughout my pre-adolescence, myself an allegedly lonely school-aged kid.
The distinction between history and prehistory has been dissolving for some time. It confers an unjustified authority on text-based forms of evidence and downplays the materiality of tablets, books, letters and scrolls themselves. As historians broaden their geographical horizons, giving such primacy to written records – if not the Bible then Egyptian hieroglyphs or Sumerian cuneiform – is untenable. The notion of ‘prehistory’ simply does not work for cultures that rely primarily on oral communication. It was this division based on writing that gave rise to the widespread notion in the West that much of Africa didn’t have a history.
They were there, outside the fish and chip shop, all of them. The dad with his household order on a scrappy sliver of paper. The girl of 11 or 12 quietly reciting her own family’s demands, lips miming through lyrics of Mum’s mushy peas and little brother’s Vimto. Teenagers documenting the seconds that passed on mobile phones. They argued over whether gravy on chips was disgusting or not without looking up from their screens. A man of 60 or so joined us, rubbed his hands together and addressed my mum: “You can’t beat Chippy Night can you, love?” For a few splendid minutes, the democracy of the chip-shop queue made everything seem all right.
The world is “in its final stages”, Armfield tells us near the start of the book. Yet her characters do not live as though in an emergency. The siblings moan about their jobs, delayed commutes and relationships that are on the rocks. No matter the circumstances, we will always be anchored by life’s mundanities, Armfield seems to say. It’s reassuring.
My Body Is Paper is a book of dualities, filled with sadness, lust, love, and the bitter agony of feeling one is at odds with oneself. Balancing both the past and present, Cuadros invites us into his everyday life, where he juggles maintaining his romantic relationships with confronting health obstacles, the concerns of his Chicano community, as well as sexuality, religion, and toxic masculinity.
At nineteen, I was practically Christian. No sex, no drugs, a lot of desperate hopes that didn’t seem so different from prayers: to be normal, to be smart—above all, to be good. I owned multiple translations of the Bible.
In reality, I wasn’t religious; I was just afraid. I’d seen friends get drunk or fall in love, and their altered states made me all the more careful about maintaining the stasis of my own. I skipped parties. I did my homework. (The Bibles were assigned reading.) As soon as a boy I liked liked me back—never mind, no, I didn’t. “Goodness” was a vague idea in my head—no one had ever told me precisely what it meant—so I made up the rules and granted myself the satisfaction of never breaking them.
Amy Twigg’s striking debut offers a new twist on the cult narrative. Rather than focusing on a charismatic male leader, Spoilt Creatures (the title comes from a letter Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf) is about one woman’s sway over a feminist commune buried in the Kent countryside.
There are few concepts as resonant as “Roman road”. The words ooze purpose, chutzpah and superiority. Catherine Fletcher’s epic study unpacks every aspect of the subject: from the roads’ construction and military importance to their hold over our imaginations and those of imperialist imitators. “They offer a lesson in the exercise of power across the centuries,” she writes.
It’s estimated there were a total of around 100,000km of Roman roads. Fletcher travels across 14 countries to trace the routes and the reasons for their existence: Cicero suggested that they bound states together through “alliance, friendship, covenant, agreement, treaty”, but they were also, of course, military supply lines for the suppression of rebels.
Last fall, while reporting Esquire’s “Future of Books” predictions, I asked industry insiders about trends they’d noticed in recent years. Almost everyone mentioned that debut fiction has become harder to launch. For writers, the stakes are do or die: A debut sets the bar for each of their subsequent books, so their debut advance and sales performance can follow them for the rest of their career. For editors, if a writer’s first book doesn’t perform, it’s hard to make a financial case for acquiring that writer’s second book. And for you, a reader interested in great fiction, the fallout from this challenging climate can limit your access to exciting new voices in fiction. Unless you diligently shop at independent bookstores where booksellers highlight different types of books, you might only ever encounter the big, splashy debuts that publishers, book clubs, social-media algorithms, and big-box retailers have determined you should see.
But if inflation is responsible for all that can be seen today, that raises the question: What, if anything, came before?
No experiment has yet been devised that can observe what happened before inflation. However, mathematicians can sketch out some possible scenarios. The strategy is to apply Einstein’s general theory of relativity — a theory that equates gravity with the curvature of space-time — as far back into time as it can go.
You could categorize Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Your Absence Is Darkness as a generational novel – or, being Icelandic, a saga. But where many novels in that genre either proceed chronologically, or weave evenly back and forth in time, few attempt what Stefánsson does here: to collapse time completely.
Schellmann’s The Algorithm is a wake-up call. The stakes could not be greater. When grappling with the question of whether rigid standardization through AI comes at too high a cost, we must carefully weigh the trade-offs. Indeed, as my own experience on the hiring committee illustrates, even non-AI attempts to standardize hiring can become so rigid that they preclude more holistic assessments and humanizing interactions—at least during the early stages of the process. Navigating the future of hiring in an AI-driven world requires figuring out how to balance practical limitations, a drive for fairness, and a commitment to valuing each candidate’s unique qualities and potential. It’s a daunting challenge, but one we must confront to create a deeply human future of work.