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.