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.