That comes to two and a half books. Add to them a handful of lectures, essays, and sketches, most written or resurrected in the flurry of sudden, late-in-life fame, and you have Maclean’s entire literary output. You could read it all in a single day, yet it contains almost everything there is to know about what the English language can do. Are you trying to deploy a fact in a non-boring way? Consider this, on the geology of the Blackfoot River Valley: “The boulders on the flat were shaped by the last ice age only eighteen or twenty thousand years ago, but the red and green precambrian rocks beside the blue water were almost from the basement of the world and time.” Are you trying to find a new way to describe an old familiar thing? Consider this, on afternoon thunderstorms in the mountains: “By three-thirty or four, the lightning would be flexing itself on the distant ridges like a fancy prizefighter, skipping sideways, ducking, showing off but not hitting anything.” Are you trying to find a beginning for a story? Consider this, the opening line of “Young Men and Fire”: “In 1949 the Smokejumpers were not far from their origins as parachute jumpers turned stunt performers dropping from the wings of planes at county fairs just for the hell of it plus a few dollars, less hospital expenses.” That is a fly fisherman’s prose, spinning in glittering circles overhead before landing exactly where it must, for a story that is running headlong toward mortal danger.
An avid reader, Bonner likes to annotate books with different colored pens and highlighters. While watching Barbie, she remembers thinking to herself, “This is something I could annotate quite a lot in.”
A few months later, she got her wish. In December, Faber & Faber published the Barbie screenplay as a 138-page paperback, with full-color photos and a new introduction by the film’s co-writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. “I went round to all the bookshops and just happened to find it,” Bonner recalls. Meanwhile, in a real-life literary Barbenheimer, her father bought the Oppenheimer screenplay — also via Faber & Faber, which has published most of Christopher Nolan’s screenplays since 2001’s Memento. “He’s very much a history person, and he likes to read a lot,” Bonner says of her dad.
The first thing I needed to do was establish a baseline awareness of the difference between waking and dreaming using a technique called “critical state testing.” This is how it works: Several times a day, ask yourself if what you are experiencing is a dream. To make sure you’re awake, count your fingers. Plug your nose. Look at your watch, then look again to see if the numbers have moved.
If you do this often enough, the habit will spill over into your dreams. And when it does, you’ll find that your fingers are jelly. That you can breathe with your nose plugged. That your watch is unreadable. “dream standard time,” the psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge called it in his 1990 manual, “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming”:asleep and awake at once.
Pichaya “Pam” Soontornyanakij—better known as Chef Pam, the Michelin-starred chef at the helm of Bangkok’s Potong restaurant—is descended from a family that moved to Thailand from southern China in the 1880s, five generations ago. Although her roots can be traced back to Fujian Province, Soontornyanakij grew up in a family that had long since assimilated into Thai culture—or so she thought.
“Growing up, my mom cooked pad thai regularly—maybe once a month,” says Pam. “I thought it was Thai.” It wasn’t until she started studying food and went to culinary school that she realized most of the food she had eaten in her family home was in fact Thai Chinese.
The Olympics’ signal event, the marathon, was conceived to honor the classical heritage of Greece and underscore the connection between the ancient and modern. But from the start, the 1904 marathon was less showstopper than sideshow, an absurdist spectacle that seemed more in keeping with the carnival atmosphere of the fair than the reverential mood of the games. After seeing how the event played out, officials nearly abolished it for good.
This is not fiction that is efficient and controlled, containing only what’s necessary. It’s too much at times – do we need a diversion every time a new character appears? – but sometimes too much is just right.
I bet parents will relate to the nostalgia of “Sandwich,” which skirts up against sentiment without ever crossing the line because, like Thornton Wilder in the play “Our Town,” Newman is adept at capturing the everyday details of life that seem insignificant at the time but turn out to have shaped us.
Jean Follain’s Paris 1935 occupies a very particular niche in literature, one that can be best described as the Parisian diorama: offering both intimate and panoramic views of the city and inhabitants through its daily happenings, this moveable feast adapts to whatever form or story it finds itself in but is immediately recognisable on its appearance, no matter how brief.
It is hard to convey to people outside Germany the extraordinary role Jürgen Habermas has played in the country. To be sure, his name inevitably appears on the more or less silly lists of world’s most influential philosophers. But there are no other instances of a public intellectual having been important in every major debate—in fact, often having started such debates—over six decades.
A new book by Berlin-based cultural historian Philipp Felsch, translated from German simply as The Philosopher with the clever subtitle Habermas and Us, argues that Habermas has always been perfectly in sync with different eras of postwar German political culture. This is a remarkable achievement for someone of his longevity: Habermas turns 95 this year.