All year, I had been visiting Mollie’s paintings, the ones she called the lake home series. She would put them out for me, propped up against the wall and the legs of the workbench and the door of the fridge, lined up along the hard, narrow sofa, crowding her cramped living space. I always brought the dogs with me and I would grit my teeth as they snuffled around the canvasses and wagged their tails into the partially dried paint. I would try to shoo them away, but Mollie never seemed to mind. Nothing a little linseed can’t fix, she would call out from the kitchen on the other side of the rug. The smell of scented candles, and of food, always filled the cabin – sandalwood, bergamot, fresh bread, toasted seeds, carrot soup with orange in it – and I often wondered if the paintings would look different without the attendant smells. I couldn’t believe that Mollie had no protective feelings toward her work; it seemed rather that she was open to the influence of external forces, accepting of whatever it was that luck had in store. I would be apologetic, but secretly I liked the idea that a strand of hair would adhere itself to the surface of a canvas, leaving a surreptitious signature for a conservator of the future to peel off and ask herself: who was this dog? I had a tendency to search the surfaces of artworks for flaws; I found it exhilarating to locate a drip of coffee – it seemed to me as much a piece of biography as the painting itself.
Loud, shrill and penetrating – a baby’s cry is its first act of communication. A simple adaptation that makes it less likely that the baby’s needs will be overlooked. And babies aren’t just crying for attention. While crying, they are practising the melodies of speech. In fact, newborns cry in the accent of their mother tongue. They make vowel-like sounds, growl and squeal – these are protophones, sounds that eventually turn into speech.
Babies communicate as soon as they are born. Rigorous analyses of the developmental origins of these behaviours reveal that, contrary to popular belief – even among scientists – they are not hardwired into our brain structures or preordained by our genes. Instead, the latest research – including my own – shows that these behaviours self-organise in utero through the continuous dance between brain, body and environment.
As coffee’s precarity is rising, so is demand: According to some estimates, global consumption, currently 2.3 billion cups per day, could double by mid-century. The projected supply gap has left the industry scrambling for possible fixes, including non-arabica coffee species and caffeine-infused alternatives made from substances like chickpeas and date seeds.
For coffee purists, though, and millions of farming families like Ngibuini’s, the most promising solution might be a newfound push to improve adaptability, and yields, of arabica itself. That’s the idea behind Innovea, a new project led by the nonprofit World Coffee Research, that seeks to supercharge the breeding of improved arabica varieties — unique variations of a given species that have been selected for certain characteristics. In an industry that has long neglected to fund research and development, Innovea, a collaboration with government-affiliated research institutions in nine partner countries, including Kenya, is widely considered to be the most sweeping coffee breeding initiative in decades.
At this point in my career, I’ve written many thousands of words and edited quite a few different writers. I know a lot about procrastination. That is why, without speaking to the man or knowing him personally at all, I am nonetheless prepared to make the case that George R. R. Martin simply does not want to finish writing The Winds of Winter.
Atsuhiro Yoshida brings a secret side of Japan to life in his English-language debut Goodnight Tokyo, translated by Haydn Trowell. The hours between 1 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. are the prime-time setting for this series of related tales about characters who suffer from longing. Whether it is a person or a purpose, everyone is searching for a lost piece of themselves. Each character embarks upon a mini journey within the individual stories. Everyone is navigating the decisions that brought them to this point in their lives. Some characters even call it by name: fate.
In Someone Like Us, Mengestu has written a most idiosyncratic American immigrant novel, a genre that’s been available to generations and to recent arrivals from every point on the globe. All the resonant tropes are here — the crowded apartments and the random acts of nativist violence — but, by altering the reader’s vantage points, Mengestu ultimately turns the story back onto us and the control we think we have over the story of our own lives.
On an unnamed Caribbean island in the 1960s, a girl named Wheeler, the youngest of three sisters, is left in the care of her aunts while her mother goes to England to seek work. It’s a glimpse into a story not often told, of the children of the Windrush emigrants who were left behind: who waited for their parents to send for them.