“Two possibilities exist,” physicist and science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once wrote. “Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” Chinese science-fiction author Liu Cixin begs to differ. In his mind-bending trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past, adapted by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss as 3 Body Problem for Netflix, he convincingly argues that we’d be better off if we were alone in the universe and, barring that, that we should hide from whoever or whatever might be out there.
“1941” is my favorite film of Spielberg’s. It may not be his most personal movie (“The Fabelmans” is his family story, after all), but it’s the one in which he shows the most of his inner life—maybe even more than he intended. In “1941,” he lets his manic, movie-loving inner child loose and avows far more about his love of movies—and its connection to his fundamental worldview—than was prudent. It’s the film in which he lets himself go, in which he displays his cinematic id, and it’s perhaps the only one in which he suggests that he has an id at all. Yet the part of Spielberg that was unleashed proved unpopular. Critics panned “1941,” and, though it was neither a blockbuster nor a financial flop, it was a big disappointment after the smash hits of “Jaws” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Spielberg, chastened, never cut loose again.
But to Sebregondi, it meant something more personal, because she recognized, from her time as a student in Paris, the notebooks Chatwin described. Indeed, she still had several. Digging them out of old boxes, she looked at them for the first time in years—and with new eyes. Why had Chatwin become so attached to this particular model that he would order a hundred rather than risk running out? How could such a utilitarian object assume such importance? Then it struck her that she might have hit upon a solution to Franceschi’s challenge—a simple product, easy to manufacture, appealing to creatives and imparting promises of travel, of glamour, of discovery.
It takes a surprising amount of energy to walk up to a restaurant in a foreign city and ask for a table for one. Would the staff question my aloneness, I’d wonder? Would they feel I was taking up space? As I wandered the streets of Lisbon, I’d find myself mentally logging the location of any restaurant that looked like a good candidate: nice, but not too nice; busy, but not so busy the staff might resent me.
An epic adventure that is both a love letter to and a subversive send-up of the genre as a whole, it pokies gleeful fun at its most ridiculous tropes even as it embraces the very elements that have helped rocket fantasy to the top of virtually every publishing chart. It is pointed and hilarious, sincere and heartfelt by turns, building a fictional world that will feel familiar to readers but that takes narrative swings that are all its own. And, not for nothing, it’s genuinely one of the most unabashedly fun books that have hit shelves in recent months, briskly paced, often deeply silly, and self-aware in all the best ways.
On a quick pass through the first several poems in Willie Lin’s debut collection, Conversation Among Stones (2023), I somehow formed the impression that Lin rarely used the lyric “I”. When I went back to truly read the book, I saw that I was wrong. “I” appears in most poems, but so obliquely that the “I” itself is almost elided. The result takes the reader right into the title image, a “conversation among stones.” One of the pleasures and challenges of this book is struggling with the speakers to understand who they are and where they locate themselves while we ask ourselves the same questions.
The year is 2149 and people mostly live their lives “on rails.” That’s what they call it, “on rails,” which is to live according to the meticulous instructions of software. Software knows most things about you—what causes you anxiety, what raises your endorphin levels, everything you’ve ever searched for, everywhere you’ve been. Software sends messages on your behalf; it listens in on conversations. It is gifted in its optimizations: Eat this, go there, buy that, make love to the man with red hair.
Software understands everything that has led to this instant and it predicts every moment that will follow, mapping trajectories for everything from hurricanes to economic trends. There was a time when everybody kept their data to themselves—out of a sense of informational hygiene or, perhaps, the fear of humiliation. Back then, data was confined to your own accounts, an encrypted set of secrets. But the truth is, it works better to combine it all. The outcomes are more satisfying and reliable. More serotonin is produced. More income. More people have sexual intercourse. So they poured it all together, all the data—the Big Merge. Everything into a giant basin, a Federal Reserve of information—a vault, or really a massively distributed cloud. It is very handy. It shows you the best route.
Part of the pleasure of reading Want – a collection of 174 anonymous sexual fantasies submitted by women from around the world – is that the scenarios are often strikingly odd. One contributor dreams of being fed chocolate by the Hogwarts potion master. Another longs to have sex with her office door knob. Women are still seen as less sexual than men, but this book attests to a vivid imaginative hinterland, where the desires are far more inventive than the “Milf” and “cheerleader” tropes that dominate man-made porn. In one particularly detailed submission, a woman daydreams about breastfeeding an attractive cashier at the supermarket.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of independent bookstores are greatly exaggerated.
In “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore,” Evan Friss describes how these meccas to the printed word have defied similar predictions throughout the decades. Not only have they survived, but also they have shaped American culture, influenced retail trends, and even helped usher in Saturday banking hours.
Discovering this phenomenon of “translation-hopping” (also known as indirect translation) firmly established my fascination with translated literature, not only as a reader, but also as someone who is fascinated by the politics of publishing. On the one hand, indirect translations can be used to fill a gap in the market, and—for practical or financial reasons—it is sometimes easier, especially for smaller languages like Swedish, to find English-to-Swedish translators than translators that work from another small language, like Korean. According to the Swedish publisher, when Kang’s English translations blew up in the United Kingdom, the Korean-to-Swedish translators would have needed eighteen months to complete the The Vegetarian, and a further few months for Human Acts—which, in the already slow world of publishing, would have set publication back two to three years—whereas an English-to-Swedish translation would ensure that Swedish readers could have access to Kang’s writing while the Booker win was still on everyone’s mind. In this way, re-translations can offer smaller-language markets a chance to keep up with trends, and help to contribute to a more diverse literary landscape.
We tend to think that they are different things, the tears we shed yesterday or the tea steaming in our cups today or the water of the Thames or the Tigris or the Ganges… But the same droplets continue to travel beyond borders of time and geography, connecting our stories and silences.
I live on a mountain and am surrounded by mountains and last year I planted five rosebushes. Last year I dug five holes and it took a few days because the ground is hard where I live and it is full of bluestone and other rocks. In the old days they made use of the rocks that they found when they were digging into the ground. They built walls of bluestone to keep the cattle from going past the property line and you can still see many of these walls today and there are even some of these walls on my own property. These days the rocks are not useful to me at all and they were a big nuisance to my digging. Once the bushes were in the ground, four out of the five bushes from last year bloomed once or twice, and they had some nice flowers but it was nothing too spectacular. The blooms were small and the flowers were plagued by bugs and beetles and slugs. The beetles were the worst of the pests in the way that they crawled and in the way that they chewed on the petals. The blooms barely smelled like anything at all. The bush all the way to the right never bloomed and its leaves stayed small like fingernails. The lack of frequent blooms made every bloom feel like a gift. Now these bushes are more established and it is their second year. With another year come more established roots and with more established roots come more frequent and beautiful blooms. All of the rose experts and all of the expert rose gardeners agree on this.
The metaphor of the mirror, which gives this book its title and defining analogy, is designed to show that AI remains miles away from being anything like real human intelligence. By attending to that gap, between reality and reflection, we can find essential clues about what makes us human. Shannon Vallor, a professor in the ethics of data and AI at the University of Edinburgh, invites us to consider the image that appears in the bathroom mirror every morning:
Attending lectures and movies in 26-100 has been an integral part of the MIT experience for generations of students, but since 2018 they have also embraced what’s become another quintessential Institute experience just across the hall: picking up a banana in 26-110, officially the Karl Taylor Compton Room but now better known as the MIT Banana Lounge.
Open 24 hours a day during the school year, the lounge is stocked with free bananas and hot drinks. At times the foot traffic is brisk enough to produce a detectable banana gradient on campus, centered on the first floor of the Compton Laboratories and marked by a stream of people with the fruit in their hands or backpacks.
Dubbed the chile capital of the world, Hatch was my final stop on a road trip to discover a fascinating dish unique to New Mexico that features this cherished fruit-and-spice in one: the green chile cheeseburger – or GCCB as it’s known locally. Not your regular burger, it comes served big and juicy, with cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickle and, of course, a generous helping of green chiles, which I enjoyed roasted inside a "world famous" Hatch GCCB at Sparky’s Burgers and BBQ, Hatch’s roadside haven of Americana and kitsch where I escaped the searing heat after a mosey around town.
Sam Mills’s virtuosic new novel is – when defined in the strictest terms – a romp. By that I mean it’s an adventure story that doesn’t ask you to take it all that seriously. The Count of Monte Cristo is the definitive romp: a tale of repeated imprisonment and escape, of thwarted romance, of daring disguises and, in the end, of triumphant human grit and ingenuity. The Watermark has all that, but with added metatextuality and time travel. If you love Doctor Who, you will love this book. It whirls you off on a similarly breathless Technicolor tumble through different eras and genres. But where the Doctor has the Tardis, the two main characters of The Watermark – journalist Jaime and painter Rachel – have cups of magical tea.
The forthcoming biography of Hitchens by the journalist Stephen Phillips will no doubt provide an occasion for many reconsiderations of his life and career. What is most striking to me, though, is how many of his most vocal admirers these days seem to be tremulous debate bros or anti-cancel-culture “contrarians”—an unfortunate development A Hitch in Time should help redress. At the very least, it is a salutary reminder of a time when being a so-called contrarian was more than just a fast track to lucrative speaking engagements and appearances on Joe Rogan. At his finest, Hitchens was motivated by the old dissident ethos to speak truth to power, not least because he lived in a time when far too many very powerful people got away with doing very bad things. Forget the “Hitchslap” YouTube clips and the Byronic machismo: here was a journalist and essayist who—for a time, anyway—truly mattered.
Kathy Willis is professor of biodiversity at Oxford, and her new book on the emerging science of how nature can improve our health is filled with practical tips, showing how increasing our exposure to plants by even small amounts can make a significant difference.
I don’t collect endings, however, to have the final say about my life. In fact, I write against certainty. The more options I have at my disposal for ending an essay, the freer I am to change my mind about its meaning. Nor am I simply putting my pain to use, as I thought when I was starting out. I write to savor my pain, to transgress and transform it.
Sheep Meadow is quiet on this Wednesday morning in June. The guitar-strummers and sunbathers who lounged on its lawn yesterday are gone, and now its only occupants are the elms and sycamores that cluster along its edge, where I now stand with the Central Park Conservancy’s historian of the past forty years, Sara Cedar Miller. I have come to the leafy center of Manhattan on a quest to find traces, however faint, of parkmaker Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1854 horseback ride across Texas. I may be 1,800 miles from the heart of Texas, but I’m drawn to the alluring, if unprovable, theory that this famous green sward—borrowing the word Olmsted and his partner Calvin Vaux used when they designed this park in 1858—could be inspired by the upper Guadalupe River and its surroundings in the Hill Country, the land that Olmsted loved most when traveling through Texas just a few years before he became the architect of the world’s most famous park.
I had no idea banana curry pizza even existed in Sweden until I saw a piece of pizza art from Cities by the Slice on Instagram. On the account, illustrator Dan Bransfield highlights the foods of different cities, and when I saw his pizza print featuring slices around the world, with a Swedish slice topped with bananas, I was intrigued.
“Colored Television” is a novel about capitalism, race, gender, parenthood, creativity and yearning; it is, in short, a Great American Novel.
That’s a breathless way to start a review, but Senna’s story, set in Los Angeles, is also about the perpetual divide between commerce and art, and the novelist’s deft handling of all these multiple themes deserves such praise.
But are such narratives predetermined by race, ethnicity and language? Who qualifies as an “authentic” author? The demand for “authenticity” – within literary culture, in particular, and postmodern culture in general – has become a problematic, paradoxical idea. Authors are now expected to depict an authentic experience – and yet the form of such authenticity is pre-determined on their behalf.
Perhaps the question of free will is not so momentous. Philosophers have been debating about it for thousands of years, Mitchell observes. “That these debates continue today with unabated fervor tells you that they have not yet resolved the issue.” Indeed, they haven’t. Perhaps they should take a break. Perhaps it is a controversy without consequences. Perhaps whether we are free or fated, morality and politics, science and medicine, art and literature will all go their merry or melancholy ways, unaffected.
The promise of the author’s past accolades has indeed been kept with the high caliber of her recently published third novel, “Her Best Self,” a literary mystery which explores how we make memories and meaning, and how untethering one can also upend the other.
We limit our understanding when we narrow the frame, when we see ourselves, individually or plurally, as the main character. These delicately worked and impressively patient stories show us what other visions might reveal themselves when we are not in too much of a hurry to get to the end.
The Earth still being the Earth, there’s a certain amount of familiar ground, so to speak, in Bjornerud’s newest book, “Turning to Stone” (Flatiron). But it is also a striking departure, because it is not just about the life of the planet but also about the life of the author. In its pages, what Bjornerud has learned serves to illuminate what she already knew: each of the book’s ten chapters is structured around a variety of rock that provides the context for a particular era of her life, from childhood to the present day. The result is one of the more unusual memoirs of recent memory, combining personal history with a detailed account of the building blocks of the planet. What the two halves of this tale share is an interest in the evolution of existence—in the forces, both quotidian and cosmic, that shape us.
Why read popular science? The best books manage to entertain, educate, astonish and even galvanise the reader, bringing an appreciation of new realms of knowledge. They expand awareness, not just of the beauty and complexity of the universe, but our place in it as human beings. They serve as celebrations and warnings, challenges and pleas. Traditionally, the genre tends to garland hard data with lashings of anecdote and well-turned, elegant metaphor. With Becoming Earth, Oregon-based journalist Ferris Jabr achieves all of these aims and more.
Are the queen’s critics right that there was little more to her than met the eye, or was she in fact a master of psychological jujitsu, turning the gaze of the outside world back upon itself? Perhaps she is speaking to us between the lines of what others say about her. This might just be her story, as told to Craig Brown.
An espionage drama pulsating with twisty revelation and drip-fed backstory, dealing with anarchy, agriculture and prehistory, it adds a killer plot and expert pacing to the reach and sophistication of her previous work, as well as vital fun.
Towards the end of the novel, Agnes reminds herself -- and readers – that "You will have to wait to see what the uncertain future brings...Accept the uncertainty. Do not yet try to resolve it. The dynamics of the provisional. The end is written into the beginning." It's quite a lead-in to the novel's disturbing climax, which certainly commands our attention -- and upends any sunnier views of this family's future we might have been harboring.
If you’ve ever had a friend who is brilliant, super-sarcastic, notices everything, can be incredibly mean but always is so in the service of some greater ideal, then you will recognize the authorial voice of Marin Kosut in Art Monster. Books about art that are both insightful and compellingly readable (not to mention funny) are exceedingly rare, but Kosut has written just such a work.
On reflection, I have discovered that my attitudes toward work, toward composing and the internal momentums therein, remain similar to how I felt about these things before the cardiac arrest. This is a bit surprising, in that there is some expectation one should, perhaps, approach things differently after what are at least outwardly transformative and demarcating experiences. While it is unclear to me whether I have moved forward as an artist, I have in the past year, however, found myself in new territories of deliberateness—concurrent, energized states of cognizance and intuitiveness, composure and presentiment—and a yielding, perhaps (perhaps not), of new ways of hearing, of seeing. I feel, imagine, a renewed sense of resoluteness.
There was an air of subdued anticipation at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine as we waited for Philippe Petit to take the stage. A clarinetist roved through the church improvising variations on Gershwin in spurts, making it hard to tell if the event, which was being held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers, had begun. Eventually, the lights dimmed and we were told to turn off our phones, as even a single lit screen in the audience might cause Petit to fall from his tightrope. Music started, but so quietly that it seemed like it was being played from a phone, while a candlelit procession made its way down the nave. Large boards were set up, on which footage of the Twin Towers being constructed was projected. A group of child dancers imitated Petit’s walk along the ground, and were followed by a professional whistler. After we were shuffled through this sequence that felt like a performed version of ADHD, Petit finally appeared and began walking, first meekly, then quickly, to Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” wearing a white jacket laced with gold.
Those presented to the Queen found the experience discombobulating. Though it may have been the first time they had ever set eyes on her, they were often more familiar with her face than with their own. Hers was the most photographed face in human history.
So to meet the Queen was apt to make you feel giddy or woozy, as though a well-loved family portrait, familiar since childhood, handed down from generation to generation, had suddenly sprung to life. For most, the experience was unnerving, even terrifying.
A voice is “bright with swallowed disappointment”. Dark humour rumbles beneath even her most melancholy evocations; irony and compassion weave through her portraits of repressed lives that finally glimmer with some hope of liberation. The novel’s ending is subtle but complete, and infinitely moving.
The book is fun – guaranteed to raise a smile for Beatles fans at least. Its fiction is fact-based, conjured by an informed author. One imagines Burr watched Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back documentary intensely, because a lot of Reunion’s dialogue has the vibe of the real thing. Lennon cracks jokes, Ringo Starr is charismatic, an impatient George Harrison keeps checking his wristwatch and Paul McCartney keeps his bossiness somewhat in check.
A.I. that can create and comprehend language carries the shock of a category violation; it allows machines to do what we thought only people could. To a great degree, the researchers at Google experienced that shock as much as anybody else. The period leading up to the creation of the transformer was like an accidental Manhattan Project. Conversations with its inventors suggest that, seven years later, we remain uncertain about why it’s as effective as it’s turned out to be.
Reading Toni Morrison as a Black girl, a Black teen, or a young Black woman is a literary rite of passage. For me, as I dog-eared pages of Sula and Beloved in high school, I was given a depiction of Black womanhood and Black life that made me feel seen and reflected on every page. Growing up, I watched my mother cook and took mental notes. The kitchen became my own world, with a certain peace I reached for. Morrison’s masterly approach to prominently featuring and writing lovingly about food—tapping into the sense of taste, so often underutilized in literary fiction—was like a mirror.
That’s precisely what Hong has done in this novel. She brings together the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the experience of her depression and trauma, the stories of her family, and her later struggle of grief. She lets them sit beside each other, the vignettes of conversations, memories, past and present. Separate, they are nice. But together, in the reader’s mind, they become something totally different and new—something bold, and sad, and special.
If you were under the impression that the opposite of a cynic is an easily hoodwinked person of low mental horsepower, then Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology and director of Stanford’s Social Neuroscience Lab, has news for you. The idea that cynics are somehow more astute is the first of many notions demolished in this succinct, uplifting book.
“Gray Matters” is not quite a memoir, not quite a history, not quite a medical thriller, not quite an anatomy text, but at different points it seems to aspire to each of these things.
Virtually everything that can harm the human brain is contained in the book’s more than 500 pages, from tumors and gunshot wounds to sports injuries, shaken baby syndrome, aneurysms, and psychosurgery.
For Dickinson, writing letters offered a way of making a life out of this fantasy; this is why the genre so appealed to her. When, for instance, she addressed the envelopes for her brother to send to Sue, she was of course helping the couple by hastening their courtship, but she was doing something else, too. She was insinuating herself into its private scenes. Letters untether words from bodies; they loosen and redraw the bonds of time and space, and for that matter of sexuality, marriage, and blood relation. A week later, she wrote to Sue again, describing the pleasure she had taken in arranging her friend’s correspondence with her brother: “So Susie, I set the trap and catch the little mouse, and love to catch him dearly, for I think of you and Austin, and know it pleases you to have my tiny services.”
In the meantime, a better understanding of extremal black holes can provide further insights into near-extremal black holes, which are thought to be plentiful in the universe. “Einstein didn’t think that black holes could be real [because] they’re just too weird,” Khanna said. “But now we know the universe is teeming with black holes.”
For similar reasons, he added, “we shouldn’t give up on extremal black holes. I just don’t want to put limits on nature’s creativity.”
At home, if you drink before 12 p.m., it’s indicative of a problem. In an airport, it’s part of the experience.
We can’t curate our entire lives, but we can curate the accessories we keep on our person. For a younger generation locked out of the housing ladder, holidays—particularly short holidays, where you only need hand luggage—are one of the few real luxuries within reach. A small suitcase or security tray becomes a place where your life can look coherent and in control.
We generally enter stadiums to watch football or baseball, or see a huge concert, or perhaps cheer on a favorite political candidate. Chances are such activities don’t lead directly to serious consideration of how and for whom public spaces are used, or how these spaces reflect the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy. But after reading Frank Andre Guridy’s “The Stadium,” you might just find yourself thinking as much about the history of these cavernous facilities as the games on the field.
Subtitled “An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play,” Guridy’s deeply researched book delivers just that. This is a progressive-minded study of inclusion and exclusion, the relationship of highly visible buildings to their neighborhoods, and the ways in which stadiums and arenas have succeeded and ways they’ve failed to live up to the country’s ideals.
A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that might be, is always in the studio, always in its studio.
Its—but in what way do that place and practice belong to it? Isn’t the opposite true—that this form of life is at the mercy of its studio?
It seems reasonable in a coastal state like Maine to expect a fish when you order a red snapper. Unfortunately for many unsuspecting visitors “from away,” a very different product goes by the name red snapper in my home state: a beloved hot dog made with a natural casing for a toothy snap and dyed unnaturally bright red for disputed reasons.
Although the idea of “ageing dramatically” sounds exhausting. I’m not sure I have the energy to do anything dramatically any more. Can I not age lethargically and half-heartedly, with an eye-roll and a groan, the way I do everything else? Especially in August.
Can what looks like running away from grief and sadness actually be a way to heal?
In “The Slow Road North,” writer Rosie Schaap chronicles her circuitous route from spending most of her life as a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker to finding herself settling down far away in a small town in Northern Ireland.
For those of us who don’t subscribe to a one-size-fits-all approach, articulating a personal, intentional philosophy about when to walk away might be the best we can do. I worked in publishing for a decade and strive to be purposeful in my reading practice while routinely finishing several dozen new books a year and putting down countless others. I spoke with similarly committed writers, teachers, editors, and bookworms about their philosophies in the hopes of creating a guide for others to decide where their limits are—and when they should quit a book.
I remember the day when, at the age of 7, I realized that I wanted to figure out how reality worked. My mother and father had just taken us shopping at a market in Calcutta. On the way back home, we passed through a dimly lit arcade where a sidewalk bookseller was displaying his collection of slim volumes. I spotted an enigmatic cover with a man looking through a microscope; the words “Famous Scientists” were emblazoned on it, and when I asked my parents to get it for me, they agreed. As I read the chapters, I learned about discoveries by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek of the world of microscopic life, by Marie Curie about radioactivity, by Albert Einstein about relativity, and I thought, “My God, I could do this, too!” By the time I was 8, I was convinced that everything could be explained, and that I, personally, was going to do it.
Decades have passed, and I am now a theoretical physicist. My job is to work out how all of reality works, and I take that mission seriously, working on subjects ranging from the quantum theory of gravity to theoretical neuroscience. But I must confess to an increasing sense of uncertainty, even bafflement. I am no longer sure that working out what is “real” is possible, or that the reality that my 7-year-old self conceived of even exists, rather than being simply unknown. Perhaps reality is genuinely unknowable: Things exist and there is a truth about them, but we have no way of finding it out. Or perhaps the things we call “real” are called into being by their descriptions but do not independently exist.
As cities get hotter, architects and designers are exploring ways a building, or even an entire urban district, can be designed to create windy conditions on purpose. It could change the shape of cities, and redefine what makes a livable place in a hotter future.
A question underlying “By Any Other Name” is whether it’s more important for your work or your name to endure. Picoult argues in this substantive novel that, while a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, even sweeter is being recognized for your achievements.
“Spirit Crossing” returns to three of the author’s familiar themes: the rape of the natural world in the pursuit of profit, the mistreatment of Native Americans, and, with emphasis this time, that thousands of Native American women and girls are missing and not much ever seems to be done about it.
Ann Powers insists that her major new book, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, is not a biography. Still, the legendary artist stands alone on the book’s cover, and its chapters unfold to the rhythm of Mitchell’s career from the 1960s to the present. The difference is that Traveling doesn’t train its spotlight exclusively on one star. Powers forces Mitchell to share the spotlight with many others—friends, collaborators, musicians, authors, Powers herself in confessional mode—and a sprawling backdrop of cultural and musical change. As a result, the pioneering singer-songwriter appears less singular and more life-size than ever.
As you start this book, though, you may wonder why anyone would think it’s for entrepreneurs. What Rogers has to offer is, indeed, more memoir than advice, though there are nuggets to capture on nearly every page and end-of-chapter takeaways embedded in a lively, fun sort of treasure hunt that feels friendly and approachable. Rogers’ entire life on the edge shows readers that being a little bit (or a whole lot) unique isn’t a hurdle. Unconventionality is not a deal-breaker; in fact, it can help you break into success.
This book is an inspiration — especially for readers whose dreams are burning with ideas but not a lot of coin. “The Outsider Advantage” is for when the drum beat of entrepreneurship is just too irresistible.
But curation is probably still the way for bookstores to go. It no longer makes business sense for a small shop to stock a bit of everything. Learn from Aquazzura and Jimmy Choo: go boutique. The big winner in the pandemic was the romance novel. Eighteen million print copies were sold in 2020; in 2023, more than thirty-nine million copies were sold. Romance is among Amazon’s most popular genres, and, according to the Times, the number of bookstores dedicated to it recently rose from two to more than twenty. The stores’ names are not coy: the Ripped Bodice, in Brooklyn and Culver City; Steamy Lit, in Deerfield Beach, Florida; Blush Bookstore, in Wichita. You can fondle the product all you want, and the staff will be eager to assist you.
To reiterate: The woman writer is always out of time. Her responsibilities may well exist outside waged labor—if she writes on spec, if her dog needs walking, if her kids are screaming for their tablets, all while her imagination takes her away from the present (meditation app be damned) into the plotting of the next idea. The people around her want her writing to be already done, but you know what they say about women’s work.
So, what are we talking about when we are referring to these intangible moments? We are talking about how we navigate the spaces in our lives, be it how we board the bus, the kind of music we listen to when cleaning the kitchen, or how we negotiate who’s turn it is to visit grandma in the nursing home. In other words, we’re talking about how we engage with our world, in particular with the people around us, in ways that are sometimes not even accessible to us.
Yr Dead lays bare the deep loneliness of living in the digital age; how others shape us; and how, out of the ashes of catastrophe (and despite the world’s ills), humanity shows through the cracks. There is hope.
Written partly during lockdown, a time that pushed many mothers trapped at home close to breaking point, Begoña Gómez Urzaiz’s tale “of mothers and monsters” is, on the face of it, about women who break the ultimate taboo and desert their children. Some are jaw-dropping stories in themselves: take the novelist Muriel Spark, who left her four-year-old in the care of nuns in Rhodesia during the second world war, after separating from his father, and moved back to Britain; or the YouTube influencer who very publicly adopted a Chinese child and then furtively “rehomed” him when it didn’t work out as planned. But it is the author’s interweaving of these stories with more everyday reflections on maternal guilt and judgment that turns this book into a fascinating portrait not just of those who leave, but those who stay.
Bishop’s purpose is an “attempt to tell it truly while never denying the power and authenticity of the myth” of the 11 days in August 1944 that were filled with drama, bloodshed and joy. In a story rife with ambiguity, the idea of Paris, the City of Light, gleamed “like a distant lighthouse through the gloom of war.” It was the place war photographer Robert Capa called, “the beautiful city where I first learned to eat, drink and love.”
Through the perspectives of artists and writers like Pablo Picasso, Irène Némirovsky, Jerry Salinger, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, as well as French Resistance fighters and military figures including Gen. Philippe Leclerc and Charles de Gaulle, Bishop’s engrossing narrative unfurls.
Nowadays, the Little Orphan Annie comics that Harold Gray drew from Aug. 5, 1924, through his death in 1968 are less well-known than the 1977 musical that adapted the spunky orphan’s story for the Broadway stage, and the 1982 movie that adapted that Tony Award–winning musical for the big screen. But no matter the permutation, Annie has long represented orphanhood—and how to overcome it—in the American cultural imagination. Her rags-to-riches story arc has by now inculcated several generations of children with the values of grit, bootstrapping, and optimism, encouraging a vision of the American Dream that has always been impossible. I really wish that we’d reassess Annie’s iconic status, and not just because it gets orphanhood all wrong. When you really look closely at it, her narrative is plain weird.
Writers are often cautioned not to work out of the heat of the moment, as if what gives their work its focus is a bit of space. The brilliance and beauty of “Bluff” is how effectively Smith does away with that idea. For them, art is not a sanctuary but a battleground, by turns necessary and useless, and never safe and clean. The writing here pulses and pops and fills us with discomfort, exploring the ruptures we all recognize. And why not? Why else bother? Why else put in the work?
On city walks, wherever I happen to be, it strikes me again and again how much passion it takes to survive in hospitality – and yet, how often such passion seems either to have gone awol, or to have sent owners in the wrong direction entirely. So many paradoxes, so many confusions. From the outside, quick fixes are obvious, even to the amateur eye. Shorten your menu! Paint over that maroon wall immediately. But it’s also indubitably the case that some very bad restaurants are packed, and some very good ones heartbreakingly empty.
No wonder, then, that I jumped on Simonetta Wenkert’s memoir, Ida at My Table, as if on The Key to All Mythologies. I’ve been waiting to read something like it: a book that speaks, minus any macho nonsense, about the experience of running a small restaurant, through good times and bad.
Structured through a combination of chronology and theme, Friss moves from era to era, starting with Benjamin Franklin’s various shops, which combined publishing, printing and bookselling under one roof. As Friss tells us, the word “bookstore” didn’t even exist, and books were primarily luxury goods. It is clear from the outset that Friss’ research is deep, but he keeps it accessible, frequently flavoring the history with interesting morsels, such as Thomas Jefferson purchasing a “sumptuous two-volume history of Italy” that was the same price as 14 hogs.
“Out of the Dark” is a story of trust, self-knowledge, and healing. The journey with Jeanne/Elliott satisfies not only as a road trip marked by the kindnesses of strangers; readers will delight in the company of a woman traveler who grows into the self she’s in fact happy to recognize.
As It Ends With Us, the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, hit theaters last week, the details of its plot highlighted a subtle shift in romance narratives. (I know, I know—some readers insist that this story is not a romance, but that’s certainly how the book is marketed.) While a high-earning neurosurgeon initially seems to be the catch of the day, our heroine ultimately finds her happily-ever-after with a chef who spent time unhoused as a teenager. This twist reflects a broader trend simmering in romance: Maybe billionaires aren’t so sexy after all.
When Richard Chizmar was 10 years old, he wrote a story about a snowman who couldn’t melt. The thermometer climbed, and the sun blazed, but the snowman remained standing, watching his once hard-packed buddies dissolve into slush.
“He was so lonely,” Chizmar recalled and grinned. “I always saw the world differently than the other people around me. Even then, I was exploring the dark side.”
As a work of scholarship, Pursuits of Happiness would never pass peer review today. Though I’d like to make a case that its outrageousness, to use Cavell’s word, is exactly why we might learn to treasure it anew. As with any enduring marriage, our ongoing rereading of Cavell’s book might rest not only in the book itself, but in our relationship to it—by which I mean, in our relationship to it, our relationship to our past selves.
So if procrastination is so costly, why do so many people regularly do it? Years of research have provided a reasonably comprehensive list of psychological factors that relate to procrastination. But it’s been unclear what mental processes underlie the decision to start or postpone a task. When faced with an upcoming deadline, how do people decide to initiate a chore or project?
I was particularly drawn to the dreamlike structure. The narrator — who never refers to himself in the first person — slips between scenes, as if passing through the layers of a place, ventriloquising the patter of the residents and loiterers and fishermen and priests and writers who populate these localities.
The flexible structure — which is established in the first chapter, set in Trieste’s historic Caffè San Marco — allows Magris to tuck sections of literary criticism, or reflections on the complex geography and history of his chosen places.
Consider the lie embedded in a century-old photograph. Four Filipino men, dressed in ‘tribal’ costumes with spears in hand, pose for a portrait in front of a straw hut. They were among 1,200 people brought to the United States for the racist spectacle of the Philippine Village at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair – meant to entertain and educate its American audience. The dehumanising display, and its photographic record, helped incorporate the newly acquired territory of the Philippines into an expanding imperial vision.
Manila-born, Oakland-based artist Stephanie Syjuco encountered the photographs of Philippine Village in 2019, while trawling the collections of the Missouri Historical Society and St Louis Public Library. The Unruly Archive brings together Syjuco’s work with archival collections in the United States from the last half decade, which scrutinises the ways in which they have systematically excluded and misinterpreted the history of the Philippines, and asks a simple question: ‘What does it mean to not see yourself clearly?’
I was lucky. I knew something was wrong and was able to do something about it before I had a heart attack. When I was out for a run my heart rate would hit a ceiling and I had the peculiar sensation of something constricting my fuel line (this turned out to be a pretty accurate description of my dangerously narrowed cardiac arteries reaching full capacity). My GP and I ruled out several other possibilities, I went for a scan and was whisked into hospital. Because I hadn’t had a heart attack, my physical recovery was relatively swift. I was walking round the ward a couple of days after the procedure and doing gentle runs and cycle rides after a few months. But my brain was porridge. I couldn’t write or read. I woke up every day feeling as if I’d just downed a large glass of red wine or thrown back 4mg of Valium, and not in a pleasurable way. Sometimes it was infuriating, sometimes I was too tired to feel anything.
Haig’s wise and moving novel is both a mystery and a love story, a fantasy and a billet-doux to the planet. Perhaps its greatest gift lies in showing us that it is possible to dismantle the boundaries we have built, grasp the connections previously hidden, and appreciate life in all its richness. And the realisation that magic realism probably isn’t an oxymoron after all.
What Elif Shafak excels at, though, is making us understand that, despite the many ways humanity divides itself, we are all connected – by nature and also by the stories we pass from generation to generation. If we learned the lessons of history, respected and listened to the nature that sustains us, the world we live in would be a better place. Through all of her writing – and certainly in this remarkable novel – she effaces dualities, dissolves hierarchies and transcends boundaries. There Are Rivers in the Sky is a difficult book to categorise. It will make you think, cry, rage – and hope. It is Elif Shafak at her best.
Like Berry’s fierce essays and luminous novels, these poems offer gifts of vision, of knowing that there is another way to live now on this Earth: a way that honors love, the land, and all beings. Can any of us rest while there's still a chance to bring that about?
In Eddie Winston is Looking For Love, Marianne Cronin does a terrific job of balancing the divergent tones – the romance and tragedy of Bridie and Eddie’s near-miss love story, and the comedy of Eddie and Bella’s hijinks – to create a novel that feels abundant and intimate, messy and tragic, frustrating and joyful. Just like life.
With equal parts research and reflection, these essays transpose landscapes of personal and shared loss to show how absence can be an opportunity for connection—both to a place and to the people who define and witness it.
For his newest project, “The Year of Living Constitutionally,” journalist A.J. Jacobs donned a tricorne hat, lugged a musket around town, and shunned electricity in favor of reading by candlelight and writing with a goose quill pen. The goal was to climb inside the heads of America’s Founding Fathers and explore the logic of basing today’s Supreme Court rulings on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.
Mr. Jacobs practices a modern form of “stunt journalism,” in which the reporter directly participates in a story instead of merely observing it. “I like to understand things by living them,” he says. Immersion journalism, as it is also called, dates to the 1800s in the U.S.
Our brains never see the past clearly. They are like painters who are never satisfied. They constantly retouch the past with the colors of the present, putting a fresh version of ourselves on display for us to ponder.
On a steamy June evening, Curtis Eckerman embarks on a mothing expedition in the Bauerle Ranch greenbelt, in far South Austin. Towing a wagon full of supplies, he follows a narrow trail that leads between mesquite trees and into a secluded oak grove suffused with golden late-afternoon light. Eckerman, the chair of the biology department at Austin Community College, parks the wagon and begins to wrap a tree trunk in white cloth. Next he suspends a battery-powered ultraviolet light from a low branch. He’s optimistic we’ll see lots of different moths tonight; it’s been a warm, humid day, conducive to plant growth and, by extension, activity by plant-eating creatures. The oak grove is full of frostweed, persimmon trees, and various grasses, each vital to different moth species. That’s another good sign: a wide variety of plants will draw a variety of moths.
When he finishes his preparations, it’s about eight o’clock. Moths emerge to eat, mate, and lay eggs once it’s completely dark—and fellow moth-ers will arrive any moment now. Eckerman mops his brow and takes a swig from his water bottle. “Now we just wait.”
Like most estuaries, the Chesapeake Bay varies greatly in salinity levels from season to season and year to year. Rainstorms and snowmelt in the spring can make the water fresher or, as locals sometimes say, sweeter; droughts and hot spells in the summer can make the water saltier. A dry year can cause slower river flows and more sea nettles during your afternoon swim; heavier rains in other years might lead to an oyster die-off and push crabs farther south. The technical word for this kind of water—saltier than fresh, fresher than salt—is brackish. And there’s a technical definition as well: any water with between half a gram and thirty grams of salt per litre.
I’ve never really consulted a doctor about this, but it’s my sense that this is roughly the salinity level of the blood of any given Marylander as well. That’s because of our exceptionally liberal use of the regionally beloved substance known as Old Bay. It’s a spice-and-herb mix that’s super salty and oh, so slightly sweet, a perfect culinary simulation of late summer and early fall—not too hot, with the hint of a breeze. Appearance-wise, it has the deep brick red of Southern roads and flecks of gold like grains of sand. Like sand, too, it has a habit of getting everywhere—on hands, trousers, tables, chins, and, of course, every food you can imagine.
But there has to be a balance between vagueness and detail. I have come to see writing recipes as akin to writing short stories. They need a beginning, a middle and an end. They need a strong narrative arc. But most importantly the reader needs to feel they are at the heart of the action. They need to feel empowered. If a recipe is too doctrinaire it’s as dull as assembling an Ikea table. There needs to be space for interpretation, room for the cook to recognise something fundamental: that it’s no longer the writer’s dish. It’s now yours. It’s your glug of wine, your splash of vinegar, your pinch of nutmeg. Taste the dish. Does it need more? Then put some in. It’s as simple as that.
So, your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.
A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.
Lee set The Dark We Know in a dried up mining town in the middle of winter, when everything is cold and dreary and dead. Slater is the kind of place where everyone is all up in everyone else’s business and the only places to hang out are the local diner and the woods. The plot unfolds slowly (perhaps a little too slowly), before ratcheting up in intensity and fervor until it’s got you hooked. While I remain unconvinced by the handwaving that goes on to explain what’s actually happening in the town, the confrontations with the monstrous being are entertaining and chilling.
Fear often stems from truths we don’t want to face, like the truth of our inevitable death or the senseless violence that’s all around us. Our own pasts haunt us more than a horror movie’s absurdity. Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection, Mystery Lights, is particularly eerie as she expertly pulls the horror from reality. Again and again, she hits too close to home: a woman feeling scared on her own in a trailer in the desert, even while she fights that feeling. A dormitory haunting that becomes sexual assault. The rich and successful exploiting the young and poor. Online fads that turn into violence.
People disappear, during war, in crimes, from accidents, even by choice. Juliet Grames explores how each disappearance comes with secrets in her sophisticated second novel, “The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia.”
That animal health and human health and environmental health are continuous—that the damage we cause comes back for us—is a commonplace, but it doesn’t commonly structure our policies. “Herd health, flock health—that is something we think about all the time, that is part of our training,” Slavinski said, of veterinarians and the perspective they bring to public health. She said that she likes the term “one health,” which is used by a number of different environmental and health organizations, as a way of thinking about the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and the planet, all the more so now with climate change and biodiversity loss. “It’s such a valuable means for conveying a very complex concept,” she said. “I think in my world, in my role, it’s human-centric, in that it’s, like, What do we see in animals, in the environment, that we’re worried about then spilling over into humans? But it’s so important to know and value what’s happening in the animal and the environmental world.”
It’s not easy to breathe in outer space. To keep crew members on the International Space Station alive, electrolysis is used to split water from the space shuttle’s fuel cells, astronaut perspiration and urine, into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is then filtered back into the cabin, while the hydrogen is either vented into space or combined with carbon dioxide the crew exhales to make more water.
If only it were so simple on Earth.
Now an acoustics professor emeritus at Aalto University in Finland named Unto Laine has discovered an alternative and unexpected source for the sound. And it has absolutely nothing to do with trees.
After hearing inexplicable snaps of sound during an auroral storm one night back in 1990, he decided to apply his acoustician chops. The faint sounds seemed to correspond with waves of auroral light that were visible that night. Was he hallucinating?
After our separation, it was the first thing I made in my new apartment. I spooned the beans and toppings onto the lettuce and briefly considered giving the whole thing a drizzle of balsamic reduction for show, but I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. The salad was perfect already. It had everything I needed.
Its 234 pages contained some 38,000 words, but not one of them was readable. The book’s unnamed author had written it, likely with a quill pen, in symbols never before seen. Did they represent a natural language, such as Latin? A constructed language, like Esperanto? A secret code? Gibberish? Scholars had no real idea. To Davis, however, the manuscript felt alive with meaning.
Global average surface temperatures have risen by about 1.1°C (2°F) since the pre-industrial era, with most of this warming occurring in the past 40 years. Ice is melting; seas are steadily rising; storms are – well, you know this story. And yet, most frequently, it is still a story of the world out there: the world outside of us. The narrative of climate change is one of meteorological extremes, economic upheaval and biodiversity losses. But perhaps it is worth taking a maybe-mad Ruskin seriously. What of our internal clouds? As the climate crisis warps weather and acidifies oceans and shatters temperature records with frightening regularity, one is tempted to ask if our minds are changing in kind.
My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy. He was a comedy nerd, though this is so common a condition in Britain as to be almost not worth mentioning. Like most Britons, Harvey gathered his family around the defunct hearth each night to watch the same half-hour comic situations repeatedly, in reruns and on video. We knew the “Dead Parrot” sketch by heart. We had the usual religious feeling for “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” If we were notable in any way, it was not in kind but in extent. In our wood-cabinet music center, comedy records outnumbered the Beatles. The Goons’ “I’m Walking Backward for Christmas” got an airing all year long. We liked to think of ourselves as particular, on guard against slapstick’s easy laughs—Benny Hill was beneath our collective consideration. I suppose the more precise term is “comedy snobs.”
Still, the missing person drama is the meat of this story. Though not exactly a thriller, there’s more than enough plot, and quite a few twists, to keep readers quickly turning the pages. Just don’t turn them so quickly you miss the central messages Porter is delivering. The rich people may get to go away, but we should really work towards a more equitable society so that they don’t feel like they have to.
Sophie Brickman has teased a light, summer read, but delivered a satire of the American ruling class. Underneath the petty, Gossip Girl-like promise of a catty, back-stabbing novel, Plays Well With Others is actually a deep criticism of class and wealth mocking the fintech rulers who walk among us.
As director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute, astrobiologist Nathalie A. Cabrol’s work is focused on answering the question of whether we’re alone in the universe.
In “The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life,” readers won’t walk away with a clear-cut answer to that question. But they’ll have a newfound appreciation for the massive scientific undertaking that is moving closer toward finding one.
Stress is an essential survival mechanism in response to acute risk — but constant exposure takes its toll on physical and mental health. The continuous activation of stress hormones can contribute to conditions ranging from high blood pressure to depression and addiction. Cooper says that humans cannot absorb the long-term, sustained threats of environmental disasters. Climate stress and anxiety are more persistent and more chronic than are other stressors that humans experience, Cooper says. “And that is not the way our biology is wired.”
In the interwar years, it is estimated that a total of half a million acres of new garden were created. By the outbreak of the Second World War, around 80 per cent of English households were involved in some form of gardening activity. So for all the widespread criticisms, this was the real birth of the reputation of Britain as a ‘land of gardeners’. This was a time when the world war-weary, grey nation was being colourfully transformed, inch by hard dug inch. The spirit-uplifting nature of the humble flower was used as a weapon to raise horizons when the concept of beautification was twisting its way, like honeysuckle, into the thinking of another network of grassroots radicals fighting for a more egalitarian nation.
We celebrated when the cancer was gone, a party at home. In the summer, we went to Freeport, Maine, to watch our favorite singer, Mindy Smith, perform at the L.L. Bean Store Discovery Park. We ate hamburgers on a picnic blanket as the sun went down; I thumbed the handle of my new blue backpack, which I would carry to fourth grade in the fall. Mindy Smith’s mother died of breast cancer. We listened to her song about missing her mom—Please don’t go/ Let me have you just one moment more—with a strange sense of relief. “We don’t have to worry about that anymore,” my mom said to me.
My dad has since told me that that wasn’t true: They were worried all the time. It was one of those secrets that adults have to hold.
We had decided to brave Paris Plages, a citywide effort renewed during the 2024 Summer Olympics to set up temporary public beaches along the Seine. This canal spot was one of six locations where swimmers could directly enter the water (and not a floating pool) for the first time since 1923. We were a bit nervous, of course; we were submitting our bodies to the question of whether one of the largest urban water cleanups in recent history had worked. Had France’s operation to detox the river Seine and its canals succeeded? How clean was the water, really?
An astute portrait of trauma rippling down the generations, No Small Thing suggests that limited choices cause McDonald’s female characters to repeat the same mistakes. The author has a background in arts education for young people, and poignantly conveys how the grinding cycle of poverty takes its toll on the vulnerable, wreaking havoc on youthful lives, stifling expression. Although stark, this is an invigorating read, and certain threads hint at the possibility of redemption.
A Hand Made Life is a quietly political book; it is determined to remember the great scars of the 20th century, and to ask what inheritance violence leaves. But it’s also an elegy for a north that’s long gone now; a world of canals, cooling towers and lung-busting rambles on Stanage Edge that Elena came profoundly to love.
Interviewing those at the techno-cultural vanguard, including Herndon, Dryhurst and Maclean, has given me some sense of peace. I realise that I have been hanging on to 20th-century notions of art practice and the cultural landscape, one where humans spent months and years writing, painting, recording and filming works that defined the culture of our species. They provided meaning, distraction, wellbeing. A reason to exist. Making peace may mean letting go of these historical notions, finding new meaning. While digitally generatable media is increasingly becoming the domain of AI, for example, might performance and tactile artforms, such as live concerts, theatre and sculpture, be reinvigorated?
Hamya successfully makes a muddle with The Hypocrite, and I mean that as high praise. Contemporary fiction too often seeks the relief of some imagined perfect morality, perhaps because so many readers now conflate the beliefs of characters and their creator. It’s a pleasure to read a 27-year-old writer who embraces the novel’s power to fog up certainties about “bad men”—and prods readers to join in.
This beautifully told story always comes back to love, and that means back to the fig. Always the fig. The fig tree is a survivor, knowing yet humble, the tree of love lost, regained and buried in the earth.
But a genre that rejects the limits imposed by reality can go only so far in depicting the real. Though sci-fi remains her claim to fame, Russ, who died in 2011, published works of fantasy, drama, and criticism. She also wrote a single realist novel. In On Strike Against God, first released in 1980 and recently reissued, Russ directly explored and described sexism and homophobia as they existed within her milieu—forces depicted elsewhere in her fiction through the slanted lens of metaphor.
Jessica Anthony’s The Most is pitched as a one-sitting read, the story of a marriage pushed to its brink and a moment of shocking realization triggered by long hours in a pool. But distilling this novel down to just these elements misses its other dimensions, how it captures an anxiety both specific to its time and broadly relatable, how its narrator twists and diverts the story at will, and how in under 150 pages we are presented and taken through an incredibly nuanced conflict.
What is most successful in the novel is Birdy’s depiction of an immediately recognisable young manhood that will be familiar to readers far beyond the Liberties area in Dublin, where Ravelling is set. Birdy has a fantastic ear, and is meticulous in portraying the profoundly articulate inarticulacy of young people, the idiolects through which their lives are negotiated.
Be prepared to be awed, and maybe a little frightened. Be ready to have your own thoughts on life after death poked and prodded — and maybe changed. Be warned for “In My Time of Dying” to leave you breathless.
When Charles Darwin enlisted for his formative voyage on the Beagle in 1831, his role was primarily not that of a naturalist but a geologist. He developed his theory of evolution by natural selection with a keen eye on the interactions of the living and the geological world, recognising that life on Earth could transform the very environment that shapes it.
In Living on Earth, philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith takes up that theme, offering “a history of organisms as causes, rather than evolutionary products” to create “a picture of an Earth continually changing because of what living things do”. While the actors in this tale include bacteria, birds and octopuses, a substantial proportion of the book focuses on the creatures that are transforming the environment like no other: us.
Color Field painting has retained a varying vitality for over sixty years and, in the hands of certain artists, thrives today. By now, owing to its longevity and identifying qualities, it perhaps can be considered a genre of its own. But for the artists pursuing it, it is hardly that—it is the center of art, based on the belief that abstraction underlies all art and that Color Field painting, as a result, is an abstract art both refined and fundamental.
Writers are those naïfs among us who believe that language can be used to take the measure of experience. Readers demonstrate faith in them when they commit to a book or short story. The reader-writer relationship is a contract of sorts. But because the terms are not written down, there is much room in that contract for misinterpretation. What is at stake is not small: it is a shared picture of reality. Nor is it static. With each new publication or rereading, the reader-writer contract is up for review. What could go wrong?
The cradle of European civilization happens to share geography with a collection of active volcanoes: Vesuvius, Etna, Stromboli, and Vulcano in Italy, and Santorini in Greece. This means that we have records of how thinkers from Western antiquity theorized about volcanism and its causes. It is from Vulcano—named after the Roman god of fire and metalwork—that we take our word “volcano.” The ancient Romans imagined that volcanoes were smokestacks for giant internal furnaces fuelled by coal, bitumen, or sulfur inside the Earth. They imagined a great network of flues within the planet. Volcanoes were where these inner fires burst forth, like safety valves.
Twenty years ago he blew open the doors of the hushed temple of professional cooking—an intimidating, mythical white-tocqued corner of the world—strolled on in, and then held the door open for all of us to follow. I am certain that Tony would be genuinely pleased that his own steadfast work, generously shared over the years, has made this one single aspect of his cookbook feel dated. Today's reader is no amateur. He would allow me, if he were here, to give him shit about his stale, out-of-date idea of the average home cook, the average reader who would be picking up this book.
Its spritzy, berserk energy pulls it together like a force field. Baxter mercifully switches a too-sweet ending for an unsettling finish – but even without that, Woo Woo’s guttural, flamboyant imagination would stand it apart. As Sabine decrees somewhere along the way: “Making art is an athletic achievement.”
When the systems that give shape to things start to fade or come into doubt, as has happened to religion, liberalism, democracy and more, one is left looking for a new God. There is something particularly poignant about the desire to ask ChatGPT to tell us something about a world in which it can occasionally feel like nothing is true. To humans awash with a sea of subjectivity, AI represents the transcendent thing: the impossibly logical mind that can tell us the truth.
Lingering at the edges of Clarke’s short story about the Tibetan monks was a similar sense of technology as the thing that lets us exceed our mere mortal constraints. But the result is the end of everything. In turning to technology to make a deeply spiritual, manual, painstaking task more efficient, Clarke’s characters end up erasing the very act of faith that sustained their journey toward transcendence. But here in the real world, perhaps meeting God isn’t the aim. It’s the torture and the ecstasy of the attempt to do so. Artificial intelligence may keep growing in scope, power and capability, but the assumptions underlying our faith in it – that, so to speak, it might bring us closer to God – may only lead us further away.
Mathematicians are “reinventing the wheel” by giving it a new shape. Their newly imagined wheel looks like a many-dimensional guitar pick, and it could theoretically roll in ways beyond our three-dimensional understanding. This breakthrough solves a decades-old geometry problem by showing how to build objects in dimensions that we cannot envision .
Though pizza was around before it came to New York, let’s say for our purposes that New York-style pizza is its own thing that entered the city’s food lexicon well over 100 years ago. Since then, pizza-makers all around the city have been tweaking recipes, changing up ovens, and swapping in new ingredients. The result? While New York pizza — and its offspring, the New York slice — is always recognizable, an old-school versus a new-school pie is, for pizza fanatics, like comparing apples to oranges.
With the help of some of the city’s most knowledgeable pizza folks, we’re laying out a celebration of four stages in the evolution of New York pizza — all of which are still available at shops around the city.
You can name your brand anything you want, and that comes with a lot of pressure. But any name in the world, and you choose Plonts! And now I have to teach Google Docs that it’s not a mistake! The indignity.
I wandered through narrow paths, cutting between shophouses and avoiding crowds, proud that I was not lost in the streets I hadn’t seen in seven years—that I had last seen with my grandmother. At that moment, without her, I was finding my own way.
Fiction is a wonderful vehicle for the most exciting facts and this novel is a propulsive investigation into what might have happened to William Hare.
At the ancient Olympics in Greece, athletes weren’t the only stars of the show. The spectacle also attracted poets, who recited their works for eager audiences. Competitors commissioned bigger names to write odes of their victories, which choruses performed at elaborate celebrations. Physical strength and literary prowess were inextricably linked.
Thousands of years later, this image appealed to Pierre de Coubertin, a French baron best known as the founder of the modern Olympics in 1896. But today’s Games bear little resemblance to Coubertin’s grand vision: He pictured a competition that would “reunite in the bonds of legitimate wedlock a long-divorced couple—muscle and mind.”
We’re so often told to “never give up.” From sans serif font posters stuck on college dorm walls that declare “Keep Calm and Carry On” to the sob stories given by contestants on TV (“I never would have ended up on this reality show making Fabergé eggs if I had worked at Google like my parents wanted me to, sob“), we are bombarded with this idea that giving up is tantamount to failure, and that failure is not an option.
Yet I can tell you with certainty that if I hadn’t repeatedly done what society deems to be akin to moral failing, I would not be in the position I’m in today—a novelist.
Imagine that your local public library is inhabited by an undiscovered race of tiny people. They’ve hidden themselves in the racks, tucked behind books and magazines, amidst history and fiction, new media and old. If you’re lucky, you might spy them — or at least their tiny homes, which are filled with minuscule beds, microscopic stools, itty-bitty flowers and furniture fashioned out of found objects such as board game pieces and one-use spice bottles.
And these little folks need help. You have been cast as a “Teeny Tiny Beings Residential Specialist,” charged with finding the micro-humans new homes. It appears the librarians — giants, like us, at least to the microscopic persons — have been moving things around.
What no one saw coming: my vision growing exponentially worse. In August 2023, as I was starting the final edits on my book, the lasers stopped working on my left eye. I would have to go under the knife. The vitrectomy would replace my eyeball juice with fresh-squeezed artificial replacement fluid, and a self-dissolving gas bubble would be injected to push my retina into place. A painless procedure (thanks, propofol and Valium!), but the following seven days of constant facedown positioning would be absolute torture. I was inverted and sore, and sleeping with my CPAP machine (like Hannibal Lecter in his face mask) was inhumane. Worse yet, in December 2023, I learned that my right eye required the same process. I immediately burst into tears.
Before our cities lit the night and banished the stars, a gauzy band of faint light and shadows vividly cleaved the night sky. Our name for this band, “Milky Way,” originates in Greek mythology.
Heracles, it is told, was born to Zeus following one of his many infidelities. To grant him protection and superhuman powers, Hermes snuck Heracles up to Olympus and placed him at Hera’s breast as she slept. But when Zeus’s wife woke up and realized what had happened, she flung the baby from her breast and some of her milk spilled out across the heavens. Hence the Greek term kuklos galaxías (κύκλος γαλαξίας), or milky circle.
South of Tampa Bay, Florida, wedged between a quiet neighborhood and a mangrove forest, custom-designed aquariums are home to thousands of sea urchin larvae that tumble and drift through the water. Scientists with The Florida Aquarium and the University of Florida care for the little urchins, checking them daily under microscopes for signs that they’re maturing into juveniles, which look like miniature versions of the adults. Few will make it. For every one million embryos conceived in the lab, only about 100,000 become larvae. Of those, only up to 2,000 become adults.
And at this particular moment, coral reefs in the Caribbean need all the urchins they can get.
Kat Tang’s debut novel, “Five-Star Stranger,” follows one man over a months-long spiral as he realizes he’s getting attached to his clients — a violation of his first rule for himself as a rental stranger — forcing him to confront his past and examine why he got into the business in the first place.
Maybe it’s something close to the meaning of life, as understood by a man with much lived experience now mindful of his own mortality.
Kristin Vuković's debut novel is a mouthwatering platter of culture, history, and the everlasting struggle for balance between tradition and progress.
Tucked into a stark first-floor corner space flanked by a motorcycle stand on one side and a barbershop on the other, Restaurant Eels had a laid-back, Scandinavian vibe and a youthful clientele who clearly knew a thing or two about food. And Ferrand’s food was worth the trip—including his signature smoked eel with Granny Smith apple, licorice root, and hazelnuts made with European eel cultivated on a small farm in Greece. Each plate was beautifully composed, essentially a work of art. But I’ll admit to a pang of disappointment. For once the dinner crowd thinned and we had a chance to talk, Ferrand confessed he had not given eels a lot of thought.
So why name your restaurant Eels, I asked?
“Ah, that,” he said. “Of course. Eels are something very special. They speak to me of something I can’t explain, something beyond words, perhaps beyond memory. I’m sorry I can’t say more, but I am a chef, not a poet. Maybe you would like a dessert?”
Among my earliest memories as a small child is the sound, on a summer evening, of a peal of church bells echoing off the hillsides around the village in Hampshire where my grandparents lived. Over the years since then I have been intrigued by sounds of almost every kind – though I do exclude a few, such as some of those in the genre of music known as “noise”, which a friend says he finds soothing, but which I find about as welcome as putting my head in a buzzsaw.
A few years ago I went to see a flock of knots (birds in the wader family) flying inshore over mudflats off the Norfolk coast. The birds flashed in and out of view as they wheeled and turned in synchrony. It was a wonder to see, but more than the sight it was the sound made by thousands of pairs of fluttering wings as they came overhead that amazed me.
Now he’s reviving all 21 narrators of The Spinning Heart a decade on, despite the fact that one is dead and others will have met their ends before the story is done. If violence was simmering gently in the earlier novel, now it’s frothing over the sides.
It was a logical step from this apprehension of the Devil to the suspicion that certain people had done deals and bargains with him, selling their immortal souls for worldly benefits. My favorite of the many stories that Thomas recounts involves a student at Cambridge University, who was struggling to understand one of his scholarly texts. The Devil appeared in the guise of a Master of Arts, who elucidated the text and offered the student a trip to Italy and a degree from the University of Padua. “Two days later,” we learn, “the hapless student’s gown was found floating in the river,” the student having paid a rather steep price for a spot of academic help.
These kinds of tales, as Ed Simon explores in his lively new book, “Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain” (Melville House), existed as myths that enacted both resistance and control.
In Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity (2024), the former Allure digital beauty editor, Sable Yong implicitly argues that the democratization of the modern beauty industry has left warm, bright rooms empty by permanently opening the doors to illuminated ballrooms. Ostensibly, anyone with a credit card and a high pain tolerance can become the kind of beautiful that makes life easier and more fulfilling. Yet this accessibility has also created the high, punishing stakes of modern-day beauty: you can either be in the illuminated ballroom or out in the snow—there seem to be few rooms, of varying warmth and brightness, between. Now, the rewards for beauty appear greater and more diverse than ever, ranging from a glowing, beautified vision of oneself in a tiny Zoom window to a Kardashian-sized cultural empire.
Taschen has released a new two-volume book on the enduring legacy of Life magazine and its close ties with Hollywood and the wider film industry. Titled Life. Hollywood, the books chronicle the rise of Life, from its transformation into a photo-led weekly news magazine in 1936, to becoming the most widely-read publication of its kind in the 1940s, to its eventual dissolution as a weekly in 1972.
This delicate sense of ambiguity and unsteadiness is on display in Parasol Against the Axe, Oyeyemi’s new novel about how we get to know people, places, and books. Just as the novel’s protagonist, a heroine on the run named Hero Tojosoa, finds herself carted around Prague in a wheelbarrow, readers are briskly shuttled through the city in a state of undignified but delighted disorientation, jostling over cobblestones at a pace just slow enough to catch glimpses of a multitude of things they want to investigate, but too fast to get out and take a steady look.
The Pain Project, co-written with Paradis’ wife Kara Stanley, is an account of how this remarkably bright and brave couple lived with the world-transforming pain that continues to torment Paradis. It focuses on their year long pain project, launched a decade into their struggles, and it records journal entries, experts consulted and research, as well as the couple’s often poignant conversations with each other and the friends and family who support them still. The sustaining roles of music, laughter and food are vividly portrayed.
The Folly Cove Designers were a successful community in Rockport, Massachusetts, that, between 1941 and 1969, designed images on linoleum panels and imprinted them on fabric. They were led by Virginia Lee Demetrios, an accomplished artist who was also an exceptionally effective teacher.
Largely forgotten today, they remain important because of their artistic creativity, their commitment to their art form and the beautiful work they create. A new book by South Berwick author Elena Sarni is poised to bring them renewed attention.
It’s tempting to say black, or grayish black, or some variation of a color that really just conveys the feeling of darkness. But the truth is more complicated, and it depends on what time you’re asking, where you’re sitting, and whether the Moon is out.
The sky is never empty of color, not even at night, at least if you’re on Earth.
A growing body of research suggests that pollution can disrupt insect attraction to plants—at a time when many insect populations are already suffering deep declines due to agricultural chemicals, habitat loss, and climate change. About 75 percent of flowering plants and about 35 percent of food crops rely on animals to move pollen around so that plants can fertilize one another and form seeds. Even the black-mustard plants used in the experiment, which can self-fertilize, exhibited a drop of 14 percent to 31 percent in successful pollination, as measured by three different pollination metrics.
Humorist Calvin Trillin once defined humor by saying it’s undefinable: “It’s what makes the lady in the second row laugh.” You can’t debate it, he said. You can’t tell her, “This joke worked yesterday; you should be laughing.”
No matter how you describe it, the ability to make that lady laugh is rare. But Simon Rich has it, and his latest, “Glory Days,” is not only extremely and creatively funny but also a testament to what can happen when a writer sets forth without Waze connected to his word processor.
Yeah, it’s roomy but the seat belt is completely missing. Still, four on the floor, zero-to-25 in three seconds, it runs on cheap fuel, she’s got a lot of kick, it’s workable. This is the ride you’ve wanted since you were 14 years old. As in the new book “The Horse” by Timothy C. Winegard, what’ll you do with that one horsepower?
It’s a war on three fronts: Replace some of our single-use plastics with truly compostable materials. Replace another chunk with reusable containers, like metal or glass. And, finally, tweak the economic incentives so plastic recycling actually works. This isn’t my battle plan; it’s a theme I heard over and over as I spent the past year talking to scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and policy folk.
None of these ploys is a slam dunk. They’ll need not only innovation but also binders full of smart government incentives and regulation—all of which, of course, will be resisted by petroleum firms. But if you add up all these unplastic developments, you’ll find grounds for cautious optimism: We’ve got a path to a world less littered with deathless plastic waste.
Throughout “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore,” Evan Friss emphasizes that the most successful bookshops do more than sell novels, nonfiction and children’s literature. They thrive when they become community gathering places. As he writes about the early days of New York’s Gotham Book Mart: “It was a museum, art gallery, therapist’s couch, disheveled English professor’s office, grandmother’s living room, and Parisian cafe, all wrapped in one.”
As our species developed its language skills, “we became entirely dependent on words for every aspect of our lives,” Mithen writes. “To maintain such dependency, evolution not only gave us the joy of words but made language the life force of being human.” Mithen’s book is engaging, detailed, and incredibly thorough — and brings a fresh and welcome perspective to a longstanding puzzle.
In the ultra-entertaining and informative “The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982,” Nashawaty makes the case that the octet of flicks altered the trajectory, not only of the auteurs at the helm, but of Hollywood filmmaking.
There is no better way to introduce Jonathan’s book than his own words: “My goal in writing this book is to provide readers with a mental toolkit to better understand filter coffee brewing and how we can affect it,” he says in the introduction, adding that the book was not written to suggest the best brewing method or kettle, which is too subjective. Rather, he wanted to help readers explore the possibilities of coffee brewing (particularly percolation methods, the first type of brewing that Jonathan began to explore) more efficiently.
I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer.
My son, who is at pains to tell you that he is not five but five and three-quarters, is obsessed with the future. He draws pictures of crystalline cityscapes crisscrossed by “hyperloops” and flying cars; in the future, he says, scientists will “wreck down” our house to build a skyscraper, and robots will take the place of police officers. He’s certain about all this but uncertain when it will happen. Last year, he thought the future might arrive in 2024; he’s now considering 2025, or even later. “What if it takes them a really long time to build the future?” he asked me the other night, with a concerned look. “What if it takes until I’m an old man?” (I winced to hear him say those words.) “Or what if I die”—he mimed a kind of heart attack—“and I miss it?” I did my best and told him that he will definitely see at least some of “the future,” as he pictures it, when he grows up.
The truth, of course, is that we’re ignorant about the future. Who will win the election in November? Will we lose our jobs because of A.I.? Will the planet boil or merely simmer? What will skyscrapers, or smartphones, or schools look like in thirty years? We’re not in the dark about these questions; we can make educated guesses or predictions. But there’s an odd way in which, the more informed our speculations become, the more they serve to highlight what we don’t know. “The knowledge we possess determines the degree of specificity of the ignorance we recognize,” the philosopher Daniel DeNicola writes, in his book “Understanding Ignorance.” The more you know, the more precisely you can say what you don’t.
In January, UC Davis announced the results of Chin’s research: Of the tens of thousands of Chinese restaurants serving food in America, the Fongs’ unsung little diner is the oldest one continuously operating in California, and probably in the U.S. The Fongs suddenly found themselves in possession of an important piece of American history, which had been sitting in plain sight in a farm town 20 miles north of Sacramento.
The media rushed to cover the story, and hordes of new customers followed. The Woodland City Council issued a proclamation, which included testimonials from council members about their favorite dishes. And instead of retiring, Paul and Nancy were working twice as hard.
You need it when you drive. You need it when you’re looking for that new shop in the mall. You really need your surgeon to have it when they operate on your kidney. The ability to imagine and manipulate three-dimensional objects in the mind, also known as spatial reasoning, is at the base of many key tasks in our daily lives. But how do we do it?
If you thought it must involve actual images of the objects in your head, you’re in good company. Until recently, the majority of the neuroscience community believed the same. Yet a recent paper by Lachlan Kay, Rebecca Keogh, and Joel Pearson at the University of New South Wales suggests the opposite: Mental pictures are entirely optional—and, in certain cases, they might even be harmful.
Someone Like Us starts out like a mystery novel but becomes, in the end, something more like a ghost story: a meditation on the ways we can be part of a place yet simultaneously separate from it. It is the kind of book Mamush’s father says he plans to write one day: a paean to the beauty and hardship present in his native Ethiopia, but also alive and present in every corner of the United States. “When I am finished,” he tells Mamush, “no one will believe a country can be so rich and so poor at the same time.”