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.