Nonprofit arts organizations have always needed to fundraise for a portion of their income, but lately smaller and midsize organizations without endowments have been feeling the crunch—some to the degree of existential crisis. “Right now feels different,” said Lerner. “It feels chaotic. It feels like the whole field is kind of in turmoil.” As a result, she and other arts executives have been researching innovative new models for funding—and new ways of thinking about funding—to empower individual artists and supporters while also diluting the role of philanthropy. Today, there is an increased focus on collective and regenerative funding models—both nonprofit and for-profit—to prime arts institutions for sustainable futures and to look at the arts as an integral part of a larger social ecosystem.
Then on a flight from New York to Los Angeles I was asked, What are your philosophical sayings? A colleague later drew my attention to a piece in the Guardian about prominent philosophers being asked this question, and to subsequent discussion in the blogosphere. I was not aware of these reports when I received the question, and I was by no means a prominent figure. I heard myself explaining to the person next to me that philosophers write journal articles and books and contribute to existing debates. I spoke of training graduate students, and the American Philosophical Association. Eventually I bluntly said that we don’t have sayings anymore. I got the impression he thought I must not be very good; and somehow I did feel a surge of embarrassment, which I buried in a rush to be congenial. When I had a chance to think it over, I wondered if I had felt embarrassed for the guy because he was innocent about professional philosophy or embarrassed for myself because I do something as banal as contribute to existing debates. Had I cringed at a boyish fantasy about academic life? Or was I cringing at myself for devoting my life to something whose ways, whose point, would not reward this or any other fantasy? Maybe I should have some sayings. If my professional self regarded this prospect with bemusement, maybe I had missed something vital about my own undertaking.
Nothing seemed to be coming out of Val’s mouth. She was moving her lips, definitely talking. But the speech bubble between us was empty. I could hear bits and pieces, but I couldn’t make out what they meant. The guts of each word had been stripped bare. Like a fish deboned, leaving a skeleton.
The moment is forever etched in my brain and it was terrifying.
For billions of years, Earth has been at the mercy of such cosmic threats – but oh, how times have changed. Today, there exists a field of applied science known as planetary defence, which is exactly what it sounds like: scientists and engineers working around the clock to protect the world from apocalyptic space rocks. One of the ways in which they do this is by spying on the heavens, scanning the night sky for asteroids that may be heading our way. In the next few years, two next-generation telescopes are coming online that will find almost all the space rocks that have been eluding even the most eagle-eyed astronomers. And if these missions achieve their considerable promise, all 8 billion of us will be significantly safer than we are now.
In a way, I get it. Butter is luxury. That’s what it tastes like: cream rendered into something even richer. My earliest memory of wielding the butter knife puts me in the small kitchen at my aunt and uncle’s house, part of a production line of women and girls assembling sandwiches for a wake. My role was to butter each slice of bread, though I struggled to figure out how much to use. ‘We’ll need more butter than that, Ana,’ one aunt murmured, taking the knife from me. ‘We’re making sandwiches for a funeral, not an orphanage.’
Thirty years later, I am a dab hand. There’s always a block of Kerrygold in my fridge, a little luxury that has become an everyday thing. I use it to fry eggs and I melt it into mashed potatoes, elevating something unremarkable into something to be savoured with every bite. I love melting butter on the hob with a little garlic, the smell all through the house that makes your mouth water, and I love saving gold Kerrygold wrappers so that I can use them to grease cake tins or baking dishes. Hungry while cooking dinner, I cut myself a slice of bread and top it with a wedge of butter – bliss.
If every city has a culinary punch line, it’s easy to identify Los Angeles’s: Erewhon, the cultish chain of grocery stores, where a half gallon of “hyper oxygenated” water will run you an unconscionable $25.99. It started, in 1966, as a bean-sprouts-and-bulk-bins health-food stall in Boston, the brainchild of Japanese immigrants who evangelized the macrobiotic diet. Since then, it’s moved West and morphed into a slick, high-end wellness behemoth—a constant site of workaday paparazzi photos, a case study in capitalism posing as counterculture.
I took the coward’s way out on Jeopardy!. In a competitive episode of the show, typically the last round, Final Jeopardy!, determines the game’s winner. Contestants are able to wager any or all of the winnings they’ve accumulated so far on the chance they respond correctly to the final clue; if they wager everything and get it right, they can as much as double their score. And so a lot comes down to this wagering—the contestant with the highest total after Final wins the game, and gets to return for the next episode as a Jeopardy! champion. Avid fans of the show, especially the game theorists among them, long ago determined the “correct” way to wager for each contestant depending on their point totals heading into Final. When you’re in the lead going into Final Jeopardy!, as I was (not a brag, as you’ll see shortly), the correct or objective or rational strategy is straightforward: the first-place contestant is advised to wager just enough to cover the second-place contestant should the latter wager everything they have (ill-advised according to the game theorists, but an often enough possibility); if both contestants respond correctly, the leading contestant will win the game by one dollar, a common outcome on the show. So, what I was supposed to do was wager enough so that I finished the game with one dollar more than twice my nearest opponent’s current score. Of course, all of this hinges on answering the Final Jeopardy! clue correctly. Which brings me to Art.
In a novel dealing with overly familiar themes in Irish fiction – alcoholism and abuse; family and freedom; religion and bodily autonomy – the challenge is to give such tropes a fresh perspective. For the most part, Dwyer Hickey achieves this, making for a readable, emotionally engaging story of two people bound by unspoken trauma and of a city in a state of flux.
Playground is at once a portrait of a three-way friendship, a cyberpunk thriller of sorts, an Anthropocene novel, an oceanic tale and an allegory of postcolonialism. It is as brilliant on land as it is undersea, and as dizzyingly wise about technology as it is about island culture, capitalism and ecology.
Our Evenings is a novel about acceptance: of time’s passage, of life’s limitations, of the small victories that make existence meaningful.
The days are long in Dad’s house in the last year of his life. He is mostly asleep in a hospital bed in the corner of the room, while I sit quietly on the sofa hoping he sleeps a little longer. I sit watching him, worrying he’s stopped breathing, listening to the radio playing pop songs that transform the room into a time machine. “Catch a bright star and place it on your forehead…”, T Rex’s Ride a White Swan transports me back to 1970, watching Top of the Pops in this room, Dad teasing us about Marc Bolan’s shoes or Noddy Holder’s trousers.
When he wakes up, I ask him if he remembers the song. He shakes his head slowly. “I don’t remember anything…” Even trying to remember is too difficult and so, as the song fades away, we fall back into silence until he asks if we can look at spoons.
At 6am on 1 October 1964, two trains set off in opposite directions in a daring experiment that would quickly turn them into symbols of Japan’s transformation from militarist pariah to global economic powerhouse.
Up until a few years ago, the stoop’s place in society was lost on me (save for the occasion I snuck a cheeky sit on those few glorious stoops that are not tucked behind a criminalizing fence). But, oh, how the worm has turned. Now, as the proud beneficiary of a stoop that fronts my 19th-century Park Slope brownstone rental, the veil has been lifted—and I can now see so clearly the sense of bliss and belonging a stoop sit provides.
A new book by Jeffrey Pilcher, a leading scholar of food history, helps to explain how the trend toward microbreweries, and their idiosyncratic and local beers, has become, ironically, a global phenomenon. In Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity, he traces how something as personal as taste—preference for a particular beer style or brand—is actually shaped by global forces and local politics.
Four years before the CrowdStrike chaos, Robert Harris published the post-apocalyptic novel The Second Sleep, which explores how a universal technological crash could end civilization as we know it. Slight spoiler: we don’t grasp that’s what happened when the novel begins. Set in 1468, it feels like medieval thatched-cottage England, so our realization that it both is and isn’t develops gradually.We see Dark Age Christianity at its strictest. The spoken language must be that of the King James Bible, using ‘ye’ and ‘thou’ and such. Hmmm. That bible was published in 1611.
As Stephen King says in his cover blurb, this novel is compulsive reading. Puzzle after puzzle is unraveled—or are they? The story is as tense as any thriller.
So it can come as a shock to Britons to learn that their words and expressions have been worming their way into the American lexicon just as much, it would appear, as the other way around. I date the run-up (that’s an alternate meaning of run-up: “increase”) in Britishisms to the early 1990s, and it’s surely significant that this was when such journalists as Tina Brown, Anna Wintour, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens moved to the US or consolidated their prominence there. The chattering classes – another useful Britishism – have a persistent desire for ostensibly clever ways to say stuff. They have borrowed from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, teen culture, African American vernacular, sports and hip-hop, and they increasingly borrow from Britain.
Here are some of my favourite examples.
“The informal dining among foodie friends gradually evolved into what it is today,” says Unterman. “Al likes to spread the word on things culinary and Chinese and has spent a lifetime doing that. Our original group just brought on more hungry friends.” They’ve met at more than two dozen restaurants and even traveled together to Vancouver to search for the best xiao long bao.
Many members of the unofficial “club” are in their 70s; the newest addition to the group is also its oldest member, 91-year-old Fern Smith. The fact that she is a former U.S. District Court judge — not someone who has professionally opined on food — is no matter. “She ate everything at our last dinner,” Cheng says. “That was the test.” (Not present is Cheng’s son, who is 41 and the youngest Insatiable.)
I’m no artist, but, if you had asked me when I was a child to draw the shape of a life, I might have drawn a horizontal line.
A few years after that, I would have drawn life as a mountain. The upward climb would be learning, acquiring, becoming; the trip back down would be a sloughing off.
Liane Moriarty’s new book, Here One Moment, asks a simple, devastating question: What would you do if someone told you how and when you would die?
That’s exactly what happens to the passengers on an otherwise unremarkable flight between Hobart and Sydney in Australia. A woman stands up, and then walks down the aisle, pointing to people, reeling off an age and a cause of death. A workplace accident at 43. Drowning at 7. Cardiac arrest at 91.
Well, Anush Kapadia pulls off what wasn’t supposed to be possible: a book on money that is at once meticulous, all-encompassing, lucid and timely. It is also accessibly readable, though it will probably be too condensed for those who do not theorise money for a living.
“If I should use a metaphor for the action of writing, it has to be that of listening,” the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse once said. “Thus, it almost goes without saying, that writing is reminiscent of music.” To take that idea further again, writing is sometimes the vain yet necessary attempt – ever ambitious, like chasing the speed of light – to say the unsayable.
The Degenerates, the impressive debut novel of the Indian Australian author Raeden Richardson (a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop), inhabits this tension. It considers our ever-turbulent relationship with change and, with assured control, contends with how to truly express a life in language.
The Haunted Wood brilliantly celebrates what we have gained from our unrivalled storytelling tradition. If, like me, you find that it glows with nostalgia and remembered joys, then be grateful. But also ask yourself if we are going to give our children and grandchildren something less.
In prose that is graceful and often as melancholy as its theme, Eichler explores music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma and to translate collective suffering into sound without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.
It would be impossible to fully chart The Flintstones’ representation and resonance in art and culture, as it covers the entire globe and spans over half a century. Fred’s face has been plastered on everything from cigarette ads to the walls of modern art museums to Hollywood billboards to murals in shuttered gray-market weed stores in Manhattan’s West Village. One iteration of the character, “Funky Fred,” even dipped a toe in rapping for a bit.
Many of today’s physicists are grappling with a duality so surprising that it has called into question basic features of reality. It is called the AdS/CFT correspondence, and it ups the ante on the rabbit-duck illusion by equating two radically different views of an entire cosmos (albeit a toy cosmos with an exotic shape unlike that of the real universe).
In one perspective, physicists see a two-dimensional universe that is flat. In an equivalent, “dual” view, they see what they call a “bulk” universe that pops out to fill a volume, a bit like a hologram. Two sets of equations with wildly different conceptual messages end up describing exactly the same physical events.
In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She calculated that collisions involving three different types of subatomic particles would all produce the same wreckage. It was like laying a grid over maps of London, Tokyo and New York and seeing that all three cities had train stations at the same coordinates.
“They are very different [particle] theories. There’s no reason for them to be connected,” Figueiredo said.
The coincidence soon revealed itself to be a conspiracy: The theories describing the three types of particles were, when viewed from the right perspective, essentially one. The conspiracy, Figueiredo and her colleagues realized, stems from the existence of a hidden structure, one that could potentially simplify the complex business of understanding what’s going on at the base level of reality.
Physicists have a long history of pinning their grand hopes on the neutrino. In fact, they’ve been doing it since long before anyone knew that these particles even existed.
“Scaffolding. Has the ring of the gallows to it.” This line epitomizes Lauren Elkin’s debut novel, Scaffolding, a story that pulls us through Paris in two separate times, through four separate lives, as we watch our cast of characters navigate a sea of questionable choices and ever-shifting frameworks. Grappling with desire and how we justify our own hurts and wants, Scaffolding is a philosophical journey all ought to embark on.
But whereas both sides become increasingly exhausted by constantly selling things the other doesn’t really need, not to mention constantly having to decline being sold junk, Hum itself is not some useless bauble or creature comfort that will eventually end up in a landfill. Instead, it’s a quietly compelling cautionary tale on consumerism and the all-consuming need to find little pockets of peace in these continuously unprecedented times.
By the time I got there shortly before midnight, thinking I could waltz on in and be one of the first 30 buyers receiving an exclusive gift bag, the cheese and crackers were long gone and there were two measly chocolate fingers left. With the number of people crammed into the space, I couldn’t even move to eat them if I wanted to. Almost like a parody, the accent of the young woman in front of me was Irish, and somehow found a mutual connection with the stranger standing next to her.
Where I come from on the coastal plains of Georgia, we drink tea. The sweet and the iced are implied. You trust that your neighbor, the local meat and three, and the ladies at church know just how much sugar to add. Packets of sugar are for coffee.
At home, mama did not make sweet tea, and she only let us swirl in anemic packets of Sweet’N Low. To get my fix, I walked barefoot atop crunchy, parched grass to my neighbors’ house. There, Mrs. Denise, a second mother whose name my sister and I abbreviated to “Nise,” had the good stuff in a gallon pitcher in her fridge. She brewed it in a teamaker permanently enshrined on her kitchen counter. I remember watching and waiting as hot tea drip-dropped onto a mound of cane sugar, which transformed into a concentrated, viscous syrup.
Not until I picked up Tony Tulathimutte’s “Rejection” did I realize how fun it could be to read a book about a bunch of huge fucking losers. It sucks for them, the inept, lonely, self-obsessed, self-righteous, self-imprisoned protagonists of these linked stories, but it’s a thrill for the sickos among us, the king being Tulathimutte, who gives loserdom its own rancid carnival. Tulathimutte understands the project—both his own and that of his characters—with diagnostic, comprehensive hyper-precision; as you behold his parade of marketplace failure and personal pathology, he’s ten steps ahead of any reaction you could muster. Thus, you simply surrender to the sick pleasure of watching humiliating people humiliate themselves, as when a clammy self-styled feminist ally gets shut down by a girl and goes, “Grrr, friend-zoned again!” while shaking his fists at the ceiling, then creates a dating profile that includes the line “Unshakably serious about consent. Abortion’s #1 fan.” These are two of the mildest things to happen in this incredibly depraved book.
Sally Rooney, who made such a splash with her first novel, Conversations with Friends, back in 2017, has made it clear with each succeeding book that she is no flash in the pan. Intermezzo, her fourth novel, is her most fully developed and moving yet.
In the tense, messy contradictions of communal grief, Rooney weaves together beautiful whole cloth.
Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, technophobes and Luddites have continued to insist that machines “can’t really write”—at least not the way humans can. Those naysayers will be hard-pressed to wave away The Great Gatsby, the debut novel from the super-advanced Xerox 914 photocopier—an exciting new voice that wrote Gatsby after being trained on a data set comprising a paperback copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Elliot Carol, the C.E.O. and co-founder of Lunar Resources, is thirty-three, with a cherubic face and curly hair speckled with gray. Although he grew up in Connecticut and previously worked as a hedge-fund manager, he was wearing black cowboy boots. He led me to a provisional-looking conference room—the company hadn’t had a chance to renovate yet—and uncapped a dry-erase marker. Then, on a whiteboard, he drew a large circle, to represent the moon. Inside the circle, he drew a small square, which represented about two hundred square kilometres of the lunar surface. This was the potential site of the FarView radio-telescope array.
Unlike telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb, which are made from mirrors and lenses, FarView would comprise a hundred thousand metal antennas made on-site by autonomous robots. It would cover a Baltimore-size swath of the moon. To show the FarView site up close, Carol drew a big square filled with dots. Each dot represented a cluster of four hundred antennas; all the clusters together would be sensitive enough to detect a cell phone on Pluto. They would perceive light that is nearly undetectable from Earth: radio waves from a mysterious period known as the Cosmic Dark Ages.
Parents have plenty of valid reasons for feeding their kids nuggets — they’re cheap, they’re fast, and kids tend to like them, for starters. But the shame that seems to adhere to their crunchy, golden crusts says a lot about the expectations placed on parents, and especially moms, to give their kids fresh, whole foods in an economic and social environment that makes it punishingly difficult.
Chicken nuggets are a reminder of the ways “our choices are taken away from us” in American food culture, Tompkins said. They’re “both delicious and suspicious.”
But the greatest takeaway from the novel, which brims with love for humanity and the planet, is that while change is inevitable, the fragile enchantments of life — underwater and on land — are worth savoring and saving.
Frank O’Hara himself is not a recurring presence in Susan Aizenberg’s new volume, but the themes introduced in the title poem, which opens the book, weave themselves through the rest of this wise and elegant collection.
They say to never read the comments. Or at least they do to those of us who put words on the internet for a living and want to preserve our sanity. I generally abide by this maxim, save for one major exception: Recipes. On recipe sites with robust comment sections, you’ve just got to wade in there. For me, it is mandatory. The recipe you are endeavoring to cook is, in fact, incomplete until you have read and digested the comments.
You may have noticed that all of these choices date from the growing-up years and that’s because of a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”: the fact that people over 40 remember more from their adolescence and early adulthood than they do from any other part of their lives. It’s a time when our bodies are changing and we are shaping our identities and learning to express that through what we wear. It’s not always a smooth handover from being dressed by our parents to dressing ourselves, and many of us will remember a hormonal showdown over a particular item of clothing – often a miniskirt or a pair of high heels, but today just as likely a piercing or a tattoo.
You know how sometimes you think you’ve had a brilliant idea, then it bites you in the bum like an athletic but mean jack russell? Suggesting I could “live like a dog for a day to see if they’re happier” turned out to be one of those.
Spiegelhalter is one of the country’s most distinguished statisticians, but he’s also one of academia’s best communicators (he’s professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge). His aim in this book is to impose some intellectual order on a subject area that is rife with incomprehension, imprecision, contradiction and creative obfuscation.
I still remember my first long run. I was 19, home from college, and it was one of those perfect summer days: bright and blue and not too humid. When I got to the end of the trail, my typical turnaround point, I decided, on a whim, to continue. I added one mile, then another, then another. By the time I returned to my parents’ house, I’d completed 10 miles. My whole system buzzed with adrenaline and endorphins. I felt like a god.
If this run lingers in my memory, it’s not only for the feeling of transcendence that accompanied it, but also for its innocence. I wasn’t straining to meet some mileage goal or pushing myself to run farther or faster than I wanted to. I was simply enjoying myself, seeing what my body could do. Purposeful runs came later. So did tempo runs and 20-milers, half marathons and marathons, tendinitis and amenorrhea, an unhealthy fixation on weekly mileage and an eating disorder just shy of clinical. But this first long run was pure pleasure, not least because I learned what it was like to locate a limit, then to push past it. It was intoxicating. I wanted to do it again.
The British pint is one of the largest standard servings in the world – bigger than those in Australia, Germany and the US. It has been that way since 1698, when a law was passed to prevent publicans from short-changing their customers with shorter measures. But now we know that more is not always better – especially in the case of alcohol. We might not be willing to give up drinking entirely, but certainly in Australia I was happy to settle for less.
While sadder and less of a page-turner than her three previous novels, Intermezzo is in many ways a more truthful book. As delicious as Rooney’s earlier love stories have been, they tend to conclude with a tidiness that defies reality. It’s very rarely the case that two people finally becoming a couple will solve most of their problems, and loss inevitably waits around each of life’s corners. Intermezzo is the work of an artist who is continually trying out new techniques and continually growing, but in a direction that might inspire fewer bucket hats, tote bags, and Netflix adaptations. Perhaps not all of her current fans will follow her there, but the ones who do won’t regret it.
What makes Rooney so electrically compelling is the way she sticks with a scene and draws it out, often just the delicate dance of talk between two people in a room (although not just talking, given the characters tumble into bed pretty much every 50 pages). Indeed, the greatest drama here comes from conversations taking place under the pressure of life-changing events in the novel’s prehistory. Not only the obviously big ones, like Sylvia’s accident, but also things like Ivan, still in his teens, silently walking away in fearful confusion when his brother, 10 years his elder, needed a shoulder to cry on. The reader always feels different layers of grief at play – buried pain exhumed by fresh hurt – in a way that rings stingingly true to life.
A bicycle messenger for nearly 20 years, Landis started just as cell phones replaced pagers and Nextel walkie-talkies as the state-of-the-art communications in the courier world. He’d just returned from a decade of teaching English in Taiwan and needed a job, any job. The freedom of riding a bicycle as an independent contractor appealed to him—and as a former All-State soccer player at Bethesda–Chevy Chase High, he had an athletic background. Why not?
Today Landis still loves the work. But he’s a dinosaur on wheels. Like affordable neighborhoods and half-smoke food carts, DC’s messengers are nearly extinct. With his cycling cap, compact build, and bulging calves, Landis resembles a retired Tour de France sprinter on his road bike—only many days, he pedals at half speed, barely breaking a sweat. At his previous gig, Landis was the last messenger left standing for a company called LaserShip, which has since merged with OnTrac. “They had 30 couriers when I started,” he says. “By the time the pandemic hit, I was covering the whole city for Laser.”
The city of Seville awoke early, the old streets alive with singing birds and distant bells. The cobblestone alleys smelled faintly of hidden gardens. I’d flown here for a chance to hold a 480-year-old map in my hand. The archive’s curators had given me no guarantees but said that I could come, in person, to make the request. For a century after Christopher Columbus, this town was the white-hot center of global exploration, teeming with sailors who’d been to the New World and returned to tell the tale. Now it was mellow and quaint.
And even though this novel makes fun of the classic murder mystery — with its baroque plots and too-neat solutions — Atkinson understands its delights. As everything clicks into place — and the mystery is solved — we let out a satisfied, Ahhh.
Back in those days when librarians removed the jacket covers of newly acquired books, any book I picked from a shelf offered nothing to tease my interest other than the words themselves. I simply started reading. If I liked what I read, I took the book home. Why not, I now thought, present readers with a similar experience of mystery and discovery? But if my novel displayed none of the usual commercial trappings—not even a bar code, because I had no intention of selling it—how then would I reach readers?
My instinct while reading is to throw open a window, look at a painting, anything to allay the claustrophobia induced by being kept so close to people absorbed exclusively by their feelings, right now this moment, for each other. But art does its job when it pulls us beyond our instincts to experience other ways of being. Intermezzo is itself about life as continuous experiment. The novel suggests that Rooney (at Peter’s age, 33) won’t be settling in the shapes she has established, but holding us, with mixed joy and unease, in strenuous irresolution.
Rooney captures the fractious sibling dynamic and shows real empathy and insight into the impact of grief. It may not tap into the zeitgeist in the same way as Conversations with Friends and Normal People, but it is good to see Rooney’s universe expand in an emotional sense.
For Stoner, I felt a degree of respect and admiration fictional characters would seldom attain, but he would indeed reject such praise if I were able to share it with him. To all students who seek beauty in their daily readings, essays and seminars or those who long for the spark of curiosity for a class they once had, I have found the book for you.
Peter Godfrey-Smith does not use the word miracle in the title of his ambitious new book, “Living on Earth: Forest, Corals, Consciousness and the Making of the World,” but there is scarcely a page that does not recount one. His subject is the astounding creativity of life, not just to evolve ever-new forms, but to continually remake the planet that hosts it.
Intermezzo is the latest status galley, joining a relatively small club of books (like Emma Cline’s The Guest and Alexandra Tanner’s Worry) that shot to Internet fame before they were even published. The problem with the status galley is this: With all its hype and early praise from the chosen few who get a copy, the book becomes a token of cultural currency, a status symbol. These books, hot in the hands of celebrities and Internet personalities alike, prove just how susceptible we are to clever marketing, and just how hungry people are to be in the know among the literary elite. These status galleys often turn into best sellers once they actually hit shelves, but one has to wonder: Are the books even that good? And, perhaps more important, do readers care?
The muddy trail levels out and we stop to catch our breath. Which is good, because hiking with my eyes covered has been a pain in the ass. A voice says: “You can take your blindfold off now.” I squint as I get my bearings. Then, after a bit more hiking and some bushwhacking, I finally see it. The prize. The thing no one is supposed to know the location of, at least for another few weeks. A golden treasure.
I have to fight a lizard-brain instinct to reach for it. No. If all goes to plan, the treasure will soon belong to someone else—to the winner of a wild treasure hunt dreamed up by two of the guys leading me through this remote wilderness. One is a musician named Tom Bailey. The other is Jason Rohrer, the mastermind. Rohrer has designed some of the brainiest, highest-concept video games of the 21st century. Now there’s this: not a video game, but Rohrer’s first game set in the real world.
An inmate in the California prison system for nearly 30 years of his life, he was used to cooking with hamburger meat and white rice as part of the chow hall crew. But 17 years into his sentence, he realized his newfound passion for baking and made it his goal to pursue that aspiration upon his release.
A month into his new job, Thomas is humbled at the opportunity to work four days a week at such an esteemed restaurant as Flour + Water. Because now, he’s cooking as a free man.
Readers used to a quicker pace in their fantasy fiction, characters engaged in a battle between good and evil, and redemption arcs for wayward protagonists should set aside those expectations before diving into Blackheart Man. Hopkinson knows exactly what she’s doing, and all we have to do is trust her and go along for the ride.
What makes the anchovy so special? A Twist in the Tail, Christopher Beckman’s delightfully obsessive account of the anchovy in western cuisine, is here to explain. Arguably, it can be reduced to one word: umami. Anchovies, however they are preserved, have some of the highest levels of umami – really, an amino acid called glutamate – of any food on the planet. It’s an addictive pleasure. When Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, abdicated in 1556 and retired to the monastery of Yuste in western Spain, he demanded a ready supply. So addicted to them was he that on one occasion his doctor had to remonstrate with him to stop him starting on a barrelful that had putrefied in transit.
Imagine it. A dystopian government maintains power over the downtrodden population of a post-apocalyptic United States through a system of deadly games. Exposure to a strange new element gives an average young man superstrength. Invisible predators from an alternate dimension feed on human evil. A hardy young adventurer forges telepathic connections with a living world to oppose the forces that would brutally exploit them both. And then there are realities that turn out to be nothing more than mere illusions, the projections of angry and excited minds—or just perhaps, a nagging voice inside us insists, they might be real after all….
These are the dreams that contemporary culture is made of, fueling everything from Hollywood blockbusters to groundbreaking video games and prize-winning literary experiments. And, incredibly, they are all story forms popularized by pioneering genre author Gertrude Mabel Barrows Bennett, who wrote (primarily under the pen name Francis Stevens) in the first decades of the twentieth century.
People generally don’t confuse the sounds of singing and talking. That may seem obvious. But it’s actually quite impressive—particularly when you consider that we are usually confident that we can discern between the two even when we encounter a language or musical genre that we’ve never heard before. How exactly does the human brain so effortlessly and instantaneously make such judgments?
Alam’s writing is never more brilliant than when it ridicules corporate America. “Men in business casual” swarm, “common as pigeons”. While Brooke argues the importance of the arts in children’s education to Asher, he listens seriously, for “just as he’d not thought about the rights of gays to marry one another until last year, he’d never before considered the question of finger paint”. Such wryness serves Entitlement well, solidifying it as the sort of shrewd, propulsive read the word “zeitgeisty” ought to be reserved for.
Shane knows that her descriptions of sex work might be used as proof of the job’s perceived harms—the way it is said to subordinate women to their sexuality or commodify what should only ever be given for free—but she has little interest in sharpening the facts of her life to form a straightforward defense. Instead, Shane uses her experience as the basis for a sustained meditation on the misunderstandings that shadow male-female relations, whether paid for or not.
People book-club The Power Broker, pundits give it a prominent place in their Zoom backgrounds, and completing the book is something to brag about—at the New York Historical Society Museum’s special exhibition celebrating the book’s 50th anniversary, you can buy cheeky “I Finished The Power Broker” mugs.
I’m one of those Caro-crazed obsessives who has read everything he’s written—the books are well worth your time, and there’s no better place to start than this volume on Robert Moses, an unelected, and nearly unknown figure who nonetheless managed to build so many roads, bridges, and parks that he fundamentally changed America’s largest city.
Orlando is Virginia Woolf at play—a piece of frippery, pure queer pleasure, a little romantic, a little coy, hinting at secrets. I have returned to Orlando repeatedly over the years, most recently after a few lifetimes away. Each time, something different awaits. To return to Orlando is to travel in time. Woolf shows us how we might live multiple lifetimes in one life.
Oddly, the culture around me seemed to get more communicative as I aged. One day in 2019, I walked into a trendy Malaysian restaurant—Kopitiam, in lower Manhattan—and found the food of my childhood presented as cool, even chic. Enjoying it apparently meant something beyond enjoyment; beautifully photographed on Instagram, it signalled both the rising fortunes of Southeast Asia and the possibilities of one’s own personality. (“Once upon a time, food was about where you came from,” the novelist John Lanchester wrote, in a 2014 essay. “Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live.”) Americanness was shifting in its significance, too: for some people, in some places, flying a flag or eating a corn dog could be a form of resistance. Increasingly, everything was Googleable and shareable, and social media was reducing cultural difference to a matter of style; as the novelist William Gibson observed, the virtual world was colonizing the real one. Every cultural act seemed to be becoming a message to be read, a statement to be placed in quotes.
Is there a single silver teaspoon that has not stirred up the memory of seduction and rage? Is there a Fräulein in the house without vague, disabling despair? Ah, the fresh and full aroma of hysteria under a constellation of coffee cups!
Becoming a parent is life changing. Raymond Antrobus’ third poetry collection, “Signs, Music,” captures this transformation as he conveys his own transition into fatherhood.
The book is split between before and after, moving from the hope and trepidation of shepherding a new life into the world to the sleeplessness and shifted perspective of being a new father.
The title of Grabowski’s promising debut novel is, of course, an ironic reference to the Titanic. Here’s the book’s epigraph: “The only reason they say “‘Women and children first”’ is to test the strength of the lifeboats.” —Unknown. Women and Children First taps into today’s zeitgeist: it is filled with compelling women who are fighting not to go under.
Petersen believes that the bike industry’s focus on racing—along with “competition and a pervasive addiction to technology”—has had a poisonous influence on cycling culture. He dislikes the widespread marketing to recreational riders of spandex kits, squirty energy gels, and workout apps such as Strava. He thinks that low, curved handlebars contort riders into an unnatural position; that bicycles made of carbon fibre and aluminum have safety issues; and that stretchy synthetics have nothing on seersucker and wool. “The whole purpose of pro riding now is to create a demand at the retail level for the really expensive bicycles,” he said. He sees the glorification of speed—personal bests, constant quantification, metrics, leaderboards—as discouraging to entry-level riders who might otherwise enjoy life with a bike. “I would like to see the Tour de France only allow riders to ride one bike the entire tour,” he said. “Do their own maintenance, change their own flats, the way that normal people have to. Racing would have a positive trickle-down effect, instead of the way it is now. Bikes would be better, they’d be safer, and they would last longer. And the races themselves wouldn’t be less interesting at all.”
Number of Latin speakers in the Roman Empire: multitudo. Number of native Latin speakers in the world today: nil. Number of Latin speakers in the back yard of a Chelsea bar one recent sticky evening: unus.
Based on a pan-African perspective, the book documents the depth of the continent’s visual culture, dating as far back as the time of colonial rule and the postwar period, to the postcolonial era and beyond. Concise chapters illuminate significant cultural moments through the lens of some of Africa’s best, including James Barnor’s exploration of Ghana’s city life before and after independence, Ernest Cole and his visual commentary on the harsh realities of Black South Africans in the Apartheid regime, and Samuel Fosso’s gender-bending self-portraiture in 1970s Cameroon.
Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why.
But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.
And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion.
After love, money is perhaps the novel’s favorite subject, especially the novel in its most hopelessly (or, depending on your taste, endearingly) bourgeois form. Whether handled with Trollope’s irony or Fitzgerald’s romanticism, money in fiction challenges love’s delusion that our lives are defined by anything other than the hardest of practicalities, and that’s one reason money versus love is a venerable theme. But what if the two ostensibly opposing forces collapsed into each other, forming a sort of black hole? That would be enough to drive anyone around the bend, which is just what happens to Brooke Orr, the protagonist of Rumaan Alam’s fourth novel, “Entitlement.”
“Motherhood is a political state,” declares the poet and Cambridge academic Helen Charman at the beginning of Mother State, her provocative and wide-ranging study of “motherhood” in all its iterations, and its relationship to the wider social context in Britain and Northern Ireland over the past 50 years. “Nurture, care, the creation of human life… have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources, both by mothers and for them, than we like to admit.” It’s a version of “the personal is political” slogan beloved of second-wave feminism, which she dissects here before going on to examine the multiple ways in which mothers have collectively organised in support of broader political causes that affect the social structures within which they are raising children.
Sarah Moss’s memoir, the story of how her upbringing developed in her a lifelong, destructive relationship to food, is full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom.
From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing.
Year after year of endless megafire is not inevitable or an eternal state of affairs. The causes of this decades-long march of megafire incidents are recent. Depending on how the current ecological bottleneck is resolved, the increasing emergence of megafires as unceasing, yearly events may be temporary. This chapter does not describe a situation without hope of relief from endless, repetitive fire. Developing and popularizing a nuanced understanding of wildfire’s perennial and dynamic character will lead to the development of a road map through many perilous years to come. California is at a crossroads, and what choices are made in the near future regarding the issue of fire will be remembered by future generations as perhaps the most important that the people of the state ever had to collectively make.
Scientists would like to go beyond these isolated scenes. They want to understand what feelings surge inside animals when they lose kin. They want to know whether animals are haunted by death, as we are. But they’re hampered by certain practicalities. They cannot interview animals (or at least not yet). They can monitor their hormonal shifts—baboon cortisol levels spike when they lose someone close—but these can be triggered by other stressors. They don’t give us the texture and grain of their grief, if indeed it is grief that they feel.
Scientists would like to go beyond these isolated scenes. They want to understand what feelings surge inside animals when they lose kin. They want to know whether animals are haunted by death, as we are. But they’re hampered by certain practicalities. They cannot interview animals (or at least not yet). They can monitor their hormonal shifts—baboon cortisol levels spike when they lose someone close—but these can be triggered by other stressors. They don’t give us the texture and grain of their grief, if indeed it is grief that they feel.
Football food is changing. Gone are the days of lukewarm pies with indeterminate fillings. A vegan club may be extreme (although most are expanding their plant-based offerings) but from the Premier League to the amateur game, food is shifting from being mere fuel. Those watching the Euros this summer may have noticed culinary-themed rivalry, banners proclaiming “Belgian fries better than French fries”, or “tapas better than pasta”. Inane taunts, but a symbol of food’s increasing prominence. Last season, Tottenham Hotspur even displayed a fried chicken artwork in their ground, a celebration of “match day ritual” by artist and Spurs fan Jack Hirons.
On a Friday afternoon in June 2017, Anthony Flores and his girlfriend, Anna Moore, decided to go out for vegan ice cream at Kippy’s. Though the pair lived 220 miles away, in Fresno, California, they were regulars at the Venice Beach ice-cream shop. “They came in all the time. They were striking,” says the owner, Kippy Miller. The couple did have a distinct look. Even for a casual trip, they tended to wear matching suits and ties. “I just don’t ever remember seeing them with another person,” Miller adds. As the couple looked at the flavors, a middle-aged man with closely cropped gray hair approached. Dr. Mark Sawusch, an ophthalmologist, had a question for the duo: “Do you know anything about this alkaline water?” They did, as it turned out.
As far as anyone seems to know, the meeting at Kippy’s happened entirely by chance. Sawusch’s office was nearby, but otherwise he and the couple traveled in different circles. He examined eyes; they owned a yoga studio. In any case, by that evening, they had the keys to the doctor’s silver Tesla. A week later, Flores texted Sawusch to offer his and Moore’s help: “Our desire is to add ease and flow to your life and be of great service.” Sawusch responded, calling the couple “the BEST friends I have ever met in my entire life.” They moved from their apartment into his Malibu beach house that same day. In a few months, the doctor would be dead. For the next six years, people would wonder: Were Flores and Moore scammers who stumbled upon the perfect mark in a vegan-ice-cream shop? Or were they simply trying to help a man coming off the worst year of his life?
Marseille’s Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem) is a lattice-shrouded, shadow-throwing complex that juts over the waters of the city’s old port. Despite the seaside vibe, its code of conduct states that “perfect correctness, particularly in dress, is demanded of visitors; it is for example forbidden to walk around shirtless or barefoot.” Yet, on a recent afternoon, as a man strode across the entrance hall in nothing but a floral pareo and a lanyard—i.e., shirtless and barefoot—no one seemed bothered in the slightest. The museum, which was closed to the general public for the day, was offering a special tour of its big summer exhibition, “Paradis Naturistes” (“Naturist Paradises”). In keeping with the show’s theme, guests, such as the man in the lobby, would be allowed to shed their clothes, store them, and stroll through the galleries naked.
Picture this: You’re at a bar and someone clearly intoxicated starts telling your friend their grand theory about how the Titan submersible implosion was faked. Your friend locks eyes with you, clearly wanting to leave this dreadful conversation. She makes eyes to the door. Following someone’s gaze may seem like a simple act, but it has profound implications for the evolution of intelligence. And humans are far from the only animals that do it.
A few months ago, my sister graduated from college. She’s the youngest of our 22 first cousins and the final person to complete her higher education. Naturally, we were very proud and threw a big party to mark the occasion. As the drinks were flowing, my aunts and uncles began recounting family lore. One slice of that lore, stuck with me after the party ended, namely a story my grandmother had often told about how Frank Sinatra had performed at her high school while she was a student.
I’d heard this story many times. Since my grandmother is no longer alive, I thought it would be illuminating to try to track down more information about this alleged performance. What I didn’t realize is that this would send me on a multi-month journey digging through newspaper archives, pestering strangers on Facebook, speaking with leading Frank Sinatra experts, and questioning the honesty of my relatives. This is the diary of my search.
This transformation of the American literary field has been, in many ways, a salutary one. It has led to a dazzling wealth of historical narratives, fostered the careers of a new generation of American writers, and contributed to the formation of a literary canon that is markedly more inclusive than it has ever been. More important still, it has helped to reshape American historical consciousness. As historians such as Hayden White have recognized for at least half a century, our understanding of the historical past is inseparable from the structure of the stories we tell about it. The long-refuted assumption that “the difference between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ resides in the fact that the historian ‘finds’ his stories, whereas the fiction writer ‘invents’ his,” White argues, overlooks both the historian’s commitment to narrative tropes and the historical novelist’s commitment to factual research.
All of this made me realize that cooking together is a bit like starting a daily exercise practice: It requires determination and conscious decision-making and the development of new muscles, specifically that of accommodation. Could David and I cook together every day? Probably not, at least not in this kitchen. And I don’t think either of us would want to; again, we know our strengths, and we’re good at playing to them. But while I can’t say this experience led to memorably deep conversations or above-average bonding, it was, in its own way, satisfying, especially because cooking together made it a lot easier to clean as we went, which ensured that no one got stuck scrubbing dishes afterwards.
It’s all part of a unique annual tradition for a growing group of women — in their 20s all the way up to their 70s and even 80s — to let go of their inhibitions, disrobe and set off for a swim in the Irish Sea. Strip and Dip, as it’s called, is the brainchild of a cancer survivor named Dee Featherstone, who is in her mid-50s and works in digital marketing. After rejoicing over the end of her treatment, Featherstone decided she wanted to raise money for a cancer-focused charity as a way to pay it forward. She thought an epic skinny-dip would make for a more memorable fund-raising activity than, say, a bake sale or trivia night.
One of the biggest questions Anderson says she had, reading through the 800,000 words of submissions she and her editors received for the project, was why more of these women don’t share their fantasies with their partners. And why did so many of those 8,000 women who started their submissions fail to press send? “It’s obvious these women are incredibly powerful, articulate, and capable, but they wouldn’t dream of sharing their fantasies with their long-term partner,” she tells me. She says at those same pink boxes they set up for women to talk about their fantasies, in private if they chose, what most surprised her was “the amount of people who just won’t talk.”
Between the endless cycle of grant applications and the constant turnover of early-career researchers in labs, pushing science forward is slow at best and Sisyphean at worst.
In other words, science has a short-term memory problem — but there are steps funding agencies can take to make it better.
Don’t worry about the sharks. They’re large, yes, but they’re sand-tigers, which are relatively docile compared to other species in the water. It’s the barracudas you might consider. From where I’m standing, on the edge of a light tower in the middle of the ocean, I can see dozens of them floating around the structure, waiting for a snack.
“They have a mouthful of K-9-like incisors. Creepy fish,” says Dave Wood, one of the owners of the Frying Pan Tower off the coast of Wilmington, North Carolina. “They typically leave people alone, but don’t wear anything shiny into the water. It gets them going.”
Alone. Alone. The word is moist. It tastes of salt. Of red dust. Of emptiness. I want my spirit echoing with space and a beautiful silence. I will hear only myself breathing.
Daring, witty, and intensely cerebral, she upends every spy-novel cliché, propelling the genre into the modern age.
As well as a tender account of two families linked by tragic circumstances, and the transfer of a human organ from one body to another, The Story of a Heart provides a detailed map of the surgical innovations, people and logistics that allowed that transplant to happen. It also examines our shifting understanding of this “toiling, tireless, muscular miracle” that is baked into our language, representing the gamut of human feelings: “Hearts sing, soar, race, burn, break, bleed, swell, hammer and melt. They can be won or lost, cut or trampled, and hewn from oak or stone or gold.”
Meditation for Mortals follows the bestselling Four Thousand Weeks, in which Burkeman sought to realign our relationship with time and what we might do with it. The new book is thematically similar but more snackable, which is perfect for those of us whose imperfections include attention issues. Its 28 short chapters are meant to be read daily as a month-long “retreat of the mind”, but are just as illuminating if you use a dip-in, dip-out approach.
Rogow’s memoir, though intensely personal, will invite readers to imagine the conversations they might have with their own ghosts, to consider the questions most in need of asking and to prepare for the impact of their answers.
On a sweltering day in July 2023, a ragtag group of data wonks sat around a table at U Zlatého Tygra, or the Golden Tiger, a historic bar in Prague’s Old Town. A mild sense of outrage hung in the air between jokes about who among them looked the most Medieval. The group was discussing the issue of manipulated images and fabricated data in scientific publishing. Soon someone was passing around a phone showing a black-and-white image with clear traces of tampering. After a couple more rounds, the group made its way across the ornate cobblestone roads. They brimmed with frustration that, until now, had largely been shared only online. “It’s a toxic dump,” an Italian scientist known to the group by his pseudonym, Aneurus Inconstans, said about science. “It’s not about curiosity anymore, it’s just a career.”
These are the sleuths, as the media often refer to them. They are a haphazard collection of international acquaintances, some scientists and some not, from the United States, Ukraine, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, who are dedicated to uncovering potential manipulation in the scientific literature.
It would be easy to call Rejection an “incel novel” — especially because it starts with a man who’s denied sex by nearly every woman he pursues. That label would tell you how angry these characters are, how vain their efforts, how stunted their worldviews. It summons their yearning and guarantees their failure. But the seven interlocked stories in this book, the second by Tony Tulathimutte, go deeper and fouler than inceldom. In Rejection, sexual failure is only the fruiting body; self-hatred, nihilism, and shame are the mycelium that makes the fungus grow.
Elizabeth Strout packs more empathy onto a single page than most writers scatter throughout an entire book. Her fiction is filled with the scarred and the scared, good parents and bad, perpetrators and survivors, sinners and what she calls “sin-eaters.” Many of her characters are chronically lonely and emotionally fragile. Some are curmudgeons, gossips, narcissists, and bullies. The wonder is that she makes our hearts go out to all of them.
In fact, Strout loves her characters so much that she keeps going back to them.
“Tell me everything” is a credo of sorts, a statement of the writer’s voracious need to know, to solve the human case. But that Strout’s oblique approach to matters of the heart works so well is partly due to her judicious use of silence and omission to suggest the complexity of our closest connections.
You don’t read Kushner for the “relatability” of her characters or even, particularly, for what happens in her novels. Instead, she draws readers in with her dead-on language and the yellow-tipping-to-orange threat-alert atmosphere of the worlds she imagines.
If you’re someone who tends to overthink novels, you may not like this one; it leaves a lot of questions that don’t get answered. But if you’re up for a thrill-ride of a novel, “The Fallen Fruit” is a gem. A speculative fiction fan will go head over heels for it.
What is important in life? What gives it purpose, and meaning? While philosophers ponder these questions, dogs just live them. In his new book, Mark Rowlands argues the case that a dog’s capacity for joy, for meaning, for wholesale commitment to being, far exceeds that of humans. A professor of philosophy and a serial dog owner, Rowlands has written a profound and funny examination of what it means to be fulfilled, both for canines and humans. By the end, you will envy your dog’s every waking moment.
I signed up because Astro had convinced me that Google X—or simply X, as we would come to call it—would be different from other corporate innovation labs. The founders were committed to thinking exceptionally big, and they had the so-called “patient capital” to make things happen. After a career of starting and selling several tech companies, this felt right to me. X seemed like the kind of thing that Google ought to be doing. I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to build a company that, in Steve Jobs’ famous words, could put a dent in the universe, and I believed that Google was the right place to make certain big bets. AI-powered robots, the ones that will live and work alongside us one day, was one such audacious bet.
Eight and a half years later—and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI—it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on “minimum viable products” and VCs’ general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things. Here is why.
Whether punching pass-throughs in artificial structures or plotting routes away from warming oceans, thoughtfully modifying our marine infrastructure could go a long way toward protecting animals as we continue to engineer the ocean.
Law professor and investment banker Ragnar Jonasson loves Agatha Christie’s puzzle mysteries so much that, starting at the age of 17, he translated more than a dozen of them into his native Icelandic.
It should come as no surprise, then, that most of his own mysteries, 13 in all, have the same intricate plotting, multiple red herrings and startling twists that Christie was known for. This is certainly true of his latest, “Death at the Sanatorium.”
We're Alone accomplishes a lot, but perhaps the most important thing it does is that it manages to feel like an invitation from the opening pages. Yes, this is Danticat talking about racism and injustice while digging deep and showing us just how ugly humanity can be, but it's also a collection full of hope and a celebration of writing. Ultimately, this is more than a collection of essays; this is an invitation. "You're alone and I'm alone," says Danticat in one way or another in every essay, "but if you join me, we can be alone together." This beautiful invitation is one I encourage you to accept.
The mature audience member views television with the utmost discretion, as advised.
The mature audience member uses terms like “acclaimed” and “highbrow” and “prestige television.”
The mature audience member turns on subtitles in French, for la culture.
The oldest item that looks to modern eyes like a notebook sits in a display case in a castle in a Turkish city, thousands of years ago a thriving commercial and intellectual hub and now an equally busy holiday resort. In exemplary displays, the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology shows off items recovered from the bottom of the Mediterranean. The Ulu Burun shipwreck is one of its glories, and its gallery dedicates a display case to a small wood-and-ivory item: a hinged writing tablet which, when folded shut, would sit nicely on the palm of your hand.
Powers was a participant in the personal-computing revolution of the seventies and the rise of the Internet in the nineties, and he is deeply attuned to the potential cataclysms that technological innovation could invite. “I had this sense that we were living through this ethical moment again,” he said, of the inspiration for the new book.
“The World’s Longest Yard Sale” was founded in 1987, two years into Ronald Reagan’s second Presidential term, and currently runs for six hundred and ninety miles, from Addison, Michigan, to Gadsden, Alabama. The event is widely known as the 127 Yard Sale, because most of it takes place on U.S. Route 127, which cuts through six states like a lightning bolt. For four days, starting on the first Thursday in August, thousands of people set out their wares, eager to be unburdened by what has been taking up space, gathering dust. Professional pickers arrive with box trucks or flatbed trailers and come from as far away as California and France. Regulars book hotel rooms well ahead of time or, ever thrifty, sleep in their vehicles. Many bring packing materials to ship their purchases home, leaving room in the car for the next round of impulse buys—an unexpected piece of cat art, a T-shirt that reads “MITCH MCCONNELL SUCKS.”
The thing that shines through in Osman’s writing, for me, is that he really likes people and revels in all their foibles and eccentricities. All of which makes for a delightful read – and another little slice of warmth in time for autumn.
Sometimes entertaining and sometimes dull, often hilarious but also relentlessly uncheerful, and packed with brilliant observations as well as tedious arguments plucked from any living room in a small town, Banal Nightmare is full of swinging pendulums that make for a dark, chaotic read that flies very close to the line between fiction and nonfiction.
But “Pax,” the third installment in what has become the English historian’s narrative history of Ancient Rome, is not about the ideas and ideals of the Republic, which spanned the roughly 500 years between the overthrow of the Roman kings and the civil wars that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar in the second half of the 1st century BC. It is about the often brutal imperial pragmatism that strode confidently out of, if not over, the Republic’s ashes, and framed the future of the West.
On the one hand, we tell young people that exams make no difference and you can still have a great life if education doesn’t work out for you. Which is, of course, true. But on the other hand, we continue to pressurise children and grade them and rank them in relation to one another. Which, naturally, can also have its practical merits. Exam Nation is an attempt to chart a path between these two extremes. It’s an essential read – as entertaining as it is insightful – for anyone who cares about the way we treat young people.
Overall, Want is an intriguing cabinet of curiosities showcasing the sheer glorious variety of female desire; at a time when women’s freedom of expression and agency is under threat in so many places, any platform that allows us to speak up about an aspect of our lives that is still frequently veiled in shame is to be applauded.
In half century or so since the demise of Camp Century, global warming has begun melting large amounts of Greenland’s ice. The past 10 years are the warmest on record, and the ice sheet is shrinking a bit more every year. That’s science, not fiction, and a world away from the heady optimism of the Cold War dreamers who once envisioned a future embedded in ice.
Since then gravitational waves have become an essential new tool for scholars exploring the universe. But we are still at the very beginning of our explorations. What signals might we see in the data, and will they change how we see the physics of the cosmos?
There is, however, a more practical question that often gets overlooked – if something is out there, how would we recognise it?
Growing up, I understood exactly what my mom meant the first time she said nearly all of the Singlish phrases I’m familiar with. I used to think these words were just odd derivatives of Mandarin words, but I’ve come back to California with a greater appreciation for the language my family grew up on and that I now hear in my own home.
Cisco Bradley’s The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) chronicles a vital and now-vanished facet of American musical and cultural history in New York City from the mid-1980s to 2015. The book investigates how, amid hypercommercialism and mutating audio technologies, bold musicians, expert and amateur alike, impelled by a big-hearted DIY ethos, made new, imaginative music as public, independent, and free as possible by exploiting urban niches and cultural interstices, using dive bars, loft spaces, garages, warehouses, restaurants, and cafés as musical laboratories for experiments in sound, installation, and performance.
What made the best Burton movies sing was the play between the normal and the paranormal, the grounding in the real as events got decidedly unreal. He used to play that game better than anyone else — and we can see his moves with exceptional clarity in the first Beetlejuice.
It was a long road to Ralph Lauren’s spring 2025 show in Bridgehampton. Really, though: at 2:30 p.m., I boarded a sprinter van in Midtown Manhattan organized by the brand with eight other fashion editors. By 3 p.m., it still hadn't left. And at ten past the hour, as we began to inch down Madison Avenue, I knew we were going to be late for the brand’s desired 6:30 p.m. start time. I just didn’t know how late. Because the only thing worse than the New York City traffic we were currently in? Long Island Expressway traffic—the exact highway we were trying to turn onto.
Barker’s target in these books is war, a male obsession for which females tend to pay dearly. As this entertaining but relentless novel makes clear, no matter what the era some things never change. Human beings are not very nice.
I confess to a great love and admiration for Niall Williams. Time of the Child is a Christmas tale of the very best sort, one that reminds us of the fundamental mystery of being human. Even in this sinking parish on the furthermost edge of nowhere, in the dark and dying time of the year, there’s something in the air that speaks of the miraculous.
And by painting fantasy and reality with the same fine brush, you make it impossible to differentiate the strokes. They blend together, helping to create a new image, one that is neither, and both. This is Susanna Clarke’s great feat. It’s not that she tells the story of a world possessing magic. It’s that she convinces us that magic lives in ours. Not as a whimsical addition to a world we already know, but as a fundamental part of it, stamped into the foundation, intrinsic and essential, something that can be studied, comprehended, mastered, as rule-bound as maths, or physics. She melds the magic and the mundane, the fantastic and the ordinary.
But if it’s the creator’s life-story that makes an artwork ‘that little bit special’ or enables it to ‘thrive’, then what happens when the medium is storytelling? Does it really make sense to say that a good story’s ultimate value lies within another story? With the exception of Celebrity Autobiography, surely the opposite is true? We tend not to be interested in authors’ works because of their lives but in their lives because of their works.
The Watermark navigates this paradox by proposing that we think of the author as a kind of character – not as the story’s creator per se but as one of its components.
Painter’s professional accomplishments are stratospheric: a chair in the American History Department at Princeton, bestselling author of eight books along with others she’s edited, too many other publications to count, and an entirely separate career as a visual artist. She calls her latest book “A Life in Essays,” which I found reductive. Although the first group of essays is entitled “Autobiography,” this volume reaches far beyond Nell Painter’s own story in the best possible way.
For a novel of only eighty-nine pages, Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest is surprisingly deep, and will appeal to readers familiar with the Romantic movement as well as those who just want to be carried away by a good story. Chuck Rosenthal has produced a large corpus of work, many novels, a memoir and essays. He possesses an agile imagination, an eye for telling detail and an ear for dialogue, and he gives readers a sense of the mad passions that drove Keats, Shelley, and Byron.
In the fall of 1989, when the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi was in her early fifties, she found a lump in her breast. Within weeks, she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, an illness she’d previously thought of as distant, Western, nothing for her to worry about. Cancer was then a taboo subject in Chinese culture, which did not dissuade Xi Xi from writing about it. In 1992, she released Mourning a Breast, an idiosyncratic text that was hugely praised on its reception and is now considered one of the first instances of a writer discussing her experience with breast cancer in standard written Chinese. Whether the narrator is her, granted, can be hard to say. Mourning a Breast has been called a “therapeutic memoir” and a “semi-autobiographical novel”; it contains literary criticism, science writing, nutritional calculations, and poetry. It’s hybrid enough to be sui generis, and yet it feels less like a self-conscious experiment than a warm, captivating mix of genres.
As a student, I came to appreciate such granularity. Going over a text many times allowed me to fine-tune my initial intuitive judgments into something more comprehensive. There was an intellectual satisfaction in this, but I also felt, quietly, that rereading was not really reading. There was an immediacy, intensity, and complete surrender involved in the initial experience that could never be repeated and was sometimes even diminished on the second pass. Louise Glück wrote,“We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.” I felt the same about reading. I still feel like this. And, to this day, when I read something that functions as a hinge in my life—a book that rearranges me internally—I won’t reread it.
This is no “rewilding” by removing human interference from a place. On our bit of land, lack of effort to fight the effects of modern society by previous owners is precisely what harmed native habitat. Bringing death to the overly abundant so that the threatened might live, we are removing a scourge of our region’s native prairie ecosystem and a pillar of woody encroachment into the American grasslands: the eastern red cedar.
We’ve all been there. There’s a symbol you don’t recognize, a step you can’t follow, so you ask what the mess of marks is supposed to mean. The reply is a stream of gibberish. So you ask what that means. The reply is a torrent of nonsense. This continues, frustration building on all sides, until at last you nod, smile, and say, “Oh, yes. Thank you. That clears everything up.” Then, with all sense of meaning thwarted, you set about the grueling work of memorizing which shapes to write in what order.
I have a new laptop. This might not look like an interesting opening but I assure you that for me it is life-changing. Remember those adverts for, um, sanitary products which promised a life of confidence and activity to the point where the customer might be forgiven for thinking that a whole new world of hitherto unexpected talents – hang-gliding, water-skiing, tennis-playing and whatnot – was hers for the taking if she bought them? This is a bit how I feel about my new – well, reconditioned – laptop. Except I’m not doing any of those things. In fact, now I’m mostly staying in bed. But, wow, it’s a whole new world of staying in bed.
Starting at the baseline, with building blocks rather than a neoclassical mansion, is a sublime way to learn to master — or even dabble in — a cuisine. Such is the import and impact of Roberto Santibañez's 2011 cookbook "Truly Mexican."
For me personally, the fact that resonance lies at the foundation of reality is a source of delight and amazement. As a lifelong amateur musician and composer, I’ve long understood the inner workings of pianos, clarinets and guitars. But I was completely astonished to learn, back when I was a graduate student, that the structures of the universe, even within my own body, operate on similar principles.
Yet this secret musicality of our cosmos would be impossible were it not for the Higgs field.
Where I live in rural New Mexico, I see striped and hooded skunks regularly throughout the year. I see skunk tracks all the time, every day, around my house, in the fine substrate of the road that leads up to the irrigation ditch, in any bit of dirt or mud, and in the garden enclosed against deer and javelina but not skunk. Skunks regularly explore my wrap-around porch, so that my husband and I watch the animal out one window and then hurry to see it from another. Skunks are often under the bird feeders. We smell them in the morning—the result of some interaction with another animal. We’ve startled them in the early evening. They jump. We jump. Once, jumping back, a hooded skunk fell off the rise of the porch onto his back. Chagrined, he waved his paws in the air like a baby or a pill bug before more calmly turning over and galumphing away. These skunks have never sprayed or shown us any threat behavior. We don’t have any pets for them to worry about. If we live companionably with any wild mammal, we live companionably with skunks.
I’m always amazed at how Ellen Hopkins can convey so much in so few words, residing in a gray area between prose and poetry.
Her latest novel in verse, “Sync,” does exactly that as it switches between twins Storm and Lake during the pivotal year before they age out of the foster system. Separated years ago, the two write to each other in an effort to maintain their unparalleled bond. In the process, we learn about their home life before the state of California took custody, and the placements — good and bad — in between.
Embedded in this response is a dichotomous view of what books should be, or rather what they are for. Fiction tells interesting stories, usually about interesting people, ideally with some greater lessons or connection to the human condition; nonfiction offers information about the real world, past or present, in a manner that makes a coherent and easily summarized argument. Of course, there’s some blurring here and there, but both types of books generally are structured according to the conventions of their subgenres and can be easily categorized and taxonomized.
I write today in praise of a third genre that few self-respecting intellectuals admit to reading regularly, though many do: the reference book.
Our ability to imagine is an awesome power. But since it uses the same brain machinery as other thoughts and perceptions, and because we can remember what we imagine, we face a serious problem: How can we make sure we can tell the difference between memories of things that happened from memories of things we simply imagined?
By narrowing its scope to the hospital room, Small Rain keeps its eye not on a sparrow but on a suffering human being. The solution that the novel proposes to Dickinson’s dilemma—how to write about pain when pain defies expression?—is not a stunned silence or an inarticulate cry of despair. The language for pain, instead, is that of poetry, which charges the words of a sentence with the force of beauty, turning chaos into consolation.
Fans of British writer Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library” – and they are legion – will be thrilled by “The Life Impossible,” which revisits the question of how to live your best life. The two novels follow a somewhat similar playbook, each chronicling a woman at a low point who discovers life’s infinite possibilities through the help of a supernatural boost.
My Brother’s Ashes are in a Sandwich Bag is a testament to Brasier’s unique perspective on life and grief. She skilfully navigates profound themes with a blend of silliness and seriousness, capturing the essence of her experiences with an approach that is both refreshing and candid.
But this cinematic love letter contains more than in-depth commentary: there’s biography, oral history, and personal reflection. The result is a playful, even whimsical, contribution to the effort to consolidate De Palma’s auteur status, to evaluate De Palma’s reputation as one of America’s most important, though divisive, filmmakers.
“Where did that stuff come from?” Ted asked.
“The pharmacy,” I said.
“No, I mean, where did it come from?”
At the time, I could barely pronounce the names of medications, let alone hold forth on their provenance. “I’ll have to get back to you,” I told Ted. He was discharged before I could. But, in the years that followed, I often thought about his question. Every day, I administer medicines whose origins are a mystery to me. I occasionally meet a patient for whom I have no effective treatment to offer, and Ted’s inquiry starts to seem existential. Where do drugs come from, and how can we get more of them?
Like everyone I spoke to the night before our papal audience, when, minus Jimmy Fallon, the American contingent gathered for dinner, I’d initially thought that my invitation—which was sent by e-mail—was spam. “Right,” I said to the screen of my laptop. “Nice try, Russia.” I didn’t click on the attachment until Stephen Colbert assured me that it was legitimate, and that the Pope really did want to meet with comics and humorists from around the world in three days’ time, and at six-forty-five in the morning. The invitation made it sound like there’d be a dialogue, as if the Pope had questions or needed to ask us a favor, something along the lines of “Do you think you could maybe give the pedophilia stuff a rest?”
Yōko Ogawa’s novel “Mina’s Matchbox,” in a magnificent translation by Stephen B. Snyder, demonstrates the abiding comfort of fiction that envisions childhood as a time of discovery — without the elevated stakes of being a grown-up.
The “edge of the alphabet” is not primarily geographical but psychic, and her characters experience the world as a series of vivid mysteries, filled with half-apprehended connotations and meanings. From the narrative’s shadows, a querulous storyteller, Thora Pattern, emerges periodically to demonstrate how they are being manipulated and how little they are able to force their lives to cohere.
Hope I Get Old Before I Die is another triumph for Hepworth. Part whizz-bang storytelling, part social history, part forensic examination of an understudied phenomenon, the book is destined to become the go-to text on a subject we never thought we’d have to survey. David Hepworth is himself a case study in what he writes about here: life’s creative autumn. He produced his breakthrough book, 1971: Never a Dull Moment (2016), in his mid-sixties. In the eight years since, he has unleashed a further seven titles, each as insightful as the last. And all the while sporting an unfeasible mop of flowing curls.
Freed from ugly wires and nighttime glare, many of the unlit blocks are strikingly beautiful. Elsewhere, old trees are cropped into scraggly U’s to accommodate the wires; here they grow freely, forming green arches over the dark streets.
These blocks offer an urban refuge, and something else: a natural experiment.
You probably already know what I’m referring to. The pose features a groom standing directly behind his bride-to-be, with his arms wrapped around her abdomen in an anaconda vise. His head typically hovers over her shoulder, a position that sometimes forces him to buckle into a hunching squat (or, worse, stand on the balls of his feet) to remain in the center of the frame. The bride, meanwhile, has only one job. She stares directly into the camera, fear shining in her eyes, as she realizes that the best day of her life is set to be immortalized in this unnatural form.
This Richard Osman business is unfair. Not – as some think – because he got his books published via his fame as a TV presenter. No, the unfairness is that he is good at the day job, but is also a really good crime writer. What are the odds?
So what is this novel really about? Certainly it explores, with insight and empathy, the mind of an intelligent psychopath. But it also is an opportunity to put before the reader a delightful smorgasbord of ideas, stories, opinions and anecdotes. These are so well told and so interesting that it is easy to forget how dangerous a psychopath can be.
Beam of Light is the perfect title for this collection of very short stories. While it is also the title of the first story in this book, it is an appropriate label for all the tales. Appropriate because John Kinsella illuminates fascinating aspects of the lives of people who, in one way or another, have not fulfilled their potential or who long for the unobtainable or the unlikely, or who find themselves in unwanted situations.
The topic of loss and extinction has been covered extensively in recent years, but Streever has approached it freshly, with optimism as well as realism, and with his own brand of personal story and humor. His curious and enthusiastic dives into the biology and history of sea turtles, along with his direct experience along Mexican shores, will carry readers into the same engagement.