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.