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.