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.