When Zehme died on March 26, 2023, he left behind broken hearts and an unfinished book that had bedeviled him for the last two decades of his 64-year life. It was a book about Johnny Carson, the late-night television host of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” for nearly 30 years, until bowing out in 1992. When Zehme died, a New York Times critic referred to the book as “one of the great unfinished biographies.”
Well, it’s finished now.
My heart wasn’t supposed to be beating like this. Way too fast, with bumps, pauses, and skips. On my smart watch, my pulse was topping out at 210 beats per minute and jumping every which way as my chest tightened. Was I having a heart attack?
The day was July 4, 2022, and I was on a 12-mile bike ride on Martha’s Vineyard. I had just pedaled past Inkwell Beach, where swimmers sunbathed under colorful umbrellas, and into a hot, damp headwind blowing off the sea. That’s when I first sensed a tugging in my chest. My legs went wobbly. My head started to spin. I pulled over, checked my watch, and discovered that I was experiencing atrial fibrillation—a fancy name for a type of arrhythmia. The heart beats, but not in the proper time. Atria are the upper chambers of the heart; fibrillation means an attack of “uncoordinated electrical activity.”
Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one infamous estimate, an Earth-size apparatus orbiting the sun might pick up one graviton every billion years. To snag one in a decade, another calculation has suggested, you’d have to park a Jupiter-size machine next to a neutron star. In short: not going to happen.
A new proposal overturns the conventional wisdom. Blending a modern understanding of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves with developments in quantum technology, a group of physicists has devised a new way of detecting a graviton — or at least a quantum event closely associated with a graviton. The experiment would still be a herculean undertaking, but it could fit into the space of a modest laboratory and the span of a career.
The Seoul neighborhood of Bogwang-dong sits on a steep hill rising over the Han River. In Korean, neighborhoods built on hazardous slopes are called dal-dongnae, or moon villages, because they seem to reach into the sky. Dal-dongnae are a legacy of the waves of rapid urbanization that drew millions of rural residents into the capital during the 20th century. Seoul’s landscape is defined by the contrast between the uniformity of its aspirationally-branded apartment complexes — Summit La Fiume, Lotte Castle, Mecenatpolis — and the sprawling mass of aging working-class neighborhoods that lie between the towers.
Each year, when the crisp autumn leaves fall to the ground, an image of a carefree Meg Ryan sporting a shaggy lob—carrying a pumpkin in one arm and shopping bags in another—circulates the internet. While I have never been so starry-eyed during my walks throughout New York City— usually I’m profusely sweating, dodging someone body slamming me, and avoiding a misstep into dog excrement—this particular moment from 1998’s You’ve Got Mail encompasses the magic of Manhattan as depicted by the late director and screenwriter Nora Ephron, an aspirational, autumnal bubble that oozes optimism and pumpkin spice.
As a kid, the movie’s world—one in which the characters were both the living and the dead—seemed more accurate than a world that only contained the living. In the first few years of my life, I lost my aunt, my grandmother, and my grandfather. It seemed to me that the death of a close relative was an annual event, and each fall when the wind picked up, I wondered who would be next.
In The Hotel, Johnson has given us a deftly constructed new version of a horror collection, with stories that slip in like mist under the door, just right for Halloween. But like all the best horror stories, they have deep roots. Like The Hotel itself, they are haunted.
Rewitched is for lovers of aesthetically witchy stories full to bursting with cups of tea, autumn vibes and unlikely friendships that knit into a community.