Before Sunday, I had never run 26.2 miles in my life. Like many people preparing for their first marathon, I spent months training for the actual race and weeks constructing a perfect playlist for it. This was a meticulous, almost scientific process. For the first few miles, I queued up some chill live sets from the War on Drugs. For the straightaways of Brooklyn: Big Thief. For the grueling inclines of the Queensboro Bridge: a turn to metal, with some propulsive Iron Maiden, Screaming Females, and the Sword. I timed my mix to end with the Detroit Cobras’ “Feel Good,” a song that makes me smile and jump around every time I hear it — even, I theorized, after running for four hours. It would have been a great playlist, if I’d ever gotten the chance to hear it.
You may think it’s a few weeks early to celebrate the new year, but that’s only because you’re Earthist: November 12, 2024, marks the new year for Mars, when the calendar turns the page from 37 to 38.
And here I am, still putting 37 on all my checks.
“All academia is dark academia.” I said it without thinking, a knee-jerk reaction to a literary label that had been assigned to me but always felt ill-fitting. Until that moment—discussing my first novel, If We Were Villains, with the Folger Shakespeare Library book club—I hadn’t really understood why. It was the “dark” modifier I disliked. Not because what I’d written wasn’t dark, but because darkness is so intrinsic to academic life that it struck me as unforgivably redundant.
Chickens are in need of a little extra love these days. Like dogs, they, too, have been frequently surrendered to shelters in recent years.
But “What the Chicken Knows,” like so many of the author’s previous works, is less about what separates humans and animals, and more about what brings them together.