Fifty years ago, French gastronomy reigned as the aspirational cuisine of choice—for restaurant diners and for home cooks. But we were in the dark ages when it came to regional Italian cooking. We didn’t know about fresh pasta or why the shape of the pasta is as important as the ingredients in the sauce. We’d never heard of pesto or risotto or pancetta. Hell, we didn’t even know Parmesan from Parmigiano-Reggiano.
All of these remained a faraway mystery to the average eater. And then one woman changed it all and turned us all into amateur Italians. You may know her because of certain dishes of hers that have come to be deified. Lemon roast chicken. Tomato, butter, and onion sauce. Her Bolognese. Probably you know her simply by her first name:
Marcella.
I start in Helsinki. With a population of just 630,000, this is a pocket-sized, but delightful capital city, buzzing with a Nordic foodie scene, a clutch of tech startups and its own design aesthetic, all bathed in up to 19 hours a day of sunlight in the summer. Over coffee at Nolita, his zero-waste restaurant and bakery, Serbian-born chef Luca Basic tells me that he came to Helsinki aged 19 and immediately decided to stay. So, what’s happiness in the city? He doesn’t hesitate. “It’s trust in the state. It goes beyond things like buses being on time, or my staff being able to afford to live in the middle of their city.”
You can't bury your dead in San Francisco. In 1900, all new internments were banned within city limits. By the next decade, the land was too valuable for corpses. All existing cemeteries were evicted, the bodies dug up and sent 13 miles south to the town of Colma, where the dead population now outnumbers the living 1,000 to one. Most of the bodies ended up in mass graves. Private reburial cost a premium. The tombstones that were recoverable after the massive dig, and which families did not repurchase from the city, were ground and used in public works. They now line rain gutters in Buena Vista Park, make up the breakwater in the Marina, and are used for erosion barriers at Ocean Beach.
You might think we’d run out of names quickly, too, because there are many thousands of stars visible to the unaided eye at night. Fewer than 1,000 stars have proper names, however, so that doesn’t seem like a crisis—which is a good thing because there are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way! So the problem isn’t naming them so much as naming them consistently.
This is a spiritual book, but Johannes’s journey is one into mystery. The novella is never pious or proselytising; the word heaven does not appear. The closest Fosse comes to cliche is an occasional golden halo. When Johannes presses Peter on what it’s like where they are headed, his friend replies, “It is not good or bad, but it is big and calm and it vibrates a little, and it’s bright, if I had to put it into words, but the words don’t say very much”. Definitely not Crouch End, then, but not clouds and cherubim, either. A place beyond words, and so beyond the reach of this book.
In 2006, the cable channel TV Land surveyed the greatest catchphrases in American television. The winner? “Heeeeerrre’s Johnny!” the nightly words, spoken by sidekick Ed McMahon, that brought out Johnny Carson to start another episode of The Tonight Show, the still-running NBC late-night franchise that he hosted for 30 years and which remains indelibly identified with him. Even today, 32 years after Carson presided over his last Tonight Show and nearly 20 years after his death, the phrase endures, no doubt assisted by Jack Nicholson’s sinister spin on it in The Shining.
In his posthumously published new biography, Carson the Magnificent, Bill Zehme reports that “a recalculation of [Carson’s] small-screen hours cautiously translated, in conventional terms, to more than 2,500 movies broadcast live.” As no less a small-screen authority than Walter Conkrite put it, Carson became “the most durable performer in the whole history of television.” Cronkite himself was dubbed the Most Trusted Man in America, but as Zehme writes, “all forthcoming evidence could suggest that Second Most may better apply.”
My rediscovery of James coincided with falling in love: suddenly, unexpectedly, and if I may be frank, involuntarily. It was as if I were Henry St George and Paul Overt in one. At the heart of the conflict, just as in The Lesson of the Master, was a book. I was under contract and under deadline. I pictured myself as Overt in St George’s comfortable room, and I heard the elder author’s encouragement of the young writer, “Try to do some really good work,” as well as, “You’re very strong—you’re wonderfully strong.” Strong enough to give up my version of Marian Fancourt, as St George hoped Overt would do? I considered the pair of mild blue eyes that had startled me into love in the first place, and wondered if I would, by St George’s measure, pass the test.
While there are models that describe how this great transition might have happened, giant gaps in our picture remain. When did the first stars form and when did light, escaping their host galaxies, kick off reionization? What kinds of galaxies were most responsible and what was the role of black holes? How did reionization proceed across time and space? And what clues might it hold to other cosmic mysteries, like the nature of dark matter?
“We don’t understand how the universe came to be what it is today,” Muñoz says.
Some answers are now within reach, thanks to new tools that allow scientists to look back deep into the universe’s first billion years. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in 2021, is peering at the galaxies that existed only hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang and is already turning up surprises. At the same time, next-generation radio telescopes are focusing not on the galaxies but on the neutral hydrogen that once pervaded all of space. That hydrogen provides clues to how the epoch of reionization unfolded, and other characteristics of the cosmos.
I still love going out to eat, but I find there’s a level of disengagement that can come when dining out becomes the default mode of socializing. We’re just throwing down credit cards, waiting to be served. Potlucks, by comparison, require thought and active involvement. You don’t have to do the most or spend the most, but you do have to make some effort. After all, the big meat stew might earn all the oohs and ahhs, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as satisfying without someone else’s contribution of rice — simple, yet still essential.
I Made It Out of Clay looks at grief and loneliness through a romantic holiday lens. Like the golem within its pages, it is a story designed to lessen some of the harshness of life. A comforting read for literal and figurative winters, I Made It Out of Clay will inject some coziness into your holiday season while gently nudging you toward emotions that may need your attention.
Shaggy figures with snarling masks and metre-long horns, scenes of wild drunkenness, random assaults on strangers, witches winding your intestines out on a stick, a giant “Yule Cat” who will eat you if you’ve failed to put on new clothes for the day – no, it’s not your annual family get-together, at least I hope not. It’s a compendium of European seasonal lore from the dark side, as explored in this excellent short book by historian and folklorist Sarah Clegg. She combines a trove of good stories with a serious critique of earlier mythographers’ ideas about them, and also takes us on adventures ranging from pre-dawn graveyard walks to the terrors of Salzburg’s pre-Christmas “Krampus night”, named for the monstrous masked figures who prowl its streets on 5 December.
When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your writing has become hard to find, it creates a crisis not just of profession, but identity. Who am I, if not my content? It is hard not to feel the disappearance of creative work as a different kind of death of the author, one in which readers can’t interpret my work because they can’t find it. It is a sort of fading away, of losing shape and relevance.
Then, on a shelf covered in dust, I found a small, heavy bottle made of thick brown glass. I went out to stand on the rutted dirt I would dig up and fill in with my Tonka bulldozer when I was a little girl. I unscrewed the tight lid and saw a shivering mirror. I knew it immediately, though I had seen mercury only once or twice before, when a thermometer broke. Does anyone forget its strangeness? I stared at the trembling wave of silver for a long time, all brightness in a world suddenly ashen and gray.
The little bottle sat on a shelf above my desk for more than twenty years. I resisted opening it, but did now and then, to see its ceaseless, shifting radiance. One day last summer, I found myself idly thinking about house fires, as one does when one has grown up around firefighters, and I imagined the little bottle exploding. The vaporous cloud, a dreadful gall. The firemen. It had come to me, and it was my charge to figure out what to do with this thing. I have no idea where my father got the bottle, but he liked his curiosities. I began to study how to get rid of it.
It was once thought that rods and cones were the only photoreceptive cells in our eyes. But at the turn of the millennium, researchers identified a different type of cell in the retina whose existence had been suspected since 1923, when geneticist Clyde Keeler noticed that the pupils of blind mice still dilated when exposed to light. These cells—named intrinsically photoreceptive retinal ganglion cells—have nothing to do with the formation of images.
They were going to be late — that much became clear as clouds gathered over São Tomé, a verdant island 190 miles off the coast of West Africa. The group of eight — six Americans and two Australians — had left its Norwegian Cruise Line ship that morning, March 27, for a day trip across the island. But they had car trouble on the way back. Time ticked by as they sat in the tropical heat waiting for a replacement car. “Call your boss,” the passengers urged their driver. “Tell him to call the ship.”
With his new novel, Niall Williams has created perhaps the most successful work of his career. Recalling Thomas Hardy in its deeply compassionate unravelling of moral crises set in the culture of the writer’s childhood rather than the reader’s present day – a time with a seemingly closer, more constricting relationship to moral absolutes and forbidden emotion – Time of the Child is a compellingly emotional experience that catches the breath and doesn’t let up until it reaches its final, dramatic conclusion.
Ali mutates from street-fighter to Trotskyist Zelig, popping up everywhere. After Southall, he finds himself interviewing Indira Gandhi, advising her that Pakistan was unlikely to invade Kashmir. He witnesses the fall of the Soviet Union, strikes up a friendship with Hugo Chávez, is a founding member in 2001 of the Stop the War Coalition and concludes with a passionate analysis of Gaza. For all its flaws, it’s a superbly bracing world tour, written by a historical materialist who turned 80 during the book’s composition, in which he is often insightful and usually correct in his analyses.
The fact that it is still in production today (the 36th season is airing in the US with a 37th already commissioned) is a source of wonder and despair for golden-era curmudgeons. Yet there is an audience for modern Simpsons, people who love it – some who even prefer it to the early seasons. Other aficionados argue that the series is undergoing a modern renaissance, a second golden age after the struggles of the middle seasons.
My perception of loss altered that day. I discovered that small cracks of possibility reside in the dense tapestry of grief and that a painful void can also become a place of freedom and adventure.
Unusually for Stephenson, Polostan is a straight historical novel, without any fantastical or SF elements. Reading this very enjoyable confection, I found myself approving Stephenson’s change in writerly direction. Only when I reached the end of my proof copy did I realise that Polostan is only part one of a projected series, the Bomb Light cycle. It’s very possible that, as subsequent instalments are added, the whole will accumulate into a more typical infosprawly meganovel after all. It doesn’t matter: this book works as a standalone and ends neatly, an excellent adventure story in itself.
Dickinson finds words for what each woman would tell the world if she had been free to expose her reaction to the life she was enduring. Each of Harlow’s postcards begins with a quoted excerpt—mostly unsavory—from biographies of her experiences and then imagines Harlow’s thoughts about the events. Smith’s thoughts are not prepared for by the words of an external author, with a few exceptions. Instead, her postcards follow designations for her condition under her best-known song titles, like “Tain’t Nobody’s Buzness If I Do.”
Blythe’s gentle, loving spirit inspired a battalion of protective “dear ones” who helped him live and die at home. But this warm biography touches its subject’s inner steeliness too: the needy hearts of others were viewed as a distraction from the essential life-task of writing. When a grieving Julia Blackburn sought comfort in her friend, Blythe explained “with a sort of determined finality that he had never loved anyone enough to feel the pain of loss”.
Although he left no comprehensive statement about his passion for collecting, I think that, like most students of art, Morgan collected as a way of dreaming through the dreams of others—the artists and artisans who produced the powerful works he bought, including Byzantine enamels, Italian Renaissance paintings, three Gutenberg Bibles, and an autographed manuscript of Mark Twain’s “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” purchased directly from the author. Like the legendary collectors William Randolph Hearst and Andy Warhol, Morgan was self-conscious about some of his physical qualities: he suffered from rosacea, which got worse as he aged. The beauty of art was something to hide behind. And it could be nourishing to his countrymen, too. Morgan was the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1904 until his death, and he knew that the works he acquired on his trips to Europe and North Africa could expand America’s understanding of art and history, and thus enrich its aesthetic future.
On a blazing morning in October, I paddled my surfboard into a caramel-colored sea off a beach in Brazil, hoping to catch a wave with its own individual rights. The wave rose up against the wind as if in greeting, its perfect peak of foam resembling the enigmatic smile of a new friend.
Under a local ordinance signed in August 2024, the wave is now considered a person in the eyes of the law. It has the intrinsic right to existence, regeneration, and restoration and to the natural flow of the river that feeds it. With the help of human advocates, it can bring cases against those who harm it. It’s a small victory for the growing rights-of-nature movement around the world.
To gain insight into this important dimension of computing, here are three very early examples of text generation that are particularly striking: Two arising from academic research, one by a well-known Fluxus artist. Keep in mind that even if the outputs presented here seem primitive, they suggested new ways that computers could work on language and each of them had a use, whether that was the better understanding of minority languages, determining how seemingly simple writing is rich with grammatical potential, or demonstrating how poetry can be extended into a process without end.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a burger that didn’t have a lacy edge. I know they still exist out there, half-pound bistro burgers oozing with juice, but these are not the burgers that trend, the burgers that beckon obsession on TikTok. No, the burgers I am told I want are meaty doilies, pressed nearly paper thin, ground beef fried to a crisp.
Over the past five years or so, smash burgers have grown in national popularity. But 2024 was the year they officially peaked — and maybe jumped the shark. A genuine creativity around incorporating new flavors into smash burgers has made the inevitable turn into a mandatory menu addition for every place that is trying to be the next big thing. It’s pretty obvious why. Smash burgers are cheap to make and satisfying to eat, as close to a guaranteed win as you can get on a menu. With diners ever stingier with their money, and restaurant margins ever thinner, that’s increasingly the only thing there’s room for.
Dicky’s daddy’s hand was shoved somewhere near Dicky’s brain stem. My throat was in my stomach. Their hearts were in vaudeville. But we were all in Kentucky. Side by side by side, we stood near the entrance of the Vent Haven Ventriloquist ConVENTion — the annual international hajj for ventriloquists — where dummies condomed nearly every right arm. Dummies were rising from zippered suitcases, lifted from velvet-lined trunks, coffined on banquettes with protective canvas bags on their heads, like prisoners expecting execution. Dummies congested every visible cranny of the Erlanger Holiday Inn in a huge interspecies fiesta of dwarves, worms, baboons, children, et cetera.
The human delegation was only slightly less mixed.
At its best, Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet really is a series of powerful meditations on love, death, queerness, and ambition—not to mention Hollywood and Mormonism and other repressive systems. And all of it more or less smuggled into a sweet, clear Hallmark love story, if Hallmark love stories featured ghostly Mr. Darcys who haunt anal vibrators for their partner’s pleasure.
The humour is light, and the story compels you through each turn of disaster and thrilling plot to escape. Why not sail the Aegean Sea as a hero from the comfort of home?
With the freshness of Pek’s staging of online love and death, a third entry in the series will be welcome.
Patrick Hutchinson’s journey in Cabin: Off Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsmans delivers a modern reworking of the long-standing self-exploration story. The book reminds us that living alone in a cabin in the woods is never about the romantic idea of solitude, but the discovery of who we are as people.
My father was an enthusiastic traveller, but as he got older he increasingly suffered from what he called “travel fever”, a vivid term for the acute anxiety felt before a journey, essentially due to uncertainty about all the things that could go wrong. Sadly, this eventually stopped him from going on holiday. Then I, too, started to suffer similar apprehension, so I consulted a psychotherapist. She recommended a small piece of cognitive behavioural therapy, which involved acknowledging the mental and physical symptoms of anxiety, but telling myself that these were essentially indistinguishable from feelings of excitement about the prospect of a journey. This reframing of my feelings has been reasonably effective – it’s one way of dealing with uncertainty.
Beer is best served cold, and it turns out that math can help with that. Cláudio de Castro Pellegrini of the Federal University of São João del-Rei in Brazil recently set out to formulate an equation to determine the optimal shape of a beer glass that will keep a beverage tastily chilled—in other words, he was looking for a glass that prevents the liquid in it from absorbing heat.
The good news is that making risotto is a breeze. The fundamental things apply. You melt a bit of butter, sauté some chopped onion, add rice, stir it around, add wine, stir, then add hot stock, ladle by ladle, while you stir and stir again. Remove the pan from the heat. Throw in grated Parmesan and more butter. Stir. Wait. Serve. Eat. Feel your immortal soul being warmed and suffused with pleasures both rare and immeasurable. Lick the spoon. Wash the pan. Done.
On inspection, however, the fundamentals melt away. This is where trouble starts. Some recipes are onion-free. Others drop the wine. As for the dairy products, they ought to be non-negotiable, and I was once advised never to order risotto south of Rome, because that is where butter country peters out. To anyone who can’t or won’t eat anything predicated on the existence of a cow, risotto should surely be off limits. Or so I believed until I met an experimentalist chef, a few years ago, who argued that, when we praise the creaminess of a risotto, all we are really doing is confirming the omnipresence of butter and cheese. His dream was to create a risotto using nothing but stock and rice. Trapped within each grain, he told me, and secretly waiting to be released, was all the texture we would ever need.
“I need to take a picture of this for my wife. She absolutely adores Kenneth Williams.” We’re in the recently revamped performance gallery of the V&A, a dazzle of theatrical memorabilia. “This” is Kenneth Williams’s costume from Carry on Cleopatra, worn while protesting “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” And wielding the cameraphone is British novelist Edward Carey, visiting from his home in Texas to launch his eighth novel, Edith Holler. It’s an irresistible, darkly gothic story set in a theatre and full of the author’s trademark illustrations – so the gallery makes a fittingly immersive interview location.
The line, which on countless other occasions I have smugly strode past, took 45 minutes from joining to counter. With friends from out of town, I joined grumpily, unconvinced that the pastries – expensive, if delicious – would be worth the wait. At the end of the line, with nary a sheet of laminated dough in sight, for a moment it didn’t seem too late to leave. But soon we were hemmed in from behind by groups of tourists, parents with fidgety children, bored couples thumbing their phones. In Sydney this week, people queued for hours, from before first light, to be at the top of the queue when Lune opened its new flagship store. Unlike those poor sods who waited in the rain, we baked under full summer sun. All of us waiting, squinting and sweaty, for a supposedly better version of something we could get nearly anywhere else.
What draws us to or makes us abandon a queue? And why is it that some among us happily join them while others are constitutionally inclined to avoid lines at all costs?
Sally Rooney is a writer who keeps slipping out of the interpretive nets we readers manufacture. Whether she’s dodging stylistic expectations or showing us the sentimental depths beneath a cool surface, Rooney rings boldly true. I never wanted to leave these characters, and I wanted Rooney to keep telling me and showing me more about love.
In many ways, this horse is normal: it stands roughly 14 hands high, has dark eyes hooded by thick lashes, and makes a contented neighing sound when its coat is stroked. But its blood pulses with venom.
For weeks, this horse has been injected with the diluted venom of snakes, generating an immune response that will be exploited to produce lifesaving antivenom. A veterinarian inserts a tube into the horse’s jugular vein to extract its blood – about 1.5 percent of its body weight – every four weeks. Each bag of horse blood is worth around $500.
As someone who has spent thousands of hours observing the night sky, I like to think that I’m pretty familiar with it and able to navigate my way around with some ease. That’s certainly true on the large scale: bouncing from one constellation to another or searching out bright stars.
But when I’m at the eyepiece of my telescope, struggling to find some faint, distant galaxy, I get lost pretty easily. My situation is like knowing your neighborhood really well but trying to find a specific blade of grass somewhere in it. The sky is big, and objects in it appear small. How can astronomers find them?
“The stomach bears the feet.” Or so says the Bereshit Rabbah, a Jewish midrash, or commentary, on the book of Genesis from 400 C.E. For some, this phrase suggests that hope fuels our actions, but as a food writer, I think it means that being well-fed compels us to action, binding us to our faith and to our communities. This idea is borne out in Elysian Kitchens, a cookbook about food and faith that chronicles how individuals residing in 11 spiritual spaces across the globe feed and sustain one another. Journalist Jody Eddy chronicles the culinary traditions and food-focused labors of Buddhist monks, Maronite priests, Catholic nuns, and the many religious devotees who feed the spiritual collectives to which they belong. In its exceptional recipes and expansive essays, accompanied by stunning photographs from Kristin Teig, Elysian Kitchens affirms a central belief for all food lovers: In every corner of the world, cooking is an anchor for our communities, cultures, and beliefs.
The increase in modern diners and all-day cafes means more chefs are attempting to cater to the widest possible audience, and indeed often can’t afford to alienate customers over dietary restrictions. It’s clear that many are trying to ensure plentiful options. But menus need to change a lot more before many restaurants can really call themselves “for everyone.”
You only need to know the title of Hannah Arendt’s most famous book—The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951—to understand why her work might matter now. Arendt’s winding syntax is famously complex, and her writing voice torqued with intellect, in sentences like these, from the preface: “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.” Writing in English, a language she learned working as a summer house cleaner in Winchester, Massachusetts, in a program for refugees, Arendt and her philosopher husband had metamorphosed through Ellis Island in 1941 into American citizens, escaping Axis-occupied Europe where both Jews escaped the dire fate of a generation of others. Arendt brought with her a notebook of poems, written in her mother tongue, German. In What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (2024), editor Samantha Rose Hill and translator Genese Grill have given us that rare thing—a testament to what poetic thinking might be, available to all readers, and keenly attuned to our political moment. In their hands, this is less an academic volume than a story well told.
Short but hefty, Eurotrash is a book about ageing that’s steeped in a guilty knowingness about privilege, wealth and the 20th century. There’s something bracing about the narrator’s pained awareness that if there’s such a thing as the wrong side of history, he and his family are firmly on it. As he and his mother drive on, searching for their elusive catharsis, it does occasionally feel like the book is becoming baggy, but the clever ending snapped it into a shape that seemed retrospectively inevitable and left me with a lump in my throat.
The Book of Manchester is a riposte to the advancing armies of developers, estate agents, private capital speculators and their marketeers. It is writing from the core of a great historical city, calling up human lives from beneath the shadows of luxury tower blocks “springing up like magic mushrooms in Deansgate Square and Castlefield.”
None of these exercise regimes would meet the physical activity guidelines issued by national and global bodies, which set out the amount of exercise “required” for physical and mental health. For adults aged 18-64, the latest World Health Organization (WHO) advice recommends “at least 150-300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity, or at least 75-150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity, or an equivalent combination throughout the week” – along with muscle strengthening activities that involve all major muscle groups at moderate or greater intensity at least twice a week.
But briefer or gentler bouts of activity can still have a positive impact on mental health. Some experts believe there is a risk that, faced with such rigorous and prescriptive guidelines, people experiencing mental health challenges may be put off being active at all. “Given that people with mental health issues are typically less active than the population average, it is even more important to present exercise as a positive, enjoyable and accessible option,” says Stuart Biddle, professor of physical activity and health at the University of Southern Queensland.
Just the other day, my ningaaq Edvard got on a plane and headed north from Nuuk to Upernavik, his hometown, that orange oblong buoy strapped onto his backpack. Johannes was in a nearby village, so Edvard gave the buoy to Johannes’s daughter. They took a picture together at the municipal office, beneath the Upernavik coat of arms, surrounded by a narwhal tusk, a muskox skull, a Greenlandic and a Danish flag, and a framed image of the queen of Denmark, the buoy held between them.
I think, overall, the first thing you’ll need is curiosity. The second thing you’ll need is a willingness to look around—to find small-press readers and writers on social media, to figure out who’s doing the work that you’re most interested in, and then to keep paying attention. It has always taken more legwork to find the artists working outside of the best-known systems. It has always been worth it.
Private Rites is a story of buoyancy in a world that longs to see one sink, a story of withheld forgiveness and the discovery of who one is in the company of those who have already decided. For fans of stories that challenge and grieve, Julia Armfield’s new work is one of great pleasure, pain, and polluted relationships that will stay with you long after reading.
On the Calculation of Volume’s premise could, in other hands, be reduced to a gimmick. But in Haveland’s rendering, Balle’s stripped-down prose has an understated clarity that lends philosophical resonance to this fantastical setup.
The Teller of Small Fortunes presents us with systems and people that are generally good—the world as we’d like it to be. Tao’s journey throughout this book is to learn that the people and institutions she has feared, the bogeymen of her childhood and her life as a traveling fortune-teller, are not as terrible as she thought. This will hit different readers differently, I suppose, but I found it comforting. The current real world is uglier and crueler than I hoped its inhabitants would choose to make it, and I found a true respite in spending some time in a world where the opposite is true. The Teller of Small Fortunes is sweet and silly and warm. If Leong’s goal was to offer heartfelt comfort to her readers, she’s achieved it in spades.
Almost twenty years after her death, Blackwood’s serial associations with distinguished men of art and letters still cling to her like flies to shit. Forever Vera, never Vladimir. Blackwood’s biographer, Nancy Schoenberger, christened her subject a “dangerous muse,” a phrase that doubles as the book’s unfortunate title, crystallizing Blackwood’s image as a woman pressed into the service of male genius. But the preoccupation with her extravagant entanglements is misleading, for Blackwood was in fact a writer of rare distinction, the author of wit-drenched books about the wages of class, women’s inhumanity to women, bitchiness, greed, abjection, family, monsters.
The name Kafka is popularly associated with the horrors of a grotesquely impenetrable legal system, but there is another aspect to his work, which concerns knowledge. “Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” And the contemporary academy might easily be qualified as Kafkaesque, with its nonsensical rankings and evaluations, market-driven imperatives, and exploding administrative ranks.
But Lacan’s term was less about targeting the mismanagement of the modern university and more about highlighting the broad shift in the structure of authority — where knowledge and power combine to establish systems of administration operating in the name of reason and technical progress. And this is where Kafka’s dog comes in, to question this new order, to excavate the underside of its supposed neutrality, to propose another way of thinking, even, perhaps, a way out.
Who, if anyone, owns the copyright to this paragraph? As I write, nobody knows. Yet numerous online guides exist to tell authors how to make use of AI to help write fiction; patent applications for medical innovations derived using AI have quadrupled in five years; and OpenAI’s Sora model can turn a basic text prompt into a superficially plausible sequence of high-definition video. As the World Intellectual Property Organization baldly puts it: “It is unclear whether new content generated by AI tools . . . can be protected by IP rights, and if so, who owns those rights.”
There seem to be five possibilities.
To understand AI algorithms, Vallor argues we should not regard them as minds. “We’ve been trained over a century by science fiction and cultural visions of AI to expect that when it arrives, it’s going to be a machine mind,” she tells me. “But what we have is something quite different in nature, structure, and function.”
Rather, we should imagine AI as a mirror, which doesn’t duplicate the thing it reflects. “When you go into the bathroom to brush your teeth, you know there isn’t a second face looking back at you,” Vallor says. “That’s just a reflection of a face, and it has very different properties. It doesn’t have warmth; it doesn’t have depth.” Similarly, a reflection of a mind is not a mind. AI chatbots and image generators based on large language models are mere mirrors of human performance. “With ChatGPT, the output you see is a reflection of human intelligence, our creative preferences, our coding expertise, our voices—whatever we put in.”
Picture the biggest tree you’ve ever seen, laid on its side and sliced lengthways into boards no thicker than expensive steaks. Every difficult year, every drought and every flood, all the minerals and pigments leached up from the particular spot in which it took root, the rippling shadows of a woodworm’s pinhole excavations, the relentless tension required to hold up those mighty limbs, and the torturous scarred stains from a barbed wire choker oh-so-gradually absorbed.
“I Might be in Trouble,” the debut adult novel from talented YA writer Daniel Aleman, might be one of the best novels ever written about being a writer … and what not to do with a dead body. From the first page, and even simply from the book jacket, the reader is meant to understand that this is a book about when things go horribly wrong.
This novel ultimately serves as a deeply felt meditation on migration, mourning and the simultaneous entanglement and estrangement of the living and the dead.
The absence of many prolific and culturally significant writers—Agatha Christie, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, to name a few, feel like glaring oversights. Intentional, it seems, though Frank leaves open the possibility that “perhaps something interesting will come of [genre fiction].” For all that the book omits, Stranger Than Fiction is a useful and compelling analysis of these thirty representative novels of the twentieth century. Those interested in that broader historical perspective will learn quite a lot.
Published in 2020, when readers were in Covid-19 lockdown and acutely aware of the unequal access to nature, Hayes’ book became a bestseller. That same year, Hayes and Guy Shrubsole co-founded Right to Roam: a campaign demanding a “default right of responsible access” in England. Modeled on Scotland’s right to roam and the Nordic “everyman’s right,” this right would grant permission-free access to all land and rivers, private or otherwise, providing individuals followed certain rules like respecting the landowner’s privacy and leaving no trace.
Right to Roam has generated widespread debate about land access and justice in England and beyond — in large part thanks to its use of trespass as direct action. Making the case for a right to roam, and proactively modeling what it could look like, hundreds have mobilized to walk, swim, play and protest in off-limits locations around England: Kinder reservoir, Cirencester Park, Englefield Estate, Dartmoor National Park, Berry Pomeroy and Scots Dyke (an earthwork built in 1552 in the so-called Debatable Lands to mark the border between the kingdoms of Scotland and England).
Vacation rental with the in-laws — for many, it’s a setup for disaster. In Weike Wang’s “Rental House,” it’s certainly that. It’s also an opportunity for Wang, a wildly gifted writer, to explore the upside and downside of education, marriage and family. Add to the mix an interracial couple where one partner hails from an Appalachian background like that of JD Vance and the other’s life was shaped by the policies of Chairman Mao, and you have all you need for a laugh-out-loud satire of American dysfunction.
‘Gerald Durrell was magic” chirrups David Attenborough across the cover of this collection by the beloved naturalist and author who died in 1995. Chosen by Durrell’s widow ahead of his centenary in January, it includes magazine pieces, radio talks, letters, introductions to other people’s books and a selection from the vast archive of his unpublished writing. What binds the pieces is the signature magic of which Attenborough, whose own career parallels and counterpoints Durrell’s, speaks. It might best be described as the gift of finding wonder everywhere. Here is Durrell, in an unpublished scrap of memoir, on the four years he spent as a child in prewar Corfu. “Leaf to bud, caterpillar to butterfly, tadpole to toad or frog, I was surrounded by miracles. I was surrounded by magic as though Merlin had passed through and casually touched the island with his wand.”
So why do I find all this so disturbing? Why should I begrudge an entrepreneurial influencer her right to hawk sevruga-on-a-Pringle? Why should I not let every Wall Street titan have their gilded slice free of guilt?
I’m not sure at first, but I think it’s something coarse and fancy at the same time—something that is as bad for nature as it is good for a restaurant’s bottom line. In short, I think it has something to do with the Russian word poshlost’.
But these stars in the Gaia Sausage haven’t remained clustered together. They are currently scattered all around the Milky Way, their thin threads of commonality all that betrays their shared history. They have a common proportion of heavy elements, or “metallicity.” And their orbits are extremely elliptical, bringing the stars brushing up against the core of the galaxy then flinging them back out more than 60,000 light-years away. In their commonality, they tell the story of a once-mighty galaxy eventually consumed and obliterated.
Cosmologists give this process an innocent-sounding name: hierarchical galaxy formation. But what that means is that our contemporary Milky Way, like all massive and proud galaxies in the universe, has lived a violent life, and only acquired its present-day bulk through devouring its neighbors.
The bag of hummus chips was stashed in the hidden half of the waiting station and left open for us. Relaxing into this situation the assistant manager would sometimes stick her head out from the waiting station, hummus chip between finger and thumb, to see if anything was needed in the dining room. Then we followed suit: she was above us in the staff hierarchy after all. We became used to the practice. Then the assistant manager would sometimes lean against the drinks fridges, the bag of hummus chips in hand, eating them and offering them to fellow waiters. We enjoyed the spell of conviviality; we were eating together now. But of course it was a category error. On one such occasion, a customer must have caught sight of the phenomenon and complained to the manager. I am not sure how the complaint was made, whether by email or phone. We didn’t know which customer had been moved to complaint by the sight of us eating. They knew that they were the diner, and we were not. That was the end of eating hummus chips at the waiting station.
What It’s Like in Words by Eliza Moss is an astute depiction of toxic relationships and the devastation often left in their wake. However, it is also a testament to the healing power of art, the importance of comfortable love, and learning to always value oneself, flaws and all.
In a world that often valorizes the myth of the solitary artist toiling away in a secluded studio, Day Jobs offers a refreshingly nuanced perspective on what it means to make art while navigating the pressures of everyday employment. Edited by Veronica Roberts and featuring a foreword by renowned art critic Lucy R. Lippard, this richly illustrated and thoughtfully assembled volume examines the less-visible aspects of creative production: the jobs that pay the bills, the mundane routines that keep the lights on, and the delicate balancing act that so many artists maintain.
The 20th century changed everything. Lemaître’s hypothesis, initially met with scepticism, suggested that the Universe had a fiery origin – one that might be discoverable. Today, many of us still believe this story. The Universe, according to popular books, television documentaries and the theme song to at least one sitcom, started with a Big Bang, marking the origins of physical matter and time itself.
The question of our Universe’s birth seems settled. And yet, despite how the Big Bang is portrayed in popular culture, many physicists and philosophers of physics have long doubted whether science can truly tell us that time began. In recent decades, powerful results developed by scientifically minded philosophers appear to show that science may never show us that time began. The beginning of time, once imagined as igniting in a sudden burst of fireworks, is no longer an indisputable scientific fact.
When I was eight years old, I won a coloring contest that earned me a free birthday party at my hometown Chuck E. Cheese. We don’t have any photos from the event because, as my mother recalls, it was absolute mayhem. Kids were running from room to room playing video games and Skee-Ball. The adults couldn’t corral anyone for pizza and cake. And then there was the show: The animatronic rat Charles “Entertainment” Cheese and the Pizza Time Players entertained—or terrified—attendees with their songs and corny banter.
That may have been the last time I entered a Chuck E. Cheese pizzeria. And yet, when I heard that the company was phasing out the animatronic bands from all but five locations by the end of this year, I felt a twinge of nostalgia. Much to my surprise, I was truly sad that the moving dolls are being replaced by video screens, dance floors, and trampolines. Consider this my ode to the era of animatronics.
Regrets, you’ve had a few. Ever since you first admired the Taylor Swift lyric “No amount of vintage dresses gives you dignity,” you’ve wished there was a way to appreciate the writerly side of Swift without the interference of postproduction wizardry or a level of screaming that registers on the Richter scale, as was heard two summers ago at a concert in Seattle. So when you learned that the Thurber House, a literary center in Columbus, Ohio, was offering a class, open to writers of any genre, called Write Like Taylor Swift, you thought, Bingo. Still, the prospect of joining a roomful of young people to write bracingly personal accounts of love lost and wisdom gained was so daunting that you spent much of the flight to Columbus anxiously trying to think of words that rhyme with “tryna.”
But part of the power of this often fascinating book is its longing for a different kind of amplitude altogether. Gladman’s reading of popular romances feels so genuine, the love scene so easy a fusion of readerly and writerly delight, that another kind of novel seems possible – one where the lines erupt not just into paragraphs but chapters.
In the United States, it’s estimated that about three per cent of books published annually are translations, and less than five per cent of the titles reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, according to one study, were originally written in languages other than English. But translators are increasingly visible in the public sphere. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have become literary celebrities for their translations of the Russian classics, as has Ann Goldstein for her Elena Ferrante, and Edith Grossman for her “Don Quixote.” Emily Wilson, the first female translator of the Odyssey into English, was profiled in this magazine, and in just about every other media outlet. Translators have become more vocal, too. In 2021, Jennifer Croft, the English-language translator of the Polish Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk, declared that she wouldn’t agree to translate a book unless her name was printed on the cover. “Not only is it disrespectful to me,” she wrote on Twitter, “but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they’re going to read.”
One balmy evening this past summer, I was hanging out in the bustling courtyard of a bar under the Williamsburg Bridge, celebrating a friend’s thirtieth birthday. I was having a nice enough time making small talk with various partygoers—until a stranger asked what new music I had been listening to. The trains above screeched to a halt. Everyone at the party fell silent and looked my way. I racked my brain. Surely there was something cool and obscure I could turn this person on to. And … I had nothing. The truth was that most of what I’d been enjoying fell into two categories: Old Dad (Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Simon & Garfunkel) or New Dad (Vampire Weekend, Sturgill Simpson, Solange).
There’s a technical term for what was happening to me. I was becoming washed.
At Grantley Hall, a rural Yorkshire hotel so fancy they pipe jazz around the car park, there are various food offerings this Christmas Day. One of them, from the much-admired chef Shaun Rankin, is entitled the Taste of Home menu. It’s an interesting title, because it acknowledges something: that despite our growing comfort with paying others to cook for us, choosing to eat out on 25 December is still regarded as subversive and decadent. Christmas dinner is the one remaining domestic feast. It’s the one day of the year when we strap ourselves to the stove and cook a complex multistage meal, packed full of adored convention and cliche. And yet amazingly, some people choose to get out the credit card and leave the house.
If the novel is the literary form that offers freedom to speak our mind, I’m not sure it can be written with a closed mind. Clearly, there is something at stake when we ask why the novels matters.
But is it so clear? I’m guessing that sometimes, in our own lives, we prefer obscurity because it is less painful than clarity. The novel matters because it does not have to be clear or obscure. Yet, in the voyage out between these binaries – between the oil spills, thistles and phantoms a novel might pass on the way, between desire, disappointment and the people who clean offices at dawn on page 33 – a novel can reach for understanding and re-examine meaning.
Some of the most visually captivating celestial objects are quiet, steady, even calm—and so dark that they not only emit no visible light but actually absorb it, creating a blackness so profound they seem to be a notch cut out in space.
These shadowy expanses have many sobriquets—dark nebulae, dust clouds, knots—but I prefer to call them Bok globules, a name they received in honor of Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok, who studied them.
As a taxi glides dreamily through the Shinjuku neighborhood in the opening credits, Master gives a little voice-over: “When people finish their day and hurry home, my day starts … My diner is open from midnight to seven in the morning. They call it ‘Midnight Diner.’ Do I even have customers? More than you would expect.”
A little research confirmed that the izakaya in the show is wholly fictitious, yet I wanted to believe a place with that kind of food and that kind of feeling was real. On a recent trip to Tokyo, I set out to find one just like it.
A Clockwork Orange was not Burgess’s best work, though it was the one that made his reputation beyond the world of books and bookmen. He was extraordinarily productive. He wrote more than 30 novels, along with short stories, poetry, children’s books, two volumes of autobiography, lives of Shakespeare, Hemingway and DH Lawrence, books on linguistics, on music, two studies of Joyce, translations, scores of introductions to the work of others, and countless reviews, a selection of which were published in book form under the apt title Urgent Copy.
And then there was music. It was his first love, and to the end of his life he strove to present himself to the world as a serious composer, though the world consistently turned a deaf ear to his efforts. Writing, therefore, was for him a second-best career, which did not, however, prevent him from applying to it all the weight of his prodigious energies.
For about two months each year, fisherman Faustino Mauloko da Cunha and his son Zacarias spend most of their days in a dugout canoe out at sea in the South Pacific Ocean.
Armed with binoculars and a telephoto camera, they watch the cobalt waters for one of its great treasures - pygmy blue whales.
When there is a sighting, it’s all systems go.
During socialism in Bulgaria, Santa Claus—or “Grandfather Frost,” as we called him—arrived on New Year’s Eve instead of Christmas because the communist government had replaced all religious holidays with secular ones. The Christians did that to the pagans after the adoption of Christianity so this, it seemed, was some twisted historical payback.
I knew that there was no Grandfather Frost in reality because my father had trained me in science and logical thinking. Once, when I was six, prompted by my question, “Where do humans come from?” he embarked on a long, detailed explanation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. We were walking through an old city park on a warm autumn afternoon. The trees were turning yellow and red and formed a colorful tunnel around us. I had wanted a simple, easy answer. But that was never the case with my father. I listened patiently as I always did when he spoke, eager to catch all the details and follow the logical explanation and tried to keep up with his pace, taking two or three steps for every one of his, for he was tall and a fast walker. But as he spoke of things I couldn’t comprehend, my mind wandered to the fallen chestnuts and acorns and how I wanted to collect some to make tiny animals and people with toothpicks as we had done in art class. I didn’t catch the end of the lesson of evolution or what had happened to Darwin. I don’t remember this part but when my father finished, I allegedly said, “You can say what you want but I know I came from my mother’s stomach and not from a monkey.” This story occasionally came up at family gatherings and caused the adults to laugh uproariously and me to redden with embarrassment. I felt shy because I became the center of attention, yet I also craved such attention.
After many delays, budget crises, and political battles, the James Webb Space Telescope finally followed Hubble into space in December 2021, and by the time it began to open its multifaceted, infrared-detecting eyes in mid-2022, it was already clear that it was not only going to be a worthy successor to the Hubble but surpass it in ways far beyond expectations — a fact brought home by Webb’s updated take on Hubble’s famous “Pillars of Creation” image. Science writer Richard Panek’s “Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos” lays out the brave new world of the just-dawned Webb era and how the instrument is already opening fresh astronomical and cosmological vistas.
Grealy understood the power of celebrity on an intimate, almost cellular level. Just as she refused to dismiss the desire for beauty, she refused to scoff at a desire for fame; she saw why it might seem to offer access to the sublime. This moment of reverie in her essay is soon undercut by an encounter with a stalker. The tantalizing prospect of being seen is never without peril, and even as she testifies firsthand to its allure Grealy is clear-eyed about its risks. Her work explored the gap between a private self and a public appearance—a gap that, in her case, was dramatic, and represented by the mediating fact of her face. But in the time since “Autobiography of a Face” was published, technology (phone cameras, the social Internet) has made it easier for anyone to hone self-consciousness into a torture device. The rigor and empathy Grealy brings to her subject would have made her an uncommon critic today.
Despite writing a novel about ghosts, I do not profess to be a ghost expert. But I do know that every April, my family gathers at multiple cemeteries across New York and New Jersey to pay their respects to our grandparents, parents, uncles, and aunties that have passed. We burn gold-flecked paper and “hell notes” (afterlife currency) to line the pockets of our dearly departed. We talk to the gravestones while pouring tea and rice wine along the grass, and our ancestors drink from the earth.
To call these ancestral spirits “ghosts” is weirdly diminishing, but it is the Western catch-all definition for all non-corporeal matter who visit us in the living plane. Which is to say that whatever understanding of ghostly life or unlife we know will always be an inexact translation. Which is to also say that somewhere within that imprecision, the afterlife is closer to us than we think.
It’s weird to think of our consuming oysters as a means to father-son bonding. The more I reflect, especially since becoming a father and moving away from Charleston in 2007, the more I appreciate those moments. The divinity, the magic, the coincidences, they all connect over a bushel of oysters in November and December. The tradition continues, as my son has been brought into the fold. Even still, my dad holds his position firm as the head of the family and I often find myself changing my own disposition, reverting to my younger self. It’s a godlike process reminding me to stay humble.
A village "on the western edge of a wet nowhere" populated by men who drink too much and women who smile too little. Throw in cows, an addled priest, an abandoned baby and a thick cloud cover of shame and you have the elements for a quintessential Irish story.
So quintessential, in fact, I've held off reading Niall Williams for a long time, despite hearing raves about his work. My skepticism, it turns out, was misplaced. I've just emerged from a Niall Williams binge with a belated appreciation for his writing, which invests specificity and life in characters and places easily reduced to clichés.
Think of The Position of Spoons, by two-time Man Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, as a crash course in the best female authors and artists of the past century. Featuring themes of gender, consumerism, mortality and language, this collection of short stories, letters, poems and essays creates a captivating portrait, and provides deep insights into the life and mind of one of the most admired writers in the UK today.
It turns out that there is some benefit to working in an industry that is clearly contracting but has not yet died. It forces you to think. Which is anyway your job, if you’re a teacher. As Samuel Johnson said of the death penalty, it concentrates the mind. Granted, one is hardly thinking from a position of disinterest, any more than are the various gadget-mongers and module enthusiasts who constantly assert that they will, with a little more venture capital funding, finally overthrow your tyrannical grip on the process of “education” (which is to say, your tenuous grip on a day’s pay for a day’s work). But love is a form of knowledge, or so I think, and I love what I do. So before I am replaced by an automated grader, an “AI” tutor, and an underpaid, non-union “learning facilitator” who is making a third my salary to coach three times as many students through a college experience for which, somehow, Silicon Valley will figure out how to charge even more than we do, I want to try to get a grip on what that loved thing I do actually is. What is it worth? Who is it for? Why is it important to me that the academic study of literature and writing should survive?
I pace inside my Airbnb, running through a list of potential freelancers I can commission to write about what’s happening in Korea, but no one is available. I do not report on Korean politics, nor do I have enough language proficiency to interview people on the street. Also, I am completely blasted, though maybe not unusually so in Seoul on a weeknight. At dinner we were seated by a group of men with maybe a dozen empty liter bottles of beer on their table; we watched them wave down the proprietor for even more alcohol. “Wow,” I said, before going on to mix soju bombs for my companions. I sometimes describe Korea as the Ireland of East Asia; I’m not a huge drinker when I’m at home in the US, but the general ambience of Seoul shifts my habits.
As I chug hangover tea, I scroll through my phone, continuing to be baffled that no emergency alert has gone out. My cheeks are flushed and my head is buzzing, and I can’t tell how much of it is alcohol and how much of it is the pure surrealness of living under martial law. I text my brother and I text my cousin, asking if they’ve received an alert, asking them to ask their friends if they have. At 11:30PM I put on my coat and trundle off to the subway, a decision that is equal parts soju and commitment to the principles of journalism. I might as well be on the ground — even if I can’t make sense of what’s happening, the least I could do is witness it.
Cook has told a tale that delivers a measure of justice for some patients, while preserving the dreadful mystique spelled out on top of the “decorative rusty wrought iron fence” at the southeastern corner of First Avenue and 30th Street: B-E-L-L-E-V-U-E.
It’s a revelation, when you’re young, to find out that a book might not be exactly about the thing that it’s about. Or at least, not only: that with the right set of contextual keys (and yes, that “right” is highly specious), a story can be further unlocked. But it can also be a thrill to read a book about children, when you are one, that treats their interactions, however extreme the setting, with the same seriousness you do. “As far as I was concerned, the novel’s blaming finger was pointed at schoolboys like Jack, Piggy, Ralph and me,” wrote McEwan in 1986. “We were manifestly inadequate. We couldn’t think straight, and in sufficiently large groups we were capable of atrocities. In that I took it all so personally, I like to think that I was, in some sense, an ideal reader.” (I don’t have a son, but I gave my new copy to my 11-year-old daughter and, when she’d read it, asked her what she thought its message was. “Um,” she said, “that boys are idiots?”)
In some sense, yes, McEwan is right. In another sense, of course, he’s being facetious. (The same could be said, on both counts, of my daughter.) Describing the passage in which a forlorn Piggy, Ralph and Simon reflect on the mysterious sagacity of adults — “‘Grown-ups know things,’ said Piggy. ‘They ain’t afraid of the dark’” — McEwan writes: “At 13, I too had sufficient faith in adult life to be immune to Golding’s irony.” If you read Lord of the Flies again as an adult, however — and you must! — the irony, and its incumbent horror, are everything.
Racine’s version of the originally Scandinavian kringle is, at its best, numbingly sweet and astonishingly butter-forward. It takes three days to roll, fold, and rest the 36 layers of butter, margarine, and dough that make up its surprisingly low profile (it measures less than an inch between plate and icing). That super soft but dense puff pastry is then swaddled around your choice of sweet filling — classic flavors like almond and apple, or perhaps a more daring pumpkin caramel, a chocolatey-caramel pecan-stuffed turtle, or cherry cheese — and then finally spun into a large, flat ring, blanketed with a powdered sugar glaze.
It’s no surprise that in his new book, My Affair with Art House Cinema: Essays and Reviews, Lopate comes deliriously alive when its Antonioni on the big screen, likewise with other demanding international filmmakers, from Chantal Akerman to Marcel Ophuls. I have a similar impulse, always seeking out formally adventurous movies filled with moral complexity. We both opt for a properly framed long-held shot over fast cutting, mise-en-scène over montage. We both prefer a measured, unsentimental humanist cinema to facile and fashionable “edginess.” I endorse Lopate’s credo that the very best films will reveal some kind of “wisdom.” Clearly, entertainment and escapism are not ample reason for us to venture to the movies.
Saltwater Cure is a collection of stories by journalist Ali Gripper that explore the human affinity with the ocean and the transformative power it has on us. Gripper interviews a variety of people for whom the ocean gives meaning and purpose. Surfer Layne Beachley, author Tim Winton, sailor Jessica Watson and conservationist Valerie Taylor are the book’s most recognised contributors, but Saltwater Cure is best when it spends time with unsung heroes such as community advocate Yusra Metwally and First Nations scientist Dr Chels Marshall.
My friends, more schooled in these matters, reminded me that a breakup text was better than being “ghosted,” a practice that, when I learned of it, seemed worth bringing the guillotine back for. One friend asked if I had a “breakup plan.” A what? I found a worksheet on Etsy, seemingly modelled on a birth plan, only instead of “I may want a walking epidural,” the options to numb the pain included “start a side hustle.” Before I knew it, I was lost in a corner of the Internet populated by breakup coaches, heartbreak dietitians looking to replace the classic pint of ice cream with anti-inflammatory popcorn, and get-over-him getaways. The Chablé hotel, at its Yucatán and Maroma locations, offers a program called Healing Heartbreak, in which newly single guests can undergo a full-body exfoliation treatment to symbolize the “scrubbing away of the past.” When Al Green sang “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” the question was rhetorical. Now there’s the Mend app, which leads users through a seventeen-module online course that will “turn your breakup into a breakthrough.” At StrIVeMD, which has locations in Ohio, Illinois, and Texas, Dr. Syed Ali advertises ketamine injections as breakup therapy, claiming that they can provide relief from heartbreak-induced depression and anxiety within hours.
It had been nearly ten years since I’d last been on the dating market, and I felt like I had slept through some kind of revolution. I met my now ex-husband in 2015, at a friend’s birthday party. We sat on opposite sides of a long table at a Burmese restaurant, and I noticed him across the din of gossip and requests to pass the tea-leaf salad. We parted last summer, after many months of what one could call deliberation but was mostly me pleading to be free. My marriage had been everything I thought I could ask for: sturdy. I just didn’t feel particularly tended to. At first, I thought that was O.K. I was a grownup; I didn’t need anyone to take care of me. In time, I just started to feel more on my own than seemed right for someone who wasn’t actually on her own. After it ended, as I was still trying to understand how I had got caught up in a mess of my own making, I met someone really, really hot. He had a face you could not help but project all of your fantasies onto—when I showed his picture to a friend, she said, “Ooh, he looks like he reads.” He made films and lived in Chinatown, near a funeral parlor that hired a marching band to process down the street as part of the service. The last time I saw him before he sent me that text, we were in his kitchen eating pastries when we suddenly heard the brass horns. “It must be someone rich,” he said. “This is lasting a long time.” I did not know then that I was listening to our swan song.
First published in English two decades ago under the title Not Before Sundown, this novel was named one of the top 10 Nordic books. Now smartly retitled as Troll: A Love Story, and with only the odd reference to Windows 98 and CD-Roms to show its age, Finnish novelist Johanna Sinisalo’s debut feels fresh and bright.
Edwin Frank vows in his introduction to this book to try to do for the fiction of the last century what the critic Alex Ross’s landmark book The Rest Is Noise did for its music. He is as good as his word. This is the most engaging imagining of the progress of the 20th-century novel you will read. Frank brings serious erudition to the task – in his day job he is editorial director of New York Review Books and has for 25 years edited its eclectic classics series which breathes new life into half-forgotten or out-of-print treasures. Though he has a fine critical judgment, Frank writes as an enthusiast at least as much as an academic, trusting his taste, always alive to the stories he is telling and the arguments he makes.
It brings home that monetary systems constitute a pyramid of hierarchical claims, held together by a political contract that is constituted by legal codifications, material claims and social practises –without being reducible to any of those pillars. In other words, money is all kind of things. And if it is one thing, it is political.
The Christmas Island pipistrelle was a tiny bat the size of a prune that lived only on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. It had once been a common sight, darting through the night air acrobatically as it fed on insects. But in the late 1980s it began to decline as a result of predation by introduced species. On 26 August 2009, the last remaining Christmas Island pipistrelle was heard one final time, at exactly 38 seconds past 11.29pm; after that, silence.
The date on which this bat went extinct was my 23rd birthday. It was bizarre, realising I could remember exactly what I’d been doing the moment an entire species vanished on the other side of the planet. Scrolling back through social media, even more of that day came together: what I’d eaten, who I’d been with, the weather. Extinction, a phenomenon that can feel so distant and divorced from our lives, suddenly felt personal and immediate.
If you aren’t yet worried about the multitude of ways you inadvertently inflict suffering onto other living creatures, you will be after reading The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch. And for good reason. Birch, a Professor of Philosophy at the London College of Economics and Political Science, was one of a team of experts chosen by the UK government to establish the Animal Welfare Act (or Sentience Act) in 2022—a law that protects animals whose sentience status is unclear.
According to Birch, even insects may possess sentience, which he defines as the capacity to have valenced experiences, or experiences that feel good or bad. At the very least, Birch explains, insects (as well as all vertebrates and a selection of invertebrates) are sentience candidates: animals that may be conscious and, until proven otherwise, should be regarded as such.
What went wrong? The answer is both simpler and more complex than you might think, and it’s impossible to answer that question without looking at how the Honeycrisp apple came about—and how it shot to stardom so quickly.
I discussed the situation with Gefen. I don’t know how to write a car review, but I’ve watched a lot of “Top Gear,” so Gefen and I pondered what possible “Top Gear”-style stunts I might undertake with my Buzz—a limited set of possibilities, given that Jeremy Clarkson and I are made of different stuff. We decided we ought to race my Buzz against his Sonett, even though my Buzz has two hundred and eighty-two horsepower and his Sonett has sixty-five, and my Buzz can go from zero to sixty in something like six seconds, while his Sonett, he admits, “can’t get to sixty.”