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.”