What does it mean to live without handwriting? The skill has deteriorated gradually, and many of us don’t notice our own loss until we’re asked to handwrite something and find ourselves bumbling as we put pen to paper. Some people still write in script for special occasions (a condolence letter, an elaborately calligraphed wedding invitation) or dash off a bastardised cursive on the rare occasions when they write a cheque, but apart from teachers, few people insist on a continued place for handwriting in everyday life.
But we lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills, and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another. We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word. We lose the ability to read the words of the dead.
If we take the skeptics seriously, how much of the catastrophist’s argument stands? Enough, Hayes feels, that we should be gravely concerned. “We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit,” he writes. Thinking clearly and conversing reasonably under these conditions is “like trying to meditate in a strip club.” The case he makes is thoughtful, informed, and disquieting. But is it convincing?
History is littered with lamentations about distraction. Swirling lights and strippers are not a new problem. What’s important to note about bygone debates on the subject, though, is that they truly were debates. Not everyone felt the sky was falling, and the dissenters raised pertinent questions. Is it, in fact, good to pay attention? Whose purposes does it serve?
Led by Emil Ruff of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Mass., new research has unearthed communities of underground microbes that are almost as—and sometimes more—diverse than even reefs and rainforests. Ruff and his team found that subsurface bacteria and archaea are flourishing, even at depths where the energy supply is orders of magnitude lower than enjoyed by organisms in habitats that see the sun.
“All writing is stylistic extravagance, no matter how simple the writing might initially appear to be.” That simple, extravagant sentence appeared a little over a decade ago in “My Ulysses,” an essay by the poet and literary critic James Longenbach, and I have not forgotten it since. Longenbach was a professor at the University of Rochester from 1985 until his death in 2022. Alongside his courses on poetry and creative writing, he taught an undergraduate seminar on Ulysses. He realized fairly quickly that in order to make James Joyce’s novel “available to young and often inexperienced readers,” he needed to articulate his own “most basic notions about writing.” Drawing on his understanding of how poems make meaning by turning against their own best discoveries, Longenbach focuses in his essay less on the inner and outer lives of the Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Bloom’s wife Molly and more on the elaborate verbal confection that is Ulysses.
What is fiction in the first place? Despite common usage, philosophers agree that we can’t equate ‘fiction’ with ‘false content’. On the one hand, the inclusion of falsity isn’t enough to render a work fiction. Books with false statements – old science textbooks with disproven theories, history books with mistakes, memoirs with contradictory events – don’t change their status from nonfiction to fiction when false content is identified. Instead, we judge them to be bad nonfiction. On the other hand, not all fictions include false content since there are fictions that include only actual events, such as Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (2008), a factual account of the author’s experience of nursing a dying friend. And the fact that historical fiction exists – that a fictional work can be consistent with all known facts, yet still be considered fiction – shows that fiction doesn’t need to include (known) falsity.
Because I am still grasping my way out of a dream about pregnancy – blue fluid in the womb, a set of twins already born but they are not mine, I didn’t labour, my child is still inside – he gets out of bed first. When he comes back, it is with coffee and Alphonso mangos. He halves and scores the fruit with a knife. They are faintly nice, but out of season. We agree not to be greedy next time, to wait until June.
We eat. Everything quiet. There is the faint buzz of a podcast coming out of his earphones and the jagged whisper of pages turning in the books I am browsing while I decide what to write; the intermittent drop of mango skins onto a plate resting between us. Our unspoken agreement, as on most Sundays, to spend the first half of the day in bed – him on top of the duvet, me under it, the cat at our feet. I reciprocate his breakfast with lunch some hours later by chopping basil, tomatoes, and mozzarella in the kitchen and spreading them over rocket. I add oil and salt. I take this meagre offering back to the bedroom in silver bowls. No, he says, it’s good.
Pain, joy, love, fear: these are the gifts and burdens of life, and in this profoundly affecting book, Beecher has articulated them with precision and beauty.
Now, with Mothers and Sons, he has written a book that circles around an absence: the alienation of a son – Peter, a lawyer in his 40s – from his mother, Ann, who runs an “intentional community”, a women’s retreat in the hills of Vermont.
Steeds’s depiction of Ettie’s suppressed talents shines a light on generations of female artists who no doubt suffered similar obstacles, making for a hugely accomplished portrait of ambition and self-fulfilment.
In his book The Mathematical Universe, mathematician William Dunham wrote of John Venn’s namesake legacy, the Venn diagram, “No one in the long history of mathematics ever became better known for less.” While Venn diagrams may not have solved any long-standing open problems, surely these interlocking rings deserve more credit. Their compact representation of group relationships explains their enduring appeal in classrooms, infographics and Internet memes.
Not merely visual aids, Venn diagrams can help us solve everyday logic problems, and they give rise to surprising geometric questions. Have you ever seen a proper Venn diagram with four overlapping circles? No, because it’s impossible. Venn himself discovered this and came up with a clever fix, but this only begot deeper geometric puzzles that mathematicians still study today.
On a blue-sky Saturday morning, I joined a foraging hike in Sintra-Cascais nature park, a former municipal wasteland and now thriving ecosystem on the outskirts of Cascais in Portugal. Progress was deliciously slow, thanks to our passionate guide – ecologist Fernanda Botelho, Portugal’s foremost herbalist and wild forager. We’d barely made it out of the park’s welcome centre when she lunged at a bush and held a spiky leaf ahoy.
“Sow thistle,” she proclaimed. “Pigs love it. It’s good for salads, but it too often gets confused with the dandelion.” Everything has its uses, she said, from pine needles for sauces and honey to ash trees for flour and berries of the Peruvian Pink Pepper tree – “planted as an ornamental tree, but it combines very well with chocolate”.
Perhaps, in the end, the measure of understanding — which is “love’s other name” — is not seeing the same light but seeing the light in each other, the shy light shimmering over the ocean of our singularity.
This edition of the Best American series is as strong as any of its predecessors, and the stories assembled here serve as excellent examples of inventive genre storytelling. The most striking of these stories invite readers to follow characters as they try to sustain relationships and a sense of self in uncertain futures—as good a theme as any for the beginning of 2025.
One of my favorite anecdotes about prime numbers concerns Alexander Grothendieck, who was among the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. According to one account, he was once asked to name a prime number during a conversation. These numbers, which are only divisible by 1 and themselves, form the atoms of number theory, so to speak, and have fascinated humankind for thousands of years.
Grothendieck is said to have replied: “57.” Although it is hard to determine the truth of this story, 57 has since been known in nerd circles as the Grothendieck “prime number”—even though it is divisible by 3 and therefore not a prime number.
After several years of drought, it's dustier than ever. The shallow fountains have been drained, and the city has even taken to chopping down wilting palm trees before they can topple over. In eastern Catalonia, the three years from 2021-23 had some of the worst drought in recorded history.
But at certain points through winter 2024, beneath the park, a huge cistern 17m (58ft) deep becomes filled with cloudy rainwater. These are the two extremes the city finds itself in, where there can be too much water and still not enough.
Aquatic invasive species (AIS) have been making trouble for Lake Tahoe’s ecosystem ever since people started sticking them in there in the mid-1800s. Invasives crowd out native plants, starve out or prey upon native animals, and kick off disastrous ecological cascades. Increasingly, limnologists are finding alliances like that of clam and algae—in which aquatic invasive species create conditions that help other undesirables spread. They’re aided by a third accomplice: climate change. Warmer waters are worse for native species, and better for invasives and potentially harmful algae. At Lake Tahoe, native fish stocks have declined, toxic algae alerts have closed down beaches, and the celebrated waters are about 30 percent murkier than they were 50 years ago. The lake’s ecosystems, along with its multibillion-dollar tourism industry, rely on clear, clean, cool water. Tahoe—jewel of the Sierra, sacred space of the Washoe Tribe, and destination for nearly six million vacationers each year (including about a million from the Bay Area alone)—is at risk.
The subtitle to this edition of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude provides a hint of just how jam-packed the book is with ancillary material. “Newly Edited from the Manuscripts [by James Engell and Michael D. Raymond] and Fully Illustrated in Color with Paintings and Drawings Contemporaneous with the Composition of the Poem,” the volume also includes “an Introduction, Maps, Notes, Glosses, and Chronology.” If that’s not enough to keep a reader immersed in the text, there is an insightful and appreciative afterword by the late Helen Vendler.
Sunlight melts snowflakes. Fire turns logs into soot and smoke. A hot oven will make a magnet lose its pull. Physicists know from countless examples that if you crank the temperature high enough, structures and patterns break down.
Now, though, they’ve cooked up a striking exception. In a string of results over the past few years, researchers have shown that an idealized substance resembling two intermingled magnets can — in theory — maintain an orderly pattern no matter how hot it gets. The discovery might influence cosmology or affect the quest to bring quantum phenomena to room temperature.
Last night, as I carried a basin of hot water out to my balcony to wash my feet, I caught sight of a reflection of the moon on its surface, and I wondered whether I should count it as a friend.
The Empusium is the first novel that Tokarczuk has published since delivering her Nobel Prize lecture, in which she called—in somewhat utopian terms—for a “fourth-person” narrator who will preserve literature’s “eccentricities, phantasmagoria, provocation, parody and lunacy” and who is also “capable of expressing the vaguest intuition.” We encounter this fourth-person narrator in The Empusium as an all-seeing “we,” a narrative consciousness that goes beyond what might be observed empirically. It is at once an undramatic, witty Greek chorus and a psychoanalyst in an invisibility cloak. “No, we do not regard it as an obsession,” this voice says of Wojnicz’s self-consciousness about his appearance, “at most as innocent oversensitivity. People should get used to the fact that they are being watched.” This is not the voice of paranoia; it is simply one attuned to the collective unconscious.
My assumption that humanist academics were all on the left was foolish, of course. But so was my defeatist certainty that grad school hadn’t trained me for anything useful. In fact, as Elyse Graham shows in her snappy and entertaining Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, humanists and their comma-hunting, cross-referencing, collecting, and cataloging ways made pivotal contributions to America’s war effort in Europe, and may well have ensured its success.
The beauty of Live Forever? is that it acknowledges the fix we’re all in, but manages to do so in a way that almost feels like a comfort. By taking care of ourselves and, crucially, by leading happy and fulfilling lives, Tregoning reassures us that we can still make a decent fist of a bad hand. We’re all headed for the grave, but he’s as good a person as any to lead us there.
Even with Orgel’s impeccable reputation, the idea that an RNA sequence could both store information and accelerate chemical reactions (at the time considered to be something only protein enzymes could do) was hard to accept. But scientists had no choice once molecular biologist Sidney Altman and chemist Thomas Cech made the stunning (and Nobel Prize-winning) discovery in the early 1980s that RNA could indeed act as an enzyme—and potentially start up its own replication.
This solved the incredibly thorny “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” conundrum. The implication was astounding: The origin of life might simply come down to the origin of a self-replicating RNA molecule.
In the new year, I came to where it was truly winter, on a train that passed the sunset and went on for a while longer, until out of the dark there was my station, a red shed by the snowy tracks and the train shuddering away.
I am here in Vermont visiting my good fathers. They have just moved here, away from the now annual wildfires in the West, away from the place in the mountains that I loved more than anywhere in the world. They are in different mountains now, hills really, that are very old. But their house smells new because it is new, and everything shines with wood and stone and new paint on old ground. Things are in test places: perhaps the woodpile will go here, but just until a woodshed can be built in the summer. Perhaps the plates fit best in this drawer. Perhaps we will move through the house like this, or again perhaps like this. Here are all the same things, all the same people, now rearranged differently, house no longer angled into a mountain valley but courting the slope of haying fields. In my room there is a chair for reading and a view of the Milky Way at night. They hope I will like it here, and visit often; I hope that they like it here and make friends, for they will soon be too old to live on a dirt road in the country if they don’t have kind neighbors.
That’s what restaurants can do. They can support you when you’re down and embrace you when you’re happy and it needs it to be reciprocal. Don’t assume you will always be able to go to your favorite restaurant because things will change. A fire can take it away overnight or empathy can take it away over a period of years. You’re left with only memories of either the food you ate, the people you ate it with, or the people who served it to you. Be grateful for the restaurants in your life because they are grateful for you.
The book is a saga: its serious pleasures are its expansiveness and range, and Airey’s rare, particular instinct for scenes or worlds that are interesting to be with, from 1970s New York art kids to early female gamers.
Few readers even knew the poems existed until 1988, when the writer and critic Mary McCarthy, Arendt’s literary executor, opened the archive. (The biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl did include twenty-one of them, in the original German, in an appendix to her 1982 biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World.) Only in the past decade have complete collections emerged—in French, German, and Spanish. Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill’s What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024) is the first complete English-language translation of Arendt’s poetry, which poses the question: what do these poems do for our understanding of Arendt, famously private and known for her intellectual, analytical rigor?
Socrates offers neither miracle cures nor lifestyle hacks: the road to “epistemological humility”, Callard argues, is long and bumpy. But, in “always exhorting people to move forward”, he invests that journey with meaning and dignity. Crucially, it’s a journey we embark on together.
Algebra is an Arabic word. To understand its origin, we must go back to the time and place of the Arabian Nights, during the Islamic Golden Age, when the Islamic Empire was transformed into a military and scientific world power. That was the time when Caliph Harun al-Rashid ruled in Baghdad, the capital of the empire. It was the age, so masterfully described in the tales of Scheherazade, the heroine of Arabian Nights, when the Arab world was the realm where reality and magic seemed to meet.
If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, have you tried to induce total existential dread by contemplating the end of the entire Universe?
If not, here’s a rundown of five ideas exploring how “all there is” might become “nothing at all.”
Enjoy.
The last time I was in Siena there was an earthquake. The first time I was nineteen. My boyfriend, who had already graduated from college, had been in Italy most of the year, in Perugia. The plan was to take an intensive course in Italian—he wanted to read Dante—but then he discovered a passion for painting. Could it have been the day after I arrived that we took the train from Perugia to Siena? Even now, from Perugia, one changes train twice, first in Terontola, and then at Chiusi-Chianciano Terme, a station that decades later would become familiar, arriving in the Val D’Orcia from Rome, and where one afternoon we sat deathly ill in the station bar, beset by what—an ability to go on? But then everything was new.
Albuquerque-born author Kyle Paoletta takes readers on a virtual road trip around his native region, transporting us across hundreds of years and thousands of miles in his new book “American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest.”
As cities worldwide grapple with drought and rising temperatures from climate change, Paoletta describes how the Southwest developed a resilience that he says other regions will need as the globe grows hotter and drier.
The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being.
Fifteen years ago, New York Post critic Steve Cuozzo bemoaned the “infantilization of dining” as white tablecloths — elegant, urbane — disappeared from the city’s upscale dining rooms. It was a creep of casualization as diners were increasingly excited to eat Millennium Falco pizzas off of reclaimed lumber or to slurp ramen from a barstool. “For so long, the aesthetic of a Brooklyn restaurant was raw brick and Edison bulbs,” says Tim Meyers. “At least in Williamsburg, we’re thankfully moving past that.” When Meyers was planning his restaurant, Field Guide, which opened on Kent Avenue in November, he decided early in the design process that he’d include white tablecloths. “It’s a signal of, Okay, let’s unplug — we’re gonna have a nice meal,” he says. “There’s a tactile element to the white tablecloths that I don’t think a lot of people appreciate; it’s nicer to set your forearms on a warm tablecloth than a cold, hard table.”
Kali White’s The Monsters We Make (2020) plays with the primal fear of the threat strangers pose, following the lives of three people impacted by local kidnappings. The novel’s main undercurrents—the public versus the private, the community versus the individual, the concepts of victimhood versus survivorship —all circle the growing dread of an unsafe world. White constructs an atmospheric mystery that burns slowly until it is too late.
Once, when I was 18 and living in San Francisco, I spent a Sunday afternoon at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Muir Beach. I did not arrive in time to sit zazen, or for any lecture or discussion, although if you had asked, I would have said I was interested in such things. Instead, I came for tea and lunch, followed by a tour, all of which now gleams in my imagination as the emblem of a life unlived. As for how that works, let’s put it like this: I was, if not quite spiritual, compelled by the idea of spiritual practice, its rigor and its clarity, the focusing of consciousness required by contemplation. What I was not was disciplined enough.
I kept thinking about that experience as I read Pico Iyer’s Aflame: Learning from Silence, which traces the 30-plus years the author has spent visiting the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. Founded in 1958, the hermitage dates the heritage of its monastic order to the 11th century; at one point, Iyer describes a gathering, at a retreat center on the Central Coast, “to celebrate the one thousandth birthday of the Camaldolese congregation.”
Indeed, as this fascinating book attests, the more you find out about our cognitive and emotional relationship with music, the more mysterious it seems – and sounds.
Every week at “Saturday Night Live” is just like every other week. The weeks are the same because they’re always fuelled by hard work, filled with triumphs and failures and backstage arguments, and built around a guest host—Jennifer Lopez, Lizzo, Elon Musk—who often has no idea what he or she is doing. Over the past fifty years, the job of Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, has been to make the stars look good, and to corral the egos and talents on his staff in order to get the program on the air, live. Since the début of “S.N.L.,” in 1975, he has fine-tuned the process, paying attention to shifting cultural winds. What began as an avant-garde variety show has become mainstream. (Amy Poehler has characterized the institution that made her famous as “the show your parents used to have sex to that you now watch from your computer in the middle of the day.”) But the formula is essentially unchanged. Michaels compares the show to a Snickers bar: people expect a certain amount of peanuts, a certain amount of caramel, and a certain amount of chocolate. “There’s a comfort level,” he says. The show has good years and bad, like the New York Yankees, or the Dow, and the audience has come to feel something like ownership over it. Just about all viewers of “S.N.L.” believe that its funniest years were the ones when they were in high school. Michaels likes to say that people in the entertainment business have two jobs: their actual job and figuring out how to fix “S.N.L.” (When J. D. Salinger died, in 2010, letters surfaced in which even he griped about what was wrong with the show.)
Cast members and writers have speculated for years about the secret behind Michaels’s extraordinary tenure. “It’s him and Hitchcock,” John Mulaney told me. “No one else has had this kind of longevity.” Half of them think that Michaels has repeatedly been able to remake the show for a new audience because he’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a producer nonpareil. The other half wonder whether Michaels, gnomic and almost comically elusive, is a blank screen onto which they’ve all projected their hopes and fears and dark jokes—whether he, like the cramped stages in “S.N.L.” ’s Studio 8H, is just a backdrop for the ever-shifting brilliance of the country’s best comic minds.
It was below freezing the other Friday morning, in Long Island City, when the author Jhumpa Lahiri walked into a nondescript brick building beneath the Queens Boulevard overpass. She was wearing a long white wool coat and maroon suède boots. “That’s her!” someone said, springing up from a bench. As Lahiri took off her coat, she was given a nametag that read “BookOps” over the logo of the New York Public Library.
The N.Y.P.L. had just acquired Lahiri’s papers, among which are school book reports, an Italian rail ticket with scribbled ideas for a novel, and a piece of fan mail from the director M. Night Shyamalan, in which he shared that he’d cried after reading “Interpreter of Maladies.”
What is your favorite smell? This question may seem banal, but think carefully, because your answer will say something about who you are. Our most meaningful smells evoke intimate feelings, similar to how we are affected by music or art. It is almost impossible to talk about your favorite smell without getting personal. The smell of our partner or our children evokes feelings that are difficult to describe in words. A friend who recently became a father described the smell of his child as making him giddy with love. For dog lovers, the smell of the family dog is often high on the list of favorite smells.
These feelings are shaped by our memories and experiences. Researchers have shown that people often think other people’s pets smell bad, but not their own pets. New parents have the same attitude toward dirty diapers—it doesn’t smell as bad if it comes from your own child. These smells have a special meaning for us, and the emotions they evoke are due to olfactory memory—smelling enables us to remember events and emotions, and associate them with each other. This is what makes smells so deeply personal.
Gornick, 89, is a celebrated American writer not much known on these shores, although her work is diligently being resurrected by the wonderful Daunt Books. Having previously put out Fierce Attachments, the much-praised 1987 memoir about her complicated relationship with her mother, now it is republishing The Odd Woman and the City, a 150-page essay (originally published in the US in 2015) that casts Gornick as a modern-day flâneur traversing the streets of her beloved Manhattan, aiming both to keep loneliness at bay and to feed her insatiable writer’s curiosity.
The Shetland Way offers a fascinating insight into a unique place that holds past and future in uneasy tension, written with clarity and rooted in deep affection – not only for the islands but for the broader land and elements on which we all depend.
Angel recounts the history of two experiments in communal living in New Harmony that took place between 1814 and 1827. The first was led by George Rapp, a German pietist who established the town of Harmony as a religious commune; the second by Robert Owen, a secular proto-socialist from Wales who hoped to build a rationally managed society from the ground up after purchasing Rapp’s land in 1825. In what Lillian Robinson called “history’s least ‘studious’ study” of the communities, Young plays Rapp’s spiritual devotion against Owen’s faith in material progress—a contrast she likens to the “Cartesian split between body and soul.” Where Rapp “believed his people to be future angels,” Owen “believed all men to be machines.”
In juxtaposing their contrasting projects, Young mines Rapp’s and Owen’s failed experiments for salvageable, concrete traces of the loss and hope that fuel her fiction and poetry. Though the book is ostensibly a work of nonfiction, the “fairy tale” frame Young uses to narrate her histories draws it much closer to Sargent’s poetic “social dreaming” than to a dispassionate study of real-world utopian communities.
Oh, O.K. None of us read the book? Well, at least we’re all on the same page! Ha-ha, book-club humor.
In 2019, astronomer Britt Lundgren of the University of North Carolina Asheville visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York City to take in an exhibit of the works of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. Lundgren noted a striking similarity between the abstract geometric shapes in af Klint's work and scientific diagrams in 19th century physicist Thomas Young's Lectures (1807). So began a four-year journey starting at the intersection of science and art that has culminated in a forthcoming paper in the journal Leonardo, making the case for the connection.
Rather than for the base-layered, fleeced and cramponed person in your life, Mountainish is more for those who would arrive to have a look at some huge mountains and then, weirded out, instantly turn round and go home, to somewhere reassuringly flat and low.
“We have two lives,” Dr Matt Morgan writes, before clarifying: “The second begins when you realise you have [only] one.” Sometimes, as the case studies in this book detail, this realisation comes more suddenly and profoundly than most of us can imagine. For more than 20 years, Morgan has been a specialist doctor in intensive care, labouring at the extreme margins of life. Just occasionally, in his day-to-day education in human mortality, he has witnessed what might, in other traditions, be thought of as supernatural events: people whose vital signs have flatlined, but who have returned to tell the tale. The stories in this book – a sequel to his bestselling Critical – are his accounts of those impossible second acts, and his reflections on what we can learn from those lucky few who have experienced both possible answers to the question of “to be or not to be”.
Could it be a lingering effect of lockdown? The fact that so many of us are interrupted by technology and growing lists of responsibilities, so it feels natural to interrupt others in conversation?
To satisfy my curiosity — and to help me fix my own interrupting habits — I went to some experts to ask whether we, as a culture, are in fact interrupting each other more; why we do it; and how we can get back to letting people finish what they were saying.
A seductive combination of romance, puzzle and poetry, The Artist also offers a considered interrogation of the value of art: to open windows in human existence, to push against limits, to bring freedom, perspective and light.
The Moon, “like to a silver bow” (Shakespeare), “sole in the blue night” (E. E. Cummings), with its “face like the clock in the hall” (Robert Louis Stevenson), has inspired poetry for centuries. Now a new book by science writer Rebecca Boyle offers a surprising entry into the lunar canon. Our Moon does certainly convey a great deal of science and history about the Earth’s Moon, but the dominant impression it leaves is one of dream-like wonder, more akin to poetry than a dry work of popular non-fiction.
Even an obituary for Hawking in Nature by longtime colleague Martin Rees referred to “the androidal accent that became his trademark” and also speculated that Hawking’s field of cosmology was part of what made his life story resonate with a worldwide public—that “the concept of an imprisoned mind roaming the cosmos grabbed people’s imagination.” Even if only figuratively, Hawking was one of the world’s most famous living cyborgs, moving and speaking by electromechanical means because his flesh-and-blood body could not.
Some clichés are like planets, their gravitational pull too strong for all but the most propulsive acts of creativity. Middle age is one of these. The changes often associated with being in your 40s and 50s – gray hairs, career doldrums, time’s squeaky-wheeled chariot drawing near – can seem as inevitable as aging itself.
And yet, as my research on the construction and representation of aging has shown, the middle years aren’t what they used to be, nor what they will one day become.
These photographs and videos won’t last. They won’t last for the same reason that there are no lasting images of recent hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes: even with high demand for such images, there is consistent oversupply. But these images are fugitive for another reason—their function has changed. They bring us news of devastation, quick news that will soon be supplanted by other news. They are victims of an unremitting public need for novelty. The meanings of these images—which speak variously of environmental collapse, policy failure, ineluctable helplessness—do not invite their use as objects of contemplation. You don’t put photographs of the Lahaina blaze or the Camp Fire on the walls of your home. Our ways of seeing are not yet adequate to our predicament.
In the 1960s, Dr. Jack Geiger and a group of health professionals started a community health center in the Mississippi Delta, where children were dying from infectious diarrhea and malnutrition. Geiger and company began writing prescriptions for healthy food — patients would buy the prescribed food at a grocery store that would charge the clinic for the cost. When Geiger caught flack for prescribing food instead of drugs, he replied, “The last time I looked at my textbooks, the most specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”
In the afterglow of our sighting, surrounded by the pulse of life that marks a late Arctic summer, it’s easy to envision the grandeur of this valley in perpetuity, and equally easy to ignore the signs of change, both visible and not. As a biologist, I’m keenly aware that we’re living in an age of extinction, but here, now, I couldn’t conjure a sense of absence if I tried. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to feel anything but awe. Like the researchers I’ll soon meet—a binocular-clad cult of falcon fanatics who chase their subjects to the far ends of the globe—I’ve inadvertently become a peregrine fangirl.
The novel was inspired by Robertson’s own encounters with the British counterculture during this period, and that lived experience certainly informs every page of a novel that is brimming with finely drawn characters, astutely observed milieus and an achingly credible depiction of the dual pain of unrequited love and internalised homophobia.
The book follows three men who, in the wake of that catastrophe, are thrown together to look after a toddler. None of them is equipped for it but all are forced to rise to the challenge. In charting their separate struggles and shared responsibilities, Lamont crafts a wholly engaging and frequently affecting tale about friendship, fatherhood, family ties, and finding the ability to love unconditionally.
Kenitz crafts a terrifying modern-day villain. And he’s refined exactly what makes domestic thrillers so gut-roiling: They turn the places and people that should be safest — home and family — into something to be avoided at all costs. Kenitz turns the perfect home into a nightmare with proficiency and horrifying pizzazz.
Humans are unrealistically optimistic about the world and the future; we systematically underestimate our chances of experiencing unpleasant diseases, going through a divorce, or losing a loved one. About the only people who don’t see the world through the lens of this “optimism bias” are the clinically depressed. Depressive realism – the name given to the relative immunity of the melancholic to this illusion – suggests that we see reality clearly only at the cost of our mental health. This presents psychologists with an interesting dilemma. We are always caught between the delusion of wearing rose-tinted spectacles, and the debilitating affect of taking them off. Should we prioritise accuracy or happiness?
Sumit Paul-Choudhury comes down firmly on the side of optimism in this lively exploration of glass-half-full thinking and its relationship with social progress. What initially feels like it might be a self-help book turns into an eye-opening history of the idea of optimism, before exploring its potential to help us address social and ecological challenges. The tension in our relationship to optimism, between its motivating and its delusional possibilities, is present throughout.
Horwitz’s sudden death obliterated that idyll, and Memorial Days, Brooks’s heartbreaking new memoir, is an attempt not only to process her profound loss but to reflect on our culture’s diminishing ceremony around death and dying. Sadly, Brooks discovers that the blunt phone call from the doctor who announces Horwitz’s death and then “can’t get me off the phone fast enough” will be just the “first brutality” in a broken system.
Yet the Doyle estate used those late stories as a wedge, arguing that it retained licensing rights for all works featuring Holmes and Watson during the remaining quarter of a century before the final tales—widely seen as the worst of the bunch—fell out of copyright. Their claim: The characters didn’t assume their definitive form until the series was complete. The estate based its argument on a distinction between “flat” and “round” fictional characters first proposed by E. M. Forster in his 1927 book, Aspects of the Novel, a concept frequently invoked in high-school literature classes but never previously tested in court.
I love some good historical fiction, but there’s something particularly ominous about a story in which contemporary people have problems that could only happen today. A good thriller blows up the problem to monster proportions, but hopefully, it also says: hey, you see this thing we all rely on? Here’s how it can suddenly become a disaster. Our phones solve problems, but they can also turn on us.
Ask Me Again, the first novel by American short story writer Clare Sestanovich, is structured around a series of questions. Each chapter title is a kind of inquiry: Did You See That?; Can You Feel That?; Can I Tell You Something? It’s a simple device, but it creates an atmosphere of interrogative uncertainty I last felt when reading Carol Shields’s Unless, a book in which adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions serve as chapter headings: Therefore; Instead; Despite. The isolated events that make up a life are connected less by tight plot lines than by little fragments of language and the hunger for connection they represent.
Author Liz Pelly lays out the sordid history of the streaming service Spotify in Mood Machine. It would be comforting to believe that the corporate actions described here represented a culmination of the depredations that technology wreaked on the arts. Unlikely. Not unless we (the body politic) thoroughly reevaluate our tolerance for surveillance and our laissez-faire attitude toward fairly paying musicians. And, oh yes, unless the capitalist system is dismantled.
In Islamesque, cultural historian Diana Darke sets out to show Islamic art’s influence on Europe’s Romanesque monasteries, churches and castles, via a very similar story of surprising borrowings and occasional thefts.
These notoriously hard “NP-complete” problems promise a million-dollar prize, awarded by the nonprofit Clay Mathematics Institute, for either finding their fast solution or proving that none exists. An amazing insight from the 1970s makes this challenge even more tantalizing: those thousand-plus problems are, in a deep sense, one and the same. If you solve one, you solve them all. This concept, now fundamental in the field of theoretical computer science, shows that certain groups of computational problems form a unified web. Discover a fast algorithm that solves Sudoku puzzles of any size, and you can now break the encryption schemes that protect our digital economy. Reveal a shortcut for scheduling a flight tour within a budget, and you can use it to solve nearly any famous open math problem.
The catastrophic decline in oyster landings has been well reported. For example, around the east coast of Scotland near Edinburgh, over 30 million oysters a year were landed in the 1830s. Just half a century later, landings had declined to less than 300,000 a year, and by the 1950s, oysters were declared locally extinct. This trend was repeated in coastal locations around Europe and today, only a handful of wild fisheries remain.
Less widely recognized is the massive loss of oyster habitat that accompanied these declines. Europe's seafloor is now largely dominated by shifting sand and mud, interspersed with rocky boulders covered in kelp, and occasional seagrass patches.
The future, in itself, exerts an attractive force—not just the general future, with its bland procession of potential events, but the futuristic future, with its alluring, fascinating, and forbidding narrative turns.
Eddie Winston is 90, but for all practical purposes he is more like 17. Like a teenager, he’s gregarious, gangly but strong (few 90-year-olds can sit in the grass for a picnic lunch and then hop up again, no problem) and — most important — he has yet to enjoy his first kiss.
This unlikely but delightful character is at the heart of Marianne Cronin’s novel, “Eddie Winston is Looking for Love,” an entertaining story filled with all good things — friendship, honor, generosity, humor and, yes, love.
Romantasy’s reliance on tropes poses a challenge for questions of copyright. Traditionally, the law protects the original expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. A doctrine named for the French phrase scènes à faire, or “scenes that must be done,” holds that the standard elements of a genre (such as a showdown between the hero and the villain) are not legally protectable, although their selection and arrangement might be. The wild proliferation of intensely derivative romantasies has complicated this picture. The worlds of romance and fantasy have been so thoroughly balkanized, the production of content so accelerated, that what one might assume to be tropes—falling in love with a werewolf or vampire, say—are actually subgenres. Tropes operate at an even more granular level (bounty-hunter werewolves, space vampires). And the more specific the trope, the harder it is to argue that such a thing as an original detail exists.
Insects make up about forty per cent of all living species. An estimated trillion insects are farmed per year; quadrillions are killed by pesticides, and many species have gone extinct as humans have cleared habitats for farms, factories, and cities. Most of us do not think much about their inner lives, and our laws do not usually consider their welfare. Insects are small, they don’t scream or bleed red, and many are considered pests; we tend to kill or mutilate them without pause. “The default view of the vast majority of the general public, as well as many of my colleagues, is that insects are largely reflex machines,” Lars Chittka, a behavioral biologist who researches bees at Queen Mary University of London, told me. If humans seriously considered the possibility that insects are sentient, he said, we would need a “completely different connection with the natural world.”
From the highest mountains to the depths of the ocean, humanity’s influence has touched every part of planet Earth. Many plants and animals are evolving in response, adapting to a human-dominated world. One notable example came during the Industrial Revolution, when the peppered moth turned from black and white to entirely black after soot darkened its habitat. The black moths were camouflaged against the soot-covered trees, surviving to pass on their genes to the next generation.
As human influence has expanded, so too have the strange adaptations forced on the natural world.
“Many of the residents here are not equipped for life as it is commonly regulated,” reflects the narcissistic, madly distracted yet profoundly cultured narrator Helen near the end of this captivating, strange novel by New York author Lynne Tillman (who writes novels, short stories and criticism). Least of all this clever ex-historian whom I took to be Tillman’s realisation of a postmodern successor to such endearingly digressive women as Winnie from Beckett’s Happy Days or Joyce’s Molly Bloom.
The poet illustrates the connectedness among everything with his signature metaphors: The menacing shadow cast by a coasting vulture conjures “a crop duster, / passing low over the trees, spraying shade,” while the “pink nose” of an opossum spotted before dawn is “a struck match, its light probing / the depths of the darkness before her.”
Dubbed “the Tolkien effect”, after the author of the The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit who was influenced by the Welsh language and literature, Wales has undeniably influenced fantasy writing, both old and new.
But while some applaud the spread of Welsh culture and language, others fear its misuse could have a detrimental impact.
In a way, The Fortunate Fall is about the experience of re-reading, revisiting a narrative only to have it reinterpreted in a new light.
When some of us want to dismiss an opinion or an artistic performance as without sophistication, we often refer to it as “provincial.” A recent collection of essays from the B.C.-based online magazine The Tyee, Points of Interest: In Search of the Places, People and Stories of B.C. proves that content can be province-specific without being in any way provincial in the pejorative sense. Edited by founding Tyee editor David Beers and senior editor andrea bennett — who does not use capitalization for their name — the volume gathers items published between 2005 and 2023 plus two items newly commissioned for the book. Doing so, it creates a multi-faceted gem of a text, with each essay depicting a place in B.C., each from a different and unique perspective.
More and more, the sentences I had in my head were like the sentences I loved in books: they began in one place and ended somewhere you hadn’t imagined them going, though, at each turn, idea seemed to follow idea perfectly naturally. The surprise at the end, as the thought completed itself, seemed wildly exciting: the whole sentence needed to be reëxperienced in this light; waves of unexpected revelations and insights resulted. Paradox. But an interrupted paradox is not simply edited—it is fundamentally changed, sometimes into the orderly, reasonable opposite it seemed destined to be. Because I never got to finish what I intended to say, a response (on the rare occasions when one was given) never seemed a response to my thought but, rather, to the simplified idea it had become.
Still, D&D has never quite resolved its relationship to reality. During the satanic panic of the ’80s, the game’s publishers stressed that D&D was a harmless leisure activity enjoyed by productive members of society — like reading a novel, only better. “This is a game that is fun,” a 1982 rule book amusingly stated. “You, along with your friends, will create a great fantasy story, you will put it away after each game, and go back to school or work, but — like a book — the adventure will wait.” Yet unlike a novel, a D&D campaign had no fixed ending; in fact, the game’s uncanny way of resisting all attempts to end it, like Scheherazade delaying her execution with yet another tale, was both a selling point and a real source of anxiety. “Game players often joke that they are ‘crazy’ or ‘insane,’ ” wrote the sociologist Gary Alan Fine in his 1983 study, Shared Fantasy, noting the community’s awareness of a “relation between psychosis and immersion in a fantasy world.” Early D&D media reflects this: Andre Norton’s 1978 novel, Quag Keep, the first book ever set in a D&D universe, concerned a group of players who are sucked into a fantasy world — and make peace with staying. A darker vision of the game would appear in the delightfully overwrought made-for-TV movie Mazes and Monsters, starring an unknown Tom Hanks as a delusional role-player who tries to jump off one of the Twin Towers and ends up in a permanent state of psychosis.
Pose a question to a Magic 8 Ball, and it’ll answer yes, no or something annoyingly indecisive. We think of it as a kid’s toy, but theoretical computer scientists employ a similar tool. They often imagine they can consult hypothetical devices called oracles that can instantly, and correctly, answer specific questions. These fanciful thought experiments have inspired new algorithms and helped researchers map the landscape of computation.
The Many Ghosts of Donahue Byrnes continuously challenges the idea that you can truly know somebody.
The story revolves around the concept of memory, mainly how we remember those who we have lost, and how we react when those notions are challenged.
If you long for the same kind of happiness a snowy day gave you as a kid, “How to Winter” will help you recapture that feeling. If you need a cold weather mood-booster, that’s here, too.
In the opening scene of the 1941 mystery Citizen Kane, the eponymous protagonist, played by Orson Welles, clenches a snow globe in his hand as he utters his last word: “rosebud.” The glass-encased spherical diorama of a snowy scene was a mere novelty at the time, but the film, in part, gave rise to its popularity.
Now, more than 80 years later, it’s hard to imagine the Christmas season without snow globes. A symbol of childhood nostalgia, the Austrian innovation has become beloved around the world.
Te Araroa is considered one of the world’s most diverse trails, with walkers navigating mountain terrains, coastlines, farmland and cities. Each year, roughly 2,000 walkers travel the route: some in a continuous journey over months, others dipping in and out to hike sections.
Along the way, live a vast network of trail angels – locals ready to offer a bed, a lift, or a shower to weary walkers for free, or a small fee. Trail angels are not a formal part of the Te Araroa trail, but for many walkers, they have become a lifeline.
“The Brain – is wider than the Sky – / For – put them side by side – / The one the other will contain / with ease – and You – beside –,” wrote Emily Dickinson. To all that the world presents to our senses, the mind effortlessly adds things that will not and cannot ever be. We can’t help it: imagination is humankind’s unbidden superpower, perhaps the capacity that most distinguishes us from other animals.
In The Shape of Things Unseen, neurologist Adam Zeman attempts to explain how and why this is. It is a wide-ranging survey – too wide, offering a mass of fascinating information about creativity, mental imagery and child development bloated by superfluous discourses on the origins of life, the Covid pandemic and climate crisis. Even then it doesn’t quite resolve the mystery of why our imaginative capacity seems to far exceed what is adaptively useful. But in this Zeman simply reflects the state of play: brain science tells us a great deal about the imagination but can only ever take us so far.
When Charles, a western lowland gorilla, died in the Toronto Zoo last year, did his fellow primates mourn his passing? What does a gazelle think when a member of its herd becomes a lion’s dinner? Questions like these have been very much on the mind of the Spanish philosopher Susana Monsó, whose new book, “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death,” invites the reader to think about death from the point of view of the creatures we share the planet with.
This simplifying ethos applies to everything from understanding how dark matter weighs down galaxy clusters to estimating how common life-friendly conditions might be throughout the cosmos, and it allows astronomers to simplify their mathematical models of the universe’s past as well as their predictions of its future. “Everything is based on the idea that [the cosmological principle] is true,” Lopez says. “It is also a very vague assumption. So it’s really hard to validate.”
Validation is especially challenging when significant evidence exists to the contrary—and a host of recent observations suggest indeed that the universe could be stranger and have larger variations than cosmologists had so comfortably supposed.
Disappoint Me is a novel structured around meals, whether assembled distractedly or seasoned with care, and people making strained conversation over birthday barbecues or overpriced small plates in Hackney restaurants. Like her cult debut Bellies, Nicola Dinan’s highly readable and engrossing second novel paints mealtimes as a sociocultural ritual as much as a means of giving characters something to chew on while they reach new understandings or fail to connect. Food and sex, talk and pointed silence, the heart and the stomach are deftly entwined in this deeply contemporary story which explores friendship, queerness, the pacifying allure of couplehood and evolving social mores among millennial Londoners.
Ben Yagoda’s lexicon is a spin-off from his popular blog Not One-Off Britishisms, an unwieldy title for a fun experiment in which the professor emeritus of English at the University of Delaware tracks British usages in the US. Like all popular books about language, Gobsmacked! does several things at once: it offers a lot of “fancy that!” facts about the origin of popular words and phrases. (Did you know the word “cushy” derives from Persian and Urdu, and was a military term popularised by British soldiers during the first world war?) It also gives the broader historical context of why certain phrases took off at certain times. (A combination of Geri Halliwell and a single episode of South Park is blamed for the introduction of the pejorative “ginger” to the American lexicon – which Pagoda records Ed Sheeran among others lamenting.) Above all, though, it provides a starting point for pedantic language nerds to argue over the specific meaning and provenance of words (the section on “posh” is divine).
There are some major movie stars that have had so much written about them over the years that you really feel there is simply nothing left to learn (but still, if it’s about Marilyn Monroe, you can bet your bottom dollar there’ll be another offering in the offing any time soon). Then there are actors like Al Pacino. We’ve seen him in a bucket load of movies and he’s been around for decades. We probably think we know him too. But do we, really? Sonny Boy (a childhood nickname that stuck) is Pacino’s autobiography and it tells the actor’s story comprehensively and entertainingly.
It was by seeing operas not just as works of art but predominantly as work that I truly began to enjoy and understand them. When you see grand opera, you’re seeing a group of people who can do something only a scarce handful of people in the world can do. Operatic voices can take over a decade to blossom and sometimes don’t mature until a singer is middle aged. Opera singers traditionally do not use microphones, and the sound of their voices filling a 3,800-seat theater like The Metropolitan Opera is literally one of the loudest sounds a human voice can make without screaming. Through the shape of the mouth, the muscles in the diaphragm, and the way singers move air through their chest and lungs and mouth, they transform oxygen into some of the most beautiful and most difficult to perform music. There is an unbelievable amount of skill, to say nothing of physical strength, required to transform a frail human body into a finely configured wind instrument. Attention is paid in practice to single phrases of music (that is the equivalent of a phrase or a sentence in writing), which are to be shaped differently depending on the language you are singing in, the specific tradition and era of the opera, the character’s emotional state in that moment of the performance, the singer’s own voice, the director’s instructions, the composer’s intentions, and the expectations of an audience who has heard this particular phrase pronounced in an arbitrarily specific way at that opera house for the last generation.
Published in 1934, under the pseudonym Joanna Field, A Life of One’s Own is a strange bird, often described as a meta-diary or field guide to Milner’s mind; WH Auden praised it as a “detective story”, referring to the narrator’s deductive reasoning and rigorous process. Milner herself envisaged the book as a sort of self-help guide, which could provide an accessible alternative to psychoanalysis. The positive response led her to eventually retrain as a psychoanalyst herself. A Life of One’s Own, meanwhile, was this year republished by Routledge Classics: a testament to its enduring relevance.
Ninety years later, Milner’s struggle to feel actively engaged in her life might be dubbed “languishing”: a term that was popularised during the pandemic to describe a sense of general stagnation. Her account of feeling herself to be drifting, led by external opinion like “a cork bobbing on the tide”, resonates strongly today as smartphones and social media serve us continual diversions and drown us in chatter.
What might seem like outlier local drama is actually the way these things tend to go when the reputation of New York City as both an idea and real place is put in the hands of, well, present-day New Yorkers. Street co-namings, those bonus street signs that sit above the actual street sign to indicate that a person of some importance is somehow connected to the area, are always a fight. (“There’s always endless drama around them because community boards have strong opinions, block associations have strong opinions, and you also want to do it in a way that makes everyone feel good,” the former Speaker of the New York City Council Corey Johnson told the New York Times in 2017, when people were fighting about the removal of a sign honoring Jimmy Breslin at 42nd and Second.) But these little arguments raise two essential questions about the city: Why do we name streets after people and who actually “deserves” it?
In Memories of Distant Mountains, a selection from the illustrated notebooks he kept between 2009 and 2022, we are thrown deep deep into the mind of a mature writer, a Nobel Laureate. Even so, it reveals what he might describe as a naive and sentimental passion for both writing and painting.
Young people today are no less obsessed with climate disasters than Gen X was with nuclear war. Where we had nightmares about missiles, theirs feature mass extinctions and climate refugees, wildfires and water wars. And that’s just the beginning. As Dorian Lynskey, a British journalist and critic, writes in Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, wherever you look in contemporary pop culture, humanity is getting wiped out—if not by pollution and extreme weather (as in Wall-E and The Day After Tomorrow), then by a meteor or comet (Armageddon, Deep Impact), a virus (Station Eleven, The Walking Dead ), or sudden, inexplicable infertility (Children of Men).