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.