It is during the 20th century that a variety of thinkers from a variety of disciplines — anthropology, sociology, psychology and philosophy — start calling the very idea of a true or authentic self into doubt. This is the period during which the Enlightenment ideal of freedom and autonomy and self-determination fell from grace, accused of fundamentally misrepresenting humanity, of disguising the fact that we are creatures thoroughly shaped by the contingencies of the culture in which we are embedded.
Given the collapse of individualism, why celebrate weirdness?
All children grow up: those who write for children need, therefore, to write fiction that will speak to them both now and in their future. I have two work lives – I write non-fiction for adults, and fiction for children. The question I am most often asked is: which is harder? Children’s writing is by far the work I find hardest, because it has its own urgent imperatives, and its own laws, and those laws are both the laws of writing and the laws of childhood: laws that must be taken seriously.
In winter 2020, Hoppe spent months living on a ship wedged into an ice floe, through the polar night, to study the limits of photosynthesis in the dark. Her team’s recent study in Nature Communications reported microalgae growing and reproducing at light levels at or close to the theoretical minimum — far lower than had previously been observed in nature.
The study shows that in some of the coldest, darkest places on Earth, life blooms with the barest quantum of light. “At least some phytoplankton, under some conditions, may be able to do some very useful things at very low light,” said Douglas Campbell, a specialist in aquatic photosynthesis at Mount Allison University in Canada, who was not involved in the study. “It’s important work.”
A footprint and a pile of animal scat is the spark that sets a group of rangers on a special trek through a vast forest complex in Thailand’s deep west.
National park personnel and researchers have traversed undulating dirt trails through thick and dry evergreen forest, home to black bears, elephants, tapirs and pheasants.
While all animal activity is of interest, this is primarily a tiger hunt - one designed to save the big cat.
At first, my mother Linda took little heed of her sign and which traits it supposedly embodies. Now, after overcoming a difficult adolescence and the challenge of nurturing a neurodivergent son, she feels much more ectothermic than she did during her childhood in Benghazi, Libya.
"I like being a snake," Linda said. "If someone told me that my birthday was wrong and I was actually born in 1966, the Year of the Horse, I would not be able to relate. I would tell them, no, I'm definitely a snake."
An inventive framework, then, but McBride’s originality is most striking in the way she handles words. She uses verbs as nouns, nouns as adjectives. On a hot day “the boil outside makes sloth of in here”; on a cold one, a caress is “a skate of chill hands”. Stephen’s damaging history is “the past’s thwart of your now”. McBride coins new words: “blindling” for blindly stumbling. She gives familiar ones new cogency by misplacing them: “all his vaunt’s gone”. She is playful, planting puns and submerged quotations in the stream of Eily’s consciousness. And then she will spin a line in which grubby imagery is rendered lyrical by rhythm: “Down where the foxes eat KFC, and night drunks piss, and morning deliveries will bleep us headachely up from dreams.”
Christine Coulson’s One Woman Show (2023) embraces an unusual formal conceit: it tells the story of one woman’s life via museum wall labels. Each entry begins with the title of an “artwork,” its year of construction, details about whom the artwork features, and the name of the collection to which the artwork belongs. Coulson follows these headings with brief paragraphs that ostensibly describe the work of art, though the art demonstrates fantastical agency. These wall labels become sites for conflict and character development, the fractured structure blurring the boundaries between visual art, life, and literature while implying questions about objectification and ownership.
This is really a book about art—how and why we make it and need it. That involves digging, a care to ever reconsider the past, a drive to outrun whatever hunts and haunts us, from the Green River Killer to familial trauma. And a hope to be fiercely feminist—at one point she rightfully laments, “How do women have any space left inside us with all the shit we swallow?”