Ardent hobbyists are often viewed as eccentric. I think they might be the only normal people left. As a rule, they are active and engaged. They are more interested in making than consuming. They dream and they do. A passive appreciation for steam engines or military history or orchids isn’t enough. Hobbyists want to take part. “I grew up fascinated by history, and wargaming helps you make that interest interactive,” says Daniel Faulconbridge, editor of Wargames Illustrated. “It’s not good enough for me that I just read about the Battle of Hastings, I want to collect the figures that represent the troops that fought in the battle, and then paint them and play a game with them. So it’s taking your hobby to the Nth degree.”
I have been writing this column for 15 years. That means there have been 180 of them, filled with wisdom, insight, whimsy, prejudice, contradiction and sometimes just outrageous stupidity, all of it interrogating the way we cook and eat now. As this is my last of these columns I thought, as a service, I should summarise the key points. Are you ready? Good. Let’s go.
As a piece of writing it is absolutely in a class of its own, with an inventive and often witty prose style telling a complex story in a spell-binding way that has a rare physicality about it.
There is, quite literally, never a dull moment.
To run your finger along the body of work snapshotted here is to appreciate offering somebody the opportunity to drill deep into a subject that produced pieces that stand the test of time. A ludicrous thought in our clickbait world.
It matters too that Talese had an uncanny knack for mining gold where others wouldn’t even be bothered to break ground.
We’re settling into the hot tub, me with my glass of wine, my 30-year-old daughter with some probiotic drink. She lives in my pool house with her husband whose birthday is today. He’s working late tonight as a server at the Coffee Zone, wearing an “it’s my birthday” sash to get better tips. I let them stay for free as long as they pay electrical, to make them accountable and curb their use of AC. All three of my daughters have moved back home for stints of time to reset and relaunch. This daughter is a struggling writer. These days, moving back in with parents is a thing. Not like in my day. When you left home, either booted out or running free, you stayed gone. Mom booted me. She’s been on my mind since last week when I stumbled upon her lifelong list of things that made her angry.
This elusive, desperate desire that drives her narrator seems to me the central subject of Notice. It’s what gets Nina both into trouble and out of it; it’s the thing that keeps her alive but also pushes her to the brink. It is likely this same sort of desire—an urgent attempt to make meaning of her survival—that drove Lewis to write.
“Sometimes I worry you have Alzheimer’s,” says my daughter, yanking my brain back into the hot tub.
In Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves, Nicola Twilley argues that at each stage of its development, modern refrigeration has driven us to eat and behave in ways we wouldn’t have chosen if we could design the system from scratch. To take just one example, she explains that refrigeration is the main reason that so many commercial tomatoes are flavourless. It isn’t just that the volatile aromas in a ripe tomato are killed by the cold, or that the ripeness may be generated by ethylene rather than the sun, but that most of the tomatoes grown commercially don’t have the ‘genetic capacity’ to be delicious, as the plant breeder Harry Klee told Twilley. Tomatoes, she writes, are bred for ‘the sturdiness to be shipped and stored under refrigeration’. The important thing is that, at the moment of purchase, a consumer should deem the tomato red and perfect, even if it is left to spoil after it reaches the salad drawer at home.
Most of us are familiar with Nietzsche’s words, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking” or Thoreau’s famous line, “The moment my legs begin to move my thoughts begin to flow.” And so we assume that walking, somehow, oils the brain. We move our feet in a forward direction, and our brain simultaneously begins to crank out new ideas.
But, as I discovered when I walked in the footsteps of legendary feminist Simone de Beauvoir, this is far too simplistic. Writers, artists, thinkers and musicians, walk for very different reasons, in very different ways, and with very different outcomes.
I was walking around the city the other day and maybe it’s just me or maybe it’s because I like things I used to like and dislike new things I don’t like (though I will say I do like new things I do like), but it just seemed to me that New York has really changed.
Right?
Like, you know what I mean, right? Like . . . it’s different.
Right?
Seethaler’s subtly understated voice remains warmly welcome in a literary culture that often displays its intentions too obviously. Many will love this calming, gentle and unsentimental story. Certainly, Seethaler remains admirably true to his creative vision. A poet of the small, the random and the event without consequence, his is a world we can all enjoy.
I checked into the Hôtel Crystal just as dawn was breaking. The room was small and stained with time. From the window, I watched a bleary-eyed waiter drag crates of wine bottles into an alleyway and smash them one by one.
I made myself a stranger in Paris in order to find a book. A book that some consider lost. But I believe books are rarely lost. Rather, they wait. They bide their time as shards, fragments, phrases, and titles. A book has many lives, though some are more shattered than others.
The emails from my dad were an oasis. With a cheerful tone and dry wit, he’d check in on my academic happenings, signing off with a paragraph of encouragement. But the heart of his letters was the commentary in between, op-ed style musings that felt pulled from the Times, personalized just for me. His thoughts on political happenings were razor sharp and darkly funny. But his fixation on politics didn’t stop him from waxing long on the brilliance of, say, Battlestar Galactica, or a new dish at the local Chinese takeout spot. What struck me most, what I could feel, even then, was the lyricism in his notes, a rhythm that made you feel as if you were singing the lines.
My Manhattan apartment does not have a dishwasher. We’ve debated installing one; there’s room, just barely. I always pull back at the last minute. I like doing the dishes by hand, the more the merrier, the crustier the better. Sometimes music will be playing. I’ll find myself moved by it, the way the English novelist Barbara Pym was, as she wrote in a 1943 journal entry, when she caught herself weeping to Yehudi Menuhin on the radio one evening while her hands were “immersed in the washing-up water.” More often, there will be silence. I get my best thinking done here, far from a blinking cursor, my raw hands plunged into the soapy warmth.
Despite its imaginative nature, it carries a strange sense of realism that leaves readers wondering about the journeys we have embarked on to wrest control over our own lives. This is a serenade, a love song to memory and a naming of that which we dare not speak out loud.
It’s some measure of the extent of urbanisation that the bookends to our day may not be birdsong but the sound of a kettle as the water in it reaches boiling point. That “tock” is made by a miniature device, a small disc consisting of alternating strips of two different metals. When exposed to heat, the metals expand at different rates, the disc gradually curves, and a switch is tripped, cutting off electricity to the kettle. Few of us know this; we write odes to nightingales, not thermostats, even though it is the latter that provides our morning soundtrack, those sonic notches that mark the passing of each day. Tock, tock, tock.
I thought little about those metallic notes until I read Tim Minshall’s new book, an ambitious exploration of the world of manufacturing. In it, he examines the myriad things that surround us, from transistors to ice-cream: the intricate, ingenious ways in which they are made, then shuttled around the world to reach our doorstep. For Minshall, manufacturing has been overlooked and undervalued, with perilous consequences. He writes that it “has become like a sewage system: essential for our lives, yet out of mind until things go wrong”.
In the earliest days of film, one star was such a box-office success that she was able to sustain a career in Hollywood over 45 years and hundreds of movies. But despite Helen Gibson’s loyal fans, her fearless stunts, and her role as a pioneer, not many people know about her today.
Mallory O’Meara’s biography “Daughter of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood’s First Stuntwoman” dusts off Gibson’s remarkable legacy.
Jones offers at least some hope that while the gaps in health care and other needs remain after the pandemic, that chronicling them the way she has creates a memorial in itself that could spur action.
Valentine’s Day and chocolate — they simply go hand in hand. In recent years, the confection has been regarded as the symbol of affection with stores and major retailers selling them by the box. But in its earliest iteration, chocolate carried a completely different meaning. In fact, it was the antithesis of romance. It wasn’t until the 1860s when chocolate became synonymous with Valentine’s Day thanks to one British chocolatier.
Elegy, Southwest is artful and beautifully written, as are the depictions of Southwestern wastelands and the life that somehow perseveres there. There are many questions left unanswered by the end, though perhaps that’s the desert for you: a longing that’s never reciprocated, a need for nourishment that will never materialize.
Without relinquishing any tension, O’Donnell vindicates some of the reader’s fears – and, ultimately, hopes – for Ciara. In the process, she turns the idea of the domestic novel inside out, relocating it in emergency accommodation, where every tiny act that goes into keeping two children fed, clothed and convinced that it’s all a big adventure is at once more daunting and more meaningful.
Having been a Chicagoan now for way too many winters, in the last few years I’ve tried to, if not embrace it, then tolerate it better. But why waste a whole season waiting for it to end? The longer I live, the less of that kind of time I have. In her new book, “How To Winter,” Kari Leibowitz offers practical strategies to help you harness your mindset to thrive on cold, dark, or difficult days.
Years ago, not long after ending a marriage, I was having coffee with two women, new acquaintances, when we discovered that we were all divorced. “Yay!” one cried. “Hot Divorcées Club!” Something shrank and recoiled in me. Why must we be hot? Couldn’t we just be divorced? Plus, what in divorce, a thing about as common as marriage, made it worthy of a club? Both being married and being divorced seemed equally empty categories on which to stake an identity. That these two ladies were above average in the physical attractiveness stakes is not the point, nor is that semi-facetious striving for common ground in which new female friendships are forced or forged. The point was we couldn’t just be women who’d been married and now were not.
It’s now clear humanity lacks the luxury of eternity. We know this because evidence has accumulated to show that there are greater, even more encompassing mortalities than our own. We now understand Earth and its life had their origins and, one day, they will be cremated by our ageing Sun. A ‘third death’, then. Beyond that, even the Universe itself has its bounds: it began with a bang, and the consensus view is that, in the distant future, it will likely have its end. Thus, a ‘fourth death’. Multiple grander mortalities, expanding concentrically outward.
We are only just coming to terms with this – this supremacy of finitude. It marks a historic reorganisation of our sense of orientation that may, one day, be judged comparable to that of the Copernican Revolution. Just under 500 years ago, Nicolaus Copernicus initiated a string of discoveries eventually proving our planet is not the centre of a tidy, manageable cosmos. Instead, Earth pirouettes around a mediocre star within an ungraspably vast Universe. It took generations for people to start noticing – and giving names to – what Copernicus had wrought. Similarly, we are only now waking up to the significance of the nested mortalities we live within. With the most seismic revolutions, it takes time for the dust to settle before we can glimpse the landscape transformed.
Perhaps that's down to our culture, which is rooted in tradition, and my parent's generation having to deal with the struggles of being an immigrant in the West. Taking the safer route made sense to ensure success. Their tried and tested attitudes don't only apply to food. They apply to technology, destinations, and careers, too. But food, being the thing that brings us all together, is something we've taken an interesting journey on, guided by the younger members.
This being McBride, it’s the telling that’s as important as the story; in seeking to portray what it’s like to live in a body and a mind, she operates at a frequency most novelists ignore, intuitively able to recognise how something so apparently insignificant as the position of type on a page – indentation, spacing, line breaks – can be pressed into communicating nuances of thought and emotion.
Most of us take our senses for granted, at least until one of them stops working. But despite the usefulness of smell, sight, touch and the other senses, they took millions of years to work themselves out. Indeed, many creatures in the tree of life have evolved just fine without eyes or ears, while others have senses we can only imagine. Just the fact that we can see and smell is something of a miracle, and scientists are still learning how they work — and how they work together.
When Shamil Thakrar talks about Bombay, he has a favourite word: palimpsest, “something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form”. In fact, Shamil has been (fondly) banned from using it by his cousin Kavi, with whom he co-founded Dishoom, the hugely successful group of Bombay-inspired restaurants, 15 years ago.
But palimpsest is an apt word to describe Bombay – or Mumbai, as it is known internationally – the port city on India’s west coast, where multicultural influences eternally trickle in without erasing the layers of what came before. Two eras of imperial rule, two waves of Persian migration, a Hindu majority and a large Muslim community, people from every Indian state, language and ethnicity rubbing shoulders with one another, Maharatis, Gujeratis, Punjabis, Goans; 19th-century gothic architecture alongside art deco, neoclassical opposite mid-century, and the onward march of new development along every major road. And it is absolutely its own place, of itself: “Everything has coalesced here and become ‘Bombayified’,” says Shamil, as we wander around Colaba, the southernmost tip of the old city.
For all the robot vacuum cleaners in the world still can’t answer the vital question: what counts as work, and when and how much is a person owed for doing it?
What does it mean to believe something? Is it possible for a person to profess an idea sincerely, yet discover that he never really believed it? If a man’s actions contradict his beliefs, is he necessarily a hypocrite, or might both the actions and the beliefs be sincere? Which, in that case, does he really believe? How does self-deception work? If a man understands an idea to be false, how can he arrange to believe it? Can he will himself to believe what he doubts? These and many questions haunt the Russian tradition. Explored by the great thinkers and novelists, they have led to insights about the human condition that are one of Russian literature’s great gifts to the world.
These questions occur to the fictional characters of Dostoevsky. But he posed them in his own agonized quest for faith as well. His faith was precisely that: a quest for faith, a process. In what sense?
Andrei picked up an unused bread plate from a nearby table. “This is Bishkek,” he said, pointing to one edge. He swept his finger across the plate’s diameter to the opposite side. “Here is Eugene.” Pronouncing the name of my hometown, he emphasized the first syllable, shortened the second: Yew-jin. “It’s mistika.”
I stood next to him, translating for my friends and relatives gathered on the terrace of a lakeside resort in Wisconsin. It was a second wedding of sorts, taking place almost a year after we signed our marriage certificate in a dank, low-ceilinged government office in Bishkek. There we had celebrated with friends at a hotel outside the city, next to a bluish mountain river that charged over boulders, posing for photos under birch trees that glowed yellow before the sun dipped behind the canyon wall. Our guests raised toasts to wish us many tapochki—pairs of slippers—in our future home.
The last time I talked to my mother, she laughed over the phone from her kitchen in South Carolina, saying she had to hang up to go to the bathroom — a running joke between us. (We both have tiny bladders.) It was July 28, 2024 — a Sunday morning — and I was lolling in bed in my sun-filled apartment in Astoria when I decided to call her to say hi. My sister Ellen, who lives in upstate New York, had the same instinct the next morning. When they talked, my mother mentioned to her that she felt funny — an unusual admission, given how rarely she complained. A lifelong Catholic and daughter of immigrants, she was always insistent that she didn’t want to “bother” anyone. Ellen suggested she go to the doctor that afternoon.
When my mother didn’t show up for her weekly mahjong game on Tuesday evening, her friends in the 55-and-over community where she lived in Bluffton went to her house and found her unconscious and unresponsive on the kitchen floor. They called an ambulance.
Spy fiction is mostly a gently conservative genre. The reader is usually asked to sympathize with the status quo and against those attempting to radically alter it; when a government is portrayed as behaving badly, it is generally also portrayed as malfunctioning. The genre also has a conservative relationship with realism. Since so much of spying happens behind closed doors, hidden by design from the general public, it is hard to know what counts as verisimilitude or plausibility, or even whether and in what way this might matter. In tandem, there has always been a permeable membrane between spying, spies, and writers of spy fiction. The two undisputed giants of the genre, John Le Carré and Graham Greene, were also, famously, practicing intelligence officers before becoming writers, and a great deal of Le Carré’s invented spylish—“mole,” “honeytrap,” “lamplighter”—has entered the vernacular of actual espionage practitioners. Kim Philby, the most famous double agent of all time (and the author of his own intriguing spy memoir) was nicknamed after the protagonist of Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim, arguably the first spy novel to be recognizable as such. Something about espionage and writing attract the same sort of people, or at least some of the same people. Again, it is hard to know what this means in practice. Le Carré declared his novels to be deliberately unrealistic; Ian Fleming, another espionage alum, wrote James Bond with no particular relationship to actually existing intelligence operations in mind at all.
Though no one may be around to hear when a tree falls in the forest, countless critters take note. Dormant fungi within the tree awaken to feast on it, joined by others that creep up from the soil. Bacteria pitch in, some sliding along strands of fungi to get deeper into the log. Termites alert their colony mates, which gather en masse to gobble up wood. Bit by bit, deadwood is decomposed, feeding new life along the way.
Yet breaking down wood — one of the toughest organic materials — is easier said than done, and scientists still have much to learn about the vital ecological process. Some are studying the tricks fungi and other microbes use to digest wood, and the ways that animals harness this skill for their own benefit. Others are tallying deadwood’s roles in recycling organic matter and stabilizing the global climate. What they’re learning is beginning to lay bare the complex interactions playing out inside expired trees.
It can be easy to take our maps, images and story of the Moon for granted. But over the past six decades, our cultural and scientific relationship with the Moon has been radically altered. Multiple robots landed on the Moon last year, and more are on the way. The Moon is a place and a destination – but this was not always the case.
My very first memory takes place at the local Blockbuster store, where I went one night with my father to rent a movie. I was four or five years old. He let me run ahead of him through the aisles, and I remember a rare, if not completely novel, feeling of independence. Turning a corner, I saw a man wearing glasses and light-wash jeans, with a brown beard and brown hair, standing with his back toward me, facing the shelves. He looked exactly like my father. I hugged him around his legs. When the man turned around, I realized that he was not my father but rather another man, a stranger, whom I had mistaken for my father. And the stranger seemed displeased with my affection. I exploded into tears. This is not only my first memory but also my first experience of terror.
There is nobody alive writing sex like this. McBride is able to capture the often indistinguishable line between agony and pleasure, the way one can be known totally and known not at all from one moment to the next. I read this book in the flayed aftermath of a break-up, still in that state where it seems unlikely that I’ll ever touch anyone again. The execution of these scenes was so powerful that it felt as if they were recalling painful memories of my own, instead of those belonging to fictional characters. What a glorious achievement, to make life instead of merely describing it.
Two years ago, I began to remember things that had never happened. I would wake in the morning with these vicious intruders: images and sequences of horrific events, all of them realistic and detailed, all of them entirely false. I knew they weren’t real, but my mind had encoded them as memories, and they felt like memories—traumatic ones at that. I would spend the morning walking through the logic of how they couldn’t be real, proving it to myself over and over again until they gradually faded. Research turned up the cause quickly: insomnia, nights of sleep interrupted repeatedly by my daughter’s prolonged illness, a mind that has always been plagued with particularly realistic nightmares. After a month or so, my daughter improved; we all started sleeping through the night; my insomnia receded, and so did the false memories, but the experience was a haunting one.
A sexy restaurant is one of those things that you can’t really put your finger on, but you know it when you see it. There’s a certain combination of factors — good lighting, a chic crowd, plush seats — that all adds up to a place that oozes sex appeal. But this mood is not the result of some ineffable je ne sais quoi, it’s the result of dozens of deliberate design choices that restaurant owners are making in order to create a space that feels cozy enough to canoodle with a new (or old!) flame.
Six months ago, I flew to upstate New York to bring my 77-year-old father—suffering from a major depression—back to Colorado to live with us and, hopefully, begin to live again. I took him from the only home he’s ever truly known: Ithaca—or, more specifically, Brooktondale. More accurately yet, a stretch of Landon Road, no more than a quarter mile long, where my father had once lived in a converted barn on thirteen acres of woods my family has possessed since 1864. Just up the hill on Landon Road is the large, white house in which my grandfather was born, and the currant bush from which, when I was young, he picked small, bitter, red berries—the main ingredient of his favorite pie—and dropped them into a tin pail. Coming down the rise, where Landon Road angles into Lounsberry Road, a steep gravel drive leads up to the Quick Cemetery. There, from the ages of six to sixteen, I helped tend the graveyard that bore my family’s name.
Paleontologists aren’t easily deterred by evolutionary dead ends or a sparse fossil record. But in the last few years, they’ve developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. In the absence of a living specimen, scientists say, an ambling, flying, swimming, or slithering automaton is the next best thing for studying the behavior of extinct organisms. Learning more about how they moved can in turn shed light on aspects of their lives, such as their historic ranges and feeding habits.
Digital models already do a decent job of predicting animal biomechanics, but modeling complex environments like uneven surfaces, loose terrain, and turbulent water is challenging. With a robot, scientists can simply sit back and watch its behavior in different environments. “We can look at its performance without having to think of every detail, [as] in the simulation,” says John Nyakatura, an evolutionary biologist at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Indelibly though the various emperors are drawn, The Lives of the Caesars ranks as much more than a collection of individual biographies. Read in its entirety, it furnishes a sweeping analysis of how, over the course of a century and a half, autocracy came to bed itself down in the Roman state, evolve and replicate itself. It is a drama shaped as well by its interplay with a further dimension: that of the supernatural. So rooted in the diurnal realities of political life are Suetonius’s biographies that the intrusions of the otherworldly, no matter how repeatedly they occur, invariably deliver a jolt. Ghosts are glimpsed on lonely roads, phantoms on the banks of distant rivers, and portents everywhere.
Rocks, minerals, metals – these materials from the depths of the Earth and from distant space – have inspired reverence and horror, wonder and greed. They have power over us, and they give us power. It’s likely that the first murderer used a rock. So did the first artist. Our connection with the mineral world is bone deep.
In Under a Metal Sky, travel writer Philip Marsden follows the seam of this story from the defunct tin mines around his Cornish home to the untapped gold deposits of Svaneti, high in the Caucasus. How, he asks, have the materials we shape, shaped us? And what lies behind our often impractical desire to dig, chisel, smelt and collect?
Into this debate marches Morgan Falconer, an art critic and educator at Sotheby’s. His new book, “How To Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art,” proposes that a solution to this problem may be found among the enfant terribles of the early 20th century, who radically transformed our perception of what art can be with their unorthodox, confrontational, and irreverent methods. It’s an engrossing survey, full of colorful characters and winning personal touches. Like all good art, it ultimately raises more questions than it answers.
In the creepy Netflix series You, which I’m slightly embarrassed to say I’ve watched one season of, manager and book nerd Joe Goldberg presides over a sprawling New York City bookstore, the kind that any book lover would be excited to come upon and linger in for hours. Besides books, it’s filled with plush chairs and reading nooks and lamps that emit soft light. A charming doorbell jingles when customers enter. Joe’s something of a romantic, and right away he falls for Guinevere Beck, an insecure graduate student who comes into the store and asks his help finding a book. Cringey flirting ensues—followed by obsession, stalking, and serial murder. Meanwhile, the store, Mooney’s—the exterior of which was filmed outside an actual bookstore on the Upper East Side, Logos Bookstore—seems to be doing just fine financially. Little do customers know, Joe has in the store’s basement a climate-controlled rare book storage and repair room-turned-dungeon where he tortures and murders his kidnapped victims in between friendly cash register interactions aboveground.
Murders aside, I find myself wishing I could visit a bookstore like Mooney’s. (Better yet, to walk—not drive—to one.) Bookstores, whether hosting author talks, book release events, or other gatherings, provide important social functions to their communities. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg in 1989 coined a term for places like bookstores, cafés, coffee shops, and hair salons, among others: “third places,” sites where people spend time while not at work or at home. As historian Evan Friss notes in his 2024 book The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, third places “function as critical sites for intellectual, social, political, and cultural exchange. They nurture existing communities and foster new ones.” Because they “cost nothing to enter,” “they are de facto public spaces, gathering spots.”
In November 1923, Ford Madox Ford, “like everyone else in Paris,” was sick with flu. Yet he was optimistic. He dashed off letters from a typewriter set on “a table across my bed.” In 1908, Ford founded The English Review, and edited its first fifteen issues. Now, as he wrote his daughter, he was “at my old game of starting reviews” again.
The Transatlantic Review had an almost preternatural birth. Paris “gyrated, seethed, clamoured, roared with the Arts. Painters, novelists, poets, composers, sculptors, batik-designers, decorators, even advanced photographers, so crowded the boulevards that you could not see the tree-trunks.” Ford had a “vague sense rather than an idea” of what to do about this “immense seething cauldron” of artists, who “bubbled and overflowed,” but lacked a practical vision. His brother Oliver suggested a magazine. (The original name of the magazine was to be the Paris Review. The name was switched because the first serial advertisement was from Compagnie Transatlantique.)
Medieval science, broadly speaking, had followed Aristotle in seeking explanations in terms of the inherent causal properties of natural things. God was certainly involved, at least to the extent that he had originally invested things with their natural properties and was said to ‘concur’ with their usual operations. Yet the natural world had its own agency. Beginning in the 17th century, the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes and his fellow intellectual revolutionaries dispensed with the idea of internal powers and virtues. They divested natural objects of inherent causal powers and attributed all motion and change in the universe directly to natural laws.
But, for all their transformative influence, key agents in the scientific revolution such as Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton are not our modern and secular forebears. They did not share our contemporary understandings of the natural or our idea of ‘laws of nature’ that we imagine underpins that naturalism.
This dissonance between the idealized notion of dying speech, based on people’s expectations and cultural ideals, and the reality of final moments so often complicated our understanding of death. And when delirium enters the equation, the gap between expectation and reality widens even further.
What should we make of people who can speak and yet make no sense?
One big author and one major publisher announced within weeks of each other that they were through with the practice of blurbs, and the resulting conversation threw publishing into a tizzy. In the process, it provided a new lens on who has access to clout and resources in an increasingly precarious industry.
“You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip” is a whirlwind inquiry into one of society’s oldest practices. McKinney writes about gossip with an intellectual rigor that borders on reverence, explaining how a raunchy Doja Cat lyric exemplifies the theory of mind and how the notorious burn book from “Mean Girls” actually helped teenagers avoid a predatorial teacher.
In the privacy of notebooks, lists live a different life. Some exist largely as traces of the act of attention, the conceptual material of their connection having eroded away. Absent a centre of gravity, they are hardly lists at all. Intention and occasion are exposed as ephemeral, and what the purpose of these lists may have been no longer matters. Liberated from project, they have been spared the fate of becoming content. They have eluded expectation and, thus, disappointment. Only curiosity remains, both before and after the fact. These lists are little anarchic wastes of time. Valueless in terms of product, they remind me of the higher value of pointless acts of attention, and to love what is incomplete.
A bald eagle visits me every day. I have learned to recognize his voice as he approaches, a querulous complaint against the crows that usually accompany him like a desperate ring of courtiers vying for his attention. To people who will listen, I have mentioned that to be an eagle is to be harassed from sunup to sundown. If the crows leave him alone for a moment, their place is taken by herring gulls cursing his existence. No one likes an eagle except other eagles, it seems, and the eagle shrinks down when the birds dive at him, this bandit among the large pines. Half amused, half ashamed of his bulk and thieving nature, he settles on the topmost rim of branches, a Billy Budd foretopman, his eyes scanning the cold waters of the Pennamaquan River as it merges with Cobscook Bay.
Don’t Make Me Laugh is, at its most straightforward, a robustly funny and fleetingly soulful revenge caper, set in a comedy world that’s about to have its (long-overdue) #MeToo moment, but Raeside’s freewheeling style – a perfect match for lonely, lackadaisically flawed Ali – allows her to edge into some discomfiting, provocatively grey areas. Because while Bonatti is clearly a dangerous creep, it’s a certain type of self-styled “good guy” that the author dares to expose here.
For all the rhapsodizing about candy, she is smart, witty and philosophical on the nature of time, memory, grief, poverty vs. affluence, exploitation and sexism. Mix in a vein of child psychology.
Tatsuya Ueda, the owner of this operation, gets felled trees from local forestry cooperatives, and from gardeners and maintenance crews. This year, he expects to process enough wood to heat about a dozen homes through the long, wet winter here. The solar panels that shelter the wood could power 15 more for an entire year. Solar is clearly a less carbon-intense alternative to the imported fossil fuels that fulfill the majority of Japan’s energy needs. Under the right circumstances, burning wood or other organic materials may be too.
This tidy system of renewable-energy production isn’t scalable. It cannot replace the need for solar and geothermal power plants, or wind farms. It wouldn’t make sense in exactly the same way elsewhere. But it makes sense here and now.
This alienation from the self is at the hollow, restless heart of Anna and Tom’s lives: constantly yearning, empty of meaning. Latronico’s thought-provoking book is anything but.
By bearing witness to trauma, engaging civic memory, and addressing complex moral and ethical considerations of guilt, responsibility, and suffering in discursive rather than didactic ways, fictional works can play a role in preparing the ground for more formal processes of reckoning.
Interwoven through the feminist meditations are Hero’s thoughts about her current relationship, which she directs to her boyfriend using the second-person voice. Loosely plotted, Hero is a fearless interrogation of female desire, anger and loneliness.
One problem with this shifting space-time is that as it stretches and shrinks, the density of the energy inside it changes. As a consequence, the classical energy conservation law that previously described all of physics didn’t fit this framework. David Hilbert, one of the most prominent mathematicians at the time, quickly identified this issue and set out with his colleague Felix Klein to try to resolve this apparent failure of relativity. After they were stumped, Hilbert passed the problem on to his assistant, the 33-year-old Emmy Noether.
Noether was an assistant in name only. She was already a formidable mathematician when, in early 1915, Hilbert and Klein invited her to join them at the University of Göttingen. But other faculty members objected to hiring a woman, and Noether was blocked from joining the faculty. Regardless, she would spend the next three years prodding the fault line separating physics and mathematics, eventually setting off an earthquake that would shake the foundations of fundamental physics.
From a whale watching boat near Valdes Peninsula in Argentina, marine biologist Maria Piotto observed a mother-calf pair of southern right whales. As the calf splashed around in the water playfully, a kelp gull hovered overhead and persistently swooped down to nab at the breaching baby whale’s flesh. The gull was attacking with such intensity, Piotto says, “that I thought the gull must be getting a really considerable meal.”
Piotto, a doctoral candidate at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina, wondered what impact this harassment was having on baby whales. From June to December, southern right whales migrate from the frigid Southern Ocean to the warmer waters off the Valdes Peninsula to mate and rear calves. The decade spanning 2003 to 2013, however, saw an unusually high number of calf deaths in the region compared to previous decades. Piotto says she was curious to know how much of a role the gull attacks played.
A 19th-century Asian game is lighting up TikTok. Mahjong, long synonymous with grannies at Chinese New Year, is attracting a new legion of fans. Mahjong clubs with light shows and DJs are forming in Los Angeles and New York; luxury hotels such as the Standard, East Village, in New York City are holding mahjong nights for their guests; and the game has also been given the nod by Hollywood as actress Julia Roberts revealed she plays mahjong every week with her girlfriends. The new generation of players is finding that the game, which the actress said aims “to create order out of chaos based on random drawing of tiles,” is not only helping people create social connections after the Covid-19 lockdowns, but also boosting their mental health.
So strong is this porridge's connection to illness that some people can only stomach it when they're under the weather. Like Yuri Cath, a Japanese Indonesian who recently became a Singaporean citizen. "I had a negative association with congee for the longest time because I only had it when I was sick," she says, echoing a sentiment of many locals. "So, having it kind of made me feel ill." Not for long though, she laughs – the flavours won her over again, "and I love congee now".
It's tempting to call congee the king of flu food, but this is Singapore, one of the most culinary-obsessed nations on Earth, and competition is fierce. A literal melting pot, the island's official languages are English, Tamil, Malay and Mandarin, representing the many cultures that form its core population. Each brings with it enough comfort dishes to soothe an army.
I realize I sound like my grandfather—these kids with their TikToks! Complaining about loud bars certainly ages me. When you’re opposing youngsters, you fear you look like you’re living in a black-and-white film criticizing the Beatles. But as a man staring down 50, I’m not going to take advice from a generation raised on Red Bull and vodka. Age helps wine, whisky, and, I believe, appreciation of the enduring traditions that underlie a good place to drink them.
Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without an exchange of gifts among my two grandmothers, mother, and aunt, featuring the trait they shared: all four were left-handed. Waiting for them under the tree in our sunny Pasadena living room might be left-handed oven mitts or can openers, kitchen gadgets too mundane to pass as gifts for righties, but treasures to the matriarchal quartet. I’ll never forget the crows of delight one Christmas morning as they unwrapped identical packages to find pairs of left-handed sewing scissors, the first designed and widely marketed not just with upside-down handles but with inverted blades to make cutting fabric easy.
We Do Not Part is captivating, moving and from sentence to sentence Han Kang’s sensitive approach to Jeju 4.3 makes us reflect on why we still need to remember and commemorate this tragedy and the many others that still go ignored.
Like the cycle of water, these intertwined stories flow and shift from darkness to light, flood to drought, past to present, from the worst that people are capable of to their very best. Elif Shafak weaves a magnificent and spell-binding story.
I’ve long contended that Anchorage, Alaska’s largest and most complex city, has been denied its proper place in the state’s literature. It’s a void Chiappone steps into three times over with stories that delve into the city’s poverty, homelessness, cultural divides and transitory nature. His characters encounter the emptiness of its busy streets, the dark secrets lingering behind its doors and the futility of trying to change things. It’s hardly a complete picture of an often vibrant metropolis, but in a book plumbing the subsurface of several of the state’s communities, it’s an overdue recognition that the sprawling conurbation that dominates it in both size and influence is as distinctively Alaskan as any of its other towns.
Here’s how blurbs work, in general. An author writes a book. If the author is very lucky, a publisher gives them a deal for that book. The publisher’s marketing team then draws up a plan for how best to get readers, bookshops, and book reviewers interested in the book. That plan will include getting other authors to say that they think the book is good: a blurb. The author, the editors, and the marketing team will send versions of the book, in digital and physical “proof” formats, out to authors with some name recognition that they think might read the book ahead of its publication and offer their positive feedback, so that when the book is released into the world at large, it will do so with those quotes on its cover.
Sounds good, on the face of it. Books go out to readers adorned with reassuring evidence that the book is worth that reader’s time. But almost everybody in the literary world hates them. And depending on what corner of that world people occupy—reviewer, author, bookshop buyer, bookseller, book critic, agent, book editor, marketing professional—they hate them for slightly different, often conflicting reasons. On the heels of the Simon & Schuster news, I asked people from across this ecosystem to anonymously dish the dirt: What’s so bad about blurbs?
Junior year of high school, my mom took me to the dentist to have my teeth filed down into sharp, flat daggers, then covered with perfect, shinier teeth, like press-on nails. They were called veneers. All the Hollywood It Girls like Hilary Duff were getting them at the time, whereas my broke-ass classmates could barely afford fake vampire teeth for their Halloween costumes.
Technically, Mom couldn’t afford to buy me veneers either. Once as a kid, I asked her if she could take me to the library, and she told me we couldn’t go because gas was too expensive. It wasn’t the first time I realized we were poor, but it was the first time our poverty seemed cartoonishly inescapable: we couldn’t even afford to drive five blocks for free shit.
In addition to being a clever use of format in which to seed clues and unravel the truth, this is a terrific examination of old shibboleths that still have uncomfortable relevance for readers today. The Turnglass as a whole confronts readers with the many ways in which injustice – whether it be via patriarchy, classism, or eugenics – has manifested throughout history, cloaking itself in a pretense of caring for the disadvantaged while ruthlessly enriching itself via their exploitation.
Brendan’s magic isn’t the kind that comes from a wand, but the kind that arises out of love. This is a surprising, tender and warm-hearted novel about a real place and real people: a gentle gift for spring.
Starling House demonstrates that Alix E. Harrow is an author to follow for anyone who finds pleasure in surprising reconfigurations of familiar genre conventions into something entirely new and alluring.
Their return has been captained for more than 20 years by biologist Juan Vargas Velasco and his partner María Catalina Porras Peña, a couple who long ago moved away from the comforts of the city to endure extreme winters living in a tent or small trailer, to manage the lives of the 48 condors known to fly over Mexican territory. Together — she as coordinator of the California Condor Conservation Program, and he as field manager — they are the guardians of a project whose origins go back to condor recovery efforts that began in the 1980s in the United States, when populations were decimated, mainly from eating the meat of animals shot by hunters’ lead bullets.
This whole phenomenon is very American; deep pagan and agricultural traditions were adapted by a newspaper editor, businessmen, and groundhog hunters into a spectacle and pageant. Everyone knows Punxsutawney Phil, the Coca Cola of groundhogs, but even his well-trod history has got some strange darkness: Phil saw his “blackest shadow in history” in 1938, ominously had an “unfortunate meeting with a skunk” in 1937, and apparently got so sick of fame that he blasted off in a “Chucknik” spacecraft in 1958. That’s right: Punxsutawney Phil was involved in the Cold War.
But beyond Phil, there are so, so many other hogs cursed with a vision of the world to come. So many that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps track of the most accurate groundhogs and ranks them by their track record.
I was a bit of a weird little kid, from a palate point of view. While my friends were eating 1970s peanut-butter-and-jam sandwiches and Chef Boyardee pizza from a box, I was devouring beef tongue dipped in sweet-hot mustard and chicken necks boiled until the meat fell off the little bones. I liked oily things and fishy things: shmaltzy grieven made from crispy fried chicken skin, smoky lox that my parents ordered from British Columbia by the side, sardines from a can with a big squeeze of lemon. For something lighter, I ate flaky homemade potato knishes or cheese blintzes, fried to a crispy gold and smothered in sour cream. Best of all were August’s wild blueberry varenikes, boiled and ready to squirt their purple juice into your mouth.
We Do Not Part is both act of witness and a beautiful poetic object. There are repeated images of birds, candle flame, trees. Even as family relationships become tangled or undone, the novel is bound together by a secret web of lines, of nerves “like silk” and cotton threads, and this lacework expresses the theme of connection in the title.
With brutal dialogue and an exploration of what it means to be successful, “I Am Not Jessica Chen” is a firm reminder to those wishing to be someone else that being someone you are not is far more difficult than loving yourself.
At its core, Old Growth Forest Walks is presented as a fun, educational guide for a hiker interested in the immediate area. For the right reader, it could be the basis of a wonderful year-long project: take one of these hikes every other weekend with this book in hand to enhance the experience. But it is also a gift for the reader who curls up on a winter night with the aim simply to escape from the drear and enjoy a journey of the mind.
Here’s a fun game we can play. I’m going to give you some quotes from a few recently published novels. Some of them are vaguely associated with an infamous downtown scene in New York. In this scene everyone’s either young or cool or beautiful, and they’re all skinny and smoke cigarettes, and they laugh at all the fussy pieties of the world, and they’re all constantly online while also constantly going to parties. According to the young, cool and beautiful people, they’re trying to find a new and authentic literary voice in an age of social and technological disintegration. They’re trying to carve out their own space, away from the prissy bullshit of the mainstream literary world, where they can write something real. They’re enraptured by the surging raw nowness of the internet, and they think literature that tries to rise above that is just blinding itself to the way we actually live today. They want to bear witness to their times, and yes, they want to have fun and look good while doing it, because otherwise what’s the point?
All of this testing not only costs our healthcare system and patients in time and money—insurance reimbursements and patient copays—it can also do real-world harm to our patients. It increases the possibility of false positive results, which may lead to still more testing, creating a vicious cycle. It can drive misdiagnosis, followed by unnecessary prescriptions and even surgery. It can expose patients to unneeded radiation from X-rays and scans, and anemia from repeated blood draws. It can also cause unnecessary anxiety, with patients spending sleepless nights worrying about their health, and taking precious time away from their lives to make endless hospital and doctor visits.
So what drives us to overtest?
The main element tying all of them together is Novik’s writing and storytelling style, which is luscious and vivid and at times deeply emotive in a way that sticks with you long after certain stories are finished. It means that when you turn the page to a new story, you’re never quite sure what you’re getting into – save for the fact that it might make you really feel something.
Good Dirt is a taut and entertaining multi-generational saga, weaving past and familial ties in short chapters, always with a blazing sense of the present. The ostensible subject Wilkerson seems to want to tackle is the ways in which personal trauma, family lore and history can shape an individual’s sense of themselves, and their place in the world. But the novel’s sustaining appeal comes from witnessing Ebony learn to love again. The novel is really a love story at its core – the love between Ebony and her parents, and the love she’s trying to let go of for Henry. Wilkerson manages to coax even the darkest scenes in the family’s past with a genial sensibility. It’s an impressive feat, and reminded me of the singular ecstasy of inhaling a well-written book.
Two starving boys, fleeing the Nazis in 1945, sharing a single raw egg.
This poignant image serves as a symbol of a Jewish family’s survival and resilience in “How To Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty” by Bonny Reichert.
In the memoir, she attempts to reconcile the privileges of her middle-class 1970s upbringing with the wartime deprivations faced by her father and his cousin.
What makes Shon Faye’s memoir about love so refreshing is that it resists heteropessimism, and tries to do something more hopeful. Faye is a trans woman who spent years convinced that she would always be an “exile” from the closed world of heterosexual romance, but the idea she puts forward in this book is that this sense of exclusion is not unique to her. Faye argues that, collectively, we ask too much of romantic love: we expect it to solve all of our problems and when, inevitably, it doesn’t live up to the hype, we feel excluded from the “happy kingdom” of successful partnership. Instead of blaming men for love’s disappointments, Faye analyses her breakups to try to imagine better ways of approaching relationships. This is a memoir but it is also a kind of self-help book. Faye is trying to teach herself – and her reader – how to love in a different way.
It can have many symptoms and can appear as a diverse range of seemingly unrelated difficulties pertaining to books and reading. Bibliophobia can only occur when someone has, crudely stated, loved books to a dangerous degree.
You may have bibliophobia if you frequently experience intense reactions to books that somehow act on you, or activate you, in ways that you suspect are unhealthy or hurtful—or at times, simply bad for you. And yet they are necessary; you would not be you without them.
McNally considers herself a humble bookseller. She is also the founder and owner of an ever-expanding empire, McNally Jackson, now likely the third-largest buyer of books in the city, after only Barnes & Noble and the Strand. In December, the company celebrated its 20th anniversary. Over the course of the past two decades, as many independent booksellers closed their doors, what began as a single shop on Prince Street has become five. Among them, readings and launches are hosted most nights of the week, and happy are the authors who manage to secure a spot. “McNally Jackson,” one novelist said, “conveys prestige better than anyone else.”
Boasting the largest digital camera ever created, Rubin is expected to study the cosmos in the highest resolution yet once it begins observations later this year. And with a better window on the cosmic battle between dark matter and dark energy, Rubin might narrow down existing theories on what they are made of. Here’s a look at how.
For cleansing one’s mind and reconnecting with nature, there’s nothing like a calming walk in the pastoral splendor of the English countryside. Normally, it’s a safe and carefree experience—unless you’re in one of my Walk Through England mysteries. In that case, watch out! Danger can lurk behind every tree, around every bend, and even in the warm confines of a country pub.
There’s a scene near the end of Anne Tyler’s new novel, Three Days in June, where the two main characters, a divorced middle-aged couple named Gail and Max, compare their lives to the movie Groundhog Day, “where people live through the same day over and over until they get it right”, Gail reminds him. “Wouldn’t it be great if the world worked that way?” says Max. Instead, Tyler’s novels are records of the numerous ways people get things wrong and learn to live with it, and how the wrong things have a sneaky habit, eventually, of turning out to be right.
Stephen J. Campbell, a professor of art history at Johns Hopkins University, has a sleuth’s acuity about the “misinformation, cliché, and myth” that has always distorted biographical accounts of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). His interest took root when he began teaching courses on Leonardo in the late 1990s. Now, in an erudite treatise, he argues that this species of wishful thinking has intensified dramatically over the last two decades. He targets cultural influencers who trick out the High Renaissance polymath as a “character” who resonates with many a current concern: the bastard; the loner; the religious agnostic; the vegetarian; the left-handed misfit sexually attracted to people of the same gender. Likewise, he scolds pundits who designate technological trailblazers as latter-day Leonardos.
In a 1975 lecture titled “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” Ursula K. Le Guin summarized the plot of one of her worst stories: “This scientist was escaping from a sort of prison-camp planet, a stellar Gulag, and he gets to the rich comfortable spoiled sister planet, and finally can’t stand it despite a love affair there, and so re-escapes and goes back to the Gulag, sadly but nobly.” Le Guin called this “a really terrible story, one of the worst I have written in thirty years of malpractice.” And yet she reworked it into one of the great American political novels, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, first published in 1974 and now out in a 50th anniversary edition. The book has aged well. In her lecture, Le Guin lamented that the “moral proposition” of The Dispossessed had not been completely dissolved in the “mass of living experience”: “The sound of axes being ground is occasionally audible.” I heard them only faintly, and they grow fainter with each rereading, as the harmonies and disharmonies of Le Guin’s creation become ever more discernible.
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem “The Speed of Darkness” not long after James Baldwin told an audience of writers that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” We make the world not with our ballots — though they do, oh they do matter — but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of, the stories we believe to be true. Politics, after all, is just the weaponized business of belief. And it may be that the only real antidote to the insanity of our times, to this planet-wide storm system of helplessness and disorientation, is to resist with everything we’ve got the belief that our story is finished, that we and our organizing principles are the final word of this universe, dragging behind us the fourteen-billion-year comet tail that blazed from the first atoms to the atomic bomb.
When the sun sets, the tower takes on a menacing quality, with its concrete terraces jutting out like spikes on a club. Later at night, when the construction lights are on, it’s possible to imagine that the building is inhabited—that people are up there drinking wine, slipping into the infinity pool, looking down on the city at their feet. Before it started leaning, 1 Seaport was designed to withstand hundreds of years of wind off the harbor. Until someone figures out what to do with it, it’ll hang there, the tallest eyesore on the skyline.
Everyone has their favourite example of a trick that reliably gets a certain job done, even if they don’t really understand why. Back in the day, it might have been slapping the top of your television set when the picture went fuzzy. Today, it might be turning your computer off and on again.
Quantum mechanics — the most successful and important theory in modern physics — is like that. It works wonderfully, explaining things from lasers and chemistry to the Higgs boson and the stability of matter. But physicists don’t know why. Or at least, if some of us think we know why, most others don’t agree.
As the taxi approached the remote Lake District house where I’d be spending a week doing a silent Buddhist retreat, a thought struck me with Zen-like clarity.
You must be out of your tiny mind.
Billed as “A Verse Novel,” this collection of poems written—so the opening notes tells us—while the author was hiking the San Andreas Fault, fits perfectly into the framework of “a composing as the body tires.” Writing en plein air (as the painters say), Gander’s long lyric sequence moves forward and also halts “to watch” and “wait”: patiently testing certainties within the environment’s truth. While Gander’s trajectory is through a desert, and the “swags” here are endangered Joshua Trees, his pilgrimage (surely the correct term for a walk toward truth) is in the tradition Stevens inherited.
Haber, while seemingly random and confused in choosing which of his narrator’s thoughts lead to which others, is actually impressively in control of the novel’s sequences that reveal a fragmented mind wrestling with an interior chaos as he confronts the deepest loss imaginable.
Surprising, complex, and strangely beautiful, Remedy is one of those smart horror novels that deliver the gory, brutal stuff while also digging deep into the humanity of its characters.
Chihaya rejects this kind of faith-based relationship to books: “Books, like people, should not be asked to save us.” She has arrived at this hard-won knowledge after a lifetime of asking books to do exactly that, and repeatedly feeling them give way beneath her. Indeed, she views all her past attempts to read “for something”—“for comfort, for pleasure, for validation, for comprehension”—as proof that she used to be a “terrible reader.” Bristling at accounts of reading that are premised on progress (“I am disturbed and irritated whenever I encounter the moralizing claim that the main point of reading fiction is relentlessly positive self-improvement”), she instead characterizes reading as a thoroughly mixed bag: “Sometimes it is nutritious. Sometimes it is poisonous. Sometimes—surprisingly often—it is both.”
Evans’s nonfiction marries that faith in the value of subjective experience to a fierce interrogatory intellect; the result is a fascinating overview not only of a writer’s evolution but of the shifts in our understanding of art as (to quote Bernardine Evaristo from Evans’s profile included here) “activism and community”.
The 21-year-old engineering student, her sister Alexandra Ósk, 16, and their friends Arndís Inga Árnadóttir, 18, and her sister Áslaug Anna, 15, are now the first generation of female guides on their river in northern Iceland, and among the very first female fishing guides in the country.
But after thousands of salmon escaped from an offshore fish farm in 2023, threatening the wild salmon population of multiple rivers, Andrea fears the job and the livelihood she has grown up with may not exist to pass on to her own children.
Seven years ago, Robyn Drayton stood out the front of her home in Newcastle, north of Sydney, and felt overwhelmed with a desire to get out.
“Something came over me. I just burst into tears,” Drayton, now 63, says. “I’d done a lot of travelling overseas and had a caravan and knew it was time.
“I told my three boys I’d see them in a year, but then I never came home.”
More broadly, the stories capture the spirit of our doomscrolling age: the paranoia, the dread, the defensiveness and resentment that has curdled into political death spirals everywhere. There is something cleansing about being confronted with these realities.
Searls’s point is that all writers, translators included, have the same tools. If I’m trying to produce a novel in English, whether that novel is an original or a translation, then the English language is my medium, just as oil paint was for Claude Monet. It follows, then, that I’m as constrained by English—by its rules, its conventions, the linguistic habits of its speakers—as Monet was by his chosen canvases and brushes. Searls admits that translators deal with the “especially strong constraint” of the tight relationship between the original text and the new one, but the latter is still, well, new. At the end of the day, the translator’s job, the essential aspect of moving a text from one language to another, is to write a new book—and write it well.
But Searls’s book isn’t called The Philosophy of Writing, and his claim is not that translation isn’t unique, but that the writing aspect of it isn’t. What differentiates translation from the other literary arts, he argues, is the way translators read. The Philosophy of Translation is a meditation on what it means to read like a translator, which means, really, that it’s an ode to close reading. Searls writes in his introduction that, rather than adopting the imperious stance of theory—a discipline that too often “suggest[s] the foolishness or impossibility of trying to engage in the practice” without it—he hopes that practicing translators will “find these ideas suggestive, illuminating, or at least lovely.” As a practicing translator myself, I certainly did, and yet what I most enjoyed about The Philosophy of Translation was something more implicit in its mission. Without claiming that he set out to do so, Searls has written a philosophy of what, how, and why to read.
The global financial crisis of 2008 and ensuing Great Recession should have been a wakeup call, but in the interveneing years, to many have gone back to sleep. And the world of finance is hardly unique. Economics is supposed to be a science whose models tell us how to maximize general welfare — meaning the welfare of the many, not the few at the top. But in case after case, whether in dealing with the climate crisis, economic inequality or international trade — economists’ answers don’t deliver as promised.
Something has seriously and fundamentally wrong in this so-called science, and “Ricardo’s Dream,” the new book by English writer and researcher Nat Dyer, a fellow of the Schumacher Institute and the Royal Academy of Arts, helps us understand why. Dyer's subtitle sums things up nicely: “How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray.” But to be clear, he doesn't argue that all economists forgot the real world, and thereby seeks to point toward a more promising future.
Mothers and Sons is an intricate, compelling novel about the power of stories and, especially, about the need to let go of those stories that keep people stuck. Maybe, in that sense, it's a fitting novel for the new year after all.
The novel offers a compassionate portrayal of a laconic, tenacious protagonist as she tries to rebuild a shattered life, without ever masking the low drumbeat of grief that rumbles beneath.
Biblio-memoirs can be as distinctive as the lives and books they document, but they tend to support the idea that reading is good for you—that it can teach you things, or help you better understand yourself and others. The first hint that Sarah Chihaya’s darkly humorous new entry in this small genre will follow a different path lies in its title, Bibliophobia. It is not a paean to the healing powers of narrative, but an account of how her reliance on books played a major role in a crisis, leading her, for a time, to fear them.
Agnes Callard doesn’t just admire Socrates, the philosopher forced by his fellow Athenians to drink hemlock in 399 BCE; she wants to be him. Entirely conscious of himself as an icon, Callard writes, Socrates “presented himself as a person one can become.” Following in his path, she styles herself as the sort of philosopher who doesn’t just do philosophy at work, but strives to live philosophically. Even as a college student, Callard tried to be a public philosopher in the Socratic mold, setting up shop on the steps of the Chicago Art Institute, the city’s most agora-resembling locale, inviting random museumgoers to engage in philosophical conversations. Those who accepted her invitation were grilled with questions about the meaning of life.
The non-modest mission of her sprightly new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, is to develop a strand of ethical thought that she labels “Neo-Socratic,” and which departs entirely from the prevailing ethical systems of Kant, Mill, and Aristotle. Among the challenges of the project, she notes, is that Socrates was content to refute everyone else’s positions while affirming nothing concrete himself, meaning that his philosophical heirs do a lot of performative contradiction, which is not sufficient. Nor is what we like to call “the Socratic method”—teaching by asking questions until students produce the correct answers—what Socrates had in mind. Such attempts to mimic him miss the point, which is that true thinking should be dangerous to your intellectual equilibrium. It should strive for answers that overthrow the terms of the questions being asked, not simply prove a point.
Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, has given us a definitive biography of the scholars who produced the most disturbing collection of fairy stories ever published. Rigorously and at times densely written, this is a book that aims to situate the Grimms and their studies of language in the larger historical context of the intellectual and political movements of their time, and in this it succeeds admirably. But it is also an implicit commentary on the constancy of the human mind. Grimms’ Fairy Tales plants a question mark over what it means to be a fully developed human being.