Jane Muschenetz’s poems don’t look like the sonnets you remember studying in high school English. If anything, they’re more likely to call to mind your statistics class.
Flip through the pages of her poetry chapbook Power Point and you’ll see charts, graphs, and citations galore. One poem visually documents maternal mortality rates and women’s unpaid domestic labor in such a way that the bar and pie graphs spell out the word “MOM.” Another tracks deaths from gun violence across the globe and is presented as a gun-shaped graph. Still others are written in more standard poetic form but include citations that reference documents put out by the US government, the United Nations, and news organizations.
As a wheelchair user, I’m used to justifying my right to exist. It turns out, as a translator I’ve also found myself having to defend disabled characters’ right to exist. Like a lot of translators, I’ve always loved books. Though literature was my escape from the harsh reality of an ableist world, I’ve never felt represented in fiction. There are many wonderful memoirs written by disabled authors, but those are mostly directed at able-bodied people as a way for them to understand the hardships we go through. But I never find myself in the books I turn to for escapism.
Nonhuman intelligence has been the subject of a long-running and contentious war in science whose sides have periodically skirmished over the past 150 years. It was Charles Darwin who first popularized in the West the abilities in plants that in any human we would be comfortable describing as a display of intelligence.
But we don’t. Intelligence is still, for the most part, tightly defined as a human quality. The strict rules have relaxed somewhat in the past few decades, thanks to animal behavior scientists from primatologists to insectologists agitating to admit the objects of their study into the smart club. Crows can use tools, dolphins and bees use language, whales appear to communicate across hundreds of miles, octopuses are extraordinary escape artists — the list is getting longer every year.
All told, from fires and dust storms, from crashing ocean waves and hurricanes, a trillion trillion bacteria cells are emitted into the air each year—a mass of more than 100,000 tons. Close to the same number of fungal spores are released as well, and with their bigger size, they weigh in at about 50 million tons. What comes up sooner or later comes down. The aerobiome—the Earth’s entire habitat of airborne creatures—is a peculiar realm: an ecosystem of visitors. A flea may hop into the air for a second, a diatom may be carried by the wind for days before falling back into an ocean, and a common swift can fly for ten months before landing to build a nest. But sooner or later, they all return to Earth. By one estimate, a single square meter of ground may be pelted with 100 million bacteria during every hour of a rainstorm.
I don’t use “authentic” when I write about Mexican food, for one good reason: There’s no such thing. Food is constantly evolving, and every version and iteration of a dish or cuisine can be argued to be as legitimate as the one that came before it.
Writers tend to assume painters think like them, but they don’t. Sophie Madeline Dess, an accomplished art critic before she pivoted to fiction, knows this. In What You Make of Me (2025), she has written not only a very good novel about painting but also a believable painter’s novel.
Pressly’s book is less about privacy and more about what it protects, a condition he calls “oblivion.” A good deal of the book is devoted to justifying the choice of this word, although it is used to express a fairly straightforward concept: Privacy actually concerns limits to the knowable. For Pressly, oblivion is “a particular form of not knowing,” a circumstance in which “there is no information, no fact of the matter, one way or the other.” The book, then, is an intricate case for a quite simple and appealing intervention: Sometimes we want others—and even ourselves—not to need to know anything at all. It is Pressly’s contention, and a convincing one, that this particular unknowing “is essential for the sense of potentiality, depth, play, and freedom in human affairs.”