Robert Caro has spent most of his life asking questions of others, and he rather prefers it that way. He is gracious and fascinating company, but while he takes evident pride in the work he has done, he’s ambivalent about too much talking of himself. Toward the end of our final meeting, he’ll mutter with wry good humor, “I never want to use a sentence with ‘I’ in it again.”
Recently, Caro has found himself doing quite a few interviews. Most have been to mark the 50th anniversary of the book that made his name: The Power Broker, a 1,162-page biography of the urban planner Robert Moses, the man who, in Caro’s persuasive telling, did more to shape 20th-century New York than any elected official. But Caro has also agreed to meet me to discuss the wider arc of his life’s work, and to show me some of the material in his newly opened archive at the New York Historical, formerly known as the New-York Historical Society. More than once he refers to our encounters as his “last interview,” which I think is less meant to sound ominous than to signal a resolution to himself. “I’d like to get back to work,” he says.
I don’t find anything intrinsically special about bookstores. I wouldn’t even say their value is created. That’s too “finance bro” for me. In ebbs and flows, with peaks and valleys, there is something special though in the intimacy of how it comes to be valued. By intimacy I mean it comes in moments, quiet and loud, as when a customer is newly heartbroken or in love, and encounters the heartbreak and love of others, and the curiosities they walked in with carom in new directions. That isn’t something there waiting to be found in the bookstore, another purchase for the bottom-line. It’s just something that can happen there, not unlike a fire.
Coral is two things at once. It is a stony underwater structure, often spanning swaths of seafloor, that shelters ecstatically diverse marine life. It’s also the animal that builds that structure: an anemone-like polyp less than a centimeter long. By building calcium carbonate cups one on top of another and budding asexually, polyps collectively bulge, branch, ripple and fan out into diverse shapes, including shelves, boulders, pillars, branches and cauliflower-like nubs.
Why do corals form one shape over another? A single species can form different shapes under different circumstances, and simple environmental factors such as light and water flow aren’t enough to explain the variety. What coral researchers could really use is a computer model that simulates how polyps grow into complex structures from simple physical rules. Such a tool could help them understand how reef structures grow and change, and it could guide their efforts to restore corals where they’ve been lost.
A decade after the dress, we’ve learned a lot about how people could see a simple image so differently from one another. The dress is of particular interest to me as a researcher who studies differences in perception and cognition between individuals. While the colors of a piece of clothing might be a trivial thing to disagree about, we can all learn a thing or two from the dress about how to navigate high-stakes disagreements.
The battleground at the heart of a struggle between an 89-year-old man and a multi-billion pound multinational is a small junction in a Norfolk village, where a red phone box stands. And at the red phone box, sheltering from the wind, is Derek Harris. Last month, he learned that BT (formerly British Telecom) was threatening to close the phone box in the village of Sharrington, where he has lived for 50 years, when he saw it on the agenda of the parish council meeting. “I thought: ‘I’d better do something about this,’” says Harris.
But just when you think you’ve got it sussed – ah, a semi-philosophical enquiry into the nature of connection and human frailty! – it twists again. We’re back with Conway, and an unexpected denouement that uncoils with page-turning urgency. Having been absent a while, the chief of mission returns, or a fractured version of him anyway – a portrait of a man who, like Petit before him, possesses a singularity of vision and an ability to endure extremes. And the book becomes… something else. A character study? An ecological thriller? Certainly it wasn’t the book I thought it was. But sometimes it’s best to take a breath and follow the line.
Giesberg isn't trying to generate reunion stories. Although there are a couple of those in this book, Giesberg tells us the cruel reality was that: "The success rate of these advertisements may have been as low as 2%."
Instead of happy endings, these ads offer readers something else: they serve as portals into "the lived experience of slavery."