This little website will be on break for a couple of weeks, from March 5 to 19. See you soon.
Works of imaginative literature are not manuals for life, though they might along the way gift us with some wisdom; they are sites of discovery and rediscovery.
The whole “local” author issue is superpuzzling. I thought being Canadian was good enough.
Mirzakhani was an influential cartographer of the hyperbolic universe. While still in graduate school, she developed groundbreaking techniques that allowed her to start cataloging these shapes, before moving on to revolutionize other areas of mathematical research. She hoped to revisit her map of the hyperbolic realm at a later date — to fill in its details and make new discoveries. But before she could do so, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died in 2017, just 40 years old.
Two mathematicians have since picked up the thread of her work and spun it into an even deeper understanding of hyperbolic surfaces.
There are certain books that bide their time, like plants, waiting decades to flower. If you’re lucky enough to have an Agave americana on your land, wary enough to stay clear of its sharp-toothed leaves, and patient enough to hang around for anything from eight to thirty years, you will be rewarded, at last, with the sight of its butter-yellow blossoms. Likewise, if a copy of “The Underground Man,” a novel from 1971, by Ross Macdonald, has been sitting on your shelf for ages, unread and barely noticed, try opening it now. Suddenly, it’s a book in full bloom.
The cause of that flowering is not hard to find. You hear a hint of it in the opening sentences: “A rattle of leaves woke me some time before dawn. A hot wind was breathing in at the bedroom window.” At once, we are on our guard; since when did the weather become an intruder, stalking us while we sleep?
A London political adviser who was living in the English countryside during the pandemic, Dalton knew next to nothing about hares. Yet when she found that the leveret hadn’t moved for hours, she decided to take it home and try to save it — despite her fears that by interfering she might hurt its ability to return to the wild.
What follows, as recounted in the new memoir, “Raising Hare,” was an unexpected experiment in coexistence.