Christian Dines' hands were twitching. As though he were still gripping his video game controller, about to make a killer move. But the game was switched off and his hands were free. The US-based sustainability advisor had also noticed how, when he glanced at objects in his room, he felt an urge to absorb or "collect" them, like weapons or power-ups in his game.
He swallowed hard. "I thought, 'what the hell is this?' It was something I'd never experienced before as a gamer," he says. After a week of playing the same game maybe two or three hours a day, Dines' virtual experience was spilling over, disturbingly, into reality.
How one navigates and deals with perfidy is one of the questions that Zora Neale Hurston raises in her posthumously published novel, The Life of Herod the Great. A work of historical fiction focused on the story of King Herod and his ties with Sextus Caesar and Marc Antony in the first century bce, the novel required more than 14 years of research and is a text of considerable and sublime genius: a study of how ancient military empires were able to engulf a series of territories through puissance and deceit. But at the root of the novel is something far less grand and more commonplace: What does one do when one is betrayed? How does one gauge and handle treachery?
How did the language you’re reading this in come to exist? The Indo-European family of languages covers most of Europe, the Iranian plateau, northern India and parts of Asia. Its members are spoken by almost half of all living people, and they all stem from a common source. English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Norse and many others (more than 400 still exist) can all be traced back to this starting point: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Laura Spinney’s new book tells the story of how a language that may initially have been spoken as a kind of lingua franca by only a few dozen people evolved into the mother tongues of billions.
The premise of Rot, Padraic S. Scanlan’s comprehensive, elegantly written, and heartbreaking account of what was surely the most terrible catastrophe to befall Ireland in the modern era, is succinctly expressed in a passage from the book’s epilogue: “The structures that built and justified British imperial power in Ireland meant that in 1845”—the first year of the Great Famine—“the leaders of the United Kingdom could find no other way to explain the worst subsistence crisis in the new country’s short history than a definitive lack of civilisation among the Irish. The empire could conceive of no other useful tools to meet the crisis than the principles of the free market and the workhouse.”