I first read Patricia Highsmith’s novels in the fall of 1994. I was twenty and living in a room in her house in Tegna, Switzerland, that was plastered with bookshelves full of her first editions, organized in chronological order. Pat was seventy-four and knew she was about to die; she had been, it was rumored, diagnosed with cancer or some other terminal disease. I was trapped in her world with her, trembling. She had weeks left to live and had spent so much time writing about how to get away with murder. I fantasized that she might try to kill me.
The story of how I ended up in that house begins a few months earlier, in Zurich, with me on a blue tram, on my way to dinner at the house of Anna and Daniel Keel, a couple I’d grown friendly with. Anna was a brilliant painter for whom I had been modeling since I was seventeen. Her studio smelled like oil paint, instant coffee, and the brine in which floated the mozzarella balls that she ate while working. She was a genius. In the foreword to one of her catalogs, she explained that although she felt guilty about spending “so much time in the company of two lemons” (the subjects of her still lifes) when there were so many big problems in the world, she had concluded that being able to see beauty was also essential. She taught me, in the years I knew her, a great deal about fighting my fears and following my passions.
I gave up journalism and started writing novels because I was tired of telling the truth.
….This is a punchline I’ve used over the years whenever I’m asked about my career transition from being a reporter to writing fiction, and it almost always gets a laugh. It’s not quite accurate—there were many, many reasons why I switched from journalism to fiction—but there is certainly a painful honesty about this statement that reflects my failings as a reporter.
So if large language models demonstrate a preference for em dashes, it’s because they have been trained on books and other writing whose authors embraced them first. The idea that AI adoption could unwittingly recast any single piece of punctuation as a literal mark of fraudulence seems like an unbearable irony. The arrival of AI in our lives without introduction or permission brings with it fears about human endangerment; coming together to defend what we fear losing is an act of solidarity whether it’s macro (say, nationwide protests against an undemocratic political regime) or decidedly micro (declaring on Bluesky that ChatGPT “can pry my em dashes from my cold dead hands”). Defiance is a rational response to tech businesses urging us to prioritize the use of tools meant to replace our work and welcome their most bizarre and dystopian interventions.
The Geiger counter starts flashing and buzzing as I hold it against the 100-year-old Parisian doorknob. I am standing in the doorway between the historical lab and office of Marie Curie, the Polish-born, Paris-based scientist who invented the word "radioactivity" – and here is an especially startling trace of her. The museum that houses the lab has invited me in here to track radioactive handprints left by her when she worked here in the early 20th Century. Here, on the doorknob, is one such trace. There's another one on the back of her chair. Many more of these invisible traces are dotted all over her archived notes, books and private furniture, some only discovered in recent years.
But when we reached the far wall, several shelves sat empty.
Accornero shook his head. “It’s weird for me,” he said quietly. “I’ve never seen it this way in my life.”
The empty shelves are the result of a sharp drop in production across the region. Fontina producers are making significantly less cheese than usual, brought on by a perfect storm of challenges: climate shifts, rising costs, labor shortages, and changing consumer habits. For one of Italy’s most iconic mountain cheeses, the ripple effects are beginning to show, not just in the aging caves, but on grocery shelves around the world.
In September 2023, Geoff Dyer was interviewed about his latest book “The Last Days of Roger Federer,” which dealt with “things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out.” The journalist asked Dyer if, after writing a book about endings, he would consider writing one about beginnings. Dyer’s response was a categorical no. It was only a couple of weeks later that he realized the book he had just completed was precisely about beginnings — “specifically my own.”
Dyer shares this anecdote in his author’s note to that book. “Homework” is a chronicle of his early years growing up in the English town of Cheltenham in the 1960s and ’70s. It marks a departure for this richly versatile writer. Dyer’s previous nonfiction books have encompassed subjects as diverse as jazz, film, war, literature, and photography. In this, his first memoir, the subject is himself, in various incarnations. The result is both a captivating portrait of the artist as a young man and an insightful snapshot of postwar Britain.
English, as Stefan Collini observes in his wry and compendious new history of the discipline, Literature and Learning, tends to inspire an extravagant attachment rarely associated with, for example, geography or chemistry. Half the labour of writing a history of English must lie in gathering encomia to the subject by its besotted disciples. To the patrician epicures and monied amateurs who ushered the subject into universities at the beginning of the 20th century (men who fondled poems like antique clocks and ranked novelists like vintages of claret), the study of literature was “a glory of the universe” or “the spring which unlocks the hidden life”. For the evangelists of the critic FR Leavis and charismatic secondary school teachers of the Sixties it was a moral crusade that pitted humanity against the spirit-killing incursions of machine civilisation: English had “life-enhancing powers”, and its study was essential if a modern person hoped to retain “any capacity for a humane existence”. Collini winces fastidiously at some of these “soaring affirmations”. And indeed, such confident panegyrics read strangely in an age when the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking. Today, English is reduced to doing its pathetic, blundering best to ape the sciences, grinding scholars through the Research Excellence Framework and promising students “transferable skills”, that mad but unkillable doctrine beloved of prospectus writers which holds that studying ecocritical perspectives on early Shelley is useful preparation for making PowerPoints at PWC.
There are many ways in which human beings come to terms with their fragility. Anand makes a strong case for compassion as a first response; but always informed and fortified with rigorous science.