“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only for children. They are more than fantasy, more than fiction, shimmering with a surreality so saturated that it becomes a mirror for what is realest in us, what we are often yet to see. They enchant us with their strangeness because we are largely strangers to ourselves, ambivalent in our yearning for transformation, for redemption, for homecoming, restless in our longing to unmask the face of love and unglove the hand of mercy. They ask us to believe in magic and reward our trust with truth.
Roald Sagdeev has already watched one scientific empire rot from the inside. When Sagdeev began his career, in 1955, science in the Soviet Union was nearing its apex. At the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he studied the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside of stars. A few lab tables away, Andrei Sakharov was developing the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet space program would soon astonish the world by lofting the first satellite, and then the first human being, into orbit. Sagdeev can still remember the screaming crowds that greeted returning cosmonauts in Red Square. But even during those years of triumph, he could see corruption working its way through Soviet science like a slow-moving poison.
McClintock had a reputation for eccentricity. Still, her question seemed more likely to come from a philosopher than a plant geneticist. She went on to describe lab experiments in which she had seen plant cells respond in a “thoughtful manner.” Faced with unexpected stress, they seemed to adjust in ways that were “beyond our present ability to fathom.” What does a cell know of itself? It would be the work of future biologists, she said, to find out.
Forty years later, McClintock’s question hasn’t lost its potency. Some of those future biologists are now hard at work unpacking what “knowing” might mean for a single cell, as they hunt for signs of basic cognitive phenomena — like the ability to remember and learn — in unicellular creatures and nonneural human cells alike. Science has long taken the view that a multicellular nervous system is a prerequisite for such abilities, but new research is revealing that single cells, too, keep a record of their experiences for what appear to be adaptive purposes.
Dreaming of Dead People might best be described as an early example of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is the same age as Belben was at the time of writing, and she recalls a similar childhood in Dorset, including a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the book as “a study of the human figure”, and given its parallels with her own life story and its raw and deeply personal style any reader could be forgiven for assuming that the figure is her own.
The book is divided into six very different sections, including a stay in Venice, a treatise on masturbation, a description of a beloved dog’s euthanasia and a vivid erotic daydream involving Robin Hood. It is hard, at first, to understand how these parts relate to one another, for this uncompromising book offers few obvious clues, but on second reading they shift and merge, and the payoff for this extra mental and imaginative effort is a truthful and vivid portrait of a highly particularised human consciousness.
Democracy proves as fragile as its leaders, but TV’s expanse has led to all kinds of unintentional consequences. The Simpsons found such immediate success that it took on NBC’s The Cosby Show Thursday prime-time slot for a ratings tie and led, in at least some small way, to Murdoch’s News Corp owning The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, HarperCollins books, and Fox News. That The Simpsons wins consensus as one of the medium’s greatest creations defies industry gravity.
They say Eskimos have lots of different words for “snow.” I wish there were as many for “lying.” Because I would have loved to tell that frightened, shamed girl sitting in the oppressive silence of that room, imbibing the thick disapproval in the air and believing that she was, to quote Miss Fitz-Maurice-Kelly, a “corrupting presence”—that what she did that day wasn’t so bad at all (although the joke was lousy). That coming up with an imaginary culprit may have been a lie, but it was also creative and kind, and that one day she would turn into a novelist, who would make up things every day, and give people pleasure from it. And moreover, she would explore lying in her work, she would make her main character also tell a whopper that was far more outrageous and disastrously consequential, but creative and kind and morally interesting, too.
Ben, the novel’s protagonist, sets out on a quest to audition for Big Shot, a Shark Tank–style reality show, even though he has no real idea to pitch. Ben is an out-of-work accountant, but he resembles a writer. He spends his days in a library carrel, staring at a computer; he procrastinates, struggling to dream up an invention or a business plan. Gradually, True Failure comes to seem like an allegory for the writing life today.
Always witty, sometimes surreal, frequently diving beneath mundane surfaces to mysterious and mesmerizing depths, An Oral History of Atlantis, the first collection of Ed Park’s short stories, showcases a master of the form.
The result is a comic melodrama that’s never dull, and a satire that hits most of its targets. After the darkness Niven lets in, the ending feels a touch glib, but the slow comradeship that grows between the two leads is charming nonetheless. The Fathers is a fine choice for anyone who likes a little grit in their holiday read.
Cosby’s precise prose and exacting plotting keep “King of Ashes” on a forward momentum. Cosby knows how to draw in a reader. Liking his characters isn’t as important as wanting to know what they will do.
Many writers claim to write from the wound; few claim to have “self-inflicted” it. Even if we take Donoso at his word (and why should we?), the question remains: what child believes an ulcer bestows je ne se quois? To accept his invitation to psychoanalyze, the child of a doctor: “I had cheated the grown-ups, especially my father who was a doctor, and this made me superior to him: the theme of the reverse of power.” Donoso’s first fiction might be described as an act of revolt against the in-house biopolitician who regulated his body. His father was ousted, in the end, by his ulcer. The pain, “a cruel beak,” cut him up inside, and cut him apart. He became “an outcast, a derelict.” He became a writer.
It was a most intriguing request. “I would love to be a human coral,” said Tekoui ‘Jérémie’ Tamari to biodesigner Chris Bellamy, one night around the campfire.
Bellamy had traveled to French Polynesia hoping to craft new materials inspired by nature and had spent weeks with the Indigenous communities there, learning about their culture, wondering how his skills as an engineer and designer could be applied locally. It was the challenge he had been looking for.
If we agree that we ought to make life good for our descendants, and that this means supporting a stable, sizeable human population, how can we achieve this? The solution proposed by Spears and Geruso is no less than a total restructuring of society around care, in which parenting is so well supported socially, culturally, economically and medically that it is seen as a joy, not a relentless struggle. Were this to have been my reality a decade ago, I might have had the football team of tumbling, laughing babies I sometimes feel a pang for. Whether humanity can achieve anything like it in time to avert depopulation seems doubtful, but if there’s one thing After the Spike leaves us with, it’s the impulse to back ourselves.
Valentish’s well-informed, wide-reaching advice will benefit a large audience of readers who feel like they’ll burst if they have yet another small talk conversation about the weather. It comes from a realistic, experiential, and non-judgemental perspective that isn’t invested in the reader being fundamentally different, just a bit less stressed, a little more vibrant.
In the popular imagination, World War II concluded in 1945 with the deaths of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Europe, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. As historians James Holland and Al Murray chronicle in their finely detailed book “Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders,” those events alone were not capable of halting the colossal military might unleashed over the previous six years.
Shade saves lives. That, with little more complexity, is half of Sam Bloch’s remarkably simple argument in Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. It’s a persuasive and solutions-oriented counter to the increasingly frantic warning from climate writers and scientists that, to quote the title of Jeff Goodell’s haunting book, “the heat will kill you first.”
Janet Malcolm once remarked that most well-read people have not read Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans.” Famously inscrutable, Stein’s opus exceeds nine hundred pages and sets out to tell the story of “everyone who ever was or is or will be living.” When Malcolm was tackling the novel, she chopped it into six parts with a kitchen knife.
Perhaps what’s so exciting is that it has tapped into the huge energy and enthusiasm for poetry felt by young writers and readers, who recognise it can be a comfort and release. “Aftershock has given me everything,” Wallis says. “It’s proof that you can take an awful few years and make them into potentially the most astonishing year. Having not wanted to live at all … what it is to choose life over and over again. It’s incredible.”
Gilpin ends her foreword with simple humility: “My life is closing. I am grateful to those who are interested in reading these poems.” Her poised acceptance first seems impossible, then exemplary. Indeed, it is the most fully realized understanding of our pact with life: an appreciation for all that the days have offered despite their unexpected curtailment. Not raging against the dying of the light, but peacefully welcoming it with the same curiosity and openness one held toward life. Gilpin offers all of us a path toward this wisdom which is, after all, the work of our lifetimes.
“Time theft, wage theft, the planet’s temperature—background noise.” But as we know, these are the great stories of our time. How can we bring this background noise forward, so we can actually examine the situation and make decisions? Information Age tackles the problems of work, mediation, self-determination, and reproduction amid the dizzying cultural landscape that makes up millennial life.
Keith Houston’s history of emoji, Face With Tears of Joy, argues that emoji have “become so ubiquitous in our writing, so quotidian, that we should be talking about them in the same breath as grammar or punctuation.” I don’t know about grammar, which seems as fundamental to language, spoken and written, as words themselves. But punctuation? Absolutely. As Houston’s breezy, witty blend of pop culture and tech history ponders exactly what emoji are—symbols? Words? Pictographs? A script? A language?—his assertion that these little images have become an inextricable part of our culture, and even perhaps of our unconscious minds, feels credible, that giant poop emoji by the highway being a case in point.
What’s lost in such diluted coverage is proper assessment of the basic cultural unit. Just as the individual work is what individual artists—whether directors, actors, crew, or producers—create at a given moment, it’s also how viewers fundamentally seek out works: one at a time. And what a review embodies, above all, is one viewer’s experience of it. The essence of the review is evaluation, which of course doesn’t imply the crude simplicity of a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. (There’s a special pleasure for critics in hearing from readers who are unsure whether to take a particular review as positive or negative.) Even as a review confronts a work’s commercial role, it also embodies the opposite—a work’s potential vastness, the possibly overwhelming and transformative impact of a single viewing or listening.
So, what does it really mean to embrace an entangled life? The answer is not straightforward. Truly affirming entanglement means recognising that we are vulnerable, and terrifyingly edible. This is the shocking realisation Plumwood had in 1985, when she awakened to a ‘parallel universe’ in which she was no longer just a person but also ‘food’ for a predator. In the aftermath, she contemplated the tremendous gap between these realities: ‘There is an incommensurability which shuts these two worlds off from each other. They exist as parallel universes, in different dimensions. Yet, we exist in both simultaneously.’
This raises a hard question for those who want to pursue a more intentionally entangled life: how do we embrace living as both ‘people’ and ‘food’? Can we reconcile our moral sensibilities with our immersion in the relentless processes of the natural world? This question has become urgent in recent decades. It was also, perhaps surprisingly, a point of intense concern for one of the 19th century’s greatest thinkers: Friedrich Nietzsche.
When I was knee-high to a grasshopper, we lived in a house in the country—on a rural road on the outskirts of Springfield, Illinois, where the water was from a well, the street name was a number, and the neighbors were farmers. The flat plain of our mowed backyard smudged from tamed grass to tall trees, which marked the edge of my world. I imagined those trees were a primeval forest, its trunks and branches witnesses to the land’s past. I was rarely brave enough to wander more than a few paces into their dark understory, but close to the edge I dug in the dirt looking for arrowheads and fossils. The older I get the more I think about the past of this land that we tread and build upon, and profane.
Teen-agers today are the most photographed generation ever, having been snapped incessantly by their parents before graduating to selfies and Instagram in their own right. Compared with the self-curated, only partially self-disclosing pictures that are the mainstay of social media, however, Salinger’s images—many accompanied by a short text drawn from extended video interviews she conducted—have a disquieting intimacy, offering a sense of the perennial perilousness of adolescence. Danielle D., seventeen, shot in Syracuse, New York, in 1990, is pictured seated in a white wicker chair like a throne, a pair of pink ballet pointe shoes draped over a pushpin board above her bed. Dressed in a stripy T-shirt, khaki shorts, and tube socks, with fair, cascading curls and a winsome smile, she looks like a paragon of the high-school popular girl. The text on the opposite page reveals that, after a manic episode, Danielle spent thirty days in a mental hospital and was diagnosed as bipolar. In the photograph, she is on lithium.
While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and “romantasy” – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today.
Slowly, everything – trees, houses, road signs, other cars – begins to fade into the vanishing point in my rear view mirror. There is nothing but me and Radio 2’s Sara Cox and a vast expanse of rugged, rusty moorland, pockmarked with silver-topped pools and giant, leather-skinned mountains looming on the horizon. I’ve seen photographs of Rannoch Moor: blue skies, limpid pools, auburn swathes of heather and gorse, strikingly spare and beautiful. But now, with dusk encroaching, rather than spare and beautiful, it feels raw and alien, and as the only car in sight melts away into the gloom, I discover I am a little spooked. I pull off at the Three Sisters viewpoint and step out of the car.
Early in my first pregnancy, about three years ago, I did a thing that a lot of pregnant women do. I picked up my phone and scrolled through videos of pregnant women doing cool things. In one, a woman with a big belly—she must have been about seven months—was surfing. She wore a bikini, and her legs looked strong. Her hair blew behind her shoulders when she slid down a wave. When I watched the video, I thought, Wow, good for her! in a not-sarcastic way. Weeks later, on modified bed rest to protect my endangered pregnancy—marooned on my sofa, unable to confidently shower or walk upstairs for fear of triggering labor—I thought of the surfing woman again, this time huffily. “Good for her!” I said to myself, and returned to my book.
I reflected on how a true sense of mischief requires one to cultivate a certain reputation for sternness, so as not to give the game away. Of course people who know you will eventually catch on. You can’t fool them for ever.
I looked down at my feet, and I thought: somewhere under there, under the carpet, under the floorboards, are the very joists we stood on.
With a pitched battle raging over the future of these public lands, Josh Jackson’s The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands, a beautiful book of photographs, maps, and illustrations coupled with accounts of Jackson’s journeys of discovery to far-flung but public corners of California, is incredibly timely.
She’s wearing a huge diving mask and snorkel that hide half her face. Undeterred, Conant shoots, and then shoots some more. He knows and feels that he is about to capture the image he’s been searching for on this Jamaican beach and that all of his effort will have paid off. The relationship between film icon Grace Kelly and this virile 40-something photographer with his refined manners is as transparent as the clear Caribbean water. They don’t know it yet, but this photo shoot will soon be one of Kelly’s most talked-about shoots, and Conant’s work will be admired and envied. She appeared au naturel that day—with wet hair and without any makeup, giving her a certain rebellious look. Conant will long remember that enchanted moment.
This is the inside story of how, over a span of just two months, a sprawling network of global astronomers found, followed, mapped, planned for, and finally dismissed 2024 YR4, the most dangerous asteroid ever found—all under the tightest of timelines and, for just a moment, with the highest of stakes.
“It was not an exercise,” says Hainaut. This was the real thing: “We really [had] to get it right.”
In her inventive writing, there is a casualness, a spontaneity, a poignance, that tumble over each other again and again. Though “Bonding” sheds light on anomie and what one might see as a kind of contemporary societal degeneration, it is, in the best sense of the phrase, also a carpe diem story, illuminating the power of human connection, which may indeed be the only point of being alive.
Fair is so titled in part to reflect its qualities as a manifesto – not only an improvement in pay and working conditions, but a demand that literary translation as a practice and profession should be a viable aspiration for a far greater number and type of people. It also describes the book’s puckish structure, in which we wander the stands, stalls and hallways of a notional trade fair, and where the illusion of cosy intimacy and friendliness – the decorated cubicles for meetings, the drinks receptions, the musical performances – are at odds with the corporate reality of such gatherings, which are essentially transactional rather than poetic.
But rapid changes to the climate are disrupting many of the seasonal patterns encoded in many Indigenous calendars. Warmer weather and disrupted cycles of storms and precipitation are transforming the very character of the seasons while also shifting them forward or backward in time. Some cycles that used to be in sync—such as the ice freeze-up and the whitefish migration—now no longer are. Climate change is shifting the schedules of plants and animals, making seasonal events harder to predict and key activities harder to plan. As Western scientists plot the extent and details of these changes, many Indigenous people are feeling them viscerally through their calendars as their practices, identity, traditions, and sense of seasonality are disrupted.
Seeking a way forward, some communities are exploring ways of adapting their calendars to new conditions so they can continue their traditional ways in a warming world. “As Gwich’in people, we have this idea that we are spiritually connected to the land,” Charlie says. “We still want to rely upon it. We still want to trust that we can harvest and travel out on the land [safely].”
If you were lucky enough to get assigned to the morning shift, nothing much was expected of you beyond basic, regular friendliness. You could call customers “guys,” hide imperfectly-made pastries behind the register and take a bite in between taking orders, and go to the bathroom without asking permission. Even the swing shift wasn’t too bad. But the evening staff had real managers on the floor, and they expected you to memorize the specials and dress as if we had a company uniform. They didn’t want to provide us with company uniforms, so they’d just send you home if you wore a collared shirt that didn’t seem white enough, that sort of thing.
The "tiny things" of the title are not merely metaphorical, they are the unspoken tensions, cultural misunderstandings, emotional burdens, and quiet betrayals that accrue in every immigrant story. Okonkwo writes with a calm confidence, where she refuses to rush her revelations. And by the end of the novel, we are reminded that what weighs us down most isn't always the trauma we left behind, but the identities we try to build or abandon in the name of survival.
“Lonely Crowds” is both a coming-of-age novel and what the Germans call a Künstlerroman, an account of the artist’s growth. Wambugu doesn’t dwell overmuch on the details of Ruth’s or Maria’s work (both do end up in New York pursuing creative lives), but she’s adept at sketching the details, and the stakes. In short, blunt sentences, the book devastatingly portrays the realities of money, race, sexuality, ambition — along with the gossipy competitiveness of any insular scene — that both Ruth and Maria confront in New York.
Altitude and coolness co-create the cloud. Humid air is pushed upward by the land, bringing the water it bears to a condensation point, and forming the mist which cloaks such forests year-round. The mist also reduces direct sunlight, reducing transpiration from the trees and retaining more water within the forest system.
Because this drifting mist infiltrates the full volume of the forest—wandering from ground to canopy, between trunks, into every niche—the available surface area for condensation is maximized. And because cloud-forests are characterized by an astonishing density of air plants, or epiphytes (that is, plants which grow on other plants), this surface area is immense. Liverworts, mosses, ferns, orchids, lichens, and bromeliads throng the trees of a cloudforest; hundreds, sometimes thousands of plants can flourish upon a single big tree, in a proliferating density of floral life greater even than that of a rainforest.
Black dress, pink coat, thick beige stockings. This is the third time I’ve seen her. She walks down the middle of the street outside my window, her head bent forward under its helmet of grandmother hair. She carries her handbag like a briefcase with a bomb in it. She has the look of someone whose friends are all dead.
I saw her first outside Saint Spyridon Church, lighting a candle. And then again in Spianada Square, among the scootering children. I lean out the window to watch her disappear around the corner. Maybe there’s nothing suspicious about it. Corfu is a small city, on a small island in Greece. From my hotel room I can see the green edge of the cricket pitch where, in John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, the Czech agent, Axel, chased Magnus Pym in slow, limping circles.
I think, whether you believe in divine creation or solely in physics (though the two are really not incompatible), there can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love. Whether it is because some loving, omnipotent, unoriginated Being consciously decided to make the particular farting, mewling, grasping masterpiece that is you, or because a set of cosmic coincidences aligned so perfectly and yet so improbably that Simon Boas resulted, being alive at all is something we don’t appreciate nearly enough.
In the 1960s, a hospital in London held a ward full of women who suffered from a range of mental disorders. The women in this “sleep room” were subjected to various medical procedures, including electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, and, at times, a lobotomy, without their consent.
In “The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him,” Jon Stock tells the harrowing history of the British doctor who subjected them to medical abuse and gives voice to those who survived him.
But. If you want one road that gives you the American West in all its beauty and mystery, this is it. Starting here at the border, U.S. 89 rolls nearly 1,400 miles south through Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona, through national parks, through Blackfeet and Navajo country, crossing rivers, climbing mountains, stunning and surprising at every turn.
And me? I will spend the next two weeks driving U.S. 89 because I need a road trip, and specifically this one. I grew up along this road. The highway is braided into my earliest memories, so entwined that I can’t imagine my childhood without it. I have spent many of the years since then traveling the West and writing about it, and though I have seen many remarkable places, Highway 89 remains my prime meridian. I’ve been away too long. I’ve needed a trip down a highway that is familiar but strange, because my life has grown familiar but strange. I want what only the best road trips give you: velocity and transcendence.
In 1847, the Springs General Store — a two-story Greek-revival farmhouse sitting near the East Hampton wetlands known as Pussy’s Pond — opened its doors. Just about 100 years later, Jackson Pollock moved into a barn down the road and began to trade paintings for his groceries. In 2003, Kristi Hood, a chef from California, moved into the apartment upstairs with her family and started to run the store downstairs. Under Hood’s stewardship, Springs General Store became the kind of place where real-estate brokers and carpenters rubbed elbows with summer visitors over breakfast sandwiches, and a launch point where residents could take kayaks out on a sliver of semi-public waterfront. “It was a part of everyone’s everyday life,” Hood says, “but it was not a moneymaker.” Hood managed for almost 17 years in a town where the cost of goods is inflated, year-round staff retention can be difficult, and would-be customers all but vanish in the winter months. In June 2019, the store was listed for sale, asking $2.9 million. In the fall of 2021, two brothers, Daniel and Evan Bennett, bought it. Now, nearly four years later, they’re still struggling to open its doors.
Throughout “American Mythology,” Cromley keeps readers reaching for answers alongside the motley expedition crew, anticipating a big reveal with Bigfoot in the woods (or an inevitable letdown). Without giving anything away, the ending is both magical and deeply meaningful for Jute and Vergil, reminding readers that their enduring friendship has been at the center of this tale all along.
If art imitates life, then My Clavicle does a good job, because it’s all over the place—but not all over the place in a way that feels disorienting. Although, if it is disorienting, it’s because, Sanz is saying life is disorienting, and fractured like the main character’s pain, in a way we don’t ask for.
“The Tilting House,” by Miami-based writer Ivonne Lamazares, is an affecting and sometimes amusing coming-of-age novel set in a country that few have had the opportunity to visit, despite its proximity to the U.S.
It’s a study of hidden family secrets, the unhealed wound of losing a mother and the quest for home.
In his new book, simply titled Shade, Bloch argues that the absence of shade from our lives is not an accident. “Shade has been deliberately designed out of our environments,” he tells me on a recent phone call. “Those decisions may have made sense in the past, but we are rapidly moving into a new world where sun protection is going to be as important as sun access.”
The novel is often described as a “feminist classic”, which Sundström resists – the implication being that any political objective undermines its integrity as a novel. “Feminist books ordinarily end with a happy divorce. And this doesn’t.” Instead, Engagement is a dense, thoughtful book that takes on questions of sex, boredom, self-esteem and what Sundström calls, “the moral issue; the question of can you treat another person this way, the way Martina [treats Gustav]? At the end, she herself comes to the conclusion that you can’t, it isn’t right. She can’t go on exploiting him, because he’s helplessly in love with her.” The book is less about the experience of loving someone than about being the object of love, and given current discussions around young women “decentring men” and “heteropessimism”, it is a startlingly modern novel.
What’s in a pen name? Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn’s debut short story collection, Every One Still Here, is receiving rave reviews and rapturous praise, but hardly anyone seems to know who they are. A cursory Google turns up no photos or biographical information. All we know is that the writer is Northern Irish and was born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday agreement.
However you rate lunch, it is probably the original meal—for much of history, procuring food and finding fuel to cook it with took so long that people were unable to eat until several hours after waking up. At the same time, the amount of physical labor early humans performed required them to consume the bulk of the day’s calories as soon as they were available. “So eating meant lunching if we take lunch to be the meal eaten in the middle of the day,” the food historian Megan Elias writes in “Lunch: A History.” As a class system emerged, the rich began to eat multiple times a day. The middle class followed, and eventually advances in lighting technology expanded the duration of daily activity, allowing for extended eating hours. By around 1850, the midday mono-meal had diversified into the three-meal system that now dominates Western culture.
Nothing, in Forrest’s writing, is ever simple. Things are deceptive, untidy and uneasy – and happen when you least expect it. Actions have consequences, and those consequences can change the shape of everything – which is, I suppose, always the true lesson of adolescence. And the true, tricky, slippery lesson of Forrest’s novel.
What’s captivating about her book is all the thinking she does mid- or post-trek: on writing, friendship, welfare, illness, Charles Atlas, climate change, protest marches, knitting, and why it is that in popular mythology “walking women” are either models on a catwalk or sex workers. As she wanders, her mind wanders. Solvitur ambulando: she’s not sure what exactly it is she’s trying to solve by walking, but the book’s as much an invigorating mental workout as it is a hard physical trudge.
He sits squarely in front of us on the screen, a full-bodied man with a carefully trimmed white beard and a nearly bald head, his eyes looming behind dark-framed glasses—one eye glaring with cyclopean fury, the other with lid at half-mast, as if signalling a secret of some sort. Behind and around him stand solid walls of CDs—perhaps a hundred thousand disks—and sometimes, depending on where he is sitting in his house, a bronze tam-tam. He speaks rapidly, voluminously, with growling dips into the lower register and high-pitched flights of indignation or rapture. He tends to be smiling, and sings (often) in a scratchy voice redolent of old Yiddish songs and Hebrew chants. He is merry, outraged, laudatory, abusive. If Dickens had set about creating an improbable YouTube star—a classical-music-record critic—even he might not have come up with anyone as vivid as David Hurwitz.
I spent a lot of time at Fenway growing up. There’d be a bustling in the house, and my brother, David, would tell me to get my glove. At first, I’d think the two of us were going to play catch in the street, or our father was going to take us out to practice grounders and flies. But if my father told us to “bring coats ’cause there might be a chill,” I knew we were going to Fenway.
We would drive there in my dad’s Catalina, which was the color of amber ale, with chrome bumpers and door handles. I don’t know what model year, but it had that Pontiac nose and a black vinyl roof that looked like close-cropped hair. My father never seemed to worry about traffic. He’d ease along shoulders or speed down side streets to find a parking spot. If he couldn’t find one, there was always some secret lot he knew of, or an old buddy’s gas station nearby. He always tried to get “closer.”
One beach looks much like any other. Would you agree? In autumn 2019, on a writer’s residency in Cascais, a Portuguese coastal resort, I spent hours on Guincho beach. The summer surfers were gone. The wind kept all but the hardiest walkers away. I would wander from one end of the beach to the other, as fragments of dialogue and glimpses of possible episodes in my novel began to reveal themselves to me. I came to love the beach, to feel myself entirely at home there, at one with the whistling sand, the tireless wind and the grey waves breaking on its shore. I would be lying if I were to say that first glimpse of the beach had given me a Proustian jolt of realisation. And yet, even though it would take me another couple of years to make the connection, I did know this beach. I had seen it before, almost exactly 50 years earlier. And seeing it back then, witnessing the drama that had taken place there, had been one of the most powerful and formative experiences of my young life.
The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?
True beauty in literature isn’t ornamental. It isn’t a lyrical flourish on the surface of pain, or a reward for rendering trauma with the right degree of humility. It’s what Sarah Lewis, in The Rise, calls “aesthetic force”—a quality that stuns, alters, destabilizes, and lodges itself in our memory not because it comforts us, but because it insists that we see something differently than before. In writing, as in life, the beautiful often travels with its opposite.
There were times reading this book when I was genuinely scared. It was more than the faint idea that someone could be behind me, more than walking faster through the house in the dark. This collection reminds us that what is most frightening is outside of our control. Random chance events could haunt us and we’d be unable to stop them. These stories will stay with me.
Remember When chronicles, with illuminating candour, the changes that culminated in Phillips’s diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2022, at the age of 61. Billed as a memoir by Phillips herself, owing to her decline during the three-year writing process, it’s really a co-production between her, her ghostwriter Alison Phillips (no relation) and Frizell, who provides fitful interjections. As such, it offers a rare account of the impact of Alzheimer’s not just from the person who has it, but from their primary carer too.
Bill Watterson knew, or at least captured better than anyone, the private derangement of the average 6-year-old boy. Imagination is one thing: Monsters lived under the bed, dinosaurs roamed the Earth, teachers were misshapen alien monsters in disguise, Tracer Bullet charges $50 per day plus expenses. But somewhere beyond those fairly standard fantasy worlds lies the grisly id of the artist, and the snow is his canvas.
But we were bound for some confusion, Ursa and I. She turns the corner and observes, with some surprise, the crowd of people in fly cosplay outfits streaming in and out and all around the Ernest C. Morial Convention Center: Two little boys dressed as Squirtle and Wartortle, a tall white woman in Misty’s denim coochie cutters and suspenders, a Black-man Brock with his broccoli-green vest, and a woman in a one-piece Eevee costume, collar fluffy as a mink, like one I’d seen this waiter wearing at the Clermont Lounge a couple years ago. No longer the fringe performances they were in the ’90s or even early 2000s, these cosplay fits are popular enough that any normie can find lesser versions of them at Target or Walmart as a last-minute Halloween pick. Such objects are the cultural materials of the present, a superstructural enterprise that keeps on giving, even as it exhausts our collective time and patience; and yet there are more of us than ever, waiting for the next game or trading-card set to activate us, the sleeper agents of Pokémon fandom, many of whom happen to be here at the largest international Pokémon championship in history. Only some of us are players, but most all of us are fans.
It is the year 2004 and I take a seat at the counter of the Koreatown Denny’s, just three blocks from my apartment, and for a little while, I watch as a blonde waitress with makeup the colors of a tropical fish smiles at me every time she walks by. Her path is constant: she arrives from one side, departs from the other, grabbing or leaving pots of coffee on the warmer. She leaves a cup with me at my request and, in this way, I become part of the ritual.
Hideous Kinky married the cocktail of unvarnished truth and inherent unreliability that marks the best child narrators, and Freud invokes a similarly fragmentary, often hazy style of narration here. The chapters often feel more akin to short stories — interlinked, but ultimately discrete units. But once I acclimated to the tone, I was swept up into this world of visceral intimacies, the fraught but powerful relationships between the main characters more than gripping enough to carry me along.
With the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima attack approaching next month, “The Hiroshima Men” is a potent reminder of the extreme human costs that were wrought by the first atomic weapon employed during warfare.
By profiling some key players, MacGregor pulls readers into their personal stories with visually enticing description and lively dialogue.
Humanists knew that they were imitating the ancients when they sat and talked in libraries. But they knew little about what these lost collections looked like or included. After all, as Andrew Hui points out, even library terminology was slippery. Bibliotheca could refer to anything from a single compendious book, such as the Scriptures, to a single cabinet or a whole collection. Monasteries had large, sunny scriptoria (‘writing rooms’) where the monks created splendid codices. But the books themselves were generally stored rather than displayed. Monks borrowed them for use in their cells.
Over the years, I have seldom felt inclined to fuss much about food or fashion. There are too many people starving to worry about the freshness of truffles. But what Besha Rodell is talking about is not fussiness but quality: she and her husband could have had an easier life by settling for the same old. There are plenty of expensive restaurants that don’t do anything special.
Rodell has spent decades trying to find the others and, in so doing, has stood up against the homogenisation and commodification of our basic appetites. She knows the difference between image and substance.
We have all read — or at least heard of — epistolary novels. “The Wonder and Happiness of Being Old” is the first epistolary memoir I have come across. Memoir might be the wrong word. Sophy Burnham’s new book is an expression of her personal philosophy as well as a description of parts of her life.
“The Roma: A Travelling History” is a fascinating look at a marginalized and misunderstood group of people who have encountered hostility for centuries.
Written by Madeline Potter, a scholar of 19th century Gothic literature, the new book recounts how members of the group long have been maligned, enslaved, deported and murdered.
My faith first wavers in the train station parking lot. It’s not really even a station—there’s no ticket booth or shaded bench, just a scythe of pavement cleaving the railroad tracks, a half-flight of concrete steps, and a gravel dugout. The train from Paris was an inrush of rolling farmland and blazing expanses of mustard and the dancing specular light of phone screens on the train car’s ceiling. The connecting station had a ticket machine, an espresso machine, and a vending machine that dispensed wedges of fresh Comté. Winding farther into the countryside, every house had a trampoline in the yard. All this bucolic wonder and you could still be bored. As we pulled into the village, I saw a pair of listless children sitting on the sun-drenched mesh of one, inhaling the scent of warm plastic.
I look for habits. Would they wear habits? Lots of nuns, I read on the internet, have updated their wardrobes to include cotton skirts and tasteful khaki chore coats. A few even wear denim, to better identify with the common man. They’re invested in volunteering and protesting and cave-aging small-batch cheddar. I chose Benedictines because the order has a tradition of hospitality, and because the names of the abbeys are beautiful: Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Our Lady of Grace.
This growing body of evidence is beginning to rewrite our assumptions about death. If life can persist—or even reorganize itself—after clinical death, then what exactly does it mean to die? Perhaps this “twilight” zone isn’t an end point, but a hidden stage of life we’ve only just begun to understand.
Nock Loose is a fascinating weird book written by a very gifted person. In their scathing and hilarious Author’s Note, ‘cretin by habitat’ Patrick Marlborough avers that Australia is ’a deeply humourless country with incredibly thin skin … stretched tight over an atavistic ever-thrumming nastiness’. The result? ‘Danoz Direct, JB Hi-Fi, highway tolls, Chris Lilley, Barnaby Joyce etc.’ And now, happily, this book is their wildly entertaining, go-for-broke response to the ‘inevitable curdling of our violent colonial origins, the barbarousness of which is ongoing’.
Life is hard but books like this – books that are funny, romantic and heartwarming – remind us that it’s pretty wonderful too.
Cancer was no longer a shameful obscenity but a rallying cry. Shattering the silence was undoubtedly progress. But with this shift came new metaphors – and new expectations.
You can tell men’s cycling isn’t a serious sport because the “Big Six” athletes come from four small nations—Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Slovenia—with a combined population of 38 million. Meet the rogues’ gallery of minor European whiteness: Remco Evenepoel, Wout van Aert, Jonas Vingegaard, Mathieu van der Poel, Primož Roglič, and Tadej Pogačar. Add the top women and you at least get one Italian, the excellently named Elisa Longo Borghini, and possibly a Pole, the dashing Kasia Niewiadoma. But in women’s cycling the top ranks are if anything more dominated by the vestigial organs of Westphalian sovereignty, the Benelux countries. Unquestionably the best three women, the frenemies Demi Vollering, Lotte Kopecky, and Lorena Wiebes, hail from Belgium and the Netherlands. Is there any other global athletic endeavor whose competitors are only becoming more white and less international?
To love cycling of all sports in 2025 requires a hard look at yourself, and perhaps some special pleading. As a white guy of a certain age—with knees too old to keep running, too much pride to join the old folks at the pool, and newfound disposable income to blow on carbon fiber and lycra—I fit the profile.
“How do experiences live on, not as memories, but as absences?” asks the narrator of Girl, 1983, Ullmann’s latest novel, now translated into English by Martin Aitken. The book seeks to answer this query by recasting personal writing as a conversation between recollection and amnesia. For the protagonist of Girl, 1983, this relationship is intensified by competing desires: to recover the lost shards of a painful adolescent memory, or to let them fade into oblivion.
There’s a real sense of trepidation in these later chapters but there’s also a beautiful feeling of hope; a belief in the unending power of simple human kindness. It’s an incredibly ambitious novel and Stiefvater pulls it off with admirable ease, weaving together themes of class, war, love and wonder.
What does it mean to lead a good life? How far should a person be willing to go to help others and make the world a better place? Ben Brooks brings a practiced, light touch to these profound questions, which drive his new novel, “The Greatest Possible Good.”
What's compelling about seeing the story of Lemire's work life unfold is the tremendous creativity he has sustained over time, which shows no signs of slowing down. He describes a creative practice of juggling multiple projects at once, an approach that counters the trap that many artists fall into when they hit a wall on a major project. He speaks candidly, too, about the depression and anxiety that has plagued him since his youth. It's making comics, he explains, that brings him back to himself when he feels most unsettled.
While a great deal has been written about Toni Morrison’s fiction, her work as a senior editor at Random House is less well known. Dana A Williams, professor of African American Literature at Howard University, sets out to fill this gap, offering an impeccably researched account of Morrison’s stint at Random House between 1971 and 1983, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and the Black Arts movements. Reflecting ideas generated by that convergence, Morrison’s novels – described by the Nobel committee, when they awarded her the prize in literature in 1993, as giving life to an essential aspect of American reality – were driven by an unwavering belief in the possibility of African American empowerment through self-regard. Williams’s interest lies in showing how Morrison’s editorial career was informed by the same invigoratingly insular ethos. Whether writing or editing, her work was aimed at producing “explorations of interior Black life with minimal interest in talking to or being consumed by an imagined white reader”.
I used to think everyone who read books also re-read them. I was surprised, once I was an author, to discover that there are plenty of book lovers who once they’ve read a book never pick it up again, no matter how much they love it. I don’t think such people are wrong—we have limited time, and there are always new books beckoning—and yet I can’t help but feel that such people are missing out on one of life’s great pleasures, of picking up a book which you already know from both personal and previous experience that you are going to love.
Perhaps my family was exceptional in its love of conversation, but all families are, to some extent, learning spaces for how to talk. This is the paradox of growing up. Language is learned in the family; it solidifies our place within it, but it also allows us to move beyond it, giving us the tools to widen our experience with people very different from ourselves.
With a sweet tooth that often leads me to scan the dessert menu before the main course, I find myself calculating exactly how much room to save. Fortunately for sugar lovers like me, restaurants worldwide are elevating desserts from an afterthought to the main event.
These aren’t bakeries, but upscale establishments and bars devoted entirely to multi-course dessert dining.
So in some ways, despite being the fifth Trainspotting spin-off so far, Men in Love makes perfect sense as a novel in 2025: old rope in a contemporary culture made mostly of old rope. It displaces 2002’s Porno as the original’s most direct sequel, taking place in the immediate aftermath of the drug deal/betrayal that closes it out.
Despite its elegiac tone, in Absence there is an underlying philosophical wave of hope. Ernst Bloch saw art and literature as vital for encouraging hope and envisioning a better future. For Bloch, hope was an existentialism. Art and literature are powerful tools that allow us to express our human desires and to push towards a better lived reality. This idea of absence—of what’s missing—this loss isn’t necessarily only the end of something. For our narrator, these reveries and ruminations lead to new understandings, new connections. This loss becomes an echo, a ripple, that reaches out and connects the disparate cast of characters in this book—an interconnected ensemble cast, using moments and fragments to build a mosaic of emotional resonance. It shapes, and reshapes, understanding, grief, and identity.
If I couldn’t trace my fish back to the source, what could I learn if I switched directions? Could I follow a salmon from net to plate?
Hoping for traceability, I scanned a QR code on a package of “Responsible Choice” frozen sockeye. It opened the grocery store’s home page.
Flummoxed, I bought chicken. And vowed to learn more.
Hong Kong, 1941. Newly-wed Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn floated into Victoria Harbor on a Pan-Am clipper. She was to cover the Sino-Japanese War for “Colliers Magazine,” and he was the unwilling companion, or U.C., lovingly nicknamed by Gellhorn. Though she noted in her memoir, “Travels with Myself and Another,” that he was also “better at the glamorous East” than she, “flexible and undismayed.” Hemingway was fresh off selling the movie rights to “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” At the height of his fame, money in his hand, and ripe to live like royalty. The Prince of Hong Kong, as it were, albeit for a couple of months.
We come to this Pearl City with his footprints in our pocket, ready to discover where he planted them.
“All history is contested,” Tessa Hulls writes early in her extraordinary graphic novel/memoir, “Feeding Ghosts.” “Evidence exists as a field of dots. And we connect them according to what lenses we employ to examine the past.” To this she appends, “But there are unequivocal facts.”
The line captures the story that Juneau resident Hulls, recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the Memoir or Autobiography category, deftly and beautifully weaves in this story of how histories, both global and within families, shape how we are formed and what we become.
The stories anatomise how technology and, particularly, social media distort its characters’ view of themselves, but the collection also emphasises their culpability in this degradation.
“I know that anything I’ve lost,” one character suggests, “has been given away freely.”
This is a spellbinding book by a skilled writer. The result is a read that’ll have you in its thrall from start to finish. The Bewitching is a resounding affirmation of Moreno-Garcia’s talents as a horror writer and offers an inventive merging of witch lore from two different North American traditions.
Here is the past, drawn without sentiment, but also without judgment, something of an achievement in our violently sententious times. Warm and inspiriting as well as delicately painful, it surely heralds the arrival of a big new talent in the world of the cartoon.
For several years now, I have been reading these early theorists, thinking that their vision of geological and evolutionary time might give me a context for understanding not just the age of mountains but something more current. It’s one thing to hear of the millions of years it took the Andes to rise; it’s quite another to hear that, in mere centuries, the oceans may reach levels of acidity not seen in 300 million years, or that the earth is the hottest it has been in the past 125,000 years. These days, geological forces, formerly the stuff of earthquakes and volcanoes, have escaped the confines of deep time to present themselves daily, winter, spring, summer, and fall.
In the 1980s, as Americans were swept up in a fitness craze and growing obsession with personal wellness, self-betterment projects extended from the outdoors to domestic interiors. Bathrooms in particular got larger and larger (some large enough to do cartwheels in), as did bathtubs and showers. Interior designers promoted renovating one’s bathroom to feature the latest high-tech gadgets and encouraged people to reconceive of these spaces as “luxury spas.” These architectural changes imagined that media practices and hygiene practices could seamlessly coexist. Over time, bathroom culture expanded well beyond basic hygiene.
I can trace my personal descent into what science journalist Ed Yong calls “birder derangement syndrome” back to when I started referring to myself as a “sewage lagoon aficionado.” It wasn’t just that I had taken to setting my alarm for 4 a.m. during spring migration to be in position just in time for the peak dawn chorus, or that I was cancelling all non-bird-related social engagements in May, but that I had started planning vacations around proximity to wetlands and sewage lagoons to maximize roving insect populations, which translate into bird sightings.
I wasn’t always like this. I used to be what some might call a “normal person”—waking up at civilized hours, going to the movies, and wearing something more presentable than ultraviolet-safe hiking pants with a bird-themed T-shirt, trail shoes, and a Tilley hat. But I’ve realized that I’m at my best when I’m birding: curious, my sensory antennae on high alert, attuned to the nuance and detail of the world around me, fully present. I agree with Yong that birding is “more meditative than meditation.”
Thanks to Edmond Albius, an unsung Black botanical genius on the French island of Réunion in the 19th century, vanilla literally flowered. And thanks to Gaëlle Bélem, the Réunionese novelist long-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize, Albius’ remarkable story has found its champion.
She was still so new to the sport that she barely knew the rules of competitions. Floating on the surface before her first official dive, she asked the judge whether she should submerge before the judge finished counting down or after. “She was like, ‘Read the rule book!’ ” Burnett recalls, laughing. But she performed well during the tournament, reaching 65 meters.
That same judge told her, after she had completed her dives, that she ought to try for the U.S. women’s free diving team. Athletes must apply to compete in a world championship, and the deadline was imminent. “I was on a high,” she says. “I was like, Oh, f— it, I’ll just sign up.” She was startled when she was one of four women chosen for the U.S. team.
After working as a critic for various publications in the UK for over a decade, I was haunted by the desperate look in the eyes of the hundreds of performers I’d been sent to review, a look that fell somewhere between pleading and confrontational. I held an unsettling suspicion: that people who make art are usually desperate for the approval of critics, yet sometimes they don’t—or can’t—think of critics as fully human.
“A Marriage at Sea” is an enthralling account of a partnership in extremis, and of how the commonest hazards of married life—claustrophobia, codependence, boundarylessness—become totalized amid disaster.
Castillo is a writer of razor-sharp acuity who takes seriously the sinister instrumentalisation of storytelling, in a world increasingly veering right. As a novel of ideas, Moderation contains terror enough to keep you reading, and looking for signs of the nightmare its author has taken the time to document.
“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” These questions about our place in the world, famously asked in an 1897–98 painting by French artist Paul Gauguin, are as relevant today as they were at the turn of the last century. And, in the ambitious spirit of Gauguin’s beautiful and controversial masterpiece, Lucas Schaefer’s much vaunted debut novel The Slip raises issues of race and entitlement, as well as the malleability of identity, all in one big, sloppy, and occasionally gorgeous package.
Nothing is harder to find these days than quality time with oneself. We are always trying to run away from ourselves, chasing a million distractions. Yet the solitude we crave and, perhaps, dread, is right within our reach, within a moment’s capture. In An Island to Myself, Michael McGregor, in luminous, evocative prose, reminds us why it’s worth our while to embrace the present and seize the day. Maybe even on the island of our choice.
The heart of an empath beats behind every page of The Roma: A Traveling History. The book is, first and foremost, a critique of stubborn stereotypes and historical crimes against the ethnic group known variously as Romani, Travelers, Zigeuner, and by other names. It provides a useful overview of the political and legal mechanisms behind institutionalized racism and ethnocentrism against the Roma in Europe. But at its core, this book is an ode to Madeline Potter’s people and culture. Her upbringing in a Romani family during a time of upheaval—as nomadic traditions are eroding rapidly in the face of globalization and technological advancements—lends an important authenticity and lived experience to her writing. The book rests on a foundation of her nostalgia for those years and her desire to celebrate and revivify her heritage.
It’s clear how much Lee cherishes his connection to Martha’s Vineyard, a place that’s easy to love. And in these pages, he’s crafted a must-read for anyone who seeks to know the island with depth that extends well beyond its superficial myths.
Truth is, we don’t know how the Tree of Life will fall, and we don’t know when. It could happen in five years, in 40 years, or tomorrow; perhaps, as you read this, it has already happened. But we do know this: The Tree of Life has led a singularly strange existence.
On the one hand, I am aware that every generation complains that the kids who come next are doing everything wrong and have gotten stupider and less respectful. I fear falling into this trap myself, becoming an old man yelling at cloud.
On the other hand, with every new story, I find myself asking: … Can the kids read, though?
In Havoc, Waits mines the rich seam of girls’ school fiction to delirious and rewarding effect. There are welcome echoes of St Trinian’s – the shade of Alastair Sim hovers over the staffroom, comforting and anarchic at once – and there is abundant Ealing comedy in the madcap chases through school corridors and machinations in the lighting gallery during the school play. Yet beneath the comedy lies a distinctly unsettling undertone: the girls experience a convincingly visceral terror that edges towards Shirley Jackson territory and gives their hysteria an extra dimension. This, along with a genuine unexpectedness in the characterisation and a lot of very funny dialogue, loosens things up and brings real originality to the game.
In 1950, during her junior year at Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich attended a reading by Robert Frost, then in his mid-70s and comfortably exercising his rustic poet persona. Afterward, in a letter, Rich gushed to her parents that the acclaimed poet “talked so acutely and honestly about poetry that I sat there swelling inside with a great and joyful assent.” That reaction epitomizes Rich’s lifelong, single-minded dedication to the craft of poetry, which was, as Hilary Holladay writes in a preface to her The Power of Adrienne Rich (published in 2020 and newly released in softcover by Princeton University Press), “as close to a religion as anything she would ever know.”
Technically, the evidence is circumstantial. Pipes with cannabis residue were dug up in Shakespeare’s garden, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Shakespeare is the one who put them there. (Hey, maybe they were planted in his garden by Sir Francis Bacon, right?) So Professor Thackeray, being a smart and thorough scientist, decided to obtain conclusive proof. He asked the Church of England for permission to exhume Shakespeare’s corpse and run the necessary tests in order to answer, once and for all, the question of whether Shakespeare smoked pot. Guess what the church said. No way, not a chance, that’s not a question they want answered.
But if Shakespeare was a stoner, he faced a thorny dilemma. On the one hand, he enjoyed using drugs and wanted to include depictions of drug use in his plays. On the other hand, he didn’t want the church to ban his plays for immoral content. So how did the greatest writer of all time resolve this dilemma?
How is it possible that a bioweapons accident that killed dozens was kept secret for decades, even in the Soviet Union? As the Washington Post reporter David E. Hoffman writes in The Dead Hand, his history of the Cold War arms race, the answer lay in the nature of the weapons themselves: “Biological weapons were the ultimate challenge for spies, soldiers and scientists.”
Unlike a missile silo, easily distinguishable from the air, a laboratory where bioweapons are being developed doesn’t look that different from a benign medical laboratory. Unlike nuclear warheads, which leave clear radiological traces in their silos and are unmistakable in their use, a weaponized pathogen and the outbreak it would cause could be difficult to discern from a naturally occurring one, giving any attacker plausible deniability.
In impish yet tender style, Irvin thoughtfully explores what it means for a mother to care for a daughter in a world where male violence is everywhere. Life Cycle of a Moth is the very best kind of fiction: with the book open, you feel utterly transported; once you close it, you see how cunningly it holds a mirror up to reality. I can’t wait to read whatever Irvin writes next.
After a somewhat slow start, the action in the novel speeds up as the story advances, and the end approaches with multiple twists and surprises.
“It is surprising to think that I have had Parkinson’s for almost 30 years. For most of that time I have been remarkably well,” Smith writes in the acknowledgements. “But this disease takes no prisoners, and now I have finished my last book. There is only one Arkady and I will miss him.”
The spectres that haunt our dreams and hypnagogic states are unreal, but they are also vivid manifestations of what troubles us, Akbar concludes. Acknowledging that is not a cure for the vulnerability that night ushers in, but it is a step towards allowing a little light into the darkness. This imaginative and empathetic book will probably not guide you to better sleep, but it will be a fine companion for the wakeful hours.
I used to love my Teflon pans. I crisped tofu, fried latkes, and reduced sauces to sticky glazes in them, marveling at how cleanup never took more than a swipe of a sponge. Then I started to worry that my skillets might kill me.
You think you want a cheese with pedigree. The kind that reeks of washed rinds, that crunches with tyrosine crystals, that bears the name of a tiny European village in delicate, old-world type. But what you actually want — what your body, your cravings, your Fourth of July grill night wants — is ooze.
Ooze like only American cheese can provide. And yes, I mean that American cheese: the creamy, melty, ultra-processed stuff you grew up with and now pretend to be above.
Ní Chuinn’s stories are unpredictable and memorable. While they contain the stuff of plots – family secrets, abuse, fraudulent fertility clinics and human trafficking – these aren’t their true subjects, and they almost entirely lack the resolution provided by that familiar short-story trait, the epiphany. Rather than accounts of revelation, these are reports from the knotty midst of things. They describe entanglements that cannot be ignored or consigned to history.
These stories — which were published between the mid 1950s and early 1990s — touch on loss, exile and the distance between people who are intimately connected. They are vital and lively, but not maudlin.
In 2016, Apple announced that its gun emoji, previously a realistic grey-and-black revolver, would henceforth be a green water pistol. Gradually the other big tech companies followed suit, and now what is technically defined as the “pistol” emoji, supposed to represent a “handgun or revolver”, does not show either: instead you’ll get a water pistol or sci-fi raygun and be happy with it. No doubt this change contributed significantly to a suppression of gun crime around the world, and it remains only to ban the bomb, knife and sword emoji to wipe out violence altogether.
As Keith Houston’s fascinatingly geeky and witty history shows, emoji have always been political.
John Warner’s examination of the relationship between writing and artificial intelligence is, indeed, about more than words. Much more. While it provides a sometimes dizzying amount of information about both the promise and limitations of artificial intelligence, it ultimately deals with something infinitely more basic: the nature of our humanity.
Price works in a mode that he calls “urban panorama”—a sociologically rich realism that depicts the tensions of city life. “Lazarus Man,” though it is written in this way, is unlike anything else he has published. The novel is animated by the explosion of a Harlem tenement building and the confusion and collective soul-searching that follow, but it’s not a “thriller,” Price said, sounding proud to have written a book in which, as he put it, “nothing remarkable happens.” Composed of snapshots and fragments, it’s told in a mournful and introspective style that subverts, or mocks, the comfortable arc and resolution of a police procedural: there is a mystery (a man who went missing after the building collapse) and a cop (named Mary Roe) who is trying to solve the case, but Price is uninterested in her pursuit. He explores, instead, her reckoning with aging and divorce.
Billy Mitchell, the most knowledgeable and masterful Pac-Man player ever to drop a quarter in a machine, is a hard man to find. When I asked one of his best friends, Walter Day, the best way to get in touch with him, Day told me, “First I spend an hour praying to God, then I visit a psychic, then I place a classified ad, then I hire a plane to carry a banner that says CALL ME BILLY! and make it fly all over South Florida. Because he might be anywhere.”
After some seventy phone calls, I manage to arrange a meeting with Mitchell at Ricky’s, the restaurant in Hollywood, Florida, that he took over from his father in the mid-1980s. Mitchell is probably the greatest arcade-video-game player of all time. When the Guinness Book of World Records first included a listing for video games in 1985 (discontinued in 1987), Mitchell held the records for Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong, Jr., Centipede, and Burger Time. In 1999, he achieved the Holy Grail of arcade gaming, executing the first-ever perfect game on Pac-Man. The feat requires navigating 256 boards, or levels, and eating every single possible pellet, fruit, and ghost, for the highest score of 3,333,360, all without dying once.
This convenient, catch-all, somewhat mysterious product may be divisive, but you can’t deny its staying power. From no-effort whipped cream substitute to “healthy” dessert base endorsed by fitness influencers, Cool Whip has shape-shifted through the decades to meet America’s cravings.
The heart is a peculiar organ. It wants what it wants, as Emily Dickinson wrote. Especially when you’re young and have no previous experience of love and desire, or the deleterious effects of time on both. This is the core subject of 24-year-old Harriet Armstrong’s debut novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, published by the consistently adventurous independent press Les Fugitives.
Identity politics can be summed up by the old New Yorker cartoon – why do you have to be a non-conformist like everyone else? The most interesting aspect of the argument here is the stress on having no identity, not having a different identity. There is something appealing about existing in a state of positive provisionality rather than deracinated neutrality, though it might require a degree of sanctity to achieve it.
As you read this, there will probably be a cup of tea going cold on Veronica Pullen’s kitchen counter. Every time she wants a cup, Pullen makes two, one milkier than the other. She drinks the milkier one (she likes her tea lukewarm) immediately. She lets the other one sit for 40 minutes before drinking it once it has reached optimum temperature. It is an efficiency – albeit a tiny one – that she has been perfecting for two years. A copywriter and online trainer, Pullen, who is 54 and lives on the Isle of Wight with her husband and their chihuahua, says it takes her five minutes to boil a kettle, so she saves five minutes with every other cup. Over 24 hours, that adds up to 20 minutes saved. Across two years? She has clawed back slightly more than 10 full days.
Pullen is just one of many people incorporating microefficiencies into their daily lives. There are people who brush their teeth in the shower; lay out their clothes the night before to save time in the morning; boil hot water for the day first thing and keep it to hand in a flask. But are these small, savvy streamlinings that shave minutes (sometimes, just seconds) off a task merely fun life hacks? Are they a symptom of a snowed-under society? Or are they indicative of an obsession with productivity?
Fear is rarely rational or proportionate. Occasionally we fear genuinely dangerous things (guns, say), sometimes we have entirely irrational fears (balloonsor dead birds) and other times our fears may be part of our evolutionary inheritance.
I saw my grandmother across the street when I was in line for a free ticket to a fancy talk by Annie Ernaux. I had never heard of Annie Ernaux before this afternoon, but I did always relish the exhilaration of standing in a queue—perhaps even slightly more, depending on the weather, than I enjoyed seeing my dear grandmother.
While many historical fiction novels focus on the battlefield, Dear Miss Lake uses the war as a backdrop for a more lighthearted, compassionate story — not about soldiers on the front line, but about the civilians holding everything together at home.
If you consume too much true crime it starts to infect your routine. Let your dog off the leash in any lonely overgrown place and you’ll start to worry she’ll come bounding out of the undergrowth with a body part in tow. Maybe that’s my personal fear, but Joyce Carol Oates taps straight into it with the gripping, disgusting and darkly comic opening to her latest novel, Fox.
Smell is deeply tied with the emotion and memory centers of our brain. Lavender perfume might evoke memories of a close friend. A waft of cheap vodka, a relic of college days, might make you grimace. The smell of a certain laundry detergent, the same one your grandparents used, might bring tears to your eyes.
Smell is also our most ancient sense, tracing back billions of years to the first chemical-sensing cells. But scientists know little about it compared to other senses — vision and hearing in particular. That’s in part because smell has not been deemed critical to our survival; humans have been wrongly considered “bad smellers” for more than a century. It’s also not easy to study.
The first Superman strips were written by Jerry Siegel, drawn by Joe Shuster, and published in Action Comics magazine in 1938 by DC (or National Allied, as the company was then called). And in those, he was a far more unruly, and in some ways far more modern character. He was "a head-bashing Superman who took no prisoners, who made his own law and enforced it with his fists, who gleefully intimidated his foes with a wicked grin and a baleful glare", says Mark Waid, a comics writer and historian, in his introduction to a volume of classic Action Comics reprints. "He was no super-cop. He was a super-anarchist." If this rowdy and rebellious Superman were introduced today, he'd be hailed as one of the most subversive superheroes around.
In the end, the journal isn’t a practice in narcissism, but a practice in attention. To keep a diary is to say: I am paying attention to my life, and I believe that it matters. That might be the most radical act of all.
In the book’s physical edition, the reader chooses which half to read first by flipping the book over. (Both the electronic and audio versions put the novella first.) Really, readers should begin with the memoir: It is both better and makes better sense of the fictional part. The novella—consulted second—acts as a kaleidoscopic lens on the first part, adding complexity and color to the memoir’s narrative. But this is no binary divide. Both sections play with form, both are filled with philosophical reflections, both resist linear narrative as they explore our messy desires, compulsions and repetitions. This is a looping Möbius strip of an inquiry, unyielding to easy resolution.
We were in Central Park after dark scanning the shadows for movement. Every now and then a rabbit, raccoon or rat scurried by. But they weren’t the animals we were looking for. Suddenly, sirens punctuated the quiet as emergency vehicles sped along a nearby road. The park’s only resident pair of coyotes began calling as if on cue. We listened to their yip-howls, grabbed our cameras and hurried to the nearest lookout.
Central Park’s ghost dogs are famously good at hiding, but their loud howls enabled us to find them on a nearby lawn. Romeo and Juliet, as we’ve come to call them, were out in the open bonding affectionately with each other. Romeo, the smaller of the two, playfully lay on his back with his paws in the air, much like a domestic dog looking for a belly rub, while Juliet licked him on the face. Something caught Juliet’s attention, and she looked up, flashing her alert, amber-brown eyes. Romeo stood, and his upper coat—a mix of gray and brown with reddish hues—became visible. They trotted off together, and we photographed them while admiring their perky ears, long legs and bushy tails. Soon, they disappeared into the darkness.
Yet arguably the novel's biggest impact has been the conversations it has started. Women, especially, have pressed the book eagerly into the hands of friends, sisters, mothers, strangers, urging them to read it. Many have called it life-changing. Some have hated it. But everyone who reads this book has something to say about it.
Taking on a big book is making the time to relax, but also to think in the longer term and commit to something bigger. So many people picking up bigger books and reading them with others is a sign that we want to look forward, to think deeper, and to seek community and connection. Sounds like a hot summer to me.
The journey started with a train to Paris, arriving at Gare de Lyon. I decided to take an Uber to the airport. That was super interesting, because Uber drivers always like to chat, and when you’re sitting in the car and say “I’m going to Antarctica for a year” they just look at you, with the three backpacks, like, You’re not serious, right?
At the Paris airport, I met some of the French crew for the first time. We flew to Christchurch, New Zealand, (with a layover in Singapore) and that’s when I really connected with the other two women going to Antarctica. We sat next to each other, discussing things like, “How is it going to be?” “What did you pack?” “Did you take more clothes than they’re giving us?” “Do you have special equipment?” It was a chat about everyone’s strategies, what we did, what we had, if we took medical supplies from the lab.
Everyone is searching for something in Kyoto: the “real Japan,” a moment of Zen, the perfect shot. What they find amid the rising tide of tourists is something else — a modern conundrum with no obvious solutions. Tokyo and Osaka are big enough to soak up tourists in the same way New York and London can, but Kyoto is hemmed in by mountains, which keeps the city from expanding. (There are 1.4 million people living in Kyoto today, as many as there were in 1975.) It also makes the glut impossible to ignore.
Like a summer vacation, “The House on Buzzards Bay” moves at a languid pace showing the calm, restful days at a beach house, until those peaceful times take an abrupt turn.
Samuel Irving “Si” Newhouse Jr became chair of Condé Nast, the magazine group owned by his father’s media company, Advance Publications, in 1975. Under his stewardship, Condé’s roster of glossy publications – titles such as Vogue, GQ and Glamour – broadened to include Architectural Digest, a revived Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Newhouse spent big in pursuit of clout, and his company’s extravagant approach to expenses became the stuff of legend. Condé positioned itself as a gatekeeper of high-end living but, as Michael Grynbaum explains in Empire of the Elite, its success in the 80s and 90s was down to its willingness to embrace “low” culture.
Perhaps there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the collectors, the enthusiasts, who want to keep, save and preserve: “Nequid pereat,” they might say, “Let nothing perish.” Then there are the others, already on the phone to the skip-hire company. Lally MacBeth is firmly of the former persuasion. If you’re of the latter, The Lost Folk might make you hyperventilate, so crammed is it with places, practices and stuff. The word “save” appears many times. So indeed does the word “skip”, as in “saved from a skip”. But persist, because you might see the culture of the UK in an unexpected light.
Let’s call it writing for its own sake. Not only because it is a book of poetry—my first form, my first love, both text and subtext of so many youthful notebooks of secret writing—but also because of the circumstance of its release. No one will ever be able to buy this book, or to review it. No one will ever recommend it to a friend. Such mechanisms are rendered moot, inoperable, by the very nature of its creation. For me, this has become almost entirely the point. To be freed from the apparatus, the machinery of publication: It represents a liberation. It brings me back to a condition of…innocence is not the word I want, but maybe artlessness. It recalls the ways I wrote when I was young. It reminds me that before I ever thought about engaging with a reader, I had to write first for an audience of one. To explore, of course, the febrile nature of the language, as well as my relationship to it. But also, equally essential, to activate a conversation with myself.
Claire McCardell hated being uncomfortable. This was true long before she became one of America’s most famous fashion designers in the 1950s, her influence felt in every woman’s wardrobe, her face on the cover of Time magazine.
As a young girl growing up in Maryland, she hated wearing a dress when climbing trees, and didn’t understand why she couldn’t wear pants with pockets like her brothers—she had nowhere to put the apples she picked. At summer camp, she loathed swimming in the cumbersome full-length stockings women were expected to wear, so she ditched hers and went bare-legged in the lake, even though she knew she’d get in trouble. When she was just starting out as a fashion designer, in the 1930s, she went on a ski trip to New Hampshire and one evening saw a woman shivering in a thin satin dress. Why, McCardell wondered, couldn’t an evening gown be made out of something warmer, so a woman could actually enjoy herself?
I simply looked out the window with a natural, recurring, reflexive interest at the field where the cows liked to stand and occasionally walk, very rarely run, and when something I saw struck me, I made a note of it. Was it communication before it was published?
So, don’t let the bright summer colours confuse you; this is a book about friendships, grief and the reality of long-term relationships. You’ll tear through it, but you’ll still have to pause from time to time to have a bit of a cry.
Soft Core is more a study in feeling-tones than a tightly plotted thriller. It’s a trippy excursion down the rabbit hole into a particular substratum of culture, maintaining a tether to the “real” world while burrowing out to the misty shoreline where it’s hard to tell horizon from sky. Each subplot sounds a distant foghorn of loneliness.
Whether you believe in ghosts or you scoff at the idea of a spirit world, this novel will satisfy your cravings with lots of hair-raising moments and one or two moderately-explicit eyebrow-raisers, along with an intriguing back-story that includes a bit of mystery. But it’s not all boo-who: author Clarence A. Haynes injects enough excitement and humor to keep even the most sober-minded reader entranced with a plot that’s twisty fun.
The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while making her poems. That life, those mornings, is never to be pitied. Asked what she found most surprising about Plath as she worked, Clark responded: ‘Her force.’ This in turn surprised me, since I thought that was all there was of her. I had come to her differently. I read the poems in childhood and have a memory of reciting ‘Daddy’ aloud to my father as he tried not to laugh. Next came The Bell Jar, then the unabridged journals, published in 2000 and edited by Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her acupuncturist for keeping her healthy.
The chronology at the beginning of Plath’s Collected Prose attempts to raise her into a three-dimensional space where bare facts are set next to intangible desires, ambitions and influences. She is born in 1932 to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father dies in 1940 of an embolus in the lung after his leg was amputated due to gangrene; she begins a journal, ascends into a kind of golden American girlhood; she’s published in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas.
Moving to Paris made my cheeks hurt. After a decade since I’d last worked in France, I found myself back in the land of one of my ancestors’ other colonizers. My Broca’s area could still conjure the language easily enough. But the fast-twitch fibers in my orbicularis oris had atrophied, making the physical production of French’s extra vowels sounds more labored and slower than I was trying to talk.
Not far from one of Milan’s last remaining medieval gates is a tiny shop door, sandwiched between shuttered storefronts. Cross the threshold, and you’ll enter a gilded world of esoteric symbols: stars, skeletons and fools. This is Il Meneghello, the workshop of some of Italy’s last known great tarot artisans.
Inside, on the register, is a portrait of its original owner, Osvaldo Menegazzi. While tarot may be a game or hobby for many, for Menegazzi, it was always first and foremost about the art. Before his death in 2021, he had become world-famous for his painstaking, hand-painted reproductions of some of the world’s most ancient and storied tarot decks. His desk, a mess of paints and materials, is just as he left it.
The summer of 2023 was all about tomatoes, but not in the way you probably envisioned. Tomatoes became more than just a seasonal cooking staple — they became an aesthetic, an online trend and a way of life. Tomato Girl Summer paved the path for the eponymous Tomato Girl, a young woman who dons flowy dresses and silk headscarves à la Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe while embodying a picture-perfect lifestyle filled with scenic walks along the Amalfi coast and afternoon feasts of antipasti. Red is a core color of the Tomato Girl’s wardrobe, but certainly not a requirement. Her overall aura is bright and blushing with ripeness, much like the juicy produce.
A year after its inception, the “tomato girl” enjoyed a resurgence, this time with literal tomatoes.
Rigorous yet casual, funny and fierce, intimate and formidable, Pause the Document invokes the documentary impulse and turns it back on itself in ways that are seriously playful and deeply enjoyable.
“You can’t actually see the Great Wall of China from space,” Dalrymple begins, “but the border wall dividing India from Pakistan is unmistakable.” Stretching more than 3,000km and flanked by floodlights, thermal vision sensors and landmines, this is more a physical scar left by the hurried dismantling of British India than a traditional geopolitical divide. What might now seem like natural frontiers were shaped by five key events: Burma’s exit from the empire in 1937; the separation of Aden that same year, and of the Gulf protectorates in 1947; the division of India and Pakistan, also in 1947; the absorption of more than 550 princely states; and, in 1971, the secession of East Pakistan. Neither ancient nor inevitable, these lines were hastily drawn in committee rooms, colonial offices and war cabinets.
What makes Shattered Lands remarkable is not just the breadth of its archival reach or the linguistic range of its interviews (from Bengali to Burmese, Urdu to Konyak), but the way it reframes south Asia’s history through the lens of disintegration.
When I first heard Britney Spears, I was five years old, escaping interminable reruns of the Twin Towers collapsing to dance to “I’m a Slave 4 U” with my sister in her bedroom. She was 11 years my senior; it had not occurred to me until then that she was anything other than a babysitter, much less a dance partner, a friend, someone with whom I could share a cultural touchpoint. Waiting similarly bridges this gap. Maybe things are worse now, or at least the charade of promise has disintegrated, but isn’t clarity the first step toward change? When the dust from the car chases and the haze from weed settle, we find Jeff with his own marquee, trumpeting a simple truth: not much is different, but everything could be.