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.