So while I do continue to read Dr. Seuss, I also reject Geisel as a cultural ambassador for children’s literature.
It has long been debated why the eyes were lost. Some biologists used to argue that they just withered away over generations because cave-dwelling animals with faulty eyes experienced no disadvantage. But another explanation is now considered more likely, says evolutionary physiologist Nicolas Rohner of the University of Münster in Germany: “Eyes are very expensive in terms of resources and energy. Most people now agree that there must be some advantage to losing them, if you don’t need them.”
The complicated, festive, painstakingly orchestrated meals they served feature heavily in a charming new exhibition now on view in a dining room–sized gallery at the New York Historical (recently renamed from New-York Historical Society). Curated by Nina Nazionale, “Dining in Transit” gathers a range of memorabilia—menus, cookbooks, brochures—documenting the food that travelers enjoyed on the ships, planes, and trains of the early-to-mid-twentieth century and the labor of the workers who provided it. The show pays frank attention to the financial incentives that motivated the operators of ocean liners, railroads, and airlines to treat their customers so hospitably, cannily predicting that they could use oysters, beef Wellington, kale salad, and martinis to edge out the competition. It revels in the nostalgic glamour of these luxury meals even as it alludes to the patterns of exclusion and exploitation that made them possible. The prevailing racial, economic, and gender hierarchies of the first half of the twentieth century were, the show makes clear, on full display in transit dining rooms and kitchens—an argument that gets all the stronger as the focus turns from international ocean liners to domestic enterprises like TWA.
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.
It is on this other end of the scale of time—in seasons rather than eons—that my own interest in natural science began and where today it finds its focus and concern. As a child and to this day, one of my deepest pleasures has come from walking farm fields and alpine meadows, watching for butterflies, a pursuit that takes on a formal touch each year when, in early July, I join the annual Concord, Massachusetts, butterfly count. Fifteen or twenty naturalists, most of us amateurs, gather and split into several teams to search a set list of local fields and woods. My group always begins in nearby Sudbury, where there’s a colony of Appalachian Browns, not a rare butterfly but one found only in wet woods, swamps, and bottomlands, a habitat I would have done well to read about before my first visit, when I waded into a field of tall sedges and spent the rest of the day in waterlogged shoes.
Keeping my livelihood as remote and dissimilar from my passion as possible has been a favorable, if not a totally accidental, strategy. In fact, it was precisely (and ironically) my experience as grocery-store worker that occasioned my big break at a major publication. And perhaps it’s this fact keeps me insecure and conflicted. Am I a writer first, or a grocer? And is it possible to be fully and completely both, to be present in a dual reality?
This anthology manages to be satisfying on the simple level of horror-genre plotting, while also thoughtful in its relentless exploration of contemporary horrors like police misconduct, misogyny, violence, and many other social issues. Ultimately, this collection explores morality—in these stories, death is not necessarily absolute, nor is a proud legacy guaranteed.
The bluntness of Purvis’s title, which refers both to the girls transforming into dogs and to their neighbors taking up the hunt, is a hint: This is not a novel particularly interested in nuance. Instead, it wants to directly engage the subtext of all witch stories, in which femininity itself is perceived as a menace, and to try to understand why women are often seen as natural conduits for unnatural forces. Hence the sisters—because if a woman is strange and unnerving, a group of them connected by the inherited bonds that link sisters is even more so.
Cluster headaches are relatively rare, affecting less than one per cent of the population, whereas migraine is among the most common serious maladies. Globally, some 1.2 billion people suffer from it, some forty million of them in the United States. Men are more likely to experience cluster headaches, whereas female migraine patients outnumber their male counterparts at a ratio of about three to one. The two conditions provide the focus of Zeller’s book, which weaves together history, biology, a survey of current research, testimony from patients, and an agonizing account of Zeller’s own suffering, which began when he was in his twenties. Readers with migraine or cluster headaches will find themselves, as I did, comparing their own experiences with the rich material in the book, which is both a survey of the field and a great cry of pain.
I tell her that since moving to New York, people at home will sometimes ask me how I can live in the US and that all my native New Yorker friends will reassure me that I have no idea because New York is not the US.
“Oh, you live here?” she says, and I believe I can see her like me a sliver more. “Well, that’s right, New York is not America. America could be more like New York. And in fact New York should now try to be more like New York. A lot of my friends have never been to America. I have friends who have been 50 times to Cambodia, to Vietnam … have you ever been to Kansas?”
I used to scorn fussy eaters until I became one. For years, food was an integral part of my identity. Eating it, cooking it, writing about it. As a suburban child of the Findus Crispy Pancake generation, moving to London in the mid-noughties felt like Dorothy stepping into a technicolour, flavour-laden Oz. I had spent my teens on a miserable series of Ryvita-based diets; it was liberating to rebrand my newfound greediness as “foodieness”. My appetite knew few bounds. Raw or fermented or tentacled – I’d eat it. I prided myself on being gastro-literate. I judged those who asked for a fork or paled at an unfamiliar ingredient. A broad palate was synonymous with being an interesting person, I thought. A sensual person. I once stopped dating someone perfectly nice because his pickiness at dinner was so deeply unsexy.
But that was then.
“Culpability” is not a thriller — it’s in the cracks-in-a-family-emerge genre of “Ordinary People” and “Before and After” — but, with all of the unfolding secrets and ominous hints of something nefarious at the Chesapeake Bay mansion next door, it is a propulsive, difficult-to-put down novel.
One thing that appeals to me about writing is that I’m able to communicate without being looked at directly, or at least judged away from my appearance. Issues increasingly arise as the job of the journalist now necessarily requires a front-facing camera and the ability to stand onstage to an audience of thousands and opine about fascism, say, or love.
Whatever the season, there is warmth to be found in these stories. But the heat arises from her characters’ intellectual willfulness, however misguided, and in the way their author thwarts or punishes them for it. The willfulness and the punishment are also Ozick’s, and while reading her best stories, you can feel her striving, ecstatic presence everywhere, like belief.
As is to be expected of a cosy crime novel, this second book in The Bookshop Detectives series is a light and often very funny read about a dark subject. Yes, there’s death and danger, but there’s also Dungeons and Dragons, a quest to safely capture a bookshop mouse named Basil and a ‘Death Cafe’ meeting after close to eat cakes shaped like headstones.
At the Park on the Edge of the Country is an example of the variety of poetic forms and devices a poet can use while maintaining a single theme or message throughout their work. This collection is moved by image and identity, circling closer to its goal as it asks for meaning from itself.
The truth is that certain books should be set in a big city like New York because of what it offers: stimulation and serendipity and constant hits of the truly strange.
In life, a T. rex’s teeth were fearsome. Arguably the majestic carnivore’s most valuable weapon. But 66 million years after the king of dinosaurs exited the Mesozoic scene, its fossilized, banana-size flesh rippers are finding a new purpose. Fossilized T. rex teeth—along with gnashers from other dinosaur species—are yielding chemical clues that can help researchers reconstruct Earth’s ancient climate.
On a sweltering day bleached by the fearsome southern Italian sun, a group of international travellers have gathered a stone's throw from Naples' San Gennaro catacombs, named for the city's patron saint.
But these visitors aren't here to venerate the ancient martyr; they've come in service of something equally important to the city's identity. Hailing from Belgium, France, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Brazil, these men and women are all aspiring pizzaioli (traditional Italian pizza makers), and they are about to take the biggest pizza test of their lives.
Emily Hunt Kivel’s debut novel is a masterclass in how to tell a story: a story to challenge ourselves to believe in things bigger than us, a story urging us to not resist so hard going through the doors the open for us just because they’re scary, a story to think a little harder about what it means to be a hero.
Machines no longer assist our lives from the outside; they increasingly define the conditions under which we think, work, and relate. And here Skidelsky joins a growing chorus of artists, poets, and writers in asking the big questions we once debated and wrote about—questions of meaning, purpose, and the conditions of human freedom. His concern isn’t just with jobs or privacy or misinformation, though these all appear in the book. It’s also with the subtle shift in what it means to be human when the architecture of daily life—how we work, relate, remember, even grieve—is increasingly determined by technical systems indifferent to context or value. We no longer simply use machines; we inhabit them. And Skidelsky wants us to see that we are doing so without having fully considered the costs.
When was the last time you stopped to say thank you to a tree? Perhaps it’s something we should do more often. After all, we owe them everything, from the air we breathe to the soil beneath our feet, and far less obvious things too. We have trees to thank for the swirl of our fingerprints, our posture, and possibly even our dreams.
In her new book, British tree science consultant Harriet Rix presents trees as an awesome force of nature, a force that has, over time, “woven the world into a place of great beauty and extraordinary variety”. How have trees done this? And can they really be said to possess “genius”?
At my family’s apartment in Los Angeles, there was a swimming pool that overlooked a tributary of the Los Angeles River called the Tujunga Wash. In the summer it was barren, an empty expanse of concrete, but sometimes, after a storm, a murky stream would thread through it and join the river near Studio City. I barely noticed this backdrop to my summers until a schoolfriend from London came to stay for a few weeks and asked about it. I told her it was a stream that fed into the river that fed into the ocean, and she drily suggested we’d been lied to by our realtor. Later, she suggested we drive up the winding canyons that separate the valley from the rest of LA to look at the mansions lining the hills. I hadn’t yet learned to covet homes like jewels (or the Tiffany necklace she wore) and, until then, had seen our apartment as only a haven.
For all the upward mobility that Sherpas have recently enjoyed, they have yet to make the leap from being guides who climb in their off-hours to athletes being paid to chase their own dreams. In aiming to be the first, Nima hopes to earn a measure of respect and equality that his people have long been due. But to grasp the opportunity before him, he’ll have to transcend the world of commercial climbing that has both elevated and circumscribed his community for generations.
In late 2005, five months after a car accident, a 23-year-old woman lay unresponsive in a hospital bed. She had a severe brain injury and showed no sign of awareness. But when researchers scanning her brain asked her to imagine playing tennis, something striking happened: brain areas linked to movement lit up on her scan.
The experiment, conceived by neuroscientist Adrian Owen and his colleagues, suggested that the woman understood the instructions and decided to cooperate — despite appearing to be unresponsive. Owen, now at Western University in London, Canada, and his colleagues had introduced a new way to test for consciousness. Whereas some previous tests relied on observing general brain activity, this strategy zeroed in on activity directly linked to a researcher’s verbal command.
Moderation is, at its core, a book about the moment when everything we’ve been repressing comes back to the surface. You can hide from yourself for only so long: until the work day ends, until your favorite show is over, until the feed runs out of content, until the digital tide recedes and all that is left is your broken, beautiful life.
“Just as any advanced comrade must have a watch, he shall also possess mastery of a photo camera.” So declared Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1926, in his role as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment. This programmatic statement was included in the very first issue of the photography journal Sovetskoe Foto, published that same year. In fact, such amateur photographic practice—as Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko make clear in their book In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos—was a key form of active Soviet citizenship. A photographer’s manual published in 1931 openly ordered all to turn their cameras away from family, friends, and other mundane subjects and demanded, “Not one photograph devoid of social significance!”
Trickshots have become a huge business. In the algorithmically segmented world of short-form video, these brief and #oddlysatisfying clips of ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things are one the closest things we have to a shared culture. The best of them transcend language, religion, culture, politics. They work as both sport and absurdist commentary on the futility of all human endeavour. Their appeal lies somewhere in the ratio between the laborious hours of toil that the trickshooters put in and the instant gratification they provide the viewer. They have wasted time, and now doth time waste us, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Richard II.
Histories of artificial eyes tend to start with the ancient Egyptians and recount how they were pretty good at making eyes for people to be mummified — they “removed the eyes of the dead, poured wax or plaster into the orbits, and then inserted precious stones to simulate the iris,” according to one history — but not all that sophisticated in their techniques for the living: an eye-size piece of clay painted to look like an eye and then secured over the socket with a piece of flesh-colored cloth. Those histories usually jump over centuries — to the mid-1500s — before describing any real progress, particularly in the design of an ocular prosthetic meant to fit into the socket rather than in front of it.
Tyler’s Vinegar Girl is a straightforward all-American success story about how what really matters is essence and not appearances. But it’s also a story of how immigrants enrich our culture, our economy, and our personal lives. Though surely the author never set out to make a political statement, Vinegar Girl stands as a mirror of our better selves and of a normality, now shattered, where strangers were once embraced as family.
The story of the Atomic Age’s start is a fascinating one about the power of invention and a chilling one about its consequences. In “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb,” Garrett M. Graff skillfully tells both.
Once again, Reid has created a story that’s deeply immersive, wonderfully written and endlessly readable from start to finish. A Theory of Dreaming may have swapped out some of the more gothic, fantasy elements found in A Study in Drowning for something a little more raw and real, but the story is no less compelling for it.
Readers looking for advice or succor must read between the lines to find it here, but you won’t mind. “Briefly Perfectly Human” reminds you to live each day as if it’s your last, and that, packs a punch.
As far as I can tell, the Moby Dick marathon is a thing simply for being a thing. There are a surprising number of gatherings dedicated to getting through Herman Melville’s dense 1851 whaling classic in one uninterrupted go. You’re probably familiar with the outline of the book–“Call me Ishmael,” Ahab, the white whale–but might not know that the plot is actually the minority of its roughly 600 pages and 135 chapters, plus epilogue. If you know about the rest of it, you’re probably asking what my friends asked me when I told them I was going to a two-day Moby Dick marathon in Mystic, Connecticut: why?
You don't need to be a hardcore gamer to appreciate the character's core purpose of strategic nibbling, with Pac-Man's gameplay both refreshingly simple and, ultimately, difficult to master. When it came to the original, gamers could either frenetically run around without much thought or, like many people did back in the 1980s, religiously read a How to win at Pac-Man guide that taught you how to memorise hundreds of complex maze patterns and optimal paths. Such tactical preparation would make you war-ready to compete at a Pac-Man tournament – of which thousands have been hosted worldwide.
Etchells claims this format was far less driven by testosterone than a lot of Pac-Man's rivals, and that was a big reason why the game made such a splash. "Pac-Man's creator Toru Iwatani has specifically said he intended to create a game that everyone could enjoy, and women in particular," he adds. "Pac-Man, and its colourful sequels like 1982's Ms Pac-Man, therefore stood apart from the primarily male-geared, shooting-based titles of that era, including Asteroids and Space Invaders, because it focused on a much broader range of demographics."
To Flett and Hewitt, the idea of perfectionism as a form of admirable striving is a dangerous misconception, one they have devoted three books and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers to overturning. “I can’t stand it when people talk about perfectionism as something positive,” Flett told me, as we sat at his kitchen table in Mississauga, a Toronto suburb where he has spent most of his life. “They don’t realize the deep human toll.” Hewitt, a clinical psychologist, has seen with his therapy patients how perfectionism can be “personally terrorizing for people, a debilitating state.” It’s driven not by aspiration but by fear, and by the conviction that perfection is the only “way of being secure and safe in the world.”
A few hours after I arrive at Hôtel Belles Rives in the south of France this summer, I’m seated at dinner when I see a flash of green light ricochet across the glittering water. It’s almost too perfect.
I’ve come here to visit the places that inspired the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald as he traveled across France with his wife and daughter in the 1920s. I’ve ended up in a scene from his most famous novel. In The Great Gatsby, the light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock shines green, entrancing Gatsby. I’m staring at a pinprick of a lighthouse in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea while a glass of vermentino sweats on the table in front of me, but still. I’m entranced.
The plot is like a zany Dungeons & Dragons campaign played with friends; the storyline is meandering but with a definite aim and purpose, and the characters are lovably boisterous (or hateful, in the case of the antagonists). It’s funny, surprising, smart and weird, and fully lives up to the high bar you’d expect from a great like Sachar.
Instead, Castillo writes a love story, neither trite nor pandering, over this terrain; it is simultaneously an interrogation of capitalism and tech ecosystems.
In 1983, Octavia E. Butler published “Speech Sounds” in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, a short story that would win her her first Hugo Award a year later. Written, as Butler put it in the afterword, “in weariness, depression, and sorrow” and with “little hope or liking for the human species,” the story ends in a place Butler seemed not to have expected: not with salvation, but with a sliver of purpose carved from ruin.
Love, as it turned out, was Baldwin’s greatest subject. And when I finally finished my journey with Baldwin, these became my book’s last lines: “It would not be until close to the end of this voyage that I realized what I had actually been researching and trying to write all along was a new James Baldwin biography. But from the very beginning, I always knew it was a love story.”
Yet there are some people, so-called finitists, who reject infinity to this day. Because everything in our universe—including the resources to calculate things—seems to be limited, it makes no sense to them to calculate with infinities. And indeed, some experts have proposed an alternative branch of mathematics that relies only on finitely constructible quantities. Some are now even trying to apply these ideas to physics in the hope of finding better theories to describe our world.
While Pepys’s dark side has long been known, it is something else to be confronted with the evidence laid out quite so starkly. The man who emerges from De la Bédoyère’s meticulous filleting is no Restoration roustabout but a chilling embodiment of male entitlement. This newly explicit view of Pepys does not negate the continuing value of his diary – which remains a magnificent historical resource – but from now on it will be impossible to go to it in a state of innocence, let alone denial.
No matter how much we humans might research and theorise, some of the most entertaining stories throughout history remain disputed or tenuous at best. But in Half-Arsed History podcast host Riley Knight’s debut book History’s Strangest Deaths, this flaw of history is instead an asset. After all, as Knight often reminds the reader, who are we to let historical accuracy get in the way of a good story?
Campbell’s first devotion is to his art, and his primary feeling about that art, both in theory and practice, is gratitude. “To me being grateful was the key to everything… For the life. For the music.” The vagaries of ego, drugs, money and fame notwithstanding.
We all should be grateful for the art of Mike Campbell, and that he has celebrated his art so beautifully in “Heartbreaker.”
That writers slip into the narrative reflex of the mother as too powerful or too central to allow for a character’s development is revealing. Space must be cleared for the daughter to suffer, individuate and grow. Yet, these novels also show that we never fully cast our mother out. She remains at the edges of our identity, both threat to the self and origin.
Ashworth-Beaumont, a super-fit and sunny former Royal Marine from Edinburgh, would go on to spend six weeks in an induced coma as surgeons raced to repair his crushed body. But as he lay on the road, waiting for the paramedics, his only thoughts were that he was dying. He did not have the wherewithal to consider the irony of his predicament.
In the late 1990s, after he had left the marines, Ashworth-Beaumont, now 59, studied for a degree in prosthetics and orthotics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Clinicians in these disciplines help patients with pain, function and mobility by making and fitting devices such as prosthetic limbs and orthotic braces. He had written research papers and trained prosthetists while specialising as an orthotist at the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital (RNOH) in north-west London. “Now I was the patient,” he says.
I meet up with them on Unstad beach, at the north-western corner of Vestvågøy, one of the best places on the islands to catch the midnight sun, thanks to its unobstructed views across the bay. Even at 23:00, surfers cheer each another on from the waves. Families enjoy snacks on the rocks while children shriek in the shallows as they splash in the frigid, single-digit Arctic waters. Mountains hover on either side of us, framed by a sky a few shades paler than the sea.
"When I used to travel abroad and said I was from Lofoten, people looked blank," says Haugen, as we stroll the beach. "Now they've seen pictures online and can't believe this is my everyday view."
"That's part of the problem," adds Berg. "This is our home – not just a backdrop for a Facebook selfie. When people litter or block roads, it's so frustrating".
The book, beautifully and amusingly written and prodigiously well-informed, is part travelogue and part history. Martin enjoys the whimsical fantasies of English seaside arcana — and it was the railways which spawned the crazy golf courses, the lidos and aquariums, the end-of-pier, what-the-butler-saw diversions; and although railways didn’t invent adultery, they greatly facilitated it.
Yanagihara lulls us into interpreting the title – an echo of a line in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land – as merely condescending or ironic before demonically electrifying it, 400 pages in. Much of the book was written late at night in the renovated bottle factory in New York where she lives (the steel beams apparently block internet reception); I’ve never been able to shake the thought of her calculating that ugly twist after dark.
Dravet Syndrome is just one of many neurological diseases that are exacerbated by higher temperatures, says Sanjay Sisodiya of University College London and a pioneer in the field of climate change's impact on the brain. A neurologist who specialises in epilepsy, he frequently heard from patients' families that they had more troubles during heatwaves. "And I thought to myself, of course, why shouldn't climate change also affect the brain? After all, so many processes in the brain are involved in how the body copes with heat."
As he dug into the scientific literature, he discovered a range of neurological conditions that are made worse by rising heat and humidity, including epilepsy, stroke, encephalitis, multiple sclerosis, migraine, along with a number of others. He also discovered that the effects of climate change on our brains are already becoming visible.
“Delivering the mail is a ‘Halloween job,’ ” Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. “An occupation with a uniform, immediately recognizable, even by children.” What to call Grant’s book is harder to say. It is an unusual amalgam: a pandemic memoir, a love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal—for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: those occupations, such as police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, yes, postal worker, whose worth is not measured first and foremost in dollars but in public esteem. Or should be, anyway.
When he sat for an interview with Hakim Jamal, founder of the Malcolm X Foundation, Baldwin was hammered with questions about living in France: “Why on earth would you go to a country that is predominantly white?” And his sexuality: “Are you a homosexual?” Baldwin replied, “No, I’m bisexual, whatever that means,” to which Jamal responded, “Good. No, I know, because that’s what they say anyway.”
Baldwin’s somewhat cagey responses were a product of what he later described as the conflict between “my life as a writer and my life as—not a spokesman exactly, but as public witness to the situation of black people.”
There’s an irony that, in real life, it’s these animals we’ve come to love so much who create a civility and kindness we rarely have energy for with each other. The pandemic all but wiped out the many loose relationships we kept—the barista, the crossing guard, the nail technician at the salon. Hobbes and his canine friends have created a whole new network of fans, friends, and fleeting joys.
Lalami is a canny, powerful, humane writer. She has created a fictional world that we now understand implicitly and a protagonist who could be any one of us. Sara Hussein assumes she will gain her freedom by following the rules. But her sentence keeps spooling outward; following the rules has not brought her any closer to being released.
These essays are essentially journeys – knotty and meandering, with moments of pithy, clarifying insight. If you can hold someone’s interest while figuring things out for yourself in real time on the page, you’re doing something right. Perhaps the true source of authority is companionable intelligence, and what we think of as sound judgment is just a function of familiarity – comfort in another person’s psychic skin.
Inspired by a series that Marcotty wrote for The Minneapolis Star Tribune, this book tackles the momentous story of the American Prairie: the rich ecological world that existed before first contact, the European settlers who transformed that world into farmland that fed the nation, the price we’re paying now for that transformation, and the efforts to remediate damage. What emerges is a panoramic, stirring story that exhorts readers to reconsider a region that’s “feared by pioneers, shunned by tourists, dismissed today as a wasteland best viewed from thirty thousand feet” and that is also one of the ecologically richest and most endangered ecosystems on our planet.
The absurdity of these two clichés—that all older people struggle with technology and all younger people are somehow naturally adept—is obvious, especially to anyone in regular contact with either population. Yet they do persist, in media accounts and everyday life.
In “Wired Wisdom: How to Age Better Online,” Eszter Hargittai and John Palfrey look at the real differences between older and younger people in their use of digital technology, the attitudes that underlie those differences, and—where older folks do lag in adoption—what can be done to help.