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.