As evening fell, 80,000 spectators took their seats and the lights were turned back on. The sleeping moths stirred, and soon thousands were zigzagging among the players. Photographs taken that night show annoyed football officials picking moths off each other’s suits, while the swarm blocked the lenses of TV cameras and hung from the goalposts. Perhaps the highlight came when Cristiano Ronaldo sat injured and weeping on the pitch, while a lone Silver Y sipped his teardrops away.
As the Portuguese superstar had discovered, the mingling of urban development with the natural world can throw up some weird and wonderful occurrences. Cities are like mad scientists, creating their own crazy ecological concoctions by throwing all kinds of native and foreign elements into the urban melting pot, then spicing it up with artificial light, pollution, impervious surfaces and a host of other challenges. Researchers around the globe are documenting how globalisation and urbanisation are changing the behaviour and evolution of animals.
Indeed, evolutionary biologists no longer need to travel to remote places like the Galápagos to discover their holy grail: speciation, the formation of new and distinct species in the course of evolution. The process is going on right in the very cities where they live and work.
Last fall a friend told me a story about Ryuichi Sakamoto, the renowned musician and composer who lives in the West Village. Mr. Sakamoto, it seems, so likes a particular Japanese restaurant in Murray Hill, and visits it so often, that he finally had to be straight with the chef: He could not bear the music it played for its patrons.
The issue was not so much that the music was loud, but that it was thoughtless. Mr. Sakamoto suggested that he could take over the job of choosing it, without pay, if only so he could feel more comfortable eating there. The chef agreed, and so Mr. Sakamoto started making playlists for the restaurant, none of which include any of his own music. Few people knew about this, because Mr. Sakamoto has no particular desire to publicize it.
It took me a few weeks to appreciate how radical the story was, if indeed it was true. I consider thoughtless music in restaurants a problem that has gotten worse over the years, even since the advent of the music-streaming services, which — you’d think — should have made it better.
Jonathan Gold was a restaurant critic, one whose roving intellect uncovered a new story about food in America, one about everyday, often immigrant-run restaurants, not just fine dining. That alone made him revolutionary. But Los Angeles is not in mourning because of the loss of a food-writing pioneer. The second-largest city in America just lost a secular saint. It’s mourning a welcoming guide and a listening ear, a curious palate and an endless appetite, a man who saw the very best of the city, and told the rest of America that a place written off by the national media as vapid, soulless and sun-dazed was actually the country’s beating heart.
Breast versus bottle is but one of the many debates wending through Kurlansky’s often fascinating (“Thomas Jefferson liked to serve ice cream on sponge cake with a lightly baked meringue on top”), sometimes mundane (“In addition to milk, cheese and porridge, the Dutch ate huge quantities of butter”) and occasionally weird (“There are also records of women in the highlands of New Guinea breast-feeding piglets, pre-European Hawaiians breast-feeding puppies, and Guyanese women breast-feeding deer”) new book, which can be seen as nothing less than an attempt to tell the history of the world via what is, let’s face it, a bodily fluid.
“Convenience Store Woman” is short, and it casts a fluorescent spell. Like a convenience store, it is chilly; it makes you wish you had brought a sweater. At the same time, it’s the kind of performance that leaves you considering the difference between exploring interesting topics and actually being interesting.
The many-layered types of discomfort in “Orange World” come together into a story that outlines the difficulty of giving love, especially motherly love, when that love is always accompanied by a fear of loss. Meanwhile, the looming figure of the devil-creature complicates the distinction between rational versus irrational fear. It reminds us that the act of contemplating risks is always necessarily a form of fortune-telling, of guessing at a future that still doesn’t exist—in a way, rendering fear itself as an act of speculative fiction.