Sometimes animals end up in cities because they have nowhere else to go. Other times they happily move in, finding readily available food or other advantages over life in the wild. Chicago’s coyotes, for instance, escape year-round hunting and trapping by staying within the city’s borders. “The city actually serves as a huge refuge for them,” says Stan Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist at The Ohio State University who has been studying the canines for almost two decades. “There are a lot of nooks and crannies in the landscape, places that people don’t use, that coyotes are really good at exploiting.”
One of the great mysteries of urban adaptation is what, if anything, living in cities does to animal minds. Research on urban wildlife has already shown that cities can have jaw-dropping effects on animals’ behavior. Gehrt’s coyotes have not only learned where it’s safest to cross roads, but have also learned to avoid traffic based on its speed and volume. Do behavioral shifts like this reflect deeper changes in how urban animals think? In what urban animals are?
You may not think you know classic service standards, but you probably do. Even if you’ve never worked in a restaurant, spend enough time in upscale establishments and you know the deal: Women are served first, going clockwise around the table, then men are served clockwise. That goes for every step of the service, from how the water is poured to the order in which orders are taken to how plates arrive to (and are set down on) the table. The same goes for wine, though the host (the diner who receives the “taste” pour from the bottle) is served last, regardless of gender. That’s according to the Court of Master Sommeliers, the training most beverage professionals undergo to learn the social graces of good service, which was founded in 1969. (Incidentally, that’s also the era in which women increasingly pushed back on restaurants’ discriminatory practices — in some American cities, women weren’t allowed to enter restaurants, or specific sections of restaurants, unaccompanied by a man until the 1970s.)
But at Chicago’s Tied House, which opened in February 2018, general manager Meredith Rush says there’s a way to provide thoughtful service without relying on those measures of old-school etiquette: Essentially, it’s omitted the idea of “ladies first.” The staff has eliminated language like “ladies and gentleman” from its vocabulary, and no longer serves guests in order of gender performance. “We’ll do our service as elegantly as we would if we were adhering to the classic standards,” Rush says.
Pop quiz: What’s a word you use a hundred times a day — that doesn’t show up in the dictionary?
Give up? Mhmm.
You got it! Mhmm is a small word that’s often used unconsciously. But it can actually tell us a lot about language, bias and the transatlantic slave trade.
Toward the end, Franz goes with a Japanese friend to see an exhibition of calligraphy. “What do you think?” the friend asks, as they gaze at the scrolls.
“I don’t understand anything. But I also can’t look away.”
“Oh. Then you understand,” her friend says.
Franz’s book — a love story, a recovery narrative, a knowingly futile attempt to penetrate “a nation that takes great pride in its impenetrability” — is the same kind of thing. It demands attention, and defies understanding.
In fact, the closer you look, the more it seems that the human brain is hardwired to enjoy the mazes and labyrinths that its own structure resembles. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, Wendy and Danny explore the hedge maze outside their hotel, wandering in and out of dead ends. Then, as Jack broods over an architectural model of the maze, the scene cuts to a bird’s eye view of mother and son as they arrive at the centre. “I didn’t think it was going to be this big, did you?” asks Wendy. She could just as easily be talking about the amazing history these books dig up and put on display.
The Icelandic literary maverick and Oscar-nominated songwriter Sjón writes with a poet’s ear and a musician’s natural sense of rhythm. This extraordinary performance, consisting of three books in one – the first originally published in Iceland in 1994, the second in 2001, and the third in 2016 – sets out to entertain, but also to prod the reader towards a stark realisation of human mortality and the games fate plays.