Around the world, everyday surgical procedures, from treatments for common infections to chemotherapy, rely on antibiotics. In the past decade, however, the drugs we rely on to keep us safe from everything from E. coli to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) are failing to keep up with the rapid evolution of such infections and viruses. As these antibiotics continue to lose their efficacy, we lose our ability to treat even the most basic of illnesses. The situation is so severe that the World Health Organization regards antibiotic resistance as “one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development today”.
Nor is this a new crisis. In 2014, the Prime Minister David Cameron appointed economist Jim O’Neill to investigate the economic fallout of antibiotic resistance. The resulting report, the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, put the global annual death toll due to drug-resistant superbugs at 700,000, with an estimated annual mortality rate of ten million by 2050. O’Neill also predicted that, should the crisis continue without a satisfactory response, the reduction in worldwide population would diminish the global economic output by up to 3.5 per cent, at a cost of $100 trillion (£63tn) – roughly 35 times the GDP of the UK. Four years later, we’re no closer to solving the problem.
Some years ago, I had a colleague who would frequently complain that he didn’t have enough to do. He’d mention how much free time he had to our team, ask for more tasks from our boss, and bring it up at after-work drinks. He was right, of course, about the situation: Although we were hardly idle, even the most productive among us couldn’t claim to be toiling for eight (or even five, sometimes three) full hours a day. My colleague, who’d come out of a difficult bout of unemployment, simply could not believe that this justified his salary. It took him a long time to start playing along: checking Twitter, posting on Facebook, reading the paper, and texting friends while fulfilling his professional obligations to the fullest of his abilities.
The idea of being paid to do nothing is difficult to adjust to in a society that places a high value on work. Yet this idea has lately gained serious attention amid projections that the progress of globalization and technology will lead to a “jobless” future. The underlying worry goes something like this: If machines do the work for us, wage labor will disappear, so workers won’t have money to buy things. If people can’t or don’t buy things, no one will be able to sell things, either, which means less commerce, a withering private sector, and even fewer jobs. Our value system based on the sanctity of toil will be exposed as hollow; we won’t be able to speak about workers as a class at all, let alone discuss “the labor market” as we now know it. This will require not just economic adjustments but moral and political ones, too.
The beloved neurologist and author Oliver Sacks was a man of many enthusiasms — for ferns, cephalopods, motorbikes, minerals, swimming, smoked salmon and Bach, to name a few — but none more so than for words.
When I say he loved words, I don’t simply mean within the context of being a writer of numerous classic books — “Awakenings,” “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” “Musicophilia.” Even if he had never written a single one, I am sure Oliver would still have been that funny fellow who took giant dictionaries to bed for light reading (aided by a magnifying glass). He delighted in etymology, synonyms and antonyms, slang, swear words, palindromes, anatomical terms, neologisms (but objected, in principle, to contractions). He could joyfully parse the difference between homonyms and homophones, not to mention homographs, in dinner table conversation. (He also relished saying those three words — that breathy “H” alliteration — in his distinctive British accent.)
Residency programs suggest that the best thing to do is to shrink and compartmentalize the whole process—to arrange for some brief, glorious period of time in which you get to live in the bathroom of a McDonald’s, or rattle around the back of a U-Haul, or, if you’re particularly lucky, decamp to some breathtaking cabin in the countryside, and make your stuff. Perhaps one no longer lives as an artist but merely vacations as one.
“The key element of any Dead Girl story is the investigator’s haunted, semi-sexual obsession with the Dead Girl, or rather, the absence she has left,” Alice Bolin writes in her deliciously dry, moody essay collection, “Dead Girls.” Bolin’s own obsession is nowhere near as lurid but just as fascinating. Once she spots the necrophiliac thread running through our culture — from “Twin Peaks” to “True Detective,” and including every procedural ever made — she can’t stop seeing it, can’t stop thinking about what it would be like, as a girl who’s alive and kicking, to occupy so much central, privileged space. The ubiquity of the popular narrative she comes to call the “Dead Girl Show” makes her think that the dead girl might be something she “could hitch my wagon to.” This might seem an oddly static choice if it didn’t prove so generative.
As expected, the book contains chapters devoted to charting the history of important toys, such as wood blocks and Lego. But “Design of Childhood” casts a wider, more ambitious net, looking at the ways in which attention to children and their needs has helped shape design at large — including public space (playgrounds), architecture (schools and the home) and urbanism (safe street design).
And it looks at the way design has tried to shape children in turn. Those open-plan schools of the ’70s? They were an attempt to foster free thinking and collaboration by removing the walls between classrooms. Unfortunately, they also fostered poor acoustics and quickly went out of vogue. (Though the buzzwords remain with us still.)
Both novels are about women trying to imagine and work their way out of a narrative that has already been decided for them. Both novels are inspiring, not in spite of Tambu’s hopeless situation but because through it all she never loses sight of herself while, at the same time, never underestimating the brutal reality of her predicament. In this regard, “This Mournable Body” is a story of triumph, not despair.