Matt Haig is feeling hopeful. His first ever illustrated story, The Truth Pixie, is published in the UK on Thursday – and he is optimistic it will encourage young children to talk about their anxieties. “It’s a book I want parents to share with their children – a read-aloud bedtime story,” Haig says. “Bedtime is a time when children’s heads are full of fears, and those don’t go away by just ignoring them. They go away by talking about them, externalising them and dealing with them.”
While his books for children are usually full of jokes, Haig’s bestselling non-fiction titles for adults, Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet, both explore his own struggles with mental illness. He says The Truth Pixie is “Reasons to Stay Alive for seven-year-olds – but with trolls and elves and silly jokes thrown in”.
The arrows of time we have observed in nature – due to growing entropy, cosmic expansion and certain physical processes in particle physics – make it extremely unlikely that human events will recur in time. As far as we can see, the Universe is ageing; Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence seems at odds with the world’s fundamental rules. On the other hand, if the Universe is infinite in space, there’s still a chance that planets nearly identical to Earth exist, untold light-years away. If we contemplate an endless cosmos, a spatial repetition of worlds could happen by mere chance. Perhaps on one of them, so far away that we could never hope to observe it, a replica of Blanqui walks free.
The 2014 right-wing fever dream of a film God’s Not Dead, a fantasy version of higher education for young adults raised on the Left Behind series, is a comic masterpiece, at least to me and my fellow college faculty. Kevin Sorbo (of Hercules: the Legendary Journeys fame) stars as a philosophy professor who believes — get this — there is no God. And he insists his students believe the same. He really insists. He insists with a passion that could only exist in the imaginations of people who have never taught, and perhaps never stepped on an actual college campus. In the mind of the American conservative, this is precisely what happens in college: Professors stand before students and scream the correct beliefs at them. When the students don’t reprogram quickly enough, we punish them.
In reality we don’t get paid enough to do the hard work brainwashing would require. Political indoctrination? I can’t even get students to read the syllabus. The American right is so heavily invested in the fantasy of radical leftist professors that no evidence can convince them otherwise. Many of them draw that conclusion without any contact with academia whatsoever. Turning Point USA frontman and diaper enthusiast Charlie Kirk, for example, spends his days spamming Twitter about left-wing bias on campus despite not having attended college.
This is a thoughtful and balanced work — and an aggressive one. He takes on all sides, starting with the French for "clinging to an empire" and underestimating their foe; the U.S. for its arrogance and foolish military strategy; and South Vietnam for its corruption and unwillingness to provide a better government for its people.
And he sharply criticizes the North, as well, comparing Ho Chi Minh and other leaders to Stalin — for their indifference to suffering among their populations and for creating a repressive state. "All those possessed of property or education became marked for exclusion, even death, under the new order," he writes.
Nine pints, give or take. That’s how much blood you have, surging in time to “the old brag”, as Sylvia Plath put it, of your heart. Although for Rose George in the opening scene of this book, it’s eight, since she introduces herself in the act of giving one pint to the NHS Blood and Transplant service. Ten minutes lying back hooked up to a bag, then eat a biscuit and go on your way. “The reality of it, that I am emitting a bodily fluid in public, is contained as much as possible,” she writes, “and not just in clear plastic bags.”
The ordinary act of giving blood is an astonishing one. But then blood is an astonishing and contradictory substance. It’s immensely valuable – although voluntary donation is the gold standard for safety, people worldwide routinely sell the contents of their veins. Yet for centuries, medicine was merrily letting it by the bowlful as a “cure” for every imaginable ailment. This passion for bleeding took lives: if the first bleed wasn’t effective, another was ordered. Bleeding was even recommended as a cure for bleeding.
Time has a way of sanding off the rough edges of historical memory, turning even the most convulsive, contentious lives into opportunities for national triumphalism and self-congratulation. With “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” the historian David W. Blight wants to enrich our understanding of an American in full who, for more than half his life, wasn’t even legally recognized as such. Now that Douglass is enshrined on his pedestal, shorn of what made him “thoroughly and beautifully human,” Blight notes how the “old fugitive slave” has been “adopted by all elements in the political spectrum,” eager to claim him as their own.