I read Meaghan O’Connell’s And Now We Have Everything, a collection of gloriously unsettled essays about imagining giving birth and then actually giving birth and then circling the tiny creature, lying in his Pack ’n Play, at first desperate for him to sleep and then desperately afraid he has died. I read the brilliant and unforgettable stories in Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories, including the one about a man carrying an alien baby, which is also about what it means to feel both violated by the life you made possible and beholden to it. I reread Meghan O’Rourke’s Sun in Days, whose poems wonder at—among other things—the shift from conjuring an imagined child to caring for an actual one, a baby built not from longing but from grapefruit and Rice Chex: “you were already you, not / an outgrowth of my mind.”
One evening I strapped my baby to my chest with the impossibly complicated stretchy fabric wrap and walked to a bookstore to listen to Terese Marie Mailhot read from her eloquent and seething memoir, Heart Berries. Swollen with hormones, I nearly started crying as she read about remembering her son’s milky breath years after losing custody; then my daughter started crying, not because she imagined another woman remembering milk but because she wanted milk herself. It felt good to nurse her, but it didn’t solve the pain in Mailhot’s precise, exquisite book, nor was it meant to.
“One of the things I tell people,” he said, “is that if I had applied the discipline and planning to anything else in my life that I did to running, I would have a Nobel by now.”
“I didn’t know how to deal with my domestic situation,” added Mr. Sagal who got married again in June, to Mara Filler, a stage manager. “But looking back on myself it was probably really comforting to think, ‘let’s see if I can run a marathon in under a certain amount of time.’ I was probably attracted to the coherence of it. It was a high contrast to everything else.”
“You guys ever see any ghosts?” I asked.
I believe that suicidal people can see ghosts in a way that sturdier folks cannot. The Canadian physician and addiction expert Gabor Maté describes addicts like me as living “in the realm of hungry ghosts,” people who have become ghosts while still alive. I think you can almost see when a deeply addicted person, who is killing himself with his drug of choice, is making the transition into the ghost lands.
One of my other nicknames for Tad is Mr. Efficiency. He obsesses over the shortest route to a destination, orders everything in bulk, is always on time, writes thank-you notes within a day, and absolutely detests standing in line. Especially for food.
When it came to cooking, Tad was characteristically economical. Once we had our kids and our schedules went haywire, he set about mastering a handful of dishes he could pull off on a moment’s notice: fish tacos, pasta alla vodka, and Daddy’s pasta.
Jason Farman’s Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World is a timely and insightful reminder that waiting is a natural, integral part of how communication unfolds and has been unfolding for millennia. Whether it’s in sending and receiving written missives, the regulation of how information flows, or building infrastructure to alleviate uncertainty around waiting, the act of waiting leaves traces in the records of history and material culture, as technology is — inevitably — invented and reinvented to mark and mitigate how people wait.
By exploring seven different historical instance of waiting — from sending messages via the pneumatic tubes in New York City in the early 20th century, to the royal seals of Elizabethan England, to the New Horizons mission exploring space — Farman unpacks how waiting is recorded in various social and material cultures. “[T]he promise of communication technologies is that they will connect people at an ever-accelerating pace until the distance between us is completely bridged,” Farman argues in the book’s introduction. “Contrary to the feelings of anxiety people have while waiting for messages, most of the contemporary rhetoric around the digital age seems to argue that digital media users have arrived at the promised era of instant connection.” Delayed Response walks readers through the culture of waiting and how it changes depending on what is being waited for and why.
These are fraught times, and while you may be scared, Tim Wu suggests that you may not be scared enough. Like Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk,” a recent book that shows how something most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about — government bureaucracy — is consequential (and potentially terrifying), Wu’s “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age” is a surprisingly rousing treatment of another presumably boring subject: mergers and acquisitions.
What book about wit doesn’t contain a single quotation from either Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde? The answer, of course, is this one. For James Geary hasn’t produced a compendium of quips, comebacks, ripostes, zingers or verbal firecrackers, but rather a serious, even a philosophical study of — as his subtitle declares — “what wit is, how it works, and why we need it.”