When she finally grew tired of the silence (this took a while – Le Guin seemed quite content to sit quietly with me) Le Guin told stories. In retrospect, I see that she may have cottoned on to what I was going through, for the stories she told were about being out of place and being brave. She told me about the first time she took the train across the country – to attend Radcliffe just after the war, when Radcliffe was deeply in the shadow of Harvard and the idea of educating women was an afterthought. She told me about living on the East Coast for the first time and feeling out of place among upper crusty New Englanders. She told me about her struggles to learn French and the time she spent studying in Paris when the words would sometimes refuse to come and she wondered if she’d ever be fluent. But then, she told me, one day she was riding the bus. She was about to miss her stop; the driver, in a hurry, was speeding right past it. When she found herself yelling at the driver rapidly in French to slow down, to stop, she realized she had conquered the language. She told me about writing at the kitchen table late at night after she’d put the children to sleep, that writing when no one expected you to write, when there was little support for a woman writer, had some advantages: ‘If no one is expecting much, it’s not hard to exceed their expectations.’ And she told me about how tired she was of being asked what it takes to be an author. ‘Don’t try to be an author,’ she said as we stood outside a lecture hall in the bitter cold. ‘You cannot control that. Instead, try to be a writer. And to do that, you must write. That’s it. It’s very simple. Why don’t people understand that?’ The words came out in a tumble and her breath, mixing with the frigid air, turned to crystal.
Nonsense such as this might get tiresome to read, but it can make for a useful thought-experiment – particularly about language. In the Snark, as in the Alice books of 1865 and 1871, the commonsense assumptions that usually govern language and meaning are turned upside down. It makes us wonder what all of those assumptions are up to, and how they work. How do we know that this sentence is trying to say something serious, or that where we are now is not a dream?
Language can’t always convey meaning alone – it might need sense, which is the governing context that framed it. We talk about ‘common sense’, or whether something ‘makes sense’, or dismiss things as ‘nonsense’, but we rarely think about what sense itself is, until it goes missing. The German logician Gottlob Frege in 1892 used sense to describe a proposition’s meaning, as something distinct from what it denoted. Sense therefore appears to be a mental entity, resistant to fixed definition.
The first literary anniversary of 2019 will be one of the biggest: Jan. 1 marks the centenary of J.D. Salinger. (To mark the occasion, his four books are being reissued in a boxed set by Little Brown.) A hundred years seems like it ought to be a long time in literary history—Salinger is as distant from a child born in 2019 as he himself was from Herman Melville. Yet somehow he doesn’t feel as far removed from us as the other writers of his generation—figures like Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, or John Updike, who also became famous in the post-World War II years. Our readerly accounts with those famous names are basically settled, but Salinger’s remains open; his achievement feels unsettled, incomplete.
“Bandersnatch” ’s do-overs lighten the weight of our decisions, which in turn lightens the gravity of the whole. It’s an exhilarating experiment, not least because it’s played out on such a major stage, and on one of Netflix’s prestige properties. Much of the episode’s success, however, relies on the clever marriage of theme and mechanism. Without this, the flimsiness of the supporting framework, more gimmick than revolution, would be exposed. It is a choice, in short, to be repeated only with great care.
When does a word become unfashionable? When unfashionable people start using it, of course. In other words, well before these Google peaks—driven as they are by the uninitiated, many of them looking to learn the meaning of a trendy piece of jargon for the first time. As such searches rise, the cool kids who came up with the slang in the first place will have already moved on, preserving their avant-garde status by coining something else.
What is it that makes the world of the miniature so appealing? “It’s the feeling that you can hold the entire works of Shakespeare in your hands,” says Garcia-Ontiveros. “Miniature books were never seen as serious books, they were curiosities, seen as fun objects, not the kind of books that would make it into libraries. They were the books people would have at home, and because they are tiny and often printed on cheap paper they don’t tend to survive, so in any age miniature books are very rare. And they get lost! We ourselves had one fall behind a cabinet and it wasn’t until we had some building work done that one of the builders saw it behind a cabinet. We’d been looking for it for years.”
Already in the 1990s, early experiments showed that rutherfordium (104) and dubnium (105) do not behave in keeping with their positions in the periodic table. According to the periodic law, the two should behave like the elements directly above them, hafnium and tantalum. Instead, rutherfordium reacts like plutonium, which is quite far away in the periodic table, while dubnium behaves like protactinium, a distant element in the table. But not all super-heavies behave unexpectedly. Seaborgium (106) and bohrium (107) act so in keeping with what Mendeleev’s table would have predicted, scholarly papers on them were titled “Oddly Ordinary Seaborgium” and “Boring Bohrium,” Scerri notes.
Whether or not the periodic table remains periodic for very heavy atoms is, Scerri admits, “of no great practical consequence, at least for the foreseeable future. The loss of predictive power in the superheavy realm will not affect the usefulness of the rest of the table.” However, “the question of special relativity’s effect strikes at the very heart of chemistry as a discipline.” If the periodic law loses its predictive power due to special relativity, chemistry will be more reliant on physics. But if the periodic law remains (largely) valid, chemistry would keep some independence.
When I started this harebrained experiment in January, to visit and report on the Times’s entire 52 Places to Go in 2018 list, I thought that by stop 48, for sure, I’d be the Wonder Woman of travel: blocking mishaps with a flick of my wrist. Instead I was staring down a 2 a.m. arrival in New Delhi before having to force myself awake for a morning plane to Bhutan.
But there was the man on the platform — a waiter for the railway, whose job it is to pass out dinners — flashing a gesture that seemed to mean, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.” I had bought an “unreserved” ticket, which I thought was for people who’d had trouble purchasing online, but which really meant I’d likely have to stand for five hours.
But when the train pulled in, the man talked to the conductor and ushered me into a sleeper car. English-speakers all around jumped in to interpret. Seven dollars in fines and upgrade fees later, I was sitting in a cluster of bunks with four boisterous 20-something women from New Delhi.
A million plastic sprinkles. A neon-lit sound bath. A giant egg carton, welcoming you to step inside. Chances are, you’ve come across at least one of these sets, designed expressly for staging cool photos, at some point in your Instagram feed. This is recreation in the social media age, designed for users who live to get the ‘gram. Pics or it doesn’t happen.
Instagram is no longer just an app, but a visual lens through which we navigate physical spaces. With 1 billion users worldwide, the social media platform has given rise to a cottage industry of photogenic pop-up “experiences” and installations that cater to preening users looking to capture a memorable, and envy-inducing, experience.
In 1976, James Baldwin released what is perhaps his most novel—and most often forgotten—book: Little Man, Little Man, a curious, hybrid-genre composition without precedent in his body of work. A few years earlier, his little nephew, Tejan, had asked Baldwin—Uncle Jimmy—to write a book about him on one of Baldwin’s visits to New York to see Tejan’s family at 137 West 71st Street. At the time, Baldwin was spending most of his days in a residence in the southern French village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, so whenever he made the transatlantic trip to drop by his American family’s home, friends, kin, and strangers would simply appear at the door like moths to a lantern, seeking an audience with the great writer, and soon the apartment’s air would be thick with the sound of voices and music and sweet-pungent with the scent of whiskeys and wines.
Tejan and his sister, Aisha, liked to spy on the events; they had learned that their uncle was not simply popular in the neighborhood, but, as the siblings would boast to their friends and schoolmates, he was “an Author,” with a capital “A” that betokened Baldwin’s celebrity. One day, Tejan claims in the foreword to a lovely new edition of Little Man, Little Man—published last year at the urging of Baldwin scholar Nicholas Boggs, who co-edited the book—he caught his uncle by the arm. “Uncle Jimmy!” he yelled repeatedly. “When you gonna write a book about MeeeeEEE?”
“Ravens” is refreshing because it allows these subtleties of ideation and reception to bubble up, even in a book that covers over 70 years of photography. This is due to Fritsch’s even-handed approach, one that allows for other voices and resists centering itself. I’m sure there are experts who will quibble with her choices — some artists, like Morimura Yasumasa, already much discussed in the West, receive more attention than others — but the book gives me hope. In the realm of art, at least, perhaps we are moving toward a more respectful, circumspect discourse, where it might be possible to recognize oneself through the lens of another.
Twins make up only a small fraction of the population but loom disproportionately large in literature. They are handy for storylines involving mistaken identity and creepy synchronicity, and offer the chance to show how people whose lives begin in the same place can take drastically different paths. A contrast between dissimilar twins is at the heart of “Golden Child”, Claire Adam’s assured and compelling first novel, which is set in rural Trinidad, where she grew up, during the 1980s.