My high school’s production of Man of La Mancha introduced me to the character of Don Quixote, the dreamer of impossible dreams whose main achievement is to encourage the serving woman and part-time prostitute Aldonza to see herself as the lady Dulcinea. Never mind that such a change in her view of herself does nothing to protect Aldonza from the predations of violent men; in the end, the musical unironically celebrates the idealism of Don Quixote. An idealist myself at the time, I was inspired.
When I first read Don Quixote as a college freshman, its satiric plot and tone surprised me. The Don Quixote I encountered in the novel by Cervantes is quite different from Don Quixote as he is portrayed both in the musical and more generally in the popular imagination—a fool admirable for his idealism and noble intentions. In the novel by Cervantes, not only is Don Quixote a bad reader whose “brains got so dry that he lost his wits,” but he is also full of rage, armed, and violent. Again and again his story shows that idealism untethered from reality leads to nothing but real harm, and I find in it a cautionary tale for our age, in which misinformation and conspiracy theories proliferate.
Astronomy is in the middle of a data revolution, a time of enormous discovery. Humans have been looking up at the stars for thousands of years, but modern telescopes and computers are rapidly accelerating our understanding. We know far more than we did even 20 years ago, and we are now much closer to answering questions about whether life exists elsewhere in the cosmos, how our planet came to be here, our cosmic origins and eventual fate.
On a clear night the stars twinkle in the sky, and often we can see the bright planets of our own solar system in orbit, like us, around our sun. Until the early 1990s, we had no idea whether there were any other planets around the stars in the sky. Astronomers suspected so, but had no way to prove it. We have in the past decade found thousands in orbit around foreign stars, and have a better idea of how common they are. A sizable fraction of stars probably have their own planets, their own worlds carried around them in the most fantastically diverse solar systems.
Up until then, most women in broadcast journalism were researchers. At first, the four of us in our little group were grateful just to be in the door as reporters. Things began to stir when the women at Newsweek sued over gender discrimination. Then, 46 women filed a claim against NBC News. At our shop, it was Sylvia who organized a committee to go to the president of CBS, Arthur Taylor, with demands for more airtime and better assignments. She asked me to join.
I remember worrying about the men who viewed the women’s agenda as a personal assault on themselves, and knew that women who “made waves” were often penalized. I was a coward and didn’t go. I let Sylvia carry the banner, while, I’m ashamed to admit, I crouched.
Is it true that Asian-Americans cannot say “I love you?” The striking title of the writer Lac Su’s memoir is “I Love Yous Are for White People,” which explores the emotional devastation wreaked on one Vietnamese family by its refugee experiences. I share some of Lac Su’s background, and it has been a lifelong effort to learn how to say, without awkwardness, “I love you.” I can do this for my son, and it is heartfelt, but it comes with an effort born of the self-consciousness I still feel when I say it to my father or brother.
Thus, when the actress Sandra Oh won a Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama, “Killing Eve,” perhaps the most powerful part of her acceptance speech for many of us who are Asian-Americans was when she thanked her parents. Gazing at them in the audience, she said, in Korean, “I love you.” She was emotional, her parents were proud, and I could not help but project onto them one of the central dramas of Asian immigrant and refugee life: the silent sacrifice of the parents, the difficult gratitude of the children, revolving around the garbled expression of love.
In the ’60s, Martin Luther King Jr. told Nichelle Nichols, the actress who portrayed Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek series, that her show was the only one he let his kids stay up late watching. His rationale: The positive depiction of an African-American woman. Thirty years later, Star Trek: The Next Generation was the show I was allowed to stay up late watching. Crammed next to my father in an old easy chair, I was mesmerized. The portrayals of brave, competent women conducting scientific experiments and exploratory missions nudged me toward imagining a career in science. But unlike the majority of scientists for whom Star Trek was an inspiration, I didn’t choose physics or engineering or computing. I chose evolutionary biology. My fascination for Star Trek life forms sparked my curiosity about how life on our world works.
A biology professor at Duke University, Mohamed A. F. Noor might have had a similar experience. Indeed, in his new book, Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us about Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds, he thinks the series has a lot to teach us about the evolution of life on our planet. He’s not actually the first to make this point. Two other books, both published in 1998, explored aspects of this same topic, but they were overshadowed from the get-go by physicist Lawrence M. Krauss’s 1995 best-selling The Physics of Star Trek. This is not surprising: the show was still associated at that time with space and feats of engineering — and so with the physical-sciences-focused, Sputnik-infused mid-20th-century “golden age” of science fiction. Now, however, life itself is our most rapidly changing frontier, and for this reason, Noor’s book is timely in a way the other two books weren’t.
Humans have long understood that sunlight can be good for us. Almost 4,000 years ago, the Babylonian king Hammurabi advised priests to use sunlight in the treatment of illness. In the 4th century BCE, Greek physicians associated with Hippocrates recommended it for the restoration of health. The splendid 19th-century geographer and anarchist Élisée Recluse advocated nudity on the grounds that it was healthier for skin to be fully exposed to light and air. What, then, is the “new science” of sunlight?
Michael Pollan sums up his manifesto In Defence of Food with: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Similarly compressed, Chasing the Sun by Linda Geddes would become something like: “Get lots of natural light, not too much direct sun, and avoid blue light at bedtime.” But that would understate a key point. Because the new science – which Geddes explores in a range of encounters, from insomniacs untethered from the passage of day and night to Nobel-winning scientists and Sámi reindeer herders, as well as in her own try-it-at-home experiments – situates an understanding of the importance of natural light in the study of the daily and seasonal rhythms of our lives. We are, as Ted Hughes wrote, “creatures of light”, but for our wellbeing, the dark is just as important.
A hybrid of nature journal and motherhood memoir sounds cynically on-trend, but Salt never feels anything less than wholly authentic. True, its brief chapters sometimes read like the ramblings of a writer in search of her story, hopping from topic to topic with a fidgetiness that can leave the reader feeling almost seasick. Still, relax into its motion and the narrative’s fluidity becomes a joy.