HIV is used as a weapon, but not usually by the people who carry it.
There is a type of book, I find, that falls in this category: books that resist you. This is different from books you think are bad, or books you don’t want to read. These are books you want to read, but for some reason are unable to. These are books that, if anything, you somehow fail, not being up to the task.
Readers of detective fiction look forward to a big reveal: Whodunit? Readers of campus fiction hold out for a quieter pleasure. If a character is an academic, at some point the author will divulge the topic of the character’s book or dissertation. Generally speaking, writers don’t let this opportunity go to waste. You know how dogs look like their owners? The bouncy, athletic guy matches his golden retriever, and the tall, skinny lady with a long nose, her greyhound? Likewise, fictional academics resemble their work.
Perhaps because creative writers have reductive opinions of their scholarly counterparts, though, the question What breed is this academic? tends to yield one of only two answers. Many works in progress expose that the academic is a Tesman or a Lovborg.
How difficult is it for a story to move continents? One of Sherlock Holmes’ early Chinese translators, Cheng Xiaoqing (1893–1976), decided to find out, appropriating both the style and characters of the famous detective stories in Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection (translated by Timothy C. Wong). Cheng transplanted Sherlock Holmes from the foggy streets of 19th century London to his own Republic-era Shanghai. Calm, intellectual, and addicted to tobacco, Cheng’s protagonist Huo Sang is instantly recognizable as Holmes; the stories’ faithful narrator Bao Lang plays the part of Watson.
Despite the vast difference in context, the stories follow patterns that will be familiar to any Conan Doyle aficionado: the mysterious crime, the unexpected twists in narrative, and the bumbling local police force who invariably pursue the wrong suspect. Jewels go missing at society balls, blood drips from ceilings, and murders are not all that they seem. Huo Sang smokes Golden Dragon cigarettes and plays the violin, using his powers of deduction to unravel impossible cases. But these stories also touch on issues more specific to Cheng’s own lifetime, like corrupt officials and the rate of social change in areas such as marriage.
To converts, almond and oat milk are the next wave in a fundamental shift towards a more conscious, sustainable way of living. To critics, they’re little more than cleverly marketed nut juice with additives – a symptom of everything that’s wrong with modern food culture. And so a strange battle has emerged, between an industry trying to replace something it says we don’t need in the first place, and dairy, a business that for a century sold itself as the foundation of a healthy diet, while ignoring the fact that most of the world does just fine without it.
While China does produce lots of poultry, many of their chicken paws are exported to richer East Asian countries such as Korea and Japan. This lets them command higher prices, writes researcher Xiaosi Yang. Meanwhile, billions of American chicken paws are worth next to nothing in their country of origin. Yet they can be sold in China, where even a low price means the seller can extract profit from an otherwise worthless byproduct.
While it might seem like a home run for free trade, the United States and China have turned the international chicken paw trade into a subject of diplomatic wrangling, retaliatory tariffs, and even formal complaints to the World Trade Organization. Years before trade wars were the talk of Twitter, chicken feet were stirring up talk of unfair trade practices and reciprocity.
There’s a lot to process here, but Cander is a smart, deft storyteller who holds her Scriabin-worthy tale together. She understands how something as beloved as a piano can actually be a burden.
She also understands the inner workings of a Blüthner, just as she seems to understand carburetors and brakes. I’d probably let her work on my piano — or my car.
In his third book, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, he deploys fascinating facts of natural history and genetics as he enters a debate staked out centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among other philosophers), and still very much alive today: how to understand the conjunction of fierce aggression and cooperative behavior in humans. Why are we so much less violent day-to-day within our communities (in pretty much all cultures) than our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are within theirs? At the same time, how is it that human violence directed toward perceived enemy groups has been so destructive?
This book about the commercial takeover of the news business is sure to make a lot of powerful people very angry. Jill Abramson takes an unsparing look at US journalism’s moral decline; as former executive editor of the New York Times, she is someone who knows where most of the bodies are buried and is prepared to draw the reader a detailed map. Names are named, mistakes are exposed, and the writing is unforgiving and unadorned, as befits a woman with “balls like iron cantaloupes”, as one veteran journalist tells her. It is a cracking read, and a complicated one, flawed in many places yet absorbing in its frank desire to hold journalism to account for becoming overly willing to sell out to advertisers and thereby endangering its own future.