“Libraries are not musty, fusty museums that are just filled with books that nobody even wants to look at — they are exactly the opposite,” she said. “They’re vital, robust, thriving institutions that are very much part of the modern world.”
Libraries may have been threatened decades ago, Orlean said, when the internet came into widespread use and seemed to put the entire universe of information at people’s fingertips. But rather than rejecting technology, libraries embraced the internet and transformed themselves into digital hubs as well as physical spaces to gather, learn, work and connect.
Every morning for 20 years, Karl-Heinz Martens steered his yellow mail truck through the narrow streets of Eutin, a market town arranged around a little castle in northern Germany, near the Baltic Sea. On his route, Martens would drive through miles of farms and fields before disappearing into a deep, enchanted forest, where he unlocked a gate using a special key and reversed into his parking spot—as all mailmen do—facing outward to ensure a quick exit. As he crunched into the woods carrying his mailbag, his tidy beard and glasses were sometimes flecked with snowflakes or sleet, and every morning, just before the clock struck 12, he arrived beneath a towering oak.
“People used to memorize my route and wait for me to arrive because they couldn’t believe that a postman would deliver letters to a tree,” Martens told the press, who called the now-retired mailman the “messenger of love.” The Bräutigamseiche, or Bridegroom’s Oak, is the only tree in Europe with its own mailing address. Every day the 500-year-old tree receives dozens of lonely-hearts letters, and singletons arrive from near and far to reach into a small knothole in the trunk, hoping to find a match. The tree is believed to possess magical matchmaking powers.
I didn’t notice you at first, not even when I held the door open, but as you moved past me with a thank you, I glimpsed your cream macramé top, the one I almost kept when I cleared out your closet. Beautiful. It stood out against the dull T-shirt and jeans, the scuff of that stranger’s sneakers. You disappeared into the store. Passing the shelves of wine in front, I noticed the empty spots that always appear after a weekend. I was at the fountain drink machine, pressing my foam cup, when, suddenly, you were beside me, smiling, asking what kind of ice. Is it crushed? I moved my cup quickly and let the pieces fall, pointed to them. Ah, no, you said. Cubed. But ice is ice. I understood this, standing beside you.
The night of your funeral, I reasoned with every quick glass of chardonnay that as long as I didn’t sleep, I was still living in a day in which I had seen you. I kept only the corner lamp on and stared at the couch where you’d huddled for months under a red blanket, gripping that silver tumbler, crunching ice in your teeth. It was as if you were gnawing your way out of grief.
The high-profile death of the gorilla Harambe, who was shot dead in 2016 at the Cincinnati Zoo after a young boy fell into his enclosure, sparked a massive outcry—and conversation—about what is still one of the most hotly contested debates involving animal welfare. Just this past weekend, activists turned up at the Bronx Zoo to demand the release of Happy the elephant, chanting in unison that “Happy is not happy.” Indeed, the idea that keeping animals in captivity is morally acceptable has long been questioned by those who argue that zoos infringe upon animals’ freedom. In recent years, an increase in research on the ethics of captivity has helped to dispel the misconception that critics of zoos are simply anthropomorphizing the animals they say they’re trying to help.
But not everyone agrees. Robin Ganzert, CEO of American Humane, recently penned an essay in USA Today arguing that zoos “protect animals and restore endangered species, even as some activists seek to dismantle these arks of hope.” Is she right? Should animal advocates and conservationists be rallying around zoos?
Van Gogh referred to this work as a “repetition” of the London painting. But art historians and curators have long been curious to know how different this “repetition” is from the first. Should it be considered a copy, an independent artwork or something in between?
An extensive research project conducted over the past three years by conservation experts at both the National Gallery and the Van Gogh Museum has concluded that the second painting was “not intended as an exact copy of the original example,” said Ella Hendriks, a professor of conservation and restoration at the University of Amsterdam, who was the lead researcher on the project.
A few decades earlier, the telegraph marked a change in the speed of communication that dwarfs anything observed in our lifetimes. In our supposedly accelerationist epoch, smartphones and the major online monopolies have been around for more than a decade, and much trumpeted “innovation” has consisted of attempts to rebrand taxi or hotel businesses as technological breakthroughs. Yet books and articles constantly tell us that the world really is speeding up. What is the truth?
I had never created man before so I invented my son first as a dream body. In order to create the dream body I must first believe in the force of opposites, a terrible tension of what has existed and the struggle yet to come. And it is true, that I had a notion of him for many years; for generations my imagination traveled in search of him.