A few summers ago, Stefano Piraino was walking along the rocky shoreline on a small island off the coast of Sicily when he spotted a washed up jellyfish. Naturally, he tore a piece off and popped it into his mouth.
“After a few days in that state they lose their stinging cells, and the UV radiation from the sun should have killed any bacteria,” he said. “But still, I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Like an increasing number of researchers, Piraino, a biologist at the University of Salento in Lecce, Italy, is interested in turning huge blooms of jellyfish from the unlikely menace they often are into something useful.
But finding room to appreciate the site and its symbolism was tricky. At three places, young travellers were staging lengthy amateur photo shoots, striking poses and monopolising swathes of space. (Art-covered walls like the “Insta-worthy” angel wings mural in tourist-smothered Nashville commissioned by Taylor Swift command massive queues of visitors.) Locals and fellow travellers alike both had to manoeuvre to get around the self-involved spectacle.
To be fair, this style of staged influencer photo is apparently wearing thin with the Instagram set. Still, the idea of securing proof of your trip, making it (and you) look fantastic and then beaming it out to everyone you know is a driving force of over-tourism.
“The question is, do you want to go to a place – or show people you’ve been to the place?” says Eduardo Santander, executive director of the European Travel Commission.
Juliet Escoria’s autofictive debut novel, “Juliet the Maniac,” is a worthy new entry in that pantheon of deconstruction. Told in a series of fragments spanning the teenage years in which bipolar Juliet’s life unravels, it is a narrative that insists on its own severity.
Midnight Chicken, a new cookbook by British author Ella Risbridger, probably could teach me some new techniques, if I were to read it like an instruction manual. I have my eye on Risbridger’s recipe for bolognese (it involves an ox cheek and four squares of dark chocolate), although it strikes me as something better cooked on a chilly November day than in June. And her recipe for labneh reads beautifully simply: “I promise you this is as simple and good as it sounds,” she writes, “and I would never lie to you about cheese.”
But reading Midnight Chicken that way would be a waste, because everything about this book begs to be savored and enjoyed. It’s a beautiful book, and I mean that in multiple senses.
In its May 27, 1950 issue, The New Yorker published Roger Angell’s short, whimsical piece about “the decline of privacy,” a development “speeded by electronics” that was subtly reshaping politics, relationships, and the national pastime. “At a recent ball game,” he reported, “a sensitive microphone at home plate picked up the rich comments of one of the team managers to the umpire and sent them winging to thousands of radio sets, instantly turning the listeners into involuntary eavesdroppers.”
This was among the first bits of baseball-related writing Angell did for the magazine. In the decades that followed, he would file dozens more pieces about the sport — a knowledgeable and oft-anthologized roster of player profiles, World Series wrap-ups, and state-of-the-game “summer essays.” His most recent baseball piece — a funny item about an angry Houston Astros pitcher who surrendered a 440-foot home run and proceeded to punch himself “in the chest and then in the jaw” — was posted on The New Yorker’s website on May 2, 2018.
It’s 11:59 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Do you know where you are? For most, the minute before what was supposed to be the Y2K disaster – a technological screw-up that represented the apocalypse we all deserved – was spent drinking, partying, perhaps eyeing the television screen hoping that things would turn out okay. (Thank god social media was not yet a thing.) Myself, I was in the basement of a friend’s house, rewatching The Matrix on VHS for the umpteenth time. Before I paint myself as an incurable nerd, I should note that I, too, went to a house party earlier that evening ... but all I wanted to do in the last hours of 1999 was watch movies. So I did.
It turns out, 20 years later, a lot of people felt the same way.