A Macintosh PowerBook 160: she’d left it to me in her will, along with her books, but it had sat, plastic and inert, a thwarted life of the mind, her mind, a mind that I crammed into a box and stored in the back of the cupboard where I keep my fabric, yards of cambric and calico and gingham. So this spring I yanked it out of the cupboard and hauled it out of the box. I plugged in a power cord attached to an adapter the size of a poundcake, but when I pried open the laptop sharp bits of steel-gray plastic broke off like chipped teeth, and the hinges cracked, and the screen fell away from the keyboard and dangled, like a mostly decapitated head, the Anne Boleyn of Apples. I propped the screen up against the wall and pressed the power button. It made that noise, the chime of Steve Jobs’s doorbell, but nothing happened, so I pressed a bunch of keys and fussed with some parts that seemed to move, and I cursed, until my fourteen-year-old figured out that I had set the brightness to black. He fixed that, and the screen blinked at me, as if blinded by its own light, and then a square Macintosh-computer face turned into a thick black arrow pointing at her hard drive, which, I discovered, she’d named Cooper, for my old dog, a lame yellow Lab, long since dead and buried.
All historians are coroners. I began my inquest. I hunted around this tiny-screen world of black and white, poking at the membrane of her brain. I clicked on a folder named “personal” and opened a file called “transitions notes.” Microsoft Word version 5.1a 1992 popped up, copyrighted to the kid in graduate school we’d pirated our software from; she’d never updated hers. “Transitions” turned out to be notes she’d taken on a book published in 1980 called “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes,” by William Bridges, who’d started out as a professor of American literature, a scholar of transcendentalism. She was always falling for this stuff, stuff I hated. The endless therapy, the what-color-is-your-parachute quizzes, the courage-to-heal to-do lists, the lifelong self-examination, the bottomless well. Bridges ended up a management consultant, an adviser to C.E.O.s engaged in downsizing. Transitions? Joblessness. “Jane, that stuff is crap,” I’d say, and she’d smile, and shrug, and go back to her book, Oprah for intellectuals, Freud for feminists, mother yourself, the latest claptrap.
The Soviet Union, it must be remembered, was a regime founded by freelance writers and editors. In other words, a nightmare. Pamphleteers, autodidactic theoreticians, critics, publishers of small journals, hot-take artists, takedown artists, and failed poets who’d reinvented themselves as labor organizers—fractious and at constant war with one another, literary people through and through.
If we imagine the early Soviet Union as a hierarchical publishing company, a magazine or new media outfit like The New Republic or BuzzFeed, Lenin was the founder and publisher, Trotsky was the deputy editor, and Stalin was the seemingly humble managing editor. As anyone who has worked in publishing knows, the managing editor is the hardest worker. They make sure the deadlines are met and the trains run on time. They are, above all, reliable. This particular managing editor takes no vacations, never leaves town. He lives for the work, strives to appear to be the mere executor of the will of the publisher and the company.
When the publisher becomes very sick, it is the managing editor who visits him at home to cheer him up with jokes and receive his instructions. By bringing the boss’s instructions back to the office from on high, he leverages this personal relationship and increases his authority within the organization. It’s not hard to see how Stalin’s ascent within the Bolshevik hierarchy happened. We’ve all seen this person before. When the publisher dies, no one suspects the managing editor of harboring ambitions to take over. But really, who better understands the day-to-day functioning of the organization, who better to be in charge?
A few years ago, a scientist named Nenad Sestan began throwing around an idea for an experiment so obviously insane, so “wild” and “totally out there,” as he put it to me recently, that at first he told almost no one about it: not his wife or kids, not his bosses in Yale’s neuroscience department, not the dean of the university’s medical school.
Like everything Sestan studies, the idea centered on the mammalian brain. More specific, it centered on the tree-shaped neurons that govern speech, motor function and thought — the cells, in short, that make us who we are. In the course of his research, Sestan, an expert in developmental neurobiology, regularly ordered slices of animal and human brain tissue from various brain banks, which shipped the specimens to Yale in coolers full of ice. Sometimes the tissue arrived within three or four hours of the donor’s death. Sometimes it took more than a day. Still, Sestan and his team were able to culture, or grow, active cells from that tissue — tissue that was, for all practical purposes, entirely dead. In the right circumstances, they could actually keep the cells alive for several weeks at a stretch.
When I met with Sestan this spring, at his lab in New Haven, he took great care to stress that he was far from the only scientist to have noticed the phenomenon. “Lots of people knew this,” he said. “Lots and lots.” And yet he seems to have been one of the few to take these findings and push them forward: If you could restore activity to individual post-mortem brain cells, he reasoned to himself, what was to stop you from restoring activity to entire slices of post-mortem brain?
Direct-to-consumer artisanal food products, from coffee to olive oil to chai to chili crisp, are proliferating. A lot of them a really good. Storytelling has become a tedious marketing buzzword, but these businesses live or die by clarity of their message. And so a select few choose to tell their stories through small, personal, quirky paper publications, which their creators call zines.
One way to get a handle on Orner is to observe that he writes short. His stories tend to be three or four pages, gone in the blink of an eye, though some are longer. In his novels, he keeps the chapters clipped tight, too. Rarely are these chapters more than a few hundred words. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?
Reading him I recalled Clive James’s crack that some literary magazines fetishize brief stories, “as if written specifically for people who are bright but tired.”