Some people are much more likely than others to become members of the reading class. “The patterns are very, very predictable,” Griswold told me. First, and most intuitively, the more education someone has, the more likely they are to be a reader. Beyond that, she said, “urban people read more than rural people,” “affluence is associated with reading,” and “young girls read earlier” than boys do and “continue to read more in adulthood.” Race matters, too: The NEA’s data indicate that 60 percent of white American adults reported reading a book in the last year outside of work or school, which was a higher rate than for African Americans (47 percent), Asians (45 percent), and Hispanic people (32 percent). (Some of these correlations could simply reflect the strong connection between education and reading.)
Of course, possessing any of these characteristics doesn’t guarantee that someone will or won’t become a reader. Personality also seems to play a role. “Introverts seem to be a little bit more likely to do a lot of leisure-time reading,” Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, told me.
Picture a beach along the same vast ocean you know today—the same powerful waves and shifting tides, reflecting the same beautiful sunsets, even the same green-blue water. Now imagine a crowd gathered at the shoreline, standing in a big circle, gawking at something that just washed up. Kids tug on their parents’ shirt sleeves, asking questions about the dead creature lying on the sand. Reporters arrive. The story is momentous even if the takeaway isn’t much fun. Everyone knows there used to be fish in the oceans—kind of like the ones that still live in some rivers and lakes, except they could be much bigger, sometimes meaner, more diverse, more colorful, more everything. But those mythical ocean fish all died. Except maybe this one. This one was alive in there, and now it’s dead too.
According to Stanford University paleobiologist Jonathan Payne, an expert in marine mass-extinction events, a scenario where all the ocean's fish, mammals, and other creatures—even tiny animals like krill—are all gone is far from science fiction. The type of die-off that would lead to a largely lifeless ocean has happened before, and we're well on our way to seeing it happen again.
All that time at sea was not Mathaussen’s only sacrifice. He had left his partner and their 1-year-old at home for a couple of weeks. He had cashed in valuable vacation time. He had spent hundreds of dollars, too: for transportation and accommodations, for equipment and membership fees.
In return, once the boat reached its destination, he would have the dubious pleasure of spending seven nights on a mattress in a school gymnasium, struggling to sleep in a room filled with a few dozen friends and strangers.
Yet he had not thought twice about any of it, and nor had his teammates from the soccer club Equaluk-54 who were embarking on this odyssey with him.
For Formula One drivers, the Singapore Grand Prix represents the toughest physical challenge of the year. A combination of heat, humidity and a race that regularly runs to its two-hour time limit, makes for a serious workout for the body. Add into the mix the mental challenge of threading a car between concrete barriers at speeds of over 180 mph, and the race in Singapore is truly a challenge unlike any other in the world of sport.
Over the course of Sunday's race, each driver's body will be fighting a losing battle against dehydration and heat stress. Aside from the obvious physical discomfort they cause, the other concern is the impact they have on mental performance and concentration levels. Much like an F1 car, the body needs specific preparation to operate as close as possible to its peak during the Singapore Grand Prix, and drivers and their trainers go to great lengths to maximise performance. But even the fittest drivers are close to their limit, and if things go wrong, the cockpit of an F1 car at Singapore can quickly become an intolerable environment.
My first year in Japan, I wrote a book about my enraptured discovery of a love, a life and a culture that I hoped would be mine forever. My publishers brought out my celebration of springtime romance in autumn. Now, 28 years on, I’m more enamored of the fall, if only because it has spring inside it, and memories, and the acute awareness that almost nothing lasts forever. Every day in autumn — a cyclical sense of things reminds us — brings us a little bit closer to the spring.
The Spanish port city of Algeciras boasts a long and rich history, and is home to some of the country's most beautiful parks, plazas and churches. But Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, the two aging Irish men at the heart of Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangier, aren't interested in any of that. They're spending all their time in the city's dingy ferry terminal, along with a mass of weary travelers and a handful of bored employees.
It's not the kind of place you'd likely choose to while away the hours. "Oh, and this is as awful a place as you could muster — you'd want the eyes sideways in your head," Barry writes. "It reeks of tired bodies, and dread." The Alhambra it's not, but it's a fitting setting for Barry's dark, haunting novel.
In his new book, Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Hendrickson pushes back against the idea that Wright’s famous arrogance crowded out all feelings of shame, regret, humility, or sadness. Behind the superstructure of his ego, vulnerability was always “ghosting at the edges,” Hendrickson writes.