While it’s impossible to underscore Hurricane Katrina’s impact on her family and the city at large, Broom’s hope with The Yellow House is to reveal the ways in which Katrina was no singular catastrophe. “When we boil Katrina down to a weather event, we really miss the point,” Broom told me recently over the phone. “It’s so crucially important for me to put Katrina in context, to situate it as one in a long line of things that are literally baked into the soil of this place.”
Broom recognized these connections, but her aim was not so clear to publishers. “The main complaint was that I needed to choose,” Broom recalled. “That I was either going to write a book about New Orleans or a book about my family, but not both—which was so confounding to me that I couldn’t even process it.” While memoir is often pigeonholed as subjective and emotional, the genre is a genuine entry point for history: Collective historical narratives are drawn from individual experiences. Broom writes in her book, “The facts of the world before me inform, give shape and context to my own life. The Yellow House was witness to our lives. When it fell down, something in me burst. My mother is always saying, Begin as you want to end. But my beginning precedes me.”
The online furor and the stylebook’s high-council summits to respond to the controversy may seem like a lot of bramble and vinegar over some stray hyphens. But I get it. As an ex–copy editor, I can get surly about this stuff, too, as will soon become apparent. And even nondorks can admire the red-pen passion of the incensed. In this case, the people shouting from the cheap seats seemed to have more reason than the justices on the Supreme Court of journalistic grammar. Using a hyphen as a chain to link adjectives working together sends readers a clear signal: These conjoined modifiers describe the same noun that follows them. Makes honest-to-God sense, right?
Perhaps, but the AP Stylebook’s former guidelines on compound modifiers—the Way of Things before all this tinkering—didn’t actually dictate that they should always be hyphenated. So the protesters’ anger in that vein is pretty puzzling. And with due respect to the objectors, anyone who has regularly used the AP Stylebook in recent years should know that the rule “changes” are barely changes at all. The stylebook loosens some already loose guidelines, and devotees react as if it’s a major shift. That’s what’s more telling here. Why did this change—as with the AP Stylebook’s other changes in recent years—offend so many so intensely?
With its rigid beat and dry, monotone vocals, the song sounds like a synth-pop hit you would have heard in a dance club in the Eighties. (Or at least on an Eighties Spotify station.) Close your eyes and you can imagine a music video: awkwardly lip-synching musicians, exploding lightbulbs, foggy streets. It’s familiar. But the name of the artist or band doesn’t come to mind.
That’s because, right now, no one knows anything about it: who wrote it, who sang it, or even when it came out. And for about a dozen years, a dedicated gaggle of music obsessives from around the world has been searching for any information about these three minutes of music. Throughout this quest, which intensified this summer, thousands of man-hours have been devoted to unearthing anything at all about what these zealous investigators calling “the most mysterious song on the Internet.”
Kevin Buzzard, a number theorist and professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London, believes that it is time to create a new area of mathematics dedicated to the computerization of proofs. The greatest proofs have become so complex that practically no human on earth can understand all of their details, let alone verify them. He fears that many proofs widely considered to be true are wrong. Help is needed.
I feel like a baby, glossy-eyed and speechless as I step out of Incheon Airport and onto Korean soil for the first time since I was born. Around me, everyone is hugging. We’ve only just arrived, but to simply be here is a massive event, and the anticipation easily cuts through the thick exhaustion. There is a banner hanging outside of the airport, Welcome to Korea 2017 stamped across it in massive purple-gold font, bolded. Underneath it, in thin, plain black letters, is Holt Children’s Services. My parents hug me in turn, my mother and then my father, both asking how I feel. Are you excited? What do you think? Mid-June Korea is hot and muggy. So far it is like every big city I have been to in America, yet I know something is different, something crucial and basic that I spend the entire bus ride to Seoul trying to pinpoint, except I can’t.
I imagine the crocuses also sometimes come down unexpectedly
feverish, spreading