In a leafy cafe courtyard in San Francisco, Anna Wiener is cradling a cup of tea while eavesdropping on the next table. “There’s a man wearing shiny pants, holding forth on artificial intelligence and ‘the Chinese hegemon’,” she says, eyes glimmering with amusement.
It will come as no surprise to readers of her debut, Uncanny Valley, that Wiener is as quick witted in person as she appears on the page. “All writing is a sort of performance,” she says. In the book Wiener condenses four years of working at tech startups in Silicon Valley into a neat narrative about outsized male egos, dramatic wealth disparities and the psychological toll on young female employees.
We like to think that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, or more resilient, or . . . something. Deeper. Wiser. Enlarged. There is “glory in our sufferings,” the Bible promises. “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” In this equation, no pain is too great to be good. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars,” Dostoyevsky wrote. “The deeper the grief, the closer is God!” We atheists get in on the action by insisting that the agony of loss elucidates the worth of love. The hours spent staring into the dark, looping around our own personal grand prix of anxieties, are not a waste of time but a fundamental expression of our humanity. And so on. To be a person is to suffer.
But what if our worst feelings are just vestigial garbage? Hypervigilance and pricking fear were useful when survival depended on evading lions; they are not particularly productive when the predators are Alzheimer’s and cancer. Other excruciating feelings, like consuming sadness and aching regret, may never have had a function in the evolutionary sense. But religion, art, literature, and Oprah have convinced us that they are valuable—the bitter kick that enhances life’s intermittent sweetness. Pain is what makes joy, gratitude, mercy, hilarity, and empathy so precious. Unless it isn’t.
Until recently, it was almost unanimously assumed that huge amounts of invisible dark matter was the key to galaxy formation; the gravitational effects experienced and induced by clumps of dark matter in the universe produced swirling disks of gas clouds, stars and dark matter. Dark matter had to make up the majority of matter in these galaxies, according to standard models of the universe, otherwise they would never have formed.
But since 2016, researchers keep stumbling upon galaxies that don’t seem to be dominated by dark matter. Some calculations imply that these galaxies lack dark matter entirely. Either way, galaxies which have far less dark matter than expected would give physicists a lot of explaining to do: why are they lacking dark matter, and how did they form in the first place?
Bad listeners are not necessarily bad people. You likely have a dear friend, family member, or maybe a romantic partner who is a terrible listener. Perhaps you, yourself, are not the best listener. And you could be forgiven since, in many ways, you’ve been conditioned not to listen. Think back to when you were a little kid. If a parent said, “Listen to me!” (perhaps while holding you firmly by the shoulders), it’s a good bet you weren’t going to like what was coming next. When your teacher, Little League coach, or camp counselor beckoned, “Listen up!” what followed was usually a bunch of rules, instructions, and limits on your fun.
And certainly the virtues of listening are not reinforced by the media or in popular culture. News and Sunday talk shows are more often shouting matches or exercises in “gotcha” than respectful forums for exploring disparate views. Late-night talk shows are more about monologues and gags than listening to what guests have to say and encouraging elaboration to get beyond the trite and superficial. And on the morning and daytime shows, the interviews are typically so managed and choreographed by publicists and public relations consultants that host and guest are essentially speaking prepared lines rather than having an authentic exchange.
Napolitano’s fearless examination of what took place models a way forward for all of us. She takes care not to sensationalize, presenting even the most harrowing scenes in graceful, understated prose, and gives us a powerful book about living a meaningful life during the most difficult of times.
With this entertaining novel, Reid subverts our notions of what it means to write about race and class in America, not to mention what it means to write about love. In short, it’s a great way to kick off 2020.