I'll never forget the first time I woke up in New Zealand, having arrived late at night from the other side of the world, beyond exhausted and unable to focus on anything except getting to my hotel room and crawling into bed. I had traveled widely but had never before crossed the International Date Line, or indeed the equator. So, on that first morning, I was unprepared for what happened when I drew back the curtains: an assault of light such as I had never before experienced. Once outside, I found that I couldn’t see properly unless I had sunglasses on, such was the light’s intensity. I was meeting a friend for coffee in downtown Wellington, and when I told him about my experience, he laughed and said, “Yes, of course! This is your first experience of southern light. I expect your poor old Northern European eyes will adjust eventually.” But they never did, and despite many more trips to New Zealand over the years, they never have.
According to New Zealand historian Jock Phillips, the Māori word for the country, “Aotearoa” — usually translated as “land of the long white cloud” — can also be translated as “long bright world” or “land of abiding day.” New Zealand’s most iconic author, Katherine Mansfield, who spent half her short life in Europe away from that light, remembered it vividly in her short story “At the Bay,” conjuring up memories of her childhood holidays by the sea: “[T]he leaping, glittering sea was so bright it made one’s eyes ache to look at it.”
On Monday the New York Public Library, celebrating its 125th anniversary, released a list of the 10 most-checked-out books in the library’s history. The list is headed by a children’s book—Ezra Jack Keats’ masterpiece The Snowy Day—and includes five other kids’ books. The list also includes a surprising addendum: One of the most beloved children’s books of all time didn’t make the list because for 25 years it was essentially banned from the New York Public Library. Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, would have made the Top 10 list and might have topped it, the library notes, but for the fact that “influential New York Public Library children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore disliked the story so much when it was published in 1947 that the Library didn’t carry it … until 1972.” Who was Anne Carroll Moore, and what was her problem with the great Goodnight Moon?
The surest signal that one is watching one of the nine films in the Star Wars Skywalker saga isn’t something on the screen. It’s not the opening crawls or the scene wipes. It’s not the lightsabers, blasters, or starfighters. It’s not even the indefatigable droid duo of R2-D2 and C-3PO. All of those things are present at some point in each movie, but not from moment to moment. The only true constant in the Skywalker saga is the sound of the score. And for five decades, that sound was the work of one man, John Williams, who announced in 2018 that The Rise of Skywalker would be his last Star Wars soundtrack.
Few institutional building booms come without stylistic commonalities: America has dozens of neoclassical art and natural history museums built within a decade or two of 1900. So it was with the science center. The majority of science centers date from a similar span from 1980 to 2000, a less promising architectural moment, when Postmodernism had blurred back into the mainstream. Although a few of them are proper starchitecture (for better or worse), most are less fancy. Some science centers are wonderful; many are OK.
This all occurred at a hinge moment of museum popularization, at which nearly all museums undertook steps to increase their attendance, adding theaters, gift shops, larger public spaces, and splashier traveling exhibits to lure visitors. These measures weren’t only of interest to museums themselves—they were avidly sought by civic authorities and boosters.
When novelist Joanna Kavenna was recently asked what subject she found most challenging to write about, she answered: “General Reality. What is it? Who decides? Is it just the physical things we can see and touch? Atoms, no atoms? Thoughts only when they become deeds? Whose thoughts? (Whose deeds?)” Her newest novel, “Zed,” doesn’t answer these questions, but rather asks them over and over again, until what begins as a familiar addition to the dystopian or techno-horror genres becomes far stranger and more appealing.
But Wade’s book rises above the publishing cliches to tell a deeper story about women’s autonomy in the early 20th century, about their work and education, politics and activism. What emerges is an eloquent, pellucid, sometimes poignant study of five female intellectuals, each of whom disdained convention to fulfil their potential as thinkers and writers.
It’s tempting to call Uncanny Valley a coming-of-age tale, but what the memoir offers is less about Wiener’s own personal narrative and more of a sociological study on tech-bro, start-up culture. There is something Swiftian about her professional journey, which first takes her to a small e-book company in New York that allows her to “fail up” (her words) then to a rapidly growing analytics start-up before landing in a more established open-source platform enterprise. Each step up the economic chain proves to be more grotesque, as the promise of technology devolves into the threats we understand today, and it becomes clear why: Despite tech leaders’ and workers’ belief that their products are ahistorical, apolitical, and practically atemporal—perpetually relevant and futuristic in their mind—the systems they create are political by design.