Last year, Krzysztof Stanek got a letter from one of his neighbors. The neighbor wanted to build a shed two feet taller than local regulations allowed, and the city required him to notify nearby residents. Neighbors, the notice said, could object to the construction. No one did, and the shed went up.
Stanek, an astronomer at Ohio State University, told me this story not because he thinks other people will care about the specific construction codes of Columbus, Ohio. He brought it up because it reminds him of the network of satellites SpaceX is building in the space around Earth.
Toilet training is an exercise in behavior modification: you try to convince an otherwise happy and contented child that they have to take responsibility for their own actions — namely toileting. It is a classic situation where the interests of one party (the parents) differ from those of the other (the child). If you want to align those interests, someone is going to have to pay up. The only question is, how much? What reward do you need to offer to get the behavior you want?
What are the limitations of reason? Can a computer know love? What might a bat feel? What if we could share a brain? Are there plural worlds? These experiments introduce each phase of Ward’s tale of love and loss, narrated from the perspectives of Rachel and Eliza, Rachel’s mother (confusingly called Elizabeth), baby Arthur, Arthur’s dad and his husband Greg, not forgetting the ant itself. They disrupt – and are intended to disrupt – the flow of the narrative. Think, they advise you, stand on the other foot, turn the glass upside down.
Leo Tolstoy was an inveterate quitter. All his life, he gave up the things that mattered to him, or tried to. He bolted from university without a degree, left the army, renounced the privileges of aristocracy. He rejected the Orthodox church and abjured fiction as a vanity. He forswore the libertinism of his youth, and—eventually—fled his tortured marriage, in the fatal escape that ended at the railway station in Astapovo.
The stories are tragic. Each chapter in the work is its own little black Sunday. But, although Abraham’s novel can be described as an exercise in confronting pain, her narrative is also an exercise in emboldening the “female spirit.”