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Tuesday, October 27, 2020

The Ghosts Of Newspaper Row, by Elizabeth Mitchell, The Paris Review

The center of news in the nineteenth century lined the streets around City Hall Park, only a short sprint to Wall Street, close to the harbor. News sailed in on the wind. Newspaper schooners cut through the waves and fog to land their men onboard the arriving European steamers before the less affluent New York newspapers could get out there with their rowboats.

Amid recent renovations on Park Row, construction workers discovered artifacts of news reporters inside the walls—papers and typewriters. Who knows what ghosts might lurk there still?

The Meaning Of Leaf: An Autumnal Tour Of England's Arboretums, by Alexander Turner, The Guardian

Autumn’s blaze of glory, all flame-red leaves and burnt-gold foliage, offers an opportunity to marvel at the brilliance of the natural world before hunkering down for winter. Though, as nature goes into hibernation, forests, woods, parks and arboretums can often feel alive with walkers, joggers and families exploring them.

The Saddest Stories Ever: On Sigrid Nunez’s “What Are You Going Through”, by Anna E. Clark, Los Angeles Review of Books

Where What Are You Going Through differs, though, is in how it situates intimate tales of individual lives in a simmering atmosphere of collective doom. The novel contains as clear-eyed an account of humanity’s grim prospects as you’re likely to find in fiction, but it is grounded in a series of stories about people — mostly women — facing the defeats and indignities of aging and dying.

Between The Covers By Jilly Cooper Review – As Fresh As Ever, by Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

Good journalism is easier to read than to write, especially the kind that has to do with (ugh) so-called lifestyle. It’s all about tone, and more hacks than you might imagine, not to mention their editors, have a tin ear in this regard. This kind of journalism tends, moreover, to go off faster than fresh fish.

All of which makes Between the Covers, a new collection of Jilly Cooper’s journalism, the more remarkable.

Facial Recognition, by Alice Liang, The Slowdown

In China these days,
they recognize a face
with a single hair.
The city streets lined
with one camera
for every ten heads.