It was so simple yet so profound. So obvious yet so overlooked. One word at a time. One sentence. One book. It mimicked the structure of life. One moment. One day. One life. As books were written in words, life was lived in moments. The word I was paying attention to would lead to the next. The moment I was living in now would roll into my future.
As the sun sets over the waters of Kenya’s Lake Victoria, the soft sound of the lapping waves is drowned out by the hum of motors. Squinting, I can see them on the horizon, the tiny boats splitting the oranges and blues of the twilight sky.
Cultured meat is eye-catching technology. But it is also an over-engineered solution to a problem that we can solve by changing our diets. If we simply stopped eating meat, or ate it far less often, then there would be no need for either harmful intensive animal agriculture or meat grown in a lab. The cultured meat industry rests on a view of human beings as greedy and incapable of change. But the coronavirus pandemic has shown that, globally, we are able to make enormous changes to our behaviour when faced with existential crisis.
This is a complex novel that never allows one storyline to overpower the others. The fight against gentrification lies at its core like a rotten chunk of whale flesh buried under a crumbling building, but there's enough going on to build a whole town on top of that.
Who didn’t love Julia Child? Who didn’t embrace her antics on TV as she became more and more well-known? Knopf has just published a selection of her witty sayings, gathered by The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts that should make the cooking aficionados on your list gleeful. A great stocking stuffer, it will make a delightful treasure trove of all things culinary for cooking buffs of any age.
To speak of cinematic milestones is common. To speak of the director named Milestone, much less so. But what a name it was, Lewis Milestone, as monumental as director King Vidor’s name was regal. Lewis Milestone: Life and Films, Harlow Robinson’s new book from the University Press of Kentucky, is a welcome biography of a man whose films remain better known than his name.
hangs where the plaster cracked
and the ribs of the house show.
He’s the only stranger I can afford,
a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt