Mark Sabbatini first noticed the cracks in his apartment's concrete walls in 2014. It had been six years since he moved to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago far out in the Barents Sea, about halfway between Norway's northern tip and the North Pole. He was an itinerant American writer drawn by promises of an open, international society—and jazz music. Every winter the community of Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town at 78 degrees North latitude, holds a jazz festival to liven up the perpetual darkness. Residents, university students, tourists and visiting scientists mingle in music halls, clinking champagne glasses to melodious tones as winds howl through the surrounding mountains. On his first visit Sabbatini had arrived just in time for the festivities. Svalbard, he says, instantly felt like home. “It was like when you look across the room and spot somebody and fall in love.”
But fissures were now appearing in the relationship. Sabbatini worried the apartment cracks were caused by a leaky roof; it had been raining more than usual. Then he realized the building's concrete foundation was buckling. Fractures slithered up the stairwells and defaced the building's beige exterior. The next year tenants discovered that part of a cooling system underneath the building, meant to help keep the permafrost ground frozen and stable during warm spells, was faltering. “And we were getting a lot of warm spells,” Sabbatini says. Suddenly, on a February afternoon in 2016, town officials ordered the occupants to evacuate, afraid the building could collapse. Sabbatini and 29 others had only a few hours to pack and get out.
When she didn’t turn up to meet a friend in London the next day, alarm bells started ringing. Within hours there were hundreds of tweets about her, describing her, detailing her last known movements, and asking for information.
But Esther hadn’t planned to become a missing person. She just wanted a break, and had taken herself somewhere else to get some space. “In my eyes, people were missing from me,” she told me last summer. “I’d removed myself from everything, to try to push the world away.”
There is just one threat to English as the world’s lingua franca, and it is not Mandarin. It is not even the (overrated) potential of translation technologies. It is the language’s own descent into bullshit.
Everyone has a story and sometimes this story is made up of several stories culminating in one major narrative. This narrative is what we tell ourselves and so often that we believe it. Not only does it promote a perception of ourselves but more importantly, it’s how we want others to perceive us. This narrative not only shapes our self-concept but also helps us in approaching relationships, situations and decision-making.
Charlotte Foret, the main protagonist in our story has such a narrative. It helps her and her young Vivi to survive not only the latter stages of the war but also lead a more fulfilling life after liberation.
One Last Stop is an electrifying romance that synapses into the dreamy "Hot Person Summer" kind of story you wish you were a part of. McQuiston is leading the charge for inclusive happy-ever-afters, radiant with joy and toe-curling passion, and bursting with the creative range to make anything from electricity to social activism sound sexy.
Three new books examine our current understanding of matter’s origin and qualities, and chronicle our continuing quest to probe beyond atoms.