It is almost certain that you recently interacted closely with an invisible giant, as the Harvard landscape ecologist Richard T T Forman has described it. Others have called roads ‘the single most destructive element in the process of habitat fragmentation’, declaring that ‘Few forces have been more influential in modifying the Earth than transportation.’ Yet you probably didn’t even notice. An expansive feature that snaps the globe but is effectively invisible: the vast network of transportation infrastructure – all the railways, canals but also, most significantly, roads. Roads are everywhere, forming an almost inconceivably complex system, an endless, ever-expanding, interconnected grid that facilitates the movement and exchange of people and goods over vast areas. This colossal structure is probably the greatest ever cultural artefact, a requirement and precondition for human development. For us, roads are essential connectors, linking places and purpose. But almost everywhere these networks have been imposed with scant regard for the landscape in which they occur.
I made my wife cry the day we brought home Musa, our newborn baby boy. I wanted to be a “good dad” so badly that I spent the final months of the pregnancy deep in baby strategy. Every night, I read from The Happiest Baby on the Block out loud so I could retain it better. I practiced its swaddling techniques on our couch pillows. I also studied Your Baby’s First Year, a new-parent almanac by the American Academy of Pediatrics for how a baby grows, poops, and sleeps. I downloaded simplified diagrams to help me keep track of how much and how often Musa would do those things during the early essential weeks.
When my boy got home and he didn’t eat, poop, and sleep exactly as predicted in those books, I lost my cool. I fully panicked.
Can we blame tech superstars like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos for what happens on their platforms? What happens when a great idea takes on a life of its own? These are questions at the heart of Tahmima Anam’s latest novel, “The Startup Wife.”
Assembly is a slow-motion tragedy, all the weight of four hundred years coming to bear on one woman and the heartbreaking clarity with which she narrates exactly what that feels like. It is a story of failure inside success, slipping and falling even while continuing to ascend, and all the ways capitalism, racism, and misogyny inflict violence on the self.
Matthew Aucoin happily wrestles with multiple impossibilities in this highly personal book. In vivid, granular detail, he explores composers and operas he loves, from Claudio Monteverdi in 17th-century Italy to contemporary British composers Harrison Birtwistle and Thomas Adès. He also highlights the process of writing two of his own three operas: Crossing, a work about Walt Whitman dating from 2015, and Eurydice, which premiered in February 2020 at the Los Angeles Opera and made its Metropolitan Opera debut this fall.
The overlarge seas. Salt pressing
the blue. Still, some sparrows.
The sky. The tumbling relief of sky
in the after-winter seasons. Words,
their bright shattering. The wars,