A good book, play, or film can be absorbing, enabling our imaginations to engage and take flight, but rarely does it envelop us; there is still space for reflection and contemplation. By privileging immediacy and affect, immersion requires us to submit to our senses. But culture is not just a matter of feeling. It is also a way of knowing and understanding the world. The immersive precludes the discursive by collapsing the distance needed for critique.
Massimo Stiavelli heads the JWST Mission Office at the institute that allocates research time on the telescope. According to Stiavelli, “every area of science is covered” in the proposals his group has approved, from the search for potentially habitable exoplanets to studies of the earliest stars. Yet he is particularly hopeful that JWST could help settle one of the biggest controversies in modern astronomy: the dispute about the expansion rate of the universe.
“If you try to measure the current expansion rate, well, there’s a variety of techniques that people use, and they tend to get a certain number,” says Tommaso Treu, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And it turns out that those numbers don’t match.”
Still known colloquially as “the most beautiful suicide,” McHale makes a cameo appearance in Renée Branum’s stylish, shimmering debut, “Defenestrate,” along with Buster Keaton; the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal; and Juliane Koepcke, the teenager who survived a nearly two-mile plunge when her plane disintegrated over the Amazon rainforest in 1971. Branum breaks up her novel into fragments, some only a paragraph long, and each with its own subhead. There’s a diaphanous flow to her storytelling, full of light and air, with darker notes that play off our hard-wired terror of falling, or basophobia.
Gary Shteyngart’s contribution to the burgeoning genre of the lockdown novel is very, very Russian – in the best possible way. The premise is that a group of old friends are to spend a month in the country (well, several months) riding out New York’s pandemic in a little ad hoc colony in the Hudson valley. The cast is a collection of privileged, mournful “lishnii cheloveks” (as the “superfluous men” of 19th-century Russian literature were known) in late middle age, pottering and squabbling in rural exile, wondering what the world is coming to and regretting the past.
Oliver Roeder, a student of games and game theory, is deeply aware of the tension between what games are and what people project onto them; he even quotes that line from “Shibumi” to start the chapter on Go in his new book, “Seven Games.” His “group biography” of seven classic games — checkers, chess, Go, backgammon, poker, Scrabble and bridge — is in many ways an interrogation of these questions: Are games more than their rules and playing pieces? Are they metaphors for deeper truths of the human experience? Is chess “life in miniature,” as the former world champion Garry Kasparov once said? Or is it just a board game — Risk with more rules and a boring map?