The conclusion seems inescapable: We may not be able to prove that we are in a simulation, but at the very least, it will be a possibility that we can’t rule out. But it could be more than that. Chalmers argues that if we’re in a simulation, there’d be no reason to think it’s the only simulation; in the same way that lots of different computers today are running Microsoft Excel, lots of different machines might be running an instance of the simulation. If that was the case, simulated worlds would vastly outnumber non-sim worlds — meaning that, just as a matter of statistics, it would be not just possible that our world is one of the many simulations but likely. As Chalmers puts it, “We are probably sims.”
I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to reconsider cake. For most of my life, I’d thought of it exclusively as a celebratory confection: to be eaten—for dessert, usually—on the occasion of a birthday, an anniversary, or a wedding. Then, one summer in college, I spent a month in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, where I was enrolled in a conservation-biology course on the tiny, rural campus of an institute for ecological research. A staff of local women prepared and provided not only breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but also two coffee breaks, midmorning and midafternoon. The indisputable star of the latter, café da tarde, was cake, cut into neat squares: bolo de fubá, made with cornmeal, coconut, condensed milk, on one day; dense chocolate frosted in buttercream another; vanilla sponge layered with strawberry jam and vanilla cream the next.
For weeks, I had a piece every afternoon. What at first felt unreasonably indulgent came to seem necessary: I was working up a fierce appetite tromping through the steamy forest and its interstitial patches of farmland, testing the pH levels of soil, running from cows, scanning treetops for monkeys and sloths. This cake was not dessert; this cake was sustenance. More important, it was a daily pleasure formally sanctioned, with no whiff of the guilt that I would have felt eating cake so regularly in my normal life.
If Lizzie Damilola Blackburn’s debut novel, “Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?,” was to become a TV sitcom, it could run episode after episode, season after season, without losing steam on story material. Cheeky and entertaining, the novel, which spans just six months in the chaotic life of its British-Nigerian protagonist Yinka, packs in a whole lot of cross-cultural drama and social commentary with an easygoing, conversational style.
On their second date, he told her that, should they continue seeing each other, "[she] could still date and sleep with other people, even fall in love again. I don't want to restrict my partners' experiences."
This thrilled her, although knowing that he would also forgo monogamy eventually did not. Still, she was fascinated by and powerfully drawn to him, so she decided to give it a shot. Her first book, Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy, documents what happened next, using extensive research, interviews with experts, and her own meticulous record-keeping to flesh out and interpret her personal experiences.
This book is thrilling: it leaves the reader scrambling for ground: Is every possible interpretation or nuance about archipelagoes contained here? The possibility enthrals. Within the compendium individual writers reveal their own sources so the effect is like a Russian doll of mysteries within mysteries. The editors are to be praised for uniting these threads into a rare and colourful garment.
Reid, who was born in Canada, has been the first lady of Iceland since 2016. She is 45 years old, married and has four young children. She would, and often does, say that she is privileged, and she shows that she understands this by structuring her book around interviews with other women, mostly in Iceland, who have set out to do what they wanted to do and have succeeded. Many of these “sprakkar” (an ancient Icelandic word meaning extraordinary or outstanding women), she explains, “fly under the radar, but their lived experiences nevertheless help portray a society that values the ambition of gender equality.”
Three toes fall over the line, severed at just the right place so the
foot does not bleed. The foot walks away and the toes become