With no successor yet announced, the question of which path the Book Review will take becomes more pronounced. Continuing to chase an audience whose attention might be elsewhere with hat tricks, celebrity contributors, and recommendation lists may be tempting to the new editor, even if recent history has provided little indication that doing so strengthens the Review’s influence or authority. Alternatively, the Book Review could choose to prioritize the sort of reader who cares about and is invested in literary criticism in its own right. Whatever the case may be, resting on legacy alone isn’t an option. Like any institution that seeks to be all things to all people, the Book Review risks being a publication that doesn’t much appeal to anyone.
Say “the artist’s life” and already we are in thrall to the old romantic myths: the garret in winter with wind lisping through the cracks, the dissolving nights at mirrored bars nursing absinthe, the empty pockets, the feral hair, the ever-looming madhouse. Or let us reach further back in time to a Taoist philosophical text circa the late fourth century B.C., which tells of a Chinese lord who summons artists for a commission. They compliantly line up before him with brushes and ink, ready to compete for the job — all but one, who trails in late, then goes back home, disrobes and sprawls on the floor before starting to paint. The lord approves: “This is a true artist!”
When Alan Turing turned his attention to artificial intelligence, there was probably no one in the world better equipped for the task. His paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (1950) is still one of the most frequently cited in the field. Turing died young, however, and for a long time most of his work remained either classified or otherwise inaccessible. So it is perhaps not surprising that there are important lessons left to learn from him, including about the philosophical foundations of AI.
In many ways, Century 21’s world of tomorrow has become the world of today. The U.S. emerged victorious in the Cold War and successfully shared the fair’s vision with the world: one of American ascendance, scientific progress and capitalist consumption. World’s fairs, meanwhile, have seemingly fallen out of fashion in America. The last time the U.S. hosted one was 38 years ago, in 1984, when New Orleans presented the Louisiana World Exposition.
“The purposes of the fair have been taken over by other mediums,” says Lydia Mattice Brandt, an architectural historian at the University of South Carolina. “The way that [fairs] offered fantasy … is today so easy to get in other ways, whether it’s physical experiences like theme parks or movies [and the] internet.”
Who among us in these anxious times cannot relate to bouts of sleeplessness and the resulting brain fog and dishevelment? “Insomnia” is a nimble suspense story, but it’s even more disturbing as an account of how a restless brain can weaken and lethally doubt itself.
Maybe you’ve heard the adage inviting you to walk a mile in someone’s shoes before you judge them. Taken literally, the phrase suggests that walking is the physical key to gaining understanding of others—and ourselves. Ben Shattuck puts that to the test in his debut, Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau. Reeling from another nightmare about his ex-girlfriend, Shattuck took a shower and, as the water washed disturbing dream scenes from his mind, imagined Thoreau smiling on the beach. Without considering consequences, Shattuck packed bread, cheese, and the copy of Cape Cod he had been reading into his backpack, then set off to recreate Thoreau’s 1849 walk along the Cape. Six Walks is the moving account of Shattuck’s journey to find peace by undertaking six of Thoreau’s nineteenth-century walks: along Cape Cod, up Mount Katahdin and Mount Wachusett, from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, through the Allagash, and then, a few years later, back to the Cape.
Juggling motherhood and creative work can leave one feeling like an iconoclast and a failure all at once. “The Baby on the Fire Escape,” Julie Phillips’ tremendous group biography and exploration of what she identifies as a “mind-baby problem,” focuses on women of the mid-20th century onward, when “motherhood went from being an accident and obligation to being a choice.”