I was the kind of notebook keeper Joan Didion so perfectly describes, in “On Keeping a Notebook,” one of those “children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” All the more unsettling, then, to lose the only record of what’s been narrowly saved. I contented myself to think that if anyone had intercepted my notebook, they wouldn’t get very far, by the same law that says no one can stand to listen to anyone else recount their dreams.
What I didn’t expect was a Facebook message. A stranger named T had discovered my bag, she said, on an Ohio-bound Greyhound, and was eager to get its contents back to me. “Girl, not to be a hippie, but when I found your stuff I felt like the universe put it there for me to find you.” I was overcome with gratitude. When the package arrived days later, I tore it open, relieved.
Then—confused.
So, while the question of why our fingers and toes began wrinkling in water in the first place remains open, our pruney digits are proving useful to doctors in other surprising ways.
Defining ourselves by our jobs is a core cultural trait that’s hard to shake, Gomez says. After all, the first question we often ask a new acquaintance is, “What do you do?” LinkedIn’s new posting culture signals a celebration of some of the most insidious aspects of working life: namely, an unyielding, cultish devotion to work, valorizing the hustle and the idea that our jobs are an extension of our personhood, all while frequently glossing over the more critical conversations we could be having. On LinkedIn, what we do has become who we are, and who we are is what we do.
The Novelist takes place over a single morning, following an unnamed writer as he faffs around on social media while his girlfriend sleeps in their apartment; he occasionally fiddles with novels in progress in Google Docs. That’s it. The first 16 pages describe the protagonist looking at Twitter in minute-by-minute detail, thinking inane thoughts like “my Twitter was horrible—Twitter in general was horrible.” A more annoying premise for a book is, frankly, hard to imagine. And yet, here I am, recommending it. What’s good about a novel with a plotline so insipid it borders on openly hostile? Well, for starters, it’s funny—a rare and cherishable quality in contemporary literature.
It also contains some of the most accurate—and accurately abject—depictions of the experience of using the internet ever captured in fiction.
Like many thousands of other people, I have relied throughout the course of COVID-19 on Yong's reporting at The Atlantic as he cracked open the fast-changing world of pandemic science. Now, with An Immense World, Yong brings into beautiful focus a host of other animal sensory worlds that co-exist with ours, and how we may protect them. He has synthesized and compellingly presented a spectacular amount of scientific information to do this, making it look easy along the way. But isn't easy at all. It's a magnificent achievement.
Bourgon puts herself in the poacher’s shoes, and the result is a refreshing and compassionate warning about the perils of well-intentioned but overzealous environmentalism.