But it did make me wonder: What makes a good vacation read? Is it a novel set in the city you’re in that provides a frisson of recognition every time you stumble upon a street corner or plaza where some plot point occurs? Is it a nonfiction book about that place that helps you understand its history, culture or architecture? Is it a biography of someone closely associated with that city?
Or is it something else entirely: an unrelated palate cleanser chosen to help reset the mind after a frenzied day of sightseeing? A vacation is supposed to be an escape. Would your escape benefit from escapist literature?
At the dawn of the pandemic, Gabino Iglesias had already been living paycheck to paycheck in Texas for more than a decade. Then the public high school where he was teaching had devastating news: He was being let go.
Iglesias, a Puerto Rican novelist, found himself without a salary or health insurance. Unable to find other work in the bleak 2020 job market, he gambled on finishing the book he had started writing on his lunch breaks.
Many of the items seem mysterious without context or origins, and for more than nine years no one ever reached out to claim one, McKellar said.
That changed last month, when Jamee Longacre was looking through some of the collection and a green sticky note caught her eye.
Nothing is certain in life except death, taxes, and—a physicist might add—the values of the fundamental constants. These are quantities, such as the speed of light or the mass of the electron, which physicists have determined do not change over time throughout the universe.
Or do they?
The Mediterranean’s apocalyptic scenes are some of the clearest examples of how the climate crisis is already upending life around the world and is a harbinger for what could await others. It is also part of a stark global pattern: In the United Kingdom, record-breaking heat has melted roads and forced the government to declare a national emergency. The American West has been baking under an acute heat wave and drought, coastal communities on the east coast of Australia are at risk of washing away, and extreme flooding in China has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Fourteen volunteers, six climate researchers and a mobile biometeorological cart named “Smarty” prepared to set off for a “heat walk” in the Southeast Asian city-state’s downtown area. The volunteers had strapped on devices to measure their heart rates and the temperature of their skin. Winston Chow, the lead researcher, watched the scene as a sliver of sweat formed on his forehead.
Mr. Chow and his team are part of Cooling Singapore, a multi-institutional project that was launched in 2017 with funding from the Singapore government. The project’s current goal is to build a computer model, or “digital urban climate twin,” of Singapore, which would allow policymakers to analyze the effectiveness of various heat mitigation measures before spending money on solutions that might not work.
For three years in the 1980s, my father, who was a partner at a class-action securities firm that bore his name, had an ongoing legal case in Oregon. As a child, I had no idea what this meant, only that he often returned to New York from his long business trips with two things: a stupid dad joke, and a tiny spoon, purchased in the gift shop of an airport. An afterthought, sure, but it was something. We were almost always apart, my father and I, from the time I was 1, when my parents separated, to the time he died, when I was 30.
Their purpose seems obvious — to quench thirst, duh — but stage actors get dry mouths, and no Hamlet puts down his sword to pick up an Evian.
The water bottle is the prop that clues us in that a comic — not a character — is at work.