A good romance feels like putting two puzzle pieces together. One piece might be gruff and grumpy while the other is sweet and affectionate. Two pieces might be very alike, but detest each other: similar-shaped curves that just won't line up. One proud piece, one prejudiced. The dramatic core of the romance novel is the moment when the two pieces finally click! into place, but for that click to satisfy, readers need to know those puzzle pieces in detail. Their shapes, their histories, their hard and soft edges, the curves and scope of all the different parts that make two people work. It means that every romance novel is at its heart a character study, an examination of those details that make someone who they are.
Unsurprising then, that in romance literature as everywhere else, race matters. The choice to write a character as a particular race is never a coincidence. Though whiteness is often permitted to pass uncommented, Sally Rooney's novels are as much about what it is like when two white people fall in love as Tia Williams' are an ode to the romantic experience of two Black people. Our racial identities and experiences form a core part of our personhood. In a character study, they're significant.
As I thought about offering my students the online option, I began to imagine them many years from now, coming upon that London diary from their college days. I remembered my first group of students drawing sketches on their pages, attaching a Travelcard, café napkin, or theater ticket. I remembered Anna Jackson with the kowhai flower. I couldn't shake my conviction that future diary readers will be less enthralled by a digital product – even enhanced with multimedia – than by the quirky, untidy books hand-lettered by their predecessors.
I am not charging into battle but being shuffled along. Earlier, my husband led me to the car, to the 405 freeway, up La Cienega Boulevard and down Beverly. At the cancer center, we were treated to valet parking and I could almost pretend we were headed to a fancy restaurant.
People tell me to fight. They call me a warrior. They tell me how their friend fought or their cousin fought or they themselves fought, how they won, which is obvious, so obvious because they’re standing here or sitting here, alive, claiming victory. It’s not a fight, I’m thinking, it’s submission, it’s leaning back, full of Xanax, and offering up a body, a vein.
The three mathematicians relied on a strategy — called proof by contradiction — that had been previously employed in related work. The argument goes roughly like this: First, the researchers assume the opposite of what they’re trying to prove, namely that the solution does not exist forever — that there is, instead, a maximum time after which the Kerr solution breaks down. They then use some “mathematical trickery,” said Giorgi — an analysis of partial differential equations, which lie at the heart of general relativity — to extend the solution beyond the purported maximum time. In other words, they show that no matter what value is chosen for the maximum time, it can always be extended. Their initial assumption is thus contradicted, implying that the conjecture itself must be true.