In October, the Swedish Academy will have the opportunity both to chip away at its record of overlooking many of the most profound writers in its field of vision and to help correct its woeful hesitation in standing up for the values it ought to champion. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Salman Rushdie’s masterpieces, “Midnight’s Children” and “Shame,” had been translated into Persian and were admired in Iran as expressions of anti-imperialism. Everything changed on February 14, 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini condemned as blasphemous “The Satanic Verses,” a novel that he hadn’t bothered to read, and issued a fatwa calling for the author’s death. Khomeini’s edict helped inspire book burnings and vicious demonstrations against Rushdie from Karachi to London.
Rushdie, who could never have anticipated such a reaction to his work, spent much of the next decade in hiding and under heavy guard. The literary world was hardly unanimous in his defense. Roald Dahl, John Berger, and John le Carré were some of the writers who judged Rushdie to have been insufficiently attentive to clerical sensitivities in Tehran. Among the more cowardly acts of the time was the Swedish Academy’s refusal to issue a statement in support of Rushdie. The Academy waited twenty-seven years—a period during which booksellers in the United States and in Europe were firebombed and Rushdie’s Japanese translator was murdered––before it roused itself to condemn the fatwa as a “serious violation of free speech.” Stern stuff.
In June, I had a long talk with Marilyn Horne, the great mezzo-soprano. In the course of our talk, I said, “Aren’t you glad you lived and worked in the age of recordings?” Pre-Caruso, no singers were recorded: not Maria Malibran, not Jenny Lind, not any of them. Horne, born in 1934, worked in the second half of the twentieth century. The opera roles she performed, the songs she sang—a great deal of that is captured on recordings. Her career, her art, is well documented.
Yes, she said, she was glad. But she added something I hadn’t thought of: singers today have many fewer opportunities to record than their predecessors did—fewer opportunities than their teachers, and their teachers’ teachers, did. The recording industry is transformed. Who will pay for an album of, say, Schubert songs? A person can go to YouTube and hear Hans Hotter, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fritz Wunderlich, Janet Baker, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau . . . Marilyn Horne.
There is a popular saying in Cheongju, South Korea, that “anyone who does not know Jikji is a foreign spy.” The word appears on every street sign, and has been appended to the names of cafes, bookstores, and delis. For a few years, the local soccer team rebranded as Jikji FC. “It’s literally everywhere. I’m not kidding,” says Angelica Noh, who recently moved to the city from Seoul. Noh learned the word in elementary school, “like everyone in Korea,” she says. Jikji is the name of a book, a collection of Confucian teachings, that was printed by a group of monks in a temple in Cheongju in 1377. And though few outside of Korea know it, that date is significant: Jikji is the world’s oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, predating the earliest Gutenberg Bible by 78 years.
NASA can land a probe on Saturn's largest moon, 764 million miles from Earth—yet no one has been able to mathematically demonstrate the exact positions of the Earth, sun, and our own moon at a given point in the future. Scientists can make estimates, but these all rely on simplifications.
Two-body problems, like mapping the movement of one planet around one star, are solvable. These binary orbits are easy to predict. But a serious complication arises if a third body is introduced. Our moon, which has the gravitational forces of both the sun and the Earth acting upon it simultaneously, is part of an infamous three-body problem.
“Technically, a spring roll is a dumpling,” chef Shirley Chung says during a recent visit to her Ms. Chi restaurant in Culver City. Seated next to her at a table are food writer Andy Wang and culinary consultant and event producer Caryl Chinn. I sought counsel from these three because they are known for their dumpling expertise — after all, they refer to themselves as the Dumpling Mafia. “The definition is [it] has a wrapper and has a filling. ‘Dumpling’ is a big umbrella.”
Also on her list of dumplings: cabbage rolls, empanadas, even calzones, which she refers to as “giant dumplings.”
Oklahoma tries to make everyone happy with an official state meal that includes eleven separate dishes, while Louisiana stands out as the only part of the union bold enough to name an overall state cuisine, which is gumbo.
It’s a fascinating list, one you could spend hours studying, alongside the inventory of state beverages, of which there are 22 (most are milk). As you get into the more esoteric items, a few obvious questions arise, over and over. For starters: Who picked this hodgepodge of foods? And was there ever any debate about some of these seemingly random selections?
Still, there’s a difference between hope and grace. Literature abounds with characters who jury-rig salvation out of scraps. But Escoffery’s protagonists, though resourceful, can’t accomplish the impossible; nor do they sacrifice themselves for the reader’s sentimental education. If I survive you, the book qualifies, and its prose comes alive in that gasping and clawing—what Trelawny calls an “exquisite, wracking compulsion.” These characters are strange amalgams of limited agency and boundless originality. Their survival, perhaps, comes down to their style.
Better than the minivan you slept a winter in, American Legion