Five hours into a long drive through New England last week, I needed coffee. I pulled up to a Dunkin’ in Gorham, New Hampshire, parked, and got out of the car. Mistake. In the donut-scented interior, I learned that this Dunkin’ wasn’t taking orders in the store—only at the drive-thru and via the app. Reluctantly, I downloaded Dunkin’, selected a large cold brew, tapped in my credit card number, and watched in silence as two workers prepared and placed the coffee on the largely obsolete counter.
Seven days later, I got an email—“Are Your Cravings Calling?”—that left me unsure if I’d signed up for DD or AA. I was part of the Dunkin’ digital universe now, which is right where the company, owned by Atlanta-based Inspire Brands, wants me. Certainly more than in the actual store. Last August, Dunkin’ opened its first “digital” location on Beacon Street in Boston. There are no cashiers, replaced by touchscreens and mobile ordering, and no seats or tables.
Could gravitational waves be used someday to probe distant matter in the universe? Through a theoretical physics calculation, researchers from Case Western Reserve University suggest that they could. Their work demonstrates that signals scattered by large astronomical objects could reveal what is inside them.
The early days of my relationship with the dirty martini were complex. I craved the easy sophistication that a martini conjured, but my postcollege self wasn’t ready for its stone-cold booziness. Few in their early twenties have dealt with enough adult life to appreciate the marti- ni’s ability to make you forget that you now have to deal with adult life. A dirty martini, however? That wisp of olive brine alongside gin and vermouth made the drink downright quaffable and fun, even though it still looked like the thing that grown-ups who had a mortgage and a dinner jacket drank. It became a go-to when I felt the need to flex some faux refinement.
On the cover of “Bliss Montage,” clear plastic clings to the nubbled curves of oranges, suffocating all that sunshine-y zing. The title and Ma’s name are ruffled too, as if the author herself were shrink-wrapping delicious pleasure into a denatured product.
The stories of “Bliss Montage” keep the cover’s cheeky promise. They take place in little pockets removed from “real” life, whatever that means: inside a parallel world hidden behind a wardrobe; at a cultish festival in a fictional country; on a protracted vacation in a “de-Americanized” world; in an MFA workshop. The air has been sucked out of all these claustrophobic nowheres.
Why do we remember the past and not the future? Theories of time in physics abound, but one such idea goes like this: time is like film from a movie—everything that will happen has already happened or perhaps it would be more apt to say that everything is always happening. In such a world, it is mere happenstance that human beings remember the past and not the future.
Such mental gymnastics abound in Elisa Gabbert’s new poetry collection, Normal Distance. “Why do I have to make this future that already exists?” she asks in “I Don’t Want To Hear Any Good News or Bad News,” and “Today, there’s more past that yesterday. But is there any / less future?” in “Historians of the Future.”
The dream – three really
of being with Roni.