It’s very late-stage capitalism, of course, to sit there or lie there in your envelope of sound, your private entertainment capsule, technologically sealed and cerebrally catered to, fiddling with the volume. But being read to is ancient. I love a podcast—the chitchat, the colloquy—but this is deeper: the reading voice, the singular storytelling voice, thrums in the memory tunnels of the species. When I’m listening to an audiobook, I’m being entertained like a tired ploughman. I’m being lulled, bardically lulled, like a drunken baron at a long feast table, pork grease shining on my chin. I’m being quieted like a child. I’m being spellbound like a face caught in firelight.
I regret having to ask Joyce Carol Oates — five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the 1970 National Book Award, whose books number more than 70, whose own longtime editor could not tell me how many novels he’d worked on with her and had to run some quick numbers in his head, who published four books last year alone at age 83 — about her Twitter presence. But I do, because, fairly or not, that is what a lot of people know her for these days.
It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive.
Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered reflections about the place—or absence—of handwriting in their lives. Instead of the Civil War past, we found ourselves exploring a different set of historical changes. In my ignorance, I became their pupil as well as a kind of historical artifact, a Rip van Winkle confronting a transformed world.
Designing the perfect queue is no easy task—and the mass of people snaking through London is no ordinary queue. But help is at hand—from the behavioral science of queue theory to tricks of the trade more commonly used at theme parks, it’s possible to keep hundreds of thousands of people in order. Especially when most of them are Brits—a people famed for their ability to stand obediently in line.
“The perfect queue is one that doesn’t take longer than 10 minutes,” says Eric Kant, founder of Phase01 Crowd Management, a Dutch company that manages events—including long lines. (A 2017 study from University College London suggests that Brits get antsy when they wait longer than 5 minutes 45 seconds.) “From this perspective, it is not a perfect queue,” says Kant. But it is a well-prepared one, with meticulous planning, pinpoint precision, and wild logistics. In short, it’s a queue fit for a queen.
The Book of Goose is a taut landscape built of all literature’s attachments, manipulations, displacements, anxieties, and escapes. It is the labored breadth of an economy that is resplendently libidinal and compelling—the mark of an experienced writer’s rigorous later work.
Osman concocts a satisfyingly complex whodunit full of neat twists and wrong turns. But unlike most crime novelists, he ensures his book’s strength and momentum stem not from its plot or its thrills but rather its perfectly formed characters. Once again, the quartet of friends makes for delightful company.
It’s supposed to be solemn and settled
And in celebration of the individual human life,
Whatever it is. It’s each of us of course,
And yet the view we have of it is so oblique