There is something like an implicit, magical relationship between pavements, cafes and writing. It is as if there exists a tension between the very ideas of them – the act of writing, of dwelling inside an establishment while also being out in the world. They create a situation in which humans might be observed in that most impossible of places: the wild. While the urban environment can never be truly wild – there are many interventions that subtly affect how we interact, there is something mystical about the pavement cafe.
The Japanese writer Taeko Kōno is a maestro of transgressive desire whose stories often—and deliciously—use food as a metaphor for sexual appetite. Kōno, who died in 2015, is considered one of Japan’s foremost feminist writers and one of its foremost writers of any kind. She won many of the country’s top literary prizes, including the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri. The single selection of her work in English, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, first published by New Directions in 1996 and translated by Lucy North and Lucy Lower, contains ten dark, deceptively simple stories about women who find the gender roles in Japanese society unbearable, and are warped by them.
Suddenly, there seemed every reason to visit New York.
Semiconductors are the cornerstone of the modern economy. Everything from emails to guided missiles relies on them. Yet parts of the supply chain, particularly for cutting-edge chips, depend on choke-points dominated by a small number of firms. For decades few people worried much about this—until covid-19 and rising tensions between China and America highlighted the sector’s fragility. In “Chip War”, his elegant new book, Chris Miller of Tufts University shows how economic, geopolitical and technological forces shaped this essential industry.