Although I’m not proud of it, as an author, I often engage in the masochistic ritual of checking my Amazon ranking and reviews.
So back in the spring, shortly after my latest book came out, I typed “The Puzzler” by A. J. Jacobs into the Amazon search bar and pressed “Enter.”
Up came my book, of course. But to my surprise, so did several other books. Six of them. These books had titles such as Summary of The Puzzler by A.J. Jacobs and Workbook for the Puzzler by A.J. Jacobs. They ranged from $5 to $13.
It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.
On the surface, there are few word games that would seem to need active editing less than Wordle. After all, the daily Wordle puzzle boils down to just a single five-letter word. Picking that word each day doesn't exactly require the skill or artistry of, say, crafting an entire crossword puzzle or designing a more algorithmic game like Knotwords.
Despite this, on Monday, The New York Times announced that "Wordle finally has an editor." Which kind of leads to an obvious follow-up question: What does a Wordle editor actually do all day?
As multigenerational family sagas go, they don't get more intense and operatic than Ghost Town, a novel by Kevin Chen and the winner of the 2020 Taiwan Literature Award. Now translated into English thanks to Darryl Sterk, Ghost Town is reminiscent of the dreamlike narratives of Can Xue and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and will require readers to hold on tight to their sense of reality as the prose blurs lines between the living and the dead, the past and the present, and finally, the guilty and the innocent.
To modern readers, “after icebergs” may suggest our experience with climate change and the fact that Arctic and glacial ice are diminishing. We may soon be in a time when icebergs are no longer found where they were in the past. In “After Icebergs with a Painter,” though, the meaning is about going after icebergs, as on a hunt. The book is a reprint of a long-out-of-print manuscript — a diary, really — from an 1859 voyage by an artist and his companion, a writer, to witness and paint giant icebergs floating along North America’s northeastern coast.
In “Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge,” his new book of immersive journalism, Ted Conover returns to his home state to explore the San Luis Valley and the people who live there. The valley’s flat, arid plains are bordered by sand dunes and the Sangre de Cristo mountains and are populated by hundreds of people in remote trailers and cabins, living off the grid.
You might think it a bleak place, so windswept and isolated, but Conover grew to love it.