Eight months after doctors cut the cancer out of my mom, four months after her second surgery, three months after she closed the women’s consignment boutique she owned for 10 years, two months before her third surgery, and one month after my dad turned 60, my parents organized a family phone call. Those are rarely good. Considering everything that transpired over the past year, it was a call we should have seen coming. They wanted to sell the farm.
On a sticky, late-spring night in parts of the eastern United States, you might witness one of the wonders of the animal kingdom: a constellation of hundreds of fireflies blinking in unison. Only three of the 130 or so species of fireflies in the U.S. are known to exhibit this synchrony, and they do so for only a few weeks a year.
The displays have gotten so popular that the Great Smoky Mountains and Congaree National Parks hold lotteries for the privilege of watching the fireflies in the parks during their peak. If you are lucky enough to win that lottery, you might run into Orit Peleg, a computer scientist and biophysicist from the University of Colorado Boulder, setting up cameras to record the display with some of her research collaborators.
In 2024 a shockwave rippled through the astronomical world, shaking it to the core. The disturbance didn’t come from some astral disaster at the solar system’s doorstep, however. Rather it arrived via the careful analysis of many far-distant galaxies, which revealed new details of the universe’s evolution across eons of cosmic history. Against most experts’ expectations, the result suggested that dark energy—the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion—was not an unwavering constant but rather a more fickle beast that was weakening over time.
Death by a Thousand Cuts is a book about people living in the 21st century. It connects with our moment in history – but transcends it – by placing basic human struggle at the centre of each tale. These stories contend with the effect that abject loneliness has on our souls when our private hells make us public spectacles, and with the particular kind of loneliness that often accompanies chaos, and ultimately, the loneliness that is found within it.
Eco-anxiety is not an official medical diagnosis, but everyone knows what it means. The American Psychological Association defines it as “the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one’s future and that of next generations”. Fear of the future, an ache for the past, the present awash with disquiet: into this turmoil Alice Mah’s new book appears like a little red boat, keeping hope afloat against all odds.