Ruth saves me from despair. She tells me we will take it in turns to tell Max a reason we love him. We lean very close and revive each other with his myriad idiosyncrasies, a litany of his infinite seven-week-old self. I feel that if we stop, he will go. In this way, we cross London to Great Ormond Street.
I’ve thought a lot about why I’m writing this. I know that I’m repelled by the kind of spiritual vultures who might scour Max’s story for shareable aphorisms, and that ideally, I’d like to slap them with an injunction. On the other hand, I also know that what happened has changed me utterly, and confronted me with things about the world that I had never even tried to understand: how unbelievably precarious it all is, the breadth of what constitutes a meaningful life, and the medieval state of anxiety that the disabled world still produces in the typical one. I hate the way that disabled lives recede out of view because other people are too squeamish to talk about them, and I want to confront that tendency. Mostly, though, I think Max is already a thousand times more interesting than anyone I’ve ever met, and I want to tell you about him.
Vlasis calls this the "human ecology" of glaciers: a way of understanding not only ice, but how people interact with it. Nature isn't something separate from us, he says. "We are shaping and impacting in a lot of different ways".
By amplifying the sounds of glaciers, he hopes to develop a way of listening to global warming in real time. "We look towards melting glaciers as visual symbols of climate change. I wanted to know the stories that those sounds told, and I wanted to know how people had listened to glaciers throughout history."
Can a historical novel be morally serious, even tragic, and also playful at the same time? For a writer of fiction, history is a dangerous thing to play with—one doesn’t want to be trivial or false. History itself might render judgment. Yet Daniel Kehlmann’s new book, “The Director”, suggests that such a combination is not only possible but, in the hands of a writer with saturnine wit, exhilarating. “The Director” is a complex entertainment—a sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura.
“We were learning to love // the middle part best.” When the Horses (2025), Mary Helen Callier’s debut collection, is an education in this odd kind of love, a book about the paradoxical blend of narrative and detachment it takes to see anything as the middle part. Callier focuses her attention on frozen images that gain a strange, mythic weight as they expand beyond the more knowable events that once defined them: to love the middle part is also to be free of the story that it encapsulates.