Whoever had the idea, what is not in dispute is that the notion of a pregnant Lucy Ricardo faced a steep and immediate uphill battle in the corporate suites of CBS and Philip Morris. While there was no codified ban on pregnancy on television, it was a mass-market medium, dependent on the blandest possible, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road appeal to the maximum number of viewers. And the act that produced pregnancy—that is, sex—was all but nonexistent on television, where even married couples typically slept in twin beds. It may be hard to imagine, but in 1952 pregnancy was still regarded as such a debilitating (or vaguely embarrassing) condition that expectant mothers were routinely dismissed from their jobs. The network and sponsor suggested alternatives: hide Lucy behind furniture (impossible, since Ball ballooned dramatically in her pregnancies); devote only one or two shows to the plotline; avoid showing the pregnancy at all costs. But Oppenheimer insisted that the story could be done in good taste, and Desi was adamant that an effective narrative arc required half a dozen or more episodes to track the progress from the first word of the pregnancy to the actual birth. Still, they got nowhere. Desperate, Desi appealed to the ultimate authority, the chairman of Philip Morris, Alfred E. Lyon.
Since Singapore was made a trading outpost by the British in 1819, scientists estimate that human activities, such as deforestation, have led to an extinction rate of 37%. Now, however, the country’s central government is working to protect and develop the natural world as part of its city-planning strategy, which it says will improve mental health, keep urban temperatures down and safeguard the country’s environmental legacy.
It was through this strategy that the Singapore freshwater crab found a reprieve. Shortly after the discovery that its numbers were dwindling, a sophisticated conservation strategy kicked into gear. The National Parks Board (NParks), Singapore’s nature authority, formed a working group with representatives from academia, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and international conservation specialists. Together, they developed a captive-breeding programme for the crabs and released some of them at suitable sites to boost wild populations. Today, J. singaporensis is still endangered, but not facing imminent extinction.
Growing up, I had the diet of a cautious senior. Mayonnaise sandwiches, boiled chicken, and well-done steak. What eventually changed that was a British science fiction show called Red Dwarf, a grungy space comedy about the last man in the universe. The main character, Dave Lister, was everything a nerd like me would think was cool—he was a carefree slob, he had dreadlocks and a Scouse accent, and nearly every meal he ate was chicken vindaloo, served “kamikaze hot.” That show and that dish introduced me to the guilty pleasure that’s equal parts addiction and toxic masculinity—eating the spiciest foods possible.
Your whole life is a research expedition, collecting specimens and building your pattern-recognition skills as you accumulate experiences and ideas about them, or at least mine has been. Around the time my book A Field Guide to Getting Lost appeared in 2005, I tried to reorient a class of wonderfully, frustratingly diligent journalism students who had been trained that writing begins with rushing outside to gather material, that you’re starting from scratch every time. Turning journalists into essayists in that long-ago class meant turning them from people devoting most of the time they had to collecting new material into hunter-gatherers in their own memories, experiences, and interpretations, curators in the natural-science museum of their heads, or at least trying to do so.
It is true that many of the stories are funny and thought-provoking. They’re what you’d call dark comedy. But in Autocorrect, there’s something further. Even in works of dark comedy, we often get a sense that a system of justice, sometimes called karma, exists in the world. A person behaves in an evil, cruel, or merely unpleasant way, and something bad happens to them in turn. One can either believe this is an aspect of wish fulfillment in art, or an intrinsic property to the real moral, spiritual, or even physical universe — the reader can decide for themselves. Autocorrect is willing to live outside of this framework.
Aftertaste pulls together familiar elements of romance and the supernatural, adding a dash of Anthony Bourdain-style bullishness and a pinch of Davelle’s own authorial smarts. I’ll bet there’s a run on fleur de sel right after publication day.
In the end, Journey to the Edge of Life is less a literary pilgrimage than an exorcism. Özlü has written through her ghosts and memories and past readings, emerging with renewed capacity for life and its shapeless wanderings.
At first, the plot unfolds slowly as the author introduces a new community of characters, but soon the pace picks up. As always with a Connelly novel, the characters are well drawn and the prose is tight, precise, and easy to read.