How do you write a life like that? It is presumed that artists make things while scientists discover them, the lives of the first leaving traces in what their minds produce, the second not so much, or, in the case of very technical and abstract inquiries, not at all. We tend to think that Philip Roth bears a different relationship to Portnoy’s Complaint than Albert Einstein does to E=mc
Hal Ebbott has raised an uncomfortable reality that our closest friends may not be the safest, and forces us to confront what we might have to do. Among Friends explores an old idea in male friendship. Volumes have been written about rich white men and the way they live. The topic in so many ways has been exhausted by the heavy, 20th-century novel Ebbott clearly aspires to write. But where Ebbott finds new ground is in attaching contemporary values to the examination, packaged in a way that recalls a different time and place, a different way of thinking, and in that dichotomy, has created something new and compelling for the present.
Death at the White Hart is, as such things go, a fairly traditional mystery. It isn’t particularly groundbreaking in terms of story or style. What it is, though, is genuinely compelling, an entertaining read full of interesting and three-dimensional characters that make the search through a village’s worth of red herrings and false leads more entertaining than it has any right to be.
I’d never known that Morrison had straddled the line between writer and editor. Perhaps naively, I hadn’t envisioned that someone could do both jobs at once, especially a writer of Morrison’s caliber. And I didn’t know then how many of the writers who surrounded her in the Norton volume—Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Leon Forrest, Toni Cade Bambara—as well as figures beyond the anthology, such as Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Huey P. Newton, had relied on Morrison to usher their books into the world. I certainly did not appreciate how dynamic—and complicated—both the art and the business of those collaborations had been for her.
Now readers can discover Morrison the bold and dogged editor, thanks to a deeply researched and illuminating new book, Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, by Dana A. Williams, a scholar of African American literature and the dean of Howard University Graduate School. Decades of path-clearing and advocacy had preceded the Norton anthology, and Morrison, as the first Black woman to hold a senior editor position at the prominent publishing house, had played a major part. In a 2022 interview, Gates remarked that Random House’s hiring of Morrison, at the height of the civil-rights movement, was “probably the single most important moment in the transformation of the relationship of Black writers to white publishers.”
The United States and China see eye to eye on very little these days, but there is one surprising point on which their top officials agree: the world is becoming multipolar. In one of his first interviews in office, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted that the unipolar dominance the United States had enjoyed in recent decades was “an anomaly” and “a product of the end of the Cold War.” The United States, in his view, was no longer the unrivaled global hegemon but one of a handful of “great powers in different parts of the planet.” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi agrees. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Wang declared, “A multipolar world is not only a historical inevitability; it is also becoming a reality.”
To be sure, Beijing’s and Washington’s understandings of multipolarity are different.
We have become adept at locating cancer’s physical presence—its corporeal form—but remain largely blind to its character, its behavior, its future. We employ genomic assays and histopathological grading, but many early-stage tumors remain biologically ambiguous. They might be the kind of early cancers that surgery can cure. They might be slow-growing and unlikely to cause harm. Or, most concerning, they might already have metastasized, rendering local intervention moot. Three possibilities—yet we often cannot tell which we’re confronting.
To complicate matters further, false positives abound: tests that suggest cancer where none exists, leading to unnecessary procedures, anxiety, and harm.
Beneath the richness of our world lies a pristine simplicity. Everything is made of a set of just 17 fundamental particles, and those particles, though they may differ by mass or charge, come in just two basic types. Each is either a “boson” or a “fermion.”
The physicist Paul Dirac coined both terms in a speech in 1945, naming the two particle kingdoms after physicists who helped elucidate their properties: Satyendra Nath Bose and Enrico Fermi.
Some of us find relief from what James Rebanks calls our “dark and chaotic world” in physical activities, others in hobbies and various forms of entertainment. Reading is my favorite handy escape hatch, and these days I find stories about people who engage with the natural world and the critters that inhabit it – hares, hawks, crows, octopuses, ducks – particularly soothing. Rebanks’ “The Place of Tides” fits the bill.
Okonkwo astutely captures the awkwardness and insecurities of a young woman from any country or culture starting an independent life as an adult. She also shows how relationships with family members can change when young people reach adulthood and head out on their own.
Among Friends is a bracingly honest and affectingly intimate depiction of abuse, family dynamics and self-deceit. It is sharply observed and psychologically astute, somehow both passionate and dispassionate, and it upends its characters’ lives so ruthlessly and revealingly that it is hard not to take pleasure in a false facade being finally smashed.
This collection might not always have faith in the world that made it, but it tries to. It trusts this place to hold it.
So newspaper history is a tricky genre that must capture the ephemeral and show why it matters. Ian Mayes’s excellent book follows two previous, quasi-official volumes of Guardian history by David Ayerst and Geoffrey Taylor. It begins in 1986 when the Guardian was still a one-section, inky, monochrome paper full of misprints and poor quality pictures, newly threatened by Rupert Murdoch’s move to Wapping and the birth of the Independent. It ends in 1995 with a radically restyled paper, with new sections such as G2 and the pocket-sized TV and entertainment supplement, the Guide.
Collins says that “ultimately photography is about the art of looking” and that’s what this book is really about. How do we look and what do we see?
The Grateful Dead weren't just a band. They were a lifestyle. Originally a local blues outfit known as the Warlocks, they soon ascended to the rank of house band for author Ken Kesey's "Acid Tests", and by the late 1960s became a force to be reckoned with on the national touring scene. The Dead, as many call them, helped define San Francisco's characteristic counterculture, fusing folk and Americana influences with Eastern spirituality – as well as forward-thinking experiments with futuristic tools.
But the Dead shaped far more than rock, psychedelia and '60s drug culture. Thanks to a group of music-loving tech enthusiasts, the Dead popularised what some call first real online community. Generations later, the ideas formed in this pioneering digital space still reverberate through our daily lives.
Whatever you seek in Austen – romance, family, escapism – she’ll always give you more than you asked for. That’s why it’s hard to be too upset by her ubiquity. Gimmicks bring readers, and anyone who reads her will feel her. And however much we try to cheapen her, she will always enrich us. The Romantic Collection is only available at Harrods, but the six novels can be found in any bookshop. If a new perfume is of dubious value, they are not. So when we see the next Austen innovation – whether it be a LizzieGPT girlfriend simulator or a Bonnet Girl Summer – we should feel as Anne Elliot feels on reading Captain Wentworth’s letter in Persuasion: “half agony, half hope”.
As Susan Faludi illustrated exhaustively in Backlash, ideological forces in the 1980s and ’90s, as incarnated not only in governments but by academia, journalism, and popular entertainment, were highly invested in promoting the questions of sexuality and gender as a dangerous and unsolvable mess, making cleaving to traditional family structures and gender roles a can’t-live-with-them, can’t-live-without-them situation. There exists underneath this message a reproach of twentieth-century radical movements in general, although the women’s movement was a popular punching bag: life was absurd, liberation was impossible, and compromise was the only way forward, even when we were compromising our deepest desires. The anguish lacing through the satire-obsessed ’90s burns like a hangover, at the same time mocking and cherishing the inert residue of hope that history might keep moving forward, rather than oscillating stupidly between revolution and revanchism.
The year my sister Amy was invited to play Mrs. Claus in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was the same year Hugh had his hip replaced.
“It somehow makes sense that these two things are happening within a week of each other,” I said.
“Except I’m not doing it,” Amy told me.
The good news is that both readers who long for the comfort of the familiar and those who hope for the electricity of the unknown in Bury Our Bones should find themselves satisfied. In a sense, the book is review-proof: a huge swath of Schwab’s readership only needed to hear “new book” and “sapphic vampires” to smash the pre-order button. As a huge fan of Addie myself (I raved about it for CHIRB here) but with no particular interest in vampires, I set out with a bit more caution. I needn’t have worried. In Schwab’s hands, even the well-trod territory of immortal bloodsuckers turns fresh and new.
Again, I was six. I can still imagine the line of hyped-up, thrill-junkie teens snaking around the block to buy tickets at the Showcase Cinemas in Dedham, Massachusetts. The movie had been out in the world less than twelve hours and already the word had somehow spread that this was the movie you had to see. I can picture the poster with a leviathan-scaled Great White with teeth like daggers rising up to the ocean’s surface, where an unsuspecting female swimmer is about to get turned into chum. I can picture the blood-red letters spelling out J-A-W-S on the theater’s marquee. And I can picture the teenage usher shooting my parents an insinuating, I-don’t-know-if-this-is-the-best-idea look as he ripped our tickets. I didn’t know it at the time, but my life was about to change forever.
I remember the thrill of anticipation mixed with mild nausea as the lights started to dim in the theater. From that moment on, things get a little spotty. I know my heart was racing like a fucking greyhound as a young skinny-dipper stripped off her clothes and sprinted into the ocean for a moonlit swim. I know my stomach sank like cement block as John Williams’s iconic two-note da-duh…da-duh score kicked in. And I know that I splayed my fingers over my eyes as that skinny-dipper got bucked and thrashed around like a chewy rag doll. Not that that did anything to block out the screams, mind you. My God, those screams. I’m proud to say that I stuck it out until the end of the movie, but I’d be lying if I also said I didn’t spend most of it with my eyes squeezed shut. But it doesn’t matter because watching that movie was a rite of passage. A rite of passage that would mark the beginning of a fifty-year love affair that’s never lost an ounce of its primal, white-knuckle power.
‘It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright – very, very bright. You could see the city from 50 miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.”
I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I’m writing for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life.
Jones’s book brilliantly highlights the amount of extraordinary music created that year, from the groundbreaking plastic soul of David Bowie’s Young Americans to the carefully judged pop of Steely Dan. And, arguably, there was the last great album of Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks.
The film wasn’t poking fun at gay men, nor was it particularly raunchy. Instead, Lee’s film depicted the truth of the gay experience, which is that it’s just like the heterosexual one, with one big difference: At some point, no matter when you come out, your longing will have to happen in silence. This reality, painted with such quiet, heart-wrenching affection, is what gave “Brokeback” its lasting power through all the jokes and critiques; it’s what changed minds and opened hearts. And though it may be 20 years old, that essential generosity makes “Brokeback Mountain” the most pivotal film you can watch in theaters this summer.
One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact particularly exceptional. This was Bacon County, Georgia, where in those days “it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife,” as he wrote in his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. “It was only unusual if he hit her.” Crews and his older brother heard the shot, which blew the mantelshelf off the fireplace, from their shared bed. The shot—and the silence that followed. They fled on foot, mother and sons, down the dirt road to an uncle’s house, and the next day boarded a Greyhound bus to Jacksonville, Florida. In A Childhood, Crews recalls the details of their escape: the hurriedly packed straw suitcase, his father’s fury and frantic pleading, the sight of him frozen in the doorway under a kerosene lamp. And then, in the darkness of the road, a bizarre vision: “I began to feel myself as a slick, bloodless picture looking up from a page, dressed so that all my flaws whatsoever but particularly my malformed bones were cleverly hidden.”
It’s an idea that Crews, the author of fifteen novels and countless pieces of long-form journalism, often returned to: there is the life that is lived, and then its rival, a counterlife, where every flaw is hidden and one can feel whole. “The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making,” he writes in A Childhood. “Fabrication became a way of life . . . not only a way for us to understand the way we lived but also a defense against it.” What began as dissociation, a kind of trauma response, would become a program for art and life.
Bourdain probably would’ve rolled his eyes at the fake quote, maybe the candle, definitely the AI voice. But he also might’ve understood the impulse. We don’t need saints — we just need someone who reminds us to stay curious, order the cream sauce and tip well.
He never said those words. But he made us hungry for them.
At the time of the Lenin Peak avalanche, I was a twenty-seven-year-old seeking adventure. I’d grown up in Argentina, come to the U.S. for college, and gotten bored with a tech job in Silicon Valley. So I’d embarked on a gap year of sorts to backpack around Asia while I considered a potential career shift into the outdoor-travel industry. I’d trekked in India and Pakistan and climbed mountains in Nepal. But Lenin Peak was to be my biggest summit yet.
Narrowly surviving the avalanche didn’t stop me from climbing mountains. Indeed, I spent the next five years helping to guide expeditions all over the world before switching careers again, into journalism. Although the memories never left me, the recurring nightmares eventually stopped. But that tragic day—the luckiest of my life—was vividly etched into my psyche.
The thought that I had made Vlada’s life worse for my own selfish ends made me feel sick, and challenged my views – and lifelong ambition – of pet ownership. I couldn’t have put it this way then, but I felt myself caught in an unexpected ethical dilemma: the more I’d come to care for an individual animal, the more I’d started to question the morality of “owning” them altogether.
Is giving an artist a one-star review an act of abuse – casting the first stone? Is it worse when the reviewer is male and the artist female? That’s the starting point of this entertaining and very timely debut novel from Charlotte Runcie, an arts journalist who, as a young intern, was lambasted on stage by a successful standup to whom she’d given a bad review.
With its expressions of profound loneliness and deep longing for human connection, “Lucky Tomorrow” offers lessons on observing pain and cherishing hope, while also illuminating the lives of the unnoticed and unseen, arraying itself among other masterpieces such as Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women.”
Maybe this is what literature is now: the author as entertainer; where Dua Lipa has a book club; and where cooing over Zadie Smith in a 500-capacity tent on the Welsh border is normal activity for the literary parvenu. Demur if you must: why should novelists have to explain themselves to a coterie of drunk fans in cardigans? One visit to the green room, where the novelists and déclassé journalists are having as good a time as the audience, provides its own answer.
As the severity and frequency of climate change–amplified events increase, the way we communicate about them will need to become ever more sophisticated. What that means in practice is employing a variety of approaches, from highly aestheticized photographs to more personal approaches to classic reportage.
Part historical novel, part gothic tale, part mystery, The Spirit Circle celebrates the unconventional ways that communities can form, particularly among women, and the way that a desire to protect these connections can lead to powerful consequences.
However, photographers will not be able to do that alone. Editors, art directors, and curators will need to step up to their responsibilities to commission and seek out work that harnesses photography’s power to evoke emotion and empathy, helping us understand the urgency and existential nature of the crisis we find ourselves in.
Into this crowded field steps Jan Gradvall’s “The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover,” a book that does not, in fact, tell the story of ABBA. Gradvall forgoes the standard band-bio form and opts instead for a rangy study of the group’s origins and legacy. It is a wise choice, and not just because there isn’t much to add to Palm’s seven-hundred-page opus. A band composed of two couples who got divorced and then chronicled the fallout in their music (if more obliquely than, say, Fleetwood Mac) may seem like a piquant subject for a biography, but the group members’ consummate professionalism and fierce protectiveness of their private lives have made it hard to fit their story into any of our received genres. There is surprisingly little melodrama or tragedy to draw on: just four co-workers.
Edward White has pulled off an unusual experiment in his biography of Diana, Princess of Wales – the life of one of the most famous women in history captured entirely in long shot. There are times when his resourceful use of contemporary Everyman diaries and interviews with insightful nobodies provides valuable historical insights, and others when it’s a bit like reading a profile of Lawrence of Arabia from the point of view of the sand. Only occasionally does the real Diana, the practised superstar I lunched with in New York six weeks before she died, break out of the suffocation of mass perceptions and cultural analysis.
In retrospect, though, there’s something almost quaint about the oral-culture hypothesis. We might say that it was largely developed during the Zuckerberg Parenthesis—a period of history, inaugurated by the invention of Facebook, in which social media ruled. No one inside this parenthesis imagined how much of a threat artificial intelligence would soon pose to the conversational internet. We have already entered a world in which the people you encounter online are sometimes not actually people; instead, they are conjured using A.I. that’s been trained on unimaginably vast quantities of text. It’s as though the books have come to life, and are getting revenge by creating something new—a marriage of text, thought, and conversation that will revise the utility and value of the written word.
This constant return to the scene of writing—this demand that we grasp the text not just as a written thing (this being the demand of classical postmodernism, with its delight in self-reflexive textual play) but also as a writing, as the product of a writer struggling with her material, encoding that struggle into the text itself, and producing some unaccountable hybridity in excess of the “real”—is Lacey’s great breakthrough. Coupled with that is the refusal of the conflation of the person writing (the author-as-mere-author) with the act of writing itself. To write is to pass the material of one’s life through an inscrutable matrix that somehow defies the laws of physics by yielding something more than what went in. In this mysterious sense, something happens when a person writes that is profoundly impersonal. If there is a primal scene of contemporary autofiction, it is this passage through writing from the merely personal to the impersonal—and Lacey has pointed the way there precisely by refusing to write a properly autofictional work.
For those of us who’ve lost faith in fiction at some point in our lives as writers or readers, Lacey’s highwire act of juxtaposition in The Möbius Book serves to rekindle our conviction in the value of its ability to reveal rather than to obscure the mysteries of human life. “At most, a religious service might change its attendants, just as art can change its viewers,” she writes, “and perhaps the thing that religion and art share is that mysterious progression: the emotional and visceral process of one idea breaking down to make way for the entrance of another.” And in this multifaceted and endlessly rewarding text, breakdown comes to represent not only rupture but also the tenuous beauty of belief in something entirely imaginary, even after it’s already been lost.
Old place names recall old ways of belonging. They often reference characteristics of the land or its use, the people who lived there, or the non-human lives they were enmeshed with. A great many of these vivifying genii loci are birds, although their identities aren’t always obvious because language evolves over time. We need a guide.
Enter Michael Warren: teacher of English, amateur ornithologist and a man who lives in a Britain different to the one most of us inhabit: a medieval one, which by some magic has “survived in another dimension parallel to our own”. The gift he bestows in this gorgeous book is that, by the end, we live there too, newly able to read the growth rings of place, and to perceive an alternative land shimmering over the one we already know.
Still, if journalism is the “first rough draft of history,” Kelley shows how crucial it is to write that first draft—as accurately as possible, yes—but not to get left behind. It’s a playful cautionary tale for the current moment. Make haste slowly; or, fact check quickly.
In the history of the advice column, one can glimpse the history of what can be said in public, and by whom. As literacy expanded to new social strata, and new periodicals circulated among increasingly diverse publics, what letter writers could divulge and columnists could discuss changed. What could not be divulged was sometimes still expressed, through various styles of discretion. “It has been my misfortune to be seduced into a very great sin,” one Querist explained to the Athenians; Norton suggests that his refusal to name his “very great sin” meant that he may have been referring to either gay sex or an illicit affair.
While Borjigin acknowledges that her work is preliminary, her observations and others like them show just how blurry the line between life and death has become, and how much science still stands to learn about such a pivotal event. As technological advances increasingly allow researchers to study death—including interventions that now allow for the use of so-called living cadavers in scientific research—so too have they necessitated new, oftentimes fraught conversations about the nature of death, its biological and societal underpinnings, and whether existing legal definitions are in alignment with current medical standards.
Scientifically, an echo is both the repetition of a sound caused by the reflection of sound waves and the resulting sound due to such reflection. A sound’s reflection, however, is never an exact mirror of what came. The soundwave is altered by everything with which it interacts. The entirety of the sum is the echo. David Welch’s latest book, The Book of Echoes, is successful to this end. The sonic elements, ideas, and images in this collection interweave the preoccupations of poets past and present in a joyous celebration of the art.
It’s easy to imagine that we would be the ones to stand up, speak out, and resist. But that’s seldom what happens when the rule of law is supplanted by a hierarchy of fear. First, our moral vocabularies begin to shrink, edging us ever closer to an aphasia of our principles. Next, we begin to look warily at those who still insist on conscience. Little by little, we submit. And then, when the knock comes at our neighbor’s door instead of our own, we congratulate ourselves for having identified the safest course of action.
Boris Fishman’s somber third novel, The Unwanted (2025), is a powerful allegory for why this surrender is the default posture of humanity. The protagonist, George, is a university professor in an unnamed country. A member of the minority sect, George first debases himself by agreeing to teach the poetry of the dominant sect. He reckons that each additional compromising step is a choice to keep his family safe a little longer as his nation’s leader attempts to protect the country from “vermin.” In fact, at the novel’s start, he has done little better than call the coin flip a few times in a row. There are no real choices here.
Every paragraph of Mushtaq’s prose is intricately drawn. Her feminism and rebellion are unmistakable, but packaged in wry humour and unforgettable characters. The stories are naturalistic and unflinching descriptions of Kannada. But they are also life-affirming, with moments of earnest sincerity sweeping the reader in an emotional wave.
Marina Warner begins this dazzlingly protean book with a distinctly mundane memory. It is the 1950s, she is a young teen, and the highlight of her week is going to the Saturday morning “flicks” with a neighbour’s slightly older daughter. One particular movie scene has stayed with her: it involves a man dressed in a vaguely historical costume who is fleeing for his life. Face contorted with terror, he makes it as far as the door of a cathedral, whereupon he knocks loudly and cries “Sanctuary!” The door opens a crack, the man slides inside, and the Saturday morning audience breaths a collective sigh of relief. Even if the plot points remain hazy – is Robin Hood somehow involved? – the underlying principle needs no explaining. The fugitive has invoked the ancient right by gaining entrance to a designated sacred space. As long as he stays put his pursuers can’t touch him.
From these hyper-local beginnings, Warner sets out to explore and expand what “sanctuary” means in an age when millions are on the move around the world, chased out of their homes by environmental disaster, economic collapse, war and political oppression.
“There is a supernatural process going on under the surface and within the substance of all things,” says a priest in Muriel Spark’s 1965 novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Spark believed herself wired into this process. The novelist was aware from the start of “a definite ‘something beyond myself’”, an “access to knowledge that I couldn’t possibly have gained through normal channels”.
“Somehow things happened, odd things, when Muriel was around,” recalled her friend Shirley Hazzard. “Everything that happened to Muriel,” according to her American editor Barbara Epler, “had been foreseen”, usually in her books themselves. If Spark wrote about blackmail, she too would be blackmailed; if she wrote about a burglary, she would then be burgled. Thirty years after toying with an idea for The Hothouse by the East River (1973), in which electrocution by lightning takes place down a telephone line, lightning struck Spark’s house in Italy, sending a current of electricity through the external wires and burning her upper lip.
Online, you can acquire Bob Ross paints, Bob Ross brushes, Bob Ross underwear, Bob Ross coffee mugs, Bob Ross energy drinks, Bob Ross watches, and Bob Ross toasters.
But there’s one thing you won’t often see for sale: his artwork.
With international visitor numbers to Taiwan booming and new routes – including flights from Emirates, timed specifically to suit Taiwan-bound travellers from the UK – It's not hard to see why the Taiwan Railway Administration was so supportive of the endeavour. It's an opportunity to show off the island's less-explored regions, showing visitors that there's more to Taiwan than Taipei's sky-scraping Taipei 101 tower and famous night markets.
But this railway is more than just a tourist train – it provides an insight into Taiwan's history, starting with its colonisation by Japan.
For Wendy Erskine, the move to a larger canvas feels entirely unforced. Her highly praised stories, collected in 2018’s Sweet Home and 2022’s Dance Move, often display a certain capaciousness, a willingness to wander beyond the single epiphanic moment that is the traditional preserve of the short story. Now, in her first novel, she revels in the possibilities of an expanded cast, yet controls the pace and framing with all the precision of a miniaturist. The result is a novel that feels like a balancing act: at once sprawling and meticulous, polyphonic and tonally coherent.
Climate change is already having a profound impact on cities, as global urbanization pushes more and more people to live in them. The animals who cohabitate with human, whether we appreciate their presence or not, are changing too. Specifically, there's been an increase in invasive species — a term used to describe introduced organisms that bring dramatic and often destructive changes, and sometimes can drive other species to extinction.
But here's the thing: Invasive species don't stop evolving themselves. Consider the infamous brown rats of New York City, which have evolved longer noses and shorter upper molar tooth rows, the better to enjoy the Big Apple's colder weather and higher-quality food. Other invasive species are adapting behaviorally, physically and genetically to life in cities as well. While invasive species pose major public health implications and can certainly affect humans' quality of life, their adaptive abilities can rival those of human migrants and pose a puzzling question: Who's the real invader here?
With every heartbeat, a man can produce around 1,000 sperm – and during intercourse, more than 50 million of the intrepid swimmers set out to fertilise an egg. Only a few make it to the final destination, before a single sperm wins the race and penetrates the egg.
But much about this epic journey – and the microscopic explorers themselves – remains a mystery to science.
We are all made up of memories as much as our present experiences. Erskine’s elegant rendering of this cross-time continuum makes The Benefactors more daring than most novels – and more true to life.
This wide array of material hints at Sad Planets’ general approach, which forgoes any single thread or discipline in favor of a constellation of objects, entities, and ideas. This is media studies that far exceeds the conventional bounds of human culture and technology. Here everything mediates information and moods, sometimes in very strange and unhuman ways. Sad Planets is an attentively promiscuous book—and not only at the level of content, but also in style and form. The prose is refreshingly adventurous and unafraid to experiment. The format is a series of micro-essays complied into 16 “sequences” that can be read in any order. This format mirrors the unthinkably large expanse of the universe, the nested galaxies within, the glittering stars within them, the planets within solar systems, all the way down to the space stuff indexed by our very own sapient bodies (as the theory of panspermia—the idea that some of the key ingredients for our biological soup hitchhiked from outer space—is appearing increasingly likely). This ambient form of writing matches the book’s ambition, which is to track the affective relay between these celestial bodies on our ways of being and thinking.
Fairy tales, it seems, are out of fashion. After all, what do they have to teach a modern reader? Finding Prince Charming is passé; we should be getting comfortable with our own company. Evil stepmothers aren’t such a problem when you can just go no contact. And going to sleep for 100 years no longer has to affect your career arc – we’re all on our own timelines!
Yet look a little closer and you might find that a new kind of fairy tale is alive and well. Because what are most of them if not love stories, set in magical worlds? Romantasy, a relatively new literary genre that offers exactly that, is, largely thanks to its popularity on TikTok, having a seismic effect on the books industry.
My nan wasn’t the kind of person who left a trail of anecdotes in her wake. She hadn’t really left much body in her wake, either. Physically, she was a tiny lady. Wrapped in her beige shawl and cradled by timber, she looked, I thought on my way up to the altar, like Yoda.
I worked with what I had. ‘Despite being half-blind, her eyes twinkled,’ I started. ‘She had no teeth, yet her smile lit up rooms, and though her voice rattled with the endless cigarettes that had diffused into the wallpaper, she had a contagious laugh.’
An American friend recently asked me what to wear on her first flight to Europe. "I want to be comfy but chic," she said. She'd come to the wrong person. As a travel journalist, I'm either on assignment, sun cream-smeared in hiking boots and hauling a rucksack like a tortoise shell; or travelling light with a five-piece capsule wardrobe in beige neutrals to leave space for edible souvenirs.
Meanwhile, many of my fellow travellers parade past in floral gowns, breezy summer whites or cosy pyjama-like layers. Sometimes I glimpse my own reflection and feel a pang of FOMO. Should I have worn a floral dress to photograph ruins? I don't even own one. Or perhaps instead of clunky hiking boots, I would be more comfortable in a pair of Birkenstocks, with thick white socks hiked up to my knees.
The water is “the colour of wet dirt,” but what else are they supposed to do? Ungainly as Into the Sun often is, there’s something true and touching in Ramuz’s descriptions of the “infinite troop of swimmers” who, sunstricken and desperate, spend their days in the scummy remnants of the lake. We may find ourselves, in a superheated world, putting off doomsday by doing much the same: jostling for position on a packed beach, thirsty, wretched, and uncared for. Let’s hope not.
For the past two years, a group of friends and I have gathered each Wednesday to discuss our progress on a famously grueling book, beginning with Infinite Jest and The Power Broker and continuing with Ulysses and Gotham, a 1,400-page history of New York City that often reads like the world’s most tedious Wikipedia article. The Difficult Book Book Club didn’t start as an explicit strategy to wrest our attention from screens, but that’s what it became: We were nostalgic for school, or rather for a version of school that no longer exists, one where you couldn’t count on ChatGPT to concoct a 500-word essay on postmodernism in a matter of seconds or Zoom into class half-asleep with your camera off. Instead, we discuss the 100 pages we assign ourselves each week, seminar style, returning to book after book in lieu of far more immediately entertaining content (or less depressing, as is the case with our most recent read, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich). “As someone who was once in graduate school and now orders pants for a living, I missed the factor of my life that was educated and well read,” says Laura, who works in film costume departments. “I do think I’m getting dumber,” she adds, and we all nod in agreement. “You forget your brain is a muscle,” says my friend Lars, who works in what remains of the country’s public-health sector. The brain is not, in fact, a muscle, but the point stands.
What does it mean to build a new world from the wreckage of a broken one? This question lies at the heart of Jennifer Mills’ mesmerising fifth novel, Salvage – but it’s one that her gruff, defensive protagonist Jude would rather avoid. For most of the novel, Jude has her head down and is hard at work, cooking, fixing engines, caring for other people. She’s a survivor whose adaptative mechanisms involve leaving everything and everyone behind: “Things will be simpler when she’s on her own. Belonging nowhere, carrying nothing.”
There’s something deliciously odd about writing a “biography” of something that has never drawn breath. But in Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, Joseph Luzzi makes a compelling case that a great work of art can lead a life every bit as dramatic, chequered and instructive as the artist who made it.
What he delineates is not so much a history of how The Divine Comedy came to be nor a canto-by-canto analysis but an exploration of what Dante’s epic has meant since its publication; how its reception, reinvention and occasional rejection have shaped its cultural afterlife. And how this epic journey can highlight key moments of our own intellectual and artistic history.
One of the most enjoyable things popular science can do is surprise us with a new angle on how the world operates. Yon’s book does this often as he draws out the implications of the predictive brain. Our introspection is unreliable (“we see ourselves dimly, through a cloud of noise”); the boundary between belief and perception is vaguer than it seems (“your brain begins to perceive what it expects”); and conspiracy theories are probably an adaptive result of a mind more open to unusual explanations during periods of greater uncertainty. This is a complex area of psychology, with a huge amount of new work being published all the time. To fold it into such a lively read is an admirable feat.
I first read Patricia Highsmith’s novels in the fall of 1994. I was twenty and living in a room in her house in Tegna, Switzerland, that was plastered with bookshelves full of her first editions, organized in chronological order. Pat was seventy-four and knew she was about to die; she had been, it was rumored, diagnosed with cancer or some other terminal disease. I was trapped in her world with her, trembling. She had weeks left to live and had spent so much time writing about how to get away with murder. I fantasized that she might try to kill me.
The story of how I ended up in that house begins a few months earlier, in Zurich, with me on a blue tram, on my way to dinner at the house of Anna and Daniel Keel, a couple I’d grown friendly with. Anna was a brilliant painter for whom I had been modeling since I was seventeen. Her studio smelled like oil paint, instant coffee, and the brine in which floated the mozzarella balls that she ate while working. She was a genius. In the foreword to one of her catalogs, she explained that although she felt guilty about spending “so much time in the company of two lemons” (the subjects of her still lifes) when there were so many big problems in the world, she had concluded that being able to see beauty was also essential. She taught me, in the years I knew her, a great deal about fighting my fears and following my passions.
I gave up journalism and started writing novels because I was tired of telling the truth.
….This is a punchline I’ve used over the years whenever I’m asked about my career transition from being a reporter to writing fiction, and it almost always gets a laugh. It’s not quite accurate—there were many, many reasons why I switched from journalism to fiction—but there is certainly a painful honesty about this statement that reflects my failings as a reporter.
So if large language models demonstrate a preference for em dashes, it’s because they have been trained on books and other writing whose authors embraced them first. The idea that AI adoption could unwittingly recast any single piece of punctuation as a literal mark of fraudulence seems like an unbearable irony. The arrival of AI in our lives without introduction or permission brings with it fears about human endangerment; coming together to defend what we fear losing is an act of solidarity whether it’s macro (say, nationwide protests against an undemocratic political regime) or decidedly micro (declaring on Bluesky that ChatGPT “can pry my em dashes from my cold dead hands”). Defiance is a rational response to tech businesses urging us to prioritize the use of tools meant to replace our work and welcome their most bizarre and dystopian interventions.
The Geiger counter starts flashing and buzzing as I hold it against the 100-year-old Parisian doorknob. I am standing in the doorway between the historical lab and office of Marie Curie, the Polish-born, Paris-based scientist who invented the word "radioactivity" – and here is an especially startling trace of her. The museum that houses the lab has invited me in here to track radioactive handprints left by her when she worked here in the early 20th Century. Here, on the doorknob, is one such trace. There's another one on the back of her chair. Many more of these invisible traces are dotted all over her archived notes, books and private furniture, some only discovered in recent years.
But when we reached the far wall, several shelves sat empty.
Accornero shook his head. “It’s weird for me,” he said quietly. “I’ve never seen it this way in my life.”
The empty shelves are the result of a sharp drop in production across the region. Fontina producers are making significantly less cheese than usual, brought on by a perfect storm of challenges: climate shifts, rising costs, labor shortages, and changing consumer habits. For one of Italy’s most iconic mountain cheeses, the ripple effects are beginning to show, not just in the aging caves, but on grocery shelves around the world.
In September 2023, Geoff Dyer was interviewed about his latest book “The Last Days of Roger Federer,” which dealt with “things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out.” The journalist asked Dyer if, after writing a book about endings, he would consider writing one about beginnings. Dyer’s response was a categorical no. It was only a couple of weeks later that he realized the book he had just completed was precisely about beginnings — “specifically my own.”
Dyer shares this anecdote in his author’s note to that book. “Homework” is a chronicle of his early years growing up in the English town of Cheltenham in the 1960s and ’70s. It marks a departure for this richly versatile writer. Dyer’s previous nonfiction books have encompassed subjects as diverse as jazz, film, war, literature, and photography. In this, his first memoir, the subject is himself, in various incarnations. The result is both a captivating portrait of the artist as a young man and an insightful snapshot of postwar Britain.
English, as Stefan Collini observes in his wry and compendious new history of the discipline, Literature and Learning, tends to inspire an extravagant attachment rarely associated with, for example, geography or chemistry. Half the labour of writing a history of English must lie in gathering encomia to the subject by its besotted disciples. To the patrician epicures and monied amateurs who ushered the subject into universities at the beginning of the 20th century (men who fondled poems like antique clocks and ranked novelists like vintages of claret), the study of literature was “a glory of the universe” or “the spring which unlocks the hidden life”. For the evangelists of the critic FR Leavis and charismatic secondary school teachers of the Sixties it was a moral crusade that pitted humanity against the spirit-killing incursions of machine civilisation: English had “life-enhancing powers”, and its study was essential if a modern person hoped to retain “any capacity for a humane existence”. Collini winces fastidiously at some of these “soaring affirmations”. And indeed, such confident panegyrics read strangely in an age when the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking. Today, English is reduced to doing its pathetic, blundering best to ape the sciences, grinding scholars through the Research Excellence Framework and promising students “transferable skills”, that mad but unkillable doctrine beloved of prospectus writers which holds that studying ecocritical perspectives on early Shelley is useful preparation for making PowerPoints at PWC.
There are many ways in which human beings come to terms with their fragility. Anand makes a strong case for compassion as a first response; but always informed and fortified with rigorous science.
What was an educated woman with no dowry to do? Take up sewing? We know Jane Austen was gifted with the needle from what her nephew tells us in his memoir and from what she herself admits in her letters. All well and fine to make shirts for your father, brothers, or the poor, but to practice any handicraft for income was considered vulgar for a woman of her class. Jane was the daughter of a vicar. With neither land nor money, theirs was the bottom rung on the gentry ladder.
In Sense and Sensibility and throughout Jane Austen’s oeuvre, we witness a recurring theme, the dilemma yet again of women without property. The first few chapters of Sense and Sensibility are all about money, and money is mentioned throughout the novel. Who has it. Who doesn’t have it. How much someone is worth. How much someone needs to keep up appearances and not slip into penury.
Mrs Dalloway contains the birth and the doom of the modern self. We are all Virginia Woolf’s children. She wanted light and was determined that it could be found somewhere at the back of the “dark region of psychology”. She never found it, but we have continued her search.
Cast in an experimental mode and form, it makes the reader work, and casts our attention to different places and people at unpredictable intervals. It’s in communication with many other writers, but it is still very much its own thing. You’re rewarded with a highly stimulating set of ideas about power and discontent.
This book isn’t a directly political text, but its colourful tales from the animal world do have a point of view: biology, Lents argues here, comes down strongly against rigid categories. The story of sexual evolution is one of experimentation and constant improvisation, and that, he says, goes a long way to explaining why human sexual norms seem to be undergoing a transformation: “I assert that this moment of sexual turmoil is actually a rediscovery of the much more expansive relationship with sex that our ancestors once had and that other animals enjoy,” he writes.
Is the form of philosophy dominant in English-speaking universities covertly resistant to radical thought? Does it present as the work of pure reason what is in fact the function of an ideology complicit in oppression? In A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (2025), the philosopher Christoph Schuringa argues, with deliberate provocation, that the answer in each case is yes. His book presents itself as “ideology critique,” unmasking the hidden influence of liberal dogma on the scope and methods of “analytic philosophy.” This influence extends not just to moral and political theory but also to the study of mind and language, to metaphysics and epistemology: for Schuringa, analytic philosophy rests on a pervasive fantasy of free inquirers, justified in trusting “common sense,” which only serves to naturalize an unjust status quo.
While what’s lost in translation is admittedly enormous, to conclude that poetry is therefore untranslatable is to fundamentally misrepresent both what poetry is and what translation is, and Jakobson’s pronouncement that “poetry by definition is untranslatable” in fact hinges on definitions of poetry and of translation that are both unreasonably narrow.
Around 240m years ago, a 12-foot-long reptile called a chirotherium walked along a beach in what was then part of the supercontinent of Pangaea, and what is now the shoreline of Kildonan village, on the rugged, southern coast of the Isle of Arran. Natural dykes of black igneous rock – cooled magma – jut out into the ocean here. The houses on shore are backdropped by grassy cliffs.
We know that this giant proto-crocodile once roamed here because it left behind footprints – which can still be seen today. “This is older than the dinosaurs,” says Malcolm Wilkinson of Arran Geopark, as we crouch down next to the trace fossil. I place my hand in the massive print and attempt to imagine the world millions of years ago, when Scotland sat just north of the equator and the climate was tropical.
It is weird, rambunctious and repeatedly demands the reader surrender to its particular wildness. Its generosity of spirit, its unrestrained warmth and humour – the brilliantly kinetic description of a surprise ceilidh is a case in point – steadily worked away at my scepticism. Like Ouse’s flamboyant designs, inspired by the spectacular landscape around him, it is “garishly alive”.
At first, Shulamith Firestone was told that her brother Danny had died in a car crash. It took her “over twenty-four hours to dig out of [her] father the bitter truth that the body had a bullet hole in the chest.” Firestone was alienated from much of her family. She and Danny had not spoken in years. Even when both attended the same college, even when she passed him on their campus, “he did not say hello.” After graduation, Firestone heard “distant reports of him” from her sisters: Danny was in therapy, Danny was in graduate school, Danny, who had once been so upset with Shulamith for breaking some “trifle” of Jewish law, was “dating ‘shiksas’” and a Zen Buddhist now; in a photo Firestone saw during those years, Danny “looked like he was medicated, with swollen fingers.”
Firestone spends the final pages of her 1998 memoir Airless Spaces tracking Danny’s collapse: from a Zen center in Ithaca, to whom he had given nearly every cent he had, to Taos, New Mexico, where it seemed “he had purposefully chosen a secluded spot on an Indian Reservation that he knew of and meditated himself into the suicide, in which he shot himself at close range with his own gun.” Or perhaps, Firestone came to suspect, he was murdered. She never found out. “In the end, theories about his death, whether murder or suicide, afterlife or no,” she wrote, only “contributed to my own growing madness—which led to my hospitalization, medication, and a shattering nervous breakdown.” These are the final words of Airless Spaces, but the book is ouroboric: only physics prevents you turning the page and finding the first again, from taking another loop through the sections “Hospital,” “Post-Hospital,” “Losers,” “Obits” and “Suicides I Have Known,” the last of whom is Danny, until the madness, institutionalization, release and the hard late life of Shulamith Firestone once again reaches the final page, and its beginning.
Since 2007, I’ve written some books directly in French and others in English. Each time, I feel a familiar pang of regret of having to choose one language over the other.
I had never translated my own work until a couple of years ago, when I decided to experiment: I would write a book simultaneously in both languages. I opened two documents on my screen—one in English, one in French—and began switching back and forth between them.
Earlier this year—Valentine’s Day weekend, to be precise—I found myself sitting on the floor of a loft in downtown Los Angeles with eight other adults, learning how to fake an orgasm. We had been told to make three “oo” sounds punctuated by a sharp inhale. Next, we bit our lower lips and exhaled on the letter “V.” “Vuh, vuh, vuhhhhhhh,” we harmonized. After a few rounds of this, I started feeling out of breath. A scene from “Barbarella” in which Jane Fonda’s character, strapped into an orgasmatron by a mad scientist, nearly expires from pleasure flashed before my eyes. At the front of the room was our conductor, Yehuda Duenyas, a lithe fifty-one-year-old in a pewter-colored sweatshirt that matched his graying faux-hawk. After our final exhale, he leaped up from a stool and gave each of us a fist bump, adding a heartfelt “Good work!”
I was participating in a four-day sex-choreography workshop run by CINTIMA, which Duenyas co-founded in 2023. It is one of twelve certification programs accredited by SAG-AFTRA to train intimacy coördinators. It is a new job—so new, in fact, that the union offers a definition on its website: “an advocate, a liaison between actors and production, and a movement coach and/or choreographer” of sex scenes. My CINTIMA classmates were hoping to join a rapidly professionalizing field. In April, for example, the Intimacy Professional Summit, a three-day conference in Minneapolis for intimacy coördinators, featured panels such as “Sex Parties, Orgies, and Other Large Scenes” and, for those interested in depicting, say, Regency-era raunch, “Romancing the Past.”
When the seventeen-storey Avari Towers opened in Karachi in April 1985, it was the tallest hotel in the city. ‘It felt other-worldly,’ said one chef who worked there when he was a teenager. ‘It was there that I saw a swimming pool for the first time,’ he remembered, ‘and swimsuits.’ By December 1986, this $32 million building had another novelty to offer – Fujiyama, a Japanese restaurant at its summit, named in honour of the famous peak. For the first six Saturdays of that month, eighty of Karachi’s most powerful residents were hosted for a complimentary lunch party at the restaurant’s soft launch. There had been no advertisements for Fujiyama, and for those six weeks, the only way to get in was with an invite; these began to land in the homes and offices of the city’s bankers, businessmen, doctors, and other members of Karachi’s elite. By the new year, the restaurant was so busy it had waiting lists. There were now two kinds of people in the city of six million: those who had tried sushi and those who had not.
There are plenty of surprises as the story develops, always centered on the power of female friendships and the importance of family.
A young woman sits reading, a pot of tea to hand, her blue dress almost the only colour in a still, sandy room. Gwen John’s painting The Convalescent shows a subdued yet happy moment, for this woman is free to think and feel. That, we see in Judith Mackrell’s outstanding double biography of Gwen and her brother, was her ideal for living: to be at liberty even if that meant existing in deepest solitude.
The first patient I ever wrote about wasn’t actually my patient; as a first-year medical student, that possessive grammatical construct—“my patient”—hadn’t yet entered my consciousness, much less my lexicon. In any case, by the time I met him, he was already dead. I’d followed my fellow-students into the bowels of the medical examiner’s office, just north of Bellevue Hospital, past the silent storage areas of unclaimed bodies and into the clamor of the autopsy room. There he was—a boy, maybe twelve years old, claiming hardly any space on the metal table.
His jersey was pushed up to reveal a smooth preadolescent chest. His pristine basketball sneakers were oddly bright in a room that has since receded into shadow in my memory. I hardly registered the narrowness of the gap between our ages because I was blindsided by how small the bullet hole was. I didn’t have the language to articulate how something so tiny could carve such devastation.
I seem to have spent years in archives. I seem to be endlessly drawn back to them, to places of beginnings and places where stories end. These are archives with filing cabinets, microfiche, with ledgers on shelves, with manila envelopes of photographs and carousels of books, letters and receipts and wills and photographs and account books.
Lists of acquisitions and lists for deportations, catalogues of objects and the lives of those who owned the objects. I try to make an appointment and hope someone will reply.
Choi has been creating high-protein, egg-focused snacks since 2022, but it wasn’t until she started slicing and topping her hard boiled eggs that the idea of “egg flights” came into fruition. The trend itself garnered significant online attention during an unlikely time.
Over the decades, Burke has built up a distinctive and glorious body of work, and Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie is a notable addition to the canon and possibly his most comprehensive. This is James Lee Burke’s world, after all, hell and heaven included.
For Elizabeth Bishop, a successful translation was, in large part, a matter of luck. As someone who published translations of poetry and supervised the translations of her own poetry, she had definite ideas of what made for a good one. “You really should repeat a line exactly if the original repeats it exactly,” she told her Portuguese translator, urging her to avoid taking liberties. “You shouldn’t put in words that aren’t there…. You should pay attention to repeated words and phrases—etc.” Her punctiliousness about formal and semantic equivalence made luck loom all the larger. Yes, you needed skill and sensibility, but they weren’t enough. Translation was worthwhile when “a poem just happens to go into English without losing too much of the original.”
Twenty-two years ago, when Erna stood outside her house, “the windows were as high as my chest”. Now they’re knee-height.
As their home has sunk, she and her family have had to cope with frequent flooding. In the most extreme cases “we used canoes - the water kept coming in and swamped the ground floor”, she says.
Erna lives in the Indonesian capital Jakarta - one of the fastest-sinking cities in the world. Her home is in one of the worst-affected areas, the north of the city, and is now much lower than the road.
Just before the hour, I stroll off the subway and head straight to nearby Nakamura Tokichi Honten; once the supplier of tea to the emperor and now arguably the most prestigious matcha purveyor in Japan. I've heard securing a table at their cafe can be difficult, so I grow nervous as two girls scamper ahead of me. The cafe hasn't officially opened yet, so I grab a numbered ticket to reserve a spot. Somehow there are already 35 people ahead of me in line.
While I wait, I stroll through the shop and browse the many matcha products lining the shelves – ice creams, confections, even matcha-infused noodles. But I'm looking for some of the actual stuff: matcha powder.
Best Friends is splattered with astute observations and imaginative prose: A breeze carrying smoke from a barbecue resembles “dry ice from a Duran Duran video”.
Running through the novel like a watermark and mirroring its whimsical tone is Meehan’s wordplay.
The realist novel comes with a fiction of resolution, progress, ending in a new and better place. Bessette defies that fiction. In her, I find the form to fit our ongoing present, where hiding our tears seems disingenuous—but so does the fantasy of the neoliberalism smuggled into the traditional novel. In concealing tears, in looking away, or down, at a shoe, or a stain, those stories hide much more than tears. They come excusing the violence we are facing.
It was in this state of complete surrender and focus on my surroundings that the clamor of my own troubles disappeared, and I began to make out the voice of the Snake River, who spoke to me in gurgles and words that flooded my mind with ideas separate from my own. Sometimes I even heard a voice speaking, despite the absence of other humans. I began communicating with the river, seeking comfort and letting the love I felt when I was with her lead me.
My parents watch television out of tiredness, to fill the void. Sometimes separately: my mother in the morning, busying herself in the kitchen with all the breathlessness of her ninety-six kilos; my father late at night, his ankles resting on a second chair. Without shoes or socks, head thrown back and mouth half open, he wakes with a start, follows the program for ten minutes and then sinks back into an unhealthy drowsiness. One can’t help but note the necrosis in his halluces – he’s starting to die toes first.
The barrel was full to the brim with postcards waiting for delivery. I took a couple home with me and delivered them with glee: one to a teacher from their pupil, and another from a girl to her boyfriend. The recipients were incredibly grateful, and it felt wonderful to have brought such joy.
Weeks later, I couldn’t stop thinking about the letters. I’d already planned to do some more travelling, but then I thought: what if I spent a year delivering more letters from that postbox? I realised I could keep my remote job, and at the same time travel the world delivering post, using air miles and working along the way.
It’s a rare debut novelist who can combine a seemingly random set of topics and make them cohere. Maria Reva wraps together serious subjects like war and extinction into an entertaining and meaningful book. Her meta message: Any life is worth saving.
We met Lyonne in a corner of the studio where uncanny clips generated by Asteria’s AI model were playing on a dozen old-school televisions. The footage was unnerving. Robots with smooth, blank faces typed blindly in an old-fashioned office. Disembodied mannequin heads drifted in space. Lyonne was drinking a sugar-free Red Bull and wearing a structured black velvet jacket with a plunging neckline. She was fresh off a plane from Seattle, where she had done a talk with the science-fiction author Ted Chiang, who has written at length about why AI will never create great art. Over the past few years in Hollywood, it had become clear to Lyonne that many people were not being forthright with how often they were using the technology. “If I’m directing an episode, I like to get really into line items and specifics,” she said. “And you find out that there’s a lot of situations where they’re calling it machine learning or something but, really, it’s AI.” She had begun to do her own research. She read the Oxford scholar Brian Christian and the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who argues that AI presents a significant threat to humanity’s long-term existence. Still, she had come to feel it was too late to “put the genie back in that bottle.” “It’s better to get your hands dirty than pretend it’s not happening, she said.
Less than a millimetre in length, the squishy, transparent animal was completely unaware of my presence, my entire existence, while I watched it in awe. On my computer screen, where I gazed at the image generated by a cheap USB microscope, the water bear stumbled over grains of eroded rock and plant matter, an assemblage of soil, and I felt amused by its bumbling nature. Like someone trying to move through a field of beach balls, I thought.
At least half the products are still in boxes, and there are signs on the walls warning customers to NOT OPEN THE BOXES, so you have to scan the barcode with your phone or decipher clipped product descriptions: “module stool,” “gratitude journal,” “Xmas tea light green.” But the great innovation of Amazing Binz is its pricing structure, which is splashed across the facade in Spanish and English and makes good on the promise of CRAZY DEALS. On Fridays, when the bins are freshly stocked, everything costs $10. On Saturdays, $8. Sundays: $6. Mondays: $4. Tuesdays: $2. Wednesdays: $1. Thursday is bin store Sabbath, when the shop is closed and restocked.
The store is like nothing else on the block, which boasts, among other things, a yoga studio, two vape shops, a volunteer-run book store and a Marxist reading room, and no fewer than four Ethiopian joints.
Where did all this stuff come from? Who opened this store, and why? Is it profitable? What does it mean for the uneven gentrification of Baltimore Avenue and West Philadelphia? I decided to spend a week visiting Amazing Binz every day. Here is what I found.
With their lighting, restaurants aim to strike a balance between functionality and the immersive theater they’re inviting diners into for a few hours. Unfortunately, diners and restaurant owners don’t always agree on what constitutes bright enough.
In a place where the ocean long served as the main highway, roads came late. When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, there were just 195km of pavement for a province with more than 29,000km of coastline. The obvious solution was to build roads, with the goal of improving access to jobs, schools and healthcare. But this came at a cost. Building takes time and the initial roadways bypassed many small coastal settlements, leading to the abandonment of more than 300 outport communities.
"But a new road can change everything," Keith Pike, the city manager in Red Bay, an outport on Labrador's southern coast told me, after I'd continued my trip west. Just 80km north of the Quebec border and the Newfoundland-Labrador ferry terminal in Blanc-Sablon, Red Bay hugs the edge of the Strait of Belle Isle. Not long ago it also marked the end of the old gravel road; isolation that forced Pike to leave the place his family had called home for generations. But with the recent completion of the Trans-Labrador Highway – known as Expedition 51 for the latitude it follows – he has returned, and is hopeful others might do the same.
You never know when it’s the last time. There was a last time that I crawled, a last time I used training wheels on my bike, a last night that my immediate family lived under one roof. There were last kisses in fading relationships, last shows with bands that broke up, last laughs with friends who have died. One day, I’ll climb a mountain for the last time, talk to my parents for the last time, see a sunset for the last time.
My singing voice was as constant as my heartbeat, as unique as my fingerprints, as necessary to my self-recognition as seeing my face in the mirror. Despite this awareness of life’s endings, I somehow never expected that there would be a last time that I would sing with my steady, reliable voice.
While our ancestors were evolving in the intervening aeons – learning how to use fire, circling the globe, discovering petroleum and then polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases – “the animals in Movile cave slurped up their microbial crop” oblivious to the world outside.
They represent just a few of the exotic species that populate Riley’s fascinating portrait of how life survives despite radiation, desiccation, the heat of the Sahara, freezing polar temperatures, total darkness, extended famine, lack of oxygen and the oceans’ abyssal depths.
London Feeds Itself functions both as an alternative guidebook to London, and as a utopic vision of a city now plagued by traffic wars and landlordism. In doubling up as an urban planning document, and in doing so, the volume introduces a new materialist form of food writing: one that works from the plate up toward the hand that plates it, and eats from it.
Every woman knew that the consequences of collapsing these two personas — mother and artist — were severe, resulting in ostracism and invisibility. To borrow from the Bay Area writer Ursula K. Le Guin, this “received wisdom” stipulated “that any attempt to combine art work with housework and family responsibilities is impossible, unnatural.”
Yet in midcentury San Francisco, a small group of women quietly resisted that narrative. Artists including Ruth Asawa, Merry Renk, Nancy Thompson, and Imogen Cunningham challenged the supposed incompatibility of creativity and caregiving. They didn’t just make art while raising children; they made motherhood central to their creative lives.
Ultimately, Asimov’s laws are both a gift and a warning. They helped introduce the idea that A.I., if properly constrained, could be more of a pragmatic benefit than an existential threat to humanity. But Asimov also recognized that powerful artificial intelligences, even if attempting to follow our rules, would be strange and upsetting at times. Despite our best efforts to make machines behave, we’re unlikely to shake the uncanny sense that our world feels a lot like science fiction.
I moved to Los Angeles after graduate school because I had vague dreams of working in Hollywood. Those dreams didn’t materialize, but instead of going back East, where I’d grown up, I stayed. Twelve years went by. Time disappeared like in some fairy tale. I had a daughter; we bought a house. Life felt like a pleasant purgatory, surrounded by other artists and dreamers, drifters and schemers. Meanwhile, on the East Coast, my family got old. Some of them died. I felt trapped in an easy but maybe meaningless life. Then the winds started.
If I should get distracted from my screen long enough to think about that, about how far I am from everyone I know, there is one small comfort: when I’m done playing, when I have figured out the exact five-letter word that a computer somewhere on the planet has generated for the day, I know the bot will be there for me, tapping its foot expectantly, desirously, waiting to let me know how I’ve done today compared to everyone else who has played the game, and how I measure up to his own efforts. He will be there, as always, with his open invitation, asking me, as if it is something to seriously consider, What would you like to do?
Although the forty-four Mavis Gallant works assembled by editor for the 2025 Uncollected Stories had their initial magazine publication in the 1950s and 1960s, they are still as fresh and inventive as they were when new. Gallant stories are unique, like no other writers. That is especially striking because they were written at a time when the well-made Joycean story dominated as a standard, a central character involved in a dilemma that culminates with the surprise of a personal epiphany. It was still the model when Charles Baxter’s objection essay, “Against Epiphanies,” came out in 1997. Yet Gallant had been writing story after story that did not depend on an epiphany long before Baxter attacked the device as cliched and inauthentic.
The characters in Flashlight are complex, sometimes stuck in their ways. Each carries their own shard of a bigger story, accidentally cutting themselves and others on the sharp edges. Putting the pieces together wouldn’t render a complete picture, but it can form a beautiful mosaic.
Women are judged on what they do and what they don’t do and whether they follow traditional paths patriarchy has set out for them – or not. But they’re probably judged the most based on their status as mothers. In Lucy Nelson’s collection of short stories, Wait Here, 12 women offer their perspectives of being childfree, either by choice or circumstance. The book also speaks to how the world views women in general and the judgement women receive regardless of whether or not they are mothers.
John Seabrook’s “The Spinach King” is a great American tragedy – about his own family. In this thoughtful, cautionary tale, the longtime New Yorker magazine staff writer reports on how three generations of his forebears, beginning with his great-grandfather, revolutionized vegetable farming and the frozen food business in southwestern New Jersey. And how, in the process, they amassed a fortune but fractured their family.
Pieces of the business still hum along in the city, albeit more quietly than they used to. Executives and agents are back in the office, at least the ones who weren’t laid off. Pitching and deal-making continue, though much of that now happens over Zoom. But production — the physical process of turning script pages into movies and TV shows — has largely left town. What began years ago as a trickle has suddenly become an exodus. Today, only about a fifth of American movies and shows are filmed in L.A. As recently as the late 1990s, that proportion was closer to two-thirds.
Daniel Janzen only began watching the insects – truly watching them – when his ribcage was shattered. Nearly half a century ago, the young ecologist had been out documenting fruit crops in a dense stretch of Costa Rican forest when he fell in a ravine, landing on his back. The long lens of his camera punched up through three ribs, snapping the bones into his thorax.
Slowly, he dragged himself out, crawling nearly two miles back to the research hut. There were no immediate neighbours, no good roads, no simple solutions for getting to a hospital.
Maybe as we fight to make sure third places can actually open and operate, we also need to remind ourselves how to be in them. And also that not every bar requires a cute outfit.
It’s not just a novel about architecture—it’s a novel constructed like architecture: every beam of narrative serves a purpose, every window of emotion is carefully placed.
In Jennifer Trevelyan’s A Beautiful Family, we start as we mean to go on: viewing a family in the 1980s through the lens of the distance that exists between them. Our protagonist is 10 years old, and to her the world is only as large as her family, consisting of her 15-year-old sister, her secret-book-writing mother and her adventurous and pragmatic father. We travel with the family two hours north of their home in Wellington to a holiday home that presents as a place where inevitable coming-of-age changes are in store for the two sisters.
But there are other threads introduced early on in the story that involve her parents and their motivations, which force multiple plot lines to cross and push the pace of the novel forward to its devastating – yet somehow satisfying – conclusion.
There’s nothing quite like a book about space travel to remind us just how tiny our place in the cosmos is. Atmosphere – the latest novel by Daisy Jones and the Six author Taylor Jenkins Reid – is set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program and it’s a book that’s impossible to read without reflecting on the smallness of humanity compared to the immovable stars above. And yet, through the soaring love story at the very heart of the book, it also shows just how important we are too. We may be mere specks to the universe, but we are the universe to someone – a sentiment that Reid explores with a tenderness that’ll make your heart ache for her characters.
Orbiting around Cato’s cheesecake recipe, the characters scheme and compete, not only to make the best cheesecake, but to keep their neighborhood from completely disappearing. Cheesecake is a buoyant and entertaining read.
By the time she was in her mid-30s, the writer Melissa Febos had been in relationships for 20 straight years. One romance would end and another would begin immediately, if it hadn’t already started: a long relay race of partners. In the rare stretch of singlehood, she would always have a crush ready to grab the baton soon enough.
This might sound, to a lot of people, like great luck. “Our culture tells us that such abundance is a privilege,” Febos acknowledges in her new book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. But abundance, in her experience, felt more like constraint.
Is it possible to make peace with uncertainty? Rebecca Solnit hopes so, and she’s pleading with us to embrace it. In her latest bouquet of essays from Haymarket Books, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, the author elegantly argues that human yearning for assurance is what gets in the way of true progress. Belief in absolutes—whether those absolutes be optimism or an assurance that we’re doomed—is an obstacle to humanistic growth and community. Like a balletic divertissement, each essay in No Straight Road Takes You There is a piquant exploration of human capability.
A swerve is not a deliberate choice but rather the result of a last-second panic, an instantaneous response to a sense of threat, twisting to avoid a crash. Laurie Blauner’s unexpected metaphoric disruptions are both verbal and autobiographical, radical linkages that capture the crises of her life, her inability to stay on course and a struggle to cope with the unexpected and escape the impact.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Or so I’ve read. But this review isn’t about that book. Rather, it’s a review of another book about what may, or may not, have happened in the beginning, if a beginning there was. Written for those of us who are not physicists, “Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins,” by Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, fits comfortably into the genre of popular science. Afshordi, the book’s narrator, is an astrophysicist and cosmologist at the University of Waterloo. Halper is a science writer, “astro-enthusiast” (my term) and YouTuber who interviews cosmologists for his series “Before the Big Bang.”
What distinguishes “Battle of the Big Bang” from other popular science books is that Afshordi and Halper pull back the curtain on the petty, sometimes nasty professional rivalries that make cosmology something of a blood sport. What is at stake in these battles? Well, for starters: reputations, tenure, grant funding, book contracts, social media followers, television interviews, guest spots on “The Big Bang Theory,” celebrityhood (think Stephen Hawking), and last, but (I hope) not least, the Nobel Prize in physics.
Opting for a chronological structure (running from 1961-2023), Troy fills his yarn with brief but detailed depictions of people, places, and the times, along with his own recollections of how he took part in the story he is telling. It’s a Bostonian memoir imbued with historical context. And he offers readerly pleasure; Troy boasts a commanding way with words, providing compelling and insightful stories about the sex worker biz.
It’s that livingness that crawls through the language, whatever language we can find to describe these encounters which are also happening, John Clare reminds us, in whatever constitutes bug-thought and bug-language, “whisperingly / too fine for us to hear.”
Where it counts, we are perfectly able to understand what nature has to say; the problem is, we choose not to. As incredible as it would be to have a conversation with another species, we ought to listen better to what they are already telling us.
With my mouth agape, Miyaguni – a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner and Ryukyuan chef – gives my tongue a long look before drawing its likeness on a whiteboard and offering a prescription: "More cacao at night, honey in the morning and more butter," she concludes, noting it will help improve my blood circulation and dry skin.
I didn't come to Okinawa for a diagnosis per se, but in many ways, it was my taste buds that led me to Miyaguni's kitchen. I had been hoping to learn more about the island's elusive and indigenous Ryukyuan cuisine, which can be traced back to the 12th Century when the Ryukyu Islands began trading with other East Asian states.
What propels Flashlight is a more ambient sense that not everything is as it seems, enhanced by an unnerving series of doubles and echoes. Choi seems to be exploring, if subtly, the limitless number of paths a person can take, the manifold consequences of choices that seem inconsequential, the ways interpersonal disputes can widen into irretrievable losses, the awkward intersections of agency and fate: If only this, if not for that. The book’s many omissions are challenging at times. But Choi is a writer who can be trusted to have a plan, and she sews the narrative up with a conclusion that’s almost impossibly heartbreaking — about which the less said the better. Some things you can see coming from miles away. But life, we’re reminded, retains its ability to surprise.
A Möbius strip is a length of any material joined into a loop with a half twist. It’s an uncanny shape, common and obvious, easily created and yet awkward to describe geometrically. For literary purposes, a Möbius is interesting because there’s intricate structure and constraint but no ending. It goes around again, mirrored with a twist. Lacey’s book takes this literally, the text printed from both ends, with memoir and fiction joined in the middle. Twin stories experiment with plotlessness and irresolution, while remaining aware of the way fiction attaches itself to linear plot and reverts to romance and quest. Characters find and lose love, find and lose meaning.
Shibboleth has already been greeted with an unusual degree of admiration and acclaim for a first book, and its author has been interviewed in GQ for an article exploring the gender gap in fiction. However, the pleasures of this fine novel are far from tokenistic: somewhat ironically, given that its narrative revolves around the way in which contemporary university education has become mired in the most blinkered and repressive forms of tokenism, and that only the strongest-willed can resist the siren call of “fitting in”.
Welcome to Oxford University in the era of identity politics, where students discuss “lived experience”, acknowledge their “moral complicity” and pontificate about ways to enact “systemic change”. The spearheads of these discussions have names like Annunziata Rees-Mogg and went to boarding school, except they’re not Tories, they’re liberals with right-on opinions about decolonising the curriculum.
Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s debut novel Shibboleth is an enjoyable satire of such ideologues, cloistered in this echoiest of echo chambers.
Tunnels, then, is an anti-essentialist text, one that insists upon a multiplicity of truths. This multiplicity is what gives the novel its liberatory power, for Tunnels is at every turn subversive, revolutionary, and antiauthoritarian.
To attempt a biography of a biography is a fresh venture. James Joyce, a life of the innovative Irish novelist who died in 1941, was published to international acclaim in 1959. The validity of its findings, and the prestige of its author, Richard Ellmann, have lasted. In Ellmann’s Joyce, Zachary Leader follows the making of James Joyce with empathy for Ellmann, as well as his book and its subject. Above all, Leader, himself the biographer of Saul Bellow, does justice to Ellmann’s feats of research, most strikingly by persuading a Joyce contact, Maria Jolas, not to divulge her suitcase of papers to Joyce’s son, Giorgio, who would have taken possession and shut the door.
For years, we've known that not all bacteria are enemies — some are actually good for us, and belong inside us. That understanding sparked a boom in probiotics science and a multibillion dollar probiotics industry. But viruses? They still get a bad rap, despite quietly occupying our insides —and sometimes even helping us.
Not that scientists even agree on whether viruses are alive or not. There's so much we don't know, including just what they are doing in our bodies. What we do know, though, is that viruses are not, in fact, all out to get us. Not only are they not uniformly bad news for our health, but many viruses actually live with us in a symbiotic and evolutionary relationship. Viruses exist in healthy people, and some are even actively beneficial for human health. Not to mention that about 8% of our very own genome consists of ancient viral genes. So basically, viruses are in us, and are us. Although we have known a lot about a small number of heavily-studied "bad" viruses for decades, the vast diversity of these weird little guys that co-exist in humans is mostly unmapped, just waiting to be discovered and understood.
The tragedy unfolding that day shines a spotlight on an issue which, according to people working on Everest, has been ignored for far too long: the deadly risks and impossible safety dilemmas faced by Sherpas. The famous guides and porters of the Himalayas are, in the words of one Sherpa climber, often wrongly portrayed as "superhuman", as if they were untouched by altitude, effort and oxygen deprivation. But their legendary feats on Everest come at a huge sacrifice, as growing research, and interviews with climbers, doctors and officials, reveal.
So what exactly happened on 22 May 2024 — and what does it reveal about the bigger struggles over Sherpa health and welfare?
It’s morning, so I’m making coffee, which means forgetting to put in coffee grounds, forgetting to add water, or forgetting to turn on the hob. I talk myself through it. Today: success. Maybe there’s actually nothing wrong.
Dawn chorus clucks from our rescue hens squawk out the next reminder of the day. My senses, increasingly, are a memory-crutch. Sound, particularly. Smell helps, too. Which reminds me – have I turned the stove off? (The toxic fumes of a melting lunchbox alerted me yesterday that I had not.)
It’s 11:15 p.m. on a Monday. 30 Rock is on the TV, there’s a crushed can of seltzer on the coffee table, and I'm experiencing one of life’s great joys: hammering bowl after delicious bowl of Special K Red Berries.
Chronicle of Drifting enacts a surrealist crossroads, with lexicons spanning the natural, the bodily, the alchemical, and the oracular. The myriad sources of perception belie a mind in flux, embodying a desire to reimagine the mortal veil as more capacious and mutable than it currently seems. In this way, the poems move beyond the ornamentation of songs to the hard work of channeling grief in motion. As Tanaka forges through the uncanny waters of imagination, he reckons with what it means to wander the earth while longing for a less contingent existence.