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.