December 24, 2018 Best of 2018 On the Radio, It’s Always Midnight By Seb Emina We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! “Ultimately, we don’t belong in the world governed by time,” says Michael Cremo, a guest on KNWZ, a radio station in Palm Springs, California. “As beings of pure consciousness, we are essentially timeless.” It is around two thirty A.M. in Palm Springs and around eleven thirty A.M. in Paris, where I am tidying my apartment. Cremo is talking about the end-time, which he thinks could well be imminent, but his point is relevant to the experience of listening to local radio from somewhere I am not. I love listening to radio, but sometimes I don’t want to listen to a particular station, genre, or category. Sometimes I want to listen to a time of day. Which is, of course, entirely possible thanks to the rise of online streaming at the expense of older analogue broadcast methods. If I am feeling afternoony in the morning, I can leave the world that is “governed by time” and join whichever community of radio listeners—in Mumbai, Perth, or Hong Kong—is currently experiencing three P.M. The optimism of a morning show somewhere to my west offers a fresh beginning to a day that’s become lousy by midafternoon, whereas the broadcasts of early evening, burbling across the towns and cities to my east, can turn my morning shower into a kind of short-haul time machine past those hours in which I’m expected to be productive. But for the loosest and strangest of broadcast atmospheres, I am drawn most often to the dead of night, to the so-called graveyard shift. That low-budget menagerie of voices and music is concocted to serve an unlikely fellowship of insomniacs, police officers, teenagers, and bakers—and cheats like me, tuning in from afar to behold radio’s closest equivalent to the Arctic Circle. Read more >>
December 24, 2018 Best of 2018 Ode to Gray By Meghan Flaherty We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Vilhelm Hammershøi, Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne (Dust motes dancing in sunbeams), 1900. The color gray is no one’s color. It is the color of cubicles and winter camouflage, of sullage, of inscrutable complexity, of compromise. It is the perfect intermediate, an emissary for both black and white. It lingers, incognito, in this saturated world. It is the color of soldiers and battleships, despite its dullness. It is the color of the death of trees. The death of all life when consumed by fire. The color of industry and uniformity. It is both artless and unsettling, heralding both blandness and doom. It brings bad weather, augurs bleakness. It is the color other colors fade to once drained of themselves. It is the color of old age. Because I have no style, I defer to gray. I find it easier to dress in gray scale than to think. I buy in bulk, on sale, in black and white and shades between—some dishwater desolate, some pleasing winter mist. I own at least five cardigans in grandpa gray. Read more >>
December 24, 2018 Best of 2018 I Have Wasted My Life By Patricia Hampl We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Winslow Homer, Sunlight and Shadow, 1872. “I vant to be alone,” my mother used to say distractedly, channeling Greta Garbo, when my brother and I were wrecking havoc at home. In fact, though Garbo’s character said the line in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, Garbo herself never said it. What she said, when faced with a scrum of journalists at a press conference a few years later, was “I want to be let alone.” But in our culture, the distinction between the two statements has been conflated. For us, “I vant to be alone” means I want to be off the grid, no iPhone, no email, the 24-7 connectivity of our lot. I want to be let alone to be alone. No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to all overwhelmed people now—solitude suggests not loneliness but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity. We speak of being alone to recharge our batteries—even in our reach for solitude, we seem unable to unplug from the metaphor of our connectivity. Read more >>
December 21, 2018 Best of 2018 The Paris Review Staff’s Favorite Books of 2018 By The Paris Review Lucia Berlin in Oakland, California, 1975. Photo: Jeff Berlin (© 2018 Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP). 2018 has been a year of fragments, brief episodes, flashes. The seasons, at least here on the East Coast, fractured into kaleidoscopic hot and cold days, which alternated at random. The news was bad, then very bad, then bad, then worse. We were all watching, then no one was watching, then we lay under the covers, lit only by our screens. Was there a summer? Yes, but that’s its own novella, long ago. There was no single narrative. It seems no surprise, then, that many of the books I loved this year are short-story collections. Lydia Millet’s Fight No More fulfilled the voyeur in me, the one who stares into incandescent ground-floor windows of Brooklyn brownstones. In these linked stories, Nina, a realtor, drifts in and out of the lives and homes of strange, estranged Angelenos. She reveals a web of strangers and, in that isolation, shows our shared humanity. In the stories of Some Trick, Helen DeWitt skewers the publishing world, the art world, mathematicians, and computer scientists with an outsider’s cutting wit reminiscent of Paul Beatty and Nell Zink. Reading Lucia Berlin’s Evening in Paradise (and the accompanying volume of memoir and letters, Welcome Home) is like sitting in the back seat of a car driven so fast over broken roads that your teeth rattle and the empty whiskey bottles clank together, while the driver sings the most heartbreakingly beautiful of songs (if that was a terrible metaphor, then please know I’ve written about these books using fewer metaphors here). Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk reinvents the fairy tale in a way I didn’t know could still be done. Her craft feels generous, fluid, inventive: she bends myths and archetypes like balloon animals. And yet for all that sense of play, what she reveals is not lightness but wildness. There is something elemental in her stories, as complicated and tangled as the roots of any ancient tree. I read novels this year as well—Sight, by Jessie Greengrass, flew woefully under the radar, though it’s one of the sharpest, smartest books on motherhood I’ve read in a long time. Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman stuck with me far longer than I expected it to, especially for a book so intentionally flat and strange. The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard, was published in 1980, but anyone who knew me this year heard about it. It filled me with a sense of giddiness about the possibilities of literature that I haven’t felt since I was twenty. I followed it up with Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, from 1988, which, though it didn’t siderate me with the same outrageous coup de foudre (but what could?), made the perfect companion to Hazzard. Both books capture a sense of lucid, quiet feminine fury at the world’s limited possibilities, of desire and intelligence bridled but by no means dulled. They felt, I must say, very appropriate to this year. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
December 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Was Holly Golightly Bisexual? By Rebecca Renner Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s The name Holly Golightly is synonymous with sex and sophistication, but viewers may not know as much about her as they think. Audrey Hepburn’s portrayal of the character in the 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with her iconic little black dress, ushered in a new fashion era for women. But the movie also signaled a change in the average person’s attitude toward sexuality. As the 50s became the 60s, sexual mores strayed from the rigid monogamy of the past into the culture that produced key parties, beatniks, and the Free Love movement. Hollywood’s standards lagged behind. The Motion Picture Production Code, which banned such on-screen events as excessive kissing — and please, don’t even talk about sex — came into effect in 1934. Since then, homosexuality had been nodded to in film, but in coded language (a pansy worn on the lapel) or in stereotypical and mocking portrayals, almost always of effeminate men. Lesbians, according to Hollywood, didn’t really exist. By the time screenwriter George Axelrod was adapting Tiffany’s for the screen in 1960, the production code’s grip on American filmmaking was already beginning to loosen, thanks to the competing racy material in foreign films and on television. Axelrod found himself with the challenge of satisfying audiences who wanted movies that reflected their changing attitudes, while still making a movie the tight rules of the Production Code would deem decent enough to release. Read More
December 20, 2018 Arts & Culture The Truth About AI: A Secular Ghost Story By Zachary Mason Some of Facebook’s AIs invented their own language, one incomprehensible to humans, at which Facebook’s researchers panicked and were compelled to pull the plug. At least, this was the story I heard on a Vanity Fair podcast. The host seemed deeply disturbed by the thought of these alien, almost Lovecraftian beings taking shape under the blithe gaze of an amoral tech giant. I thought it was probably nonsense — scientists spin the truth all the time. I guessed that the underlying reality was that Facebook scientists had designed a program to evolve some kind of communication protocol which, for whatever reason, become hard to understand; seeking attention, they’d played up the drama to an in-house publicist by glossing the technical details and the publicist over-interpreted it to journalists, whose stories drifted still farther from the facts, until the emerging narrative ended up frightening an innocent podcast host. As it turned out, I was right about the technology, but wrong about how the story got inflated. The Facebook scientists had made a sober and unassuming blog post about their research, which journalists took up and inflated without further encouragement. This is one of the fundamental mechanisms of the so-called AI Renaissance, which is essentially a cycle of money, hype and fear. Read More