Another rigged election in Africa is not news. But that US election observers were so quick to endorse it is shocking. Perhaps they believed that wrapping the election up quickly would prevent violence. A far more troubling possibility is that the US wants Kenyatta to remain in power, at the expense of democracy.
Books
Trump’s Hoodlums
Trump’s base shares his contempt for the Washington institutions that are once again exposing their duplicitous nature. Some of this base also happens to be armed. Over the last two weeks, we have seen Donald Trump send out signals to the vigilantes of his own choosing. “Be wary of paramilitaries,” the Yale historian Timothy Snyder warned in his recent book On Tyranny.
Making Memories
H.M., as he came to be known in the medical literature, could no longer remember anything he did. He could not remember what he had eaten for breakfast, lunch, or supper, nor could he find his way around the hospital. He failed to recognize hospital staff and physicians whom he had met only minutes earlier. Every time he met a scientist from MIT who was studying him regularly, she had to introduce herself again. He could not even recognize himself in recent photos, thinking that the face in the image was some “old guy.” Yet he was able to carry on a conversation for as long as his attention was not diverted.
Fukushima From Within
The publisher of the English edition of Kazuto Tatsuta’s book Ichi-F, about the Fukushima nuclear power plant, has opted to call this 550-page tome of dry, detailed reportage a “graphic memoir.” The original Japanese subtitle describes the manga instead as a “rōdōki,” literally a “record of labor,” putting more emphasis on the work itself than the person doing the work. The difference might seem trivial, but it speaks to many of the things that Ichi-F both succeeds and fails in doing.
Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution
As a child in the evangelical South during the 1970s, I was taught that “Darwin” was a bad word. My textbook for the creation of life was the opening chapters of Genesis, Yahweh’s six days of exquisite labor and then an extra day to chill. One week. The notion of evolution and its timeline — billions of years — seemed a heresy cooked up by egghead scientists and Satanic secularists. Just four decades and forty miles away from the infamous Scopes trial, I sang “I’m No Kin to the Monkey” along with my peers in Sunday School: I don’t know much about his ancestors / But mine didn’t swing from a tree. Anti-Darwinism remains as American as God, guns, and apple pie: a recent poll revealed that nearly half of adults believe in a divine creation of a universe only a few millennia old.
But since the mapping of the human genome in 2000, we’ve confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that humans are primates, sharing over 99 percent of our coding DNA with chimpanzees, whose own sequence tracks more closely to ours than to gorillas or orangutans. The genomics revolution has proven that Darwin was a prophet, his legacy still debated by evolutionary biologists across the globe. In his new book, Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution, Harvard biologist and zoologist Jonathan B. Losos infuses a sense of whimsy and playfulness into the staggeringly complex problems of evolution, explaining why the evidence must be tested and re-tested, new data introduced, with each generation of scientists.
A lizard specialist, Losos has pursued his fieldwork in mostly tropical archipelagos, where he’s studied anoles and how their scattered populations morph into similar body shapes, with virtually identical nutrition and behavior, depending on the ecological niches they inhabit.
Tahiti, Bermuda, Madeira, Bali. Everyone loves islands but no one has nesiophilia — the inordinate fondness and hungering for islands — more than an evolutionary biologist. Darwin drew much of his inspiration from island stopovers on the fabled voyage of the Beagle . . . Each oceanic island or archipelago is a world unto itself, the evolutionary goings-on there independent of what happened elsewhere. That means that by comparing one island to another, we can get a sense of evolutionary potential and predictability.
The occasional hurricane would wipe out Losos’s slithery subjects, but he gleaned enough data to build an argument: presented with wildly different environments, species usually fill open niches in predictable ways — the concept of convergent evolution. In other words, if you could roll evolution’s dice over and over, you’d get the same (or similar) results each time.
Improbable Destinies takes us on a whirlwind odyssey, from vibrant Caribbean jungles to English grasslands to innovative swimming-pool labs in Seattle, surveying a spectrum of species: guppies, moths, deer mice, bacteria. He recounts myriad experiments that show that Darwin was wrong about one pillar of his theory: evolution doesn’t always move at a glacial pace but rather can be observed within a few generations (or over the course of a biologist’s career): “The resistance of rats to developing cavities, the tendency of fruit flies to fly toward light, and fruit fly tolerance of alcohol fumes . . . pick any trait that varies in a population, impose artificial selection, and you will get an evolutionary response.”
The literary scholar Harold Bloom once asserted that “the meaning of a poem is always another poem,” but his maxim could apply to science writing as well. Behind Improbable Destinies lurk David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo and Jonathan Wiener’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Beak of the Finch, but Losos’s major influence is Stephen Jay Gould’s 1989 masterpiece, Wonderful Life, whose detailed analysis of the Burgess Shale’s wealth of Cambrian fossils posits that life on earth could only have evolved the way it has once — rewind the tape and you’ll get different chemistry, different avenues of natural selection, different flora and fauna, and so on. (Gould’s title is an homage to Frank Capra’s 1946 film, which allows James Stewart a glimpse of a notional world in which he’d never been born.) Losos both explicitly and implicitly engages Gould’s ideas; and in a twist that Darwin would have loved, he reaches no firm conclusion. “Start with identical circumstances and you’ll usually — but definitely not always — get a pretty similar outcome.”
Improbable Destinies is a crackling good read, threading rich anecdote into trenchant science. It belongs on the same shelf as I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong’s gorgeously crafted account of microbes and their critical roles in our bodies; Nick Lane’s dense, groundbreaking work on the origins of life, The Vital Question; and other recent books that grapple with Darwin’s revolution, such as Richard O. Prum’s The Evolution of Beauty and Robert M. Sapolsky’s Behave. Ours is an era of paradigm shifts in science, with a bonanza of literature that captures our world’s breathtaking diversity as well as its dire future. As Losos notes, “The elephant in the room, of course, is global warming . . . one seven-year-long experimental study on worms detected replicated genetic changes associated with warmer soils. I predict that this is just the tip of the melting iceberg and that soon we will detect many physiological, behavioral, and anatomical changes convergently evolved in vulnerable species.”
Given that climate change may be our most daunting challenge — and given that all kinds of species, from worms to fish to germs, will mutate rapidly to accommodate these shifts — books such as Improbable Destinies offer a roadmap for our species, from the African savannahs to inundated coasts. Fortunately for readers, Losos and Yong and Sapolsky are also every inch the prose stylists as the majority of fiction writers promoted with more fanfare. It’s high time to transform the hearts and minds of Americans hostile not only to evolution but the crisis that is already forcing the world’s next cycle of rapid biological change. It’s high time we act — our evolutionary future may pivot on what we do next.
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Christina Baker Kline
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
Christina Baker Kline’s fiction draws us with subtle and irresistible power into the lives and hearts of her characters, from the abandoned children of her bestselling novel Orphan Train to the enigmatic heroine of her latest book. In this episode of the podcast, the author talks with Miwa Messer about A Piece of the World, in which she investigates and re-imagines the story behind Andrew Wyeth’s iconic painting “Christina’s World.”
To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century.
As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction in a powerful novel that illuminates a little-known part of America’s history. Bringing into focus the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, she vividly imagines the life of a woman with a complicated relationship to her family and her past, and a special bond with one of our greatest modern artists.
See more from Christina Baker Kline here.
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Cartier-Bresson’s Distant India
Henri Cartier-Bresson is perhaps the most well-known photographer in India, or rather—an important distinction—the photographer whose work is most well-known. In “Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame,” the Rubin Museum brings together selections from his trips between 1947 and 1980. It’s hard not to detect a sense of social estrangement here. In fact, Bresson made a style out of his outsider status.
A List of Fears: Megan Stielstra and “The Wrong Way to Save Your Life”
Talk with Megan Stielstra about the art of writing essays and you’ll end up in a conversation about the art of living instead. It’s not a change of subject, just recognition that, in many ways, the activities are interwoven on the most intimate of terms. “The thing about creative nonfiction,” she says over the phone from Chicago, where she lives with her husband and young son and teaches writing at Northwestern, “is that our experience runs parallel to our pages.” I know exactly what she means. How do we make art out of a life we are in the midst of living? “The biggest question,” she acknowledges, “is the stopping point.”
Stielstra is referring to her new book, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, a collection of loosely linked essays that add up — bit by bit — to a memoir. The title comes from a reader’s comment on a piece she wrote for the New York Times about a fire in her building; the implication is that she somehow responded incorrectly. But who’s to say, Stielstra wants to know, what’s right or wrong? And how can we help doing it our way when we have no choice but to make it up as we go? This, of course, is what the essayist does. “We have to get into it,” she writes in the introductory pastiche that opens the book. “Throw it against the wall, stand back and take a good close look. It’s ugly: heavy, dark, and centuries in the making. You might want to move on, to turn it off, watch something else, but wait — look again. Look closer. How was it made? When was it made? What was happening when it was made? What are you going to do about it? And when are you going to start?”
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life covers material that will be familiar to anyone who has read Stielstra’s 2014 volume of essays, Once I Was Cool. (She’s also the author of the 2013 short story collection Everyone Remain Calm.) Both of her nonfiction books revolve around the rigors of work and family, the question of identity, the challenges of being an adult when there are no road maps, and we slip from one moment to the next without any clear demarcation between where we’re going and where we’ve been. The echoing, she says, is “absolutely intentional; I wanted the essays in this book to talk to one another, which led me to think about how this book might talk to the last one, or to other essays I have written.” To highlight that intention — while also developing a kind of narrative spine for the project — Stielstra divides The Wrong Way to Save Your Life into four parts, each of which begins with a fragmentary meditation on a decade (ten, twenty, thirty, forty) of her life. “It was a happy accident,” she says about the structure. “When I started, I didn’t expect the book to be connected.” At the same time, the device allows for what she sees as a necessary double vision, a tension between present and past. “I’m interested,” Stielstra explains, “in narrative distance, in tracing how, as I age and live, my experience changes my perception. I’m interested in always telling the truth but also in telling you how I am telling you, in trying to be honest to who I am as I am writing, but also to who I was.”
As an example, look at the stunning “Here Is My Heart,” which anchors the opening section of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life. After her father has heart surgery, she starts dissecting deer hearts in her kitchen, as if by exposing the mechanics, some sort of deeper meaning will be revealed. “I tried to explain: blah blah metaphor blah,” she writes, when a friend asks what she is doing. “Randy waited patiently as I talked myself in circles, finally arriving tipsy at the truth: I’m afraid he will die. I’m afraid of the truth. I’m afraid for his heart.” The condition of his heart, as it turns out, proves less of a threat than Stielstra has anticipated; but the fear, once summoned, never goes away. Indeed, fear is a central motif of the collection, its métier, we might say. The book begins with an epigraph from Ben Okri: “Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.” There it is, love and terror, the conflict we cannot resolve. “The book began,” Stielstra recalls, “as a list of fears. I thought it would be five pages long. Sixty thousand words later, I called my agent.”
This is hardly new territory for her; “Channel B,” selected for The Best American Essays 2013 and republished in Once I Was Cool, highlights Stielstra’s fear of becoming a mother and her experience with postpartum depression, material that emerges in the new collection as well. “I hadn’t been aware of the constant buzzing,” she says, “until my son was born, but once I became aware, it was everywhere. I was unhappy at my job, but I was scared to leave. And when the building caught on fire, it was the greatest moment of fear ever. I wanted to write about it. I still want to write about it.” The trick, the transference, is that in addressing her own most vivid fears and emotions, she gives voice to everyone’s. “This is what happens,” Stielstra points out, “when we write personal essays. The works connects to others through ourselves.”
Such a process has to do with empathy, which is, as it has ever been, a key factor in how narrative engages us. At the same time, she wants to push it further, beyond mere identification into proximity. One word that comes up often for her is shame, not as an impediment, but rather as something that must be faced, and to the extent that we are able, overcome. “Enough,” she writes, “of shame — I’m done with it.” Another is privilege, which she explores throughout The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, invoking her students, family, and friends. In one of the book’s most powerful sequences, she remembers being asked, during a college writing class, to define her attitude toward her work. “If your writing is political,” her teacher told the students, “stand against that wall . . . If it doesn’t have anything to do with politics, stand against the other wall.” Stielstra opted for the latter, explaining, “I write love stories.” A gay student and a woman of color, standing at the opposing wall, responded that they did the same. “To this day,” Stielstra writes, “I struggle to explain what happened in that moment. All of the clichés apply: lightbulb, lightning, ton of bricks . . . It was the first time I’d considered how a person could be perceived differently based on their identity.”
This is not about guilt and it’s not about lip service, but consciousness instead. Art, Stielstra wants us to understand, can alter us, yet we must be open to the process, not only as observers but also as participants. “It’s interesting,” she suggests, “how hard it is to talk about privilege when, really, it’s responsibility. It’s overwhelming when you first discover systemic discrimination, systemic racism. There was so much I didn’t know. But in learning about it, it’s not possible not to be fundamentally changed.” Again, Stielstra cites her audience: “I have to earn it,” she says of their trust. On the one hand, this refers to her roots in spoken word; she has been affiliated for many years with the Chicago storytelling collective 2nd Story and debuted many of her essays from a stage. More to the point, though, is that notion of conversation, of collaboration — literature as an endeavor shared by author and reader, the art of writing essays and the art of living once again. “How does how we’re telling play into what we’re telling?” Stielstra wonders. “I have to be transparent in how I interrogate these issues. So much of writing personal essays means making space for someone else.”
Photo of Megan Stielstra by Joe Mazza – Brave Lux
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Why We Must Still Defend Free Speech
Does the First Amendment need a rewrite in the era of Donald Trump? Should the rise of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups lead us to cut back the protection afforded to speech that expresses hatred and advocates violence, or otherwise undermines equality? If free speech exacerbates inequality, why doesn’t equality, also protected by the Constitution, take precedence?
Alice Coltrane’s Songs of Bliss
Alice Coltrane played piano in her husband’s groups from 1966 until his death the following year. Alice recorded a dozen albums under her own name, ranging from straight-ahead jazz to experimental mixtures of orchestral music and improvisation to Hindu chants performed in gospel arrangements. Her corpus remains one of the most varied and underappreciated in jazz.
Sig Nordal 