Latest news with #BooksBriefing
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
When the Status Quo Doesn't Cut It
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Why are so many Americans so eager to find alternatives—political, medical, vocational—to the status quo? By many measures, the 9-to-5 workplace, the medical industry, and other mainstays of American life seem to have served the country's population very well: The United States has the world's largest economy, and its population is far healthier and wealthier than it was before World War II. Yet in 2023, North Americans spent an average of $5,800 each on 'wellness' treatments whose efficacy has not always been backed by research. One in 13 Americans have participated in multilevel marketing, even though research has shown that 99 percent of them lose money in the process, and 30 percent supported a Cabinet position for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the leader of the movement to 'make America healthy again,' who has falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism. This state of affairs has animated several stories in The Atlantic's books section over the past two weeks, and all of them identify the same basic answer: The status quo is no longer working. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books desk: A reality check for tech oligarchs The world that Wages for Housework wanted Five books that will redirect your attention 'I Remember': A poem by William H. McRaven As Adam M. Lowenstein wrote in his essay on Gardiner Harris's No More Tears, an exposé about the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson's persistent efforts to downplay the risks of some of its products, evidence that the health-care system puts profits first may have 'left some people so disillusioned and distrustful that they were willing to try anything else.' Cases of pharmaceutical wrongdoing give a message like Kennedy's—that the medical industry is corrupt—an understandable appeal. This same message underlies the $6.3 trillion wellness industry, with its array of purported miracle cures. Sheila McClear, in an essay on Amy Larocca's new book, How to Be Well, wrote this week that 'Americans are exhausted from navigating a health-care system so costly and inconvenient that it has sent many of them scrambling for alternatives.' Those who can't find a therapist who takes insurance can instead buy a '$38 jar of adaptogenic 'dust' that claims to improve your mood,' for example, while the wealthy can enroll in boutique health services that make house calls. This deep distrust in American institutions—and the parade of disruptive entrepreneurs eager to take advantage of it—extends far beyond the medical arena. Last week, Lora Kelley wrote about Bridget Read's book Little Bosses Everywhere, a history of MLMs—companies that hire salespeople who earn commissions by signing up more salespeople. These businesses first proliferated during the Great Depression, and it felt like no coincidence to Kelley that they resurged online a few years ago during the 'Great Resignation,' when growing numbers of workers were laid off or quit out of frustration. Many modern MLMs, Kelley writes, 'promise what American jobs used to: security, freedom, dignity. Those promises have consistently failed to materialize. But the fact that so many are desperate to get in on the schemes each year is not a credit to the broader job market.' She summarizes Read's argument like so: 'MLMs are a toxin masquerading as a cure.' McClear, in her article, writes that the second Trump administration has opened the gates to medical skeptics. Casey Means, a wellness influencer, is the current nominee for surgeon general, and Kennedy now leads the Department of Health and Human Services. McClear notes that some of Kennedy's policy positions, such as curbs on microplastics, unhealthy foods, and unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies, could be productive reforms, and others, such as reducing access to vaccines and fluoride, feel like dubious solutions in search of a problem. It's not so hard to argue that the current state of the nation has left many people disappointed—in some cases, desperate for something that works. But this doesn't mean that any alternative is necessarily better. Some are proving to be demonstrably worse. The Perilous Spread of the Wellness Craze By Sheila McClear A new book reveals how health-care inequality fueled the spread of anti-science conspiracy theories. Read the full article. , by Denis Johnson Johnson's drama of the American frontier is barely a novel; the thin paperback can be started on a hot afternoon and finished by happy hour. Yet it has accrued a devoted following in the nearly 15 years since it was published, because it conjures a great expanse—the mythic West. Its main character, Robert Grainier, works as a contract laborer for the railroads running through Idaho and Washington State. Sweating and straining, he hauls down giant conifers in the region's old-growth forests. He feels a sweet freedom while riding over freshly laid rail, watching the wilderness blur by through a boxcar's slats. Train Dreams is not overly romantic about its time and place: In the first chapter, Grainier's boss orders him to throw a Chinese laborer off an unfinished bridge. A curse later seems to fall upon Grainier. He experiences God's cosmic vengeance, a cleansing fire racing across the dry landscape. Johnson has a cinematic style, lingering on images. But the novella barrels forward with the locomotion evoked in its title, until the end of Grainier's days, and the end of the Old West. Give it a few hours in June, and it may hold on to your imagination until August. — Ross Andersen From our list: The 2025 summer reading guide 📚 Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid 📚 Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, by Mark Kriegel 📚 Charlottesville: An American Story, by Deborah Baker The Talented Mr. Vance By George Packer J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America's social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump's first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J. D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
30-05-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
When the Status Quo Doesn't Cut It
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Why are so many Americans so eager to find alternatives—political, medical, vocational—to the status quo? By many measures, the 9-to-5 workplace, the medical industry, and other mainstays of American life seem to have served the country's population very well: The United States has the world's largest economy, and its population is far healthier and wealthier than it was before World War II. Yet in 2023, North Americans spent an average of $5,800 each on 'wellness' treatments whose efficacy has not always been backed by research. One in 13 Americans have participated in multilevel marketing, even though research has shown that 99 percent of them lose money in the process, and 30 percent supported a Cabinet position for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the leader of the movement to 'make America healthy again,' who has falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism. This state of affairs has animated several stories in The Atlantic 's books section over the past two weeks, and all of them identify the same basic answer: The status quo is no longer working. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books desk: As Adam M. Lowenstein wrote in his essay on Gardiner Harris's No More Tears, an exposé about the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson's persistent efforts to downplay the risks of some of its products, evidence that the health-care system puts profits first may have 'left some people so disillusioned and distrustful that they were willing to try anything else.' Cases of pharmaceutical wrongdoing give a message like Kennedy's—that the medical industry is corrupt—an understandable appeal. This same message underlies the $6.3 trillion wellness industry, with its array of purported miracle cures. Sheila McClear, in an essay on Amy Larocca's new book, How to Be Well, wrote this week that 'Americans are exhausted from navigating a health-care system so costly and inconvenient that it has sent many of them scrambling for alternatives.' Those who can't find a therapist who takes insurance can instead buy a '$38 jar of adaptogenic 'dust' that claims to improve your mood,' for example, while the wealthy can enroll in boutique health services that make house calls. This deep distrust in American institutions—and the parade of disruptive entrepreneurs eager to take advantage of it—extends far beyond the medical arena. Last week, Lora Kelley wrote about Bridget Read's book Little Bosses Everywhere, a history of MLMs—companies that hire salespeople who earn commissions by signing up more salespeople. These businesses first proliferated during the Great Depression, and it felt like no coincidence to Kelley that they resurged online a few years ago during the ' Great R esignation,' when growing numbers of workers were laid off or quit out of frustration. Many modern MLMs, Kelley writes, 'promise what American jobs used to: security, freedom, dignity. Those promises have consistently failed to materialize. But the fact that so many are desperate to get in on the schemes each year is not a credit to the broader job market.' She summarizes Read's argument like so: 'MLMs are a toxin masquerading as a cure.' McClear, in her article, writes that the second Trump administration has opened the gates to medical skeptics. Casey Means, a wellness influencer, is the current nominee for surgeon general, and Kennedy now leads the Department of Health and Human Services. McClear notes that some of Kennedy's policy positions, such as curbs on microplastics, unhealthy foods, and unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies, could be productive reforms, and others, such as reducing access to vaccines and fluoride, feel like dubious solutions in search of a problem. It's not so hard to argue that the current state of the nation has left many people disappointed—in some cases, desperate for something that works. But this doesn't mean that any alternative is necessarily better. Some are proving to be demonstrably worse. The Perilous Spread of the Wellness Craze By Sheila McClear A new book reveals how health-care inequality fueled the spread of anti-science conspiracy theories. What to Read Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Johnson's drama of the American frontier is barely a novel; the thin paperback can be started on a hot afternoon and finished by happy hour. Yet it has accrued a devoted following in the nearly 15 years since it was published, because it conjures a great expanse—the mythic West. Its main character, Robert Grainier, works as a contract laborer for the railroads running through Idaho and Washington State. Sweating and straining, he hauls down giant conifers in the region's old-growth forests. He feels a sweet freedom while riding over freshly laid rail, watching the wilderness blur by through a boxcar's slats. Train Dreams is not overly romantic about its time and place: In the first chapter, Grainier's boss orders him to throw a Chinese laborer off an unfinished bridge. A curse later seems to fall upon Grainier. He experiences God's cosmic vengeance, a cleansing fire racing across the dry landscape. Johnson has a cinematic style, lingering on images. But the novella barrels forward with the locomotion evoked in its title, until the end of Grainier's days, and the end of the Old West. Give it a few hours in June, and it may hold on to your imagination until August. — Ross Andersen 📚 Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, by Mark Kriegel 📚 Charlottesville: An American Story, by Deborah Baker Your Weekend Read The Talented Mr. Vance By George Packer J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America's social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump's first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J. D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Funniest Part of Alison Bechdel's Work
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Dykes to Watch Out For, the long-running lesbian comic strip that launched Alison Bechdel's career, is full of kitchen-table drama and dry humor, but its title is also more literal than those elements might suggest. Watch out, strip after strip said: Here comes Mo, the main character and author-avatar, spinning her way onto the page like a flustered Tasmanian devil of '90s-lefty anxiety. Look out for Mo, going hoarse over the rise of Pat Buchanan or chiding her circle for not thinking enough about genocide in Bosnia. There's Mo, nose in a newspaper, ignoring her friends' new baby to stress about the latest mainstream co-optation of radical activism. This might sound like a drag, but it's actually one of the funniest running bits in Bechdel's work. For decades, the author has allowed herself—or her stand-in self—to be loudly annoying, and often wrong, on the page. When Mo's a bummer, her friends snap back at her; when she talks or worries her way out of an opportunity to get laid, they poke fun at her. Mo is frequently uptight about other people's choices (to take Prozac, for instance, or to transition), but her diatribes usually end with her being dressed down or hurting someone she cares about. I've always been charmed by how much Bechdel is willing to let Mo be both her double and the butt of her joke. In her new book, Spent, Bechdel blurs the writer-character line even further, Hanna Rosin writes this week, and the result is even more gratifying. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books desk: Return of the shaman Shutting down Salman Rushdie is not going to help America's Johnson & Johnson problem An awkward truth about American work Spent is not a memoir, but neither is it wholly fictional. Instead, it's a graphic novel about a character named Alison Bechdel, who looks just like Alison Bechdel, the book's author—and also an older Mo. Novel-Alison, like real Alison, lives in Vermont with her partner, Holly, and has made a lot of unexpected money off a television adaptation of her memoir. (Bechdel's memoir Fun Home was adapted into a Tony Award–winning musical.) Alison and Holly's closest friends in Vermont are old standbys from DTWOF: Sparrow, Stuart, and their child, J.R.; Ginger; and Lois, who all live in a group house. They're busy with their own various crises and hookups, while Alison finds that more money means more problems. 'There's no avoiding it. She is complicit to the craw with the capitalist crisis,' a box of omniscient narration says in one panel. Alison, sitting at her desk doing her taxes, says aloud: 'Someone should write a book about this.' Spent is that book. Bechdel the author is 'astute enough to know that famous people lamenting the burdens of fame are insufferable,' Rosin writes. So here, 'she's created an Alison whose dilemma parodies contemporary celebrity culture, while also parodying herself, the author.' And, thank goodness, it's still funny. Alison keeps putting her foot in her mouth on social issues, especially in front of the radical recent college dropout J.R. and their companion, Badger. The young adults—furious with the world for going about business as usual during a 21st-century 'polycrisis' (the name of a podcast they host)—resemble in many ways a younger Mo. Meanwhile, Alison wonders where her fighting spirit has gone, growing concerned that luxury and age have dulled her into complacency. When Sparrow suggests that the kids cool it, Bechdel isn't mocking their idealism. And she's not suggesting that Alison's become a coldhearted reactionary—just that she has more to manage, and perhaps more to lose, than she did years before. After all, in DTWOF, Mo's all-consuming neuroticism prevented her from living a fulfilling life, driving away friends and lovers. As in previous books, Bechdel seems to hint that a middle path is the only way forward: Giving in to mega-corporations and nihilistically welcoming climate apocalypse, she suggests, is an abdication of our responsibilities to one another. But her characters have to learn, again and again, that sticking to your principles doesn't have to mean ruining every meal shared with your loved ones. What Is Alison Bechdel's Secret? By Hanna Rosin The cartoonist has spent a lifetime worrying. In a new graphic novel, she finds something like solace. Read the full article. , by Elaine Castillo Girlie Delmundo—not her real name; she adopted it for her high-stress job—is a content moderator at a massive tech firm. Her work involves filtering through a carousel of online horrors so crushing that there are typically three or four suicide attempts among her co-workers each year. Girlie, however, is sardonic and no-nonsense by nature: She's an eldest daughter shaped by the 2008 recession, when her immigrant family lost everything. The job can't break her. But her life transforms when she gets a cushy position as an elite moderator for a virtual-reality firm. Suddenly, Girlie is enjoying perks such as regular VR therapy sessions, in which she experiences rare moments of bliss—swimming through cool water, touching the bark of a tree. The new gig is great, at least for a while. (All may not be as it seems there.) Her new boss, William, also happens to be a total stud, and his presence transforms Castillo's flinty satire of the tech industry into a sultry romance novel. As we watch Girlie's defenses melt, the book shows a woman slowly surrendering to human experiences that can't be controlled. — Valerie Trapp From our list: The 2025 summer reading guide 📚 Autocorrect, by Etgar Keret 📚 When It All Burns, by Jordan Thomas 📚 The South, by Tash Aw The World That 'Wages for Housework' Wanted By Lily Meyer But creating social conditions that are conducive to motherhood doesn't have to be part of a reactionary agenda. Indeed, one of the feminist movement's most radical and idealistic intellectual branches, a 1970s campaign called Wages for Housework, advocated for policies that, if ever implemented, genuinely might set off a baby boom. Its central goal was straightforward: government pay for anybody who does the currently unremunerated labor of caring for their own home and family. On top of that, the movement envisioned communal social structures and facilities including high-quality public laundromats and day cares that would get women out of their homes and give them their own time, such that paying them to do housework wouldn't consign them to a life without anything else. Read the full article. * Lead image: Excerpted from the book Spent, provided courtesy of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. © 2025 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Funniest Part of Alison Bechdel's Work
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Dykes to Watch Out For, the long-running lesbian comic strip that launched Alison Bechdel's career, is full of kitchen-table drama and dry humor, but its title is also more literal than those elements might suggest. Watch out, strip after strip said: Here comes Mo, the main character and author-avatar, spinning her way onto the page like a flustered Tasmanian devil of '90s-lefty anxiety. Look out for Mo, going hoarse over the rise of Pat Buchanan or chiding her circle for not thinking enough about genocide in Bosnia. There's Mo, nose in a newspaper, ignoring her friends' new baby to stress about the latest mainstream co-optation of radical activism. This might sound like a drag, but it's actually one of the funniest running bits in Bechdel's work. For decades, the author has allowed herself—or her stand-in self—to be loudly annoying, and often wrong, on the page. When Mo's a bummer, her friends snap back at her; when she talks or worries her way out of an opportunity to get laid, they poke fun at her. Mo is frequently uptight about other people's choices (to take Prozac, for instance, or to transition), but her diatribes usually end with her being dressed down or hurting someone she cares about. I've always been charmed by how much Bechdel is willing to let Mo be both her double and the butt of her joke. In her new book, Spent, Bechdel blurs the writer-character line even further, Hanna Rosin writes this week, and the result is even more gratifying. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books desk: Spent is not a memoir, but neither is it wholly fictional. Instead, it's a graphic novel about a character named Alison Bechdel, who looks just like Alison Bechdel, the book's author—and also an older Mo. Novel-Alison, like real Alison, lives in Vermont with her partner, Holly, and has made a lot of unexpected money off a television adaptation of her memoir. (Bechdel's memoir Fun Home was adapted into a Tony Award–winning musical.) Alison and Holly's closest friends in Vermont are old standbys from DTWOF: Sparrow, Stuart, and their child, J.R.; Ginger; and Lois, who all live in a group house. They're busy with their own various crises and hookups, while Alison finds that more money means more problems. 'There's no avoiding it. She is complicit to the craw with the capitalist crisis,' a box of omniscient narration says in one panel. Alison, sitting at her desk doing her taxes, says aloud: 'Someone should write a book about this.' Spent is that book. Bechdel the author is 'astute enough to know that famous people lamenting the burdens of fame are insufferable,' Rosin writes. So here, 'she's created an Alison whose dilemma parodies contemporary celebrity culture, while also parodying herself, the author.' And, thank goodness, it's still funny. Alison keeps putting her foot in her mouth on social issues, especially in front of the radical recent college dropout J.R. and their companion, Badger. The young adults—furious with the world for going about business as usual during a 21st-century 'polycrisis' (the name of a podcast they host)—resemble in many ways a younger Mo. Meanwhile, Alison wonders where her fighting spirit has gone, growing concerned that luxury and age have dulled her into complacency. When Sparrow suggests that the kids cool it, Bechdel isn't mocking their idealism. And she's not suggesting that Alison's become a coldhearted reactionary—just that she has more to manage, and perhaps more to lose, than she did years before. After all, in DTWOF, Mo's all-consuming neuroticism prevented her from living a fulfilling life, driving away friends and lovers. As in previous books, Bechdel seems to hint that a middle path is the only way forward: Giving in to mega-corporations and nihilistically welcoming climate apocalypse, she suggests, is an abdication of our responsibilities to one another. But her characters have to learn, again and again, that sticking to your principles doesn't have to mean ruining every meal shared with your loved ones. What Is Alison Bechdel's Secret? By Hanna Rosin The cartoonist has spent a lifetime worrying. In a new graphic novel, she finds something like solace. Read the full article. What to Read Moderation, by Elaine Castillo Girlie Delmundo—not her real name; she adopted it for her high-stress job—is a content moderator at a massive tech firm. Her work involves filtering through a carousel of online horrors so crushing that there are typically three or four suicide attempts among her co-workers each year. Girlie, however, is sardonic and no-nonsense by nature: She's an eldest daughter shaped by the 2008 recession, when her immigrant family lost everything. The job can't break her. But her life transforms when she gets a cushy position as an elite moderator for a virtual-reality firm. Suddenly, Girlie is enjoying perks such as regular VR therapy sessions, in which she experiences rare moments of bliss—swimming through cool water, touching the bark of a tree. The new gig is great, at least for a while. (All may not be as it seems there.) Her new boss, William, also happens to be a total stud, and his presence transforms Castillo's flinty satire of the tech industry into a sultry romance novel. As we watch Girlie's defenses melt, the book shows a woman slowly surrendering to human experiences that can't be controlled. — Valerie Trapp Out Next Week 📚 Autocorrect, by Etgar Keret 📚 When It All Burns, by Jordan Thomas 📚 The South, by Tash Aw Your Weekend Read The World That 'Wages for Housework' Wanted By Lily Meyer But creating social conditions that are conducive to motherhood doesn't have to be part of a reactionary agenda. Indeed, one of the feminist movement's most radical and idealistic intellectual branches, a 1970s campaign called Wages for Housework, advocated for policies that, if ever implemented, genuinely might set off a baby boom. Its central goal was straightforward: government pay for anybody who does the currently unremunerated labor of caring for their own home and family. On top of that, the movement envisioned communal social structures and facilities including high-quality public laundromats and day cares that would get women out of their homes and give them their own time, such that paying them to do housework wouldn't consign them to a life without anything else. * Lead image: Excerpted from the book Spent, provided courtesy of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. © 2025 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
What It Costs to Get the Life You Want
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. The wives in Mavis Gallant's stories aren't happy. In 'The Flowers of Spring,' from 1950, a woman named Estelle visits her paralyzed husband, Malcolm, at the hospital. She feels sorry for him but also resentful and trapped, and she wonders whether the wives of other disabled men also feel 'despair and discontent.' She'd 'been a charming bride'; now, a few years later, she sees herself as a 'delinquent wife.' She has no desire, despite the doctor's entreaties, to discuss her husband's condition. First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic's books section: What to read to understand your mom Parenthood cannot be optimized Why do collaborators do it? How the best restaurants can make you feel What kind of questions did 17th-century daters have? Many of Gallant's characters are 'strays,' as Vivian Gornick wrote last week. They are out of place in the world, supremely lonely, seeking something better or different in life. Three of the Canadian writer's later stories, which appear in the collection Varieties of Exile, focus on a woman named Lily Quale, who agrees to marry a humdrum diplomat named Steve Burnet, despite not loving him. She trusts that Steve will get her out of provincial Canada—but although he makes good on his promise, taking her to live in Europe, Lily has no interest in spending her life tied down to this kind yet dull man, and she leaves him not long after they arrive in the south of France. Why is she willing to do something so reckless to get what she wants? Gornick observes that Lily lives in a time when a woman couldn't make her way in the world alone. 'Whatever the future held for her, she was bound to pursue it through a man in whom she aroused desire: the only card she ever had to play,' she writes. Some women used that connection to advance, as Lily does. Others, Gornick notes, spent too much time with 'one Steve Burnet or another,' and the person they never became 'hardened' inside them. Women today might have more freedom and more choices than Gallant and her characters did—but the kind of burdenlessness that Gallant's women seek can still be out of reach. Gallant herself yearned to be 'perfectly free,' Gornick writes, and found that the only way she could do it was by living in Paris, where she 'never felt at ease,' among people she never felt intimate with. She chose to have neither children nor a husband (after a brief youthful marriage) and was thus able to devote herself to her work. For her characters, freedom is more urgent than security; they make their choices without looking back. But some women may feel more ambivalent. Even if these decisions are no longer as binary as they were in Gallant's era, attaining total independence in the 21st century can still mean forgoing, or de-emphasizing, the kinds of attachments that place demands upon us—things such as marriage, children, and a steady career. And in this less black-and-white world, where women have the opportunity to balance family, work, and leisure, people who feel pulled toward multiple kinds of fulfillment may find that dedicating themselves to one over the other is less simple than it was decades ago. There are now more paths to choose from, but that doesn't necessarily mean the choices are any easier to make. The Writer Who Understood Aloneness By Vivian Gornick Mavis Gallant's short stories are about people, especially women, who prefer to live on the social margins. I cherish one of them most of all. Read the full article. , by Jamaica Kincaid Kincaid's account of her three-week trek in Nepal—undertaken to collect rare seeds with several botanist friends—is sure to make any reader appreciate their local flora. Kincaid views the Himalayas through the lens of her own home garden in Vermont, searching for plants she can cultivate in the North Bennington climate as her group climbs up through the mountains. I often paused as I read to look up the species she mentions, shocked to see some of the huge plants that grow naturally in alpine zones. She approaches the experience as a true amateur, always ready to learn something new, and her honest reflections on the trip's difficulties make the book intimate and amusing. Reading Among Flowers feels like traveling alongside Kincaid: You can experience the highs of the journey (gorgeous vistas, rare native-plant sightings, camaraderie and companionship) alongside the lows (leeches, arduous climbs, Maoist guerrilla groups) without ever having to navigate the forbidding range yourself. — Bekah Waalkes From our list: Six books you'll want to read outdoors 📚 Freedom Season, by Peniel E. Joseph 📚 The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong 📚 Happiness Forever, by Adelaide Faith Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture? By Spencer Kornhaber What art can do is remind us that our lives are not simply shaped by systems—they're also a product of our own thoughts, inspirations, and relations. My favorite new TV show of this decade is HBO's Fantasmas, a comedy created by the former Saturday Night Live writer Julio Torres. It's a magical-realist depiction of a near future in which people live with bumbling AI assistant bots in housing complexes owned by corporations such as Bank of America. Torres's character wants to make surreal films about animals, but is being pressured to cash in on his backstory as a gay immigrant. (A streaming service run by Zappos—yes, the shoe company—commissions a screenplay called How I Came Out to My Abuela.) This subject matter asks, quite darkly, whether the artistic spirit can survive modern life. But the imaginative way the show is rendered—in a dreamscape of interconnected skits, featuring handcrafted set decoration, performed by talents from today's offbeat comedy world—offers a hopeful answer. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
