The Re-Possessed
Ursula K. Le Guin storms the Library of America.
Ursula K. Le Guin storms the Library of America.
The fact that our costume began as a sturdy and predictable garment, then evolved into a million variations and constant novelty—how American is that?
The essays in The History of the Future often chronicle the various ways these places and their founders, planners, architects, or investors imagined the future alongside the ways the future did and did not cooperate. Even where wrong (and they almost always were), their vision still shapes the fruits of their labors in ways they never would have wished.
Jenny Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin, is an award-winning German novelist, short story writer, playwright, and opera director. Not a Novel is her first full-sized nonfiction collection, translated in 2020 by Kurt Beals, a professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.
Milligan’s central thesis in Nobody Owns the Moon is that we should avoid applying overly simplified ethical guidelines to make decisions regarding current and future activities in space, and that we need to weave multiple moral concepts into a complex and flexible framework.
With new evidence, along with fresh perspectives, David L. Roll has revised and refined aspects of conventional wisdom. First, Marshall’s leadership is more inspired than previously acknowledged. Second, in his professional life he is generally more assertive and self-assured, more likely to be uncompromising, and at times even less humble.
You will dizzy yourself if you try to find today’s criteria, the organizing principles we use to categorize. Genre can be determined by historical period (regency) or geographic location (westerns); by how tightly it cleaves to established reality (fantasy, magical realism, science fiction, true crime); by what psychological needs it satisfies in us (mystery, romance, thriller); by how it uses language (poetry, essay, novel, play).
The place Count Basie flew us to, home of romance. Home of superstition and dark ritual, too, keeping the night mysterious. The Moon has so many moods, we can moon over unrequited love and moon a frat brother for a prank and sail over the moon with delight. So much, we have projected upon that luminous orb. Including the very air we breathe.
Drugs and machines and experts spin a sense of certainty, a collaborative fantasy we all prefer. Yet a 2000 study in the British Medical Journal found doctors’ predictions accurate only twenty percent of the time—and that was for patients already diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Refusing to speak someone’s name either acknowledges their power or cancels it. Some traditions refuse to speak the name of their god in a show of humility; others signal scorn the same way.