Author Archives

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Paul Auster: ‘I Feel Utterly Astonished That We Could Have Come to This’

In a candid interview at the Guardian, author Paul Auster — who turns 70 next month — discusses his breadth of work over the decades, American life and politics in the age of Trump, and his new novel, 4321, which he refers to as the biggest book of his life.

“I’ve been struggling ever since Trump won to work out how to live my life in the years ahead,” he says. And he has decided to act: “I have come to the conclusion to accept something that has been offered to me again and again over the years – to become president of PEN America. I have been vice-president, and secretary, but I’ve never wanted to take on the full burden. I’ll start early in 2018. I’m going to speak out as often as I can, otherwise I don’t think I can live with myself.”

In 4321 the young Fergusons react to landmark events of 1960s US history: the civil rights movement and JF Kennedy’s assassination, the Vietnam war and the student protests at Columbia University in 1968. I ask Auster if there any connections to be made between then and now. “Tumultuous as those times were, they weren’t as depressing as what’s going on today,” he reflects. “How little has changed in American life since then. Race is still a very big problem. Stupid foreign policy decisions are still being made. And the country is just as divided now as it was then. It seems as though America has always been split between the people who believe in the individual above everything else, and those people who believe we’re responsible for one another.”

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‘Then Again, Maybe They’re Just Birds’: One Farmer’s Bald-Eagle Problem

Harris is an idealist, the kind of all-natural farmer whose cows finish on grass, whose birds run free, whose goats and sheep transform overgrown land. His faith in biodiverse, sustainable methods has only been affirmed by his multimillion-dollar annual revenues. And not that he would, but shooting a bald eagle is punishable by a $100,000 fine and a year in prison. Whatever was to be done about the eagles, Harris’s farm would work with nature, not fight against it. But as he would discover, that’s not as easy as it sounds.

“Now, you know John Muir said: In nature, when you pull a string, you see that everything’s connected?” Harris lamented to me later. “This is a good example of that.”

What happens when your chickens are killed by predators protected by law? At The New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Williams reports on the farming hardships posed by bald eagles and what one family farm in Bluffon, Georgia, is trying to do about it.

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‘Not Too Much, Not Too Little’: Programming Luck Into Video Games

In fully digital video games, luck is even more deeply baked into the experience, and must be actively simulated. When the soccer ball sails past the goalkeeper in FIFA, or when, inexplicably, a herd of race cars slows down to allow you to catch up, a game designer’s hand has just acted to provide some ghostly rigging. The effect of this manipulation is to flatter you and thereby keep you engaged. But it’s a trick that must be deployed subtly. A player who senses that he’s secretly being helped by the game will feel patronized; after all, luck is only luck if it’s truly unpredictable.

Which is where the problems begin.

— At Nautilis, Simon Parkin examines the responsibilities and challenges of engineering luck into video games.

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‘We Have a Lot of Firepower — and We Will Persevere’: California vs. Trump

The journalist and historian Carey McWilliams once called California “the great exception.” McWilliams was writing in the 1940s as he tried to make sense of the first 100 years of the state’s turbulent history. But McWilliams’s idea that California is a singular place, a nation-state unto itself, has never felt truer than it does now.

On the same night that Americans narrowly elected Donald Trump, Californians voted overwhelmingly in favor of his rival, Hillary Clinton. They sent 39 Democrats to the House of Representatives out of 53 seats. They elected Kamala Harris, a liberal Democrat whose father is Jamaican and whose mother is Indian, to the U.S. Senate. They gave Democrats supermajorities in the state Legislature. They passed ballot propositions to legalize recreational use of marijuana, raise the tobacco tax, ban high-capacity magazines, relax parole rules for nonviolent felons, increase transparency in the legislative process, repeal the decades-old limits on bilingual education, and extend higher income taxes on the wealthy. Elsewhere in the country, the Democratic Party lay in tatters. In California, it was dominant.

In the first piece in a series at The California Sunday Magazine, Andy Kroll sets out to explore the relationship between California and Donald Trump’s Washington.

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The Mysterious Disappearance of Keith Davis

Davis boarded the MV Victoria No. 168 in Vacamonte, Panama, on August 5, 2015, departing a few days later for a voyage that was supposed to last between two and a half and three months. The Victoria was operated by Gran Victoria International, a Panamanian company, but had ownership ties to Japan, and was staffed with a Taiwanese captain and a Burmese and Chinese crew. It was not an ordinary fishing boat; the Victoria was a tuna transshipment vessel, a kind of mother ship for smaller commercial boats, with large refrigerated holds that allowed boats to offload their catches at sea and avoid the hassle of making regular trips back to port. Such an arrangement also makes it easier to hide illegal shark fins and drugs among the fish transfers. Davis had worked on transshipment vessels before and knew they were among the most dangerous for observers.

“The ship is a little bit different. I’ll tell you about it once I get back,” Davis wrote in an email to his father, John Davis, a few weeks into his trip. The two were close, and John often received emails from his son while he was out at sea—nothing about this one suggested he was in any danger.

Fisheries observer Keith Davis monitored and collected data on fishing vessels, devoting his life to protecting the seas—until he went missing. Sarah Tory reports on his disappearance at Hakai Magazine.

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An American in a Strange Land: A Journalist’s Tour of a Divided Country

After living abroad in cities like Beijing, New Delhi, and Rome and watching the United States from afar for more than a decade, New York Times correspondent Jim Yardley returns to find a country he doesn’t recognize.

This summer, I decided I wanted to explore this place that had become a foreign country to me. I didn’t understand what had happened since I left, why so many people seemed so disillusioned and angry. I planned a zigzag route, revisiting places where I once lived or worked, a 29-day sprint through 11 states (and four time zones). I knew I would be moving too fast to make any sweeping declaration about the state of America, and I wouldn’t ask people which presidential candidate they were voting for. I was more interested in why they were so anxious about the present and the future. I wanted to find out why the country was fragmenting rather than binding together. Most of all I wanted to see with my own eyes what had changed — and so much had changed.

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America’s HGTV Obsession: A Reading List

Let’s get this out of the way: I can binge-watch House Hunters for hours. In the past, I’ve devoured episodes of House Hunters International and Tiny House Hunters as well, but the original House Hunters gives me the most satisfying fix: its predictable formula has never felt stale, even after many seasons.

America’s most popular home renovation and real estate network, HGTV—the home of House Hunters, its spinoffs, and a growing network of lifestyle porn—succeeds because of its consistent programming in useful escapism. In a single episode, I might learn how to refresh the color palette of my bathroom or see how much space $800K will buy me in the vacation rental market in Maui. In a half-hour dose, I can experience that strangely pleasurable thing called House Hunters rage: I’m inspired, enlightened, and incensed in equal measure, my voyeuristic side piqued by the entitled and pointless arguments over whether the kitchen countertop is the right shade of granite or whether an older house has enough “character.”

Regardless of what you think of its shows, HGTV knows the formula for successful programming. Here are six reads that touch on why this network can dish out exactly what its audience wants, hour after hour. Read more…

Roald Dahl at 100: A Reading List

When I was in elementary school in the eighties, being read to in class was such a treat — and something I really miss. The weekly reading hour that I looked forward to the most was when my favorite librarian came to read a few chapters from a Roald Dahl story. (And over the years, she read them all.) I could hardly wait to hear the next prank Mrs. Twit would play on Mr. Twit in The Twits. Another favorite, The Witches, remains one of the stories from my childhood that really opened me up to the magic of reading. Dahl’s whimsical yet macabre and darkly comic stories piqued my imagination for the first time in those years, and — being a shy, quiet kid — showed me that anything was possible.

September 13 is Roald Dahl’s birthday, and 2016 marks 100 years since his birth. To celebrate, here are seven stories about the bestselling novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, fighter pilot, and British spy. Read more…

Walls and Fences: A Reading List

In a 2012 piece, Paul Theroux recounts a visit to Nogales, Arizona, which borders the city of Nogales in Sonora, Mexico. He is fixated on the fence that divides the two and asks: “Do you go through, or stay home?”

We build fences and erect walls to keep things in, or to keep people out. But walls and fences can represent much more: political uncertainty, writer’s block, or a childhood lived in a city cut in half, like Berlin. These reads explore walls and fences as physical borders, but also things we’ve built in our minds.

1. “Fences: A Brexit Diary.” (Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books, August 2016)

“When everyone’s building a fence, isn’t it a true fool who lives out in the open?” Zadie Smith reflects on the state of Britain after the Brexit vote. Read more…

A Search for the Man Who Saved My Parents’ Lives

During World War II, John Temple’s parents hid in a Budapest cellar with a French doctor, underneath a home that German soldiers had made their headquarters. After they separated from the doctor, they never reconnected. For the next 70 years, they wondered what had happened to this courageous man who saved their lives. Curious to piece together the past after his parents died, Temple embarked on a search to find this man, known to him only as Dr. Lanusse:

When the book arrived from Europe, for the first time I saw my parents’ lives from the outside. It was like watching a movie, in French, without subtitles. A very dramatic, frightening movie co-starring my mother and father. I had heard snippets from them about living beneath German troops. But I had never heard it as a coherent story, with a beginning and an end. I had struggled to picture it, and couldn’t imagine how my parents survived. And then I read:

We heard a noise above our heads. It was the sound of boots, and then the sound of many boots. We didn’t have time to ask ourselves whether they were German, Russian or Hungarian boots before we heard footsteps in the stairway to our cellar. A German soldier burst in, machine gun in hand, just as surprised to see all of us with our hands up as we were to see him.

I was there, with my parents, nearly 10 years before my own birth. It was terrifying.

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