Philip Graham at Persuasion:
My wife Alma Gottlieb is an anthropologist, and for years we had lived in small villages in West Africa, among the Beng people of Côte d’Ivoire. In 1993, during our third extended stay, news of my father’s death back in the U.S. arrived in the village, too late for us to return for his funeral. Stunned, I couldn’t decide what to do, how to mourn, until village elders offered to give my American father the ceremonies of a traditional Beng funeral. After days of elaborate ritual, the village’s religious leader, Kokora Kouassi, confided to us that my father now visited him in his dreams—from Wurugbé, the Beng afterlife—with messages of farewell and comfort. The Beng believe the dead exist in an invisible social world beside the living, and Kouassi’s dreams were meant to assure me that my father wasn’t far away at all. Instead, he hovered invisibly beside me.
Soon after, I began to receive, unbidden, the first sketches of ten fictional characters. I understood immediately that they were all ghosts—American ghosts, but existing in an afterlife similar to Wurugbé. And they were all surprises. Among them was a car repairman who discovers in his afterlife the pleasures of Books on Tape; a 1950s entomologist hiding her sexual identity who, as a ghost, continues her research in an ants’ nest; a Civil War-era teenager beset by an ambiguous religious vision; the ghost of a Depression-era reporter who leaves far behind the restrictions of her former newspaper’s women’s craft page; and above all, Jenny, the ghost of a three-year-old child who, through her longing, encounters and absorbs the memories of these diverse ghosts—ghosts whose lives and afterlives encompass overlapping eras of nearly 200 years of American history. Jenny’s embrace of these inadvertent mentors opens within her windows of empathy into the difficult, essential gift of otherness.
For the next 30 years, I wrote and rewrote this novel, while publishing four other books of fiction and nonfiction. Learning the territories of this afterlife that had risen from somewhere deep within me, as well as Jenny’s challenge of balancing a growing crowd of selves within her, became the one steady creative project of my life.
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Can you pass me the whatchamacallit? It’s right over there next to the thingamajig.
T
In January,
Nobel Laureate and a psychologist, best known for his work on psychology of judgment and decision-making as well as behavioural economics, 
Covid was a privatized pandemic. It is this technocratic, privatized model that is its lasting legacy and that will define our approach to the next pandemic. It solves some problems, but on balance it’s a recipe for disaster. There are some public goods that should never be sold. Dr. Gounder checked off the basic mechanisms by which public health experts confront a pandemic: They create systems to understand and track its cause and spread; they identify the people most at risk; they deploy scalable mechanisms of protection, like air and water sanitation; they distribute necessary tools, such as vaccines and protective gear; they gather and communicate accurate information; and they try to balance individual freedoms and mass restrictions.
In the introduction to his latest book, How to Feed the World, Vaclav Smil writes that “numbers are the antidote to wishful thinking.” That one line captures why I’ve been such a devoted reader of this curmudgeonly Canada-based Czech academic for so many years. Across his decades of research and writing, Vaclav has tackled some of the biggest questions in energy, agriculture, and public health—not by making grand predictions, but by breaking down complex problems into measurable data.
ELAINE MAY DIDN’T SET OUT to become a director. What she really wanted to do was write. Her first film, A New Leaf, came about partly because it was 1968 and Paramount knew it would look good to hire a woman director. And partly because May wouldn’t sell her script without being guaranteed director approval—the only way to ensure her work didn’t get turned into something else entirely. The studio said no but told her she could direct the film herself; they also wouldn’t let her cast the female lead, but the part was hers if she wanted it. As May tells it, she had been offered $200,000 for the script alone, but as writer-director-star, she received just a quarter of the original fee. “You can’t expect to get that much the first time you direct,” her manager explained. Charles Bluhdorn, the industrialist who owned Paramount, told May that he was going to make her the next Ida Lupino. On the first day of shooting, when the crew asked May where she wanted the camera, she couldn’t find it. “I began sort of on one foot,” May remembered, “and just continued that way.” It was a fitting start for a woman who had become famous for improvising.
In March 2019, heavy rains in California led to a brilliant carpet of orange poppies in Walker Canyon, part of a 500,000-acre habitat reserve in the Temescal Mountains southeast of Los Angeles. Run by a state conservation agency, the reserve was mainly a local attraction until a twenty-four-year-old Instagram and YouTube influencer with tens of thousands of followers posted two selfies of herself amid the poppies. The result, as technology critic Nicholas Carr explains in his book Superbloom (named after the viral hashtag #superbloom), brought a Woodstock-size influx of selfie-seekers who “clogged roads and highways,” “trampled the delicate flowers,” and in general “offered a portrait in miniature of our frenzied, farcical, information-saturated time.”
‘I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception … telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas … Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming … Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies.’
T