Video length: 28:01

Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker:

Refugee stories often focus on transit, for obvious reasons. Children travel thousands of miles unaccompanied, hiding in train stations and surviving on wild fruit; men are beaten, jailed, and swindled just for the chance to make it on a boat that, if it doesn’t capsize and kill them, will allow them to try their luck in other dangerous seas. But in his new novel, “Exit West,” Mohsin Hamid, the author of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” tells a story about migration in which the refugee’s journey is compressed into an instant. (An excerpt from the novel ran in this magazine.) In the world of “Exit West,” migration doesn’t involve rubber rafts or bloodied feet but, rather, “doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away.”

When the novel opens, rumors of those doors have started circulating in a nameless, besieged country, where Saeed and Nadia, the book’s protagonists, live. They reside, at first, in an ordinary world. “In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her,” the book begins. The novel’s sentences tend toward the long and orotund: “It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are puttering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.” That last phrase is a statement of purpose for both migration and romance. This is a love story, too.

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Romeo Vitelli in Providentia:

As one of the leading French mathematicians of his generation and author of two books on elementary geometry, Jacques Hadamard was always open to new mathematical ideas. When he received a mathematical proof in the mail from a previously unknown mathematician named Andre Bloch, Hadamard was mesmerized by its elegance. The proof related to a branch of elementary geometry involving paratactic circles, systems of two circles with orthogonal planes with the intersection being the common diameter of the two circles and cut according to a harmonic division. According to Bloch, parataxy remained invariant under inversion and any inversion with respect to a point situated on one of them transforms them into a circle and it's axis.

Hadamard was so intrigued by Bloch's discovery that he immediately decided to invite him to dinner. Since he had no other way of contacting Bloch, Hadamard wrote to the return address of 57 Grand Rue, Saint-Maurice with the invitation. Bloch wrote back that a visit would be impossible but asked the great mathematician to visit him instead. It was only when Jacques Hadamard finally took him up on his offer that he discovered why Bloch was unable to come to him: 57 Grand Rue, Saint-Maurice was the address of the Charenton lunatic asylum (now the Esquiral hospital) where Andre Bloch was an inmate. He had been involuntarily committed to the hospital following a brutal triple murder in 1917 and would never be allowed to leave. Although Hadamard was astonished by his discovery, he and Bloch talked at length about mathematics and he learned more about the inmate's story.

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Lisa Feldman Barrett in Popular Science:

For my daughter’s twelfth birthday, we exploited the power of simulation (and had some fun) by throwing a “gross foods” party. When her guests arrived, we served them pizza doctored with green food coloring so the cheese looked like fuzzy mold, and peach gelatin laced with bits of vegetables to look like vomit. For drinks, we served white grape juice in medical urine sample cups. Everybody was exuberantly disgusted (it was perfect twelve-year-old humor), and several guests could not bring themselves to touch the food as they involuntarily simulated vile tastes and smells. The pièce de résistance, however, was the party game we played after lunch: a simple contest to identify foods by their smell. We used mashed baby food—peaches, spinach, beef, and so on—and artfully smeared it on diapers, so it looked exactly like baby poo. Even though the guests knew that the smears were food, several actually gagged from the simulated smell.

Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.

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Adil Najam in Newsline:

The problem with history is that it just keeps happening. Most of the time, it happens and few take notice. At least not until it is too late. At other times, although not very often, history goes into overdrive and it cannot be ignored. This is such a time.

It would be both, premature and pompous to proclaim that a new New World Order has emerged. But it is clear that whatever the world order was, it is now imploding before our eyes.

However, those who had long lamented – not without justification – that the world order was unjust, hypocritical and callous, should heed caution before they break out in celebration. Implosions, after all, are messy affairs. And what seems to be emerging, at least for now, is even less fair, blatantly dishonest, and certainly not compassionate. In fact, it is anything but.

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Jessie Wender in National Geographic:

In honor of International Women's Day, we asked seven National Geographic photographers to reflect on a time where being a woman played a pivotal role in documenting a particular story, whether it be in gaining privileged access to a situation or bringing a nuanced approach to a subject. From Lynsey Addario's embed with an all-female combat patrol unit to Erika Larsen's intimate portrait of a woman with a double mastectomy, these images show the power of a shared sisterhood and exemplify the necessity to see the important stories of our time through a woman's lens.

Amy Toensing

I love how being a woman can be an instant ticket to community, like when I was at a Bedouin wedding in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. The scene was incredible with camel races, feasting, and dancing. When I told one of the hosts I had a present for the bride they suggested I give it to her myself. In traditional Bedouin culture, men and women who are not from the same family don’t often mix, but because I am a woman, I was allowed. They led me to a house where access was restricted to women and immediate male relatives of the bride. I made this picture while sitting next to the bride as these beautiful young girls danced in her honor. We didn’t speak the same language, but we connected.

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Zack Colman in Christian Science Monitor:

Fatima Ait Moussa paces in front of 13 women sitting on the floor of a rectangular room in this village in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. She’s shy, avoiding most eye contact, but Ms. Moussa is an accomplished woman. She commands the room with a familial tone and motherly smile.

“Who is your husband?” she shouts out.

“Argan!” they respond in unison. Moussa, dressed in a flowing black djellaba, repeats her question. One person responds, “Argan is my wallet!”

In reality, argan isn’t literally a husband or a wallet. It’s a tree that happens to play a vital role in sustaining the livelihoods of these entrepreneurial farmers. For the 149 women spread across 20 villages in Moussa’s cooperative, the trees and the oils they provide – used in expensive cosmetics, soaps, and food products – are the primary source of income. Moussa’s actual husband died in the mid-1990s, saddling her with massive debt. Around that time, she witnessed a similarly cash-strapped woman try, unsuccessfully, to convince a grocer to accept argan oil as payment. The encounter sparked the idea for the business venture she now runs. It’s a success, judging by the women’s enthusiasm and the framed certificates and photographs with leading politicians that decorate her office. Yet the cooperative is also beset by serious challenges, from drought and climate change to deforestation and global competition, that squeeze the women’s $5 daily incomes.

What’s happening here is emblematic of forces that reach far beyond Moussa’s venture in these arid, windswept mountains of southwestern Morocco. Worldwide, 3.4 billion people live in rural areas, often in poverty and with lifestyles that expose them disproportionately to the effects of changes in Earth’s warming climate. From Afghanistan to Bolivia, as well as in large swaths of Africa, many of them cultivate land that’s dry or growing drier. The challenge for farm communities is to adapt and respond before climate change starts to erode agricultural productivity. For governments and development groups, the challenge is broader: They are recognizing that it’s not just that climate change is affecting farmers, it’s also that farmers are affecting the climate. While plants like argan trees can help store excess carbon that would otherwise add to the world’s emissions, many agricultural practices create greenhouse gases. They, in fact, account for about a quarter of such emissions worldwide.

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John Freeman in Literary Hub:

Sharon Olds can still remember how furious editors became when she started submitting her poems, 40 years ago. “They came back often with very angry notes,” the 74-year-old poet says, sitting in her small, light-filled apartment overlooking NYU’s campus in Greenwich Village. We’re speaking on a warm afternoon last summer, before the news blossomed into an ongoing outrage. This memory of hers stirs up bewilderment like a warning. For two hours, however, the future president’s name doesn’t pass either of our lips. Wearing sweats and a hand-me-down t-shirt, her face sculpted by curiosity, Olds is illuminated, patient and quick to praise: a benevolent siren on an island as a storm approaches in the distance. “They used to say, ‘Why don’t you try the Ladies Home Journal?’ she continues, her face now crinkling into a frown. ‘We are a literary magazine.’ Very snooty, very put-me-down… women, you know… poems about children?”

A season later, even if bragging about grabbing women by the genitals did not derail a presidential campaign, Olds’ poems about children and desire, about so-called women’s issues—family, and how the complications of loving what can nearly break you—continue to make her one of Americas’s most beloved poets. Her books sell tens of thousands of copies, her poems were viral before there was an internet. They were and still are taped to the inside of dorm rooms, copied down into notebooks, covered in songs, even tattooed onto readers’ bodies. (“Do what you are going to do, / and I will tell about it” is a popular line). They also render novelists speechless. I once stood in a room of Pulitzer-, Booker- and Nobel Prize-winning writers—“Is that Sharon Olds?” was the question I kept hearing the novelists under 50 asking of the woman with long grey hippy hair tied up in pigtails.

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George Philip LeBourdais in The Point:

The diminutive iceberg was an afterthought by the time it broke apart. I was riding a soft inflatable boat towards one of the great glaciers of Spitsbergen, an island located north of Norway and east of Greenland. Spitsbergen is part of the remote archipelago of Svalbard, deep within the Arctic Circle and about halfway between mainland Europe and the North Pole. A tall ship had carried me there along with a troop of photographers and writers and scientists for an improbable artist residency. We stared at the glacier’s calving face in Fuglefjord, where it stops gouging the earth and splinters into the sea. We were trying to catch one of those awesome, humbling instances when ice splits like marble in a quarry and crashes into the water. Momentary respects had been paid to a distinctive but small iceberg (no bigger than a stout Victorian house in San Francisco) but we puttered past en route to the glacier itself—where we thought the action was.

We shuddered when the iceberg broke at our backs. Turning in unison with my shipmates, I felt the air change. It had become so fresh it was almost repellent, as though an ancient sepulcher had cracked open to release a saturated gush of oxygen. Dark, clear ice below the berg’s surface began to rotate upwards, cranking horologically into its new position. After a collective gasp, we hushed and watched.

Once a land on the margins, the Arctic has become a global center of attention for climatologists, environmental activists and tourists. The rhetoric of the sublime is no longer required to imagine the epochal changes that happen there; we can watch the footage ourselves. Time-lapse videography has made the retreat of the world’s glaciers dramatically clear. James Balog, photographer for the award-winning 2014 documentary Chasing Ice and director of the Extreme Ice Survey, calls ice “the canary in the global coal mine … the place where we can see and touch and feel climate change.”

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Shashi Tharoor in The Guardian:

Many modern apologists for British colonial rule in India no longer contest the basic facts of imperial exploitation and plunder, rapacity and loot, which are too deeply documented to be challengeable. Instead they offer a counter-argument: granted, the British took what they could for 200 years, but didn’t they also leave behind a great deal of lasting benefit? In particular, political unity and democracy, the rule of law, railways, English education, even tea and cricket?

Indeed, the British like to point out that the very idea of “India” as one entity (now three, but one during the British Raj), instead of multiple warring principalities and statelets, is the incontestable contribution of British imperial rule.

Unfortunately for this argument, throughout the history of the subcontinent, there has existed an impulsion for unity. The idea of India is as old as the Vedas, the earliest Hindu scriptures, which describe “Bharatvarsha” as the land between the Himalayas and the seas. If this “sacred geography” is essentially a Hindu idea, Maulana Azad has written of how Indian Muslims, whether Pathans from the north-west or Tamils from the south, were all seen by Arabs as “Hindis”, hailing from a recognisable civilisational space. Numerous Indian rulers had sought to unite the territory, with the Mauryas (three centuries before Christ) and the Mughals coming the closest by ruling almost 90% of the subcontinent. Had the British not completed the job, there is little doubt that some Indian ruler, emulating his forerunners, would have done so.

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Emily Wolahan at The Quarterly Conversation:

What I most appreciate about In Praise of Defeat, however, is that it coveys the length and breadth of Laâbi’s career as an artist. His early work is very powerful, but since 1985 he has been in exile in Paris (though he has recently been able to return occasionally to Morocco). Because Laâbi’s political activism and imprisonment came at the beginning of his career, most of Laâbi’s poems are written in the thirty years since his release. As with anyone who suffers something as horrific as imprisonment and torture, it’s not something Laâbi can leave behind. And the experience permanently places him in the in-between. In “Suns Under Arrest,” dedicated to Nelson Mandela and Abraham Serfaty, he writes:

The prison that our man inhabits
is round and square
near and far away
it is of yesterday and tomorrow
subterranean and lost in the clouds
carnivorous and vegetarian
it is a hutch near a mosque in a shantytown

By evoking the in-between, the prison our man inhabits also becomes any place where we are caught in stasis.

Laâbi is the man in prison who survived and therefore he has the opportunity to continue to develop as an artist. This is evident in the wonderful “Fragments of Forgotten Genesis” from 1998. Laâbi adopts the form of fragments, in between sentence and utterance, and shifts between witness, memory and reflection.

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Dwight Garner at the NYT:

Herself the daughter of Turkish immigrants and a graduate of Harvard, Batuman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them” (2010). That book was a witty and melancholy tour de force about reading and love and the pleasures of travel as against tourism.

That same voice is poured into “The Idiot.” It’s memorable to witness Selin, via Batuman, absorb the world around her. Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations.

Only Batuman would send a character in search of new clothes and have her think, “what was ‘Cinderella,’ if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?”

Selin notes the “death roar” of an institutional toilet. She observes how, lighting a cigarette, “when the flame came into contact with the paper, it made a sound like the needle coming down on a record player.”

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Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Shortly before Angela Carter’s death in 1992 — from lung cancer, at age 51, after a lifetime of smoking — I reviewed her last novel, the marvel-filled, magnificent “Wise Children,” a century-long saga covering the melodramatic lives and amours of an English theatrical family. Suffused throughout with a Shakespearean air of enchantment, it included an Ophelia-like mad scene, myriad echoes of “King Lear” and “The Tempest,” twins substituting for each other with lovers, knockings at the gate, rude mechanicals, a kitschy Hollywood production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” near-incest, fathers belatedly recognizing daughters, the dead returning to life and, on every page, an atmosphere of mummery and carnival where, in the end, every Jack gets his Jill and all’s right with the world — hey nonny-no! I loved it then, and still do.

Nonetheless, Edmund Gordon’s “The Invention of Angela Carter,” while an exceptionally thoughtful and engrossing biography, has left me wondering whether it’s such a good idea to read about contemporary writers one admires. In the case of Carter, Gordon traces an inner life of intense self-scrutiny, marked at times by melancholy desperation, an almost hysterical search for love, and periodic callousness toward family and friends.

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