Kate Brown at Eurozine:

The race to relegate the Chernobyl disaster to history books shows that humans don't have the patience for the time scale that nuclear accidents require. The period for half of the cesium and strontium fallout to decay elapsed at thirty years. It will take another thirty years to extinguish the remaining half. Americium as it decays over several hundred years issues radioactive iodine, a powerful and harmful, short-lived isotope. Plutonium will continue to pulse with destructive energy for thousands of years.

In the dawning age of the Anthropocene, humans are grappling with new temporal orders presented by a mounting, steadily accruing layer of toxins and carbons produced and released by human activity. One thousand years from now geologists will find substances in the sedimentary layer, among them radioactive isotopes, which they will date starting about 1945. The scientists of the future will be able to track the remnants of plutonium, uranium and other isotopes as they multiplied on the earth's surface in the decades of nuclear weapons testing followed by decades of furious reactor construction. They will locate hot spots of concentrated activity, but generally the isotopes will embrace the planet like the sweet icing glaze encircling a donut: existing everywhere, holding fast, spiking the flavour of life.

Looking back now, it is easy to see how resistant scientists were in the months after the accident to accepting the fact that Chernobyl was a problem with very long legs. In August 1986, Soviet and international scientist met at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. The anxious body of experts rushed to tell the public that the accident was under control.

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Edward White at The Paris Review:

Evliya so adored the bustling energy of Istanbul that he dedicated the first volume of the Seyahatname to it. In his telling, it was a place of learning, culture, and endless sensory stimulation, where acrobats from Arabia, Persia, Yemen, and India performed in the streets, and where “thousands of old and young lovers” exposed their “rosy pink bodies, like peeled almonds” to the summer sun, swimming and canoodling in the open. That this tribute came from a man who repeatedly described himself as a “dervish”—a man who during the course of his life recited from memory the whole of the Koran more than a thousand times—reveals something vital about his world and his mindset. To Evliya’s mind, the divine and the earthly were bound tightly together; sensual pleasure was not inimical to piety.

Despite his wanderlust, Evliya was actually a pretty lousy traveler: a fussy eater, prone to discomfort, with a fear of boats. And he didn’t travel light, accompanied as he was by mules, camels, libraries of books, and cases of fine clothing, all attended to by at least half a dozen slaves, frequently more. This entourage was itself usually part of the larger retinue of an ambassador on a diplomatic mission or a military leader pursuing territorial expansion, with Evliya tagging along in the role of a glorified jester. Once the jaunt was over he would return to Istanbul to regale the court, including the Sultan himself, with tales of the places he had seen and the scrapes he had gotten into.

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Helen Joyce in The Economist:

It all began with “Star Trek”, or more precisely with James T. Kirk, the captain of the Enterprise, and his first officer, the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock. The show, which debuted in 1966, was no immediate hit: it was nearly cancelled twice before finally being taken off the air just three years later, after 79 episodes. But throughout the following decade, as it was endlessly repeated, a cult built up around it. Films and new series followed. Now, a half-century later, its influence on popular culture is clear. Its catchphrases (“Beam me up, Scotty”; “Live long and prosper”) have entered the language. Its adventures are entwined with real-life space exploration in the public’s mind. The show’s creators thought Kirk – handsome, outgoing, irresistible to curvaceous aliens – would draw female viewers. But many women found the slight, buttoned-up Spock at least as appealing. Some perhaps identified with the difficulty of being a Vulcan in a man’s world, or his struggle to repress his emotions (Vulcan hyper-rationality is actually a species-wide convention to suppress passions so turbulent they would otherwise tear society apart). But above all, female viewers were intrigued by the relationship between the two men. They risked their lives for each other, and stuck together through thick and thin. They were clearly more than colleagues. Were they, perhaps, more than friends?

For some female fans, the answer was clear. In “slash” fan-fiction, as it was known by the end of the 1970s (for the punctuation mark in Kirk/Spock, or K/S), they made explicit an erotic bond between the two men that the show’s creators had not intended to imply. They wrote slash in fan-produced magazines, or fanzines (the first, launched in 1967, was named Spockanalia) and shared their obsession at “Star Trek” conventions. Some soft-core, some highly explicit, these stories circulated via invitation-only mailing lists or could be bought from dealers who kept them under the counter at conventions. Even mildly suggestive slash was seen as more transgressive than the steamiest heterosexual pornography.

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Galya Diment in the Times Literary Supplement:

Dostoevsky had “grand mal” seizures; mine were the simple partial ones. And they may have made me a much more discerning reader of the very same Nabokov who was the subject of the conference where my first seizure took place. I write about Nabokov and teach him every year, which means that I constantly re-read him (“One cannot read a book”, Nabokov famously advised his students; “one can only re-read it”). And certain passages in his autobiographical and fictional writings – amounting overall to a kind of obsession – started to come into sharper focus: he, too, must have suffered from some form of epilepsy.

Nabokov is, in fact, as generous in distributing epilepsy among his characters as was Dostoevsky who, as I will discuss below, may have been the main reason why the author of Lolita was not more open about his affliction. Nabokov’s personal testimonies do, however, at times approach the confessional.

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Jennifer Oullette in Gizmodo:

Piltdown Man is one of the most famous scientific hoaxes in history. A new paper in Royal Society Open Science provides compelling evidence that there was just one forger, rather than many. Also, the bones used to create the fakes came from a single orang-utan specimen and at least two human skulls.

“The people at the Natural History Museum [in London] have never stopped looking at Piltdown Man,” lead author Isabel de Groote, a paleoanthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.S., told Gizmodo. As new technologies become available, the specimens are re-examined, in hopes of shedding light on the remaining mysteries. This time around, the analyses included CT scanning, ancient DNA analysis, spectroscopy, and radiocarbon dating.

When paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward and lawyer and amateur antiquarian Charles Dawson announced their discovery of unusual fossils in a gravel pit near the town of Piltdown in December 1912, it caused an immediate sensation. The two men claimed to have excavated human skull fragments and a distinctly ape-like jawbone with two worn molar teeth, along with some stone tools and the fossilized remains of animals.

Since the bones were found next to each other in the pit, surely, the men argued, they all came from a single creature—technically called Eoanthopus dawsoni, but soon nicknamed Piltdown Man. Many hailed the find as the long-sought missing link proving that man and apes were evolutionarily linked.

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Nausicaa Renner in The Nation:

There’s a game I sometimes play with my friends, and it’s not unlike 20 Questions: One player picks a thing to keep in mind, and then the other players take turns trying to guess it. But instead of asking yes-or-no questions, players will ask, “Is it more like X or more like Y?” Say I pick “cloud” as the thing; my friends might ask me if it’s more like art or more like grass. That’s a tough one, but I would answer, “It’s more like grass, but it’s like art in that it’s lofty.” While 20 Questions works by a process of elimination, hacking away at the possibilities rationally and categorically, this game is much less direct and more comparative, working by poetic similarity. It’s good for long car rides; it can take a while, but sometimes not as long as you might think.

In The Philosopher: A History in Six Types, Justin E.H. Smith plays a similar game with philosophy: Is it more like ballet or more like dance? It’s easy to see what Smith is getting at—dance is a general category and ballet a specific one. What’s more, ballet is a Western practice, whereas dance has emerged in cultures globally; and while dance is an innate human phenomenon, ballet is not. Philosophy, as is its wont, doesn’t fit easily into either category. Is philosophy practiced by a “specialized and privileged elite within a broader society”? Does everyone in society do it in some way? If philosophy were more like dance, it would be ubiquitous. But it isn’t a practice that we see in every culture—in fact, Smith asserts, it has only arisen organically as a defined practice twice in human history, once in Greece and once in medieval India. But if philosophy were more like ballet, we should be able to see it as part of something larger than itself.

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Nicola Lagioia in The New Yorker:

Elena Ferrante: Where do I start? In my childhood, my adolescence. Some of the poor Neapolitan neighborhoods were crowded, yes, and rowdy. To gather oneself, so to speak, was physically impossible. One learned very early to have the greatest concentration amid the greatest disruption. The idea that every “I” is largely made up of others and by the others wasn’t theoretical; it was a reality. To be alive meant to collide continually with the existence of others and to be collided with, the results being at times good-natured, at others aggressive, then again good-natured. The dead were brought into quarrels; people weren’t content to attack and insult the living—they naturally abused aunts, cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents who were no longer in the world. Of course, today I have small quiet places where I can gather myself—but I still feel that the idea is slightly ridiculous. I’ve described women at moments when they are absolutely alone. But in their heads there is never silence or even focus. The most absolute solitude, at least in my experience, and not just narrative experience, is always, to paraphrase the title of a very good book by Hrabal, too loud. To the writer, no person is ever definitively relegated to silence, even if we long ago broke off relations with that person—out of anger, by chance, or because the person died. I can’t even think without the voices of others, much less write. And I’m not talking only about relatives, female friends, enemies. I’m talking about others, men and women who today exist only in images: in television or newspaper images, sometimes heartrending, sometimes offensive in their opulence. And I’m talking about the past, about what we generally call tradition; I’m talking about all those others who were once in the world and who have acted or who now act through us. Our entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death. We are, as you say, interconnected. And we should teach ourselves to look deeply at this interconnection—I call it a tangle, or, rather, frantumaglia—to give ourselves adequate tools to describe it. In the most absolute tranquility or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others. And this crowd is certainly a blessing for literature.

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Thomas Berenato at The Point:

Logue’s long exposure to Homer cautioned him not to count your chickens before they hatch; asked the most important lesson life has taught him, he replied: “Count your blessings.” Logue, who marched to Aldermaston against the Bomb, understood that the rumor of war is an eternal murmur ever about to erupt into the wrath of Achilles, whose talking horse here pledges to leave his heroic master “not for dead, but dead.” More than disgust, violence as Homer saw it inspired in Logue a fatal hopelessness: war was the only god he could believe in; it alone was awesome enough to inspire his holy dread. He identified in the Iliad a stoic resignation to war’s ongoingness that attracted and revulsed him in equal measure. Logue innovates by transposing this dynamic into explicitly erotic terms. (His half-jealous Aphrodite calls our attention to Hera’s “gobstopper nipples.”) Rivalrous fear and sexual self-loathing will always be with us; in both love and war alike they manifest themselves as “the hatred human animals / Monotonously bear towards themselves.” What Logue admired most in Homer was his preternatural ability to match his muse against this terror on its own terms. “Homer keeps you on the move,” he said.

He found this same nerving, and unnerving, flickering quality in the work of Samuel Beckett, a friend. “It is not verse. It is not prose. It ‘floats,’” is how Logue once characterized the dialogue in Beckett’s plays unmetrical, but “broadly rhythmical,” and to that extent in sync with the jolting rhythm of life and death as it is felt along the heart. Less curt than Beckett but in search of the same sensation of verbal whiplash, Logue worked perpetual variations on a loose pentameter line. The reader should feel present, “there” in the fray, carried along by the carnage—and by the jokes. “Except humorously, our times cannot deal with these creatures,” he said of Homer’s gods and heroes.

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Henrik Bering at The New Criterion:

When we think of propaganda art, images of Soviet Stakhanovites furiously exceeding their production quotas, heroic tractor drivers on their mighty machines, and fresh-faced collective farm girls in abundant wheat fields fill the mind. Above it all rules Stalin, the Man of Steel, who comes in two basic versions: as the unshakable defender of Mother Russia against fascism, or as the bountiful father of the nation, whichever suits the occasion.

F. S. Shurkin’s Morning of our Fatherland from 1948 has it all: Stalin—the man who had dismissed the famine of 1932–33 as just a minor bureaucratic foul-up by a few overeager officials who were “dizzy with success”—positively glows with benevolence as he surveys the landscape, while the combine harvesters whir and the power lines sing. About the portrait, the wonderfully sycophantic artist has pronounced: “In the sound of the tractors, in the movement of the trains, in the fresh breath of the spring fields. In everything I saw and felt the image of the leader of the people.”

“Official” propaganda art, we have all been taught, is crude and laughably primitive, invariably inferior to real art. Except, of course, when it isn’t. And here the career of Jacques-Louis David is highly instructive. David became France’s leading artist during the nation’s most turbulent period, first acting as the high priest of the Revolution, then switching horses to become the celebrator-in-chief of Napoleon.

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Ingrid D. Rowland at The New York Review of Books:

There has never been a painter quite like Jheronimus van Aken, the Flemish master who signed his works as Jheronimus Bosch. His imagination ranged from a place beyond the spheres of Heaven to the uttermost depths of Hell, but for many of his earliest admirers the most striking aspect of his art was what they described as its “truth to nature.” The five hundredth anniversary of his death in 1516 has inspired two comprehensive exhibitions, at the Noordbrabants Museum in his hometown of ’s-Hertogenbosch and at Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado, as well as an ambitious project to analyze all of his surviving work, drawn, painted, and printed, according to the latest scientific techniques (the Bosch Research and Conservation Project). Yet despite all we have learned through these undertakings—and it is a great deal—the man his neighbors knew as “Joen the painter” remains as mysterious as ever.

How could it be otherwise with so strange and masterful an artist? His early admirers celebrated the boundless ingenuity of his work, but they also recognized the sureness of his hand and his unerringly observant eye. In the precision of his draftsmanship, his sensitivity to landscape, his fascination with animals, he shows some surprising affinities with his contemporary from Florence, Leonardo da Vinci—who else but Leonardo would have noticed, and recorded, as Bosch does, the way that evening light can turn the waters of a distant river into a radiant mirror? Both artists were fascinated by grotesque human faces, but Bosch also detailed grotesque human behavior with a bawdy abandon all his own. No matter how closely we look at his minutely particular works, there is always something more to see.

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Jeff Hecht in Nature:

On 19 June, several hundred thousand US fans of the television drama Game of Thrones went online to watch an eagerly awaited episode — and triggered a partial failure in the channel's streaming service. Some 15,000 customers were left to rage at blank screens for more than an hour. The channel, HBO, apologized and promised to avoid a repeat. But the incident was just one particularly public example of an increasingly urgent problem: with global Internet traffic growing by an estimated 22% per year, the demand for bandwidth is fast outstripping providers' best efforts to supply it.

Although huge progress has been made since the 1990s, when early web users had to use dial-up modems and endure 'the world wide wait', the Internet is still a global patchwork built on top of a century-old telephone system. The copper lines that originally formed the system's core have been replaced by fibre-optic cables carrying trillions of bits per second between massive data centres. But service levels are much lower on local links, and at the user end it can seem like the electronic equivalent of driving on dirt roads. The resulting digital traffic jams threaten to throttle the information-technology revolution. Consumers can already feel those constraints when mobile-phone calls become garbled at busy times, data connections slow to a crawl in crowded convention centres and video streams stall during peak viewing hours. Internet companies are painfully aware that today's network is far from ready for the much-promised future of mobile high-definition video, autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, telepresence and interactive 3D virtual-reality gaming.

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Robert L. Kehoe III in The Boston Review:

We are used to the Olympics being sold as boons to economic prosperity. But they never seem to make good on that promise, not least because local communities can’t benefit from structural improvements if they are never completed. As Vanessa Barbara recently reported from Rio de Janeiro, “Bricks and pipes are piled everywhere; a few workers lazily push wheelbarrows as if the Games were scheduled for 2017. Nobody knows what the construction sites will become, not even the people working on them.” Rife with commercial and political corruption, the games in Rio are only the latest example of a now-familiar trend. But once the spectacle begins the cameras will capture sixteen days of drama, our eyes will delight in moments of heart-stopping beauty, and the leaders of the XXXI Olympiad will echo their claim that anything done in the name of sport is above and beyond public scrutiny or political protest.

This is a far cry from the way the Greeks would have seen it. According to historian Nigel Spivey, the games of antiquity never ignored or hid from their political significance, serving as an unabashed display of military power. Far from an apolitical exercise, stadiums were

decked with the spoils of armed conflict. Altars were attended by specialists in sacrosanct military intelligence; events were contested to the point of serious injury and fatality; and the entire program of athletic ‘games’ could be rationalized as a set of drills for cavalry and infantry fighting.

In other words, “all games were war games.” If the spectacular events we now watch in high definition do not portray themselves this way, it is largely due to the father of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who worked hard to obscure the political nature of sport.

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David Auerbach in the LA Review of Books:

To find a personality that captures the sheer vacuousness of Trump’s anti-ideology, we have to turn to literature, and specifically to Robert Musil’s modernist masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. Begun in Austria in 1921 and left uncompleted at the time of Musil’s death in 1942, The Man Without Qualities is a surgical examination of the varieties of European intellectual pretense and folly in the years leading up to World War I. Musil’s work, begun in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, only became more urgent and desperate in the 1930s as events continued to bear out his direst assessments. The novel stands as a testament to the importance of maintaining independent, sober perception and thought in times of mass hysteria and madness.

The character who concerns us here is Christian Moosbrugger, a working-class murderer of women who becomes an object of fascination for many of the characters in the novel and for the Vienna they inhabit. While standing trial for the brutal killing of a prostitute, he becomes a celebrity due to his cavalier and eccentric manner:

During his trial Moosbrugger created the most unpredictable problems for his lawyer. He sat relaxed on his bench, like a spectator, and called out “Bravo!” every time the prosecutor made a point of what a public menace the defendant was, which Moosbrugger regarded as worthy of him, and gave out good marks to witnesses who declared that they had never noticed anything about him to indicate that he could not be held responsible for his actions.

The rationale for Moosbrugger’s behavior, Musil explains, is his overwhelming neediness, his desire to have himself recognized by others as a superior person:

He was clearly ill, but even if his obviously pathological nature provided the basis for his attitude, and this isolated him from other men, it somehow seemed to him a stronger and higher sense of his own self. His whole life was a comically and distressingly clumsy struggle to gain by force a recognition of this sense of himself.

Moosbrugger will gladly go to jail as long as it reinforces and perpetuates his fame. Yet this formal need for public attention is not backed up by any fixed essence.

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J. W. Mason in Evonomics:

I’ve felt for a while that most critiques of economics miss the mark. They start from the premise that economics is a systematic effort to understand the concrete social phenomena we call “the economy,” an effort whose methods unfortunately are unsound. But I don’t see any method at all.

It seems to me that Deirdre McCloskey was right: Economics is not the study of the economy. Economics is just what economists do. Economic theory is essentially a closed formal system; it’s a historical accident that there is some overlap between its technical vocabulary and the language used to describe concrete economic phenomena. Economics the discipline is to the economy, the sphere of social reality, as chess theory is to medieval history: The statement, say, that “queens are most effective when supported by strong bishops” might be reasonable in both domains, but studying its application in the one case will not help at all in applying it in in the other.

A few years ago Richard Posner said that he used to think economics meant the study of “rational” behavior in whatever domain, but after the financial crisis he decided it should mean the study of the behavior of the economy using whatever methodologies. (I can’t find the exact quote.) Descriptively, he was right the first time; but the point is, these are two different activities. Or to steal a line from my friend Suresh, the best way to think about what most economists do is as a kind of constrained-maximization poetry. It makes no more sense to ask “is it true” than of a haiku.

One consequence of this is that radical criticism of the realism or logical consistency of orthodox economics does nothing to get us closer to a positive understanding of the economy. Another consequence is that when we turn to concrete economic questions there isn’t really a “mainstream” at all. Left critics want to take academic orthodoxy, a right-wing political vision, and the economic policy preferred by the established authorities, and roll them into a coherent package. But I don’t think you can. I think there is a mix of common-sense opinions, political prejudices, conventional business practice, and pragmatic rules of thumb, supported in an ad hoc, opportunistic way by bits and pieces of economic theory. It’s not possible to knock over the whole tottering pile by pulling out a few foundational texts.

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Om Malik in The New Yorker:

We are ever more dependent on digital connectivity. Want to get somewhere? Tap the Uber app or ask Siri to give you directions. Want to buy diapers? Order them on Amazon—maybe even ask Alexa to order them for you—and have them delivered the next day. Want to check up on friends and family? Open Facebook. Each of these conveniences was adopted with astonishing speed, and demand for products and platforms that enable connection will remain huge. The Big Five provide those platforms of the future.

A skeptic might point out that the Big Five are reminiscent of the “Four Horsemen of Tech,” a moniker for Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and Cisco Systems coined by the CNBC commentator and hedge-fund manager Jim Cramer during the first Internet boom, in 1999. They grew at breakneck speed as the commercial Internet weaved its way into our lives. Three of the four companies’ fortunes have faded, but I would argue that is because they weren’t platforms.

A platform is essentially a business model that thrives because of the participation and value added from third parties with only incremental effort from the owner of the platform. Take Apple. With the iPhone and iPad, the company has put its iOS in the hands of hundreds of millions of people. That has allowed its active App Store to thrive—Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, recently tweeted that Apple has given away about fifty billion dollars to its developers. Assuming a thirty-per-cent cut for Apple, that means more than twenty billion dollars to Apple for little effort.

Size clearly has its advantages. No one would award Apple a gold medal for its Internet services, but the revenues from those services—Apple Music, iCloud, and Apple Pay, among others—grew nineteen per cent during the last quarter, to six billion dollars, thanks in large part to hundreds of millions of iOS users. Today, services account for fourteen per cent of Apple’s quarterly revenues and, if Cook’s predictions are right, will be “the size of a Fortune 100 company next year.” This growth occurred despite the chorus of critics, including me, panning Apple Music as well as iCloud’s multiple outages.

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Microfiction from the excellent current special issue of 91st Meridian, edited by Shabnam Nadiya and Daisy Rockwell:

“How are cattle born?” The teacher asked.

“When the cattle sprout legs, the cattle are born,” the child replied.

“Wrong,” the teacher said. The teacher recited the following from the textbook, “No one is born as cattle. Instead, first, one gets fifteen years of education, a job, a wife, a car and a television set. Then, in due course, as a child is born, a household is set up.

“Together, progress is dutifully achieved.

“Thereafter, horns begin grow on the head.

“Or else,

“They work in a factory or a field. Or even at a university or an office.

“They labor and struggle against difficulties.

“Together, they dream up revolutions.

“For all this too, as a reward, horns sprout on the head.

Hearing this, the child was overcome with sorrow.

“Is there any way to avoid becoming cattle oneself?” he asked the teacher.

“I don’t know,” replied the teacher as he scratched the tip of his horns.

Much more here.

Scott Barry Kaufman in The Atlantic:

Americans spend billions of dollars each year on books and seminars claiming to help people change their personalities. These books are built on the assumptions that personality can change, and that changing personality is good: Altering the basics of who you are will make you a better, healthier, happier person. Last week, I wrote about how the latest science of personality suggests that personality can indeed change—either through natural maturation, new responsibilities, or intentional strategies. But would changing your personality actually make you happier? Recently, a series of studies in Australia looked to see whether changes in personality (regardless of the cause) were associated with increases in life satisfaction. The series drew on the country’s HILDA Survey (Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia), which annually assesses the personality, life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect of a large, nationally representative sample of Australia’s population. In one of the studies, researchers examined the data from 11,104 Australians, ages 18 to 79, over the course of four years. They found that increases in extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness were all associated with increased life satisfaction, whereas increases in neuroticism were associated with decreased life satisfaction.

Another study, conducted on more than 8,000 Australians, found that personality changes during this same time period occurred as often as changes in socio-economic factors, such as income, unemployment, and marital status. Together, these two studies add to a growing body of literature suggesting that personality changes are related to changes in life satisfaction, and that personality change can even be a better predictor of life satisfaction than many of the external variables that are normally considered in economic models of happiness.

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Martyn Wendell Jones at Open Letters Monthly:

In the world of letters, overt religiosity can seem an offense against taste. Gone are the days of Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and Reinhold Niebuhr; in their place have stepped artists, writers, and intellectuals of faith who, in the words of novelist Doris Betts, “whisper” rather than “shout.” Faith is a private affair; its public mandate for the individual believer is discomfiting, especially to those who have no truck with it. Ours is an age of pronounced religious anxieties.

It’s refreshing, then, to find someone whose personal faith is an aesthetic and intellectual enablement rather than an encumbrance. Gregory Wolfe, editor of the quarterly journalImage, is unabashedly Catholic, but ideologically nonpartisan. (Though he came of age under the tutelage of William F. Buckley at the National Review, he left a career in political commentary behind during the Reagan administration to dedicate himself to culture and the arts.) His book The Operation of Grace contains editorial statements for issues of the journal as well as essays and public addresses; their historically and culturally wide-ranging reflections are focused through Image’s guiding themes of art, faith, and mystery.

The pieces collected here are loosely arranged by topic; the six groupings of chapters include headings such as “Art Speaks to Faith,” “Christian Humanism: Then and Now,” and “Scenes from a Literary Life.” A portrait of Wolfe emerges in his treatments of current events, historically diverse literary figures, and theology. He is no mystic longing for another world; nor is he a staid cleric with his collar starched.

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Francine Prose at The New Yorker:

I feel a kind of messianic zeal, which I share with many writers and readers, to make sure that Gallant’s work continues to be read, admired—and loved. One can speculate about the possible reasons why she is not more universally known. Though her work appeared regularly and for decades (from the nineteen-fifties until the mid-nineteen-nineties) in The New Yorker, where it attracted a loyal and enthusiastic readership, Gallant, who died in 2014, never became quite as popular, as widely recognized, or as frequently celebrated as any number of writers who published as regularly in the magazine during roughly the same period of time.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that she was a Canadian short-story writer, born in Montreal, in 1922, living in Paris, where she worked initially as a journalist, writing in English, and publishing in the United States. It was hard for any country to claim her, to make her a public figure (which she would have resisted) or for readers to classify her as one thing or another. Things (including books) are always easier to describe when they are like something else, and it was Gallant’s great strength and less-than-great public-relations problem that her work is so unlike anyone else’s. What one extracts from what (little) Gallant has said about her life is the central fact of her wanting to do what she wanted, which was to write.

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