Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:
Nature writer Robert Macfarlane will need little introduction, having authored a string of successful books on people, landscape, and language. I was impressed by his 2019 book Underland, so when Is a River Alive? was announced, I decided to spoil myself and purchase the signed Indie Exclusive edition. Billed as his most political book to date, Is a River Alive? is a hydrological odyssey into three river systems that sees Macfarlane wrestle with the titular question and examine its relevance to the nascent Rights of Nature movement.
At the heart of this book are three long, 70–100-page parts that detail visits to three river systems in Ecuador, India, and Canada. They are separated by short palate cleansers, describing brief visits to local springs close to his home in Cambridge. In the back, you will find a surprisingly thorough 10-page glossary, notes, a select bibliography, a combined acknowledgements and aftermaths section detailing developments up to publication, and an index.
This dry enumeration aside, it is the quality of the writing that we are all here for, and Macfarlane is on fine form as he immerses you in the landscapes he visits.
More here.
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When he was France’s finance minister in the 1960s, former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously complained about the “exorbitant privilege” that the dollar’s position as the world’s leading reserve currency conferred on the United States. This meant, essentially, that the US could borrow at low interest rates, run persistently large trade deficits, and print money to finance its budget deficits. He never could have imagined that the US would end up letting these advantages slip through its fingers.
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From the Christian perspective, the hyphen is a sign of Jewish translatability; but the same sign, read, we might say, from right to left, also points to a more confrontational reality, that of Jewish resistance to being translated (elevated) into a (higher) Christian register. The Jewish insistence on reading “the Bible” in Hebrew every week, in synagogue, to congregations whose first language was (and is) probably not the language of the patriarchs but the language of their non-Jewish neighbors, is a performance of otherness. We can see what is at stake in this attachment to the original when we appreciate the difference between reading Hebrew texts in Greek—from right to left—and reading the Bible as a Greek text, from left to right. From the perspective of the former, the Alexandrian translation of 
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In the recent K-Drama Our Unwritten Seoul, a simple wooden chair emerges as the iconic stand-in (or sit-in) for a young farmer’s late grandfather, whose favorite chair it had once been. Broken and mended multiple times, patched together with tape, glue, and hastily hammered braces, the chair, on its last legs, gets tossed out by an over-zealous new employee. The young farmer is devastated.
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