Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:
After our entire book club, with unprecedented unanimity, pronounced Cutting for Stone the best book we had read yet, we waited twelve long years. Every few months, one of us would ask, “Hey, has Verghese written his next book yet?” Finally, The Covenant of Water came out.
The man is a consummate storyteller. This hardly seems fair to the rest of us, when he is a physician whose specialties are supposed to be infectious disease and pulmonary medicine. A distinguished professor at Stanford’s medical school, he only went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop—showing up in his doctorly tweeds and feeling utterly out of place—after caring for AIDS patients wrung him dry. He needed a way to tell their stories.
He found that and more. Few contemporary writers offer such rich sensory details, memorable characters, and compassionate depth. Did he learn all that in Iowa, I wondered last week, en route to his sold-out Q&A at the St. Louis County Library headquarters. Or is it because he is a physician? Could any trained observer who sees people at their most vulnerable turn into a modern-day griot?
I wanted Verghese to spill the techniques, tell us his tricks.
More here.
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Most of the discussion on the move from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy is about tackling climate change. Quite rightly: that was the main reason I got into “this” in the first place and remains a key motivation. But that framing is very much about simply solving a problem. In reality, there is also a much more exciting change going on, one that can create opportunity and radically shift how we think about energy overall.
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Game developer Bennett
While often citing American critic and screenwriter James Agee as a model for her emotional and intellectual engagement with the cinema, Kael claimed that she “was more influenced . . . by literary critics, such as R. P. Blackmur.”
Among the earliest forms of visual imagery are, of course, the cave paintings of Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, which often feature images of animals, hunting scenes, dancing people, and handprints that may signify the presence of a specific creator. Although we can’t be absolutely sure what the images were meant to convey, cave painting is a familiar enough case of the impulse of ancient artists to create significant images that seem aimed at replicating and perhaps even controlling an otherwise fleeting reality. Capturing the image of an animal, for example, perhaps meant freezing it in time and thereby magically ensuring good hunting.
I rarely eat fruit. But because I’ve been taken in by healthy living campaigns, I occasionally find myself buying a half kilo of pears or apples or grapes. Why these expensive imports? I think it’s because they were once totally unattainable to me, and now that I can afford them—while I still can afford them—I bring them home and put them in my fridge as a little act of revenge. Rarer still, I might buy a bunch of bananas, just because they’re right there in between the cassava and tempeh at the vegetable peddler’s stall. But I never buy papayas, watermelon, or mangoes. I grew up surrounded by papaya trees and I simply cannot accept a business transaction in their name. Papayas are obtained in two ways: asking or just taking. It’s very hard for me to entertain any other option. And watermelon reminds me of my childhood. From when I was ten until I was fifteen, my mother tried to support us by selling them. She was a very kind woman, but a terrible merchant, and so watermelons bring me back to a time in my childhood that I’d rather forget—grudgingly waking before dawn and trudging to market shouldering two heavy baskets, my mother’s tears over her financial losses and the other burdens she had to bear. Watermelons were my first foray into critical philosophy: Why does the sweet, red watermelon, with no sour bite, sell for so much less than citrus? I’ll eat one now and then, but I won’t buy a fruit that brings back such bad memories.
As the tech industry spends and spends, 
There are two ways to decarbonize: 1) degrowth, and 2) green energy. None of the proponents of degrowth are asking China to stop growing its economy
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It’s easy to take safe drinking water for granted. In most developed countries, access to safe water takes a simple flip of a kitchen tap or a run to the grocery store. But over 
The idea of 
Shamanism defines religion as a yin-yang battle between its “shamanic” and “institutional” elements. The chaotic forces of individual prophecy, possession, and inspiration give rise to formal religious rituals and doctrines, which in turn constrict those same forces. Singh argues for an extreme broadening of what “shamanism” refers to. It encompasses not only Siberian and Pan-American Indigenous practices, whose similarities (and potentially shared Asian origins) have long been acknowledged, but also a broad and much more transcultural spectrum of phenomena including charisma, possession, mounting, glossolalia, dream journeying, catching the holy spirit, trance, and other things. These phenomena all involve inducing special states of consciousness in the “shaman,” their audience, or both, in order to communicate with the beyond: to speak with gods and ancestors, to see the future, or to discover one’s spirit animal.