by Ethan Seavey
On the Métro a man reads an ancient book. He cares for it greatly and flips each page with an abundance of caution. You know that it is ancient because the incredibly thin sides of each page have been painted an antique green and the page that he is reading is yellowed but in otherwise very good condition. The cover is a nice dark gray but it is too dark to read the title from where you stand clutching a pole, your body swaying and swinging and attempting to balance inside this skittish steel carriage. You know that he cares about this book because the dark cover reflects his fingertips. It is covered with a cellophane wrapper which implies that he has bought it just an hour ago from a Bouquiniste along the Seine and that he hasn’t brought it home yet where he would throw out the plastic. But he is deep within the book, hours, days into its story. He kept the plastic to protect it in a world as dangerous for an antique book as the Métro.
This man engages with his identity in a way that you fear. He’s seen: he is a literature professor in the making, the kind that leaves behind a stable life of business and begins to teach later in life. Today he’s too young and proud and primped to stoop to that salary. He wears a Hugo Boss mask and three layers of suit and tweed and pressed cotton. His shoes are as shiny as the cellophane holding the book and he is seen loving books and he is a bit unhappy. He turns and leans his forehead against the door and looks into the lightless tunnel flashing past. This tells his fellow passengers that they should expect his departure and a wordless goodbye and more space in the car and a subtly sentimental vacancy. Read more »
The soon-to-be famous ship is part-way around the world. It will eventually become only the second vessel in recorded history to achieve the complete circumnavigation – after Magellan. But the ship is poised over disaster. Somewhere in the seas off present-day Indonesia, the captain has ordered full sail and then retired to his cabin. The ship hits something – there’s an awful shudder and it stops dead in the water. A reef, probably.
Everyone knows—or should know—how burdensome a pregnancy is on a woman. It’s especially hard now if you live in Texas where a fetal heartbeat detected at six weeks means by law the woman cannot terminate her pregnancy; she must carry it to term. The burden of having a child, whether planned for or forced, is made worse by the financial responsibility of raising that offspring, for parents and families, through childhood and adolescence, the next eighteen years. Would any man argue that such a load, for poor women in particular, is among the toughest things she’ll ever face?
When Robert Solow asked me in Cambridge if I’d like to join the faculty at MIT in the other Cambridge, I was taken aback, and asked for some time to think about it. Until then I never imagined living in the US, a country I had never visited before, and what I saw in Hollywood films was not always attractive. I was planning to go back to India where my aging parents, younger siblings, and the majority of my friends were.
Someone described the US Federal Government as a huge insurance company that has its own army. There’s real truth to that description. The vast majority of the federal budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those entitlement programs take up about 65% of the federal budget, while the military takes up about 11% of the federal budget. The interest on the federal debt takes up another 8%, leaving only about 15% for “discretionary” spending. The money spent on the military is also considered discretionary but given our vast reach with hundreds of military bases in dozens of countries, voting to reduce the military budget much would be political suicide.
Last year the federal government took in $3.4 trillion of taxes and spent $6.6 trillion, nearly twice its revenues. A trillion dollars is a vast, almost inconceivable amount of money. And yet our government spends money in such cosmic sums that congresspeople and senators toss around the word trillion as if it’s the cost of a night’s stay in a Motel 8. Perhaps the two best quotes about casually spending and losing vast sums of money come from the late Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt. When asked about his $1.7 billion losses after he tried to corner the silver market, he replied, “A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be.” Then at a congressional hearing when asked about his net worth, Hunt replied, “I don’t have the figures in my head. People who know how much they’re worth aren’t usually worth that much.” 
Tanya Goel. Mechanisms 3, 2019.
Clairvoyant of the Small, Susan Bernofsky’s long-awaited biography of the Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser, is erudite, painstakingly thorough, and sensitively written. Readers of Walser finally have a volume that connects the development of the writer’s work and its publishing history to the various episodes of his peripatetic adult life in the cities of Biel, Bern, Zurich, Berlin, and finally the sanatoriums in Waldau and later Herisau, where Walser—revered by Franz Kafka and Max Brod, Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, and many others—presumably ceased writing altogether.
Men have always wanted to fly to the moon and stars. We wanted to find out what was up there on the moon and planets? Was it heaven? Were there angels? Or were these worlds inhabited by strange creatures who built canals? We looked up, we used telescopes. We watched the stars and charted their movements. But we wanted to do more than look and imagine; we wanted to go up there and see for ourselves? The birds could fly, why couldn’t we?
