Still Pictures: On photography and memory (Granta) by Janet Malcolm In postwar New York, after escaping Nazi-occupied Prague in 1939, Janet Malcolm’s mother Joan was having dinner in an American household. When time for seconds came, Joan declined. In bourgeois Prague, this was a charade known as nutcení, and the host would insist until you relented. “But here ‘No, thank you’ was taken to mean just that, and the platter of delicious American food was whisked away before my mother’s sad eyes,” Malcolm writes. The anecdote captures a key theme of Malcolm’s autobiography-of-sorts: the alienating ..read more

For centuries, electricity and magnetism had everyone baffled. In the 19th century, Michael Faraday not only discovered new phenomena but summarised all that was already known in his three-volume Experimental Researches in Electricity. It enabled the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell to distill everything down to 20 equations in 1861-1862. A couple of decades later, this was reduced to four by the physicist and mathematician Oliver Heaviside. Maxwell’s equations are considered to be the high-point of 19th-century physics. They contain the seeds of the revolutions that took place in the 20th ..read more

I’ve been spending these dark winter nights immersing myself in so-called “witch lit” – reading four of the many new books about witches published in the last year or so. My generation of 20-somethings enjoyed our fair share of feminist necromancy, with the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and hit films like The Craft coming out in the mid-90s. I wanted to know what the current trend for witchy novels and non-fiction revealed about the tastes and dreams of today’s young women. How far are these books mere fantasies – wrapped up in social media-fuelled new age mumbo jumbo about tarot readings ..read more

Survival of the Richest: Escape fantasies of the tech billionaires (Scribe) by Douglas Rushkoff It’s difficult for a book to live up to the racy subtitle “Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires”. This is the problem with which professor of media theory and digital economics Douglas Rushkoff saddles himself. His book, entertaining and necessary though it is, never quite lives up to its marketing. The subject is tech billionaires and “The Mindset” with which they tackle the problems of the world. In the author’s eyes, The Mindset is the belief that with enough money, the elite can leave behi ..read more

The UK has never had a drug consumption room. At least not officially. From August 2020, an unofficial one was run in Glasgow for around ten months by Peter Krykant. He invited people into the back of his makeshift ambulance, converted from a second-hand minibus, and gave them a safe space to inject cocaine and heroin. It is the closest the UK has come, despite having the highest rates of drug-related death in Europe. Injecting drugs is a risky activity – even when it is done in the carefully controlled environment of a hospital, with high-quality pharmaceuticals, experienced healthcare profe ..read more

Cocoon (World Editions) by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang Zhang Yueran is one of China’s “post-80s” writers, also known as the Y generation. Born in 1982 in Jinan, Shandong, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and the one-child policy, she grew up in the Reform era. This epic novel (which took Zhang seven years to complete) is a stunning evocation of China’s recent past and a poignant examination of how events reverberate through the decades. Former friends Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong meet in their childhood home on the campus of Jinan’s medical university. Jiaqi’s grandfather, “the ..read more

Cocoon (World Editions) by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang Zhang Yueran is one of China’s “post-80s” writers, also known as the Y generation. Born in 1982 in Jinan, Shandong, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and the one-child policy, she grew up in the Reform era. This epic novel (which took Zhang seven years to complete) is a stunning evocation of China’s recent past and a poignant examination of how events reverberate through the decades. Former friends Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong meet in their childhood home on the campus of Jinan’s medical university. Jiaqi’s grandfather, “the ..read more

For years, community healthcare worker Netradipa Patil had been making her rounds in rural Shirol, in the Indian state of Maharashtra. She enquired into people’s health and asked how she could be of assistance. One day, she decided to ask an extra question: “How are you feeling today?” She noticed that several women didn’t even reply. Patil was haunted by their blank stares and silence. What made them feel so low? When she returned soon after, she encouraged these women to speak and spent hours listening to their stories. She discovered they were widows who had been harshly ostracised by thei ..read more

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974, was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. A work of fictionalised autobiography, the book follows its author Robert Pirsig on a long motorcycle ride through the US, from Minnesota across the prairie to Oregon, then down to southern California. The muscles of that skeletal journey are Pirsig’s philosophical musings on the notion of Quality. Pirsig created the concept in order explain the relationship between human values and societal values. At once both obvious and ephemeral, Quality escapes easy definition. (And brings to mind A ..read more

The Age of the Strongman (Bodley Head) by Gideon Rachman The rivalry between democracy and autocracy promises to define much of this century. The Age of the Strongman by the Financial Times’ chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman attempts to explain how we got here. The central thrust is that, since the 1990s, the rise of a certain type of leader has become the key feature of “the most sustained global assault on liberal democracy since the 1930s”. By profiling 14 current-day leaders with authoritarian tendencies – from central Europe to South America to the Philippines – Rachman h ..read more