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It’s Still the Coronavirus Economy - A disappointing jobs report shows that mass vaccination hasn’t yet broken the link between the pandemic and our economic fortunes. - link
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The Manifold Threats of the Texas Abortion Law - It not only violates abortion precedents but also attempts to shield illegal statutes from the courts. - link
From Vox
In Sally Rooney’s new novel, a celebrity author fights her own brand -
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney. | Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Beautiful World, Where Are You is unlikely to be a crowd pleaser. But it’s gorgeous.
Early on in Sally Rooney’s fraught and lovely new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, it becomes clear that one of the big problems Rooney is going to be struggling with on the page is herself. Or rather, the phenomenon of herself.
Sally Rooney has become that rarest of creatures among literary novelists: a brand name. There are other literary novelists who have bestselling books and hit TV show adaptations of their work, but only Sally Rooney has a hypebeast bucket hat and a pop-up shop. Early galleys of Beautiful World, Where Are Yousold for hundreds of dollars online, and even the promotional tote bag her publisher put together can fetch about $80 on the resale market.
Since her first book came out in 2017, Rooney has gone from much- admired young writer to Instagram status symbol to metaphor for everything that is ailing white middle-class millennials. And she’s done it all, apparently, without much caring for the experience.
“I can’t believe I have to tolerate these things — having articles written about me, and seeing my photograph on the internet, and reading comments about myself,” says Alice, the celebrity novelist who is one of the four central characters of Beautiful World, Where Are You. “When I put it like that, I think: that’s it? And so what? But the fact is, although it’s nothing, it makes me miserable, and I don’t want to live this kind of life.”
Alice’s discontent with her life and her work is one of the chief animating forces of the novel. Like Rooney’s previous books — 2017’s Conversations with Friends and 2019’s Normal People — Beautiful World, Where Are You might be reductively summarized as being about the interesting love lives of a set of intellectually discontented young Marxist Dubliners. At its core, it is obsessed with the same set of questions that have always preoccupied Rooney: As the world collapses all around us, is it morally defensible to devote your life to love, relationships, and the aesthetic pleasure of books? What if you get rich from it?
The love stories provide the plot skeleton, and Rooney sketches them out with her characteristically sharp eye for the ever-shifting power dynamics of relationships and impressively intimate sex scenes. (Rooney’s tool kit also comes, it must be said, with a tendency to occasionally have characters break up over a misunderstanding so stupid that you kind of just say, “Okay, Sally, we’ll let it go because it’s you.”)
Alice is the principal character in our first dyad. Like Rooney, Alicerecently published two novels that were met with a level of acclaim she finds baffling. She has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, and now she is convalescing in an enormous borrowed house in a tiny Irish town. There, she strikes up a relationship with Felix, a warehouse worker she meets on Tinder who tells her flatly that he never plans to read her novels. They embark on a relationship animated simultaneouslyby Felix’s apparent disdain for Alice and her own fawning admiration for him, and by their shared understanding that this apparent dynamic is fundamentally false, and masks something murkier occurring between them under the surface.
Our other couple is firmly rooted in Dublin. There, Alice’s best friend Eileen works a poorly paid job at a literary magazine, grieves her recent breakup with a longtime boyfriend, and lives in a flatshare with a married couple. She’s nearing 30, and she’s beginning to fear that she’ll never really grow up.
Eileen’s strongest support system is with her childhood friend Simon: 35, handsome, wealthy, and saintly. Eileen and Simon are plainly in love with each other from page one, but their five-year age gap makes the power dynamics of their Emma-Knightley-esque friendship so fraught that they can only approach the possibility of a relationship on tiptoe, pretending they don’t realize what they’re doing.
Rooney gives us these two love stories in highly distant third-person prose. The narrator’s eye is like a camera’s lens, showing us only her characters’ physical movements, their dialogue, the emotions their facial expressions might seem to suggest. We have no access to what’s going on inside their heads, no way of knowing when they are lying to themselves or to each other, outside of minute tells: Alice tucking her hair behind one ear when she runs into Felix; Eileen coming straight home to microwave refrigerated leftovers covered in cling film.
The only time we begin to get a glimpse of their interior monologues comes in the chapters that bridge the book’s two romances: long, discursive emails between Eileen and Alice. There, they comfortablytransition back and forth between gossiping about their love lives and careers to heady intellectual debates about why civilizations collapse, whether it matters to the vast majority of humanity if they do, and whether beauty matters when so much of the rest of the world is miserable. Eileen thinks humanity lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, “when plastics became the most widespread material in existence;” Alice thinks it happened after the fall of the Berlin wall.
Beautiful World, Where Are You gets much of its tension from the disconnect between the spare prose of the third-person sections and the rambling soliloquies of the emails between Eileen and Alice. As they remind each other in their emails over and over again, they both know that the world is in a state of crisis. The environment is collapsing, reactionary right-wing political movements are on the upswing, and most of the world’s population lives in grinding poverty to subsidize the unconscionable wealth of the rest of the world. And yet, in their day-to-day lives, they both seem to find themselves most often concerned with their romantic travails, their careers, their families and friendships, and the art that moves them and brings them pleasure. The contradiction strikes them as by turns insufferably immoral and beautifully human.
This same contradiction is also the animating force behind Conversations with Friends and Normal People. Sally Rooney’s novels are in many ways 19th-century bourgeois marriage novels with more sex and texting, and she and her characters seem to be constantly torn between taking a visceral delight in the pleasures of the form — the sheer emotional power of hoping that Mr. Knightley and Emma will at last finally admit their love for one another — and horrified by their lack of ethical and political power.
Rooney’s earlier novels kept this debate mostly subtextual. It was the visceral, erotic tug
between her characters that pulled the reader in, that lit up her sparse prose and turned her books into sensations. Beautiful World, in contrast, is unlikely to be quite such a hit with readers, however successful it is on its own terms. It takes place very determinedly outside of the realm of the body. The love stories exist, but the ethical problem of art is what this novel is capital-A About.
“The problem with the contemporary Euro- American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth,” Alice proclaims in one email to Eileen. “Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world — packing it down tightly underneath the glittering surface of the text.”
“I agree it seems vulgar, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse,” Eileen responds. “But at the same time, that is what I do every day.”
Within the framework of this debate, turning a novelist like Sally Rooney into a merch-hawking celeb does feel as though it’s in such poor taste as to be almost violent. It detaches Rooney the human being and Rooney the artist from Rooney the brand name, whose primary value is its ability to make money for Rooney’s publisher. Books, in this world, are only barely morally defensible as it is, given their limited ability to fix society’s ills. Thinking about them as tools by which to mine wealth and social capital from the celebrity ecosystem — turning novelists into brand names — would be willfully dehumanizing.
But Rooney does offer us a possible solution to the terrible moral problem of the novel. Toward the end of Beautiful World, we take a trip to a wedding, that traditional climax of a marriage novel. At last, the camera lens through which we’ve been seeing the world breaks, and we slip seamlessly into our characters’ minds and bodies, the sensual details that occupy them most, in a long lyrical, ecstatic burst of prose.
Here, finally, is the end of alienation. Here, finally, is what it means to live life in a body, as a human being, not as a dry, mechanical observer or as a bodiless brain in cyberspace. That is what novels can offer us, even bourgeois realist novels, and especially Rooney’s earlier novels. And that, she seems to argue, is what matters most of all.
It is also what makes Beautiful World, for me, even more moving than Normal People or Conversations with Friends, although I think it’s unlikely to be a crowd-pleaser on the level the other two novels were. There is something tender about the way Rooney turns again and again to the novel, almost against her will, as though, Mr. Darcy- like, she has struggled in vain to deny her true feelings. Beautiful World, Where Are You is still very dialectical and Marxist and interested in political debates. Yet it is also a love letter to the novel as a form of art — and, by extension, to the ways in which human beings relate to one another.
“And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine?” Eileen posits at one point. “Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting.”
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a love letter to all of us, to all the ways we love. It’s much sweeter and smarter than all the merch would lead you to believe.
America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate -
America still doesn’t have a clear goal on handling the Covid-19 pandemic. | Getty Images
A realistic Covid-19 endgame requires accepting some risk. The question is how much.
More than a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, America still doesn’t agree on what it’s trying to accomplish.
Is the goal to completely eradicate Covid-19? Is it to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed? Is it hitting a certain vaccine threshold that mitigates the worst Covid-19 outcomes but doesn’t prevent all infections? Or is it something else entirely?
At the root of this confusion is a big question the US, including policymakers, experts, and the general public, has never been able to answer: How many Covid-19 deaths are too many?
The lack of a clear end goal has hindered America’s anti-pandemic efforts from the start. At first, the goal of restrictions was to “flatten the curve”: to keep the number of cases low enough that hospitals could treat those that did arise. But that consensus crumbled against the reality of the coronavirus — leaving the country with patchwork restrictions and no clear idea of what it meant to “beat” Covid-19, let alone a strategy to achieve a victory.
The vaccines were supposed to be a way out. But between breakthrough infections, the risks of long Covid, and new variants, it’s becoming clear the vaccines didn’t get rid of the need to answer the underlying question of what the Covid-19 endgame is.
America is now stuck between those two extremes: The country wants to reduce the risk of Covid-19, but it also wants to limit the remnants of social distancing and other Covid-related restrictions on day-to-day life.
“We’re not trying to go for zero Covid,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “The question becomes: When do, in most communities, people feel comfortable going about their daily business and not worrying, excessively, about doing things that are important and meaningful to them?”
Will Americans accept the deaths of tens of thousands of people, as they do with the flu, if it means life returning to normal? Can the public tolerate an even higher death toll — akin to the drug overdose crisis, which killed an estimated 94,000 people in 2020 — if that’s what it takes to truly end social distancing and other precautions?
Does it make a difference if the vast majority of deaths are among those who are willingly unvaccinated, who, in effect, accepted a greater risk from the coronavirus? Are further reductions in deaths worth postponing a return to “normal” — or changing what “normal” means — if continued precautions are mild, like prolonged masking or widespread testing?
There are no easy answers here. Even among the experts I’ve spoken to over the past few weeks, there’s wide disagreement on how much risk is tolerable, when milder precautions like masking are warranted, and at what point harsher measures, like lockdowns and school closures, are needed. There’s not even agreement on what the endgame is; some say that, from a policy standpoint, the goal should be to keep caseloads manageable for hospitals, while others call for doing much more to drive down Covid-19.
One big problem identified by experts: “I don’t think we’re having those conversations enough,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me. Instead of the public and officials openly discussing how much risk is acceptable, the public dialogue often feels like two extremes — the very risk-averse and those downplaying any risk of the coronavirus whatsoever — talking past each other.
But the path to an endgame should begin with a frank discussion about just how much risk is tolerable as the coronavirus goes from pandemic to endemic.
We’re looking for a balancing act, not a total end to Covid-19
If there is one point of agreement among most experts, it’s that Covid-19 is here to stay. “Until very recently, I was hopeful that there was a possibility of getting to a point where we had no more Covid,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. Now she believes that “it is infeasible, in the short term, to aim for an eradication goal.”
Particularly with the rise of the delta variant, a consensus has formed that the coronavirus likely can’t be eliminated. Like the flu, a rapidly shapeshifting coronavirus will continue to stick around in some version for years to come, with new variants leading to new spikes in infections. Especially as it becomes unlikely that 100 percent of the population will get vaccinated, and as it becomes clear that the vaccines provide great but not perfect protection, the virus is probably always going to be with us in some form, both in America and abroad.
That doesn’t mean the US has to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths annually in the coming years. While the vaccines have struggled at least somewhat in preventing any kind of infection (including asymptomatic infection), they have held up in preventing severe illness, hospitalization, and death — reducing the risk of each by roughly 90 percent, compared to no vaccine. Research has also found stricter restrictions reduce Covid-19 spread and death, and that masks work.
But it’s also become clear most Americans aren’t willing to tolerate drastic deviations from the pre- pandemic normal — lockdowns, staying at home, and broadly avoiding interactions with other people — for long. While social distancing staved off the virus in the pre-vaccine pandemic days, it also wrought economic, educational, and social devastation around the world. It’s the intervention that, above all, most people want to avoid going forward.
“That’s the goal, in my mind: to eliminate or reduce social distancing,” Jha said.
What policymakers can aim for is not a total end to Covid-19 but a balancing act. On one side of that scale is containing Covid-19 with restrictions and precautions. On the other is resuming normal, pre-pandemic life. Vaccines have changed the balance by giving us the ability to contain Covid-19’s worst outcomes — hospitalization and death — with less weight on the side of restrictions. But vaccines alone can’t drive hospitalizations and deaths to zero if all the weight on the restriction side is removed.
That suggests a choice: Either Americans accept some level of Covid-19 risk, including hospitalization and death, or they accept some level of restrictions and precautions in the long term.
Depending on how that choice is made, the US could be looking at very different futures. Americans could decide some milder precautions, like masking, are fine. Or they could conclude that even masking is too much to ask, even if that means a greater death toll. It hinges on how much weight on the restrictions side remains acceptable for the bulk of the population — how high the threshold is for embracing continued deviations from what day-to-day life was like before.
Regardless, experts say the balance, as the coronavirus becomes endemic, will require accepting some level of Covid-19 risk — both to individuals and to society. America already does that with the flu: In some years, a flu season kills as many as 60,000 people in the US, most of whom are elderly and/or people with preexisting health conditions, but also some kids and previously healthy individuals. As a cause of death, the flu can surpass gun violence or car crashes, but it’s a tolerated cost to continuing life as normal.
“You want to get Covid to a place where it’s more comparable in terms of disease burden and in terms of economic impact to the flu,” Céline Gounder, an epidemiologist at New York University, told me.
With about half the country vaccinated, the Covid-19 death rate is still much higher than that of the flu — the more than 120,000 deaths over the past six months is still more than double the number of people even the worst flu seasons have recently killed. But as more people get vaccinated and others develop natural immunity after an infection, the death rate will likely come down.
A glimpse of what this could look like in the future came from a study in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The study was at first widelyreported as evidence that the virus can still spread among the vaccinated because the outbreak happened in a highly vaccinated population, and three-fourths of those who were infected had gotten their shots.
But experts now argue for another interpretation of the study: It’s what a post-pandemic world could look like. Yes, the coronavirus still circulated among vaccinated people. But in an outbreak that eventually infected more than 1,000, only seven hospitalizations and zero deaths have been recorded. If this was 2020, given overall hospitalization and death rates, the outbreak would have likely produced around 100 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.
“We should cheer,” Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “The Provincetown outbreak, contrary to what the press reported, was evidence not of the vaccines’ failure but of their smashing success.”
That doesn’t mean the vaccine is perfect. A 90 percent reduction in death, relative to the unvaccinated, is not 100 percent. But it is a much lower risk. If this holds up despite future variants and potentially waning vaccine efficacy, it’s great news.
But that isn’t how the Provincetown study has been widely interpreted, especially after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited it to reinstitute masking recommendations for the vaccinated in public indoor spaces in areas with substantial or high caseloads.
And the national Covid-19 disease burden may never resemble Provincetown’s anyway, since the city resides in the second most vaccinated state. In that context, Americans may have to come to accept even higher levels of sickness and death if the goal is to return to normal and vaccination rates don’t go up quickly enough.
That leaves the country with a blunt question: How many deaths are Americans willing to tolerate?
We don’t yet know how much Covid-19 risk we’ll accept
The problem is there’s no agreement, including among experts, on Covid-19 risk. Some have accepted merely reducing the coronavirus’s strain on hospitals as the major policy goal. There’s next to no confidence that anything like “Covid zero” can be achieved now, but other experts still prefer harsher restrictions if it means preventing more deaths. And many people fall in between.
It’s this debate, between “flatten the curve” and “Covid zero,” that’s long divided the US’s Covid-19 response. Red states hewed at least for a while to “flatten the curve,” moving to lift Covid-related restrictions and reopen their economies as soon as hospitals stabilized. Blue states never truly pushed for “Covid zero,” but they were generally much less willing to tolerate high levels of cases and deaths — and, as a result, shut down more quickly in response to even hints of major surges. (Although there were some outliers on both sides.)
Even with the vaccines, this division, among both policymakers and the public they serve, has kept America in limbo.
Part of the divide is on a philosophical question about the role of government. But it’s about individuals’ decisions, too: Are they willing to forgo social activities, government mandate or not, to reduce deaths? Are they willing to keep wearing masks? Submit to continued testing in all sorts of settings?
Are 30,000 to 40,000 deaths a year too many? That’s generally what the country sees with gun violence and car crashes — and American policymakers, at least, haven’t been driven to major actions on these fronts.
Are as many as 60,000 deaths a year too many? That’s what Americans have tolerated for the flu.
Are 90,000 deaths a year too many? That’s the death toll of the ongoing drug overdose crisis — and while policymakers have taken some steps to combat that, experts argue the actions so far have fallen short, and the issue doesn’t draw that much national attention.
Is the current death toll — of more than 1,500 a day, or equivalent to more than 500,000 deaths a year — too much? Many people would say, of course, it is. But in the middle of a delta variant surge, Americans may be revealing their preferences as restaurant reservations are now around the pre-pandemic normal — a sign the country is moving on. “The loudest voices on social media and in public are way more cautious than the average American,” Jha said.
Part of the calculus may be influenced by who is getting infected and dying. Once everyone (including children) is eligible for the vaccines, is a high death toll among those who remain unvaccinated simply part of the risk they decided to take by not getting the shot?
This is not something most experts I spoke to are comfortable saying, but it’s a sentiment I’ve repeatedly heard from vaccinated people and even some who are unvaccinated — a very dire version of “actions have consequences.”
Another consideration is whether some Covid-related precautions become permanent. Social distancing in any of its forms doesn’t seem like a candidate. But what about masking in indoor spaces? More frequent testing? Vastly improving indoor ventilation? Doing more things outdoors? Depending on whether Americans embrace these other interventions, the level of Covid-19 risk people have to tolerate may end up being lower — but what “normal” looks like would also be redefined to some degree.
Other countries are talking about these trade-offs more explicitly. Australian leaders, for example, have said that they will shift from a long- heralded “Covid zero” strategy once vaccination rates hit certain thresholds — even though this means continued cases and deaths, particularly among the unvaccinated. In the US, the end goal has never been so clear.
Experts argue that these kinds of questions need to be out in the open, so Americans and their leaders can openly discuss them and decide on a plan forward.
Those conversations “were important to have in the beginning,” Murray said. “But they’re even more important now, as we move into this control phase rather than a phase where elimination or eradication [of Covid-19] seems possible.”
The country may just continue muddling along. Vaccination rates and natural immunity will slowly increase. Deaths and hospitalizations will similarly decline. Eventually, the virus will hit a level that most Americans find tolerable (if that hasn’t happened already). Politicians and the media will talk less about the coronavirus. And, perhaps before we know it, the pandemic will be a thing of the past in the US.
That’s what was happening in June — before the delta surge. But over the past 18 months, we’ve seen that, with no agreement on the endgame, it’s often impossible to say if the end is really near.
Ask a Book Critic: Autumnal books to get you ready for fall -
Amanda Northrop/Vox
Vox’s book critic recommends campus novels to set the mood for virtual learning, and more.
Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.
If you prefer your recommendations in audio form, you can listen to Ask a Book Critic, part of Vox Quick Hits. Hear a new episode of Ask a Book Critic — always under 15 minutes long — every two weeks wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Now let’s get started.
I’m looking for a fiction book with amazing prose, specifically set in autumn. Preferably from a female point of view. Some of my favorite books are The Girls by Emma Cline and Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney. I’m currently enjoying The Idiot by Elif Batuman (one of your recommendations) but really looking for something cozy, or maybe a little spooky, to get into the fall season!
The obvious pick for you is Ali Smith’s Autumn. It’s the first book in her seasons quartet, which is thematically all about the state of the UK post-Brexit. Smith writes impeccable, playful, very allusive prose that should meet your standards, and her main character is a woman in her 30s, working precariously in academia, who is best friends with a 101-year-old man.
You also strike me as someone who would appreciate A.S. Byatt. She writes very rich, beautiful, Victorian-inflected prose, often about women intellectuals. Her most famous book Possession begins in summer, but I hold it to be spiritually autumnal: It’s about two Victorian literature scholars who begin to suspect their subjects secretly had an affair, and also about critiquing Freud. It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous book.
Online learning has left me seeking fiction with the aesthetics of academia and I generally like to read things with some speculative fiction elements, but there’s been a real glut of “school for magic” stories that I’m burnt out on. I’ve enjoyed Tam Lin, Ninth House,Waking the Moon, and (back in the day) Frankenstein. Can you recommend other fantastic stories set in, at least at surface level, ordinary-seeming universities?
You might try The Lightness by Emily Temple. It’s a bit off the dark academia path as it’s set in a school for meditation and is aesthetically pretty light-filled (like the title suggests!), but it has the structure and thematic play of a campus novel. It is also about teen girls being witchy, which is truly the best plot.
You could also give Tana French’s The Likeness a try. It’s mostly a mystery, but the inciting incident is lightly supernatural: A grad student has been murdered, and the detective assigned to her case looks exactly like her. There’s never an explanation for their shared appearance, but the detective goes undercover as the murder victim, which allows French to play around with doppelgängers and the idea of a shadow self. (Incidentally, French’s other campus novel, The Secret Place, is also about teen girls being witchy, but it feels much less magical in that book than in either The Likeness or The Lightness.)
Finally, the new companion trilogy to the Dark Materials books, The Book of Dust, takes place primarily in a fantasy version of Oxford. I’m thinking it could break through your “school for magic” doldrums — fantasy Oxford exists in a magical world, but it is not a school where people teach magic.
I’m a voracious reader with very eclectic taste and never normally short of a book, but I’m beginning to feel like what I’m looking for might not exist. I really just want to see someone like me in my fiction.
I became disabled as an adult (fibromyalgia and now use mobility aids) and it just wasn’t the end of my world. There have been some tough times, sure, and letting go of some things, but it was neither the absolute personal disaster I often see in fiction or the inspirational overcoming of adversity you see in a lot of memoirs.
I’m looking for something fictional that has a disabled protagonist where their disability is treated as a facet of their lives and not either their entire personality or the thing the plot revolves around. Some of my favorite authors are Neil Gaiman, Agatha Christie, and Sharon Kay Penman, which shows a bit of the wide range I’m happy to look at to find a book about someone just like me.
Here are a few possibilities.
You might consider the Cormoran Strike books by Robert Galbraith. Galbraith is J.K. Rowling’s pen name, so if you decide to read them you have to figure out how you feel about her transphobia, but on their own merits they compose a pretty solid detective series. (Excluding the most recent volume, Troubled Blood, which is hellishly boring and also has a transphobic subplot.) The main character, Cormoran Strike, is a vet who had part of his leg amputated in the war, and while that obviously affects his life (e.g. he has to figure out how much weight he can put on his prosthetic, and when his leg is too irritated to deal with the prosthetic at all), it’s not at all his defining characteristic.
Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo are a fantasy duology set in the same universe as her Shadow and Bone trilogy, but they’re both much better than the main trilogy. Bardugo is one of those writers who becomes a more interesting author with every book she writes, and with Six of Crows she’s really reaching her peak. These two books make up a heist story, and they’re really fun. The main character, Kaz, has a bad leg and walks with a cane, but his main thing is being a criminal prodigy.
Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has a recurring subplot about chronic illness. These books cover the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief fixer to Henry VIII, and one of the many issues Cromwell has to deal with is that he has a recurring fever. He first picked it up as a young man in Italy, and at various times throughout these three books he’ll find himself confined to his bed by it. The series is also just extremely beautiful and immersive, and I think they have one of the most interesting approaches to interiority I’ve seen in contemporary fiction.
The Seamstress by Frances de Pontes Peebles is a favorite novel of mine. It’s about two sisters in Brazil in the 1930s, one of whom becomes a great seamstress; the other becomes an outlaw and in the process loses her hand. There’s a lot about how she learns to live her life without her hand, and it’s also just a really lovely, exciting book.
If you’d like me to recommend a book for you, email me at constance.grady@vox.com with the subject line “Ask a Book Critic.” The more specific your mood, the better!
From The Hindu: Sports
Shafali retains No. 1 spot in T20I batting rankings, Devine jumps to joint top-rank among all-rounders - Verma is ranked ahead of Austrailia’s Mooney and India’s Mandhana
SC refuses to entertain plea for advancement of facilities for athletics - “We have all the sympathy and share the same views,” the Supreme Court said while adding that it cannot be done under the diktat of the court
Gasly and Tsunoda confirmed at AlphaTauri for 2022 - Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda will continue to race for AlphaTauri in Formula One next season, the Red Bull-owned team said on September 7.French driv
BCCI to ratify sexual harassment policy, Ranji compensation to be discussed again - The meeting will be held virtually once again since the office-bearers are expected to be in the UAE for the IPL
Djokovic beats last American at U.S. Open to extend Slam bid - Novak Djokovic is trying to be the first man since Rod Laver in 1969 to win all four Slam trophies in one year
From The Hindu: National News
LDF, UDF protest against tax on milk cooperatives - Efforts on to pass unanimous resolution in the Assembly against Centre’s move
Delhi HC seeks NHRC’s stand on plea concerning police brutality during rally in West Bengal - The petition claims that the ’Nabanna Chalo’ organised on OCtober 8, 2020, became a ‘hunting ground for the police establishment’ and witnessed ‘large-scale brutality’
Massarat Alam named Geelani’s successor - Jailed separatist leader to head the All Parties Hurriyat Conference amalgam
Action plan will be prepared to prevent entry of rainwater into GGH, say officials - Municipal engineers will also be roped into address the problem, says KMC Commissioner
Farmers gather in Karnal for mahapanchayat, talks with officials ‘fail’ - Farmer unions had demanded action against officials over the lathicharge against protesters on August 28 in Karnal
From BBC: Europe
German election: Merkel attacks left as polls point to defeat - The German chancellor targets the centre-left favourite to succeed her, ahead of September elections.
Poland imposes state of emergency on Belarus border - The government says it needs to curb a steep rise in illegal migrant crossings from Belarus.
Sebastian Vettel on speaking out as an LGBTQ+ ally: ‘Everyone has the same right to love’ - Sebastian Vettel made headlines at the Hungarian Grand Prix by wearing a T-shirt in support of LGBTQ+ rights. He tells the BBC’s LGBT Sport Podcast why he is taking a stand.
Dozens more migrants cross English Channel in small boats - Weather conditions have become more favourable for those making the journey.
NI Protocol: Further delays for Irish Sea border checks - The UK’s Brexit minister says the move will “provide space for further discussions” with the EU.
From Ars Technica
The best Labor Day tech deals we can find [Updated] - Dealmaster includes discounts on Apple devices, PS5 games, headphones, and more. - link
Blix Vika+ review: A powerful ebike that folds and fits just about anywhere - Despite some obvious cuts and lapses in getting the price down, Blix has charmed us. - link
The quiet search for dark matter deep underground - In which the author travels to South Dakota to visit a gold mine—housing LUX. - link
Life is Strange: True Colors hands-on preview: Not afraid to make you sad - Tapping into emotion auras feels like the most genuine series reinvention yet. - link
21st-century storms are overwhelming 20th-century cities - Infrastructure that wasn’t built to handle warmer, wetter climate is increasingly risky. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Hold it firmly in your hand, put it in your mouth, lick it, straighten it, and put it in the hole -
A little old lady answered a knock on the door one day, only to be confronted by a well-dressed young man carrying a vacuum cleaner. “Good morning,” said the young man. “If I could take a couple minutes of your time, I would like to demonstrate the very latest in high-powered vacuum cleaners.” “Go away!” said the old lady. “I haven’t got any money.” She proceeded to close the door. Quick as a flash, the young man wedged his foot in the door and pushed it wide open. “Don’t be too hasty,” he said. “Not until you have at least seen my demonstration.” And with that, he emptied a bucket of horse manure onto her hallway carpet. “If this vacuum cleaner does not remove all traces of this horse manure from your carpet, I will personally eat the remainder.” “Well,” she said, “I hope you have a damned good appetite, because the electricity was cut off this morning.”
