FICTION Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Little Boy 2 Bel Kaufman, Up The Down Staircase 4 Ernesto Quiñónez, Taina 6 Louisa Luna, The Janes 8 Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown 10 Peter Geye, Northernmost 12

NON-FICTION Maria Popova, Figuring 14 Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars 16 Rob Walker, The Art of Noticing 18 Janet Messineo, Casting Into The Light 20 Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary, & Daniel Kaufman, How To Live a Good Life 22 Andy Greenberg, Sandworm 24 George Friedman, The Storm Before the Calm 26 Paul Hendrickson, Plagued by Fire 28 Gary Marcus & Ernest Davis, Reboot 30 Cameron Douglas, Long Way Home 32 Peter Finn, A Guest of the Reich 34 Sally Shaywitz with Jonathan Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia 36 Ariel Sabar, Faith and the Conman 38 David Lindley, The Dream Universe 40 Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, Tightrope 42 Tim Higgins, Blind Corner 44

Highlights from the Backlist 46 Little Boy A Novel Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Wonderfully effusive and stunningly evocative. This book is a Proustian celebration of both memory and moments that will delight readers.” —Publishers Weekly

“One hundred years of Lawrence’s life dance and shimmer in breathtaking sentences that shine with the light of this great writer’s gorgeous imagination. Little Boy is a treasure.” Doubleday —Diane di Prima, author of Memoirs of a Beatnik March 2019 “Ferlinghetti’s unclassifiable act is delightful, tragic, Rights sold: magical. Here is seriousness at play with all the power Czech Republic: Mata of a spontaneous concert. Bravo Maestro Lawrence!” Germany: Schoeffling Hungary: Helikon —Michael McClure, author of The Beard Italy: Edizioni Clichy Turkey: Everest rom the famed publisher and poet, author of the UK: Faber & Faber million-copy-selling collection A Coney Island ofF the Mind, his literary last will and testament—part Other rights available autobiography, part summing up, part Beat-inflected torrent of language and feeling, and all magical. LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI was born In this unapologetically unclassifiable work Lawrence in Bronxville, New York in Ferlinghetti lets loose an exhilarating rush of language 1919. Founder of the famed to craft what might be termed a closing statement City Lights Books and the about his highly significant and productive 99 years author of numerous works of on this planet. The “Little Boy” of the title is poetry, his A Coney Island of Ferlinghetti himself as a child, shuffled from his the Mind (New Directions, overburdened mother to his French aunt to foster 1958), is one of the bestselling childhood with a rich Bronxville family. Service poetry books of all time. He in World War Two (including the D-Day landing), lives in San Francisco. graduate work, and a scholar gypsy’s vagabond life in Paris followed. These biographical reminiscences are interweaved with Allen Ginsberg-esque high energy bursts of raw emotion, rumination, reflection, reminiscence and prognostication on what we may face as a species on Planet Earth in the future. Little Boy is a magical font of literary lore with allusions galore, a final repository of hard-earned and durable wisdom, a compositional high wire act without a net (or all that much punctuation) and just a gas and an inspiration to read.

2 EXCERPT

Little Boy was quite lost. He had no idea who he was or where he had come from. He was with Aunt Emilie whom he loved very much. She had taken him in swaddling clothes from his mother who already had four sons and could not handle a fifth born a few months after his father died of a heart attack. His brother Harry aged twelve found their father dead on the back cellar steps of their little house just north of Van Cortland Park, Manhattan. “Poor Mom, no money, Pop dead,” wrote Harry years later. His mother, Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Sephardic parents who had immigrated from Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, where the family had been established for a very long time as wealthy planters until a collapse of the sugar market in the late 1890s impoverished them. The family had originally fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal but didn’t arrive in the New World in steerage with nothing but their clothes. They arrived with all their possessions in steamer trunks, including candelabras, gold and jewels, and thus were able to set up as merchants and planters in St. Thomas where they soon had a great house on a hill with wide verandas looking down on the center of the town, and a family album showed them in broad-brimmed hats and black string ties. Saint Thomas was a Danish crown colony until America snatched it early in the 20th century, and the Monsantos had intermarried with the Danes as well as with French settlers, and there were many French relatives who visited and were visited in France. Clemence Albertine had a French mother of vague aristocratic origins, and she still spoke French. So it went that Clemence Albertine’s uncle married Emilie from northern France, and thus it was that Emilie who had always wanted a child came and took the newborn Laurent from his distraught mother and bore him off to France by herself. Little Boy surmised many years later that her husband, Ludwig Monsanto, a professor of languages, and quite a bit older than Emilie, did not at his advanced age want to adopt a son, and thus left Emilie with little Laurent. And so thus it was that Tante Emilie took him back to her home town near Strasbourg (the same town the famous Captain Dreyfus was from) when he was perhaps two years old, and there they lived long enough for him to speak French before English, and his very first memory of existence was being held on a balcony above the boulevard where a parade was going by, and someone was waving his hand at the great parade with band music wafting up and strains of the “Marseillaise” echoing. And the next thing he remembered was that they were back in New York in a big high ceilinged apartment on the upper westside overlooking the Hudson and the Palisades across the great river and steamboats hooting their whistles and Aunt Emilie and Ludwig somehow back together again. He had a prickly beard when he embraced Little Boy, and the sun shone on them for a brief time until suddenly Uncle Ludwig was not there anymore, and this time for good. So then again it was himself and Aunt Emilie in the big elegant flat, but not for long, because she had no money, and soon a Health Department man came and took him away to an orphanage in Chappaqua New York because she had no money to buy him milk and the man said Little Boy would develop rickets. And there was much weeping when they took him away from Emilie, and so it was he stayed in that orphanage, and years later the only memory he had of it was having to eat undercooked tapioca pudding the kids called Cat’s Eyes. Oh the time lost and no other memory of it, until a year later Aunt Emilie came and got him, and it was still the nineteen-twenties in America. And how he remembered her back then. She wore cloche hats and had her hair cut short like Louise Brooks and wore always the same elegant dress in the 1920s style, with low cut bosom and a long string of beads, and scent of eau-de cologne always about her. And of course it was not “always,” except in Little Boy’s memory, but it must have been her thread-bare elegance (well-hidden in her elegant spoken French) that got her a position as French governess to the 18-year old daughter of Anna Lawrence Bisland and Presley Eugene Bisland in Bronxville New York where they lived in an ivy covered mansion not far from Sarah Lawrence College founded by Anna Lawrence’s father. And so Aunt Emilie came and got him, and so began their life in a third floor room near the attic where steamer trunks with Cunard Line stickers on them shared space with old saddles and ancient bric-a-brac.

3 Up The Down Staircase A Novel Bel Kaufman

“Kaufman did not write a period piece, she wrote the most enduring account we have of teachers’ lives—not naive, not exculpatory, but empathetic and aware.” —The New Yorker

“Kaufman brings a splendidly impish sense of satire to her galvanic fable. She is the great Sholem Aleichem’s granddaughter, and she knows how to let pomposities Vintage overreach themselves, how to find merriment in a April 2019 barbarous world.” —The New York Times Rights sold: Czech Republic: Argo “With pitch-perfect tone Up the Down Staircase France: Le Livre De Poche captures the humor, pathos, and administrative Holland: Atlas Contact nonsense of the urban high schools in which Kaufman Poland: Adamantan taught for 15 years.” Russia: Albus Corvus —The Washington Post Ukraine: Old Lion ylvia Barrett arrives at New York City’s Calvin Other rights Available Coolidge High fresh from earning literature degreesS at Hunter College and eager to shape young BEL KAUFMAN was an minds. Instead she encounters broken windows, a author and schoolteacher. lack of supplies, a stifling bureaucracy, and students Born in Berlin in 1911, she with no interest in Chaucer. Her bumpy yet ultimately spent her childhood in Odessa rewarding journey is narrated through an extraordinary and emigrated with her family collection of correspondence—sternly worded yet to the Bronx when she was nonsensical administrative memos, furtive notes of twelve. Her grandfather was wisdom from teacher to teacher, “polio consent slips,” the Yiddish humorist Sholem and student homework assignments that unwittingly Aleichem. In addition to Up speak from the heart. An instant bestseller when it the Down Staircase, she is also was first published in 1964, Up the Down Staircase the author of the novel Love, remains as poignant, devastating, laugh-out-loud Etc. She died in 2014. funny, and relevant today as ever. It timelessly depicts a beleaguered public school system redeemed by teachers who love to teach and students who long to be recognized.

4 EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY DIANE RAVITCH

Every author wishes that the book he or she labored over will become a classic, but this happy distinction occurs very rarely. Why did it happen to this book? The literary reasons for its spectacular success are easy to see. Most striking is its originality of form: Kaufman presents her novel as a collection of discarded scraps of paper from the wastebasket of a large urban high school. As a narrative method, this must have been particularly startling and unfamiliar to readers in 1964, but in Kaufman’s hands it is surprisingly effective. Her chapters are a madcap medley of notes, doodles, memos, student complaints, meeting minutes, lesson plans, bits of dialogue—and somehow, magically, it all adds up to a compelling story rich with humor, poignancy, and suspense. Kaufman manages the difficult trick of lampooning bureaucratic absurdity while simultaneously bringing to life characters we care deeply about. But beyond its literary qualities, Up the Down Staircase also remains a classic because of its subject. Reading it now, well into the twenty-first century, one might expect this portrait of a New York City classroom to be dated, yet in crucial ways it is not. To a teacher living and working now, Sylvia Barrett, who speaks in the first person in the book, is familiar. She is a first-time teacher. She starts the job with high ideals about teaching Chaucer to high school students. On her first day, she discovers that she is on a battlefield where she must struggle to persuade reluctant adolescents to learn. Some want to, others are semiliterate. Some are defiant. It is never easy and is sometimes degrading, but she never stops trying. Even as she strives to get and hold the attention of her students, she is bombarded with nonsensical bureaucratic rules and demands on her time. The book is peppered with directives from administrators who steal her time and attention. Sometimes she wants to give up, but she keeps coming back because she has a passion to teach. The students do their best to harass her, yet they can’t defeat her indomitable spirit. Every time she thinks of leaving for an easier job, the kids draw her back to her difficult classroom. Up the Down Staircase is a classic because it captures the essence of the teachers’ dilemma, a dilemma that is universal. The teacher wonders: Am I making a difference? Am I really able to get through to my students? Do they care? Do they understand how much I want them to learn? Is it worth it to keep trying? Is it me or is it them? Am I a good teacher? Am I a bad teacher? Shall I stay or shall I go? I have a chance to escape, but should I leave my students in the lurch?

5 Taina A Novel Ernesto Quiñónez

Praise for Bodega Dreams: “Rich with eye-opening detail, this is a lively and entertaining work by a young writer whose talents are deserving of a wide readership.” —Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

“A new and authentic voice of the urban Latino experience.” —Esmeralda Santiago, author of When I Was Puerto Vintage Rican October 2019 uniquely dark, coming-of-age novel ripe with Rights available magical realism, music, sorcery and redemption, withA sweeping narrative from the author of Bodega Dreams. ERNESTO QUIÑÓNEZ was born in Ecuador, but arrived to When Julio, a young Puerto Rican-Ecuadorian boy in New York City with his Puerto Spanish Harlem, hears that Taina, a fifteen-year-old Rican mother, Ecuadorian girl from his church, is pregnant, and that both mother father, and four brothers when and daughter insist that she is a virgin, he decides to believe them. he was eighteen months old. He was raised in El Barrio, the Ridiculed for his naiveté, Julio begins to feel like even Latino neighborhood located more of a misfit than he’s always felt. His staunch yet in Harlem. Quiñónez is the unrequited loyalty to Taina soon unleashes a whirlpool author of Bodega Dreams and of emotions that bring Julio to question his parents, his Chango’s Fire. Quiñónez is religion, and even the basic building blocks of modern science (who’s to say Taina’s baby’s conception wasn’t Associate Professor at Cornell indeed a mystical, scientific miracle?) He finds himself University, teaching Creative willing to uproot everything he once believed in, and Writing, Latino Fiction and all for the sake of his fervent devotion to the young Magical Realism, among Puerto Rican girl. other subjects. Yet the lengths Julio goes to to defend Taina’s purity will thrust him into the girl’s murky past. In the midst of it all, he meets Taina’s uncle, “El Vejigante”, an ex-con who claims that, in order to get closer to the immaculate Taina, Julio must provide financial support to help the future young mother. Dubious but determined, and following the ex-con’s instructions, Julio gets entangled in a web of lies and stealing (dogs, for example, from Upper East Siders who will pay hefty rewards to have them returned.) He finally comes face- to-face with Taina, whose mother keeps her locked inside their apartment in the projects, but not without bringing his loved ones into his chaotic love affair, and uncovering a family secret that will not leave him unscathed. Taina is a sweeping story that delivers a subtle yet poignant critique of Latino cultural norms and society, disguised within an absorbing, magical narrative.

6 EXCERPT

And when at fifteen Taina Flores became pregnant, she said that maybe some Angel had entered her project. Taken the elevator. Punched her floor. Stepped off and left its body so it could drift under her bedroom door like mist. The elders at her Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses questioned Taina’s mother Sister Flores, and she vowed that Taina had never been with a man. That she had taught her daughter, “Si es macho, puede.” Sister Flores said that she kept so close an eye on her daughter, she was sure that Taina didn’t even masturbate. Her reply had made the elders uncomfortable. They squirmed in their chairs and though a sin, that couldn’t have made Taina pregnant. The elders inquired about Taina’s cycles, was she early, late or did they vary? What type of pads did she use? The adhesive kind or the inserted type that are shaped like a man’s organ? By this time all the air had gone flat in Taina’s life and it was her mother who answered all the questions. The trial went on for weeks. Every Sunday after service the two women were called by the elders into a cold room. Though embarrassed that the entire congregation was laughing behind her back, Sister Flores stood by her daughter’s story. The elders propose to take Taina to Metropolitan hospital not for her health’s sake but to confirm that she was no longer a virgin. Still, Taina and Sister Flores refused, time and time again, they refused. “Dios sabe, I have told the truth.” Sister Flores vowed. This left the elders with no choice but to kick both women out of “The Truth.” Afterwards, the two women became an odd sight in Spanish Harlem because they never spoke much. To each other or anyone. In the street they walked hand in hand, mother clutching daughter and only made necessary visits to the supermarket and the Check-O- mate for welfare benefits. There were places that the two had never been to like a movie, a beauty salon, or cafe. The women were living in a universe of two and it seemed that not even crowds could ever disturb them. Not cat calls from the corner boys directed at Taina. “mira, to’ eso tuyo?” Not gossip from laundromat women, whose vicious bites were directed at Doña Flores. “Perras cuidan a sus hijas mejor que esa.” At school, Taina sat alone and got lost among a sea of teenagers. She never cared for clothes, makeup, popularity or anything. Like her mother, she would smile when smiled at but not talk back, as if her smile was telling you she was not your enemy but didn’t care for your friendship. The boys liked her, they all fell in love with her but soon lost interest when she’d stare at walls or anything in front of her, as if the person talking didn’t exist. The boys called her a conceited. I’m sure Taina didn’t know she was beautiful. It’s not easy to know if you are beautiful. I wondered what else Taina did not know? Did she not know that her voice was a gift? I’d heard that Taina sang beautifully. That she had made the school chorus roster. That when she took her solo, everyone felt shivers. In her voice was the origin of music. It starts with a cry, a wail, like that of a newborn. Then the wailing turns, changes, and it seeps inside your skin and drowns out all your pain. In her voice, Ms. Cahill the science teacher had said, everyone saw whom they loved and who loved them back. That they could feel their loved ones, smell their scents. That Taina’s voice had woven itself into the fabric of their clothes and for weeks no matter how much soap or how many times they washed them, echoes would remain. Her voice was caught, fixed into every strand of their hair too, like cigarette smoke they’d smell her voice for days. That a black girl had wept and said to Taina that day, “You gave it all to the fire, honey. It was like church.” That’s what I’ve heard. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted that sound, that voice so I could hear love. A sound that people wait their whole lives for. I wanted to hear Taina sing. I wanted to see who loved me. But all was lost. And if I remember well, Taina had been in one of my classes. It was biology and she never sang. She said only one word, “pegion.” The word sounded hard, as if her tongue had never known sweets and her accent was pregnant with Spanish as if Taina had just arrived to The United States.

Shame.

7 The Janes An Alice Vega Novel Louisa Luna

Praise for Two Girls Down:

“Opening this book is like arming a bomb—the suspense is relentless and the payoff is spectacular. Lead character Alice Vega is sensational—I want to see lots more of her.” —Lee Child

“The brisk plot combines psychological suspense with Doubleday solid action, while providing a realistic look at a family January 2020 under siege, as it builds to a shocking finale.” —Publisher’s Weekly, starred Rights available “Luna is an incredibly talented writer with a bewitching LOUISA LUNA is the gift for storytelling.” author of Two Girls Down —Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the (An Alice Vega Novel) as Time well as Brave New Girl and Crooked. She was born “Gripping, emotional, and tautly written, with and raised in San Francisco a wonderful cast of memorable characters.” and lives in Brooklyn, New —Jeff Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of York with her husband and Blame daughter. he electric follow up to Louisa Luna’s acclaimed thriller Two Girls Down, featuring private investigatorsT Alice Vega and Max Caplan. On the outskirts of San Diego, the bodies of two unidentified Jane Does are found, one of them still clutching in her fist a piece of paper with a name scrawled on it. That name is Alice Vega. Vega comes in to assist the police, and she immediately recognizes that these dead Janes are only the beginning; there are more girls missing. Somewhere. And Vega will find them. Then she will find who took them, find who called the shots, and make them pay. To help, she calls in her partner Max Caplan, the ex-cop from Philadelphia, to fly out. Together, Vega and Cap make an incredibly dynamic and fresh partnership that ranks with the very best in crime fiction. Louisa Luna’s novels thrive where blistering suspense and rich characters intersect. The Janes is a rare, timely novel deserving to join the pantheon of classic crime fiction.

8 EXCERPT Meet our girl: seventeen, arrived here a year ago from a rough and dusty town in Chiapas, considered pretty by most standards because she is young, her face unmarked by scars or wrinkles, her body boasting the tender snap of fresh muscle. Our girl’s brain, on the other hand, is at war with itself and others: with memories of her mother’s worry and her father’s pain, subtle with her own simmering meditations on sex and violence, with fear of all the men that come through the door with their eyes so stark and full of want it’s like they’ve eaten her up before they’ve even selected her from underneath the butcher’s glass. Our girl walks in bare feet, unsure if she is dreaming. Her dreams these days are collisions, collages, bursts of fire and color that all start normally enough – she is playing paper dolls with her sister on the porch under the umbrella with one panel missing, or fluffing up yellow rice in a pot right after it’s done steaming. But then they turn, the dolls become scuttling cockroaches in her hands; the rice bowl fills with blood; her own teeth grow into blades and shred her tongue to streamers. The house is divided, two floors: the bottom floor, where she and the other girls sleep on towels side by side in the bedroom they share, and watch TV and wait in the living room; and there’s downstairs full of boxes that pass for rooms—no windows, no air. Those are the working rooms. Then there is the garage, which is separate from the house, but there are no cars inside. There is just a table and some machines and tools. Our girl hasn’t been there yet but this is what she’s heard. Only girls who cry and act stupid are taken there and our girl keeps her head down and does what she’s supposed to do. She doesn’t ask questions and doesn’t make trouble, but she watches everything. She avoids the bosses. Coyote Ben is easy to avoid because he comes and goes, although when he’s around and there’s no work he grabs the hair at the back of her neck and whispers in her ear. He speaks English so she doesn’t really understand everything he says but she knows he doesn’t expect her to respond. He lets her make the drinks. Fat Mitch is always there, and he’s got the gun on a belt which looks like it’s strangling all the fat on his stomach. He has named the gun, Selena, after a singer, and he is always reminding the girls the gun is there. He’ll say things in Spanish like, “Selena got a lot of sleep last night and wants to have some play-time today.” And then there’s Rafa. Rafa is the one who takes the girls to the garage. Our girl’s not stupid, and she stays away from the stupid girls: Isabel, Chicago, Good Hair. They cry and try to steal food. Stupid. The girl called Maricel is new, one of the girls from the city, and while it’s usually not a good idea to get to know the new girls, our girl actually likes her and Good Hair both. In another time and place they may have all played card games and shared secrets about boys in their class. Instead they wait to be picked. Which is better than the alternative. If a girl doesn’t get picked from the TV room for a month, she’s out, not taken to the garage—out out, out of the house and dropped somewhere in the desert because she’s not worth the Wonder Bread. Our girl has learned a little English here and there from TV. She watches a news show about a boy who looks her age, and Mexican, too, but American. She tries to wrap her mouth around a word the newswoman keeps repeating, which sounds like something about a duck flying up. Duck-ted. Up-duck-ted. The boy talks to the newswoman, points to a picture of a fish tank. Then there is another woman, not the newswoman; 2014 it says in the corner. Her name is at the bottom of the screen. Our girl notices: American first name, Mexican last name. She looks like she is police. Or a lesbian. Or a gangster. She wears black clothes and sunglasses. Back to the boy. Over and over he says the same thing: “She safes me, she safes me.” Our girl watches the boy’s top row of teeth, the way they scrape his bottom lip as he cries. The word is not, “safes.” It’s “saved.” She saved me, the boy says, again and again. Our girl watches Maricel get up close to the TV. Maricel doesn’t take her eyes off it. The boy on the screen says, “She saved me. Alice Vega, she saved me.” Maricel begins to cry, along with the boy. Our girl watches her and realizes her own hands are shaking. Our girl has a thought out of nowhere: you treat us like dogs; we’re going to act like dogs. A map unfolds in her mind, square by square. She saved me, the boy says. She saved me. 9 Interior Chinatown A Novel Charles Yu

Praise for Charles Yu:

“There’s some of the cerebral gamesmanship of Jonathan Lethem, the resigned sadness of Kurt Vonnegut, the Phil Dickian paranoiac distrust of consumer culture. But Yu’s voice, sensibility and approach are unique, especially in the ways he wrings humor and pathos out of stripped-down syntax and seemingly passive protagonists. The stories deliver more than their fair share of bitter laughs, philosophical Pantheon conundrums and existential gut punches.” January 2020 —San Francisco Chronicle

Rights available “Like Douglas Adams, Yu is very funny, usually proportional to the wildness of his inventions, but Yu’s sound and fury conceal (and construct) this novel’s CHARLES YU is the author dense, tragic, all-too-human heart. Yu is a superhero of three books, including the of rendering human consciousness and emotion in the novel How to Live Safely in language of engineering and science.” a Science Fictional Universe, —The New York Times Book Review which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the rom the infinitely inventive author of How to Live year by Time magazine. He FSafely in a Science Fictional Universe, comes received the National Book a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, Foundation’s 5 Under 35 assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to Award, and was nominated for play. two WGA awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. The narrator of Interior Chinatown doesn’t perceive He has also written for himself as a protagonist even in his own life: he’s upcoming shows on AMC and merely Generic Asian Man. Every day, he leaves his HBO. His fiction and non- tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden fiction have been published Palace restaurant, where a procedural cop TV show is in a number of publications in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here too— including The New Yorker, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the highest The New York Times, Slate aspiration he can imagine for a Chinatown denizen. and Wired. But just as he sees a chance at promotion, he realizes that the people he’s considered fellow bit players— Sifu, his inscrutable mentor; Older Brother, his elusive idol; the cold, practical Old Asian Woman; even Cute Asian Orphan Girl—may have complex backstories he’s never even imagined. Launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, our narrator discovers not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes—this is Charles Yu’s most moving and masterful novel yet.

10 EXCERPT

In the world of Black and White, everyone starts out as a Generic Asian. You all work at Golden Palace, formerly Jade Palace, formerly Palace of Good Fortune. There’s an aquarium in the front and cloudy tanks of rock crabs and two pound lobsters crawling over each other in the back. Laminated menus offer the lunch special, which comes with a bowl of fluffy white rice and choice of soup, egg drop or hot and sour. A neon Tsing Tao sign blinks and buzzes behind the bar in the dimly lit space, a dropped-ceiling room with lacquered ornate woodwork (or some imitation thereof), everything simmering in a warm, seedy red glow thrown off by the dollar store paper lanterns festooned above, many of them darkened by dead moths, the paper yellowing, ripped, curling in on itself. The bar is fully stocked with top shelf spirits up top, middle shelf liquor at eye-level, and down at the bottom, happy hour shelf of booze that you will regret for sure. The new thing everyone is excited about is called the lychee margaritatini, which seems like a lot of flavors. Not that you’ve had one. They’re fourteen bucks. Sometimes people leave a sip at the bottom of the glass and if you’re quick, while you go through the swinging door that separates the front of the house from the back, you can have a taste—you’ve seen some of the other Generic Asian Men do it. It’s a risk, though. The manager’s always got an eye out, ready to fire someone for the smallest infraction. People come to Golden Palace for the experience, he says. You have to give them what they want. You wear the uniform: white shirt, black pants. Black slipper-like shoes that have no traction whatsoever. Your haircut is not good, to say the least. Turner and Green always look good. It doesn’t seem possible for them to not look good. A lot of it has to do with the light, you understand, but that’s the point. Turner and Green, Black and White, they get the hero lighting. Designed to hit their faces just right. Someday you want the light to hit your face just right. To look like the hero. Or just for a moment to actually be the hero. First, you have to work your way up. Starting from the bottom, it goes: 5. Background Oriental Male 4. Dead Asian Man 3. Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy 2. Generic Asian Man Number Two/Waiter 1. Generic Asian Man Number One And then if you make it that far (hardly anyone does) you get stuck at Number One for a while and hope and pray that the light will find you and that when it does you’ll have something to say and when you say that something it will come out just right and everyone in Black and White will turn their heads and say wow who is that, that is not just some Generic Asian Man, that is a star, maybe not a real, regular star, let’s not get crazy, we’re talking about Chinatown here, but perhaps a very special guest star, which is the terminal, ultimate, exalted position for any Asian working in this world, the thing every Oriental Male dreams of when he’s in the Background, trying to blend in. Kung Fu Guy. Kung Fu Guy is not like the other slots in the hierarchy—there isn’t always someone occupying the position, as in whoever the top guy is at any given time, that’s the default guy who gets trotted out whenever there’s kung fu to be done. There has to be someone worthy of the title. It takes years of training, and even then, only a few have even a slim chance at making it. Despite the odds, you all grew up training for this and only this. All the little yellow boys up and down the block dreaming the same dream.

11 Northernmost A Novel Peter Geye

Praise for Wintering: “Geye’s powerful novel journeys to the frozen places in the American landscape and the human heart. —Publishers Weekly “The last time I read a literary thriller so profound Cormac McCarthy’s name was on its spine. But Peter Geye is his own man and Wintering is as unique and menacingly beautiful as its Minnesota borderlands Knopf setting.” April 2020 —Richard Russo “An elegant, quietly profound, and harrowing novel. I Rights available loved this book.” —Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven PETER GEYE was born and raised in Minneapolis, where thrilling ode to both the spirit of adventure and he continues to live. His the timeless vagaries of love. previous novels are Wintering, A Safe from the Sea, and The In 1897 Norway, Odd Einar Eide returns home from Lighthouse Road. a near-death experience in the arctic only to discover his funeral in full effect. His wife Inger, stunned to see him alive, is slow to warm back up to him, having spent many sleepless nights convinced she had lost both him and their daughter, Thea, who traveled to America two years before and has not sent even one letter back. Complicating their reunion further, a sensationalist journalist gets wind of Odd Einar’s remarkable tale of survival and invites them to Tromsø so he can properly report on what he is sure will be a bestselling story. In 2017 Minnesota, Greta Nansen has finally begun to admit to herself that her marriage is over. Desperately unhappy and unfulfilled, she makes the decision to leave her children at home with her father and follow her husband, the descendant himself of Norway’s most famous explorer, to Oslo, where he has traveled for work, to end it once and for all. But on impulse she diverts her travels to Hammerfest, the town of her ancestors, the town where her great-great grandmother Thea was born, for reasons unbeknownst to even her. A dual narrative told by two family members generations apart, Northernmost both confronts the darkest recesses of the human heart and celebrates the remarkable ability of humans to survive nearly unimaginable trials.

12 EXCERPT I heard the pastor before I saw him, his voice starting and stopping on the wind. “Thou turnest men to destruction; and sayest, Return ye children of men . . . ” Rainwater streamed down the cemetery path and I slipped on the rocks and muddied my hands and knees. I heard the horse neigh and stamp his hoof. “ . . . Thou has set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.” What rot, I thought, my gut twisting around the carrot. I felt sickly but also charged. We spend our lives in blind obedience. We pray for mercy and find only suffering. “…And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” But, we fly home. And not by the grace of God but by our wits and our own damn will. We are hungry, and you offer us nothing. We are cold, and you offer only wind and snow. We are lonesome, and you stow us in a coalbunker. It was not the first time since I’d been lost that I became furious thinking of the dreck I’d heard in church all my life, but the pastor’s psalm stoked my anger afresh, and I nearly walked into the ass of the horse as I stumbled up to the carriage. Inger’s shabby handbag sat on the bench. The wind drew down. I patted the horse’s withers and he neighed and swung his muscled neck around to meet my eyes. His own went wide and he snorted and then I heard Inger’s sweet voice as I looked up to see her, a freshly turned grave between us. “Kjære Gud. Kan det væredes?” She said. “Inger.” Did I say her name aloud? Did I say, “Is that you?” I noticed Bengt and the pastor step back together as though startled. Inger’s eyes widened as the horse’s had, and she looked down at her bible and closed it and then looked at me up from the ground. I took my hat from my head and held it before me as though I were a gentleman. I could see her trembling hands and her heaving chest. When I stepped closer I could see her wet eyes glaring now to the gravestone at her feet. “Inger, is that our daughter? Is that my Thea?” She looked up and blinked away the wetness in her eyes. “Thea?” She said and shook her head no. She said, “Thea,” again and finally came to me. She put her hand on my shoulder and then on my face. She left her fingers in my ratty beard and said, “But you’re dead, Odd Einar.” “Dead?” “That’s what they said. On Spitzbergen. You and that man Birger Mikkelsen. At Krossfjorden. Killed by an ice bear.” Her hand was still on my face, as though she could not otherwise believe I was there. “Birger died on the Krossfjorden. But I didn’t. I’m home, Inger.” She took her hand from my face. I could see the softness of the inside of her wrist and the pink of her cold flesh. What trailed her hand was a fresh scent, something almost floral, something I’d never smelled before. Bengt coughed and Inger looked over her shoulder and hurried her hand into her pocket, and in the same motion stepped back beside the gravestone. The pastor came forward and now he put his hand on my shoulder and raised his gaze to the still-shrouded skies. “The water saw thee, O God, the water saw thee; they were afraid; the depths were also troubled.” Now he looked at me. “I was but a man,” he said, very softly, before he walked over to the carriage and climbed onto the seat. Now I looked at Bengt. He held his thumbs in his frockcoat and looked down his veiny nose. The grin of a fatted man spread across his face. He stepped to the gravestone and took Inger by the elbow. He kicked at the ground with his leather boot. “Don’t carve in stone what could be branded on birchboard. I guess that’s the moral of this story.” He bent his thick neck and whis- pered something in Inger’s ear before turning back to me. “But don’t you worry, Odd Einar. I’ll add the cost of this stone to what’s already owed.” He handed Inger her purse, then he, too, walked to the carriage and took his seat next to the pastor. The horse nickered and turned down the cemetery path. Inger watched them go, the fog going with them, and I looked down on the gravestone. ODD EINAR EIDE, it read. B. 1854—TAPT PÅ ISEN I HERRANS ÅR 1897. She turned to me, my wife did, and the look on her face left me to wish I had been lost on the ice, in this treacherous year of life. 13 New York Times Bestseller Figuring Maria Popova “A passionate and erudite pursuit of truth and beauty.” —Booklist, starred review

“Throughout her complex, consistently stimulating narrative, the author blends biography, cultural criticism, and journalism to forge elegant connections. A lyrical work of intellectual history.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Invites the reader to engage with complex ideas and challenging personalities, unearthing a wealth of Pantheon material for further reflection along the way.” February 2019 —BookPage, starred review

Rights sold: iguring explores the complexities of love Germany: Diogenes and the human search for truth and meaning Greece: Travlos throughF the interconnected lives of several historical UK: Canongate figures across four centuries—beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the Other rights available laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the MARIA POPOVA started environmental movement. Brain Pickings in 2006 as a Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, weekly email that went out writers, and scientists—mostly women, mostly to seven friends and which she eventually brought online queer—whose public contribution has risen out of as brainpickings.org. The their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private site was added to the Library relationships to change the way we understand, of Congress permanent web experience, and appreciate the universe. Among them archives in 2012. She has are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way written for The Atlantic, The for women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, New York Times and Harvard’s who did the same in art; the journalist and literary Nieman Journalism Lab. critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson. Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world: Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman—and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry, and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement.

14 EXCERPT

All of it—the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown, every copper atom composing the disc that carried arias aboard the first human- made object to enter interstellar space and every oak splinter of the floorboards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the yellow of the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo’s fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of freckles constellating on the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her, all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality—it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, no smaller than the dot levitating over the small i, the I lowered from the pedestal of ego.

How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness? This veneer must have been what the confluence of accidents and atoms known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. saw through when he spoke of our “inescapable network of mutuality,” what Walt Whitman punctured when he wrote that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning- making. In the course of our figuring, orbits intersect, often unbeknownst to the bodies they carry—intersections mappable only from the distance of decades or centuries. Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth—not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: Our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves. Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. Lives interweave with other lives and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love? Two Nobel Prizes don’t seem to recompense the melancholy radiating from every photograph of the woman in the black laboratory dress. Is success a guarantee of fulfillment, or merely a promise as precarious as a marital vow? How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being? There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

15 Once More We Saw Stars A Memoir Jayson Greene

“A gripping and beautiful book about the power of love in the face of unimaginable loss.” —Cheryl Strayed

“A stunning human achievement as well as a literary one.” —Dani Shapiro

“This stunning book reminds us that nothing—not Knopf even devastating grief—can define us as much as our May 2019 deepest loves. A must read.” —Kate Bowler, author of Everything Happens for a Rights sold: Reason China: Beijing Xiron Holland: Het Spectrum “It’s funny, lucid, and deeply generous—proof Korea: Woongjin that a masterful writer can make from his own Taiwan: Business Weekly specifics a universal story with lessons for usall.” UK: Hodder & Stoughton —Lucy Kalanithi

Other rights available or readers of The Bright Hour and When Breath Becomes Air, a moving, transcendent memoir of JAYSON GREENE has been F writing for Pitchfork since loss and a stunning exploration of marriage in the 2008. He was previously wake of unimaginable grief. Senior Editor for Wondering Two-year-old Greta Greene was sitting with her Sound, and his writing has grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West appeared in The New York Side of Manhattan when a brick crumbled from a Times, Grantland, GQ.com, windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious. She Red Bull Music Academy, The is immediately rushed to the hospital. Once More We Village Voice, and elsewhere. Saw Stars begins with this event, leading the reader He lives in Brooklyn. into the unimaginable. But although it begins with the anguish Jayson and his wife Stacy confront in the wake of their daughter’s trauma and the hours leading up to her death, it quickly becomes a narrative that is as much about hope and healing as it is about grief and loss. Jayson recognizes, even in the very midst of his ordeal, that there will be a life for him beyond it—that if only he can continue moving forward, from one moment to the next, he will survive what seems un-survivable. With raw honesty, deep emotion, and exquisite tenderness, he captures both the fragility of life and absoluteness of death, and most important of all, the unconquerable power of love. This is an unforgettable memoir of courage and transformation—and a book that will change the way you look at the world.

16 EXCERPT How should we start, sweetie? Maybe with one of the silly games we invented together. They meant nothing to anyone, but everything to us. There was the time that we pretended, for half an hour, that the ramp outside of a building was an elevator. You would press your finger to a brick; I would make a beeping noise. I would say “Going down!” and you would run down the ramp, laughing. That was the whole game. It was enough. Or: We’re on the beach. You are two years old. You saw the beach once in your life before this, when you were fourteen months old; you did not enjoy it. The sun shining on your skin felt invasive (you shared your mother’s aversion to direct sunlight). The sand moving beneath your feet and hands fascinated you at first but quickly unnerved you; the ground had never stuck to you before, nor had it proven unreliable. The sea thundered. You wound up in my arms, squirming. Today, you are older, and you are unafraid. You are wearing a polka dot red cardigan over a striped green dress and a bright red hat, and in your left hand is a mango on a stick from the boardwalk vendor. I carry you out past the Coney Island pier; I take off my shoes and set you down with your small shoes on. You run out, mango stick held out careful to your side. I walk after you. The ocean is enormous to you, and I sense the thrill of awe and fear little people feel when they are confronted with the world’s vastness. You look up at me and I smile; I don’t seem scared. My shoes are off, I point out; would you like to take off yours? Your eyes go thoughtful, and then you nod. We walk up together to the mouth of the impossible ocean. The wet sand is cold; it’s only May. Individual sand grains twinkle. “Look, sweetie pie, a shell,” I say, pointing to your feet. You reach down and scoop it up out of the wet sand. It is a fragment, something that fits between your tiny finger and thumb. There is a tiny clump of sand at its point; you hold it up in my face, grinning, as I pretend to be disgusted. “EWWWW!” You laugh that throaty, snuffly, catching giggle of yours. The waves run closer, reaching us. For the only time in your life, you feel fresh ocean water running over your toes. ** The brick fell from an eighth-story windowsill on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Greta was sitting on a bench out front with her grandmother. The two of them were chatting about a play they had seen together the night before. It was a live action version of the kids’ show “Chuggington,” in which some talking train cars helped their friend Koko get back on track after she was derailed. “Koko got stuck!” Greta exclaimed, over and over. The moment seemed lodged in her brain, my mother-in-law told us later. She was struck by the simplicity of the predicament, the profundity of the call for help. Reporters interviewed the aide of the elderly woman who lived on the floor—the woman whose windowsill crumbled. Even in print, I recognized the sickened wonder in her voice, her newly dawning understanding of the malevolence and chaos of the world: “It was like an evil force reached down.”

17 The Art of Noticing 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday Rob Walker, with Illustrations by Peter Mendelsund & Oliver Munday “Filled with clever, eminently deployable strategies for getting more from the world around you. It’s a paean to alertness, a sensory upgrade, a delightful field guide to being alive.” —Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic

Knopf “In the tradition of John Berger, Susan Sontag, and May 2019 George Nelson, Walker offers a guide not to looking but to seeing—and why the difference is crucial. At Rights sold: once passionate and charming, he makes the case that China: Gingko Book Co. noticing what’s there is the first step in creating what’s Holland: Bruna new.” Italy: DeA Planeta —Michael Bierur, co-founder of Design Observer and UK: Ebury author of Now You See It and Other Essays on Design

Other rights available “If you want a more interesting and creative life, the first thing to do is to start paying better ROB WALKER is a attention to it. Walker provides an essential guide journalist covering design, to becoming an explorer of your everyday world. technology, business, the arts, I found a ton to steal here and so will you.” and other subjects. He writes —Austin Kleon, New York Times bestselling author of The Workologist column for Steal Like An Artist the Sunday Business section of The New York Times, and contributes to a variety of beautiful illustrated guidebook for altering and other publications and media A expanding the ways we engage with our everyday outlets. His previous books world—the people, places, objects and tasks we include Significant Objects: encounter. Rob Walker has designed 131 exercises and 100 Extraordinary Stories meditations that offer encouragement and guidance to About Ordinary Things help us to rediscover joy and creativity in our lives. (coauthored with Joshua Drawn from across a variety of disciplines, the short Glenn) and Buying In. He is and playful entries that make up the book—including on the faculty of the Products “Make a Personal Map” and “Eat Somewhere of Design MFA program at Dubious”—will inspire everyone from the artist or the School of Visual Arts and designer developing their aesthetic to the techie contributes to a wide range looking to disrupt a new market, but they are their own of publications including The joyful reward for anyone who tries them on. Atlantic, NewYorker.com, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Bloomberg Businessweek among others.

18 EXCERPT

Document the (Seemingly) Identical ** My friend (but not relation) Dave Walker takes close-up pictures of telephone poles around New Orleans. Close-ups. Sometimes the image shows the texture of a pole, but sometimes a pole is riddled with staples, or touched by an odd dab of paint, or marred by a bent nail. The colors vary, and subtle patterns appear. I think of Dave when I notice a telephone pole as I’m walking and study it for some quietly hidden visual appeal that he might spot.

A developer named Jacob Harris regularly takes pictures of a blue cloudless sky—near- identical squares of blue. He calls the series Sky Gradients.

The tight constraints of the project are the point; Harris cites the influence Dogme 95, a filmmaking movement from the 1990s, started by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. They created a manifesto that advocated the power of story but was notable for its emphasis on restrictions—against lighting and filter tricks or other special effects, among other limitations.

Harris suggests that his real motive doesn’t have to do even with sparking creativity. “I don’t really consider myself much of an artist or this project as art,” he writes. “I do this as a means of meditation.” While sometimes inspired by a fleeting moment of boredom, Harris claims he takes these “not to kill time but to memorialize it, albeit in a pointedly abstract way.”

Sometimes, he says, he forgets where he took a photograph or precisely why. “Much like writing it down in a journal or throwing a stone into the water, to mark the moment is also to let it pass,” he observes. “I often don’t have a pen, and I’m usually not near rocks or ponds. But I always have my phone. And sometimes even when I am sad, it’s still a beautiful sunny day. I reach into my pocket for my phone and point it towards the sky. I exhale and take a photo.”

Sidewalks, parking lots, grass, tree trunks—both human-made features and natural ones offer endless possibilities.

19 Casting Into the Light Tales of a Fishing Life Janet Messineo

moving, inspiring portrait of making a dream come true—the (unsentimental) education of a championA surfcaster (catching fish by casting a line from the shoreline). The midnight (and early morning) tales of a young woman hell-bent on following her dream and learning the mysterious and profound sport—and the art, of surfcasting on the small, legendary island of Martha’s Vineyard, breaking through the strictly enforced Pantheon male-bastion of fishing life to become a world-class July 2019 sportsman at a time when few women fished. Janet Messineo writes of mastering surfcasting during Rights available the daylight and struggling with it on the beaches at night . . . She writes of the Vineyard fishermen she’s JANET fished with and the fishing women who’ve forged MESSINEO was born in the path for others. She describes the unspoken Lawrence, Massachusetts. “fishing ethic” and the age-old secrecy behind fishing She is a former president techniques, lures and baits, fishing locations, and of the Martha’s Vineyard writes of her own favorite spots on the island and Surfcasters Association, on Chappaquiddick, of her Derby years and dreams and writes a fishing column of catching that prize-winning elusive striper; about for the Martha’s Vineyard acquiring, not only the skill of hooking and landing a Times. She lives with her big fish, but the skill of finding them. husband in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. Full of adventure and daring—a rich portrait of following one’s vision and heart.

20 EXCERPT

I was packing up my gear after a day of fishing for bluefish. Early that morning I had driven my 1979 International Scout from Katama Beach on Martha’s Vineyard, to Wasque Point on Chappaquiddick Island, a three-mile over-sand barrier beach that connects the two islands. A woman who looked to be about fifty years old, alone in her four-wheel-drive vehicle, stopped by for a chat with one of the fishermen I was standing with at the Wasque Rip. To me, she was elderly. She told us she was heading out to Cape Poge for the night to fish for striped bass. From where we stood, Cape Poge is another seven miles of desolate beach driving rough cut roads through the dunes, and before the 1980s, there was no beach management at night. It’s a barrier beach, Cape Poge bay on one side, Nantucket Sound on the other. I stood wide-eyed. I was impressed that all she had with her was her fishing gear, a thermos of coffee and a sandwich. It was unusual to see any woman fishing on the beach. The idea of spending the night alone on a desolate beach in search of striped bass filled me with anxiety. A shiver of fear ran down my spine but at the same time, I felt excitement and I got an adrenaline surge. At that moment, I wanted to be her. Striped bass, Morone saxatilis, are the most prized migratory game fish in the Northeast. They have earned respect from anglers because of their powerful fighting strength, beauty and delicious table fare. Striped bass can live for at least 40 years and have been known to grow up to 100 pounds, although fish more than 50 pounds are rare. The striped bass spends most of its adult life in the ocean, migrating north and south seasonally. They ascend to fresh water into the estuaries to spawn in the spring. The juveniles remain in the fresh water for the next few years before entering the ocean to begin their life-long annual migration. In New England, the striped bass has been a valued resource since it was first settled in the 1600s. The early settlers describe the bass as being in immense abundance. One of the first public schools in America was established in Plymouth Colony in 1670 with income from the striped bass fisheries. Today in New England this species is still a highly valued resource. On Martha’s Vineyard, the saltwater fishing season starts in April and runs through November. When the water temperature drops to below 45 degrees, the striped bass migrates south following their forage to warmer waters. When the spring water temperatures rise above 55 degrees, they return to Vineyard waters. I enjoy fishing for many species, but striped bass are the fish that first captivated my interest, especially because they are so difficult to find since they are primarily nocturnal feeders. They have a reputation of being finicky and clever fighters. Under the cover of darkness, they will trap bait up against jetties or in-between fields of large boulders, near the shoreline. Once hooked they have been known to rub their mouths against the rocks to cut your line. A bluefish is more likely to feed during the day light hours and in open waters. Bluefish ferociously shake their heads and jump into the air, tryingto free themselves from a hook. They give the fisherman a hearty tussle, they feel more like fighting a fish of muscle, but not much brain. A fifty-pound striped bass from the surf has been the dream of many obsessed surf anglers for generations. Becoming a respected surf fisherman has been a challenge. My first memories are vague, but I remember wanting to become a great fisherman, not a woman fisherman, not separated by gender, but just a respected fisherman. I knew in my gut that I was as capable as any man of catching and landing a large fish. It took many years to prove to myself and to the male dominated fishing community that I could make this come true. I’ve had many scary nights alone on the beach in search of a huge creature that I longed to know. As I think back four decades, I’m not sure why I didn’t give up after being frightened half out of my wits. I’ve learned that giving up is not something I do. 21 Vintage January 2020 How to Live a Good Life Fourteen Philosophers on Choosing— UK rights available and Living—a Philosophy of Life MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary & is currently the K.D. Irani professor of philosophy at the Daniel Kaufman City College of New York. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Tennessee, collection of essays by fourteen philosophers and has been elected fellow of presenting a thoughtful, introductory guide to the American Association for A the Advancement of Science. choosing a philosophy for living an examined and His work has been published meaningful life. in The New York Times, The Socrates famously said the “unexamined life is not Wall Street Journal, Aeon, worth living,” but what does it mean to truly live and The Philosophers’ philosophically? Magazine, among others. He is most recently the author In this thought-provoking, wide-ranging collection, of the bestselling How to Pigliucci, Cleary, and Kaufman have collected essays Be a Stoic: Using Ancient by fourteen leading philosophers reflecting on what it Philosophy to Live a Modern means to live according to a philosophy of life. From Life. John Kaag’s experience grappling with pragmatism and William James’s question of whether life is SKYE CLEARY is the worth living, to Skye Cleary’s examination of how author of Existentialism and the Existentialists’ view of love altered the course of Romantic Love. She teaches her romantic and professional paths, to Bryan Van philosophy, leadership, and Norden’s rumination on Confucianism’s relationality management at Columbia and what it means in a Western world where we hold University, Barnard College, dear the individual self, contributors offer accounts the City University of of how they find meaning in the practice of their New York, and the New chosen philosophical traditions (including Neo- York Public Library. Skye Aristotelianism, Daoism, and Judaism, among others). authored the script for the Together, the pieces in How to Live a Good Life TED-Ed animation “Why Do provide not only a beginner’s guide to choosing a life We Love? A Philosophical philosophy but also a timely portrait of what it means Inquiry,” which has had over to live an examined life in the twenty-first century. 2.2 million views. Her work has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Philosophers’ Magazine, HuffPost, and The New Republic.

DANIEL KAUFMAN received his PhD in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is professor of philosophy at Missouri State University.

22 EXCERPT

In his famous lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) recounted the story of a woman who, when she swore, excused herself by saying “I think I’m becoming an existentialist.” Existential philosophers do have a reputation for being scandalous and breaking social norms. If we take “the good life” to mean living fully, then the existentialists have plenty to say about that. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (1908– 1986) were as famous for their philosophies as for their excesses of drinking, smoking, drug-taking, and affairs—including with their students.

Some would argue that how philosophers live ought to be kept separate from their philosophy. Yet, the existential philosophers did not believe that. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the intellectual grandfather of existentialism, proposed that all philosophy is basically autobiography. Indeed, existential philosophers such as Beauvoir and Sartre explicitly set out to create a philosophy that could be lived and wrote copiously about their successes, failures, and challenges—not only in their scholarly works, but also in letters, autobiographies, plays, and novels.

Picture this: it’s 1942 at the Parisian hotspot Bec de Gaz on Rue Montparnasse when three friends—Beauvoir, along with her short, googly-eyed, yet popular-with-the-ladies boyfriend Sartre, and the much-less-famous Raymond Aron—were chatting in between drags on their cigarettes about how their philosophical education had no practical value for everyday life.

Like their fresh-out-of-college friends, they were so over the Enlightenment’s obsession with objectivity, detachment, abstract reasoning, logic, rationality, convention, restrictions, sensibility and prudence, and the theories their teachers yammered on about while the real world was descending into World War II. Their new approach, existentialism, became popular because they provided a philosophy that was particularly conducive to dealing with the extreme situations and great human suffering. It accounted for the absurdity of existence and stressed the importance of individual freedom.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was one philosopher that Beauvoir and Sartre learned about at university—and at whom they loved to roll their eyes. They thought that the problem with Hegel was that while he talks a lot about absolute ideals and what the underlying order to the universe might be, he doesn’t say anything about how we should actually live, nor does he give us a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Beauvoir and Sartre’s generation was more interested in cocktails and coffee, jazz bars and walking in forests, emotions and black turtlenecks, freedom and creativity, and irrational things like passion. Vive la philosophy applied to everyday living!

Existentialism starts with the fact that we didn’t get a say in being born, but that’s too bad, because once we are conscious, we must woman up. Everything comes down to choice, like it or not. Every action is a choice, and there is no escaping that fact. Or, as Sartre put it, we’re “condemned to be free.” This is a consequence of the maxim that “existence precedes essence,” which means that we are thrown into the world first and then we are free to create ourselves through our actions. But there are some catches. For one thing, our essence is forever elusive. It is never fixed in stone until we’re physically fixed six feet under a stone. Death, Sartre says, is the moment in which we become complete. For another, with freedom comes the heavy burden of responsibility.

23 Sandworm A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers Andy Greenberg rom WIRED senior writer Andy Greenberg comes the true story of the desperate hunt to identify and trackF an elite team of Russian agents bent on digital sabotage. In 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks. Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Doubleday Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen, including November 2019 the first-ever blackouts triggered by hackers. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware Rights available known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world’s largest ANDY GREENBERG is companies—from drug manufacturing to software to a senior writer for WIRED shipping. At the attack’s epicenter in Ukraine, ATMs magazine, where he covers froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. Hospitals went dark. NotPetya spread around the security, privacy, information world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billion dollars freedom, and hacker culture. in damage—the largest, most devastating cyberattack He is the author of This the world had ever seen. Machine Kills Secrets, and in 2017 his WIRED cover The hackers behind these attacks are quickly gaining a story on Ukraine’s cyberwar reputation as the most dangerous team of cyberwarriors in history: Sandworm. Working in the service of won a Deadline Club Award Russia’s military intelligence agency, they represent from the New York Society of a persistent, highly skilled, state-sponsored force, Professional Journalists. He one whose talents are matched by their willingness lives in Brooklyn, New York, to launch broad, unrestrained attacks on the most with his wife, documentary critical infrastructure of their adversaries. They target filmmaker Malika Zouhali- government and private sector, military and civilians Worrall. alike. A chilling, globe-spanning detective story, Sandworm considers the danger this force poses to our national stability and security. As the Kremlin’s role in meddling in the 2016 election, manipulating foreign governments, and sparking chaos comes into greater focus, Sandworm exposes the realities not just of Russia’s global digital offensive, but of an era where warfare ceases to be waged on the battlefield. It reveals how the lines between digital and physical conflict, between wartime and peacetime, have begun to blur— with world-shaking implications.

24 EXCERPT

On June 27th, 2017, something strange and terrible began to ripple out across the infrastructure of the world. A group of hospitals in Pennsylvania began delaying surgeries and turning away patients. A Cadbury factory in Tasmania stopped churning out chocolates. Pharmaceutical giant Merck ceased manufacturing vaccines for human papilloma virus. Soon, seventeen terminals at ports on six continents, all owned by the world’s largest shipping firm, Maersk, found themselves suddenly paralyzed. Tens of thousands of eighteen-wheeler trucks carrying shipping containers began to line up outside those ports’ gates. Massive ships arrived from journeys across oceans, each carrying hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo, only to find that no one could unload them. Like victims of a global outbreak of some brain-eating bacteria, major components in the intertwined, automated systems of the world seemed to have spontaneously forgotten how to function. At the attack’s epicenter, in Ukraine, the effects of the technological doomsday were more concentrated. ATMs and credit card payment systems inexplicably dropped offline. Mass transit in the country’s capital of Kiev was crippled. Government agencies, airports, hospitals, the postal service, even scientists monitoring radioactivity level at the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant all watched helplessly as practically every computer in their networks was infected and wiped by a mysterious piece of malicious code. This is what cyberwar looks like: An invisible force capable of striking out from an unknown origin to sabotage, on a massive scale, the technologies that underpin civilization. For decades, the Cassandras of internet security warned us this was coming. They cautioned that hackers would soon make the leap beyond mere crime or even state-sponsored espionage to begin to exploit the vulnerabilities in the digitized, critical infrastructure of the modern world. In 2007, when Russian hackers bombarded Estonia with cyberattacks that tore practically every website in the country offline, that blitz hinted at the potential scale of geopolitically motivated hacking. Two years later, when the NSA’s Stuxnet malware silently accelerated Iran’s nuclear enrichment centrifuges until they destroyed themselves, the operation demonstrated another preview of what was in store: It showed that tools of cyberwar could reach out beyond the merely digital, into even the most closely guarded and sensitive components of the physical world. But for anyone watching Russia’s war in Ukraine since it began in early 2014, there were clearer, more direct harbingers. Starting in 2015, waves of vicious cyberattacks had begun to strike Ukraine’s government, media, and transportation. They culminated in the first known blackouts ever caused by hackers, attacks that turned off power for hundreds of thousands of civilians. A small group of researchers would begin to sound the alarm—largely in vain—that Russia was turning Ukraine into a test lab for cyberwar innovations. They cautioned that those advancements might soon be deployed against the United States, NATO, and a larger world that remained blithely unprepared for this new dimension of war. And they pointed to a single force of Kremlin-backed hackers that seemed to be launching these unprecedented weapons of mass disruption: a group known as Sandworm.

Over the next two years, Sandworm would ramp up its aggression, distinguishing itself as the most dangerous hackers in the world and redefining cyberwar. Until finally, on that fateful day in late June of 2017, the group would unleash the world-shaking worm known as NotPetya, now considered to be the most devastating and costly malware in history. In the process, Sandworm would demonstrate as never before that highly sophisticated, state- sponsored hackers with the motivations of a military sabotage unit can attack across any distance to undermine the foundations of human life, hitting interlocked, interdependent systems with unpredictable, disastrous consequences.

25 The Storm Before the Calm America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond George Friedman Praise for Flashpoints:

“A thoughtful, uncluttered treatise considering Europe’s intractable patterns of unemployment, immigration, and racism.” —Kirkus

Doubleday “Insightful. Friedman vividly describes a region where January 2020 memories are long, perceived vulnerabilities are everywhere, and major threats have emerged rapidly Rights sold: and unexpectedly many times before.” Czech Republic: Aligier —Publishers Weekly Russia: Piter Press Turkey: Pegasus ow divided is America really? How did we get to the age of Trump? Is America in decline, or at the Other rights available beginningH of something greater? Master geopolitical forecaster and bestselling author of The Next 100 GEORGE FRIEDMAN Years, George Friedman, predicts how the 2020s is founder and chairman of will bring dramatic upheaval of American policy and Geopolitical Futures, which institutions, followed by a prosperous new American specializes in geopolitical century. forecasting. Prior to this In his riveting and important new book, George Friedman was chairman of the Friedman examines what is happening in America global intelligence company today, the turbulent road the country is headed down in Stratfor, which he founded in the coming decade, and the triumphant years that lay 1996. Friedman is the author beyond. Explaining the two fascinating geopolitical of six books, including the cycles that have allowed the United States to develop, New York Times bestsellers fracture, mature, and solidify, Friedman breaks down The Next Decade The and the coming years in thrilling detail. First is an eighty- Next 100 Years. He lives in year “institutional cycle” that has defined America Austin, Texas. (the Revolutionary War/founding, the Civil War, and World War II). Second is a fifty-year “socio-economic cycle” that has seen the formation of the industrial classes, baby boomers, and the middle classes. In a rare convergence, these two major cycles are both arriving in the 2020s—a time in which many of these foundations will change. The tremors we see now in the United States are precursors to the convergence of these cycles. In this timely and insightful new work, Friedman analyzes the types of upheaval America will have to endure, as well as possible conflicts in the 2020s, before ultimately arriving at a new American century of increased strength, stability, and power in the world.

26 EXCERPT It seems to reasonable people that the nation has never been this deeply divided and that the nation is unlikely to recover from the Trump era. The fact is that whenever the country has been at a profound turning point, a deep chasm has opened among the American people, and the different sides have raged at each other as well as at the President, who symbolizes all that is loved and loathed. It is true that Trump is a louder, rawer president than many others, and the current division is real, but it is far from a novel event. It is also very far from being the most intense division the United States has experienced. So far it has merely consisted of extensive insults. At other times, American division has involved not only insults, but also extensive deaths. The feeling that this is an unprecedented time is also compounded by something we have never had before—the existence of social media. Social media is of course a novel way of communication, in which all can participate and where there is no editor with the authority to exclude any view for being nonsense. It is the ultimate democratic tool. All are welcome to speak their mind. It should be remembered, however, that the founders created a republic rather than a democracy because they feared that unfiltered thought would be disastrous. They did not anticipate the technology, but they did anticipate the danger. When all voices are equal, the more vicious tend to drown out the more moderate. After all, reading moderate thoughts can be boring. The significance of the internet and social media has been emphasized by two groups. Those who believe they have been harmed by social media, for example those whose candidate has lost an election, regard it as an enormously powerful tool. The corporations that operate social media—Facebook, for example—have emphasized its power while at the same time expressing regrets at some of the consequences. After all, the consequences demonstrate the power of their platform. On the one hand they apologize and take steps to limit its power, and at the same time that demonstrates its effectiveness. But to a great extent the unique influence of social media is an illusion. First, where there are millions of voices, few are heard. Second, few listen to anyone they disagree with. What is interesting about social media is the manner in which it fragments conversation. Rather than the entire world hearing novel ideas, people subscribe to those voices that tell them what they already believe. Finally, as the cacophony mounts and only the most strident and preposterous voices are heard, the reach of social media contracts. People remain on social media, but screen out the nonsense. The internet is a new mode of communication, if by “new” we mean that it has been approximately 25 years since it has come to the broader public. If we date television’s entry into our lives to 1952, then the evolution of today’s internet would be equivalent to television in 1977 (or about 1945 for radio). During the 1970s the power of the three networks to define reality and trivialize it was broadly discussed. Movies like Network depicting the power, superficiality and manipulation of the media were made. Television was accused of having misrepresented the Tet Offensive because of bias. The technology has changed, and with it the process that generates ideas. But just because today’s social media might make the events we’re facing today seem unprecedented, doesn’t make it true. The 1960s and 70s were more tumultuous than this time, and the dominant media then was television. The 1860s were far worse than this time, and the dominant media was simply newspapers, which were the sole purveyor of information and were regarded as biased and harmful as men died.

To put our current era in context, consider the Civil War. The nation was not merely divided, but at war, with about 600,000 killed. Abraham Lincoln was elected with just under 40 percent of the vote but he carried the Electoral College. The divisions over his election led the south to secede and a civil war to be waged. Contempt for Lincoln wasn’t confined to the south. George Templeton Strong, a New York Lawyer wrote that Lincoln was a “Barbarian, Scythian, yahoo or gorilla.” Henry War Beecher, an abolitionist, attacked him for lack of refinement. Some northern newspapers called for his assassination. His own commanding General, George McClellan, called him an idiot and a gorilla. He is regarded today as saintly, but was widely held in contempt after his election. He had supporters but his opposition was large, contemptuous and dismissive. To his enemies Lincoln resembled Donald Trump more than the brooding and compassionate figure at the Lincoln Memorial. 27 Plagued by Fire The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright Paul Hendrickson Praise for Hemingway’s Boat:

“Hendrickson’s engrossing book offers a fresh slant on the rise and fall of a father figure of American literature.” —San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of 2011

“There’s never been a biography quite like this one. Knopf The stories are rich with contradiction and humanity, October 2019 and so raw and immediate you can smell the salt air.” —Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2011: The Top 10 Rights sold: UK: Bodley Head “The author, an accomplished storyteller, interprets myriad tiny details of Hemingway’s life, and through Other rights available them says something new about a writer everyone thinks they know.” PAUL HENDRICKSON —The Economist Books of the Year 2011 is the author of the New York Times bestseller and rom the award-winning and nationally bestselling National Book Critics Circle Fauthor of Hemingway’s Boat and Sons of Award finalist, Hemingway’s Mississippi—an illuminating, path-breaking biography Boat: Everything He Loved that will change the way we understand the life, mind, in Life, and Lost, and Sons and work of the premier American architect. of Mississippi: A Story of Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank Race and Its Legacy, which egotist who held in contempt most everything aside won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. Since from his own genius. Harder to detect, but no less real, 1998 he has been on the is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, faculty of the creative writing the choices he made. This is the Wright whom Paul program at the University Hendrickson reveals in this masterful biography: the of Pennsylvania. For two Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom decades before that, he was a he told the greatest lie of his life. And this, we see, staff writer at The Washington is the Wright of many other neglected aspects of his Post. Among his other books story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship are Looking for the Light: The with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the eerie, Hidden Life and Art of Marion unmistakable role of fires in his life; the connection Post Wolcott (1992 finalist for between the Tulsa race riots of 1921 and the murder the NBCC award) and The of his mistress, her two children, and four others at Living and the Dead: Robert his beloved Wisconsin home by a black servant gone McNamara and Five Lives of mad. Hendrickson, showing us Wright’s facades along a Lost War (1996 finalist for with their cracks, helps us form a fresh, deep, and more the National Book Award). human understanding of the man. With prodigious He has been the recipient of research, unique vision, and his ability to make sense writing fellowships from the of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic, and Guggenheim Foundation and undeniably brilliant, he has given us the defining book the National Endowment for on Wright. the Arts, among others. 28 EXCERPT Mother-fueled, father-ghosted, here he comes now, nineteen years old, almost twenty, out of the long grasses of the Wisconsin prairie, a kid, a rube, a bumpkin by every estimation except his own, off a Chicago and North Western train at the Wells Street Station on the north bank of the Chicago River, into the body heat of this great thing called Chicago, on a drizzly late winter or early spring evening in 1887. It is about six p.m. Supposedly he has never seen electric arc lights before. Supposedly he has seven bucks in his pocket. (To get most of that, he has sold off, at old man Benjamin Perry’s pawnshop on King Street in Madison, some of his departed father’s library, including a calf-bound copy of Plutarch’s Lives. He’s also hocked a semi-ratty mink collar of his mother’s that was detachable from her overcoat.) Supposedly he has managed his secret escape from his broken home on this mid-week afternoon without his two little sisters, who adore him, or his loving, divorced, and impecunious mother knowing. And now, with his pasteboard suitcase, and in his corn-pinching “toothpick” shoes, he’s made it to what he’s so long imagined as the Eternal City of the West. He’s just one part of this disembarking, suppertime crowd, these narrow tramping columns, anonymous thousands (well, hundreds), drifting out of the depot’s great clock-towered front entry (after having checked his bag at the overnight luggage hold). He’s turning south with them onto the Wells Street Bridge, which is a swing bridge directly outside the front door, not quite knowing where he’s headed, not willing to ask, just surfing along on this strange inland sea, possessed of his own small reveries and desperations and unseen haunts, longing to make history on a large scale, propelled by a “boundless faith grown strong in him. A faith in what? He could not have told you.” So he will write, in the next century, on page sixty, of his first version of An Autobiography. The boundless belief is that he will somehow turn himself in short order into a world figure on architecture’s stage. It’s not only going to happen, but in not much more than a decade. Frank Lloyd Wright—who will later wish to claim that he was seventeen, not nineteen at this arrival moment; who wishes to profess to any would-be employer that he’s finished three- and-a-half years of college but has decided to skip his final several months before obtaining his degree because it was all bunkum anyway; who has an extraordinary gift for thinking in three dimensions—has just stepped out into one of the great building laboratories of the globe. Stepped out into a rude, teeming, black-sooted, horse-carted, Bible-belted, prostitute- prowling, not exactly cosmopolitan and nowhere close to eternal metropolis that has been remaking itself since October 1871, when an apocalyptic fire, burning for thirty-six hours, took almost a third of its whole, something like 17,450 structures, practically down to weeds and the sands of Lake Michigan. Stepped out into a city that, in this decade alone, 1880 to 1890, has been doubling over on itself in population—from half a million souls to more than a million. Chicago, which incorporated itself only fifty years ago, is now the most explosively growing place on earth. Because of the circumstances and geography of its location it has also become a world center of architectural innovation and experimentation, not to say a world center of transportation, on both land and water. (There are six major rail depots here—no other American city has anything like it.) It’s a horse-collared city whose tight downtown building core is hemmed in on three sides by a small river and a great lake: it must go up instead of out, at least inside the horse-collar. In the Lakeside City Directory there are one hundred and eighty-seven listings for architectural offices—one-man ops to firms with rows of draftsmen and delineators. Some of these names are already entering American myth: Burnham and Root, Holabird and Roche, Adler & Sullivan, William LeBaron Jenney. This small-town boy, with his large imagination, has struck Chicago, has hit architecture, the mother of all arts (so he believes), at its seeming ripest moment. It’s such a grand American story: the lowly arrival, the startling becoming, and practically every Frank Lloyd Wright book that’s ever been written, not least his own, has wanted to deal with it in some way or other. Even accounting for all the luck and seized opportunity, no one has ever quite been able to explain how it happened, the realizing part, because artistic genius of this sort, or maybe any sort, doesn’t have real explanation. Except what if it didn’t happen, not nearly, not even by half, in the way he himself later told it? Meaning: the arrival itself and of the landing of the first job, but more than that, too. Wright chroniclers have pretty much known for years that so much of the arrival story and the first-job story, no matter how rich they are as stories, are, well, bunkum. Almost from the first sentences, the artist was once again giving himself away, leaving unwitting little breadcrumb clues as to some of his absurd falsehoods and myth-makings. I wish to try to take the bunkum a whole step further from what’s been previously reported, but not just for the sake of doing it. 29 Pantheon October 2019 Reboot Getting to Artificial Intelligence We UK rights available Can Trust GARY MARCUS was CEO Gary Marcus & Ernest Davis and Founder of Geometric Intelligence, a machine wo leaders in the field offer a compelling analysis learning company founded of the current state of the art and reveal the steps in 2014 and acquired in 2016 weT must take to achieve a truly robust AI. by Uber, where he launched Uber AI labs. He has been Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an a Professor of Psychology intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is and Natural Science at New far more complicated than we are led to believe. York University for over two Professors Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis have spent decades. He writes regularly their careers at the forefront of AI research and have for The New Yorker, The New witnessed some of the greatest milestones in the field, York Times, The Wall Street but they argue that a computer winning in games like Journal Wired The , , and Jeopardy and Go does not signal that we are at the Financial Times. doorstep of fully autonomous cars or superintelligent ERNEST DAVIS is Professor machines. The achievements in the field thus far have of Computer Science at occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules. the Courant Institute of These approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine Mathematical Science, New intelligence. The world we live in is wildly complex York University. He is one of and open-ended. How can we bridge this gap? What the world’s leading scientists will the consequences be when we do? Marcus and in the area of automating Davis show us what we need to first accomplish before commonsense reasoning we get there and argue that if we are wise along the for artificial intelligence programs. He writes regularly way, we won’t need to worry about a future of machine for The New Yorker, The New overlords. If we heed their advice, humanity can create York Times, The Wall Street an AI that we can trust in our homes, our cars, and Journal, Wired, and The our doctor’s offices. Reboot provides a lucid, clear- Financial Times. eyed assessment of the current science and offers an inspiring vision of what we can achieve and how AI can make our lives better.

30 EXCERPT

Since its earliest days artificial intelligence has been long on promise, and short on delivery. In the 1950s and 1960s, pioneers like Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, and Herb Simon genuinely believed that AI could be solved before the end of the 20th Century. “Within a generation”, Marvin Minsky famously wrote, in 1967, “ . . . the problem of artificial intelligence will be substantially solved.” Thirty five years later, this vision had not come true, but the inventor Ray Kurzweil bet computer software pioneer Mitch Kapor that AI would “surpass native human intelligence” by 2029. That’s still possible, but to our eyes, the chances seem pretty remote. Nowadays, not everyone is certain exactly when humanlike AI will arrive (or even exactly what that means), but ambitious promises still remain common. In 2012, Wired gushed about the “technology that will power the autonomous cars of the near future.” In 2016, spurred by Watson’s victory in Jeopardy, IBM claimed that Watson would “revolutionize healthcare,” suggesting that “Watson Health’s cognitive systems [could] understand, reason and learn” and that “with cognitive computing, . . . we can achieve more than we ever thought possible.” In 2015 Facebook launched an ambitious and widely covered Project M, a chatbot that was supposed to be able to cater to your every need. These promises, too, appear in hindsight to have been overly ambitious. Autonomous vehicles are still primarily restricted to highway situations with human drivers required as a backup because the software is too unreliable to be counted on. Nobody really thinks that they are ready to drive fully on their own in cities or in bad weather, and early optimism has been replaced by widespread recognition that we are at least a decade away—and quite possibly more. In February 2017 IBM Watson’s transition to health care began losing steam, when MD Anderson Cancer Center shelved their oncology collaboration. More recently it was reported that some of Watson’s recommendations were “unsafe and incorrect” In October 2016, a project to use Watson for the diagnosis of rare diseases at the Marburg, Germany “Center for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases” was announced with great excitement. By August 2018, the experiment had been abandoned, because “the performance was unacceptable”. In one instance, when told that a patient was suffering from chest pain, the system did not suggest heart attack, angina, or torn aorta as possible diagnoses. Not long after Watson’s troubles started to become clear, Facebook’s Project M was quietly canceled, just three years after it was announced. Yet, despite the history of missed milestones, the rhetoric about AI remains almost messianic. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, has proclaimed that AI would solve climate change, poverty, war, and cancer. X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis made similar claims in his book Abundance, arguing that strong AI (when it comes) is “definitely going to rocket us up the Abundance pyramid.” In early 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai claimed that “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on . . . more profound than . . . electricity or fire.” Others worry about the dangers of AI. One recent nonfiction bestseller by the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom grappled with the prospect of superintelligence taking over the world, despite the fact that current-day robots struggle to open doorknobs. In the pages of the Atlantic, Henry Kissinger wondered about whether the risk of AI was so profound that “human history might go the way of the Incas, faced with a Spanish culture incomprehensible and even awe-inspiring to them.” Elon Musk has warned that working on AI is “summoning the demon” and the late Stephen Hawking warned that AI could be “the worst event in the history of our civilization.”

31 Knopf November 2019 Long Way Home A Memoir UK rights available Cameron Douglas CAMERON DOUGLAS is moving and shocking memoir detailing Cameron the son of Michael Douglas A Douglas’s devastating fall from grace and brutal and Diandra Morrell, and the struggle to regain his dignity and humanity. Not since grandson of Kirk Douglas. Brooke Hayward’s Haywire has there been such an He is an actor, who appeared intimate and raw look into a Hollywood family and the in the films Mr. Nice Guy, It pain and dysfunction that envelopes them. Runs in the Family, National Cameron Douglas, the grandson of Kirk Douglas, the son Lampoon’s Adam & Eve, and of Michael Douglas, is born into wealth, privilege and Loaded. comfort, spending his childhood in a mansion in Beverly Hills, a spectacular home in Montecito, and an estate on Mallorca. As a young teenager, he parties with Julia Roberts. Jack Nicholson is a house guest. Jann Wenner is his godfather. His parents are glamorous jet-setters, his father a superstar, his mother a beautiful socialite; his grandfather a legend. And yet, Cameron feels neglected and alone. Cameron becomes a successful DJ but that brings him into the world of drugs. He gets into terrifying fights to prove his tough guy status. He commits armed robbery, thrilled by the danger. And eventually he goes to prison after a drug bust. At that point, his descent into hell truly begins. At the age of 32, he is sentenced to five years in prison. And then gets two more when he’s caught smuggling heroin into his cell. He must fight to survive. Many of the fights are life threatening. He alternates between finding drugs in prison and going through excruciating periods of withdrawal. He succumbs to the savageness of prison life and ultimately is forced to spend two years in solitary confinement. Even in solitary he figures out waysto break the rules, to get drugs, to have sex, to remain true to the ethos by which he has survived in prison. Gradually his will to turn his life around overcomes his rather savage transformation—he reads fanatically and learns the value of inner peace, determined to become the good person he knows he must be and, deep down, is. In 2016, he is released and struggles to overcome years of finely honed violent instincts. He studies acting, is completely drug-free and meets a woman he loves and has a baby with her. The family of three now lives in Los Angeles. The path is still not easy, but Cameron has achieved a never-before known level of peace—with his parents, his family, and with himself and the world at large. This is a tough and compelling memoir, in which no one in Cameron’s sphere is spared, especially not Cameron himself, but which shows that transformation is possible.

32 EXCERPT

I don’t remember when I first became aware that the man I called Daddy, then Dad, then Pop, wasn’t like other fathers, that he didn’t belong only to me. When I was a few weeks old, my godfather, Jann Wenner, put me on the cover of Rolling Stone, a naked infant slung over Dad’s shoulder and mooning America. As I grew up, there were always people nervously/aggressively approaching Dad for his autograph. We lived at posh addresses: a house with a view in Beverly Hills, a spacious apartment on Central Park West, a seven- acre estate in Montecito, the compound in Mallorca.

Sometimes I saw him on a screen like everyone else. One time, I saw him on a screen and he was talking only to me. When he accepted the Oscar for Best Actor in 1988, for Wall Street, I was eleven years old and 3,000 miles away, at home in New York City, proudly watching as he stood on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, looked into the camera, and said, “Good night, Cameron, I love you.”

##

At home, Dad was a regular father. He’d read the newspaper over breakfast. He enjoyed simple food. He liked to watch sports. He wasn’t focused on how he looked. I was confused about our relationship. I wanted to impress him. I wanted him to be my friend. I felt good when he’d come to my sports games.

When he was away, which was most of the time, he’d call nearly every day at bedtime to say goodnight. Our relationship was a series of jump cuts, vivid bursts when we were together punctuating longer stretches when we were apart. Each of our times together, and every one of his sporadic gifts to me, felt especially precious.

He’d fly me to see him on set. When I was ten, and he was making Black Rain in Japan, I spent a few days in Osaka, where Ridley Scott was shooting the film in a huge steel mill amid gigantic industrial machinery and lots of hot metal and flying sparks. I was really into video games and Andy Garcia, Dad’s co-star, was kind, shepherding me around to several of the country’s amazing arcades.

Other times, Dad organized bonding trips. Once, just the two of us went on a whitewater rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. Another time, when I was 16, he rented a houseboat on Lake Shasta and took me, his brother Joel, and my friends John and Jesse.

Later, when I was in and out of juvenile hall, Dad was liberal with me. He let me smoke cigarettes around the house. It made me feel so good, like we were buddies, even though Dad would regularly tell me, “I’m your father, not your friend, Cameron.”

33 A Guest of the Reich The Story of American Heiress Gertrude Legendre and her Dramatic Captivity and Daring Escape from Nazi Germany Peter Finn

Praise for The Zhivago Affair:

“Beautifully crafted and scrupulously researched. A kind of intellectual thriller. Well-paced and exciting.” —The Washington Post

Pantheon “A fascinating book that is thoroughly researched, September 2019 extraordinarily accurate in its factual details, judicious in its judgments, and destined to remain the definitive Rights available work on the subject for a very long time to come.” —New York Review of Books PETER FINN is the National Security Editor at The Washington Post. He he riveting, evocatively told story of the only is also the coauthor of The TAmerican woman in uniform captured by the Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, Germans, whose imprisonment among the Nazi elite the CIA, and the Battle over and daring escape in 1945 comprise one of the more a Forbidden Book, a finalist remarkable untold episodes of WWII. for the National Book Critics Gertrude “Gertie” Legendre was a society heiress Circle Award for non-fiction from South Carolina who lived a charmed life during and a finalist of the Pushkin the 1920s and 1930s. But the attack on Pearl Harbor House Russian Book Prize. gave her a different focus and she joined the OSS The Zhivago Affair has been (the predecessor to the CIA). First in Washington translated into ten languages. and then in London, some of the most closely-held government secrets passed through her hands. As the Allies advanced into France in September 1944, she was ordered to Paris. Headstrong and eager “to smell the fighting,” she fell into Nazi hands. Subjected to repeated interrogations, including by the SS, she held to the fiction that she was merely a US embassy clerk. Her toughness averted a potential intelligence disaster and unlike most prisoners, Gertie was presumed valuable to Nazis who knew they’d soon need a bargaining chip with the victors. Moved from city to city throughout Germany for six months before her dramatic escape to Switzerland, she was able to witness the collapse of Hitler’s Reich as no other American did. A Guest of the Reich provides a propulsive, heart- racing account of a little-known chapter in the story of the war, and a vivid portrait of a truly extraordinary woman.

34 EXCERPT On the afternoon of Sept. 22, 1944, Gertrude Legendre strolled into the bar on the Rue Cambon side of the Hotel Ritz. Outside the street was lined with U.S. Army Jeeps and inside the place was already crowded, mostly with Americans, a mixture of military officers and war correspondents, their volubility rising amid whorls of cigarette smoke. White-jacketed barmen mixed cocktails behind a dark mahogany counter and the hotel’s patrons consumed the signature drinks in clusters around the small tables. Just one month after the city was liberated from the Nazis, this was the Paris a certain kind of American remembered: Exclusive and jolly and alcohol-soaked. The 42-year-old Legendre—known all her life as Gertie—was perfectly at ease in the legendary watering-hole, a magnet over many years for wealthy Americans and Hollywood stars, as well as assorted European aristocrats, diplomats, spies, oligarchs and, until recently, Nazi grandees. Field Marshall Herman Goering had taken over the imperial suite after Paris fell to the Germans. Gertie knew the head barman Frank Meier from previous visits to the Ritz—including a stopover in the winter of 1928 when she was 26 and on her way to a big-game hunting expedition in East Africa. Meier was still managing the room in ‘44, his eyelids and jowls heavier, but with the same slicked, center-parted hair, groomed mustache and pince-nez. He had worked in the bar during the occupation, but surreptitiously helped the Resistance, ensuring that he kept his position after liberation. In 1944 Paris, Gertie was wearing the uniform of a first lieutenant in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), though as she was the first to acknowledge, she was no soldier and couldn’t salute properly. She did, however, know how to dress. After arriving in the city, she had her Khakis tailored by Madame Manon, her longtime dressmaker, who “couldn’t wait to fit my uniform properly—taking it in here, lifting a bit there.” Her helmet, three sizes too big, stayed as is. “I must send you a picture of me in my Khaki. You would be so amused,” she wrote her husband, Sidney, who was serving in Hawaii, a Navy Lieutenant Commander in the intelligence center of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. They had not seen each other for two years and expressed their love —and the distress of being apart so long—through their almost daily letters. “Do you ever cry because you miss me,” wrote Gertie. “I do so much. I wonder if time is rubbing off the edge and you are now accustomed to the separation. I find it an incurable heartache, and I don’t suppose I would want it any other way.” Gertie was a civilian employee of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the U.S. spy agency created in 1942 by President Roosevelt and led by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, whose charisma and daring transformed what had been a bureaucratic stepchild—despised by the FBI and sections of the brass—into a global organization which won grudging respect from the U.S. military. (FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover never came around.) By war’s end, more than 21,000 men and women would serve in the OSS. Gertie had until recently headed the cable desk at the London branch of the OSS, overseeing the distribution of all top-secret communications in and out of the office that ran European operations. The London office was a key point of contact for the governments-in-exile in Britain; ran agents into occupied Europe; managed relations with the prickly British services, which resented the growing independence of the OSS; and, most important to the Germans, formulated plans for operations against the Reich after D-Day. Communications about many of these matters passed through Gertie’s hands and she was privy to some of the OSS’s most secret plans and personnel. She was an administrator not a spy but her position gave her unusual insight into OSS operations and post-invasion planning. London was at the heart of the agency’s espionage in Europe, and Gertie sat at the center of all communications about that work, giving her an almost accidental font of knowledge about the war effort. Now, she was among the flocks of Americans descending on Paris to set up shop behind the advancing Allied armies. Everyone entering the European theater of operations fell under General Eisenhower’s command so Gertie, unlike in her previous posting, was required to wear a WAC uniform. In Paris, it carried the mark of the liberator, a feather that had yet to lose its plume among the French. It also got you into U.S. mess halls and the PX. 35 Overcoming Dyslexia, 2nd Edition Completely Revised and Updated Sally Shaywitz, M.D. with Jonathan Shaywitz, M.D. Praise for Overcoming Dyslexia:

“Fascinating. Shaywitz has illuminated the inner workings of dyslexic minds.” —Time

Knopf rom one of the world’s preeminent experts on January 2020 reading and dyslexia, the most comprehensive, up-to-date,F and practical book available on identifying, Rights available understanding, and overcoming reading problems— now radically revised to reflect the latest research and SALLY science-based approaches. SHAYWITZ, M.D. is the Dyslexia is the most common learning disorder on Audrey G. Ratner Professor the planet, affecting about one in five individuals, in Learning Development regardless of age or gender. Now a world-renowned at Yale University and Co- expert gives us a substantially updated and augmented Founder and Co-Director of edition of her classic work: drawing on an additional the Yale Center for Dyslexia fifteen years of cutting-edge research, offering new and Creativity. She is the information on all aspects of dyslexia and reading creator of the Shaywitz problems, and providing the tools that parents, teachers, DyslexiaScreenTM, a tool and all dyslexic individuals need. This new edition also used by teachers to reliably offers: screen young children for dyslexia. Overcoming * New material on the challenges faced by dyslexic Dyslexia won the Margo individuals in high school, in college, and across Marek Book Award and the adulthood, including a new chapter on dyslexia in post- NAMI Book Award. Dr. menopausal women. Shaywitz is an elected member * Rich information on ongoing advances in digital of the National Academy of technology that have greatly increased dyslexics’ ability Medicine, is regularly selected to help themselves. as one of the “Best Doctors in * New chapters on diagnosing dyslexia, choosing a America,” and has received an school for your dyslexic child, choosing a college as honorary Doctor of Science a dyslexic student, and the co-implications of anxiety, degree from Williams College. ADHD, and dyslexia.

JONATHAN SHAYWITZ, * Extensively updated information on helping both M.D. is a board-certified dyslexic children and adults become better readers. psychiatrist. He was the * New information on how to identify dyslexia in all director of the Anxiety age ranges. Disorders Program at Cedars Sinai, and more recently * Exercises to help children strengthen the brain areas the Medical Director of that control reading. Behavioral Health at Mission * A detailed home program to enhance reading. Hospital Laguna Beach and Mission Hospital Mission * Ways to raise a child’s self-esteem and reveal her Viejo. strengths. * Stories of successful men, women, and young adults who are dyslexic.

36 EXCERPT

This book is about reading—an extraordinary ability, peculiarly human and yet distinctly unnatural. It is acquired in childhood, forms an intrinsic part of our existence as civilized beings, and is taken for granted by most of us. The unspoken belief is that if, as a child, you are sufficiently motivated and come from a home in which reading is valued, you will learn to read with ease. But as with so many other assumptions that appear to make intuitive sense, the assumption that reading comes naturally and easily to all children is simply not true. A substantial number of well-intentioned boys and girls—including very bright ones—experience significant difficulty in learning to read, through no fault of their own. This frustrating and persistent problem in learning to read is called dyslexia. Most children look forward to learning to read and, in fact, do so quickly. For dyslexic children, however, the experience is very different. For them, reading, which seems to come effortlessly for everyone else, appears to be beyond their grasp. These children, who understand the spoken word and may love to listen to stories, cannot decipher the same words when they are written on a page. They grow frustrated and disappointed. Teachers wonder what they or the child is doing wrong, often misdiagnosing the problem or giving bad advice. Parents question themselves, feeling alternatively guilty and angry. It is for these parents, teachers, and children that I am writing this book. Exhilarated by new scientific discoveries about reading and dyslexia, and frustrated by the relative lack of dissemination and practical application of these remarkable advances, I want to share with you all that I know about the science of reading. I want to make it very clear that it is now possible with a high degree of accuracy to screen for and go on to identify children with dyslexia early on and then to treat and remediate their difficulties, helping them learn to read; we can also do more than ever before for teenagers, young adults, and older adults. As virulent as any virus that courses through tissues and organs, dyslexia can infiltrate every aspect of a person’s life. It is often described as a hidden disability—but dyslexia is hidden only to those who do not have to live with it and suffer its effects. If you have a broken arm, an x-ray provides visible evidence; if you are diabetic, a blood glucose measurement confirms it. Heretofore, reading difficulties could be explained away in any number of ways. Now, however, men and women with dyslexia can point to an image of their brain’s internal workings made possible by new brain imaging technology and say, “Here, look at this, this is the root cause of my problem.“ We know now exactly where (and how) dyslexia manifests itself in the brain. The harsh realities of the day-in, day-out experience of living with dyslexia can often clash dramatically with the perceptions of those teachers, administrators, acquaintances, and an array of self-appointed opinionmakers who question the very existence of the disorder that holds so many captive. Some still claim dyslexia doesn’t exist; they ascribe children’s reading problems entirely to sociological or educational factors and totally deny the biology. Those who question the validity of dyslexia declare that there is no scientific evidence supporting either a biological or cognitive basis to the disorder and contend that students with dyslexia reap the benefits of special treatment associated with their misdiagnosis. These benefits seem to have been lost on Matthew, a fifty-four-year-old marketing manager, who said to me, “I feel I have been sentenced for a crime I didn’t even know I had committed.” George, a student at the University of Colorado, described dyslexia as “the beast,” an unknown predator that silently stalks him, continually disrupting his life. Not knowing why causes him great pain, including grades on examinations that neither reflect the hours he spends studying nor his considerable fund of knowledge, nor his high level of intelligence. George wants to see “the face of the beast,” to understand why this is happening to him. In addition to this deep desire to comprehend the nature of the mysterious problem enveloping him, he harbors a pervasive fear of being discovered, and of being severely embarrassed, as a dyslexic. Not knowing what to expect from his dyslexia, or when the difficulty will manifest itself, fills George with a constant sense of apprehension—“it’s like it’s lying there waiting for me to make a wrong move and then, all of a sudden, it’s there, taunting me again.” 37 Faith and the Conman The Scholar, the Pornographer, and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Ariel Sabar rom National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Ariel Sabar, a mesmerizing true story of religionF and crime. In 2012, Karen King, who held the oldest endowed professorship in the U.S. at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery at an academic conference in Rome: She had analyzed and had authenticated a papyrus fragment of a Gnostic gospel, written in ancient Coptic, which referred to Mary Doubleday Magdalene as Jesus’ wife. Though couched in careful February 2020 scholarly language, the discovery generated headlines around the world—if early Christians believed that Jesus was married, the entire 2,000 year history of Christian Rights available orthodoxy was suddenly in question. Traditional Christian biblical scholars were in an uproar, ARIEL SABAR won the but King had an impeccable pedigree as an expert in the National Book Critics Circle Gnostic gospels, especially those which dealt with women Award for his debut book, in the early Church. For King, the papyrus represented My Father’s Paradise: A the apex of both her career and her belief that there Son’s Search for his Jewish was an alternative, and much more inclusive version of Past in Kurdish Iraq (2008). Christianity from its beginnings. He is also an award-winning Sabar interviewed King around the time she presented journalist whose work her paper, and kept encountering questions about the has appeared in The New papyrus—for one thing, the ancient Coptic grammar was lousy. Sabar began looking into the matter, and eventually York Times, The Atlantic, discovered the man who sent King the papyrus fragment: Smithsonian Magazine, He was a native German named Walter Fritz, living in Harper’s, The Washington Florida, and he had once attended and was dismissed from Post, The Boston Globe, a famed Egyptology institute in Berlin. In particular, he Mother Jones, Washingtonian failed Coptic grammar. Magazine, and This American At the time Fritz made a living in part filming his wife Life. He worked as a staff having sex with other men and uploading the videos on writer at the Providence paid pornography sites devoted to the fetish. His wife also Journal, Baltimore Sun, and seemed to believe that she was an avatar of the feminine Christian Science Monitor, divine—she was especially a fan of The Da Vinci Code, where he covered the 2008 which was published a month before they launched their site, and whose plot involved the theory that Jesus and presidential campaigns. He Mary Magdalene were married. has reported from Africa, Europe, Scandinavia, and the And, as it happened, King was interviewed frequently in national news outlets about Mary Magdalene after The Middle East. Da Vinci Code became an international phenomenon. The more Sabar delved into the question of whether the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” was an authentic early Christian document, the more surreal the story became. The book he has written has as many twists and turns as, well, The Da Vinci Code, but also provides a compelling view of the gnostic gospels and what they tell us about the history of Christianity. Faith and the Conman is at once a fascinating exploration of early biblical research, a glimpse inside the shadowy trade in ancient manuscripts, a jaw-dropping portrayal of a many-faced con artist, and a sympathetic yet tragic portrait of a scholar who was handed a piece of ancient 38 cloth that seemed to make all her dreams come true. 39 The Dream Universe David Lindley

Praise for Uncertainty:

“Charmingly written and a delight to read. Highlights the human element of science.” —The Economist

“Provides a useful précis of the mind-blowing progress Doubleday of physics in the early 20th century.” March 2020 —The New York Times

Rights available “Brilliantly captures the personalities and the science surrounding the most revolutionary principle in DAVID LINDLEY holds modern physics. Truly thrilling.” a PhD in astrophysics from —Walter Isaacson, author of the international Sussex University and has bestseller Steve Jobs been an editor at Nature, Science, and Science News. Now a full-time writer, he gripping and vivid narrative that argues that what is the author of The End of A we think of as the science of physics is changing Physics, Where Does the in fundamental and profound ways. Weirdness Go?, The Science In the early 17th century Galileo broke free from the of Jurassic Park, Boltzmann’s hold of ancient Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Atom, and Degrees Kelvin. He He drastically changed the framework through which is also a recipient of the Phi we view the natural world when he asserted that we Beta Kappa science writing should base our theory of reality on what we can prize. He lives in Alexandria, observe rather than pure thought. In the process, he Virginia. invented what we would come to call science. This set the table for all the breakthroughs that followed— from Kepler to Newton to Einstein. But in the early twentieth century when quantum physics, with its deeply complex mathematics, entered into the picture, something began to change. Many physicists began looking to the equations first and physical reality second. What emerged was a theoretical science which we have no means of testing. As we investigate realms further and further from what we can see with our eyes, we must look to elegant, aesthetically-pleasing equations to develop our conception of what reality is. As a result, much of theoretical physics today is something more akin to the philosophy of Plato than the science to which the physicists are heirs. In The Universe of Dreams, Lindley asks what is the point of science when it becomes completely untethered from measurable phenomena?

40 41 Tightrope Americans Reaching for Hope Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn

he authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Half the Sky issue a plea—deeply personal and toldT through the lives of real Americans—to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Knopf Tightrope draws us deep into a netherworld within April 2020 the country: an “other America.” Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn tell the story partly through the children who grew up with Kristof in rural Yamhill, Rights available Oregon, an area that prospered mightily for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF last few decades as blue collar jobs disappeared. It & SHERYL WUDUNN, the is an area representative of so many of the places the first husband and wife to share authors visit, from Oklahoma to New York, Virginia to a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, the Dakotas. have coauthored four previous About one-quarter of the children who rode on the books: A Path Appears, Half school bus with Kristof are now dead from drugs, the Sky, Thunder from the alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. We meet, for East, and China Wakes. They example, the Knapps, the children of migrant farm were awarded a Pulitzer in workers who had climbed to the fringe of middle- 1990 for their coverage of class life. Then, diminishing economic opportunity China, as well as the 2009 extinguished the family’s prospects, and four of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. five children are now dead. Now an op-ed columnist for But this is a story not only about decline, but also The New York Times, Kristof about resurgence. We meet people like Annette Dove, was previously bureau chief a woman who has devoted her life to serving the in Hong Kong, Beijing, and teenagers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as they navigate the Tokyo. He won his second chaotic reality of growing up poor; we meet Daniel Pulitzer in 2006 for his McDowell, a man from Baltimore whose story of opioid addiction and recovery suggests that there are columns on Darfur. WuDunn viable and effective ways to solve the nation’s drug worked at The New York Times epidemic. From the book’s deeply personal stories— as a business editor and foreign some hopeful, some tragic—there emerges a picture of correspondent in Tokyo and a land where families have been needlessly damaged. Beijing, and now works in For there is nothing inevitable about the suffering of finance and consulting. poor and working-class Americans. It is, rather, the result of decades of policy mistakes. More than half a century ago, Michael Harrington laid bare American inequities in his famous book The Other America, laying the intellectual groundwork for the Great Society. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have likewise written a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore.

42 EXCERPT

There’s a brittleness to life for about 150 million Americans, with a constant risk that sickness in the family, or layoffs, or a car accident will cause everything to collapse. Although only 1 in 7 Americans live below the poverty line, scholars estimate that half of all Americans will at some point slip below the line. A survey in the summer of 2018 found that 83 percent of Americans reported at least some financial stress each month. Another survey found that one-quarter of Americans said they had skipped medical treatment the previous year because of cost, and a recent Federal Reserve survey found that 40 percent say they don’t have the cash to cover a $400 emergency expense such as a broken car or a roof leak. They can’t even think of retirement. When all else fails, they donate blood plasma, up to twice a week, for $30 or $40 a time, getting by only because they are selling part of their bodies.

A second theme of this book is that suffering in working class America was not inevitable but reflects decades of social policy mistakes: the war on drugs, mass incarceration, insufficient health care coverage, spotty early childhood education, tax giveaways to tycoons, acceptance of growing inequality. Government authorities periodically sided with capital over labor, undermining unions and weakening wages for unskilled workers in particular. If the minimum wage of 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 per hour, instead of $7.25.

A harshness and at times a gratuitous cruelty have crept into American policy, rooted in the misconception that those who struggle with unemployment, finances, drugs and life’s messiness are fundamentally weak people, in danger of dependency, who may need to learn hard lessons. During the great recession of 2008-09 and its aftermath, the government rescued Wall Street banks but approved an inadequate stimulus so that millions lost their jobs. The housing bubble reflected an orgy of white-collar greed and criminality, but the people who paid the price were the 10 million families who lost their homes. The decision to rescue big banks but not ordinary home-owners helps explain why the top 1 percent have more than recovered from the recession, while the median America household is poorer in net worth today than it was back in 1999.

The third theme we pursue is more hopeful: The challenges are not insurmountable. There are no magic wands, but we will outline policies that at modest cost can mitigate suffering and provide traction for families that are struggling. Early childhood programs for at-risk children pay for themselves seven times over in reduced spending on juvenile detention, special education and policing, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman. Programs to help low-income teenage girls with family planning also save public money many times over, for an I.U.D. is far cheaper than a Medicaid birth. And initiatives like the Earned Income Tax Credit cover most of their own costs by nudging people into the labor force so that they become taxpayers.

To achieve these smarter policies, we must transcend the customary narrative that focuses only on “personal responsibility” and on glib talk about lifting oneself up by the bootstraps. Wiser policy requires our country to possess a richer understanding of why people fall behind, a deeper comprehension of how many children grow up with the odds stacked against them. Yes, they make mistakes—but in some cases we fail them before they fail us. Self-destructive behaviors are as real as auto-immune disorders, but both can be healed. We aim to nurture understanding, empathy, and a willingness to offer helping hands rather than pointed fingers.

43 Blind Corner Tesla, the Model 3, and Elon Musk’s Most Dangerous Race Tim Higgins

he inside story of Tesla’s make-or-break bet to Trevolutionize the auto industry. Elon Musk is among the most celebrated titans of technology in the world. Yet for all his cosmic visions of space travel and artificial intelligence, it is his most terrestrial and old-fashioned business that may yet prove to be the most transformative: Tesla.

Doubleday Tesla’s electric cars may seem like luxury curiosities— January 2021 trophy cars that happen to need no gasoline. But Elon Musk wants more than to build a product that satisfies Rights sold: the upper crust. The Model 3 is his electric car for the UK: WH Allen masses, the one he’s envisioned since Tesla’s founding in the early 2000s. He hopes it can upstage and unseat Other rights available rivals such as Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, and GM. If he succeeds, it will make Tesla the first successful domestic entrant in the US auto market since 1925. It TIM HIGGINS is an could also make Tesla the most valuable company on automotive and technology earth, and Elon Musk its richest inhabitant. If he fails, reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He appears regularly it could prove the undoing of a company valued in the on CNBC, Fox Business, tens of billions of dollars. and CNN International. A riveting tale of entrepreneurship and ambition, Blind His writing has won several Corner examines Tesla’s dangerous bet on the Model awards from the Society of 3—the high stakes, brilliant innovations, near collapses, American Business Editors hungry competitors, and financial antagonists swirling and Writers and he is a five- around the company and its enigmatic and erratic time finalist for the Livingston leader. It answers a simple, provocative question: Can Awards. He lives in San a startup conquer the biggest and most entrenched Francisco. industry in the global economy?

44 EXCERPT

On a chilly night in March 2016 at the Tesla design studio, Elon Musk took the stage in front of hundreds of supporters. Dressed like a James Bond villain, in a black jacket with the collar up, he was on the cusp of achieving a decades-long dream, the ultimate goal of what the famed engineer had spent the past dozen years building to: the grand reveal of his Model 3 electric car.

The design studio—near the Los Angeles airport and on the same complex as Musk’s privately held rocket company, SpaceX—was the home of Tesla’s creative soul; it was a magical place where Franz von Holzhausen, the automotive designer behind the re- imagined Volkswagen Beetle and Mazda’s resurgence, now headed the team that put into form the ideas that Musk envisioned for revolutionary and dazzling electric cars that eschewed the techie, nerdy look favored by competitors who had long seen such vehicles as experimental novelties.

Hundreds of customers, including several celebrities, turned out for the event. A Musk party wasn’t to be missed; whether it was for Tesla or SpaceX, his events attracted an eclectic mix of Silicon Valley billionaires, Hollywood bold names, and car enthusiasts.

Until now Tesla had been a niche luxury brand, a fantasy for California environmentalists that had morphed into a muse for the rich, a must-have among those wealthy enough to have garages full of BMWs, Mercedes, and other gas-powered status symbols.

The Model 3, starting at $35,000, held the promise of something different.

It was the embodiment of Musk’s ambition to bring a fully electric car to the masses. It was a gamble, in the form of a four-door compact car, that Tesla could generate the sales volume and cash to take on the biggest of the big boys in the century-old automotive industry: Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and, of course, General Motors.

The Model 3 would determine if Tesla was a real car company.

And Musk, just a year younger than Henry Ford when the Model T was introduced 108 years earlier, stood on stage that night, greeted by the pounding bass of techno music and screams of his fans, to rewrite history.

He came to usher in a new era.

45 Highlights from the Backlist

Please contact us with interest and we will be happy to see if your territory is available. MAX BARRY BILL CLINTON Jennifer Government Back to Work KAY JAMISON Company Giving An Unquiet Mind My Life Exuberance JAMES M. CAIN Night Falls Fast The Postman Always Rings PAT CONROY Nothing Was the Same Twice A Lowcountry Heart Robert Lowell, Setting the Mildred Pierce Beach Music River on Fire Serenade Death of Santini Double Indemnity My Losing Season HA JIN My Reading Life E.M. BARD South of Broad A Free Life The Cat I.Q. Test A Good Fall RAM DASS and PAUL A Map of Betrayal KIM BARKER GORMAN Nanjing Requiem Ocean of Words * How Can I Help? The Taliban Shuffle The Boat Rocker The Bridegroom PETER BERGER DWIGHT EISENHOWER Crusade in Europe The Crazed A Rumor of Angels Waiting Heretical Imperative War Trash Invitation to Sociology NORA EPHRON Social Construction of Reality I Feel Bad About My Neck The Other Side of God I Remember Nothing KENT HARUF The Precarious Vision The Most of Nora Ephron Our Souls at Night* The Sacred Canopy HARRY FRANKFURT RICHARD HOFSTADTER DOROTHY BRIGGS On Truth Age of Reform Celebrate Your Self American Violence ERVING GOFFMAN American Political Tradition GERALDINE BROOKS Asylums Anti-Intellectualism in American Nine Parts of Desire The Presentation of Self in Life Everyday Life Great Issues in American LOUISE BROOKS History, Vol. I-III Lulu in Hollywood ARTHUR HAILEY The Paranoid Style in American Airport Politics THOMAS CAHILL Hotel The Progressive Historians How the Irish Saved Civilization In High Places Moneychangers STUART ISACOFF JOAN FRANCES CASEY Overload A Natural History of the Piano The Flock Wheels Temperament When the World Stopped to JULIA CHILD DASHIELL HAMMETT Listen Cooking with Master Chefs Dain Curse Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom Glass Key CARL JUNG Mastering the Art of French Maltese Falcon Memories Dreams Reflections Cooking Red Harvest My Life in France Thin Man** ROBERT KAGAN The French Chef Cookbook Dangerous Nation The Way to Cook VICTOR DAVIS HANSON Of Paradise and Power Julia & Jacques Cooking at Carnage and Culture The Return of History Home Ripples of Battle The World America Made The Western Way of War LINCOLN CHILD ELIA KAZAN Death Match JOHN HERSEY Beyond the Aegean Deep Storm A Single Pebble Kazan on Directing Terminal Freeze Antonietta The Letters of Elia Kazan Utopia Bell for Adano A Life The Third Gate Hiroshima The Forgotten Room Key West Tales The Wall Too Far to Walk Under the Eye of the Storm

46 STEPHEN KING Carrie STEVEN PRESSFIELD Night Shift The Gates of Fire Salem’s Lot The Last of the Amazons IRVING STONE The Shining Tides of War The Agony & the Ecstasy The Stand Virtues of War Clarence Darrow for the The Stand (graphic edition) Defense RICHARD RHODES Dear Theo JON KRAKAUER Arsenals of Folly Depths of Glory Eiger Dreams John James Audubon Greek Treasure Under the Banner of Heaven** Masters of Death I, Michelangelo, Sculptor Where Men Win Glory The Twilight of the Bombs Immortal Wife Missoula Why They Kill Jack London Love is Eternal WALTER MOSLEY JOHN RICHARDSON Lust for Life And Sometimes I Wonder About A Life of Picasso, Vol 1-3 Men to Match Mountains You Passions of the Mind Charcoal Joe TOM ROBBINS The Origin Debbie Doesn’t Do It Anymore Another Roadside Attraction Little Green ALAN WATTS Rose Gold SAM SHEPARD Behold the Spirit Cruising Paradise Nature, Man, & Woman SHERWIN NULAND Day Out of Days Supreme Identity Lost in America Great Dream of Heaven The Wisdom of Insecurity Doctors: The Biography of The One Inside This is It Medicine Spy of the First Person Way of Zen How We Die How We Live APRIL SMITH ANDREW WEIL A Star For Mrs. Blake Eating Well for Optimum Health ERWIN PANOFSKY Be the One Eight Weeks to Optimum Health Meaning in the Visual Arts Good Morning, Killer Healthy Aging Home Sweet Home Spontaneous Healing PANTHEON FOLKTALE Judas Horse The Healthy Kitchen LIBRARY North of Montana African Folktales White Shotgun EDWARD O. WILSON Afro-American Folktales Consilience Arabic Folktales MANUEL SMITH The Future of Life Irish Folktales When I Say No, I Feel Guilty Northern Tales DON WINSLOW Norwegian Folktales RAYMOND SMULLYAN California Fire & Life Russian Fairy Tales Chess Mysteries of Arabian Death & Life of Bobby Z Swedish Folktales and Legends Knights The Power of the Dog** Yiddish Folktales Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes LAWRENCE WRIGHT DAVE PELZ Forever Undecided The Looming Tower* Putting Bible Satan, Cantor, and Infinity Short Game Bible The Lady or the Tiger? The Riddle of Scheherezade HENRY PETROSKI To Mock a Mocking Bird Engineers of Dreams Paperboy JONATHAN SPENCE Pushing the Limits A Question of Hu Remaking the World Small Things Considered WALLACE STEVENS The Book on the Bookshelf Collected Poems The Essential Engineer Letters of Wallace Stevens The Evolution of Useful Things The Pencil LEON URIS The Toothpick Exodus Haj Mila 18 QB VII Trinity

* Movie tie-in edition available. **Movie tie-in edition planned. 47 Suzanne Smith Serena Lehman Kate Hughes Director, Foreign Rights Manager, Foreign Rights Associate, Foreign Rights [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Foreign Subagents

BULGARIA HOLLAND KOREA Katalina Sabeva Paul Sebes Rockyoung Lee Anthea Agency Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency Korea Copyright Center 62 G.M. Dimitrov Blvd., Ste. 20 Herengracht 613 Gyonghigung-achim Sofia 1172 1017 CE Amsterdam Officetel Rm 520, Compound 3 Tel: 359 2 986 3581 Tel: 31 20 616 09 40 Naesu-dong 72, Chongno Email: [email protected] Fax: 31 20 618 08 43 Seoul 110-070 Email: [email protected] Tel: 82 2 725 3350 CHINA Fax: 82 2 725 3612 David Tsai HUNGARY, CROATIA & SERBIA Email: [email protected] Bardon-Chinese Media Agency Peter Bolza Room 2-702, Bldg. 2 RongHuaShiJia, Katai & Bolza Literary POLAND No. 29, XiaoYingBeiLu, Chao Yang P.O. Box 1474 Maria Strarz-Kanska District H-1464 Budapest GRAAL Ltd. Beijing 100101 Tel: 36 1 456 0313 Ul. Pruszkowska 29 lok. 252 Tel: 86 10 8223 5383 Fax: 36 1 456 0314 02-119 Warsaw Fax: 86 10 8223 5362 Email: [email protected] Tel: 48 22 895 2000 Email: [email protected] Fax: 48 22 895 2001 ISRAEL Email: [email protected] CZECH REPUBLIC Geula Geurts Kristin Olson The Deborah Harris Agency ROMANIA Kristin Olson Literary Agency P.O. Box 8528 Simona Kessler Klimenska 24 Jerusalem 91083 Simona Kessler Agency 110 00 Prague 1 Tel: 972 2 561 0568 Str. Banul Antonache 37 Tel: 42 02 2258 2042 Fax: 972 2 563 8711 011663 Bucharest 1 Fax: 42 02 2258 0048 Email: geula@thedeborahharrisagen- Tel: 4021 316 48 06 Email: [email protected] cy.com Fax: 4021 316 47 94 Email: [email protected] FRANCE ITALY Vanessa Kling Roberto Santachiara SCANDINAVIA La Nouvelle Agence Agenzia Letteraria Santachiara Trine Licht 7 Rue Corneille Via Griffini 14 Licht & Burr Literary Agency Paris 75006 27100 Pavia Ny Vestergade 1 St. PO Box 2142 Tel: 33 43 25 8560 Tel: 39 0382 520616 DK-1015 Copenhagen K Fax: 33 43 85 4798 Fax: 39 0382 526358 Tel: 45 33 33 00 21 Email: [email protected] Email: agenzia@robertosantachiara. Email: [email protected] com GREECE TAIWAN Nelly Moukakou JAPAN David Tsai JLM Literary Agency Hamish Macaskill Bardon-Chinese Media Agency 9 Andrea Metaxa Street The English Agency 3F, N. 150, Roosevelt Rd., Sec. 2 106 81 Athens Sakuragi Building 4F Taipei 100 Tel: 30 2 10 384 7187 6-7-3 Minami Aoyama Tel: 886 2 2364 4995 ext. 13 Fax: 30 2 10 382 8779 Minato-ku, Tokyo 107 Fax: 886 2 2364 1976 Tel: 81 33 406 5385 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Fax: 81 33 406 5387 Email: [email protected]

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