The Atlantic
-
Five Books That Conjure Entirely New Worlds A whole world can exist within a single brain. But the boundaries between one mind and the next are usually unbreachable—except in fiction. A writer’s task is to bridge the gap between their reader’s experience and the consciousness of their characters so well that the audience intimately understands the world their protagonists live in, even if that world is utterly fantastical. No matter the setting, the best-written stories can make readers feel as if they have passed through mundane states of being and been brought over to another universe entirely. These sites may at first feel unknowable or overtly strange, because they reflect perspectives radically unlike our own. Yet, through the intervention of fiction, we may come to recognize them, even understand them—although what feels concrete and certain to you may feel porous and surreal to someone else.This feeling of encountering another world is multifaceted. It can be an imaginary place or a glimpse of another reality. It may also simply exist in the tension between comfort and estrangement. The books on the list below dream up another world by acknowledging that fantasy is a state of mind, and even the most outlandish invention is anchored in some aspect of reality as we know it. Each pulls us out of our comfortable understanding of our surroundings, in ways both joyful and unsettling. Read any of these five titles before you go to sleep, and you’ll soon find yourself somewhere else, at least for a time.Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov Perhaps the most effervescent and elegiacal of Nabokov’s novels, Pale Fire famously consists of a long poem written by John Shade, an English professor at a small fictional college, which is explicated in extensive endnotes by his new neighbor and self-proclaimed close friend Charles Kinbote, who has come to rural Appalachia from a country he calls Zembla. The poem itself conjures up hints and glimpses of a place after death, while Kinbote’s ongoing commentary builds up a rich and detailed story about an exiled king, an assassination plot, and an unknown European land. But Kinbote’s references and allusions, over time, become more and more unreliable, and the shape of the novel reminds us that what we think of the truth is at times completely dependent on whose perspective shapes our view of events. Pale Fire opens out beyond its central verse into a wider space that asks us to decide what is fantasy, what is fact, and whose reality to live within.Primeval and Other Times, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-JonesIn a series of interwoven vignettes that roam from character to character, the fearless Nobel Prize–winning novelist Tokarczuk explores how folklore, ritual, and strife shape the minds of the inhabitants of a village appropriately called Primeval, over a long period starting in 1914. Dreamlike and yet viscerally real, the book feels like what you might recall in that space between sleep and wakefulness, when people are more in touch with otherwise-hidden instincts and emotions; meanwhile, the roving from one point of view to another recalls the technique of the avant-garde filmmaker Luis Buñuel. The author touches on key events in 20th-century Polish history while also introducing unreal phenomena, such as archangels who watch over the village and seem truly alien. You may never know what it was really like to live in a village in Poland during the period in question, but in Tokarczuk’s skillful hands you receive something both more intimate and more fulfilling: an understanding of the life of the mind in a different time.[Read: The science fiction that came before science]Brodeck, by Philippe Claudel, translated by John CullenThe past is another country, as the famous saying goes. But novels can help us enter territories otherwise closed off to us. In Brodeck, a stranger arrives in a remote French village in the mountains, disturbing the everyday existence of its inhabitants, who have secrets to hide. Brodeck, a nature wanderer who has himself returned to the village after time away, then assembles a “report” on the clash between the world the stranger brings to the villagers and the world they try to force him to accept—a disconnect that creates a dramatic, tragic conflict between the past and the present. But Brodeck’s own experiences outside the community begin to influence the telling of the tale. As the stranger suffers from the clash of two crucially different views of reality, the report becomes an indictment and a record of human folly with political undertones. By the end, Claudel’s novel is a heartbreaking and stunning work of fiction about provincialism and secrets that I think about frequently, unable to escape the unknowable place it documents in such meticulous yet compassionate detail.The Ravicka novels, by Renee GladmanIn understated prose, Gladman’s dispatches from an imaginary city-state remake the very idea of architecture into a new concept. One of the four books in the series, Houses of Ravicka, chronicles the quest of the city comptroller to find a house that has disappeared from its set location, while an invisible house begins to appear elsewhere. Similarly, other stories set in Ravicka address odd physics, ritual, logic, and illogic in peculiar ways that nevertheless feel modern and relevant. In a sense, Gladman defamiliarizes our world to show us how it works, and her novels wrench this kind of fantastical fiction into the 21st century by referencing the mundane municipal roles often left out of other works. It’s no wonder, then, that her exploration of Ravicka has spilled into her nonfiction and visual art, because the sociological and philosophical questions she poses feel as if they require expression in other media as well.[Read: One of the best fantasy novels ever is nothing like The Lord of the Rings]Dark Matter, by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes GöranssonA work of phantasmagorical, erotic, postapocalyptic unease by one of Sweden’s most important poets, Dark Matter exists in a nightmare state that entangles nature and the pollution of human-built environments in unsettling ways. A hybrid composition of prose and poetry, the book has a tactile quality that colonizes you without mercy. “I now slowly fold myself like a muscle against the wet clay to press the flesh against the sleep-gland’s mouths,” Berg writes, the terrain fusing with the speaker’s body. “I will sleep now in my bird body in the down, and a bitter star will radiate eternally above the glowing face’s watercourse.” Despite the way Berg implicates the reader in what amounts to body horror, by some alchemy she ends up transforming the reader’s initial fright into feelings of febrile fascination. Berg pulls in string theory, folklore, references to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and what appear to be H. R. Giger–esque flourishes, meshing them with a contaminated yet still powerful view of nature. There is no way to describe this trenchant, uncompromising view of a transformed landscape other than to continue to quote from it: “But time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in across the gray regions. And the soul’s dark night will slowly be lowered through me.” This is the ultimate other world, created from broken pieces of our own.theatlantic.com
-
Don’t Assume Eric Adams Is Going Anywhere By the time Eric Adams addressed reporters under a rain-soaked canopy outside Gracie Mansion yesterday morning, the biggest question about his tenure as mayor of New York seemed to be how soon it would end. Fellow Democrats started calling on him to step down even before federal prosecutors formally accused Adams of defrauding the city and doing the bidding of the Turkish government. And in recent weeks, the leaders of the nation’s largest police department and public school system had resigned from his administration amid a series of investigations.Adams, who has denied the charges and vowed to stay on, already had at least four serious challengers to his reelection bid next year. Now a much larger number of Democrats—including former Governor Andrew Cuomo—are salivating at the prospect of a special election if Adams steps down.But don’t assume he’s going anywhere.“He is not going to resign,” predicted Mitchell L. Moss, a longtime observer of New York politics who has advised, formally and informally, some of its biggest stars over the past four decades. Moss, an NYU professor, has seen the scandals that have taken down governors such as Cuomo (sexual harassment, which he denied) and Eliot Spitzer (prostitution), members of Congress like Anthony Weiner (sending explicit photos to minors), and dozens of elected officials at lower levels of government. With few exceptions, New Yorkers accused of wrongdoing have left neither quickly nor quietly. Some have stayed in office quite a while. And that was true before a New Yorker convicted of 34 felonies won the Republican nomination for president. “We’re living in a different world from the one where you would be disqualified for a divorce,” Moss said. (In 2022, Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul appointed Moss to an economic-development committee, but he said he has no other ties to the mayor. “I met the guy once in a restaurant,” he told me. “That’s it.”)[Michael Powell: How it all went wrong for Eric Adams]The charges against Adams are significant, and more could be on the way; FBI agents searched his official residence yesterday morning, hours after news of the imminent indictment had come out. Prosecutors say that for the past decade, Adams has been soliciting illegal campaign donations and taking bribes from foreign businesspeople and at least one official of the Turkish government. Because he used the contributions to receive public matching funds through New York’s campaign-finance system, the government says he essentially stole $10 million from city taxpayers.New York has had more than its share of corruption and scandal, but Adams is the first sitting mayor to be indicted. (Coincidentally, one of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani, was disbarred yesterday in Washington, D.C., for helping Donald Trump try to overturn his 2020 election defeat.) Yet the details of the 57-page indictment against Adams still pale in comparison to the government’s recent accusations against former Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey; the FBI recovered gold bars and envelopes filled with cash in his home. Nor are the allegations as shocking as those leveled against expelled Representative George Santos of Long Island, who made up his résumé to win a seat in Congress. Moss contends that, as far as Adams’s constituents are concerned, the most damning allegation is that the mayor leaned on the fire department to approve the opening of a skyscraper housing a new Turkish consulate that had not passed a safety inspection. “That is serious,” Moss said.Democrats who have called for Adams to resign argue that the charges imperil his ability to govern the city. Moss doesn’t think so. “People care about the mayor, and they want the mayor to succeed, but the city functions no matter who the mayor is,” Moss told me. Emulating other scandal-tainted leaders, Adams will likely “double down on the job” to prove he can still lead, which could allow him to retain the support of his base of Black and Latino voters who helped him win a crowded Democratic primary, and then the mayoralty, in 2021. “They are not going to abandon him,” Moss said.Under New York City’s charter, Hochul could remove Adams as mayor, but Moss believes that possibility is inconceivable—not least because of the governor’s own deep unpopularity. “She’s not going to fire an African American mayor. No way,” he said. “She’d get defeated within an hour.”[Read: New York City’s chaos mayor]Moss predicted that Adams would even start as the favorite in next June’s primary in spite of his legal troubles. Cuomo, who is reportedly eying a run for mayor after resigning as governor in 2021, is “damaged goods,” Moss said, and the four candidates who have declared their interest—the current city comptroller, Brad Lander; the former comptroller Scott Stringer; state senators Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos—could struggle to unify progressive voters.Adams has said he wants a speedy trial, but the legal process could play out for months or longer. (He’s not even the highest-profile defendant that the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Damian Williams, is currently prosecuting.) The next president will have the power to replace Williams if he or she chooses. When Trump took office in 2017, he moved quickly to oust the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara. That could happen again if Trump wins in November, Moss noted, with potential ramifications for Adams’s case. “There’s more uncertainty here than people realize.”theatlantic.com
-
A Question That Demands an Answer Around three in the morning on September 4, a Ukrainian doctor named Olesya Vynnyk was awakened by an explosion. She was staying with her parents several miles from the center of Lviv, where the blast occurred, but it was loud enough to drive her from bed. She raced to her car with a box of tourniquets and followed emergency vehicles toward the flames, until police roadblocks prevented her from reaching the site, which was close to her own downtown apartment.A Russian Kinzhal ballistic missile, fired from a MiG-31K aircraft about 200 miles from the border with Ukraine and 700 miles from Lviv, had hit an apartment in a civilian neighborhood. The apartment was the home of the Bazylevych family: Yaroslav Bazylevych; his wife, Evgeniya; and their three daughters, Yaryna, 21, Darya, 18, and Emilia, 7. Yaroslav staggered out of the damaged building, badly injured, but struggled to return inside while emergency personnel restrained him. He had lost his entire family.Vynnyk knew the Bazylevych family through their participation in a Ukrainian scouting organization. The girls reminded her of her nieces, and she thought about how easily the missile could have destroyed her own family. During the funeral, at the Garrison Church of Peter and Paul, which all of Lviv seemed to attend, Yaroslav moved between the four open coffins as if, Vynnyk told me, he couldn’t decide which one he should stay with to say goodbye. “There is a common thought in Lviv that he died together with them.”[Read: The timekeeper of Ukraine]At the many funerals she’s attended, Vynnyk has noticed that people avoid looking each other in the eye, out of some complicated mix of feelings—guilt, fear of breaking down. “You want to talk to God more than someone standing next to you,” she said. As a former member of a volunteer medical battalion, she’s lost numerous friends to the war, including a soldier who was killed the day before we sat down together this week in New York. But the erasure of a sleeping family shocked her more than anything Russia has done since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two and a half years ago. “I don’t think anyone can describe this tragedy of the Bazylevych family,” Vynnyk said. “It was beyond our understanding, beyond what we can allow ourselves to feel.”Vynnyk—whom I first met in Lviv shortly after the invasion and wrote about for this magazine—works for the Ukrainian World Congress, a nonprofit focused on diaspora Ukrainians. She was in the United States this month as part of her study for a doctorate in bioethics at Loyola University Chicago, and to speak with Americans about the war. She realized that our attention had moved away, and she wanted us to know that Ukrainians are still there, still fighting for values we’re supposed to share, still confident of ultimate victory. But beneath her cheerful resilience, she seemed tired beyond physical fatigue. The war had revealed to her the best and worst in human nature. At the start of the war, she told me, Ukrainians were standing in a circle, holding hands. “They are still holding the circle, they are doing it with all their strength, they will hold it until the last one of them is left standing, but that grip is not as strong as in the first days.”We were talking on a park bench in Lower Manhattan. A few miles north, the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly was in full swing. The world’s statesmen and diplomats were clogging Midtown with their convoys of SUVs, being chauffeured between meetings and luncheons and speeches. The UN has seemed unusually feckless recently, but never more so than while I sat with Vynnyk and she told me about the Bazylevych family.President Joe Biden was in town, and in his speech to the General Assembly he asked: “Will we sustain our support to help Ukraine win this war and preserve its freedom, or walk away and let aggression be renewed and a nation be destroyed? I know my answer. We cannot grow weary. We cannot look away. And we will not let up on our support for Ukraine, not until Ukraine wins a just and durable peace based on the UN charter.”It was a moving speech, given by a lifelong supporter of the world body on his last occasion to deliver such an address. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in Manhattan as well. He told the General Assembly that Ukraine would not accept a peace deal that surrendered pieces of his own country to Russian imperialism, and he urged Western allies to increase their support for Ukrainian resistance to aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin was not in town—he faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the kidnapping of Ukrainian children—but in Moscow, he threatened the West with nuclear war if NATO-supplied weapons are used to strike Russian territory.But Biden’s vows and Zelensky’s pleas and Putin’s threats are just words. On the night of September 3–4, Russia fired 42 ground- and air-based missiles and drones from Russia and Russian-occupied territory at Ukraine. Ukrainian armed forces shot down most of them, but ballistic missiles travel so fast that many get through. To protect itself from those missiles, Ukraine would have to attack their points of origin, Russian bases and airfields, with long-range missiles provided by the U.S. and other NATO countries. NATO’s current policy forbids Ukraine from using its weapons to hit military targets deep inside Russia—and so the Bazylevych family no longer exists.[Read: No time for funeral rites]From New York, Zelensky went to Washington, D.C., to urge the Biden administration to lift those restrictions. The outgoing secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, has indicated his support for Zelensky’s request; so has the government of Britain. But Biden has hesitated out of a fear of escalation into nuclear and world war. Putin has been blackmailing Biden and the West since the start of the invasion, first warning against the use of any NATO weapons inside Ukraine, then against certain tanks and long-range artillery, then against strikes on military positions just across the border from which Russia has been raining destruction on Kharkiv. All of those warnings turned out to be empty. This week Putin raised the stakes. Is he bluffing?That’s the question he hopes will paralyze the West. We can’t know his intent, and the consequences of guessing wrong could be catastrophic. But a lot of Russia experts think he is bluffing; after all, Putin cherishes his own survival above everything else, and he’s threatening suicide as well as mass murder. To give him the final say over every move his adversaries make is to surrender in advance. Perhaps we should ask a different question, one that Olesya Vynnyk asked me: If Ukraine is defending values we are supposed to hold dear, how can we not allow Ukraine to defend its people?theatlantic.com
-
Photos of the Week: Mansion Graffiti, Medieval Battle, Skeletal Deer The effects of Hurricane Helene in Cuba, severe drought in Brazil and Ecuador, a simulated moon walk in Germany, Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon, runway scenes from Paris Fashion Week, a comet viewed from Earth orbit, scenes from the opening weekend of Oktoberfest in Germany, and much moreTo receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.theatlantic.com
-
How to Stop Self-Obsessing and Be Happier Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.In Dante’s Inferno, the Roman writer Virgil leads the story’s narrator down through the circles of hell. Each circle is more grotesque and frightening than the last, until finally the pair reach the ninth circle, where Satan himself resides. Contrary to what you (or Dante) might expect, the Prince of Darkness is not found laughing maniacally, poking condemned sinners with his pitchfork. Rather, he is stuck up to his waist in a block of solid ice, weeping bitterly.Satan is so absorbed in his misery that he doesn’t even notice the narrator and his guide when they intrude. It is a picture not of wicked glee, but of the darkest depression. Dante’s portrait is a very humanly recognizable condition, and inspires pity, not hatred.If you haven’t experienced serious depression, you almost certainly know someone who has. According to Gallup, the proportion of Americans who have been diagnosed with clinical depression at some point in their lifetime reached an all-time high last year, at 29 percent. People describe such a spell as involving a suffocating sadness, an inability to feel pleasure, and a lethargy that makes the smallest tasks seem insurmountable.But as Dante suggests, another common characteristic might be the most miserable of all. Someone I knew and loved for many years, who lived with disabling depression, told me that what bothered her most was that it made life terribly boring. “All I think about is myself,” she told me. Her depression, she said, was like living with a person who won’t stop talking, droning on and on about the most tedious topics in the world and making it impossible to concentrate on anything else. This is a phenomenon known as maladaptive self-focus, which does indeed characterize—and perpetuate—major depression.This symptom contains valuable information for all of us. Even if, mercifully, you are not depressed, you would nonetheless probably like to be happier. You think about yourself a great deal, as we all do, but this almost certainly hurts your happiness, even if your self-preoccupation is not maladaptive. Fortunately, you can learn to think about yourself less—and reap benefits for your well-being.[From the July 1884 issue: The underworld in Homer, Virgil, and Dante]No reliable scientific data exist for how much of our time we spend focusing on ourselves, but we know it is a lot. To begin with, consider what we talk about. One study revealed that when one man talked with another man, about 53 percent of the conversation, on average, was spent discussing his own experiences or relationships. When a woman spoke with another woman, she talked about herself and her relationships or experiences about 39 percent of the time. But that is just the beginning; typically when we aren’t talking to others, or are not otherwise engaged, our brains switch to the default mode network—at which point our thinking becomes almost entirely self-referential. Even while we sleep, we are inevitably the star in our dreams. We basically think and talk about ourselves all day and all night.This intense self-focus makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. As an adult human, you are primarily responsible for your own survival and success, and the very fact that you are alive today means that your prehistoric ancestors also thought sufficiently about these matters—because if they’d failed to, they would have been unlikely to pass on their genes. In that respect, self-referential thinking is a necessary way of staying focused on life’s core tasks.This observation is not just an anachronism from the Pleistocene period; researchers today have shown that people who think about themselves a lot tend to get along well with others and get ahead in life (provided that their thoughts are not excessively negative). Even when such self-focus is pathological, as it is with narcissists, it can still confer benefits. As two psychologists argued in 2015, and other studies have largely confirmed, narcissists tend to do well in short-term mating and dominance hierarchies. In other words, they find it easy to get dates and are initially persuasive as leaders.That’s the upside, but the downside is very significant. Constant self-absorption generally makes you feel terrible. One 2002 meta-analysis of more than 200 studies found a marked positive correlation between self-focused attention and negative affect (bad feelings). Excessive self-referential thinking appears to be especially misery-making for anxious people.In addition, highly self-focused people tend to struggle to maintain emotional stability. The reason for this is that thinking about yourself causes your worries and afflictions to intrude more into your thinking, and that tends to induce such harmful emotions as anger and jealousy. Arguably worst of all, self-referential thinking can make relationships harder. I noted above that narcissists do well in short-term dating, a finding long-observed by researchers. That is one kind of success, but not something associated with the deep satisfaction of an enduring relationship. Notably, casual sex lowers happiness for most people. That is particularly true for women, who are 21 percent more likely than men to say that a hookup ultimately makes them feel lonely, 19 percent more likely to say that it makes them unhappy, and 14 percent more likely to say that it makes them feel regret.As I have previously written, studies across the span of people’s lives show that secure, long-term relationships are key to the highest levels of life satisfaction. This requires thinking a lot about your partner, and thus less about yourself, which leads to higher, more stable well-being.[Read: Eight books that will inspire you to move your body]Most of life is made up of experiences and impulses we need to keep in balance. We must eat in order to survive and thrive—but not too much and not the wrong things! Exercise is good, but if you get too obsessed with it, you can harm your physical and mental health. So it is with thinking about yourself. You can’t stop entirely, nor would you want to if you care about staying alive and well. But I am confident that most of us could cut back a bit on the self-referential thinking and gain substantial happiness benefits.The problem is that willpower alone doesn’t work because, ironically, “I won’t think about myself” is an entirely self-referential intention. The solution is constructive distraction.1. Bring happiness to others.A number of researchers over the years have undertaken experiments in which participants are assigned activities and behaviors that they enjoy, as opposed to actions that elevate others (such as making a point of expressing gratitude). You might think that the pleasure principle would win out, but the scholars have consistently found that doing something for another person confers a significant happiness advantage over having a good time for yourself. Two effects are surely at work here: First, when you are looking for ways to help another, you are distracted from your own preoccupations and problems; second, by bringing happiness to someone else, you can “catch” that happiness through what behavioral scientists call emotional contagion.2. Serve the world.An act of kindness toward another person works well—but, as four psychologists showed in 2016, so does an act of kindness to the world in general. The researchers compared acts of generosity directed at specific individuals with general good deeds toward the broader world. This didn’t entail Nobel Peace Prize–winning actions, but simply such small-scale generous, considerate behavior as picking up litter or donating to a charity. The researchers found that these good deeds were similar in their beneficial effect on well-being as those aimed at a particular individual.3. Be more mindful.One of the most common characteristics of self-referential thinking is that it is both retrospective and prospective, about what I’ve done and what I plan to do. So it makes sense that greater discipline about paying attention to the present might help to displace the self-focused thinking that ruminates on the past and the future. One way to improve that present-focused discipline is through mindfulness training, and this comes in at least two basic varieties: focused attention (such as single-point meditation) and open monitoring (such as training to observe the moment with reaction or judgment). Practicing these techniques has been shown by researchers to lower self-referential thinking and—not coincidentally—reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. These days, any number of mindfulness methods and apps are widely available to help you learn these skills.[Arthur C. Brooks: Three myths and four truths about how to get happier]An ultimate solution to excessive self-referential thinking is to turn one’s focus outward to the metaphysical aspects of life. Early Christian writers, such as Saint Augustine in the fourth century, are credited with the concept of homo incurvatus en se, a state of being that involves being curved in on oneself, or ingrown, leading to a restless discomfort with life. Augustine’s famous answer for this, in the first paragraph of his Confessions, was “Our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”Whether centered on God or not, spiritual traditions teach the paradoxical truth that only by looking outside ourselves can we find ourselves. In the words of the 13th-century Zen Buddhist master Dōgen Zenji:To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.This is precisely what Dante’s weeping, self-absorbed Satan missed. We don’t have to make this error.theatlantic.com