My Dear You by Rachel Khong
A set of delectable short stories, often hilarious but always poignant. All of them center on identity, belonging, and family, and each feel like they could only be written by Khong. This feeling is actually quite hard to elicit. So many creatives chase authenticity by flaunting deeply personal injuries, but very few achieve what Khong…
The Truth About Whole-Body MRI Scans for Cancer
For most of human history, a cancer diagnosis was a death sentence. Doctors could only identify cancer after it had spread extensively. Even with aggressive surgery, cancer recurred and eventually a cancer-related complication – a blood clot, infection, or organ failure – killed the patient. Research into the mechanisms of cancer has given us options…
Vigil by George Saunders
I’ll be honest: I was not able to finish Lincoln in the Bardo, the famous novel by Saunders that stars Lincoln’s deceased son in limbo. I promise I tried; the image that Saunders painted of Lincoln embracing his son’s body is still stuck in my mind. What a haunting image of one of the few…
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
One of the most hyped books of the year – and a debut novel – Yesteryear delivers a two-tone narrative: a survival thriller paired with an acerbic cultural exposé. The conceit of the novel is this pearl: a tradwife goes back in time to the 1800s and must survive the nightmarish struggle she pretended to…
Competition in the Housing Market
I recently posted about Marisa Kashino’s dark comedy novel Best Offer Wins. The unhinged protagonist drives the plot, but behind her actions is real anxiety about how competitive the housing market has gotten after the pandemic. In this article, I will use publicly-available data to understand this better. First, how much worse did the market…
Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino
A darkly funny romp through the DC housing market starring blackmail, murder, and the best fictional example of “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss”. Margo, our protagonist, has found the perfect suburban Maryland house to buy to cap her perfect life, and she won’t let anyone outbid her on the open market. It’s a simple premise: how far…
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
A gorgeously bittersweet novel that jumps between two families who inhabit the same home: one in 2016 and the other in the 1880s. For both families, the biggest threat to their lives is the decaying house around them. And in both families the house’s disrepair reflects the decaying society they inhabit. Kingsolver – who is…
Back to the 90s: A decade that feels way too familiar
A deeply-researched account of a nebulous right-wing political coalition that emerged from the leftovers of Reagan era. Ganz focuses on a few of the biggest names of the era: Ross Perot, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, and Rudy Giuliani and he uses these men to illustrate the counter-revolutionary fervor against the Civil Rights era of the…
Why we should break up Big Tech
The Age of Extraction (Tim Wu) A short but fiery polemic written by a tech policy insider. Wu offers a lesson in the economic history of tech companies while making a strong anti-monopoly argument against the current tech giants. At the same time, his matter-of-fact prose hides a deep nostalgia for the 1990s and early…
The Battle for Pure Food: Then and Now
The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum Our obsession with the health effects of what we eat may feel uniquely modern, but this excellent book chronicles the war against food adulteration in the late 1800s, which rhymes so perfectly with the current fights around saturated fats, microplastics, and ultra-processed foods. The author includes memorable renditions of…
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