Reviews of favorite books

Nonfiction: Clamor by Chris Berdik

7/15/2026

Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World—and How We Can Take It Back is a deep dive into the acoustics of sound, hearing, and the soundscapes that surround us. Sound is a wave of energy triggering a rhythmic cascade of molecules crashing into each other. When this cascade reaches our ears, the vibrations trigger hair cells sensitive to different frequencies of sound, and this information is conveyed to our brain where we interpret and react to it.
One of the peculiar elements of sound is that it’s transitory. A car alarm might “trigger a visceral, even furious response” but when it stops, “you do your best to return to sleep, get back to your work, or resume your conversation. Your mind moves on to more important matters—at least until the next interruption.”

But even brief interruptions can take a toll. For example, reading levels of second- and third-graders classrooms near an elevated train “lagged two to three months behind those of their peers in quieter classrooms; fifth- and sixth-graders on the noisy side were up to a year behind.” When sound mitigation measures reduced the noise, reading levels became equal.

Sleep studies indicate “that noise can splinter our slumber below the level of our conscious awareness, harming health even among people who claim not to be bothered.”
When we sleep, our eyes close, but our ears remain on guard duty “listening for potential threats. … From an evolutionary perspective, prolonged sleep is a necessary but dangerous behavior, because it makes us easy prey.”

Loud sounds invariably damage our hearing. When high-energy vibrations reach our inner ear, the hair cells shear, damaging the delicate nerve-cell synapses. “Noise-induced hearing damage is irreversible” in humans. Prevention is the best strategy. One scientist noted that earplugs are “cheap and easy. It’d be crazy not to use them.”

Humans aren’t the only ones affected by our noise-filled world.
“The spread of our mechanized din, alongside the glow of artificial light, into wild areas has brewed up what conservationists have dubbed a ‘sensory smog,’ hindering animals as they try to communicate, sense the presence of predators, hunt for food, ... woo mates, fight off rivals, care for their young, flee predators, and migrate ... a noise-saturated environment makes all those activities more taxing …robbing them of energy they can’t afford to lose."
One scientist noted: “Once you reduce noise by treating its source, it’s gone, and the recovery can begin right away.”

Sound pollution is especially problematic for marine animals. Because water is denser than air, sound travels four times faster through the ocean, which means noise from ships fills a large expanse. And because “light to see by is at a premium” sound is a critical sense for many sea creatures. For example, “baby reef fish and coral larvae begin life in the open ocean and find their reef homes partly by listening for them.”
“In a quieter ocean, [whales] could hear a mate or family member call from twenty kilometers away, but that’s now reduced to a kilometer or two. Noise adds to the fabric of what’s making it harder for these whales to get by.”

“Research vessels designed for enhanced quiet are equipped with precision engineered propellers, which churn up less [noise-inducing] cavitation.”
Adding “more streamlined hulls, drag-reducing coatings, and sound absorption in engine rooms, [can] achieve a drop of tens of decibels compared to typical ship noise. Ships with these upgrades are not only quieter, but also more efficient, which saves money on fuel.”

But in our capitalist, profit-driven world, shipping companies lack the incentive to voluntarily make upgrades to protect marine life and reduce reliance on fossil fuel.

Modern humans are “increasingly surrounded by gadgets and gizmos … washing machines, dishwashers, and coffeemakers chiming in about their completed tasks or the incessant phone and smartwatch pings from app updates, breaking news, and social media.” This can be mentally draining as well as annoying.
“As a result, one of the biggest noise challenges of our time concerns cognitive overload.” This noise-induced cognitive overload can become dangerous in hospitals, where beeping alarms are so ubiquitous, healthcare workers (and patients) mentally tune them out.
Highway and airplane noise are most often concentrated in vulnerable, impoverished neighborhoods, where the constant racket contributes to health problems as wells as poor school performance.

While obnoxious noises ramp up “stress and distraction, there’s mounting evidence that listening to nature sounds may be an antidote, relieving stress and restoring attention.”
Our “perception of noise is elastic, swayed by our attention as well as innate and learned associations with certain sounds. The same goes for our sense of quiet.” The author promotes thinking in terms of the overall “soundscape” in a given environment.

Soundscape design can have powerful effects on human environments.
For example, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts wanted an atrium cafe in an open area with high ceilings and stairwells, a recipe for a loud dining experience.
But the soundscape designers used “17,000 square feet of sound absorption that [was] artfully camouflaged within the atrium’s design … The steel beams supporting the glass curtain walls were faced with a black-metal grill that hid a thick layer of fiberglass insulation. Overhead, translucent vinyl [was] stretched across a steel frame [hanging] from the ceiling; perforated with tiny invisible holes, it sandwiched a 9-inch air gap that trapped sound.” They also used hidden speakers to provide ambient sound.

Another instance: a busy party street, with lots of bars and live-music venues, neighbors complaining regularly about the noise.
When calming music was piped in, the “vibe of the area changed dramatically, replacing the usual angry shouts, shattered bottles, car horns, and police sirens with something closer to groovy mood music. Compared to the typical Saturday night experience, the number of noise complaints plummeted, and police were able to keep a lower profile, even redeploying units to other parts of the city.”

Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World—and How We Can Take It Back makes the case that sound matters.
In the author’s words: “To care about chronic stress, distraction, sleep deprivation, patient safety, environmental justice, and habitat loss is to care about noise.”

Read more about sound in the natural world:
Sounds Wild and Broken, An Immense World, Being a Bird

Writing Craft: The Joy of Writing Sex by Elizabeth Benedict

7/5/2026

The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers bursts with actionable advice and insightful examples.
Throughout, the author stresses that sex scenes, like all fictional scenes, must serve a story purpose and should be driven by the “needs, impulses, and histories of your characters.”
She notes: “A good sex scene is not always about good sex, but it is always an example of good writing.” And should include some type of conflict: between the lovers, with outsiders, within the setting, or between the lovers and society (Romeo and Juliet). A character wanting something their partner refuses (or is unable) to give them defines dramatic conflict.

The sex scene is usually more interesting if something goes wrong or leaves the lovers “angry, empty, still yearning, or unequally fulfilled when it’s over.”

Because sex can strip us of our defenses, it can reveal vulnerable emotions:
“What makes sex so powerful an urge is our desire to connect with another human being. . . .
. . . You long for an unfamiliar heartbeat against your skin but what you often get is someone else’s heartache, someone colder and more distant than the warm body you sought, or someone as fragile and needy as you are.”
And the needier characters are to connect, the “more interesting their disappointment and its aftermath can be.”

One of the more interesting tips was on including different surprise twists in sex scenes:

Action Surprise. An event that shifts our attention from the sex act, such as the bed collapsing (true story!), another character coming home unexpectedly, etc.
Dialogue Surprise. Speech that shifts our focus away from predictable sex mechanics, such as a mistress/lover asking about an adulterer’s spouse, or an off-the-wall question.
Distraction Surprise. Such as the noise of a child in the next room, an intrusive memory, entrancing dust motes in a shaft of sunlight.
Insight Surprise. When a character has a revelation or epiphany during sex.
Language Surprise. Unusual word choice or metaphors that encourage the reader to think about sex in a new way. Often includes highly specific details: “She tasted like frybread—thick, smoked, and fat-rich on my tongue.”

In general, a well-written sex scene should be about much more than sex; it should connect “to the total package of your characters’ needs and wants and to the larger story.”

The book includes a chapter on smoothly incorporating safe sex techniques: “the details should enhance the story in some way: by helping create dramatic tension and/or revealing something about the relationship, the culture, and the characters.”
The text also covers the specific gifts and challenges of illicit sex, married sex, casual sex, first-time sex, and solo sex (masturbation).

The colorful examples of effective sex scenes were one of the book’s biggest delights:
  “He moved in and out hard at first, making my head hit against the headboard. I wouldn’t have minded, except I was scared I might get knocked out, and then I’d miss the most important part; but that didn’t happen.” --The Floating World, Cynthia Radohata
  Then I feel like I’m laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colors and I’m afraid I’ll come, and afraid I won’t. But I know I will. And I do. And it be rainbow all inside. And it lasts and lasts and lasts.   --The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
  “. . . we spent our time together entirely in darkness, for we couldn’t turn on the room light, and we barely saw each other, except for what we could make out in the dim light from the motel sign outside falling through the blinds: rose-colored profiles, the curve of a thigh or shoulder, a breast, a knee. --The Sweet Hereafter, Russel Banks
  “I tell him how brave he is, taking such a chance. So are you, he says, we’re illegal up here, you know. Not ‘it’s’ illegal but ‘we’re’ illegal. He is so lonely, so very lonely, you can taste the need on his skin.”
  —“Contact,” John Lonie

According to the author, “All you need to know as you begin to write a sex scene is what one character’s expectations are. Conflict sets in when the other character can’t or won’t give her what she wants.”
“The best sex scenes arise from the needs, histories, and compulsions of your characters. [When writing] Include well-defined, clearly motivated characters, plenty of details, at least a little conflict, a few surprises, and dialogue where necessary.”
Ideally, the encounter will have a lasting impact on the point-of-view character and the plot.

The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers was first published in 1996 and the text is dated. Although the author includes LGBTQ+ voices and examples, her default is a heterosexual couple. She also frequently references what she assumes will be a universal aversion to writing about sex in general and masturbation in particular.
Despite these quaint limitations, the book provides enough substance for writers looking for guidance on crafting compelling sex scenes. The book served as a reference for a Writer's Digest course I took, "Let's Write About Sex, Baby!" by Katrina Kittle.

Read more helpful targeted writing advice: Writing the Other, The Emotional Craft of Fiction,
The Fire in Fiction, Dialogue, Crafting Emotional Resonance, Scene Architecture

Short Stories: Amplitudes ed. by Lee Mandela

6/22/2026

Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, edited by Lee Mandela, who describes the anthology’s heart in the introduction:
Queerness itself rejects the oppressive status quo of the here and now, offering instead endlessly interconnected ways to imagine the “concrete possibility” of another world, another future. Or many other futures. The same question, of course, underlies some of the most powerful speculative fiction of the last century: but what if things were different?
Almost every entry in the anthology was excellent in both content and execution, making this story collection one of the best I’ve read. It was challenging to limit my selections for this review.

In “Trans World Takeover” by Nat X. Ray, two high school students decide to “out” their trigonometry teacher. It’s a hilarious and heartbreaking story of two kids riding high selling illicit hormones and trying to stage a trans revolution. When their plans go awry, the narrator belatedly learns the importance of loyalty and courage. The story is an insightful and funny look at teen drama, and the writing is top-notch.

“The Republic of Ecstatic Consent” by Sam J. Miller Starts with a polyamorous hippie-like group forming and diverging and reforming over the course of a day. The writing is stellar:
Because what am I supposed to do with this dull fire, this yawning soaring song inside my chest, this love so strong I’m sometimes afraid it’ll crack me like an egg? What do I do in these moments when I scan the crowded subway car or watch the street trees sigh in the wind and I feel my heart might break from how happy I am . . . how could I want [my old life] when what’s real and here and now is so astonishing?

Sarah Gailey’s story “Moonwife” is an interesting take on our digital personas. The narrator, Nell, is able to summon people who’ve died from their digital footprint. But so is her unethical crosstown rival, Dino—who uses the dead he summons for his own nefarious purposes. When a young trans kid comes seeking her help to contact and rescue a trapped digital ghost, Nell decides it’s time to take action.
The closing: Nell’s not the kid, and Nell’s not the Moonwife, either. Not anymore. … She’s got a visit to pay. The streetlights are out, but Nell doesn’t mind—the blue-white moon overhead is bright enough to light her way.

“Forever Won’t End Like This” by Dominique Dickey tells the story of a Black trans actor, Ted, playing a Black trans person. He loathes the press tours with his more successful co-actors—except for the moments when he meets a fan who connects with his trans character.
It’s an interesting analysis of the burden of being an icon—in a medium that uses characters to drive drama, with no regard for their importance to vulnerable fans.

Wenyi Lee’s “They Will Give Us a Home” showcases a couple who’ve leveraged their lives as influencers to get a luxury apartment. To keep the faux-story going, they make a desperate journey to the nether regions of the city's slums. Notice the effortless worldbuilding:
My assistant is on paternity, so it’s just Johnny and me with flashlights for the stretches where the lighting has failed or been stripped out. My beam catches bioluminescent mold more often than people.
Almost no one lives down here.
Almost.

“There Used to Be Peace” by Margaret Killjoy imagines a knighthood of queer warriors fighting confederate renegades after the fall of the United States. The narrator, Catalina, has a snarky sense of humor:
Israa was on the other side of the enemy line, organizing medical care for the refugee train. You know what they say about us lesbians, hell hath no fury like a sapphic cut off from her lover.
So if I had to murder some confederates, I would murder some confederates.
The tale is a wonderful mix of heroic action and thoughtful insights. I especially enjoyed the noble tenets of knighthood they aspire to follow.

Ramez Yoakeim’s “Fettle & Sunder” creates a dilemma: The narrator has earned a berth in space, far from the political unrest making Earth increasingly dangerous, but Juan, their beloved, doesn’t want to go as it means leaving their beloved dogs behind. And Juan knows he won’t have a purpose on the spaceship. As the danger escalates, they finally make a run for the launch site, dodging hateful rogue militia enroute.
The author does a masterful job revealing the narrator’s background and the precarious political situation, escalating the stakes on every page.

“Six Days” by Bendi Barrett is a perfectly written story exploring the simple joys of life after the fall of technology. The narrator runs a communal garden and is part of a threesome relationship. The love scenes are not explicit yet enough is described to charge the text with their erotic energy.

The story opens with their truck stuck and the community missing Hieu, one of the threesome who’s gone to help another community for the next six days.
The unnamed narrator describes their two lovers: Tam is the opposite of Hieu’s quiet, eager malleability. He’s completely solid, a force in flesh.

The truck is freed at the story’s close: Twelve of us pulling, straining, and chanting ludicrous work songs heave it free of the mud with a victorious squelch. … We have dinner afterwards and everyone is feeling celebratory. It’s just an old truck, but every win is magnified when it’s hard earned.

Sunny Moraine’s story, “The They Whom We Remember,” is set in a world where people can and do modify their bodies in numerous ways, experimenting with multiple variations of gender. The narrator wonders what it would was like in the past, when people were locked in one, unchanging body, unable to freely play with physical gender. A fascinating story.

“When the Devil Comes from Babylon” by Maya Deane is set in a restrictive Christian community. The narrator wrestles with their “sick lusts.”
  By daylight I can usually crush down my wickedness, but it always bubbles up again at night.
The narrator is a boy who prefers to do girl work, much to the disgust of his mother and the other righteous believers. At his grandfather’s deathbed he witnesses the angelic “Devil” everyone fears.  The story is a masterful balance of the beliefs we inherit and the truths we must learn for ourselves. The ending is especially beautiful.

“A Few Degrees” by Ash Huang is an entertaining story about a herd of warmth-seeking cats tilting a critical satellite dish off-center, and the human determined to uproot them. It's a fabulous example of expressing emotions indirectly:
A cat didn’t spend its days wondering what it was for, ruing that it hadn’t gone into space. A cat puked and left the mess on the floor, already forgotten. A cat would not aspire to leave the planet. It understood the joys of warm satellite dishes and cuddling with neighbors.

In “The Garden of Collective Memory” by Neon Yang, people can sell their memories. The story’s narrator has a potentially lucrative memory to sell. Running throughout the story is an undercurrent of jealousy toward her single and professionally successful friend, and dissatisfaction with her boring married life with her wife, Natalie. It takes an angry confrontation to help her see what she’s overlooking:
A dozen years from now I’ll look back on these moments and wonder how I ever found them dull. What do I care what other people think of the memories I’m making, so long as they make me happy.

Aysha U. Farah’s story, “Sugar, Shadow,” is a gritty noir tale of a private detective hunting a rich couple’s drug-addict son. The drug is called sugar and heavy users hive off into doppelgangers called “shadows.”
When the son goes into withdrawal, the detective calls on an old friend to help save him—but the price includes dealing with the worst of the city’s criminal underworld.

Paul Evanby layers emotion and spy-thriller action in his complex story, “Blueprint for the Destruction of Solitude.” The opening lines:
The rain is wet again. Has been for weeks. I like the feeling of moisture on my skin, but water from heaven is not going to win this war.
The narrator meets his “contact” in a dance club and they exchange chemical data via a kiss. As the data transmits:
We speak of loneliness and the fear we experience every day when we move through the city streets. … Of the corrosive certainty that a single mistake is enough to condemn us.

The anthology closes with Meg Ellison’s “Bang Bang,” a sci-fi riff on the B52’s song, “Love Shack.” The narrator describes parties that pop-up in different parts of the universe:
Rooms writhe and spin around and around, like a single animal that’s in love with itself. Everybody is so kind to one another. There’s no wrong body [and] the whole Shack shimmies.
The stories in Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity are wide ranging, yet consistently well written and with thematic depth. A 2026 Ignyte Award Finalist. Highly Recommended.

Read more science fiction short stories:
Even Greater Mistakes; The Best of World SFF; The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories;
Pump Six; The Mammoth Book of SF by Women; Dispatches from Anarres
Read more fiction featuring trans and queer characters:
The Four Profound Weaves, Light from Uncommon Stars,
The Bruising of Qilwa, Sistersong, Spear, Most Ardently

Writing Craft: The Secrets of Story by Matt Bird

6/15/2026

In The Secrets of Story, Matt Bird makes the sobering observation that it’s tough to capture reader interest in our media-saturated world. But he suggests a variety of ways to strengthen our stories to captivate readers’ hearts and minds, such as a character readers can identify with, scenes that force characters into conflict, and a story structure that keeps readers guessing.
Much of the advice on character construction in this book is expanded on in The Secrets of Character, so this review focuses on story- and scene-level techniques. The book covers a wide range of story elements (Concept, Characters, Structure, Scenes, Dialogue, Tone, Theme, and Revision), providing helpful examples to illustrate powerful ways to apply each technique.

Exposition:
When conveying story information (also called exposition), the author advises: “Don’t give the audience any information they aren’t demanding to know.”
Make whatever facts or background you provide imbued with the character’s attitude and voice. And tell readers only “what they don’t already know.” This avoids annoying repetition.

Heroes:
“Every hero must be active and resourceful [plus] clever, and powerfully motivated.”
“Once you’ve gotten us to care about the hero, you’ve got a huge resource: We’ll care about anything the hero cares about.”
“We love to see heroes’ true motivation established in one scene and then see others unfairly ascribe false motives to them in the next scene. This truly bonds us to a character.”
In Sky God’s Warrior, Ayda’s motivations are often unfairly misinterpreted by her nemesis Maqari as well as her own family.

Story Problem:
“Your story is about your hero’s problem. … Begin the moment the problem begins—no sooner, no later."
“Throughout your story, character should be colliding with plot [events]. The ending is the ultimate collision in which the problem is resolved as both the character and the situation are permanently transformed by their volatile clash.”

To strengthen Scenes:

There must be conflict between the scene partners.
As a result, at least one of them should end up doing something he or she didn’t intend to do when the scene began.
At least one of them should use indirect tricks and traps, not just direct confrontation.

In Sky God’s Warrior, Maqari masterfully tricks and traps politically naive Ayda into publicly giving up incriminating information on more than one occasion.

Try-Fail:
"The hero should be trying and expecting to solve the entire problem in almost every scene. … It takes a huge, hubris-filled failure [to force her to try another way.]"
Short stories often have a try-fail, try-fail, try-succeed structure, where the third try is the charm. For example, in "The Three Little Pigs," the straw house fails against the wolf, the house of sticks falls, but the brick house stands.
Longer novels can put heroes through multiple failures on many fronts, to incite a deeper, and more meaningful transformation.

Scene Outcome:
"A scene should have a concrete outcome. The hero’s agenda should either succeed or fail in such a way that things get worse rather than stay the same." Something must change in every scene, for the scene to serve a purpose in the story.
"Irony is any meaningful gap between expectation and reality. [And] the greater the gulf between expectation and outcome, the more meaning a story will have." Characters inevitably expect to gain something entering the scene; irony prevails when they instead lose in the scene's outcome.

Dialogue:
"Your goal should be to write dialogue with maximum personality and the minimum amount of clarification you can get away with. The audience doesn’t want you to hold their hand. They want you to play hard to get so they can have the thrill of the chase."

"Stories thrive on tension both external and internal, including the tension between what people say and what they mean. " For this reason, the author advises avoiding on-the-nose character self-insights (I'm too stubborn. OR: I'm insecure from being fostered by relatives.)
Another helpful technique: Cut the commas. Not "No, but I need you." Just: "I need you."

Reader Engagement:
"The best way to keep your readers reading is to make sure they’re always anticipating something that’s about to happen, both in the story as a whole and within each scene."
For example: "Begin a kitchen scene with the toaster lever being forced down. The audience will subconsciously sense the scene will end with the toast popping up."

Setup and Payoff:
Like dialogue, character behavior, benefits from “setup and payoff.” You show the character behaving one way (being rude and impatient with a slow-walking person) then reverse the behavior to show the character’s internal state has changed (being kind and patient with a slow-walking person). Because the reader is in on the setup, they understand the meaning of the payoff.
An example from Sky God’s Warrior illustrates this with setting.

Aietos, falling in love, enjoys the vibrant marketplace of Kolkha City:

He blinked against the crowded market’s bright, saturated colors. Even the normally pallid sky shone a brilliant azure. The cheerful voices of merchants and traders hawking their wares created a harmonious melody. The market’s aromas were a pleasant blend of piquant spices, sweet baked bread, and savory grilled meats.
Aphrodita must’ve pierced his heart. How else to explain the world’s sudden beauty, the fluttering in his chest, and the pulse dancing in his ears?

After upsetting encounters with the locals:

He shoved his way into the irksome stream of rowdy people jamming the thoroughfare outside the woodshop. Stalls along the street displayed pottery painted in raucous colors; textiles woven from vivid reds, glaring yellows, and bold blues; others were stuffed with pungent spices and foul perfumes, or screeching birds in wooden cages. The rancid stench of greasy food and sour bodies clogged the sweltering air. And in every shadowed corner, wretched war refugees reeked of despair.

The Secrets of Story has many more actionable ideas for creating a compelling reader experience. The author’s final suggestion: “find a way to enjoy (or at least appreciate) your own story as you’re writing it, with a tingling sense of freedom and excitement . . . Because writing is worth doing.

Read another helpful writing book by Matt Bird: The Secrets of Character
Read more excellent advice on writing technique: The Emotional Craft of Fiction, The Fire in Fiction,
Characters, Emotion, & Viewpoint, Story, Writing for Emotional Impact, Techniques of the Selling Writer

Nonfiction: Quit by Annie Duke

6/7/2026

Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away offers a profound antidote to the mantra “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” Instead, the author demonstrates through fascinating examples of real-life situations and scientific studies the opposite truth: “Contrary to popular belief, winners quit a lot. That’s how they win.”
She opens the book describing the career of Muhammed Ali, who staged impressive comebacks, but also boxed after doctors told him to stop. “The same grit that helped Ali become such a great champion—admired and revered almost without equal—became his undoing when it drove him to ignore signs that were obvious to anyone on the outside looking in that he should quit.”

PERSISTENCE:  Why do we persist when we should stop? Because we crave certainty.
  “Sticking with a course of action is the only way to find out for sure how it will turn out. Quitting requires being okay with not knowing what might have been.”
  And not knowing if a new venture will succeed or fail. “All we have is our best assessment of an uncertain and changing landscape and the hope that we have honed our quitting skills enough to walk away when conditions turn against us.”

The author offers many excellent tools to assess our aversion to quitting and to help us leave bad situations more easily. Here are some highlights:

SUCCESS: “Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest. … The problem is, perhaps because of our aversion to quitting, we tend to rationalize away the clues contained in the present that would allow us to see how bad things really are. [But if] we don’t cut our losses when it’s warranted, those losses will continue to accumulate.”
“Our intuition is that quitting will slow down our progress. The reverse is actually true. If you walk away from something that is no longer worthwhile, that frees you up to switch to something that is more likely to help you achieve your goals and get you there faster.”

EXPECTED VALUE “tells you whether any option you are considering is going to be, on balance, positive or negative to you in the long run.”
For example, if we stay in a job or relationship where we’re miserable, staying in that situation is 100% guaranteed to keep us unhappy. Whereas we don’t know how we’ll feel in a new job or relationship, but it’s unlikely to be 100% miserable (unless, of course, the problem is our attitude in any situation). Therefore leaving the current situation for a new one has a higher expected value.

TIMING: When we quit is tricky, in part because we are often driven by loss aversion. Because of loss aversion, “losing feels about two times as bad to us as winning feels good to us. … The result is that we’ll quit when we’re ahead, even if we’re giving up good opportunities to win more. If we’re behind, we don’t want to quit, even if persisting—to try to get to the other side of zero—is more likely to make things worse.”

“Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early, … specifically when you’re in the losses.”
The author cited a study of cab drivers, who quit on busy nights once they make their quota (even though continuing to work would bring in more money) and worked extra on rainy nights when they get few fares (even though economically, it wasn’t worth their time).
She saw the same behavior among amateur gamblers when she was a professional poker player. When they were losing money, they kept playing and lost more, rather than walking away.

IDENTITY: “In large part, we are what we do, and our identity is closely connected with whatever we’re focused on, including our careers, relationships, projects, and hobbies. When we quit any of those things, we have to deal with the prospect of quitting part of our identity. And that is painful.” Also, “ownership can interfere with our ability to walk away, especially when the thing we own, we created.”
I borrowed this book from the library to help me process ending my successful massage therapy business when my illness made it impossible for me to continue. Quitting was the obvious (only) choice, but in no way easy and I came to it very reluctantly.

FORCED QUITTING:  Closing my massage practice was especially distressing because it wasn't my choice.
  “For all of us, there are times in our lives when the world makes us stop what we’re doing. … It’s obviously painful when the decision to quit is not our own. But eventually, when that happens, we all have to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and look for something new to do.”
  The silver lining: more time to write and be with my spouse, and lots of nap time with the cats!

SUNK COSTS: Forty years of experiments and fieldwork have repeatedly demonstrated the effect of “sunk costs” on human behavior: “In decisions about whether to move forward, [people] take into account what they’ve already spent. They do this because they irrationally think that the only way to recover or justify the costs is if they continue on. Put simply, the sunk cost effect causes people to stick in situations that they ought to be quitting.”

War is the ultimate “sunk cost” dilemma. When soldiers die, their families don’t want their sacrifice to be in vain. “But the reality is that when it comes to decisions about whether to continue or withdraw, what matters is whether the next life is worth putting at risk. . . . If we continue, are our chances of getting the outcome we want worth risking additional lives and imposing those losses on other families?”

“When deciding whether to stick or quit, we are worried that if we walk away, we will have wasted the resources we have spent trying.” These sunk costs snowball. “The resources you have already spent make it less likely you will quit, which makes it more likely you will accumulate additional sunk costs . . . The growing debris of your prior commitments makes it increasingly harder to walk away.”

An example is the California bullet train project, meant to link Los Angeles and San Francisco by high-speed rail, originally approved by voters in 2008 for $9 billion dollars. Structural engineers have yet to figure out how to tunnel through the mountains separating the two cities (they’ve spent $8 billion in designs), and the estimated cost to complete the structure is now estimated at $105 billion.
“Every dollar that California sinks into the project is a dollar that could otherwise be allocated to something that would create more value and a greater public good for the taxpayers whose money is funding the endeavor.”

HARDEST FIRST: The bullet train brings up another important principle: figure out the hardest problems first. If you can’t get the train through the mountains, it doesn’t make sense to lay track on the flatlands. Tackling the hardest parts first will quickly reveal if the project is feasible at all. “The sooner you figure out that you should walk away, the sooner you can switch to something better. And the sooner that happens, the more resources you’re saving, which you can then devote to more fruitful endeavors.”
For writers, this means doing the actual writing and revising, not diving down research rabbit holes or rearranging our desks to feel more productive.

BELIEFS: We experience cognitive dissonance “when new information conflicts with our prior beliefs. When that happens, it makes us uncomfortable, and we want to make that discomfort go away. So we rationalize away the new information so we can defend our prior beliefs.”

“Every time you rationalize away new information to cling to a belief, that belief becomes more tightly woven into the fabric of your identity. The act of rejecting the facts becomes circular. Now the next time you discover conflicting information or your actions don’t align with your beliefs, you’re going to be even more motivated to stick to those beliefs.”
This process helps explain the political polarization currently plaguing the US. It’s also a common feature of cults.

COMMITMENT: Barry Staw is a social scientist who watched his father create a retail empire and then refuse to divest from or sell the unprofitable stores because of his emotional attachment. Barry demonstrated that “whether it is on the level of an individual, an organization, or a government entity, when we’re getting bad news, when we’re getting strong signals that we’re losing—signals that others plainly see—we don’t merely refuse to quit. We will double and triple down, making additional decisions to commit more time and money (and other resources) toward the losing cause, and we will strengthen our belief that we are on the right path.”

Barry Staw “saw the US involvement in the Vietnam War as a living, breathing, high-stakes, slow-motion train wreck of an example of our inability to quit. … By the end of the war, it was widely believed [the war] was unwinnable, yet even then decision-makers [couldn’t quit], instead responding with [an] escalation of commitment to the losing course of action, responding to the growing awareness that there was no real path to victory for the United States by increasing the nation’s commitment to the war.”

GOALS: It seems like pursuing specific goals might help us make good life choices. But goals can create their own problems. What “makes goals effective is that they get you to focus on the finish line and motivate you to keep going. But the duality is that goals also keep you from quitting a bad situation because they focus you on the finish line and motivate you to keep going.”

The author cites several instances of runners breaking leg bones during a marathon at the 1-, 6-, or 8-mile mark--yet they kept running the entire 26+ miles. “Why do these runners disregard their pain [and] continue on, putting their future ability to run a race at risk? Because there’s a finish line.”
“Once we start toward a finish line, we accumulate the sunk costs of time and effort and money spent trying to get there. [When] we quit, we fear two things: that we’ve failed, and that we’ve wasted our time, effort, or money. … [We need to realize] that spending another minute or another dollar or another bit of effort on something that is no longer worthwhile is the real waste. …
If you quit something that’s no longer worth pursuing, that’s not a failure. That’s a success.”

KILL CRITERIA: “If we can identify in advance what the signals are that we should pay attention to and make a plan for how we will react to them, we can increase the chances that we’ll cut our losses when we ought to.”

The author tells the story of four climbers on Mount Everest who had to turn around by 1:00, no matter how close they were to the summit, to return safely. Two of the climbers did turn back (quit), the ones who didn’t stop reached the summit at 4:00—but died trying to climb back down.
“When you enter into a course of action, create a set of kill criteria. This is a list of signals you might see in the future that would tell you it’s time to quit. Kill criteria [should] include both states and dates, in the form of “If I am (or am not) in a particular state at a particular date or at a particular time, then I have to quit.”
For example: I will send this short story to 10 professional magazines, and if I get no acceptance, I’ll move on to 10 semi-pro publications. Or, I will query agents for nine months and if I haven’t gotten any positive response by then, I’ll stop querying that book and focus on the next novel.

BACKUP PLANS: The author uses ants as an example of creatures who allocate resources to a known food source, but scout ants are always searching for new, and potentially better, resources.

Author playing poker

  “Backup plans are good to have especially because some backup plans can turn out to be better than what we’re already pursuing.”
  Example: After getting her Ph.D, the author was preparing to deliver lectures to secure a tenure-track position when she was hospitalized with an acute illness. During her year-long recovery, her brother (a professional gambler) talked her into playing poker for income. She ended up playing poker professionally for the next 18 years.
For writers: By developing a balance between scouting new opportunities (new stories) and developing what we already have (the stories we’ve already started), we increase our chances of not wasting our time on stories that fall short and instead writing strong, resonant stories that engage readers.

The author says: “For any of us, having a diversified portfolio of interests, skills, and opportunities helps to protect us from uncertainty.”

LIFE IS SHORT: “we all have limited time on this planet to devote to different opportunities we might pursue. … Persevere in the things that matter, that bring you happiness, and that move you toward your goals. Quit everything else, to free up those resources so you can pursue your goals and stop sticking to things that slow you down.”
If you’re looking for solid advice on navigating life’s challenges by making smart choices, check out Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. Highly recommended.

Read more about the mind-bending beliefs of cults: Cultish
Read about overcoming political polarization: Love You, Hate Your Politics, Say the Right Thing
Read how political propaganda influences our decisions: Stories are Weapons
Read a feminist take on the social context of our decisions: The Witches are Coming
Read how racism factors into decision-making: How to be an Anti-Racist

Fiction: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

5/27/2026

The Song of Achilles reveals the Greek hero Achilles through the viewpoint of his beloved Patroclus.
Drawn from the Iliad and other Greek myths, the novel breathes life into its three-dimensional characters and we live the tale alongside them: Patroclus’ exile; training with the centaur Chiron alongside Achilles; fearsome Thetis trying to protect her son Achilles; being recruited for the Trojan War by cunning Odysseus; the political jockeying among kings and heroes during the war; Patroclus’ death and Achilles’ outsized grief; Achilles taking brutal revenge against the Trojan, Prince Hector.
The vivid prose makes this a story a reader can live while reading.

We meet Patroclus as an awkward child:
Quickly I became a disappointment: small, slight. I was not fast. I was not strong. I could not sing. The best that could be said of me was that I was not sickly.
Patroclus carries this low opinion of himself into manhood, always feeling inadequate, especially in comparison with the semi-divine Achilles.

Knowing that his father, the king, disdains him. The other boys take advantage. Patroclus fights back against one of his bullies:
His head thudded dully against stone, and I saw the surprised pop of his eyes. The ground around him began to bleed.
I stared, my throat closing in horror at what I had done. I had not seen the death of a human before. Yes, the bulls, and the goats, even the bloodless gasping of fish. . . . But I had not seen this: the rattle of it, the choke and scrabble.
He is disowned by his harsh father for the murder, and sent to foster with Achilles’ father.

From the moment he meets Achilles he is smitten, but also jealous:
In the huge hall, his beauty shone like a flame, vital and bright, drawing my eye against my will. His mouth was a plump bow, his nose an aristocratic arrow. When he was seated, his limbs did not skew as mine did, but arranged themselves with perfect grace, as if for a sculptor. [The other boys] crowded him like dogs in their eagerness, tongues lolling.
I watched all this from my place at a corner table, bread crumpled in my fist. The keen edge of my envy was like flint, a spark away from fire.
Patroclus resists his attraction, but poorly:
His presence was like a stone in my shoe, impossible to ignore. His skin was the color of just-pressed olive oil, smooth as polished wood, without the scabs and blemishes that covered the rest of us.

To everyone’s surprise, Achilles names Patroclus his companion. Patroclus is unable to resist Achilles’ charms and is soon enamored with the nimble-footed warrior.
Their first kiss ignites Patroclus’ passion so strongly, he pulls back and Achilles storms away, embarrassed and hurt. Much later that they are able to consummate their mutual attraction:
I could not think, could not do anything but drink him in, each breath as it came, the soft movement of his lips. It was a miracle.
The love they share is beautifully described, and blooms into deep, mutual devotion.

Thetis, a sea-goddess, is Achille’s mother. She tries to discourage their love and becomes Patroclus’ antagonist throughout the novel. He describes her fearsome presence:
The doors blew open in a fury of flying splinters. Thetis stood in the doorway, hot as living flame. Her divinity swept over us all, singeing our eyes, blackening the broken edges of the door. I could feel it pulling at my bones, sucking at the blood in my veins as if it would drink me. I cowered, as men were made to do.

The two men are ultimately drawn into the Trojan war. Patroclus still believes himself an inferior warrior; Achilles is regarded as a hero of the ages.
Our world was one of blood, and the honor it won; only cowards did not fight. For a prince, there was no choice. You warred and won, or you warred and died.
Achilles is a wonder on the battlefield, but his hot pride leads him into conflict with the Greek leader Agamemnon. Achilles refuses to fight until the king apologizes for slighting his honor, and many Greeks die as a result.

Hoping to protect the Greeks and his lover’s reputation, Patroclus volunteers to go into battle wearing Achilles’ armor. He learns that he’s no longer a small, weak child:
I imagine how Achilles would do it, feet planted to earth, back muscles twisting. He would see a gap in that impenetrable armor, or he would make one. But I am not Achilles. What I see is something else, my only chance. They are almost upon me. I cast the spear.
He successfully knocks his opponent from the chariot, and has a moment of battle glory.

He’s later killed by the Trojan hero Prince Hector:
My hands flurry in the air like startled birds, trying to halt the spear’s relentless movement towards my belly. But I am weak as a baby against Hector’s strength, and my palms give way, unspooling in ribbons of red. The spearhead submerges in a sear of pain so great that my breath stops, a boil of agony that bursts over my whole stomach. My head drops back against the ground, and the last image I see is of Hector, leaning seriously over me, twisting his spear inside me as if he is stirring a pot. The last thing I think is: Achilles.

Because he hasn’t been properly buried, Patroclus lingers as a ghost, witnessing the rest of the war, including Achilles’ vicious revenge against the Trojan, Prince Hector.
When Achilles dies, their ashes are joined, but the grave marker is only for the hero Achilles. Patroclus tries in vain to convince someone to put a marker up with his name so he can join his beloved in the afterworld:
Do not let it be so. Do not leave me here without him.

The final scene of The Song of Achilles brought me to tears.
This is ultimately a love story between two very different men, whom fate brings together and then rips apart. But their love—thanks to an unlikely ally—proves to be stronger than death.

Read more about Greek myth: Ithaca, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Medusa, Sirens Empowered, #MeTooMedusa, Justice, The Spring Maiden, 15 Healing Deities, Water Gods, Divine Darkness

Fiction: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

5/11/2026

The Correspondent reveals the life and heart of Sybil Van Antwerp through almost ten years of correspondence with family, friends, people she admires, and people she despises. This is an epistolary novel, a story told entirely through letters (and emails).
Sybil is sharp and witty, which makes her an excellent narrator. Her brother, Felix, and best friend Rosalie, get regular updates on her life and her scathing opinions of the local garden club and the new dean who refuses to let her audit classes at the local university. But it is her young friend Harry, a troubled teen and family friend, with whom she shares meaningful secrets. Sybil’s affection and dedication to Harry’s well-being are endearing.

Later in the book, a kind-hearted gentleman becomes her confidant, and it is with him that she divulges the deepest, darkest secret of all.

The author does a masterful job capturing Sybil’s complex character (kind, stubborn, self-righteous, generous, harsh)—and revealing her entirely through the words she writes to others (and sometimes the replies she receives).
She’s in her seventies, had a stellar legal career, is well-read, and keenly interested in helping people within her social circle, which includes people she incorporates into her life, like a hapless help-desk tech whom she tries to help get a better job.

There are a number of mysteries that keep the story moving:

Why did she crash her car?
Who is this mysterious Colt she confides in?
Why and when will she lose her eyesight?
Why was she orphaned at 14 months?
Why did her marriage end?
Why is she stuck in her grief for her dead child?

Some of these questions are answered early on, others pieced together as the story unfolds, and yet others are only fully divulged to the reader in the closing pages of the book.

Sybil has plenty of fun adventures: she’s courted by a loud Texan who makes her laugh, and, less aggressively, by a thoughtful neighbor. She has two buddies she calls “the birds” with whom she pals around. And a very active literary life, reading, taking literature classes, and also writing to authors she admires, some of whom respond.

There is also darkness: she has a troubled relationship with her daughter, Fiona. This strained mother-daughter bond provides much of the novel’s angst, becoming more and more precarious as the book progresses—until reaching an intense eruption that threatens to poison Sybil’s other important relationships.
Also, someone from her past is stalking her and trying to frighten her. This twisted up the tension in several parts of the story, particularly when she ventures alone to an isolated area along the river. The resolution of this subplot surprised me, but revealed Sybil’s depth of character—which made the novel’s conclusion all the more poignant.

Some passages where the language captured Sybil’s unique voice:
Daan [her husband] and I were happy, even though I didn’t know it was happiness at the time because it felt like busyness and exhaustion and financial stress and self-doubt. But Gilbert’s death was a swift ejection back out to the loneliest bitter stretch of [life’s] road, and that is the bone crunching grief. … The stretches on the high, wind-blown road are far commoner than the stopovers in comfort, and aren’t we always trying to get back to happier times?
By the river:
Sometimes I see herons. It smelled cold this morning, and rainy, and there’s of course the briny must of the water, that smell, and the rotting trunks and leaves from the fall, and I love all of this, but it’s melancholy, too, in a way. It’s hard to explain it exactly, but it is gorgeous and melancholy all at once. I won’t be able to see it, at some point, and when I can’t see it, I won’t be able to go down there alone, which is really the only way I like to go down at all.
Describing Scotland:
The landscape soars, immense and distant and gentle, and the sky is crisp and clear, moving, and textured, the air a raw quality I never knew existed. All the green, the stone, the water.

The book explores the nature of poisonous secrets and the struggle for forgiveness, and the ways letters can be vulnerable and intimate, but also can keep people at a safe distance.
Reading The Correspondent introduced me to an extraordinary woman through her insightful, funny, heart-wrenching letters; someone whom I would feel privileged to consider a friend.

Read other books with endearing characters like Sybil: The One-in-a-Million Boy,
The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fischer, Remnant Population

Nonfiction: What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe

5/5/2026

What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins presents fascinating scientific research and entertaining anecdotes to explore the personalities and umwelt of fish.
Our oceans and waterways are the largest habitat on earth (over 70% of the planet) and most animals live in water—yet until recently, these aquatic citizens were little studied or understood.
The author provides ample evidence that “fishes are individuals with minds and memories, able to plan [and] to learn from experience. [They] have social lives. They swim together; they recognize other individuals by sight, smell, voice … and they cooperate.”

Fishes have an acute sense of smell. Migrating fishes use their sense of smell to detect home waters. They also memorize currents and turbulence patterns, and use the Earth’s magnetic field to find home.

“Despite the misconception that fishes are silent, they actually have more ways of producing sounds than any other group of vertebrate animals. … Fishes can rapidly contract a pair of vocal muscles to vibrate their swim bladders… [other options to create sound include] grating their teeth in their jaws, grinding additional teeth lining their throat, rubbing bones together, stridulating their gill covers, and …expelling bubbles from their anuses.”

Fishes use touch for pleasure in courting rituals, and cleaner fishes “curry favor with their valued clients by caressing them with their fins [to] strengthen the cleaner-client relationship.”

Cleaner-client symbiosis of fishes “is one of the most complex and sophisticated social systems of any animals . . . One or two cleaner fishes signal that they are open for business. . . . Other fishes of various types congregate at the cleaning station, where they wait their turn to be serviced by the cleaners. [Cleaners] pick over their client’s bodies, removing [and eating] parasites, dead skin, algae, and other undesirable blemishes. Clients benefit by receiving a spa treatment, including parasite removal. Cleaners get fed.”

“With dozens of clients per cleaner, cleaner fishes maintain an impressive mental database of clientele [and] the system encompasses long-term relationships built on trust [and] reputation . . . These social dynamics support a degree of awareness and social sophistication quite out of keeping with our cultural impression of fishes.”

Fishes are also capable social learners, readily learning by watching others.
Some fish use tools. An orange dotted turkfish was observed digging up clams and smashing them against a large rock (with its mouth) to crack the shells and eat the contents.

Tigerfish and catfish, among others, leap from the water to catch birds. This behavior “has all the hallmarks of flexible, cognitive behavior: it is opportunistic, since it is unusual behavior for the species; it requires practice to develop, and skill to execute; it is almost certainly transmitted through observational learning; and different methods are used [ambush from behind or underneath].”

Some fish are romance artists. Male pufferfish create elaborate mandala-like nests to attract females, decorating with “bits of small shells he cracks in his mouth before sprinkling them into the central grooves.”
Another elaborate nest is the mating bower of the male stickleback. “They produce a sticky, mucus-like substance in their kidneys [to] bind together pieces of leaves, grass, and algae filaments to his nest.”

“About one in four of all fish species—some 8,000 species—devote at least some form of caregiving to their offspring. The effort ranges from protecting eggs to looking after the young through their most vulnerable first few weeks of life.
Many fishes, including sharks, are viviparous, that is, giving birth to live young.”

The discus fish feeds its young with a special mucus “enriched with antimicrobial substances that help protect babies from infections.”
Other fish carry their eggs or young in their mouths (called mouthbrooding), and male seahorses and pipefish brood the next generation in their abdomens. “The female releases her eggs into the male’s abdominal pouch, where he fertilizes them and carries them until they hatch. “Birthing” involves contractions and contortions to expel the young from the pouch.”

Aquatic life is wonderfully diverse.
“More than one-quarter of all fishes on a reef can transition from male to female or vice versa . . . Sex-changing fishes behave appropriately, performing male-typical or female-typical behaviors according to their current gender assignment.” Other fish are unisex (both male and female), some mate daily (blue-headed wrasses), and Amazon mollies are an all-female species, reproducing by parthenogenesis.

Deep sea anglerfish might be the most unique. Female anglerfish use a dangling lure filled with luminescent bacteria to attract prey. “Some lures resemble a worm, which the anglerfish causes to squirm appealingly by twitching muscles at the base of the stalk.”
Tiny male anglerfish latch onto females and eventually become fused, “living off her blood supply and fertilizing her intravenously. One female can end up with three or more males sprouting from her body like vestigial limbs.”

Cooperative hunting, requiring planning and teamwork, occurs in several fish species. For example, “shoals of barracuda will swim in a tight spiral, herding prey into shallow waters for easier hunting.”
Yellow-saddle goatfishes take on different roles. “Chasers flush the prey out of their hiding crevices, and blockers prevent their escape.” Cross-species cooperation has been observed with coral groupers recruiting giant moray eels for team hunting.

But schools of prey fish have their own survival strategies. “Fleeing schools will [split] into two clusters that quickly swim around each side of a predator fish and reassemble behind it. If the predator turns around, the maneuver is repeated. [Or] all the fishes in a school dart away from the center as the predator attacks. The spray of fishes may cover ten to twenty body-lengths in just one-fiftieth of a second. "

Unfortunately for fishes, the anti-predator benefit of schooling backfires with human predation: "equipment has been developed to detect and then reap almost all fishes in a single school."

The final chapter of the book covers human devastation of our aquatic cousins. The number of fish killed each year by humans “is between 1 and 2.7 trillion. . . . if we lined them up end to end, they would stretch to the sun and back—a round trip of 186 million miles—with a couple hundred billion fishes to spare.”

“Unwanted fishes and other animals caught incidentally in the pursuit of targeted species are referred to as bycatch. In commercial fishing, bycatch includes all seven kinds of sea turtles; dozens of seabirds . . . practically every species of dolphin and whale; countless invertebrates; living corals; and of course, a huge range of fish species. . . . Try to visualize a pile of marine creatures, weighing 200 million pounds, most of them dead, almost all doomed to die. That’s the daily bycatch we reap from the seas.”

Also troubling: “Fishing fleets abandon or lose many untold miles of synthetic fiber drift nets and bottom-set fill nets every year—about 640,000 tons of derelict gear in total [which] continue entangling animals. The primary victims—dolphins, seals, sea birds, and sea turtles—become bait for other marine life, some of whom also become ensnared, until finally, by the sheer weight of all the dead bodies, the nets sink to the bottom of the sea.”

Farmed fish fare no better. On trout farms, “densities as high as twenty-seven foot-long fishes per bathtub volume of water.” And paradoxically, “the production of factory-farmed fish does not relieve the pressure on wild fish populations. This is because the primary food fed to farmed fish [is] fish.”
One marine activist said: “When I see a salmon farm, I see slavery and debasement of the spirit of the fish that West Coast First nations viewed as the buffalo of the sea.”

It is ultimately human consumers who drive the fishing industry:
“When we eat fishes, we fund their capture.”

Recreational fishing causes damage to delicate facial tissues and abrasions to the protective layer of mucus surrounding the scales.

“We hear no screams and see no tears when their mouths are impaled and their bodies pulled from the water. Their unblinking eyes—constantly bathed in water and thus in need of no lids—amplify the illusion that they feel nothing. [But] the accumulating evidence indicates a range of emotions in at least some fishes, including fear, stress, playfulness, joy, and curiosity.”

Fishes “show the hallmarks of pain both physiologically and behaviorally. They have the “same specialized nerve fibers that mammals and birds use to detect noxious stimuli.” In experiments, they seek out pain relief. And, like human addicts, “fishes are prone to abusing amphetamine and cocaine, unable to resist them when they are freely available.”

What a Fish Knows demonstrates the many commonalities we humans share with fish and gives us a glimpse of their captivating lives.
The book ends with this sobering thought: “feeding fishes to humans is unsustainable even at current levels of consumption.” Something consider when making choices about what to eat.

Read more about our aquatic neighbors:
Sounds Wild and Broken, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, The Underworld,
An Immense World, The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog
Read more about nature’s diversity:
Plant-Animal Hybrids, Lesbian Lizards, Aliens Among Us, Animal Emotions

Fiction: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

4/20/2026

Time-travel stories aren’t my usual fare, yet I enjoyed The Everlasting. Three main characters drive the narrative: war-scarred veteran and historian Owen Mallory; female knight and legend Sir Una Everlasting; and War Minister Vivian Rolfe, who sends Owen back in time to record Una’s legendary death for posterity.
The book starts with a recounting of Una Everlasting becoming the queen’s champion, told as a fairy tale. Then we meet Owen, who receives (in the mail) the lost book of Una Everlasting legends that past historians seem to reference. When another historian barges into his office, he bolts with the precious book: [I] ran for it, like the coward I always was and would always be.

Owen has a wonderfully self-effacing sense of humor in the face of very real trauma: “I had never flourished in a crisis. I was one of God’s natural ditherers, much given to the wringing of hands and the writing of unhelpful lists. Since the war, I had added fits of weeping and melancholic stupors, and every now and then a wave of confused and violent memory that left me curled in a corner, shaking.”

Vivian Rolfe is tough and ruthless. She steals, then returns, the precious book to Owen—but now all the pages are blank.
“Why,” I asked, swallowing, “are they blank?”
She leaned over the desk, smiling peacefully. Beneath the tang of cigarette smoke, I smelled something sweet and a little familiar, like summer flowers. “Because you haven’t written them yet,” she said, and then she stabbed the letter opener through the back of my left hand.

Owen is transported back in time to an ancient forest, specifically to an ancient yew tree, which plays an important role in the story and in Owen’s life: There was the old tree, my tree—the one I had run to as a boy, which had been my castle, my refuge, my only-good-place—though it had been cut down years ago.

Owen idolizes Una Everlasting, but she is quite different than he expects. Instead of boldly commencing on her final quest to find the Holy Grail and slay the last dragon, she’s hiding the yew forest, contemplating suicide. She both loves and hates the queen she serves, who will die without the Holy Grail. She is a woman scarred by countless battles.
Owen writes of her: You hardly seemed to notice the cold or the terrain or the long days in the saddle. It didn’t strike me as toughness so much as an odd divide between you and your own flesh. As if your body was merely something you owned, like a sharp knife or a good pair of boots, which you might use hard and tend only when it showed signs of weakening.

It is up to Owen to ensure Una lives up to her legend and completes her quest. Throughout their adventures, he glosses actual events in the book he writes to make them match the legends he remembers.

The first 111 pages of the book, comprising “The First Death of Una Everlasting,” are told entirely from Owen’s viewpoint. In “The Second Death of Una Everlasting,” we get a similar story from Una’s point of view. When Owen makes physical contact, she responds:
A shudder wracked me from skull to spine, and I knew suddenly how it would be with you. Most of my lovers—camp followers and soldiers, crofters’ daughters and the idle sons of lords—had wanted only to take or be taken; they came to me warily or arrogantly, shy or swaggering, as to a caged wolf. But you—oh, you would come to me on your knees, as to a king, and you would give and give.
I was leaning down to you, ready to let you, when you looked up from my palm. You met my eyes—and flinched.

At the end of the “Second Death,” Vivian Rolfe forces Owen to add an addendum to the legend—which significantly changes the present. Though he didn’t before, now Owen remembers journeying to the past—multiple times.

The book explores themes of cowardice and survival. At one point, learning that his friend’s lover has been imprisoned, Owen says “Love makes cowards of us all.”
But when he visits his drunkard father, his understanding shifts:
What happiness my father might have had, he’d sacrificed for me . . . As you had sacrificed yourself, over and over, for your queen.
I thought, despairing, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes didn’t usually survive.

The book also underscores the inherent instability of oppression: Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.

“The Third Death of Una Everlasting” is 25 pages of Owen and Una falling in love and trying to escape the endless cycle of her legendary death. They use “The Fourth Death of Una Everlasting” to try to change the narrative. Somewhere around the third or fourth iteration, I wasn't sure I could finish the book. It was so heartbreaking to watch them find and lose each other again and again.
The “Last Death of Una Everlasting” was worth the journey. Everything that went before comes together in the final 16 pages of the book in a way that makes every single word resonate from the preceding chapters. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say it was absolutely satisfying in the best way possible.
Writing instructors often say the ending can make or break a novel—the exquisite ending of The Everlasting made this novel a powerful and rewarding reading experience.

Read other socially relevant fantasy: Shit Cassandra Saw,  Kissing the Witch,  Not a Princess,
The Bruising of Qilwa,  The Dragon’s Path (The Dagger and the Coin series),  Pledging Season
Nonfiction on the political power of story: Stories are Weapons,  A Paradise Built in Hell

Nonfiction: The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

4/17/2026

The Genius of Birds provides a fascinating exploration of the astounding ways our feathered cousins have adapted to our world.
The author investigates how birds can anticipate storms from far away; how they learn and imitate songs; how they remember where they’ve hidden seeds and how they can remember where they put them months later "over hundreds of square miles.”
Research revels that bird’s brains function similarly to human’s in the areas activated for learning birdsong or speech. One scientist said: “mammalian brains are likes PCs…while bird brains are like Apples. The processing is different, but the output is similar.”

“Both birds and humans use similar brain circuits to produce their vocalizations.” Young birds’ “early efforts [at singing] are known as subsong, and they’re just like a baby’s babbling—noisy variable, exploratory. It’s motor ‘play,’ which helps both birds and infants learn to control the muscles required for song and speech.”

Birdsong often functions as a language. Chickadees, for example, “use their calls to convey their location to another bird or to twitter news of a tasty treat; others, to warn of predators—both the type of beast and the magnitude of its threat. … So reliable are the chickadees’ vocalizations that other species heed their warnings.”

Because songbirds pass their songs down through the generations, they can develop regional dialects. I witnessed this in eastern Tennessee, where the eastern mourning doves had an ‘accent” compared to the ones near St. Louis: a much shorter second syllable “coo-AHHH” and missing the last syllable of “coo, coo, coo.”

One of my favorite stories was of clever birds in the United Kingdom (great and blue tits) who learned to peel the cardboard caps off glass milk bottles left on peoples’ stoops and drink the cream off the top. They first learned this trick in “1921 in the town of Swaythling; by 1949, the behavior had been noted in hundreds of localities throughout England, Wales, and Ireland.”

Corvids (crows, jays, magpies, ravens, and rooks) are one of the most clever bird species.
  Crows learned to use a busy crosswalk in Japan to crack nuts by dropping them in front of passing cars, then retrieving them when the light changed.
  Scientists also documented a crow using tricks from Aesop’s fable, The Crow & the Pitcher, to get tasty treats in a variety of experiments by dropping stones into a water-filled tube.

In Oregon, a pair of ravens defended their nestlings from intruding researchers by tossing rocks at the researchers. “A rock that struck a researcher in the leg [had been] pulled out of the ground, where it had been partially buried.”

Researchers know that blue jays can “count to at least five. And they can neatly mimic the piercing cry of a red-shouldered hawk, kee-ah, kee-ah, which they often do, perhaps to fool other birds into believing there’s a raptor in the vicinity, leaving more nuts for the taking."
A favorite trick of the scrub jay "is to rob a cat of its food by giving its tail a vigorous peck and when the cat turns to retaliate, to jump for the prize and make off with shrieks of exaltation.”

A New Caledonian crow named 007 was able to figure out a complex, eight-stage puzzle. These brainy crows hail from an island east of Australia, where crows in different parts of the islands have different tool-making traditions, all aimed at extracting nutrient-dense grubs from tree wood.

There are other crows in similar environments that haven’t learned to use tools to access grubs. Scientists believe the relative isolation from predators in New Caledonia gave these crows “the time and ease of mind to tinker with sticks and barbed leaves, to poke and probe, to bite and tear, and then probe again, without looking up. Freedom from threats may also have allowed for the evolution of a more leisurely childhood, in which young crows under the watch of their parents could dabble safely in toolmaking, refining their skills over a long period of time without starving in the process.”

Kea parrots in New Zealand are mischievous tricksters, “destructive hoodlums that go around in juvenile gags trashing things, deconstructing windshield wipers and the vinyl trim on cars, as well as campers’ tents and backpacks, rain gutters, and outdoor furniture. The kea’s playfulness with objects may allow them develop a “toolkit” of behaviors for dealing with novel situations or unexpected foraging conditions.”

Keas play catch, roll snowballs to each other, and like to roughhouse: “The partners parry and duel with their beaks, ducking, thrusting, ducking again. They tussle, lock bills, bite, push with their feet, roll onto their backs while squealing and waving their feet, and stand on each other’s stomachs.”
But these unique alpine parrots are losing their habitat due to the climate crisis and rising temperatures. “Because a mountain is like a pyramid, there’s less area for habitat available as [climate-stressed species] move up the mountain. They’re being squeezed both by temperatures and for space.”

Birds also have highly evolved social skills for communal living: “They breed on colonies, bathe in groups, roost in congregations, forage in flocks. They eavesdrop. They argue, they cheat, they deceive and manipulate. … They display a strong sense of fairness. They give gifts. They play keep-away and tug-of-war with twigs, strands of Spanish mass, bits of gauze. They pilfer from their neighbors. They warn their young away from strangers. They tease, they share. They cultivate social networks. They vie for status. They kiss to console one another. … They summon witnesses to the death of a peer, they may even grieve.”

One of the most interesting social groupings are the extended families among pied babblers: “Family groups are dominated by a single breeding pair, along with several other adults that don’t [breed]; all the adults in the group dote on the young, helping to brood, feed, and care for them.” Adults help train fledglings, who “blackmail adults into feeding them at higher rates by venturing into riskier open locations.”

The author notes that roughly 80% of bird species live in “socially monogamous” pairs who stay with the same partner at least through breeding season. But this doesn’t equate with genetic monogamy. “ In any given nest, up to 70% of chicks are not sired by the male caring for them. Pair-bonded birds may be socially monogamous. But they’re rarely sexually (or therefore genetically) monogamous.”
The author’s language suggests males are "tricked" into raising bastard nestlings by sneaky females, but this relies on the patriarchal assumption that genetic paternity matters to male birds. It’s probable that male-bird parents, like the nonbreeding adults among pied babblers, know the young aren’t necessarily sired by their own sperm and simply don’t care.

Bird nests are a highly visible example of bird genius.
One of the most elaborate and artistic constructions are made by the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea.
They construct a tunnel-like bower for mating, and decorate the courtyard and avenue leading to the bower with colorful objects meant to attract and impress females.

Different species of bowerbirds favor specific color combinations: satin bowerbirds prefer blue and silvery, shiny objects; Vogelkop bowerbirds decorate their designs with brightly colored orchid blossoms, fruit, and iridescent beetle wings; great bowerbirds use a monochromatic display often incorporating white stones, bleached bones, and snail shells.
It takes about seven years for male bowerbirds to learn the craft, often by helping senior males, although some juvenile satin bowerbird hoodlums were caught stealing by a robot decoy bird.

When a female arrives at a bower, the males dance. “Some males are attentive. If a female seems alarmed, they will rein in their display, tempering their wing flipping and giving her some distance. Other males are oblivious. The responsive dudes, it turns out, are those that secure the most matings.”
Visual acuity may contribute to the artistic displays of bowerbirds. While the cone cells in human eyes see three colors, birds can see four (including ultraviolet). “Moreover, in each bird’s cone cell is a drop of colored oil that enhances its ability top detect differences between similar colors.”

In terms of evolution, the tastes of female bowerbirds encourage male artistry: only the most attractive bowers and attentive male dancers attract mates. “The beauty of the bower is shaped by the perception of the female. …her mind shapes male display; she is the architect of the male bird’s artistic creation and the brains required to achieve it.”
Throughout the book , the author demonstrates how evolution both fosters innovation and selects for cognitive growth to exploit those innovations. Whether it’s tool use, replicating precise songs, or navigating the complex social relationships of a large group, activities that require mental processing create evolutionary pressure towards greater cognition, creating smarter birds.

House sparrows are known for their adaptability, which has allowed them to co-exist with humans.
In Normal, Illinois, “two ecologists watched house sparrows working their way along a line of parked cars in a parking lot, gleaning insects trapped in the radiators. …In some cities, you can find cigarette butts in sparrow nests, which effectively function as a parasite repellent.”

The author quotes Leon Megginson of the importance of adaptability: “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent . . . It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Yet: “The wisdom is that humanity is driving roughly half of all known life to extinction, including one in four species of birds.” Most of these are specialist birds, but even sparrow numbers are declining.

The Genius of Birds is a fabulous exploration of birds’ intelligence and creativity, with many more inspiring stories than the few I've highlighted. And yet we still have much to learn about these fascinating creatures. The author closes with a quote by Albert Einstein:
“As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.”

Read more about bird and animal intelligence: Being a Bird, Animal Emotions,
An Immense World, The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog,
If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Sounds Wild and Broken

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