Two mothers.

Iris, mother of the bride, is pushy, ambitious, Jewish, overpresent, and proud of her Red Hook genealogy, which can be traced back to the Battle of the Bulge. But Iris is not exactly a local. Yes, every summer Iris comes back to the oceanfront Queen Anne house, chats up the Red Hook Ladies, attending “every last bean supper and blueberry breakfast of the season,” where she tries to befriend the wives of lobstermen by feigning enthusiasm for rummage sales. But every Fall, Iris returns to New York, to art and to work, and will never, in the eyes of the locals, be anything but a “from away”.

Iris’ father, Mr Kimmelbroad, is indeed “from away”: a real gentleman,  a refugee violinist from Prague who still smells of polished wood, rosin, violets and 4711 Kolnisch Wasser.   The family are immigrants: bustling, displaced, well educated.

Jane, mother of the groom, is a local: by temperament, by income and by genealogy. Jane is strong from “clomping up and down stairs and hauling laundry and vacuum cleaners.” Jane has been taking care of  houses for the “from aways”  for a long long time, as had her mother before her. One of these houses is Iris’, which she cleans in the summers and tends all year long.

She [would get] the furnace and the propane tank filled, turn on the water,   take down the storm windows and put up the screens, mow the meadow and lawn, replace the water filter, have the piano tuned, and replenish staples like flour, sugar and the fancy teas ….

Tagged: death, family, Maine, wedding

Categories: Interesting,Original narration

How is it possible to account for irrationality in a scientific way? What kind of a science, what kind of a scientist studies the the irrational side of human behavior? How, moreover, can irrational decisions be measured, explained and controlled? Arielly describes experiments which do just this.

Arielly describes experiments which demonstrate how and how much human beings are motivated by meaning, over and above immediate rewards. Some of these experiments point to “the Ikea effect” and explain why we feel better when we own things that we assemble ourselves. Some point to “the egg theory” which explains why Mrs. Baker will buy a cake mix to which she must add some ingredients, rather than a mix which requires no effort at all. Some experiments point to the “Not Invented Here” bias, which is the bias against solutions or goods which we ourselves did not invent. (Also called The Toothbrush Theory because we only want to use our own.) The notion that a personal investment of labour results in an increase in value is not new; what is new is a science that can quantify this revaluation, or ‘over-valuation’. Behavioural economics concerns itself with how systems and institutions and designs make room for the irrational, and what happens when they don’t.

Information has an emotional weight, it is not free of its distribution method or its owner, or the order in which it is presented. Some information can be “primed”—preceded by a particular emotional charge—so as to control its impact. Arielly’s life story, for example. Arielly introduces his work by telling us about his traumatic, disfiguring, painful accident and his prolonged convalescence and rehabilitation. Is this information intended to influence our apprehension of his work? Does it?

Tagged: behavioral economics, decision, decision theory, experiments, incentives, irrationality, M.I.T., motivation, psychology

Categories: Interesting,Listen up

A catholic tailor used his life savings to go to the Vatican. When he returned his parish gathered to find out what he had seen. “What kind of a fellow is the Pope?” they asked him. “44 Medium,” he said.

This is the kind of obsession Buffet is looking for in his managers. “In Warren’s world it is not so much about how smart we are, but how obsessed we are,” says Mary Buffet, in her sweet voice. Find an obsessive with ‘recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses or images which cannot be ignored or suppressed’ (DSM 300.3). And make sure that he is obsessed with your business.

This is a sweet book read by a sweet voice, easy to hear and easy to understand. Indeed, sometimes it reads like a recipe book, with generous margins for adding ingredients. Sometimes it reads like the ROMPER ROOM list of Do-bees and Don’t-bees. DON’T be greedy when choosing a job. DON’T borrow money. DO delegate. DON’T criticize your employees. Do what you love to do and hire people who love what they do. DO be obsessed. DO choose the right company.

When a company owns a piece of the consumer’s mind, it never has to change its products. That means more profits, and more managerial bonuses. It is good to work for such a company.

When a company sells a unique service, like H & R Block, it doesn’t have to worry about falling demand: “There is never a recession in the tax filing business.” It also doesn’t have to worry about spending lots of money on capital. It is good to work for such a company.

Below-cost buyers and sellers like Walmart’s and Costco also have a competitive advantage; but beware—the stress on keeping prices low puts a great deal of pressure on managers. Still, these chains offer good managerial opportunities.

Sometimes it reads like a macroeconomics textbook, and sometimes like a handbook in human psychology (We all have a deep and honest need to be appreciated.). Or etiquette (When meeting someone for the first time, behave in a friendly way. ).

But mostly this is a manual of common sense with instructions on how to be a good human being, not only a good manager.

Warren Buffett’s Management Secrets

Mary Buffett.2009, Unknown Binding,$40.00

Tagged: Buffetology, competitive advantage, drive, managing, Mary Buffet, obsession, Warren Buffett

Categories: Interesting,Listen up,Original narration

Millie is a happy widow who is a member of the Red Hat Club. She has just dyed her hair cinnamon. She wants to travel and step down from her job as ‘domestic goddess’, but she has two sons who are slobs. One has moved into her basement apartment after being kicked out by his wife, and one expects her to clean his apartment and do his laundry until he gets married. This is the story about how Millie organizes a home economics course to teach her two sons how to boil an egg. Sweet, warm cozy book read by the sweet warm cozy voice of Cynthia Darlow.

Tagged: Cynthia Darlow, domestic goddess, domestic retraining, educating your son to clean, homemaker, housekeeping, mother teaches son to clean up, red hat club, retired, retraining man, slob husbands, slobs, widows

Categories: Cozy,Interesting

A man, a woman, an accident a fate twisted and wretchedly out of joint. An American surgeon working for Doctors Without Borders discovers that his dead wife had been living a secret life, a political life.

Categories: Good Mystery,Interesting

A town is the scene of what people do, become and have.

Stabenow describes happy slow small towns with unusual people who are ever so slightly insane. Who might shoot people over candy bars, or murder them in quaint hotel rooms or share fried bread with a wolf.

There are towns with female elders called “Aunties” who have outlived five or six husbands each, speak English as their third or fourth language, and who have enthusiastically and indiscriminately adopted every stray idiot that crossed their path. They have walnut brown cheeks, wear gold rickrack and are poised between misdemeanors.

Some of these towns are north and some are norther. It is cold:

He wore a balaclava and a knit cap, inside hood Gortex pro shell, ski pants, Patagonia capilene, beneath down parka guaranteed to 20 degrees (below), surround caribous guaranteed to 20 below…

Some are situated where there would be gold if it could be mined. And here there are problems.

Tagged: Alaska, Dana Stabenow

Categories: Good Mystery,Interesting,Original narration

Have a bit of Christie as social chronicler, as drawing room critic of a leisure class which presents itself as a platform of unemployment. It is 1946 and the Angkatells are gathered togethered, after the murder. Lucy, the mistress of cognitive deviations, Henrietta, clever, independent and detached, Midge, dark, square shaped, and poor, David, a spoiled, sour intellectual, and Edward, the reluctant, bony, undeserving heir.

It is quite obvious that the notion of work is odd, uncertain, and turning: the way milk turns. “Is the woman sympathetic and pleasant to work for?,” Edward asks Midge. “If you must have a job you must take one where the surroundings are harmonious and where you like the people you are working with.”

But how does one explain the notion of work to an heir?

How to explain to a person like Edward… What did Edward know of the labour market, of jobs, They were all divided from her by an impassible gulf: the gulf that separates the leisured from the working. They had no conception of the difficulties of getting a job. And once you had got it, of keeping it… She had found a job for herself at 4 pounds a week… Midge had no particular illusions about working. She disliked the shop. She disliked Madame Alfredge. She disliked the eternal subservience to ill tempered and impolite customers. She doubted very much whether she could obtain any other job….

A 17 year old shop girl, circa 1946 or 2010?

Discontent does not stop at the door of the dress shop. Oxford is overgrown with it; circulates it, exports it.

“I must have a talk with you David and learn all about the new ideas. As far as I can see one must hate everybody but at the same time give free medical attention and a lot of extra education… Poor things all those helpless little children herded into schoolhouses everyday….

Tagged: class, English mystery, family, Hercule Poirot, leisure class, social critic

Categories: Clever,Cozy,Editor's pick,Good Mystery,Interesting,Listen up,Original narration

A wagonful of new Agatha Christie audiobooks (“lesser” works?) shows us an Agatha knee-deep in Freud, perhaps, indeed, an “English Freud”. Here she experiments with the entire merde ridden hagiography of psychoanalytic terms: pathologies, neuroses, perversions, deviances, persecutions. Sarah has just finished her M.B. and is interested in psychology. She looks on as an old obese mother, an ugly wheelchaired figure wields a regime of psychological oppression over her “nervy” “nervous” unnerved family. The ugly Mrs. Boynton continues to perform her chores as the warden of a women’s prison, although she no longer performs them inside a prison. Instead she institutes prohibitions against the emotions, liberties, impulses, movements, of her step sons and daughters.

Sarah complains of the rudeness of Raymond Boynton, who ignores her in the presence of his mother, despite their earlier conversation. The tradition of English manners comes to Jerusalem not in opposition to rudeness but rather as a prophylactic to madness; madness is the excess of civilization, the bad habit of civilization. As the narrator in An Appointment With Death tells us about the horrific Mrs. Boynton: “In a savage tribe they would have boiled and eaten her up her years ago”.

Tagged: Agatha Christie, Hugh Fraser, mystery, Poirot

Categories: Clever,Good Mystery,Interesting,Original narration

There is a yummy baked goods kitchen feeling, because the woman baking the cookies has an organized sense of her world, she has friends, one dead and one living ex-husband, girl-children, and flour in her pantry. But—and there are 50 years worth of buts—she also has a daughter that miscarries, and friends with bad husbands and gruesome stories, and fears that don’t go away with the rules of the Cookie Club.

Tagged: 50+ woman

Categories: Interesting

Two women, one  girl. One steals identities, one leaves identities behind her. Zosie de l’Alba is the bad witch with red lollipop shoes, who befriends the good witch, draws the entire neighborhood into her chocolate shop, and seduces an adolescent girl.

Tagged: chocolate, Joanne Harris, shadow, witches

Categories: Interesting,Listen up

Chris Faulkener has a new job and a new friend, and comes home to a beautiful mechanic named Carla, who is his wife. He doesn’t believe in violence, but he works for a conflict investment firm, which studies, tracks and finances the small wars of the world.

Categories: Audible,Interesting,Listen up,Original narration

Oliver August, correspondent for the Times of London in China is learning Chinese. His teacher asks him what Oliver means. Oliver responds: ‘Since a man that works on a farm was a farmer, a man who harvested olives was an Oliver’. His teacher then couples two radicals – olive (gan) and farmer ( no ). The 26 year old reporter is thereafter laughingly referred to as Farmer.

“Nobody in their right minds called themselves a farmer. Millions are fleeing the land to become city dwellers, to partake in the industrial revolution, to become richer. When I introduced myself people guffawed to each other. A foreign farmer has come to our China… !”

Oliver August is a sieve of a China in transformation from below. We get the language, the images, the words, the emotions, the slogans, the mixture of groundlessness and lawlessness, the sense that a Chinese being can rely neither on the earth nor on the sky for his limits. “Modern China was a magic mirror: you could see whatever you wanted to see…,” writes Oliver.

The country was both free and oppressed, at once anarchic and authoritarian, totally chaotic yet highly regulated.

Lai Changxing is an emblem of this new country; hence his is the story tracked by Oliver.
But alongside the story of the legendary Lai, a rogue reminiscent of America’s 19th century captains of industry, Oliver gives us the gossip, the rumours, the news. And the only way to report this news is “to get out and report what you saw yourself,” in sideways glances, from overnight trains, from hired cars driven by monks, from the streets and the restaurants…

But still more, Oliver gives us economics, politics, philosophy. Not cut and pasted out of wikipedia but lovely, incisive, pieces of thought, fresh from the sea, still smelling of fish.

The more China modernizes the more ravenous its appetite for the past becomes….

These wealthy Chinese who finally thought it safe to return from abroad “were known as sea-turtles who had finally brought home their nest eggs…”

A myo tan low is a building that scratches the sky…

A big-faced building iDam yam zi dasha is a building that gives the owner a lot of face…

Categories: Brilliant,Editor's pick,Enchanting,Interesting,Original narration

She is a portrait of competence. She works for the big distributor of computers that packaged itself after cows. She has a knack for customer relations. She enjoys convincing users, individual by individual, that the big company wants nothing more than to make nice and relate, long term. She has removed all excess from her life, all things huge, or insubstantial.

We find her in a hospital room waiting for her brother to come back to life, as if she is watching some overlong Swedish film… A problematic brother, liked by animals, but “...when it came to humans no one knew what to make of the boy…. “. The problematic boy, Mark, has been damaged.

The language is full bodied, rich, ripe, generously given. All in good time. Bernadette Dunne, as usual, is remarkable. She narrates people thinking in low, cool tones, as if she were playing jazz for a small group of friends.

Slowly, slowly, the author mixes in big words, medical words, technical words to explain the misadventures and mistakes of the brain, configuring the brain as a fabulous animal which never stays the same. Mark’s brain is not what it was before the accident; it cannot recognize the familiar as familiar, cannot recognize his sister as the same sister, his friends as the same friends, his dog as the same dog. This misrecognition effects another: the sister who is not recognized by her brother slowly doubts her own identity, which dissolves into a piece of a town, a piece of a bed, a piece of a river…

In the middle of fields of Nebraska wheat, one theory of the brain folds into another, from a brain that tells stories, to a brain which functions like boy scouts waving their flashlights in the dark, to the brain as a series of mappings of other brain-maps,

My brain, all those split parts trying to convince each other, dozens of lost scouts waving crappy flashlights in the woods at night….

The brother, the sister, his girlfriend, a nurse’s aid, a cognitive neurologist from SUNY Stony Brook having a mid-life identity crisis…all of them unable to recognize themselves, unable, too, to recognize other beings, or other species… Hence, too, an ecological crisis: all species depend upon recognition, or go extinct….

Categories: Bernadette Dunne,Editor's pick,Interesting

Firm writing, good characters, heavy social issues, but no story.

Meet Ruth. A divorced mother who teaches sex education at a public high school is more or less forced to teach abstinence according to a rosy if delusional Christian fundamentalist agenda. Meet Tim: divorced, saved and reformed by an evangelic Jesus-loving pastoral group, coaching soccer. Imagine supper:

Tonight was Lemon Pepper Mama, a recipe she had gotten from Five Hundred More Ways To Cook Chicken or It Doesn’t Matter How You Cook It It’s Still the Same Crap or Eat Chicken Till You Die. Because there were nights when that was what it felt like. Like you were just some stupid animal put on earth to eat a few hundred thousand animals who were even stupider than you were, then to disappear without a trace…

And so we are left in between chicken, abstinence and temptation.

Categories: Interesting,Listen up

Women are divisive. Among themselves and between their generations. Go to any academic women’s conference and see for yourself. Or listen to Blair Brown’s crisp, young, feminine voice reading The Senator’s Wife.

And listen for this divisiveness. In the pasteurized neighborly conversations of Miller’s two women: the 37 year old newly married Meri, unemployed, hypercritical and amoral, and the handsome, charming, well mannered Senator’s wife, Delia, archaism of a femininity shaped by different rules.

The light chatter of the women is seductive and irresistable and light, and unfolds their character, their virtu, as well as their style. Delia is a full-figured soul, a solid, generous, private collection of duties girdled by public beliefs and public habits. Delia is the effect of a life shared with her country, her party, her church, and a husband shared with other women. Tom Naughton, the Senator, has indeed had many women, some of whom Delia ignored and some of whom she didn’t. Her private life with Tom is ruleless. She lives more or less alone in their home in Massachusetts most of the year, and travels to Paris in the Spring. She is a privately sexual woman.

Meri, by contrast, is a patchwork of debts, impulses, and discomforts. She writes freelance pieces for a variety of journals and papers, faithful to none, committed to nothing. She finds a job at a radio station, she becomes pregnant. She loves her body, loves the pleasure it gives her, and is unhappy in pregnancy. To effect change, she goes shopping. She can assume the fantasy of a pregnant woman in the same way as she can assume the fantasy of a wife or a neighbor. Indeed she is enchanted by her neighbor, the senator’s wife. Enchanted in her very misconfiguration and misrecognition of Delia: who is (the copula) the senator’s wife but is not (the existential is not, the essential is not) the senator’s wife.

Delia is political in her own right, in her own shoes, at her own party:

My favorite of the entire group was Martha Mitchell. Old Martha critiqued the whole thing from home by the telephone… She’d call someone and announce one luny event after another with her big wide mouth. Remember Tom? When she said she’d been kidnapped by the FBI and it was true. They were all true, all these things that people assumed were dipsomaniacal….

The senator’s wife, like Martha Mitchell, is a political woman, a political animal. And then, too, a wife.

Categories: Clever,Interesting,Listen up

A short sharp meditation on how we know what we know and how we decide what we decide by the director of the Center of Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

When I became director of the Max Planck institute of Human Development, I wanted to create an interdisciplinary research group whose members actually talked worked and published together—a rare thing. Unless one actively creates an environment that supports this goal, collaboration tends to fall apart within a few years or may never get off the ground in the first place. The major obstacle is a mental one.

Researchers like most ordinary people tend to identify with their in group and ignore or even look down on neighboring disciplines. Yet most relevant topics we study today do not respect the historically grown disciplinary borders and to make progress, one must look beyond one’s own narrow point of view so I came up with a set of rules, not verbalized but acted upon that would create the kind of culture I desired.
Those rules included: EVERYONE ON THE SAME PLANE.

In my experience, employees who work on different floors interact 50% less than those who work on the same floor. And the loss is greater for those working in different buildings. People often behave as if they still lived in the savannah, where they look for others horizontally but not above or below ground. So when my growing group needed an additional 2000 square feet in which to operate, I vetoed the architect’s proposal that we construct a new building, and extended our existing offices horizontally so that everyone remained on the same plane…..

This pancake theory of organizational vitality is just one demonstration of the non-logical rules that govern human environments.

Intelligence is at work in what we call gut feelings, hunches and intuitions—despite the fact that we cannot account for them. Intelligence is also at work in the non-logical rules of thumb we use to navigate and predict the behavior of others.

Consider a woman waiting for a black suitcase at Kennedy Airport, and a cop who is looking only for a woman who is looking out for him. How does he zero in on the woman?

Consider a baseball player who wants to catch a ball: how does he calculate where the ball will be so he can catch it?

How does Harry decide on which of his two girlfriends he should marry?

Different heuristics and rules of thumb underlie intuitions, enabling fast action, utilizing ‘recognition memory’ and the ability to track moving objects… But these rules are not logical. Gerd Gigerenzer navigates the place that gut feelings hold within human knowing, inviting us to re-evaluate both knowing and feeling.

Tagged: adaptive behavior, decision theory, decisions, epistemology, gut feelings, intuition

Categories: Clever,Editor's pick,Enchanting,Interesting,Listen up,Tantor Media

Even little old Canadian villages have murders, and artists. Jane Neal lived and painted in a big house and kept both her canvases and her home private. Except for the kitchen. To it she invited her circle of friends and fellow-artists, poor and English speaking. They and their language migrate to Three Pines to continue the war between French and English sensibilities.

The death of Jane Neal re-invokes these French and English factions, in a series of tense encounters between Police Inspector Gamache and the local folks: the usual suspects.

The plot is crisp and economical, but the descriptions are sweet, pastoral, even poignant. We want to know who murdered Jane because we like her more and more as we reconnoitre her life.

Every day for Lucy’s entire dog life Jane had sliced a banana for breakfast and had miraculously dropped one of the perfect disks to the floor where it sat for an instant before being gobbled up….Every morning Lucy’s prayers were answered, confirming her belief that God was old and clumsy and smelled like roses… and lived in the kitchen.

Categories: Blackstone Audio,Interesting,Unabridged

Increasingly, the essay, the critique, the report and the annunciation are being reconfigured in the form of fiction.

Michael Crichton has mastered this form. His Next is more than a story about the re-distribution of genomes; it is Critique, Satire, Farce and Science Report, with:

• just the right amount of irony in representing jerks, like Brad the idiot nephew who attaches to underage teens, and relies on his rich uncle for jobs, cars, and bail;
• just the right amount of irony in depicting the social-emotional infantilism of scientists who can’t navigate their way out of their self-made moral sinkholes;
  
• just the right amount of Hollywoodability in scenes with children, animals and cars;
• just the right amount of Doris Day type silliness in domestic showdowns between a sorry husband and his forgiving but disciplinary wife: here Blondie accepts the half-son, half chimpanzee Henry has brought home from the Lab, welcomes her role as Mommy, and scolds Henry for not thinking ahead.
• just the right amount of mad British eco-alienated humour to work its way into the next Cadbury or British Air commercial…

Categories: Clever,Editor's pick,Interesting,Unabridged

Before Patricia Cornwell, before CSI, did anybody read dead bodies or examine them for traces of their killer? Yes, as it happens. Where there are bodies, there are secrets and where there are secrets, there are readers. Gaudinus the African, for example, who remembers people only by diseases, and greets his visitor from Palermo, the personal secretary and keeper of the King’s royal secrets such:

“Hemorrhoids!!” He said triumphantly, at last. “You had piles. How are they?”

Hemorrhoids distinguishes Mordechai Fils Barachia, who brings news of the murders of children in Henry II’s England. Representing the King of Sicily, Mordechai calls for a medical examiner, a reader and decoder of dead bodies, a Mistress of the Art of the Dead, to go to England and find out if indeed it is the Jews are the murderers of children.

Categories: Books on Tape,Interesting,Original narration

There is more than one mystery here. First, how does one make sense of the handful of quotes from Plato’s Republic which are scattered about this book like annoying commercials for a new Greek candidate? Especially when there is no candidate. Plato’s ideas are credited with breeding a monstrous economy of organs, stolen from the many, given to the few, by a gang of happy scholars with an Old School knowledge of Latin and a gamey love of Greek nicknames and Latin roots. And here, then, is the second mystery: how would a greedy ruling class locate, trace and seize particular bodily organs for their own use?

Natalie Reyes, overconfident, overcompetitive, overaggressive fourth year medical student finds out how. We meet her on the day she challenges the diagnosis of a resident in charge. We watch her being summoned to the Dean’s office, judged and condemned by an informal medical school tribunal, and cut down like a too high stalk of wheat. Suspended for four months, she is sent by her boss to present a paper at a conference in Brazil. She lands in Brazil but never makes it to the conference.

Categories: Editor's pick,Interesting

Amusing this particular intersection of history where the living instruments of the law (cops, detectives, Special Forces, Army MPs) meet the live ones (text messaging, Live search, cell phones, Google…). What results is something Lacan called the ‘missed encounter’—in other words, the subject is there, but somehow misses it, the thing, the point, the sense of it. So Harry Bosch meets the cell phone. And Jack Reacher meets the CD.

What also results is a humility, a vulnerability, a wry deference to the inscrutability of the new, the next, the insensible. Harry Bosch, stubborn, bullish, deductively logical, steps aside to let his farty new partner decode the victim’s cellphone. Jack Reacher manipulates the entire series of rational numbers in his head, but doesn’t own a cell phone.

Jack and Harry are both post-retirees. Jack flashes back to Heidelberg and Seoul; Harry to Vietnam. Neither are married, neither trust women, or men, for that matter.

Harry Bosch listens to Jazz saxophone and indeed so do we: Overlook features the original instrumentals of …. Jimi Hendrix’ second album, sixth track contains a secret message with the name of a DIA secret weapon. (Yes, this is a test. What song?)

P.S. The Coca-Cola Plastic Bottle Silencer in Connelly doesn’t work according to Childs. Not even if you use an Evian bottle.

Categories: Interesting

In the yard a piece of shiny scrap metal from a nuclear power plant is waiting for Roy to see it. But Roy is reading a not yet published New York Times obituary:

Roy Valois a sculptor whose large works are displayed in many public spaces around the United States and in several prominent museums, died today at INSERT. He was INSERT. The cause was INSERT according to INSERT. The self taught Mr. Valois worked almost exclusively with recovered materials, usually scrap metal but he was “no primitive” according to Kurt Palmeteer …. Roy Valois was born in the western Maine town of N. Grafton on TO COME. He went to local schools where he excelled at sports, eventually entering the University of Maine on a hockey scholarship. But it was while working at a summer job that involved welding and other metalwork that Mr. Valois found his true calling…. It was also at Georgetown that he met his wife Delia Stern, an economist later employed by the United Nations. She died in an airplane crash off Venezuela in TO COME…

Delia is also the name of the sculpture that occupies the center of his house, and reminds his next ex-girlfriend that he is still, in some sense, married. The obituary is wrong about his wife, he tells the journalist at the NY Times. Delia worked for the Hobbes Institute, not the U.N. The journalist is killed the next day.

And Roy himself is not well. He has a cough. His nose bleeds. His arm breaks. A doctor tells him that he has asbestos-caused cancer: . After his treatment in a Fung-Shui designed office, a man in a wheelchair, his age, but skeletal, is wheeled out or wheeled in by a nurse. Roy doesn’t want to be anywhere near the man in the wheelchair, because from the point of view of the unconscious anywhere near = anywhere like. And Roy scales his way through the world more or less unconscious, feeling his way around like a hockey player or a hydraulic excavator.

Roy has shovel fulls of partial information. From Dr. Choo. From his now dead wife. From the past. And we imagine that Roy will piece together something like the truth out of what remains. Scrap metal, memory, curiosity.

Categories: Clever,Editor's pick,Interesting,Listen up