Krista > Books: 2024‎ (49)

Shelby finds Cammie’s performance in the group almost terrifying. She watches her speak and realizes that she has no idea what Cammie’s limits are.

Shelby finds Cammie’s performance in the group almost terrifying. She watches her speak and realizes that she has no idea what Cammie’s limits are. Who knows how far she would go to preserve this fake identity. She feels like she might throw up, so instead she stands up and starts towards the door. As she walks she tries to breathe steadily and picture being home, with Coach Taylor, in her grounded place.

Who are you going to believe? Someone like me, who has survived so much, and has nothing to lose? Or a pathetic man who could barely tie his shoes after his wife left him? Or a woman who always thinks she has a brain tumour and has panic attacks in the grocery store? You’re going to believe them because they have perfect teeth and never had to do anything they didn’t want to do in life. I am tough because I have had to be. You’re a smart person, obviously. You read books. I’m just trying to give you the basics right now. I have the right to defend myself. Doesn’t everyone, even these days?

He watches from the window as she crosses the street and lies down on her back on a bench at the bus stop, her knees up, one arm over her eyes, the other arm putting her flat purse under her shirt to keep from getting robbed. She looks like she’s done this a million times. He knows then that all the times he’s protected her, saved her, bought things for her, it was theatre. She never needed him, even once, to save her from anything.

Having never heard the song, I followed along as best I could but had to wonder why the hell he was going to all the trouble of teaching me somethi

Having never heard the song, I followed along as best I could but had to wonder why the hell he was going to all the trouble of teaching me something that no one would ever hear. Maybe he was just lonely and wanted to jam? Maybe he was graciously making some no-name kid’s dream come true by inviting me to play along with him, knowing that it was a story I would get to tell for the rest of my life? As strange as it seemed, I kept focused on his strumming hand and locked into the arrangement, banging it out like we WERE in a sold-out stadium. We ended in unison on a triumphant final crash.

I noticed Paul McCartney out of the corner of my eye, chatting away with friends, and I couldn’t help but stare. There. He. Was. I don’t know what it feels like to see a UFO. I don’t know what it feels like to see a ghost. I don’t know what it feels like to see Bigfoot. But I know what it feels like to see Paul McCartney, and if that’s not a supernatural event, then I don’t know what is. I tried to avert my eyes, but it was no use. I was mesmerized.

I firmly believe that your understanding or “version” of love is learned by example from day one, and it becomes your divining rod in life, for better or worse. A foundation for all meaningful relationships to stand upon. I surely have my mother to thank for mine. I LOVE MY CHILDREN AS I WAS LOVED AS A CHILD. AND I PRAY THAT THEY WILL DO THE SAME WHEN THEIR TIME COMES. SOME CYCLES ARE MEANT TO BE BROKEN. SOME ARE MEANT TO BE REINFORCED.

James had soon become as enthusiastic as his father about taking the same big broom that others had been busy with all over Scotland, from Lanark i

James had soon become as enthusiastic as his father about taking the same big broom that others had been busy with all over Scotland, from Lanark in the south to Sutherland in the north, and it was galling to him now that they were so behindhand with their own removals when others — first in the Lowlands and then in the Highlands — had been making improvements, sweeping clean the countryside for decades and reaping the rewards. Like his father, he’d become impatient to make up for lost time — for there to be more and more portions of the Lowrie state that were rented out to a single flockmaster — where you could stand on a hill or rise and look out over clean, productive country that was quietly replete with sheep, instead of cluttered with the ramshackle dwellings of small, impoverished, unreliable tenants scraping a profitless living in a manner that no longer made any sense.

He stood for a long time in the softly falling rain and eventually he spoke to himself silently inside his own head: I have the cliffs and the skerries and the birds. I have the white hill and the round hill and the peaked hill. I have the clear spring water and the rich good pasture that covers the tilted top of the island like a blanket. I have the old black cow and the sweet grass that grows between the rocks, I have my great chair and my sturdy house. I have my spinning wheel and I have the teapot and I have Pegi, and now, amazingly, I have John Ferguson too.

There was a word in Ivar’s language for the moment before something happens; for the state of being on the brink of something. He’d tried several times to explain it using words John Ferguson already knew — with mimes and charades involving the water and the weather — but John Ferrguson had never been able to grasp what it was he was trying to tell him. In due course, John Ferguson will understand it. In due course, after a fair amount of back-and-forth and to-ing and fro-ing, he will arrive at a precise and succinct definition of it — a definition in which he will give, as examples of the sort of moment it describes, “the last moment before the tide turns; the last moment of day before night begins.”

She wished that Rosella and Larry were coming now and not weeks away. She wished her mother would let her talk about them. But she barely let herse

She wished that Rosella and Larry were coming now and not weeks away. She wished her mother would let her talk about them. But she barely let herself think about what she wished for most — that she were not in her mother’s living room trying to write a letter, hearing her mother move with difficulty in the room upstairs, but rather at home, waking to the soft light of early summer that appeared through the curtains of her bedroom on Long Island.

When the doorbell rang, Eilis stood up lazily, presuming that it was one of Larry’s cousins calling for him to come and play. However, from the hallway, she made out the silhouette of a grown man through the frosted glass of the door. Until he called out her name, it did not occur to her that this was the man Francesca had mentioned. She opened the door.

‘You are Eilis Fiorello?’

The accent was Irish, with a trace, she thought, of Donegal, like a teacher she had had in school. Also, the way the man stood there, as though waiting to be challenged, reminded her of home.

Eilis appeared puzzled, as though she hadn’t heard him properly. But he knew not to repeat the question; instead, he should give her time to take it in. He kept his eyes on her and let the silence linger. She didn’t move at all. He wondered if she was thinking about something else or if she was working out how to reply. He began to count the seconds as they went by, until he got to a hundred and then two hundred. He could feel that his own face was burned from the midday sun at Cush. But Eilis’s colour had not changed. She was pale. She looked around the room and then directly at him. He sensed that his question still hung in the air and then it became obvious that she wasn’t going to answer it.

This is the genius of Judy Blume. It’s the single most important aspect of her legacy. Her work as a children’s writer did something nobody else co

This is the genius of Judy Blume. It’s the single most important aspect of her legacy. Her work as a children’s writer did something nobody else could manage: it helped ensure feminism’s longevity…A movement requires a multigenerational buy-in to maintain its momentum. And over in suburban New Jersey, a soft-spoken stay-at-home mom was listening. Writing cutting-edge books for kids, Judy Blume became the Second Wave’s secret weapon.

Are You There God?, Deenie, and Forever form a triptych, with eleven-year-old Margaret, thirteen-year-old Deenie, and seventeen-year-old Katherine creating a progressive portrait of the new American girl. All three are smart, spunky, and in touch with their bodies. They’re all white, middle class, and from the suburbs — Judy wrote what she knew — but together, they embody an ideal for Blume that transcended race or class. The trio offers a vision of how the up-and-coming generation could digest the feminist and sexual revolutions. They’re good girls with a twist; they’re all in touch with sexuality, but they have futures.

What’s still missing from a lot of contemporary sex ed is an exploration of the way sex intersects with relationships, experts say. Even today, very few parents and educators are prepared to discuss the way dynamics of care and safety and vulnerability all contribute to true intimacy, which is crucial for a satisfying love life. That’s what Judy innately understood how to do. She taught us about our bodies and our hearts through her stories. Periods are something that happens to a whole friend group. First teenage love affects the entire family. Boys experience heartbreak, too! Truly safe intercourse requires talking and planning. You can’t go back to holding hands.

A woman who cannot, or will not, accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully, deserves what has happened to me.

Entry from Elaine’

A woman who cannot, or will not, accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully, deserves what has happened to me.

Entry from Elaine’s diary, February, 1956

Her hysteria is mounting — and as Evelyn Tate’s screen door snaps shut, Elaine says it a third time: Can it be . . . that the acme of success . . . for me . . . is being able . . . to do my job as a housekeeper? Each phrase is separated by a troubled gasp — but it doesn’t matter how fast she babbles or deeply she breathes, the panic has the better of her: I’m going to collapse, she thinks, then be swept up into the sky with my goddamn nightie up around my shoulders . . . The last anyone will ever see of me is the first anyone did: my bare behind, waiting to be smacked.

Dressed in slacks and a sweater she descends . . . she descends, dressed in slacks and a sweater — in sweater and slacks dressed, she descends: each thought corresponds to a word or words, right? Mix ’em up and you get a wordy sorta salad, like the mess in my head . . .

Yes, she’d been unhappy — upset, often, as well. But in those far-off days of a fortnight ago, with her complaisant old man, her girlish crush on his colleague, and her catty best friend, Elaine had been a goddamn poster girl for the Modern American Woman: posed in her kitchen, skirts stiff as crinolines, smile plasticized, a penis in one hand . . . a spatula in the other.

Tut, dun's the mouse, the constable's own word.
If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mire,
Or — save your reverence — love, wherein thou stickest
Up

Tut, dun's the mouse, the constable's own word.
If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mire,
Or — save your reverence — love, wherein thou stickest
Up to the ears. Come, we burn daylight, ho!

Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet

Hidy there, everybody. Good afternoon. Or evening. Sorry to be tardy, but we’ve had ourselves a dustup at the ranch. As you’ve heard by now, people have taken to calling me the Lamb, which is sure nicer than other names I’ve been called. Anyway we’ve had these pork choppers flying at us. I don’t mean to tease. I appreciate y’all tuning in, I do. Well so, okay, it’s the eighteenth day of February 1993, the year of our Lord, and I’m talking at you, through your radios, in your homes and cars and places of commerce, about the revelation of Jesus Christ. That’s the big to-do.

And still more noise — the walls absorbing what they could, the helicopters and yelling and sobbing and coughing, my breathing coming too fast and the awful high-pitched gurgling of our chickens as they were being shot and people pleading with God and barking orders and information: Get down ! Over here now! They’re still coming! I can see them and they’re still coming! Then a single shot and the sickening muffled thunk of its impact, a sledgehammer into a sandbag. Then an enormous gasp — like someone breaching the surface of water after too long below. The gasping continued and turned wet, and a man cried out, “No! No no no no!” Then, as if all the agents were ordered to aim at the same thing and hold down their triggers at the same time: The dinner bell tolled tolled tolled tolled until it dropped to the frozen earth and silenced.

What happened was tragic, no question, but there’s also no doubt about who bears responsibility: Cullen. We can debate tactics and strategies, tanks and tear gas, but if Cullen hadn’t abused those kids, we wouldn’t have been there.

But even the attorney general testified there was no evidence of child abuse.

The responsibility is Cullen’s. He did this. The tanks went in because he wouldn’t come out.

Didn’t they run out of ammo? Isn’t that what being outgunned means?

I think it means we had some help.

God, you’re saying.

What’s the alternative? Some Bible thumpers defeated Uncle Sam? That so much planning and training and equipment was no match for little old us? Sounds fishy, but what do I know? Either way, it sounds like something I can shake hands with.

We aren’t built to matter. That’s the surprise here. That’s the big finale. Tell the story a million times, a million different ways, but the ones who were punished and the ones who were pardoned ain’t switching places.

Did we win or lose? Are we damned or saved? We occupy a liminal, leftover world, and we live off scraps. We build our religion, our very existences, with salvaged and stolen parts, waiting for the next fire. To survive is to know what no one else does: Nothing is forever. Not an alibi or shelter, not bloodline or prayer, not nation or sacrifice or any glad-hearted dream of God.

The knowledge base of natural history is under threat as research funding is increasingly focussed on fast-paced, short-term experimental work over

The knowledge base of natural history is under threat as research funding is increasingly focussed on fast-paced, short-term experimental work over the slower-paced, longer-term observational work necessary to build and maintain it. I felt compelled to write this book because it seems to be a problem that everyone in biological research and almost no one outside of it is aware of. Like many of the extinctions quietly proceeding around the world, it just isn’t something we hear about. We as citizens and stewards of this planet owe it to ourselves and our children to be aware not only of the issue but of the opportunities we have to contribute to its solution.

Sitting down to my stack of herbarium specimens and alcohol-preserved flowers every day felt like losing myself in a good book. Scientific research topics can seem narrow to the point of absurdity, like an entire career spent on a single species, but ask any scientist, and they’ll tell you that there really is a lifetime’s worth of discovery there. It speaks to the complexity of our universe that even the thinnest slices can be so expansive. To me, sustained, close attention to a little-regarded slice of that universe felt spiritual, like time spent in quiet worship before a vast and intricate cosmos, trying to know it just a little bit better.

There was no one dramatic incident that extinguished my desire to be in research. What I’d faced was an environment in which I was under strong pressure to never need accommodation, to never let anyone see that I had other loyalties in my life. It was a death by a thousand tiny cuts. And that’s what makes this story important, because I suspect that’s how it is for many of the nearly half of all women in science who leave after becoming mothers. Each time you’re made to feel unprofessional for having caregiving responsibilities, each time you’re made to feel like a burden for requesting minor accommodation . . . it wears you down a little more. You believe that you are the problem. And when the reward at the end of those years of hard work and low pay are far from assured, it doesn’t take a PhD to figure out you might be happier and better off elsewhere, no matter how much you loved the actual science and the questions you were trying to answer.

Valdemar wasn’t a Nazi, even if a lot of people thought he was. When he spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but s

Valdemar wasn’t a Nazi, even if a lot of people thought he was. When he spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but something people had believed in the Middle Ages, that the First Realm was the age of God, the Second Realm the age of Christ, the Third Realm the age of the Holy Spirit.

The psychosis occurs when the mania exhausts itself, when the encounter with reality is the only thing left for it (and mania fears reality more than anything else). The psychosis is like one of the three doors in the folk tales, the one that must never be opened no matter what. It mustn’t be opened. Everyone knows. And yet it always gets opened in the end. When faced with nothing and something, you choose something first.

I wanted my drawings to smell, to stink, to seep and bleed, writhe and squirm. But I hadn’t succeeded. I told myself it was the fault of drawing itself, the very form of expression. The pen stroke served only to encase and bring under control, rationalising everything and thereby rendering it tame.

It was like looking into the unknown. It was a language, but one so foreign and incomprehensible it might just as well have been delivered to us from outer space. The truly unfathomable thing was that it was ourselves we were looking at. That what was made manifest to us was our very coding of the world around us and all that we were. The mystery was that from the inside it didn’t feel like code at all, but the world itself.

“The ddoor …” he said.
I held his gaze.
“... is oop …”
“He’s saying the door’s open,” said Mum. “Yes, you’ve said so a number times already, Mikael, but I really haven’t a clue what you’re talking about!”
She gave a laugh and glanced at me.
Her cold eyes were full of unease.

They stood there for a few moments, not looking at each other, and then Lucy finally looked at him and said, “I am so glad to see you.” The day was

They stood there for a few moments, not looking at each other, and then Lucy finally looked at him and said, “I am so glad to see you.” The day was sunny, and Bob put his sunglasses on. And then off they went for their walk. Lucy said, “Tell me everything. Tell me every single thing. And don’t leave anything out.”

A thought had taken hold of Olive Kitteridge on one of these days in October, and she pondered it for almost a week before she called Bob Burgess. “I have a story to tell that writer Lucy Barton. I wish you would have her come visit me.”

Lucy stood up and pulled on her coat. “Those are my stories,” she said, and then bent down to put her boots back on. “But you’re right. They are stories of loneliness and love.” Lucy stepped into the tiny kitchen for a moment and returned with a paper towel and she bent down and soaked up the drops of water on the floor left from her boots. Then she picked up her bag and said, “And the small connections we make in this world if we are lucky.”

The whaling captain’s wife gave me a beer, which came in a small can and a piece of whale heart to eat. The meat was chewy, did not easily shred or

The whaling captain’s wife gave me a beer, which came in a small can and a piece of whale heart to eat. The meat was chewy, did not easily shred or disintegrate into fibres. It was clearly part of a whole, carried a message about entirety. After I swallowed it, I sat still and quiet. It took me down into the ocean, sounding, down below the light where benign goliaths swam by.

From there everything happened quickly. A string was pulling me, out of the window, into the sky, across the sea. The next day I left the hostel and moved into a friend’s attic room. I got a loan, organised visas. We would follow the mothers and babies from Mexico to the top of the world, I told Max. They would swim, and we would take the bus, the train, and the boat alongside them. I told myself I would relearn from the whales how to mother, how to endure, how to live. Beneath the surface, secretly, I longed to get back to northernmost Alaska, to the community who kept me safe in the harsh beauty of the Arctic and to Billy, the whale hunter who’d loved me.

Here comes the grey whale from the beginning of time, say the fossils. They pose a question too: All this you know, now what? Human thought and intention are part of the global ecosystem, the most powerful driver of change, the most powerful obstacle that both we and the whales have encountered through millennia. We are writing the next chapter of the story of all life on earth.

I am woman, human, animal. I bore my child in water. We sang to the whales. We listened to them breathing. We listened to the sea. This book is what I heard.

Most of the world’s wetlands came into being as the last ice age melted, gurgled and gushed. In ancient days fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuarie

Most of the world’s wetlands came into being as the last ice age melted, gurgled and gushed. In ancient days fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries were the earth’s most desirable and dependable resource places, attracting and supporting myriad species. The diversity and numbers of living creatures in springtime wetlands and overhead must have made a stupefying roar audible from afar. We wouldn’t know. As humans have multiplied to a scary point of concern about the carrying capacity of the earth, wetlands were drained and dried for agriculture and housing. Today 7.8 billion people jostle for living space in a time of political ferment, a global pandemic and now a war, trying to ignore increasingly violent weather events as the climate crisis intensifies.

Early northern Europeans lived and prospered among glacial meltwater wetlands for thousands of years. And what if those old people who venerated springs, pools and wetlands as holy places could look into the future and see us? Surely they would be unable to comprehend humans who dirtied, drained and destroyed water sources, who dammed and polluted rivers, who choked the great oceans with debris and plastic.

Painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, archeologists, storytellers, ecologists, botanist succumb to the allure of the bog world, where moss makes its own ecological habitat, trees dare not put down roots, predatory sundews and pitcher plants eat living swamp meat, where bog cotton “breathes” through its air-channeled stems. Everything seems to lurch slightly, to sink and rise fractions of an inch. Decomposing plant material underwater sends up stinking gas that produces the mysterious light that wobbles through evening mists — the famous will-o’-the-wisp or ignus fatuus (fool’s light). In sunlight there is the swamp sparrow’s rapid iteration like a gear in your brain spinning loose. The profoundly unfamiliar setting is not so much a place as the sudden shock of perception of threatened existence, a realization streaked with anxiety.

It is easy to think of the vast wetland losses as a tragedy and to believe with hopeless conviction that the past cannot be retrieved — tragic and part of our climate crisis anguish. But as we see how valuable wetlands can soften the shocks of change, and how eagerly nature responds to concerned care, the public is beginning to regard the natural world in a different way.

Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means. He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first

Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means. He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love. And Steve was only the surprise ending that made the rest fall into place.

Bruno slammed his palms together. “Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?”

But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.

In the nights when he could not sleep, he enacted the murder, and it soothed him like a drug. It was not murder but an act he performed to rid himself of Bruno, the slice of a knife that cut away a malignant growth. In the night Bruno’s father was not a person but an object, as he himself was not a person but a force. To enact it. Leaving the Luger in the room, to follow Bruno’s progress to conviction and death, was a catharsis.

On the phone Vera sounded both shrill and hoarse, as if she’d just been shouting or crying. She spoke fast, as if she’d practiced, “I am sorry for

On the phone Vera sounded both shrill and hoarse, as if she’d just been shouting or crying. She spoke fast, as if she’d practiced, “I am sorry for your loss but I wanted you to know that I think that you are very cold, cold people.” I said I know, but she had already hung up.

In all of my earliest memories I am alone in my crib. I have no memories of being held. But I do remember closing my eyes in absolute pleasure while my mother stroked my head. Did she do it more than once? I asked her to do it again, all the time, and she always said no.

All the Waitsfield girls, in their little rooms, lie down, and wait and breathe. Their scalps sweat into their pillows. Their hearts slow down as they drift off. The girls are walking to school. The sides of their noses itch. They scratch them and collect flakes of dead skin under their nails. They are keeping secrets. They feel special because they have been told they are. Each of them, one in a million.

So long and sorry, darling
I was counting to forever
And never even got to ten
So long and sorry, darling
When we found a rip in heaven
We should have just

So long and sorry, darling
I was counting to forever
And never even got to ten
So long and sorry, darling
When we found a rip in heaven
We should have just ascended then

~ ‘Til Tuesday

They came into the clearing suddenly and the moon opened up above them, lighting the cracked and broken concrete that stretched like the decaying bones of giants between them and the abandoned Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. Tom stopped dead in his tracks, causing Robin to stumble into his back. He willed himself to move forward but he felt stuck, mesmerized by the menacing old bridge that loomed up before him. The massive steel structure was wild with leaves, and the undergrowth near the base was dense and uninviting. A few enormous hanging vines dangled from the top of the bridge’s skeleton, and they shifted and swayed eerily in the darkness.

We forget our victims. As a society we have a certain fascination with murder and violence. It’s not necessarily unhealthy — we are a curious people. We want to know why atrocities happen; we want to understand the causes of wickedness. We go looking for answers in books, in therapy, in our media. Unfortunately for the answer-seekers, corpses can’t talk. The dead can’t tell their own stories.

He chose a French word he liked and fastened it to a deteriorating building with vintage charm, prioritizing aesthetic over functionality. La Lapin

He chose a French word he liked and fastened it to a deteriorating building with vintage charm, prioritizing aesthetic over functionality. La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex was born. The building is located in the southern edge of downtown, with abandoned Zorn factories to its west and Chastity Valley to its east. In the early twentieth-century, the building housed factory laborers. The donor selected a darling rabbit wallpaper for the lobby, along with brass rabbit lamps he wished to place in every apartment. Developers eventually vetoed the lamps in favor of updating the building’s water heater. After suffering a few more rejections, the donor stopped trying to influence the design. Now, most tenants of the building call their home by its English translation: the Rabbit Hutch.

On a hot night in apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only eighteen years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised. It’s like your soul is being stabbed with light, the mystics said, and they were right about that, too. The mystics call this experience the Transverberation of the Heart, or the Seraph's Assault, but no angel appears to Blandine. There is, however, a bioluminescent man in his fifties, glowing like a firefly. He runs to her and yells.

Joan recalls the existence of dogs, craft stores, painkillers, the public library. Cream ribboning through coffee. The scent of the lilacs near her childhood home. Brown sugar on a summer strawberry. Her father's recovery from the tyranny of multigenerational alcoholism. The imperfect but true repossession of his life. The euphoria of the first warmth after winter, the first easy breath after a cold, the return of one's appetite after an anxiety attack. Joan has much to be happy about. She thinks: I am happy, you are happy, we are happy. These thoughts — how she can force herself to have them. Miraculous.

When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face

When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so I always think: that's what a human is.

For breakfast I eat convenience store bread, for lunch I eat convenience store rice balls with something from the hot-food cabinet, and after work I’m often so tired I just buy something from the store and take it home for dinner. I drink about half the bottle of water while I’m at work, then put it in my ecobag and take it home with me to finish at night. When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.

The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of. So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.

We’ve got excellent reasons to engage in the wisecracking life, but we may also have serious moral qualms about doing so. My title points to a kind

We’ve got excellent reasons to engage in the wisecracking life, but we may also have serious moral qualms about doing so. My title points to a kind of pun: Wisecracks may both bridge cracks and crack bridges, bond people and divide them. Which one occurs depends crucially on what role, if any, empathy plays in the exchange.

Wisecracks are ways of interacting with other people, but they are distinctive because what makes wisecracks aesthetically good — amusing — is often the very same thing that can make them morally bad. They tweak or ignore some of the norms that sustain our interpersonal lives, such as our expectations of trust and honesty, our desires for respect and equal worth, our concern to be viewed as the particular people we are (rather than as members of some group). These features make them very different, and far more interesting, than jokes.

What crucially matters in responding correctly to both the funniness and the moral status of a wisecrack are the wisecrackers intentions and motives, which amount to what the wisecracker means by it and what his or her attitudes are toward others affected or targeted by the wisecrack.

Nicky was going with Doll by then and got to experience the house first-hand. The atmosphere was that of a continuous, continuously improvised part

Nicky was going with Doll by then and got to experience the house first-hand. The atmosphere was that of a continuous, continuously improvised party that periodically doldrums and never ended, contending playlists emanating from different rooms, a standing bank of smoke shimmering in seeming permanence in the sitting room, pin-eyed young ones rattling on the front door at all hours. And things had gone on that way until a year or so ago, when Cillian suddenly stopped dealing. With the drugs gone, Cillian’s customers went away too. What Doll had told his mother was true; Sara and Cillian’s house was no longer a wild house.

He knew, from the outside, how small and meagre it all might seem, but he had been living in a way that was his own. And then the Ferdias had arrived. They had insinuated themselves, bit by bit, into his life, and now they had brought the kid. It was an intrusion that had thrown things all off course. He could feel it in the pit of his stomach. Nothing now would be the same.

All that mattered was what would happen next. As she made her way over the uneven ground, her mind was racing, lit up with fragments of animal premonition. She knew violence was close, could sense with each step the approach of some dark, whipping torsion of bodies and limbs that might sweep her up and buffet her away with the powerful headlong indifference of the sea.