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A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford: “Is she still going on about that squid?” my friend Dan once said after I had rattled off one too many tidbits of squid trivia gleaned from a recently viewed episode of Errol Morris’s “First Person”. If you are prone to that type of behavior, this book will bring it out in full force. I read ABHOEWEL while I was at my mom’s house, ostensibly to help her after a medical procedure, and I think by day 3 of me wandering into rooms where she was trying to rest or watch C-Span so I could spout off facts about the human genome she had started to wonder if she mightn’t be better off fending for herself. This book covers human genetics with a focus on what it tells us about our evolution, history, and identity. Rutherford has a clear and engaging writing style and doesn’t try too hard to wrap everything up in a unifying theory; in fact a key theme is how much we still don’t understand about ourselves and how we came to be. I don’t want to ruin all the fun facts (and, for a Finnish person, some non-fun facts about our, shall we say, shallow national gene pool). But the figures Rutherford presents make clear just how interconnected all of us are to each other, an idea I think I could do to remember in this coming week.
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Even after the appearance of the first posts on Instagram of friends and relatives in the medical field beaming as they got their vaccinations, the end still felt so far away. Our town is dark red on the map in the Boston Globe, the UK variant has shown up in Massachusetts, the stories keep piling up about doses thrown away or signup sites crashing or general chaos and ineptitude surrounding the rollout; all meaning I haven’t let myself wonder with any degree of specificity when life will restart again. Then last week my grandparents got their first shot. Then my father-in-law. The other shore is still so far away but it’s at least in sight, and I find myself feeling like I often do at the end of a long car or airplane ride: cramped, tired, desperate to be done with the journey but also dreading the moment when I have to unfold my creaky body and collect up all my hand luggage and leave the suspended state where all I had to do was be carried passively along. What will it be like to have meaningful options about what to do with my time again? How much deeper will my bafflement be when I look back on all the projects I didn’t do, the meals I didn’t cook, the walks I didn’t take, and wonder what kept me from making more of this time? I suppose I should look forward to that particular strain of regret.
Condiment Corner
My original hope for this exercise was that it might somehow result in new ideas for how to use up the condiments I already had, so I’ve tried very hard not to use it as an excuse to buy more stuff I wouldn’t buy under normal circumstances. My good intentions crumbled last week when I made my first trip since last February to that temple of condiments, Trader Joe’s. First up is this eggplant spread. I’ve been eating it with feta on toast. It had a nice smokiness but I think it would have benefited from more of a sweet note, maybe from upping the red pepper. I also think one of the most important strengths of a truly great condiment is versatility, and since I’m at a loss as to what to do with this product besides eating it on bread it seems to underperform on that count. Thoughts?