My first memory of opera is Bugs Bunny or maybe The Pink Panther Show: those Saturday-morning cartoons where the fat lady sings and shatters a glass. Much later I began to date a man who had been to hundreds of opera performances (a fact I found not only shocking but literally unbelievable) and so I went from watching no operas to almost one a month. The one I’ve enjoyed the most by far was the Met’s spring 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, staged in a town in the depressed Rust Belt. I had already read about Lucia: it’s the opera that inspires Emma Bovary to cheat on her husband (again, and more dramatically). And yet I didn’t know anything about its plot, because Flaubert doesn’t describe it; the opera serves merely to connect Emma to her younger self, the pretty country girl who had had bigger dreams than a failure of a husband and a cad of an (ex-)lover. At the opera, Flaubert writes, “d’insaissibles pensées” come over her: “elusive thoughts,” uncapturable thoughts, incomprehensible thoughts. What’s coming over her is fantasy. 

Nabokov said about Emma Bovary that she was the quintessential “bad reader,” the one who reads “emotionally, in a shallow juvenile manner, putting herself in this or that female character’s place”: above all, in the place of Lucia di Lammermoor, the tragic sister of a warlord, kept from the man she loves, who slaughters her husband on their wedding night in a crazed delirium and herself dies. But to read Madame Bovary as purely reprobative seems to me cold to the point of insanity; as Flaubert said, of course, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” We are all fantasists, incomplete and incoherent actors in search of a character, and who can blame or even fail to admire Emma: so moved by art that she too will destroy her life for a fantasy of love, and die.

And yet I myself was not at all moved by the opera to change my life. I could admire the lead soprano Nadine Sierra’s expressiveness, virtuosity, beauty; I could delight in the claustrophobic sets, in the (perhaps a tad excessive) use of projection. But the experience was not at all like that of, say, watching a nineties film and wanting to be a slacker so badly I regretted ever getting a job. Opera, you might say, is an outdated fantasy machine: too mannered, too heroic, too … boring? 

On the other hand, I increasingly find it hard to understand what people’s epistemic relationships are to all sorts of things: the massively popular Love Is Blind is an almost mockingly Brechtian, stiff recitation of clichés (“I would call myself, maybe … an empath?” “Me too!”). The people around me who seem the most obviously engaged in absurd, even delusional, fantasies of impossible and irresistible love—the ones who take their cues from Before Sunrise, from the films of Kieślowski—are the ones who feel themselves most assuredly and assertively to be living in truth. 

I first discovered opera in 1991, when my tenth-grade English teacher killed a couple of class periods by showing the movie Amadeus. The bits it contained of The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni were seductive enough to send me to the nearest outpost of the Wherehouse, a California record-store chain, where the classical and opera section was an afterthought. When I compare it to the contemporary infinity of Spotify, however, the limited selection now seems a kind of blessing: with so little to choose from, it was impossible to feel overwhelmed.

It was also an advantage not to have anyone telling me which operas were great and which were passé. Not until much later, for instance, would I learn that by the nineties, Gounod’s Faust was already a century past its prime. It debuted in Paris in 1859 and quickly became a worldwide hit, especially in the U.S., where it was chosen to inaugurate the newly founded Metropolitan Opera in 1883. But in time, Faust’s blockbuster status made it a byword for middlebrow entertainment, a bit like The Phantom of the Opera today. When Edith Wharton set the first chapter of The Age of Innocence at a performance of Faust, it was a way of critiquing the provincialism of 1870s New York from the vantage point of 1920. For instance, Wharton pokes fun at the fact that the opera, originally written in French, is sung in Italian, the language Americans were used to hearing in the opera house at the time.

The novel opens with the main characters watching the passionate love duet at the end of act 3, in which Marguerite, a virtuous young woman, is seduced by Faust, a middle-aged scholar who has sold his soul to the devil. As he begs to “caress your beauty,” she plays a game of “he loves me, he loves me not,” picking petals off a flower. It is a sign of Marguerite’s childlike innocence but also of her ambivalence: she has already fallen in love with Faust, but can’t be certain whether he really loves her or is only trying to get her into bed. She uses the game to convince herself that Faust’s love is genuine, and when she plucks the last petal with a triumphant “He loves me!” Faust immediately confirms it: “Yes, believe this flower … He loves you! Do you understand that sublime, sweet word?”

Wharton’s opera scene is the perfect opening to a novel about how old-fashioned people lived lives as passionate as our own, despite or even because of their Victorian constraints. Watching Faust, Newland Archer takes a complacent satisfaction in the idea that the young woman he’s engaged to marry, May Welland, is too innocent to understand the erotic rapture of Gounod’s music. “She doesn’t even guess what it’s all about,” Wharton writes. “And he contemplated her absorbed young face with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity.” But it is this very purity that will lead him to lose interest in May and fall in love with her cousin, the Countess Olenska, whose scandalous past has taught her the meaning of “that sublime, sweet word.”

Sometimes, on the campus of the university where I work, a visiting writer will explain to a captive audience how great poems—more often than not his own—get written. These explanations often sound a bit mystical, occasionally even mystifying. So I was amused to read the opening lines of Dobby Gibson’s tongue-in-cheek “Small Craft Talk,” a poem our readers discovered in a box of paper slush, and which you’ll find in our Spring issue:

In some languages the word for dream
is the same as for music

is the kind of thing poets like to say

Before you know it, Gibson’s takedown of writing-program clichés shades into a wonder at how poems can make us feel ourselves, as Wallace Stevens once put it, “more truly and more strange”:

There are dozens of censorship bills under consideration across the country. You can keep tabs on them and their status over at EveryLibrary, who have been diligently tracking them and getting people to write and show up to put an end to them. It will shock absolutely no one to see how many of those book ban bills overlap with 533 bills proposed this year targeting trans people.

But writing about the not good stuff doesn’t always seem to garner the same kind of fervor or action that writing about the (minimal) good stuff does. So this week, let’s look at the four bills underway that are doing the opposite: they’re proposing legislation to protect the right to read and the ability for librarians and educators to provide a diverse array of materials to patrons of all ages.

In other words, these bills will let professionals keep doing the jobs they’re educated and trained to do.

How is the happy ending in a romance “earned?” What sort of redemption arc or emotional growth does a main character need to go through to “deserve” love? What mistakes are “unforgivable” for romance characters to make? These kinds of questions trouble me as a romance reader because they can require the genre to provide moral justification for its existence. Not being deep in the discourse for other genres, I couldn’t say if other literature is similarly scrutinized. But I can say that I often find myself wishing people would hand in their romance police badges.

On the one hand, I understand people’s nature to be defensive of romance against all the naysayers. Romance lovers want to hold up shining examples of the genre. There are absolutely romances that show the redeeming or improving power of love. There are romances that demonstrate healthy ways to navigate rough spots in relationships. That doesn’t mean they all need to! There are also romances between people who are really messed up and choose each other in a cruel and uncaring world. Just because a romance can’t be staged as a morality play doesn’t make it bad, or not a part of the genre.

On one hand, everyone is allowed their preferences and boundaries. If you don’t want to read about a character having unprotected sex for whatever reason, you certainly don’t have to. And of course it’s valid for something like unprotected sex to be potentially triggering to a reader; that’s not what I’m talking about.

Also, pointing out stereotypes and tropes in books that prop up racism, transphobia, ableism, fatphobia, etc. is worth doing. It takes work for people to recognize and unlearn these elements that have been baked into storytelling for too long. That’s different from passing judgment on characters behaving “badly.” So I invite readers who simply found Feyi offputting to consider their assumptions about this character’s actions.

What is literary fiction? I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I’m stumped. (Let me just say this up front: this essay is about 750 words, and I absolutely do not give a definitive definition anywhere in those words.) Like any genre or age category, “literary fiction” is a designation that is primarily a marketing tool, an idea of where to find a book in a bookstore…but genre is also supposed to give readers an idea of what to expect, at least in very broad terms, and I don’t think literary fiction does that.

A genre like mystery or romance tells us there will be a central [mystery/romance] plot with expected tropes, familiar structure, and a satisfactory ending where the main character(s) [solve the crime/live happily ever after]. There are always books that break the mold when it comes to tropes and structure, but they conform to the central plot and ending rules almost without exception. Likewise, a science fiction book will in some way involve fictional science, a fantasy book will explore the fantastical, and a suspense book will keep the reader in suspense. Historical fiction takes place in the past, crime novels concern themselves with, well, crime (but not necessarily the solving of it), etc.

But what about literary fiction? What can I expect from the genre? The best definition I can find is that it will have “literary merit.” Well, so do all of the other genres I just mentioned. Next!

After the undefinable “literary merit,” I most often hear that literary fiction has “beautiful writing,” that it is character-focused, and that it is not genre. Hmmm. I can think of books in every genre with beautiful writing, so that can’t possibly be a serious definition. As for character-focused, I suppose it might be true in broad strokes that genre books are plot-forward and literary books are character-forward, but there is simply no way that’s true across the board, or even close to it. Which leaves the idea that literary fiction is not genre fiction.

Well, what does “genre” mean here? Simply, it encompasses the genres like science fiction and fantasy, crime and mystery, romance and women’s fiction (another “genre” that seems to be undefinable and probably nonsense). So, according to this rule, literary fiction is always realistic and never focused on a romance or mystery plot. Again, I say: Hmmm.

There are not enough books about exercise for all bodies. I realized this while reading an amazing romance novel about a woman who falls for her fitness coach. I was intrigued by the fact that I could read it through Audible and I really loved the cover art. However, I felt nervous once I hit the synopsis. This was a book about a fat woman (yes please) using a fitness app (oh dear) with trigger warnings about discussions of weight loss and disordered eating (oh yikes). I was so torn because romances with fat main characters are my catnip, but I didn’t know if I could handle it if she became thinner and subsequently got her love, never mind the diet culture bullshit that might rear its head. I took a chance.

I’m so glad I did.

While reading this book (I promise I will tell you more below) I realized that there is a lot out there about loving your body and renouncing diet culture, but much less about how to embrace things that diet culture has ruined. Most people have felt some pressure to eat differently and exercise more to shrink, and since that rarely works, we see these tasks as punishing and broken things. But what if our society talked about exercise as something that feels good no matter how your body looks? There is movement in this direction, but it’s still rare for young people to be raised with this relationship to fitness.

Below, I’ve gathered books about exercise for all bodies. My hope is that we continue to move towards a discussion about bodies that is much more about how to feel good in them than how to shrink and shape them to meet a societal standard.

Happy May, YA fans! It’s finally getting warm enough that we are in one of my favorite seasons: hammock reading season. I hope that you’re well prepared for the warm weather ahead with the perfect comfy outdoor spot, all the drinks and snacks you need, some sun protection, and — of course — a healthy stack of good books. May is going to be incredibly kind to us and shower us with some amazing new releases!

While I’m sure you already have some of this month’s biggest titles on your radar — such as the new Becky Albertalli (Imogen, Obviously), Hayley Kiyoko’s Girls Like Girls, the hotly anticipated follow up to Angeline Boulley’s first book, Warrior Girl Unearthed — I am going to be highlighting some other great reads that might not be on your radar already. From engaging YA stories that offer some incisive social commentary to swoony romcoms to horror, there’s a lot going on in May, and it was really difficult to narrow it down to just ten, especially as we have five weeks of Tuesday new releases! But all of these YA books absolutely deserve a place on your TBR.

As always, you can find a full list of new releases in the magical New Release Index, carefully curated by your favorite Book Riot editors, organized by genre and release date.

Fantasy has always intimidated me. New worlds. Complex societies. Classes of magic I don’t understand. Unfamiliar, extravagant names making up a cast of characters I can’t possibly keep track of.

Forget it. I’ll stick to horror.

But then I read a book last year that I later realized was classified as dark fantasy, and I sort of liked it. And another one that was apparently historical fantasy. Also fun. And some works of magical realism. I really liked those, too. Had I just been wrong about an entire genre for 42 years?

It turns out that the fantasy I have trouble getting into is known as high — or epic — fantasy. High fantasy is usually set in a fictional world, one that typically has magical elements. These books have high page counts, high character counts, and high stakes. Oftentimes, there is an epic quest.

Meanwhile, the books I’ve been drawn to as of late are apparently low fantasy. Some elements of magic intrude into the otherwise normal world we’re most familiar with. These types of fantasy can also often overlap with other genres.

Each season brings its own vibe to a good murder mystery. Autumn is full of anticipation and sharpened school supplies, while winter serves bone-chilling dread with the help of long nights and brutal winds. Spring promises to unearth buried secrets after the snow thaws. Summer, though, is all about possibility. The long days and balmy evenings mean beaches and pool parties, backyard barbecues and sleep away camps, and that’s just a few of the promising settings for a page-turning murder. As sultry backdrops for people behaving badly, the summer months of June, July, and August bring the heat for crimes of passion in summer mystery books. Whether the characters are watching steam come off the sidewalk in the city or listening to waves crash on a deserted beach, a sweltering summer leads to tension higher than the temperatures. 

So put on your sunglasses and SPF and get ready to lose track of time getting caught up in murder and mayhem. Here are eight summer mystery books that offer exotic vacations, fatal wellness retreats, foreboding resorts, and plenty of sweating suspects to keep you turning pages in the sun.

I love movie math. I love microrationalizing macroabsurdities, laser-focusing on hyperspecific justifications. 13 Going on 30 is a perfect proof. Once upon a time, it’s Jennifer Garner’s (Jenna’s) thirteenth birthday. She wishes she were thirty, she claims to her mom, having read a Poise magazine article touting the thirties as the prime of one’s life. “You’ll be thirty soon enough,” says her mother—and indeed, if Mom had known the film’s title, she might have clocked just how prescient she was. Jenna’s invited the popular clique, the Six Chicks, over for her birthday, despite the truth bomb from the boy next door, Matty, that “there can’t be a seventh sixth chick. It’s mathematically impossible.” The Chicks trick Jenna into “seven minutes in heaven,” that is, waiting blindfolded in a closet for a kiss (that never comes). When she realizes she’s been duped, she desperately chants the mantra she learned from Poise: “Thirty, flirty, and thriving.” By law of rhyme and the rule of threes, exactly thirteen minutes in, counting the opening credits, Jenna falls out of bed in her sprawling Fifth Avenue apartment.  

At thirteen, Jenna’s too early for everything: a retainer around her top teeth, tissue paper stuffed down her shirt to make breasts. At thirty, she’s already running late. Jenna tumbles into a waiting car; ten minutes later, she’s in a meeting for the editorial job she didn’t know she had thirty seconds earlier. The boss, with chin hair plucked into a devil goatee, pins up fourteen nearly identical magazine covers: Poise and its rival Sparkle are side by side. June’s Poise features Jennifer Lopez’s ten secrets; Sparkle’s got her eleventh. 

Math goes on. Manhattan-Matty and Jenna reunite, only for Jenna to discover that she’s been shitty to Matty in the seventeen-year blackout interim. There’s impossible real estate math: they live blocks away from each other, he in the Village with a sunken living room and a backyard, she near Union Square with a walk-in shoe closet. Even for 2004, the salaries don’t add up to a down payment on a fourth of one of them.

Time, like movie math, is bouncy: business day, lunar month, fiscal year. (I recently got into an argument about the existence of a “business week.” I argued pro: fourteen business days equals two business weeks.) I first watched 13 Going on 30 on a plane, flying backward in time. Now, I’m thirty-four going on seventeen. For the past five years, I’ve been teaching at the university where I did my undergraduate degree, but this is my last month there for the foreseeable future. It’s spring, so campus is getting ready for reunions. It’s a reunion off-cycle year for me—year thirteen—but Princeton’s reunions are famously a cosmic wormhole; even those of us who don’t believe in anything go into a New Jersey fugue state for a weekend that’s actually three days but one night. But in movie math, this all totally tracks: micro-obsessing over minutes lets you leap out of the frog-march of linear progression. 

Around the time he published some of his mostly famous works—Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn, to name a few—Henry Miller handwrote and illustrated six known “long intimate book letters” to his friends, including Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and Emil Schnellock. Three of these were published during his lifetime; two posthumously; and one, dedicated to a David Forrester Edgar (1907–1979), was unaccounted for, both unpublished and privately held—until recently, when it came into the possession of the New York Public Library.

On March 17, 1937, Miller opened a printer’s dummy—a blank mock-up of a book used by printers to test how the final product will look and feel—and penned the first twenty-three pages of a text written expressly to and for a young American expatriate who had “haphazardly led him to explore entirely new avenues of thought,” including “the secrets of the Bhagavad Gita, the occult writings of Mme Blavatsky, the spirit of Zen, and the doctrines of Rudolf Steiner.” He called it The Book of Conversations with David Edgar. Over the next six and a half weeks, Miller added eight more dated entries, as well as two small watercolors and a pen-and-ink sketch. The result was something more than personal correspondence and less than an accomplished narrative work: a hybrid form of literary prose we might call the book-letter. As far as we know, Miller never sought to have the book published, and the only extant copy of the text is the original manuscript now held by the Berg Collection at the NYPL.

Edgar had come to Paris in 1930 or 1931, ostensibly to paint, and probably met Miller sometime during the first half of 1936. At twenty-nine, he was fifteen years Miller’s junior. Edgar soon joined the coterie of writers and artists who congregated around Miller’s studio at 18 villa Seurat. His interest in Zen Buddhism, mysticism, Theosophy, and the occult apparently helped energize Miller to embark on his own spiritual pilgrimage, and to articulate what he discovered there in his writing. “I feel I have never lived on the same level I write from, except with you and now with Edgar,” Miller confided to Anaïs Nin. Miller left Paris in May 1939. Edgar eventually returned to the United States as well. Though the two men seem to have stayed in sporadic contact, they probably never met again. Except for a single letter from Miller to Edgar written in March 1937—a carbon copy of which Miller saved until the end of his life —no correspondence between them is known to have survived.

—Michael Paduano

March 17, 1937

The first and only time I went to the Walmart in Iowa City was surreal. When I was in high school, my parents’ business-oriented small press had published a book called The Case Against Walmart that called for a national consumer boycott of the company; the author denounced everything from the superstore’s destruction of environmentally protected lands to its sweatshop labor to its knockoff merchandise. So by the time I made a pilgrimage out to the superstore at age twenty-one, I hadn’t stepped in a Walmart for nearly a decade, and it had acquired this transgressive power—the very act of crossing the threshold was as shameful as it was thrilling. Immediately, I sensed the store’s anonymizing power: outside, I was nearby the Iowa Municipal Airport, en route to the Hy-Vee grocery store; inside, I was anywhere. I didn’t know what I expected, but it was wonderful, and terrible, and weird, and empty, but also full of stuff. In the real world, I was allergic to animals, but I found myself hypnotized in the pet aisle: snake food, dry cat food, wet cat food, Iams, I am what I am. Each shade of paint chip in the Benjamin Moore display bouquet was more erotic than the one before. Primrose Petals, I Love You Pink, Pretty Pink, Hot Lips. Everything was too bright, oversaturated, illuminated in fluorescent Super Soaker–level high beams. I wasn’t high; I didn’t need to be. I barely saw another human, but the accumulation of things constituted many lifetimes of living. I was in a mass graveyard—a place defined by, as Annie Ernaux puts it, “the dead silence of goods as far as the eye could see.”

From November 2012 to October 2013, in Look at the Lights, My Love—published in 2014 in France and in 2023 in an English translation by Alison L. Strayer—Ernaux recorded her visits to the Auchan superstore in suburban Cergy-Pontoise, an hour northwest of Paris. Like all of Annie Ernaux’s works, Look at the Lights plays a formal sleight-of-hand in the best way, with the feel of a dashed-off journal but the felt experience of a deeply philosophical meditation on the nature of shopping, voyeurism, late-stage capitalism, class, race, and desire.

The Auchan superstore, the locus of Ernaux’s book, is a nesting-doll “self-contained enclave” within Trois-Fontaines, a conglomeration of the city’s public and private institutions: post office, police station, theater, library, etc. Ernaux describes the apparently normal, bustling village of Trois-Fontaines as a trompe l’oeil town, a privately owned corporate center that shuts down at night. “There is a vertigo produced by symmetry,” Ernaux writes, “reinforced by the fact that the space is enclosed, though open to the daylight through a big glass canopy that replaces the roof.” I’m reminded of the indoor mall in Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas—the Forum Shops—with its sky-painted ceiling reminiscent in zero ways of the Sistine Chapel. The roof cycles from light to darker blue in an accelerated yet elongated version of time: days are thirty minutes, but there are no weeks or years.

Trois-Fontaines touts itself as having every service that people need, and then many that people don’t. In addition to the flagship Auchan superstore, there are: salons, pharmacies, a daycare, cigarette vendors, wheelchairs on loan, free bathrooms. And yet, Trois-Fointaines has no life of the mind: the bookstore and café closed long ago. Though Trois-Fontaines has the appearance of a bustling small community by day, because it’s privately owned, the center’s sealed off after business hours: “when you walk by it late at night,” Ernaux observes, “after getting off the commuter train, its silent mass is more desolate than a cemetery.”

I don’t usually write to music. I’m too susceptible; I find it can give what I’m writing a false, unearned resonance, like slipping a poem into Garamond to make it “better.” But there are two songs that are rhythmic enough, each in their own way, that I sometimes put on a loop when I’m revising. There’s something about the cadence and the breath in them that works for me, that creates a kind of chamber that keeps the outside world at bay. And though I’ve heard “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” (a quote so apt, it’s attributed to no less than a dozen people), here goes:

“Spiegel im Spiegel,” 1978—Arvo Pärt 

The piece—in English, “Mirror in the Mirror”—begins with a simple ascending arpeggio, little triads that subtly alter, reflected back and forth like light on water, a mirror looking into a mirror. The melody stretches over and through the scales, extending like a long breath. The left hand on the piano arrives, eventually and sparingly, to ground the upward yearning, trees reaching toward light from the roots. The work is minimal in its composition, yet never fails to tug me out of my momentary preoccupations into a broader sense of time, drawing me into eternity through the little window of now. There are many beautiful recordings, but Angèle Dubeau’s version is a good place to begin, I think. If you put it on and close your eyes, everything will soon feel softer.

“Fleurette Africaine,” 1962—Duke Ellington

I have always liked categorical statements that are obviously wrong. When someone says to me “This is the way the world works,” I get very excited, even though of course nobody knows how the world works. Or, even better: “There are only two types of people in the world.” This statement is usually followed by two binary qualities that could be used to define and divide all of humanity. Such a proposition is clearly ridiculous and, to me, deeply appealing. This is perhaps why my favorite game is called Dichotomies.

The game originated because my friends and I are always talking about our other friends. One night my friend Nick and I began idly categorizing people we knew, somewhat arbitrarily, as either thunder or lightning. We knew immediately who was which: Nick and I are both lightning. Our friend Ben: thunder. Alex: lightning. Graham: thunder. Lily: thunder, though maybe she has a bit of lightning too? We discussed and debated. This dichotomy is a good one in part because of its ambiguity; not everyone interprets it quite the same way, but everyone has a strong instinct for what each category might mean, and a sense of who might be which. Our attempts at categorizing people opened up some interesting questions: Was so-and-so outgoing, or actually quite shy? Did he make a big impression at first, or grow on you later? Was there a certain kind of power in being thunder and a different one in being lightning? Which would you rather be? And why was it so easy to tell the difference?

So I began to think of other interesting binaries. Another friend and I decided that some people are “men about town” and some people are “helluva town guys.” (Gender-neutral.) As I see it, a man about town is someone who always has fifteen plans that they’re running to, someone who is excited to meet new people and try new things, someone who is essentially oriented toward the public sphere and the allure of the untried and untested. At a party, they will end up talking for hours to a fascinating stranger who they will never see again, but they’ll remember the conversation forever. A helluva town guy is someone who likes to go to the same bar every weekend and drink ten beers with their best friends and say, “Man, life is so good!” But they are also someone who might know the secrets of the city a little bit, who might take you to an unremarkable-appearing restaurant that turns out to be special. They are your quintessential regular; they return, and they identify with the fact of their continuous return. Sometimes helluva town guys might find themselves living man-about-town lives—but at their core, they remain helluva town guys, even if they’re going out five nights a week. Dichotomies are, crucially, not about preference; they are about someone’s essential essence.

All summer long I thought of other ways to divide the world in half: New Hampshire/Vermont, Picasso/Matisse, punk/hippie, still/sparkling, IPA/lager, Beatles/Stones, France/Italy, Bob Weir/Jerry Garcia, glamour/charisma, hater/enthusiast, ellipsis/etc., elusive/available, green/blue, beer/shots, Yankees/Mets. Many of these pairings betray my own particular interests—you could endlessly reformulate them, and in fact I do. The best ones are pairs that are not actually quite opposites but proximate and different. So I began to play this game with people, often in groups, where you might ask someone to go around and categorize everyone, even people they don’t know well. Or, if there are two of you—say, on a date—you might go through them together and discuss who falls on which side of the aisle. I began to play it endlessly, in almost any circumstance. I started keeping a note on my phone, a running list I could pull out when someone said, “Okay, do another one.”