I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven. It has always been this way for me, even as a child. I prayed often, sometimes the requisite five times a day in my Muslim household. But I did it out of a sense of duty to my living, not what might exist after my living.

I can’t control my own arrival to whatever the promised land may or may not be, because I don’t have the rubric in front of me. I have sometimes been a good person who does bad things, and sometimes I’ve been a bad person who does good things. The way the afterlife is most often discussed is by way of a scale that sorts into binary categories. I grew up with Muslims who insisted that every bit of food left on their plate after a meal would be weighed against them on the day of judgment. I considered this: arriving in front of the robed choir, a few grains of rice tipping the scale toward an irreconcilable level of bad, banishing me to some fiery underworld.

In early 2019, spinning through Red Dead Redemption for the first time, I became obsessed with the idea of a heaven for someone who wasn’t real. Someone I had come to love, but who only existed in a fictional realm. It was a private thought. Discussing love and sanctification like this seems foolish, probably a byproduct of my many newfound chambers of loneliness. I wanted not only a kinship with this not-real someone, I wanted to save them, and save myself in doing so.

Not only is this foolish, it also tilts toward what some might consider sacrilege. But if you will allow me to soften the message: what I am saying is that I’m not invested in my own entry into heaven, but I find myself required to believe in its existence nonetheless. If enough people you have loved transition to a place beyond the living, you might grow to hope that place is heavenlike. I want everyone I have buried to be in a place of abundance, a place beyond their pain. For me, being consumed by silence—and an obliviousness to whatever has become of you—is one definition of peace. I’m fine with that for myself, but not for my beloveds. Not for you, person I do not know and will likely never meet. I want an abundant dominion for you.

A few years ago, I read a lecture by Chinua Achebe given in 1975, later published as an essay entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” While I greatly respect Achebe’s novels, his essays have often left me wanting. His voice reminded me of my grandfather’s, the intonations of a proud Nigerian man, rightly aggrieved at the dysfunctional state of his country, his continent, and its indefatigable life in the face of rampant, extractive exploitation by imperial powers. I feel that Achebe’s frustration can leave blind spots in his arguments, and the lecture in question—an outright denouncement of Conrad’s famed novel and its canonized status as “permanent literature”—was, I thought, an example of this. Achebe considered Conrad’s novel explicitly racist in its themes, in its depictions of the “natives,” and in the gaze of Marlow, Conrad’s primary protagonist, who Achebe believed wasn’t much removed from Conrad’s disposition.

Achebe questions the meaning of writing to our society, or the meaning of any art for that matter, when it can be so explicitly racist and go mostly unremarked upon by fans and critics alike, regardless of how beautiful the turns of phrase or evocative the depictions of the lush, sweltering alien landscape. I have a complex relationship with Conrad’s novel and agree with some of what Achebe put forth, but his argument felt incomplete. Achebe’s disgust is understandable, but I think one can see Conrad was also getting at a lack of vocabulary for this rich, intricate world, of atmospheres and new sensory and metaphysical experiences, at times in his prose defaulting to beautifully phrased but reductive tropes, which are still embedded in the unconscious of Western society today. As Achebe railed at Conrad’s reduction of complex cultures, knowledge systems, and languages, down to a dark, flat backdrop for Marlow’s descent into the pit of despair, and lamented Conrad’s objectification of West African bodies, I became hooked on an important and maybe even existential question—who was Achebe’s lamentation aimed at? Who was the primary audience for his words, written in English? And was there a moral authority to hear his appeal, and if so, what then?

I envision this moral authority: a shining round table, a collective ethereal body. I can picture where this body receives education, and what information and legacy bestow upon this body to uphold such cosmic authority. I peer at this body’s ancestral responsibility and how intricately woven its cultural history is with morality, technology, and progress—through religion, reason, language, war, and subsequent laws. I wonder, wouldn’t this same moral authority Achebe speaks to be the same that has canonized Conrad’s novel, lauding it as one Western literature’s great works?

Roughly around the time of Conrad’s birth, Anglican and Baptist missionaries from Britain began spreading the Christian word across Nigeria alongside armed colonial powers, and systemically implemented a proposed order and moral structure, offering bondage under the benevolent cloak of Christianity. They found innovative ways to suppress and diminish ancient local knowledge systems whilst leveraging the locals’  deeply inherent spiritual devotion. Tribal factions with differing religious and philosophical dispositions were difficult to control without the concerted imposition of particular moral principles through Christianity. Coordinating labor and governing over resource-rich lands was made easier by exploiting the tenets of local knowledge and sowing discord between tribes. Christianity has been significant to psychological governance, by imposing a moral condition and constraining culture, dissenting thought, or ways of seeing and being alien to the new “explorers” of this productive continent of vast cultural and environmental diversity.

Before I can think how to begin, she rebukes me: “Concerning death, one might observe / that those with authority to speak remain silent …” (“Bats,” A Village Life). 

Flip the pages, to “Lament,” in Ararat, and once more, a reproof:

Suddenly, after you die, those friends
who never agreed about anything
agree about your character.
They’re like a houseful of singers rehearsing
the same score:
you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life.
No harmony. No counterpoint. Except
they’re not performers;
real tears are shed.

 Luckily, you’re dead; otherwise
you’d be overcome with revulsion.

It was about four in the morning when the warrior decided to leave our group. He’d started weeping, apparently, into his mic. I didn’t have a headset, but the other members of the group did, and they detailed the player’s breakdown in the chat. He couldn’t take the pressure, they said. He was sorry. He’d let us down. He was tired. He was blubbering now. He left the group and opened a portal to Stormwind, his home city. The rest of us waited a few minutes, trying to think of a way to replace the most important member of the group before giving up, surrendering the hours we’d spent working our way through Uldaman, a subterranean dungeon filled with cursed Dwarves. I stood up and took two steps away from the computer to lie down in bed and stare red-eyed at my character on the screen, which was now lit by the late-summer sun breaking through the bedsheets nailed vaguely across my windows.

I think about World of Warcraft nearly every day, but considering the millions of people who play the game, I’m not alone. Launched in 2004, WoW is the most successful MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) ever. At the height of its popularity, in 2010, the game had more than twelve million active subscribers and continues to be the most played MMORPG today, almost two decades after its release. The game is so well populated that whole books have been written on the game’s sociological aspects and in-game economy. The objective of the game, if you could say there is a single objective, is to increase your character’s level. You do this by completing quests, raiding dungeons, and fighting in player-versus-player (PvP) combat, as well as engaging in the literally hundreds of other tasks and story lines the game contains, all of it taking place within the vast world of Azeroth, with each player’s character being a combination of a race (orc, troll, night elf, et cetera) and a class (shaman, mage, warrior, et cetera).

I got the game for my thirteenth birthday, in March of 2005, and somehow managed to play only occasionally until that summer, when I became hopelessly addicted, often playing for upward of fourteen hours a day. The addiction lasted through the summer, during which I rarely bathed, ate, left the house, or did anything but play WoW. By fall my room was littered with rotting food and unwashed clothes, and bedsheets covered my windows. I didn’t consider myself to be addicted, but dedicated. I cherished the fact that I was capable of spending my time doing just one thing. My favorite moment of the day was when I wandered through the silent house at dawn after a fourteen-hour session, impressed by the feeling of remembering what it felt like to walk. I’ve rarely been happier than I was during that time.

Most of my time in Warcraft wasn’t even spent questing, but simply “exploring” the game—walking my character across Azeroth’s forty distinct in-game zones while listening to music or imagining my own story lines. I spent whole days walking through the World with an almost obsessive fascination and appreciation for the game’s atmosphere: its infinite pixelated horizon, its endlessly looping orchestral music. Often I would just stand still and rotate the in-game camera, admiring the infamously simple graphics—which were mostly swaths of a single texture with plants or rocks drawn on them—or jump my character around to admire the way their armor moved. Once the game map had been completely explored, there were various tactics that players could use to get to unfinished or hidden areas, some of which were accessible only by a technique called “wall jumping,” wherein a player would jump directly at a wall for hours until they found an invisible hole that allowed them into the unpolished world beyond, making exploring in the game a literally endless endeavor.

I played The Sims a lot as a preteen. It was the only computer game I ever liked that didn’t involve horses, and it lived at my dad’s house, where screen time was not limited. My friend Diana had it, too, and she and I played together sometimes, in the small office connected to her parents’ bedroom. Diana liked the design element of the game, and would use cheat codes to make her Sims very rich, then build them big houses. She chose balconies with glass railings, and reupholstered her Sims’ furniture. 

That part was not interesting to me. My Sims were not allowed to use cheat codes. Instead, they had to succeed within the terms of my own life, or what I imagined it would be as an adult: they had to get jobs, learn skills, and build relationships. They spent time learning to cook, mostly by reading the cookbooks on their bookshelves. They paid bills that arrived in the mailbox, and redid their kitchen floors only if they made the money on their own. Everyone got a smoke detector, and I worked hard to help them keep their Need meters—Hunger, Bladder, Social, Fun, Energy, Hygiene, Comfort, Environment—in the green. If not given instructions, Sims will do their best to handle these needs themselves, electing to use the bathroom or play on the computer. But I liked to do it for them, sending them to the fridge if they were hungry, to bed if they were tired, and to another Sim if they were lonely.

At my dad’s, I started with the first edition, The Sims, which came out in 2000. That one had only four angles available, each ninety degrees apart, in which I could look down and out (and through the walls) of my Sims’ square houses, at three possible levels of zoom. The game was very gridded: furniture could only sit within blueprinted squares, never diagonally. Cockroaches, when they came, crawled in circles within one square only. The cheapest flooring option was black-and-white linoleum tile, which I sometimes used for my entire house, and on which the cockroaches would spread, in a grid, if I didn’t kill them. 

The Sims 2 came out in September 2004, when I had just started fifth grade. I think I got it right away—I remember I was excited—though I’m surprised, now, that I had access so early to a game that I mostly remember in terms of where I could make my Sims WooHoo, their term for sex: bed, hot tub, shower. They were very demure, and would go under the sheets, or underwater, or behind the door, and then become pixelated. Still, though: there was a lot of WooHoo, and eventually a lot of Try for Baby, which would, in The Sims 2, sometimes lead to infants, then toddlers. The toddlers grew into children, whom my adult Sims could Help with Homework. Eventually these children became teenagers, and got boyfriends, girlfriends, pimples, and the desire to run away. 

You may have seen your local Friends of the Library around, even without knowing who they were. You may have purchased used books from a sidewalk sale or donated to a fundraiser or signed a petition and not known that you were talking to volunteers from a local group fighting for your library. But what are these groups?

Friends of the Libraries are nonprofit groups that support libraries in their communities. They are run by volunteers and exist in the US, Australia, France, South Africa, and the UK.

As an example, I did a quick Google search to find my group — the Chicago Coalition of Library Friends. Their most recent project is to build public consensus and lobby the city to keep libraries open longer because from 2010 to 2021, hours were reduced from 64 hours a week to just 48. Their work helped to get back library hours on Sundays, from 1 to 5 p.m., which is a huge win.

Spider-Man is one of Marvel Comics’s most popular characters, without question. The wall-crawler has a nice history with video games, but when Marvel’s Spider-Man hit the PlayStation 4 in 2018, it was an immediate smash. From the open world of Manhattan to the stellar story, performances, and combat, everything was working right. Insomniac Games followed it up with a smaller, budget title called Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, continuing their success.

Now, a full-sized sequel is about to drop for PlayStation 5. It promises to continue the story from the first games, including both Peter Parker and Miles Morales in the adventure. What else do we know about the sequel? Based on the trailer, Harry Osborn will feature heavily. In the first game, he was presumed dead, though the ending showed otherwise. Kraven the Hunter will be a major villain. Oh, and the black symbiote suit means fascinating things for Peter and the appearance of Venom.

That might sound like a lot, but video games have the luxury of packing a lot of story content and characters in since the game can span lots of hours. The first game relied heavily on Mister Negative, Silver Sable, Mary Jane, and Aunt May, after all. That said, with so many new characters to the story that Insomniac is telling, there are a lot of comics to read if you want some background. Here are 10 comics to read before playing Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

Phrases like “coping skills,” “social emotional learning,” and “growth mindset” are the latest in buzzy educational jargon. However you describe it, adults are starting to adapt to the fact that we cannot ignore the mental health of children. While we accept that kids need explicit instruction in how to read or multiply or understand scientific concepts, for a long time, we acted like an ability to recognize and manage emotions would come naturally as children age. A short time spent observing emotionally stunted adults should disabuse us of that notion. Luckily, there has been a sea change, and children’s books about mental health have surged alongside.

Children carry all the same baggage as adults, but without the autonomy to do many of the things we do when it all gets to be too much. Most kids can’t decide when they’ve earned a little treat, make the choice to go for a long walk, or reach out to a mental health professional without support from someone else. While some kids may accidentally stumble on the skills that help them calm down and process, others might have understandable breakdowns and then be scolded for acting out of control. This is where the books about children’s mental health come in. Step-by-step teaching skills for what to say and how to respond when challenging situations arise is the biggest gift we can give the children in our lives. As adults, we’ll likely pick up some coping skills along the way.

Below, I’ve gathered several picture books that support children’s mental health, covering topics from anxiety to personal autonomy to flexible thinking. Ready to grow those social-emotional skills? Read on.

I’m not a big horror reader, although I’ve been reading more of it since realizing just how much the horror umbrella encompasses. I’m still not super into classic monster books, though. Zombies don’t do it for me most of the time. Neither do vampires. But I love books that explore monstrosity. This is currently one of my favorite subgenres, though I’m not exactly sure what to call it. I’m talking about books that play with what it means to be a monster. Books starring characters that are both monster and not-monster. Books that delve into who we label monster, and why someone might choose to become one. Can a monster be a mother? A girl? Is grief a monster? Are monsters unforgivable? Misunderstood? These questions are so juicy. I could read about them forever.

These eight books are not your typical monster stories. Some of them don’t even feature “monsters” at all — they’re about emotional monsters, the monsters we make of memory, humans doing monstrous things. Many of them focus on transformation — a mother turns into a dog, a girl turns into a mermaid, a scientist tries to become part of a wolf pack. They’ve all changed the way I think about what it means to be a monster — often with a dose of creepiness along the way.

The act of reading comes with many benefits for readers. Reading increases brain activity, according to one 2013 study, improves skills associated with “building, navigating, and maintaining social relationships,” increases a reader’s vocabulary, and can even lower blood pressure and heart rate after reading for only 30 minutes. It’s pretty established that reading is good for you. But it’s not exactly the coolest hobby around. In a world of daredevil hobbies, sports enthusiasts, and concert-goers, staying in on a Friday with a book isn’t the most exciting tale to tell to your coworkers come Monday morning. To non-readers, reading can seem downright boring.

But reading is so cool! With the assistance of celebrities spotted with books out in the wild, TikTok’s push to get reading into the mainstream again, and the rebellion of reading certain books, it’s the coolest it has ever been. However, certain books are maybe ever so slightly cooler to be seen reading. While it’s super cool to own what you like without feeling the shame of other people’s opinions, those a little more conscious of the wandering eye of strangers might lean toward books that have a cooler sense about them.

Whether it’s because of their cover, because TikTok loves it, or your favorite celebrity has sung its praises, here are ten cool lit fit books to pick up as we head into cool girl fall.

In July 2024 — nine years ago — We Need Diverse Books was founded. The nonprofit dedicated to addressing the lack of diversity in publishing emerged in response to yet another major book event showcasing a slate of white authors as their stars…plus Grumpy Cat. The movement to call out the whiteness of the industry was not new, but that year, it hit a fever pitch.

Malinda Lo tracked queer YA books published starting in 2011, continuing in 2012, 2013, and pulling together a great chart documenting change in this category between 2003 and 2013. Lo also tracked diversity in the YA bestsellers, as seen in Publishers Weekly in 2012, as well as diversity within the Young Adult Library Services Association’s annual Best Fiction for Young Adults list. Her number crunching on The New York Times Best Seller List in YA for 2013 made clear how few authors of color and characters of color were being given the budgets to succeed, if they were being published in any representative manner by the industry at all.

Requiem for Louise

We were supposed to meet Louise Glück in New York, at the end of September, to see Verdi’s Requiem at the Met. My husband and I wanted to see Tannhäuser. Louise wanted to see the Requiem, and she was insistent. We decided to hear both, and I was tasked with procuring the tickets.

Louise clearly did not have faith in my ability to achieve this, and I received a number of anxious emails in the lead-up to the day on which individual tickets became available for sale. Would the seats be any good? What would they cost? And, once I had finally purchased the tickets: Now, where are we going to eat?

All summer long we exchanged emails in anticipation. Listening and listening to recordings, comparing our favorites. Louise told us about attending productions as a young girl, becoming enchanted with the music, the drama, and the atmosphere of opera. “I’ll restrain myself from singing along,” she said.

I was thinking, recently, of a scene from the animated movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The island of lost toys, I remembered, was a place in the North Pole where the stuffed bears and Hot Wheels cars and waddling wind-up penguins that disappear from children’s lives ended up. They lived happily in their own colony, tinged only slightly with the sad shadow of their severance from their human caretakers. I went to look up this scene, and it turned out I had misremembered it and had been doing so for years. There is no island of lost toys. In the movie it is the island of misfit toys—all the more poignant, for the toys are not lost but abandoned, because they don’t quite belong. Children don’t want them and so they find one another. Eventually this odd cast of characters comes together to teach Rudolph a lesson about the beauty of being a misfit; as we all know, that particular story ends happily ever after. But if the misfits have found one another, where do the lost toys go?

That question sort of answers itself: they’re lost. They’re unaccounted for. There are some possible explanations. Perhaps that treasured stuffed lion, worn around the ears, was forgotten on the red banquette at an Italian restaurant where the child was drawing in crayon on a paper tablecloth. Perhaps it fell between the seats of a Land Rover, or worse, into the bottomless netherland of “under the bed.” But even if these scenarios are plausible or true, they might be unverifiable, and so some things simply seem to be erased from earth. I lose things all the time—credit cards, keys, jackets, sunglasses, books, a necklace, two necklaces—actually, three necklaces, all of them gifts from people who loved me. Sometimes I joke that I practice nonattachment, the Buddhist thing, though the real explanation is that I am clumsy and careless. I do wonder where it is that my things have gone. I have always been bothered by this, so much so that it seems I invented and sustained a belief in a fictional Arctic island populated by reindeer where lost things might one day be restored.

I went a few weeks ago to the bowels of Penn Station. Squeezed underneath the A/C platform, behind a door decorated with colorful sketches of tennis rackets, cameras, basketballs, guitars, purses, light bulbs—all manner of cartoon odds and ends—is the MTA’s central lost and found. Normally, one sidles up to a glass window manned by an attendant and requests an item. If the item is there, you receive it and depart. Accompanied by Ron Young, who runs the New York City Transit lost and found and has been with the MTA for seventeen years, I was able to go behind the door. This area is the sort of purgatory where every single item that has been recovered from a New York City bus or subway is awaiting its possible return. On average, five to six hundred items come in each week.

In the front office, at desks with plastic dividers between them, four men and women were working in a way that I can only describe as methodical without even understanding the method. A man at the first desk was counting dollar bills. The woman behind him had sets of keys on her desk to be slipped into plastic sleeves along with identifying information. (Usually with keys there is none.) Someone else was typing into a massive spreadsheet.

Recently, I read Virginia Woolf’s first published novel, The Voyage Out, for the first time. There, I made a discovery: it features a character named Clarissa Dalloway. This encounter initially provoked delight, surprise combined with double take, like bumping into someone I thought I knew well in a setting I never expected to find them, causing a brief mutual repositioning, physically, imaginatively. (Ah! So we’re both here? But if you’re here, where am I?) Then my feelings went strange. For some reason, I felt disgruntled, almost caught out: as if the world had been withholding something important from me. How was I only just now catching up on what—for so many readers—must be old news? Yes, there’s a Clarissa Dalloway in The Voyage Out. She’s married to Mr. Richard Dalloway: the couple have been stranded in Lisbon; they board the boat and the novel in chapter 3. She is a “tall, slight woman” with a habit of holding her head slightly to one side.

I was impressed by the boldness of this move: for Woolf to initiate a character in a minor role and then, years later, to return to her, to open out a whole novel from her private intentions and in this way continue her (Mrs. Dalloway was published a decade later, in 1925). It made me think of E. M. Forster’s two lectures on “character,” published in Aspects of the Novel in 1927. The first is titled “People.” The second: “People (continued).” Then I remembered why I’d had that “caught out,” “I should have known this” feeling: this same technique of novel-growth was also of great interest to Roland Barthes. In his lecture courses at the Collège de France in the late seventies, he named it marcottage.

It’s a horticultural term. A process of plant propagation, working for instance with trees or bushes. It involves bending one of the plant’s higher, flexible branches into the ground and fastening it there, a branch-part under the soil, to give it the time and energy to root. It was also, for Barthes, a method of novel composition, one practiced by Balzac, by Proust. In an article (translated in 2015 by Chris Turner) on the discoveries that initiated Proust’s writing In Search of Lost Time, Barthes defined the method as that “mode of composition by ‘enjambment,’ whereby an insignificant detail given at the beginning of the novel reappears at the end, as though it had grown, germinated, and blossomed.” The detail could be an object, a musical phrase, or the first mention of a character: the point is that it recurs, appearing again in a later volume, connecting several books of a life’s project—only that, each time, it is allocated a different amount of attention, provided with more or less space to develop (to grow). Marcottage. The plant example Barthes reached for to illustrate this in his lectures was the strawberry plant. Strawberries do it spontaneously, “asexually,” sending out long stems called runners from the “main,” or “mother,” plant. The runner touches the soil a small distance away, takes root there, and produces a new “daughter” plant. Together, the plants form a pair, eventually a network of mature plants, making it hard to distinguish daughters from mothers. The generative paths run backward as well as forward.

Marcottage could be a possible metaphor for translation. This work of provoking what plants, and perhaps also books, already know how to do, what in fact they most deeply want to do: actively creating the conditions for a new plant to root at some distance from the original, and there live separately: a “daughter-work” robust enough in its new context to throw out runners of its own, in unexpected directions, causing the network of interrelations to grow and complexify.

One spring evening I pulled in and saw my neighbor Stefanie was sitting on her car, which has the next spot over, with a friend. It was possible to worry for a second that I’d hit her.

“Hi, my neighbor,” I said as Stefanie hopped down. She and I had a project to one day go in on compost pickup.

We had something else in common, we realized that evening. Neither of us had been told about apartment four.

And the vacancy had filled so quickly. We both may have had reasons for considering a move—mine being I have mold—and that apartment, I happened to know, was a two-bedroom, with a bay window, beautiful gold-and-cream striped wallpaper, and decoratively ribbed molding that pooled, at the corners, in concentric circles. It was not, however, perfect. “It’s really loud in there,” I said to Stefanie. “That’s why Alex”—my ex-boyfriend—“had to leave.” I had started seeing Alex during the pandemic in 2020, a month or two after my arrival in the Northampton, Massachusetts, building. He was there already.

“He’s dead.”

The voice on the phone belonged to Joshua, a friend with whom I had gotten sober years ago. Back then, in the nineties, driving to and from twelve-step meetings held in smoky church basements across Rochester, New York, in a rickety station wagon with my drum set in the wayback, we kept ourselves focused by improvising sketch comedy and working out stand-up routines that Joshua would then use in his fledging act, which he’d eventually abandon in order to become a travel writer specializing in Southeast Asia. He was calling from Portland.

“Who’s dead?” I asked, trying to think who from our past might have relapsed.

“The actor, the guy you’re writing about. Overdosed on heroin.”