Imagine our life as a stochastic process. One thing leads to another, and it is just a matter of chance that we find ourselves in a place, far away from another, having taken a path that was equally probable yet with vastly different way points. We call these choices or circumstances. What if at the end we realize not everything was that random after all? Would that knowledge be any more comforting? Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos opens and concludes with this unanswerable question

On music, resistance, and the human refusal to be silenced This morning, during my normal scroll through my Instagram feed, I stopped at an Outlook post  featuring Ali Ghamsari , a young Iranian musician playing his instrument at the gates of the Damavand Power Plant — playing on, in the face of Trump's announcement of the annihilation of Persian civilization. The post also featured another musician, Hamidreza Afrideh . His music school had crumbled back to earth. He played s

He did it for the second time now — and I was ready, though barely. The first time I had picked up a Nathan Hill  novel, it was because I trusted NPR . On my drive back home from work one evening, the radio announced that Nathan Hill had arrived with his debut — The Nix . As an obedient disciple, I took the next turn, parked in the Barnes & Noble lot, and walked straight to my house of worship. I started on the book that very evening. Oh boy — he had arrived, all right. It wa

For the last three years, April has been my favourite month — not for its mangoes or its lazy, stretched-out afternoons, but for the small, delicious ritual it ushered in. The drawing up of reading schedules. The curated list of books. The orders placed online, and then the quiet joy of waiting — watching for the courier, feeling the weight of each parcel, the unhurried pleasure of browsing through new spines and making tidy piles according to the reading schedule. April mean