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Orion Magazine

America's Finest Environmental Magazine

Learning the Language of Plants

In celebration of their new plantcentric books, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging and The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Continue reading →

Barreleye Fish: An Abecedarian

ABOUT TWO EIFFEL TOWERS deep in the Pacific Ocean, barreleye fish hang almost motionless in the dark, like holiday decorations.   Books, books! Your father tells me you are reading too Continue reading →

10 New(ish) Book Recommendations for Spring 2024

The birds coming are back! Drag a chair into a patch of sunlight or spread a blanket under a tree, because Orion is here with some environmentally-influenced recently published book recommendations Continue reading →

4 Lessons on Breathing from the More-than-Human World

1. Inhale An African elephant’s trunk can create suction exceeding the speed of the Shinkansen. Reindeer noses can raise the temperature of incoming air by eighty degrees in less than a Continue reading →

Love Grieves But Refuses Despair: An interview with David James Duncan

ONE MORNING LAST JUNE as I sat with author David James Duncan on his deck overlooking Rattlesnake Creek, David pointed to a blur moving across the creek. A black bear cub. Continue reading →

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Orion: Nature and Culture

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Orion is a quarterly, ad-free literary magazine focusing on nature, culture, and place. We publish essays, narrative nonfiction, poetry, and short fiction that address environmental and societal issues.

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America's Finest Environmental Magazine." 100% ad-free, reader-supported publication at the convergence of ecology, art, and social justice, since 1982.

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PROBABLY this couldn’t be true, but I do remember quite clearly those afternoons when my father would hand me a stack of his students’ blue books and watch television sports while I read through the papers. As a teenager, I never understood the purpose of the ritual, but I was better for it, brought closer to him in body and mind by those powder blue notebooks and the blood-red markup they contained. Some-times, when his writing wasn’t clear, I’d find myself tracing over it, parsing the contours of his language. Sometimes, after he’d fall asleep on the sofa, I’d add an encouraging note in his handwriting at the end and replace the book in the stack, wishing that my words might be mistaken for his, that on paper I might…

The Weave of Rituals

IN MODERN secular societies, religion is often considered antiquated and its traditions a fossil of benighted people dwelling in a medieval worldview, lost in reveries of salvation. Some look down on piety as primitive, and ritual practices as childlike. Certainly secular academia avoids religion and eschews the scent of spirituality. Ethics are allowed inside the ivy walls, but anything that smacks of faith or belief is left on the steps of the divinity schools. Our siloed rationalized disciplines are enough to contain all the “truth” that is needed. A life of meaning or purpose? Perhaps the philosophy or religion departments can attend to that. Yet, can we imagine our lives without rituals? Most of us have daily rituals—as simple as our morning coffee or afternoon tea. Many of us measure time with…

The Practice of Contradiction

DADIMA PRACTICES yoga every day. She had been studying abroad in London and just returned to India when she began her practice, around the same time she married a naval officer. His mother suggested she drop out of college after the wedding, which she did. That was the year her first son was born, soon followed by her second, my father. Each of these days, Dadima did yoga. When she left Bombay in 1980 to go to Colorado while her husband stayed behind shipping butchered sheep to the Middle East, she practiced. While she raised two teen-age boys in a white town in a red state, she practiced. When the cold winters alone grew dark and heavy and she longed for home, she returned to the large rug in her bedroom to…

The Sensual and Divine Earth

WE WERE YOUNG and eager river guides, and every spring after the winter rains, my friends and I traveled to the foothills of Northern California to scout the rivers. All around, flaming crimson Indian paintbrush bloomed, and the chattering of bank swallows and coos of mourning doves filled the air. In the evenings, tired and content, we gathered round a campfire to share the poetry and stories of our favorite writers. The fire crackled and a soft darkness enveloped us in a snug cocoon. That’s when I first heard—over forty years ago—words from the Song of Songs. “Get up my beloved … Come away! /For now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. /The scarlet blossoms have appeared in the land, the time of the songbird has…

Weather Report

“IT WANTS TO BE WINDY,”Papa would say of Sila, the weather. “It likes to be cold,” he’d say in December when the Monitor heater in Papa and Gram’s home ran nonstop, the temperature at -40 to -50 degrees Fahrenheit for days. Sila is alive, his words told me. Sila has a spirit. She, after all, decides the actions of our days. Papa respected the weather. The slight, strong, sinewy man, in his scratchy, wool checkered shirts, would walk from his house to stand at the sandy beach and look out onto the ocean at the western sky. He’d accurately forecast what Sila would do for the days, the week ahead. He knew her signs. Her moods. Her desires. From the shape of the clouds. The color of the water. The direction…

After the End

MY NOTES from the summer I spent in Samsø, Denmark, are mostly about its picturesque beauty. The island appears untouched by human hands—all windswept hills, silent beaches, shallows filled with languid purplish jellyfish waiting to be pulled back out to sea. The villages that populated it in the Viking Age have been swallowed whole by the land on which they once stood. The only things to have evaded the open mouth of the earth are scattered stone dolmens and passage graves—monuments too big, I suppose, to be metabolized in a mere thousand years. Gone are the days when Samsø served as an important Viking meeting place. Today nature has reclaimed the island; no one can even reconstruct the etymology of its name. I was on Samsø to help excavate the remains…

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Spark Birds

This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access .

It will come as no surprise to readers of Orion , the publishers of this volume, that a book which draws its material from what has appeared in the magazine over the years will be of first-rate quality. Orion has been a locus of fine prose and poetry since it was launched in 1982. It is one of the English-speaking world’s premier journals for environmental writing. Spark Birds offers readers a selection of material drawn from the magazine’s pages over the last several decades. The editors have done an excellent job in assembling something that has a pleasing diversity of content yet that manages to hold together well as a collection.

The book consists of “Essays and poems about owls, cranes, thrushes, finches, penguins, petrels, and buzzards—and the people who love them.” The last part of that description is worth stressing. Yes, birds constitute the focus of the book; they provide the common denominator that underlies all the pieces and provides a sense of thematic unity. But it’s the human element that’s brought into play—the varied impact of the birds on the lives of the thirty-three contributors—that often engages the reader’s interest, not just the birds per se. As Jonathan Franzen puts it in his foreword, “Narrative nature writing, at its most effective, places a person in some kind of unresolved relationship with the natural world.” It’s the exploration of such relationships, as much as the species the writers are concerned with, that makes the book compelling reading.

Some of the essays are ones that readers may have encountered before, not only in the pages of Orion . For instance, Brian Doyle’s “Raptorous” is included in his posthumous collection One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder (2019); Kathleen Jamie’s “Storm Petrel” appears in her (wonderful) collection Sightlines (2012); and Mary Oliver’s “Owls” is in her well-known Owls and Other Fantasies (2003). But these are all fine pieces of writing that repay several readings. In any case, seeing them in the context of Spark Birds , as integral parts of this particular selection, presents them in a novel light.

In her musings on the ringed storm petrel whose body she found on a remote Scottish island, Kathleen Jamie suggests that her encounter with the bird “extended my imagination.” This leitmotif is evident throughout the book. Whether we’re reading poems about egrets, hummingbirds, or pelicans, or essays about penguins, buzzards, or sparrows, there’s a sense of the writers’—and thus readers’—imaginations being stretched by these avian encounters. This is far more than just “a bird book.” There are, as one would expect, many fascinating insights into the birds that are the explicit points of focus for these poems and essays. But the writers also touch on a whole range of other issues sparked by their encounters with the birds in question, for example: the power of naming; the failure of politicians (of whatever party) to engage responsibly in environmental protection; how “racism and sending another species to extinction grow from the same rotten core”; the nature of poetry; how the Audubon Mural Project has the potential to “connect a low-income community of color to the green sector, which is predominantly white”; and how habituation—getting used to seeing things—can dull a sense of wonder.

Describing the book as “essays and poems about birds” is, in one sense, accurate enough. But it also risks missing one of Spark Birds most striking and attractive features—namely, Chris Maynard’s exquisite artwork. Perhaps the twenty-one shadow boxes that are included, showcasing his original and beautiful avian studies, worked in carefully cut—sculpted—feathers, should be regarded less as illustrations and more as a visual essay or poem in their own right. One of the pleasures of reading a good book is to follow its leads to other worthwhile reading. I’m pleased that Spark Birds has alerted me to Maynard’s website ( www.featherfolio.com ) and to his book Feathers: Form and Function (2014).

In addition to the excellence of the individual pieces, another of Spark Birds’ s merits is that it prompts wider reflection on the nature of nature writing, thanks to Jonathan Franzen’s question-promoting foreword. Not everyone will agree with his view that descriptive writing in this area is rendered redundant by audiovisual media. Indeed, his dismissal of some of J. A. Baker’s lyrical prose in The Peregrine as “tediously descriptive” may strike some as verging on sacrilege. But Franzen makes a convincing case for an evangelical approach that focuses on persuading nonbelievers in nature to take an interest. The best way to do this, he insists, is not to offer descriptions of the natural world, however lyrical, but to tell a good story. As he puts it: “We can’t make a reader care about nature. All we can do is tell strong stories of people who do care and hope that caring is contagious.”

Writing about birds has resulted in some impressive books: J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), William Fiennes’s The Snow Geese (2002), James Macdonald Lockhart’s Raptor (2017), Steven Lovatt’s Birdsong in a Time of Silence (2021), Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014), and Jonathan Evan Maslow’s Bird of Life, Bird of Death (1986), to name just a few. There are also some good anthologies, such as Simon Armitage and Tim Dee’s The Poetry of Birds (2009). Spark Birds is a welcome addition to this literature and matches its best exemplars in the quality of writing it contains. The fact that it’s so handsomely produced—thanks in large measure to Chris Maynard’s artwork—adds to its appeal. 

Will the book help make converts in the way Franzen wants nature writing to do? It certainly contains material that’s richly endowed with caring. Whether this will prove catching will, in the end, depend on that most unpredictable of things—how individual readers respond to a particular text.

Chris Arthur St. Andrews, Scotland

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North Country: Essays on the Upper Midwest and Regional Identity Ed. Jon K. Lauck & Gleaves Whitney

Roman Stories Jhumpa Lahiri. Trans. Todd Portnowitz & the author.

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality William Egginton

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January 2024

Gene Luen Yang , winner of the 2023 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, headlines the January 2024 issue of  World Literature Today . As always, lively mini-interviews, compelling poetry, fiction, essays, and more than thirty book reviews—plus recommended reads and other great content—make the latest issue of  WLT , like every issue, your passport to great reading.

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The nsk neustadt prize: gene luen yang, in every issue, book reviews.

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Orion's "Spark Birds" Writing Anthology and Virtual Launch

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Orion 's latest anthology, Spark Birds , is now available ($22.00). This collection gathers the best stories, essays, and poems about birds from forty years of Orion . In it you’ll find owls, cranes, thrushes, finches, penguins, petrels, and buzzards—and the people who love them, including Brian Doyle, John Freeman, Elizabeth Kolbert, J. Drew Lanham, Mary Oliver, Emily Raboteau, Sandra Steingraber, and Terry Tempest Williams. Coedited and introduced by Jonathan Franzen.

Join the virtual launch event:

Wednesday, August 30th | 3 p.m. EDT | via Zoom

To celebrate the launch of Spark Birds , Orion has partnered with BirdLife International to present a virtual conversation between best-selling novelist and birder Jonathan Franzen and ornithologist, author, and MacArthur Fellow J. Drew Lanham. 

Franzen and Lanham will discuss their love of birds and how writing and art about our avian friends can inspire people to think more deeply about environmental threats while encouraging us to look more mindfully at the skies above. 

The event will be moderated by Orion editor-at-large and Spark Birds coeditor Christopher Cox.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

J. Drew Lanham (who serves on the NAAEE Advisory Council)   is a Professor of Cultural & Conservation Ornithology at Clemson University and the Poet Laureate of Edgefield County, South Carolina. His books, Sparrow Envy–A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts and The Home Place - Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature , explore the subjects of wildlife and wildlands conservation through the prisms of race, place, and nature.

Drew is also a 2022 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, a curator with several museums, and an evolving librettist with a poem about whimbrels that’s in the process of becoming an operetta with composer Gabriella Lena Frank. His forthcoming books include a collection of poetry entitled Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves , a children’s book called The Bird I Became , and an eco-memoir entitled Range Maps - Birds, Blackness and Loving Nature Between the Two .

Jonathan Franzen is the author of six novels and five works of nonfiction, most recently The End of the End of the Earth . Franzen is the recipient of a National Book Award for fiction, the EuroNatur Prize for his work in conservation, and the Utah Award in the Environmental Humanities. He has written extensively, for National Geographic and other publications, about birds and the threats to them.

Christopher Cox is an editor-at-large at Orion and the author of the book The Deadline Effect .

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A post-holocaust nuclear-political parable, as obvious as it is prolonged, from a prolific but often predictable sf pro. The...

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ORION SHALL RISE

by Poul Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1983

A post-holocaust nuclear-political parable, as obvious as it is prolonged, from a prolific but often predictable sf pro. The combatants here: the US-Canada-based Northwest Union, old-style polluting-industrial technocrats led by the megalomaniacal Mikli and the more reasonable survivor-type Ronica; the Mong, various Asian tribes now occupying America, whose ""Gaean"" ethos is Cosmic Oneness; the Oceania-based Maurai (familiar from earlier yarns), ecologically impeccable imperials to whom nuclear technology is anathema, led by spy-diplomat-warrior Terai; and feudal Uropa, kept peaceful by the armed-to-the-teeth balloon-satellite Skyholm, whose natural captain, Iern, has been usurped by Gaean Jovain. Why is the Union secretly stockpiling forbidden fissionables? That's what everyone wants to find out here. And the answer is a constructive one: they're building a fleet of spaceships. But mad Mikli can't resist also making and using nuclear bombs--which leads to an everybody-blows-up-everybody-else ending . . . with some heroism from lovers Ronica and Iern and a final plea for sanity. Creaky, fitful maneuvering, with stock characters and formula writing: heavy going for all save ardent Andersonites.

Pub Date: March 28, 1983

Page Count: -

Publisher: Timescape/Pocket Books--dist. by Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION

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Briefly Noted

Natural Magic , by Renée Bergland (Princeton) . Although Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson are not known to have ever crossed paths, this study finds meaning in their shared enchantment with the natural world. In the eighteen-thirties, as “natural philosophy” began to be reframed as “natural science,” emotion and wonder were eclipsed by objectivity and mastery. Darwin and Dickinson resisted this binary: Darwin saw his theory of natural selection as an occasion for humility, relating humans to other species; Dickinson, whose poetry reflects her extensive scientific education and interest in Darwin’s ideas, depicted the natural world with both botanical specificity and attention to its splendors. Bergland links their thinking to an earlier tradition of “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) magic, which emphasized the interconnectedness of life and valued emotion as a form of understanding.

Traces of Enayat , by Iman Mersal (Transit) . Literary obsession and detective work merge in this biography of Enayat al-Zayyat, an Egyptian writer who died by suicide in 1963, at the age of twenty-six, years before the publication of her only novel. Following the threads of al-Zayyat’s life, Mersal depicts the Egypt in which she grew up and the largely vanished Cairo where she lived, while chronicling her search for the forgotten author. “To trace someone,” Mersal writes, “is a dialogue that is perforce one-sided.” Indeed, despite assiduous research and interviews with surviving friends and family, Mersal experiences “despair at the possibility of knowing” the true story of al-Zayyat, whose remnants she embroiders with photographs, speculation, and personal reflections, leaving behind a seductive mystery.

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Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

Whale Fall , by Elizabeth O’Connor (Pantheon) . Manod, the observant narrator of this début novel set on the cusp of the Second World War, lives on a sparsely populated Welsh island where, one night, a whale washes up on the beach and dies shortly thereafter. Soon, two researchers turn up to document the customs of the islanders. Manod agrees to assist them, translating phrases (such as “sheep farmer”) and cultural realities (the people cannot swim). In time, however, misunderstandings arise between researchers and subject, imbuing their relationship with both alienation and tenderness. Stubborn transgressions committed by the interlopers testify to the hazards of anthropology and the delusions of so-called progress.

Cinema Love , by Jiaming Tang (Dutton) . This moving if uneven début novel tracks a handful of characters who emigrate, in the nineteen-eighties, from rural China to Manhattan’s Chinatown. They quickly find that it is one thing to leave home and another to move on from the world that has been left behind. That world includes a ramshackle movie theatre, the Mawei City Workers’ Cinema, a place where gay men go to seek forbidden love—and where their wives go to look for them. Part ghost story, part love story, and part tale of hardscrabble immigrant life, this intricately plotted novel asks whether, in the end, it is better to forgive or to forget.

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Who Was Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Really?

In “Once Upon a Time,” Elizabeth Beller examines the life and death of the woman who was best known for marrying John F. Kennedy Jr.

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By Louis Bayard

Louis Bayard’s novels include “Jackie & Me” and the forthcoming “The Wildes.”

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ONCE UPON A TIME: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, by Elizabeth Beller

One of the many reasons to wish that Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy were alive and well is that, without too much urging, she might have formed a sorority with Meghan Markle. They could have talked about what it’s like to be a woman thrust into a brutal family dynasty and a Hobbesian press ecosystem. Maybe they would have exchanged tips for dodging paparazzi. Maybe, over enough drinks, they would have asked each other if their husbands were worth all the trouble.

Sadly, we can only come at Bessette-Kennedy now through intermediaries. And none of them could be more ardent in their mission than Elizabeth Beller, whose unironically titled biography, “Once Upon a Time,” aims to make John F. Kennedy Jr.’s wife the princess she was meant to be. Squeezing bright memories from dozens of Bessette-Kennedy’s friends, acquaintances and family members, Beller lays down a yellow-brick road from her subject’s middle-class White Plains childhood to her tony Greenwich adolescence to her convivial semesters at Boston University to her V.I.P. sales job at Calvin Klein in New York.

Beller is there, too, when America’s most famous bachelor wandered in for a fitting. Boy and girl, helpless in their beauty, gazed upon each other. Boy asked for girl’s number. There followed “a haze of sultry dinners, dancing and walks.” But John F. Kennedy Jr. was in no hurry to settle down. He was on-and-off-dating a temperamental Hollywood actress, and even when he and Bessette-Kennedy did become an item, he didn’t introduce her to his mother, who then died before he could.

Their Georgia wedding was lovely, but the marriage was troubled. John’s energies were drawn away by the launch of George, his doomed magazine. His gregarious wife was a prisoner in her own home, thanks to an unhinged tabloid press. “If I don’t leave the house before 8 a.m.,” she told a friend, “they’re waiting for me. Every morning. They chase me down the street.”

The couple grew distant. They got into arguments. They went to couples therapy. But “Once Upon a Time” wants us to know that, through it all, they were meant to be. “They would love hard and they would fight hard,” one friend said, “but they were very much a couple.”

“They were soul mates,” Beller quotes George Plimpton as saying.

And through it all, apparently, Bessette-Kennedy never stopped being a golden girl. We’re told over and again how gorgeous and elegant she was, how smart and funny and kind. She loved kids, dogs, cats, old people. She had “abundant gifts to share.” She was “wild and vivid in a cautious and pale world.” She was “a revelation.”

The only remaining question: Why is this exercise in heroine worship emerging a full quarter-century after her death? Beller argues that Bessette-Kennedy’s legacy until now has been shaped by men, and she probably means one man in particular. Edward Klein’s 2003 pot-stirrer, “The Kennedy Curse,” helped cement the tabloid image of her as a difficult cokehead who showed up two hours late to her own wedding, severed a nerve in her husband’s wrist, fooled around with other men and, in one redolent phrase, snorted up with “a gaggle of gay fashionistas.”

Beller rebuts each charge as it comes, but with all respect to her advocacy, she seems to be litigating a case that has long since been settled out of court or, more poignantly, forgotten. What lingers, I fear, for anyone tasked with remembering Bessette-Kennedy’s name, is her haunting end: borne down in a Piper Saratoga six-seater piloted by her husband, with her sister at her side.

Ironic and fitting, then, that in recreating that fatal journey, Beller’s prose sparks to life. “They were flying through a darkness akin to that of a sensory-deprivation chamber, surface and sky indistinguishable. Only when John began to make multiple turns, climbing then descending, turning and descending again, might the sisters have noticed that it had been 20 minutes since they had seen the nebulous mainland lights, glimmering yet opaque.”

ONCE UPON A TIME : The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy | By Elizabeth Beller | Gallery | 352 pp. | $29.99

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An assault led to Chanel Miller’s best seller, “Know My Name,” but she had wanted to write children’s books since the second grade. She’s done that now  with “Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All.”

When Reese Witherspoon is making selections for her book club , she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who died on May 14 , specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope , spanning decades with intimacy and precision.

“The Light Eaters,” a new book by Zoë Schlanger, looks at how plants sense the world  and the agency they have in their own lives.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

6 New Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List

All by Columbia alumni authors.

By Kara Swisher ’85JRN 

Journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher has covered American tech since the dot-com boom in the early 1990s and has become known for holding industry leaders accountable in her no-holds-barred interviews. With thirty years of unparalleled access to a who’s who of Silicon Valley — from Jeff Bezos to Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg — she has plenty of tea to spill in her much-hyped new book . But there’s more than just gossip here: it’s a thoughtful history of a period that has irrevocably changed our world and a surprisingly hopeful vision of the potential role of tech in our future. 

Last House  

By Jessica Shattuck ’01SOA

In her latest novel , Jessica Shattuck, the best-selling writer of The Women in the Castle , captures two generations, each caught up in the politics of their time. The book opens in 1953, when World War II vet Nick Taylor, a lawyer for a major American oil company, gets drawn into the Iranian coup d’état. Meanwhile, his wife, Bet, once an Army code-breaker, bides her time in the suburbs, raising their children, Katherine and Harry. Fifteen years later, those children are grown and protesting all that their parents stood for, Katherine at a liberal newspaper in Morningside Heights and Harry near the family’s country home in Vermont. 

The Age of Grievance 

By Frank Bruni ’88JRN

American politics has changed drastically over the last several decades. In his compelling new book , Frank Bruni argues that much of that change can be attributed to a cultural shift in attitude: we’ve become a nation of whiners. Bruni writes that Americans on both sides of the aisle feel victimized and aggrieved (though he is clear that he thinks the Right has weaponized this tactic in more dangerous ways), and politicians have responded in kind. Bruni contends that while grievance is not a new concept, and has historically often been good, this new era is different. Legitimate complaints are lost among exaggerated ones. And in a nation with broad gun ownership, the results can be devastating. 

You Get What You Pay For

By Morgan Parker ’10CC

The author of three award-winning poetry collections and a young-adult novel, Morgan Parker has a bold, provocative, often hilarious voice, and her insights about Black womanhood in contemporary America have resonated with a wide audience. But in her personal life, Parker often feels isolated and alone: “I’m a poet who has never experienced true romantic love; I believe this is an American tragedy.” Her latest book , an essay collection, explores this and other intimate themes, with plenty of reflection on the greater societal contexts. 

A Walk in the Park

By Kevin Fedarko ’88CC

Veteran journalist Kevin Fedarko is no stranger to the Grand Canyon: his first book, The Emerald Mile , told the story of a thrill seeker who rode a wooden boat the entire length of the Colorado River. But now, Fedarko himself is the adventurer. Accompanied by National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, Fedarko embarked on a 750-mile, end-to-end trek through the awe-inspiring gorge. With no marked trail, punishing temperatures, and death-defying cliffs, it’s considered one of the hardest hikes in the world — and indeed, the year-long trip nearly killed them both. Fedarko’s prose is often funny, but he also pays appropriate respect to both the land and the native people that have called it home for thousands of years. 

The Age of Revolutions

By Nathan Perl-Rosenthal ’11GSAS 

In an ambitious survey of what Thomas Paine called “the age of revolutions,” historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal traces revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in North America, Spanish America, Europe, and Haiti. Producing the first narrative history of the era, Perl-Rosenthal assembles a cast of famous (John Adams, Napoleon, Toussaint Louverture) and lesser-known figures (Peruvian nun Maria De La Concepción Rivadeneyra) to show how two generations forged massive transformations and how political progress often came at the expense of racial and social equality. 

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In Dead Weight , Emmeline Clein ’16CC, ’22SOA draws on her own story, as well as interviews, academic studies, history, and pop culture

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Ozempic is the ‘it’ drug. A new book tries to explain what it means.

Johann Hari’s “Magic Pill” chronicles his experience taking semaglutide while simultaneously studying its pros and cons.

It’s hard to overstate how quickly Ozempic and similar drugs have gone mainstream. When I started taking semaglutide in January , I knew only two people who had tried it. Four months later, it feels almost ubiquitous.

Well-timed for this mania, Johann Hari’s “ Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs ” aims to help readers clarify whether they should take the plunge. His central contention, that “Ozempic and its successors look set to become one of the iconic and defining drugs of our time, on a par with the contra­ceptive pill and Prozac,” seems almost unarguable . But his conclusion on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is mixed: “If you want a book uncritically championing these drugs, or alternatively a book damning them, I am afraid I can’t give it to you.”

What he does give is an easy-to-read summary of just what the subtitle suggests — benefits and risks — though there are a couple of points about which I think he’s wrong. And the amount of digressive fluff — an account of his nightmarish stint at an Austrian weight-loss spa, a smarmy chapter on Japanese food culture — implies this could have easily been a long magazine article rather than a short book.

Scottish-born journalist Hari, now based in London, used to be a fat guy. He opens his story by confessing, “Some people say the main reason they survived the pandemic was the vaccine; for me, it was Uber Eats.” He assumed he wasn’t alone, but then he went to a post-quarantine Hollywood party where everyone was not just slim but gaunt. What was going on here? He quickly found his answer. From there, Hari chronicles his snap decision to start Ozempic while simultaneously studying the pros and cons of semaglutide.

Before continuing with a summary of Hari’s admittedly entertaining anecdotes, it feels important to mention that, while he may not be especially well-known on this side of the pond, in 2011 he was suspended from his columnist job at the Independent after admitting to plagiarism and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of other journalists. You would think this history would make him meticulous in his research, but he has already come under fire for claiming in the book that food critic Jay Rayner lost pleasure in food after taking Ozempic . When Rayner responded on social media that he had never taken the drug, Hari apologized, saying that he had “confused an article by Jay Rayner in the Guardian with an article by Leila Latif in the same paper.”

Hari’s reputation, as well as his sloppiness, casts a shadow over even the most poignant portions of the book, such as the grief he experienced after his friend Hannah, his favorite partner for epic pigouts and crude banter, died at 46 after she choked while eating and went into cardiac arrest.

Hari, 5-foot-8, 203 pounds, deeply addicted to fried chicken — he was given a Christmas card by the employees of his neighborhood KFC addressed “to our best customer” (and it wasn’t even the chicken outlet he patronized most often!) — decided the time had come to take his shot.

In his telling, things went well for him; though he experienced nausea and lightheadedness, the product worked as advertised. After three months, his neighbor’s “hot gardener” asked for his phone number. At which point he went into a bit of soul-searching about whether he was taking these drugs because he cared about his health — or was it really because he was worried about how he looked?

All I can say to that is: duh. As he reports a few chapters later, when Esquire magazine polled 1,000 women, asking if they would rather gain 150 pounds or get hit by a truck, more than half said they would prefer the truck.

This was not the first or the last of the “duh” moments. Though the book is pleasant and informative, it consistently makes aha moments out of familiar concepts. “Satiety, or the feeling of no longer wanting more, is not a word we use much in everyday life, but I kept hearing it in two contexts. The first was the science of factory-assembled food — because this food, it turns out, is designed to undermine satiety. The second was in the sci­ence of the new weight-loss drugs — because they are designed to boost satiety. I only slowly began to trace the connections be­tween them.”

Some of us will be ahead of him there.

Meanwhile, Hari flatly states that “for the medication to work, you have to take it forever.” Like hypertension or diabetes, he explains, obesity is a condition that requires permanent medical management. And most people who go off the drugs regain much of the weight they lost within a year.

However, some doctors believe that if you can maintain your goal weight for six months, your body will lower its “set point” by about 10 percent, and you can wean yourself off the drug without fearing that all your losses will be reversed. In my case, I weighed 142 when I started, and I hit my goal of 126 after about three months. Since then, I’ve been on a low-maintenance dose, and I’m hoping that staying on it for another three months will give me a set point of 128. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I do think the jury is still out here.

Hari also is critical of the off-brand semaglutide compounds available online and at med spas, labeling them “ Breaking Bad Ozempic” and suggesting that they could be fatal. But the book doesn’t lay out enough evidence to warrant such a baldly negative conclusion.

Which leads us to one last thing. I was tickled to read his claim that “there’s already been a decline in the value of the stocks of the doughnut company Krispy Kreme, which analysts directly attributed to the growing popularity of Ozempic.” So I looked that up in the endnotes and found nothing more.

I’m all for a good comeback, but perhaps Hari still has a little way to go.

Marion Winik has been detailing her Ozempic journey in a series at BaltimoreFishbowl.com .

The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs

By Johann Hari

Crown. 320 pp. $30

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