→ September 16, 2022
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Power Failure.

Power Failure is a clever small-box game from Genius Games that rethemes a Taiwanese game called Power On!, taking some of the concepts of the great route-building game Power Grid while including a key message about climate change. Sometimes a game just hits you the right way; Power Failure has just so-so ratings on BGG, for example, and my daughter really didn’t care for it, but I think it’s both clever and fun. It’s great value at $17 or less, as on Amazon or Miniature Market.

Power Failure has two main conceits: You’re building an engine of power plants that you can fire once per turn, with each plant type requiring different fuel (in the form of cards); and building and firing plants usually involves adding carbon tokens to the shared tower in the middle of the table. When that tower falls, it ends the turn of the player who placed the last token on it, and everyone else has to discard a card from their hands, simulating the environmental cost of generating energy, especially through dirtier forms like coal and natural gas. At the end of your turn, you can “fire” all your plants of one type, and then use the total power you generated to claim a City card that represents the power demand of one city, which is the only way to gain victory points in the game.

Beyond the tower, this is a hand-management game – you get a hand of cards that include power plants, fuel cards for some of those plants, and special action cards. On every turn, you can take three total actions, which can include selecting a card from the common market, playing a card from your hand (building a plant or using a special action card), or firing up all of your plants of a single type. You can do the same action type twice, and in the first two or three rounds you’ll use all three actions to play or draw cards.

There are three main types of power plants in Power Failure, coal, natural gas, and nuclear; plus renewable energy plants that require no fuel and fire automatically on every turn. All power plant types require that you add one carbon token to the tower when you build them. Coal plants require one coal fuel card each to fire them, and you have to add three carbon tokens per plant when you do so. Natural gas plants require one natural gas card each, and you add two tokens per plant when you fire. Nuclear plants don’t add carbon tokens, but you need two separate cards for each plant you fire, one for fuel and one to represent the handling of the nuclear waste. Some renewable plants generate a variable amount of energy, from 0 to 2 units, based on the number showing on the top card on the deck, so you can’t build an entire energy strategy around them, but they can be enough to supplement your other energy sources to get you to a better city card.

Thus your goal is to build an engine of plants, likely concentrating on one type, that you can fuel and fire every other turn or so to try to fulfill a contract on a city card. The catch for coal and nuclear plants, which are cheaper to fire, is that they pollute. For every coal plant you fire, you must add three carbon tokens to the tower, and for every natural gas plant, you must add two. So you might build an engine with three coal plants, which would generate 18 power, enough to claim any contract in the game, but you have to add nine tokens to the tower, doing so one at a time. The tokens are hexagonal wooden pieces about a half-inch thick, and you can stack them flat or vertically, depending on how hard you want to make it for the next player. When the tower falls, your turn ends, you generate no power, and everyone discards a card, after which you reset the tower by starting out with three tokens and play resumes. There’s a little dexterity involved here, which does exclude certain people from playing, unfortunately. I do think the idea is clever because of the way it introduces variability into the mix – every form of power production pollutes at some level, but it’s hard to predict who will actually be the polluter to push the total over some threshold.

Games take 45-60 minutes, and I think it’s good for any age range that can handle the token placement part of the game. There’s some light text required, but it’s manageable for younger players. I also appreciate the color scheme, which is brighter and clearer than Power Grid’s fifty shades of grey. It’s a serious engine-builder at heart, though, with the dexterity element a small part of the game. You can play it mostly solo against other players, or you can play more competitively with a “take-that” strategy that swipes fuel cards your opponents might need. I think it’s a small gem of a game that deserves a wider audience than it’s gotten so far.

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→ September 6, 2022
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Get on Board: New York & London.

Get On Board: New York & London is the latest game from the designer Saashi, whose solitaire game Coffee Roaster is the best purely solo game I’ve ever played (and very accurate to its theme – the man clearly knows his coffee). This one is a two to five player game, a flip-and-write game with a fun route-building mechanic on a shared central board, as players compete to build bus routes to pick up and deliver passengers in the most efficient way for victory points.

The board here has two sides, New York for 2-3 players and London for 4-5, with only one rule difference between them (put a pin in that for a moment). Players start at different traffic lights on the map, and then will build a route from there by adding their own road pieces to cover individual blocks, never branching or doubling back, and marking off every icon their route touches on their personal scoresheets. There are twelve ticket cards that will determine how many pieces each player places per turn, and in what shape, with each player placing a different number/shape for tickets from what their competitors place.

Every intersection on the map has something there, and you score just about everything. Little old ladies are just happy to be there, so you score 1 to 3 points just for picking them up; everyone else has to be dropped off in some way, though. Tourists want to be delivered to tourist sites, and you get more points if you gather more tourists on your bus, up to 4 at a time, before getting to one of those sites. Workers want to go to office buildings, up to 3 at a time, with a bonus when you do so. Students don’t need to be dropped off in order at schools, but you do need to get your route to both to score, because your points are the product of the number of students you picked up and the number of schools on the route.

When you place a piece on a street where your opponent already has one, or, on the New York map, on a midtown block that’s marked in black, you cause Traffic, and you fill in one of the circles on the bottom of your scoresheet. The first few are just -1 point for every other circle, but eventually it’s -1 every time, and if you place a piece on a block that has multiple opponents’ pieces on it, guess what? It’s one circle for every piece already there. You can also choose to lose points if you want to alter the shape of pieces called for by the ticket – for example, if the ticket’s number calls for you to place three pieces all in a straight line, but you want to make one turn, you’d mark off one of the five spots at the top of the sheet. The first costs you 1 point, the next three cost you 2 points each, and the last one costs 3, after which, you’re stuck.

There are two other bonuses available, which can be worth up to 10 points each. Every player gets a card showing three lettered spots on the board, and will score 10 points if they get their bus route to hit all three of them. There are also two common objective cards in every game, where you have to pick up five students/tourists/workers or visit all three light blue or dark blue tourist sites, worth 10 points each for the first player to achieve it and 6 points for everyone after. Finally, there are four named sites on each map, a university, two tourist sites, and an office building, and when you reach one of those, you get a bonus equal to the number of matching people you’ve picked up in total to that point in the game.

It’s a lot of scoring rules, but the game play itself is simple and quick. Flip the next ticket. Add to your route, from the endpoint, matching the shape given by the ticket number and the guide on your scoresheet. You place those pieces, marking off everyone you pick up and every building you cross on your sheet, and if your route ends at a traffic light, you get to place a bonus piece for free. After twelve rounds, you’re done – add up your points (six categories), make your deductions (two), and you get your total. For two people it can take under a half an hour; for four, the most I’ve played with, it can take 45-50 minutes.

I do think the game shines at four players; the London map is a little better than the New York one, because it’s wider and gives you more flexibility. It’s worst with three, as the New York map gets too crowded, although I haven’t tried London with five. It’s probably fine for players 10 and up, maybe even as young as 8 if they know games, and I love the way the game encourages cognitive flexibility. You can also play this online at Board Game Arena, which has a great implementation. I think it’s likely to make my best games of 2022 list when I do that in December.

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→ August 30, 2022
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SCOUT.

SCOUT was one of the three finalists for this year’s Spiel des Jahres award, losing out on the honor to the great game Cascadia, and just became widely available in the U.S. this summer with a new print run. It’s a small-box game from the Japanese publisher Oink, whose other tiny-box games include Deep Sea Adventure and A Fake Artist Goes to New York, and is their best title yet – a smart, abstract card game that’s very easy to teach but offers huge replay value.

In SCOUT, players receive hands from a deck of cards numbered from 1 through 10, with two numbers on each card, so it has a different value depending on its orientation. The dealer deals out the entire deck of 45 cards (removing a few for player counts below 5), and each player looks at their hand without rearranging any cards. You have to fight that instinct to sort them, which is difficult for most people. You can only flip your entire hand upside down, so you have two choices for your starting hand.

During the game, players will try to play sets (cards with the same value) or runs (cards in sequential value, ascending or descending) of greater value than whatever set/run is currently on the table, playing only cards that are adjacent within their hands. A set beats a run, if the number of cards in each is the same; a set or run of more cards than what’s currently on the table always wins; and if the type and number are the same, you need higher card values to beat the active set/run. So two 9s beats two 8s, a 5-4-3 run beats a 4-3-2 run, but a 9-8 run doesn’t beat a 2-2 set.

If you can play something better than what’s on the table, you take the current active set/run and put them face down in front of you, earning one point per card thus captured at the end of the round. If you can’t or don’t want to beat the active set/run, you can “scout,” taking one card from either end of the active group (but not the middle) and putting it in your hand, anywhere your like, oriented either way. The player who played that active set/run then receives a one-point token from the supply. This is the key to the game – taking the right cards to create new sets or runs in your hand, and doing so in a way that can create further sets or runs when you remove other cards by playing them.

Each player also has one “scout and show” token, usable once per round, where they can do both actions in the same turn – take one card from the table, then play a new set or run to beat and capture the active one. The round ends when one player has no hand cards remaining, or if all players scout and the turn passes back to the player who originally played the set/run on the table. Players get one point per captured card, one per token received from other players scouting their cards, and then deduct one point for every card left in their hand (except for the player whose set/run ended the round). The game continues with one round per player, so everyone gets to be the start player once, after which you add up all your points from all rounds.

SCOUT is incredibly easy to teach, and quick to play, working really well at 4-5 players; I actually haven’t tried it with 2, because there are a bunch of extra rules that I think will make it far less fun and simple. There’s some strategy to when you choose to take cards, and how you integrate them into your hand to create new sets/runs and perhaps set up further sets/runs after you’ve played something, while you also have to keep an eye on opponents’ hands to see if anyone is getting close to playing their last card. Full games take a half hour or so once everyone has the hang of things. The list price is $23, but Oink’s second printing of SCOUT sold out almost immediately; I sprinted to their booth on my first day at Gen Con to secure a copy because I was sure this would happen. If you can get a copy somehow, or are willing to wait for the next print run, it’s a definite winner, with bonus points for the easy teach and for its portability.

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→ August 25, 2022
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Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a madcap adventure, a martial-arts action film, a dark comedy, a sci-fi romp, bursting at every seam with ideas and dad jokes. It’s a brilliant work of screenwriting, carried by a career performance from the always wonderful Michelle Yeoh – who nearly wasn’t even in the film. (You can rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, etc.)

The film, written and directed by the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert, who also directed the bawdy video for Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What”), follows Evelyn (Yeoh), a harried, unhappy laundromat owner, married to the hapless Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). They have a daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and Evelyn’s estranged father, Gong Gong (James Hong, who turned 91 during filming), who is just arriving from Hong Kong. Evelyn is preparing a welcome party for her father while also staring down piles of receipts for an upcoming IRS audit (with Jamie Lee Curtis playing the tax authority’s agent). It’s clear that Evelyn is unhappy across the board in her life, but while the two are in the elevator at the IRS offices, Waymond suddenly changes and begins telling Evelyn that theirs is just one universe among many in the multiverse, and in his (the Alphaverse), people can verse-jump, gaining special skills from their parallel selves – but one person, Jobu Tupaki, has used this to accumulate immense power and is threatening to destroy all universes at once. It’s up to Evelyn, our universe’s Evelyn specifically, to save them all.

Part of the genius of this script is its combination of highbrow philosophical questions with lowbrow humor. The difference between existentialism and nihilism, with the former holding that the only meaning in life is created by the individual while the latter views life as meaningless, full-stop, is at the core of the movie; Jobu Tupaki sees and experiences all universes simultaneously, and thus believes that there is no meaning anywhere, only pain. (I don’t think there’s a Major League reference here, but I also wouldn’t say it’s impossible given some of the other allusions here, including one to a 1990s alternative song that is so perfectly integrated into the dialogue I had to pause the movie just to admire it.) Jobu is the film’s Bazarov, accumulating followers in a sort of nihilist cult, even as she seems to be speeding towards her own destruction.

The Daniels originally envisioned Jackie Chan in the main role, but rewrote the script to make the lead character a woman, with Yeoh their first choice, and the decision to re-center the film around not just a woman but a mother and an immigrant changes one of the film’s core messages. Evelyn is asked to run the family business and manage the family, to handle the finances and the relationships and organize this ridiculous party for a father who disowned her decades earlier when she chose Waymond and his dubious financial prospects against her parents’ wishes. Of course she has to save the universe: She’s a mother. If this wasn’t written as a commentary on the modern working American mother, who is expected to do it all and 20% more, it sure as hell plays like one – and Yeoh never lets us forget it, with an undercurrent of stress on her face throughout almost the entire movie. It’s a tour de force of a performance, one that lets her show tremendous range, and I’m going to hazard the opinion that it’s the best thing she’s ever done, even though I know I haven’t seen most of her performances because she’s been extensively pigeonholed since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Look at her filmography – it’s a sad commentary on the industry’s narrow view of Asian-American actors, and I haven’t even mentioned that this is Quan’s first film role in 20 years after he retired due to the lack of interesting parts offered to him.

The movie is also highly, consistently funny, from the allusions to wordplay to some gross-out jokes to some of the bizarre parallel universes we see, like the one where people have hot dogs for fingers, or the one where there are no people, just rocks. The sheer audacity of much of the humor, often right in the middle of a huge action sequence or a big emotional scene, helps some of the goofier jokes land, and even makes what is probably the grossest gag in the film much more acceptable. It feels like a film written by two people who never said no to the other’s wackiest ideas, and in this milieu, where we’re suspending disbelief to allow for its premise of travel between parallel universes, that sort of humor is almost a requirement. I do think the Daniels missed an opportunity by not having Eels or at least Mark Oliver Everett on the soundtrack, though.

I thought the story here ended exactly where it should, and the script gets to that point in a reasonable and not too predictable fashion, although it does involve a big downshift from the intensity of the first ¾ of the film. There’s yet one more theme that comes up in the back half of the film that further informs the ending, although discussing that would involve a significant spoiler; I’ll go as far as saying that I thought that was handled perfectly and hope those of you who’ve seen it know what I’m addressing. I doubt I’m going to find ten films this year that I liked more than this, or five performances by actresses I like more than Yeoh’s. It’s just a fantastic film in almost every way.

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→ July 22, 2022
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Los Angeles eats, 2022 edition.

I’ll start with the two remarkable meals I had in Los Angeles, starting with Pizzeria Sei, which has already received quite a bit of good press for their incredible “Tokyo-style Neapolitan” pizzas. I had the funghi, with fior di latte, several types of mushrooms, entire cloves of garlic, pecorino, oregano, and thyme. This might be in the top five of pizzas I’ve ever had, from the ingredients to that incredible, airy dough, perfectly baked, just a little charred on the edges and spotted on the underside. I did take the garlic cloves off before eating it, because I am a 49-year-old man who will sweat garlic out of my pores for two days if I eat all that, but the garlic/thyme flavor combination is one of my favorites to have with mushrooms – and those were exceptionally high quality, with cremini, shiitake, and I’m pretty sure porcini on there. I would eat any pizza these folks make given how good the dough is.

Sushi-Tama was my splurge meal for the trip, which I think I earned after we got through ten rounds. It’s one of those sushi places where the fish arrives daily on planes from Japan (and, as my server informed me, elsewhere around the world) and where the staff all pronounces everything as if they’re native speakers. I stuck to nigiri and a mozuku seaweed salad, which was itself unlike any other seaweed salad I’d ever had. It wasn’t bright green and vaguely briny, but dark olive (I’ve had that before) and extremely vinegary. Enough about the seaweed, though … the fish was comparable to the best I’ve ever had. I would especially recommend the kinme dai, golden eye snapper served with a little lime zest and salt. Its slightly higher oil content gave it more flavor than the madai, true snapper that was one of the daily specials. I also tried the nogoduro, fresh sea perch that they serve lightly seared, a new fish to me; the anago, salt-water eel; and the medium-fatty tuna, which the server actually recommended even over the much more expensive, fattier tuna cut. Twelve pieces of nigiri plus the seaweed salad was under $100, which I think is a bargain by L.A. standards.

Tacos Baja was my first meal after landing, Enseneda-style tacos, burritos, and other dishes mostly revolving around fried shrimp and fish. I kept it simple, getting two fish tacos with beans and rice. The fish was baja-style (of course), very crispy with a beer batter, served with a giant amount of shredded cabbage, salsa, and white sauce. There was so much stuff on the taco I could barely fold the thing, but the important part is that the fish was good and perfectly fried so it stayed moist in the center. I probably should have skipped the rice and beans and tried another taco. They have three locations, one in LA proper and two in Whittier.

Ronan on West Melrose is a pizzeria with a bunch of small plates and three other mains on the menu, although I was just there for the pizza. Ronan’s dough is actually lighter and fluffier than Sei’s, or really any Neapolitan place I have tried – enough that I’m not sure you’d even call it Neapolitan any more, although it’s still great, just too airy for that style. I had the Sweet Cheeks – guanciale, ricotta forte, and black pepper honey. It was sort of a salt-and-pepper bomb, although that was good after I’d been out at the Futures Game for several hours. The dough was the real star, though. I felt like I just had delicious salty bread for dinner. With a little bacon. It turns out that the owner of Pizzeria Sei previously worked at Ronan, although I think he’s surpassed his former employers.

Angry Egret Dinette is set back in a courtyard off Broadway in the Old Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, so it’s not visible from the road, which meant I drove past it twice before just parking and walking to find it. This Beard-nominated spot has a large patio seating area and a take-out window, offering breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with inside seating available at some point in the past but perhaps not currently. I went with their shrimp po’boy, fried shrimp (and a lot of them) with cabbage slaw, salsa negra, pico de gallo, and avocado. Salsa negra is made from chiles mecos, a type of chipotle pepper, which is itself a dried and smoked jalapeño; mecos are ripened for a longer period, giving them a deeper red color, and then smoked for a longer period as well. To make salsa negra, you fry the chiles mecos in oil for several minutes until they turn dark brown, and then add garlic, salt, sugar, at the very least, with some recipes calling for vinegar, cumin, other spices, even soy sauce. Whatever Angry Egret uses, my Italian-American palate was not ready for that heat – this was very spicy, delicious, but whoa boy that was hot. The shrimp were quite fresh and fried just enough to cook them, still tender throughout. I liked this combination of flavors but I can’t pretend I tasted everything with my face on fire.

One breakfast spot to recommend – Aroma Tea & Coffee, which offers a smoked salmon “stack,” their take on a benedict that replaces that awful Canadian ham product with smoked salmon and replaces the English muffin with a crispy potato pancake. I’ve had this combination before, including over at Square One in LA, and I’ll never not order this if I see it on a menu. The salmon here was solid, which is the main differentiator – if that’s not up to par, the whole dish fails.

I did try two coffee places recommended by a friend in the specialty coffee business. Kumquat, over in Highland Park, brings in specialty coffees from small roasters all over the country, and focuses on espresso rather than brewed coffee, although they do offer a drip coffee each day. They do a daily blend for their regular espresso and a single-origin espresso that changes daily. I love the space, but there’s no indoor seating at the moment, just a shaded patio. They also offer some baked goods; I enjoyed the blueberry cornmeal scone, which was nice and crumbly and not too sweet, so it didn’t overpower the coffee. Go Get Em Tiger has multiple locations and a sizable food menu, although I just had a drip coffee, their Ethiopia Yukro, a tart, fruity coffee that’s less citrusy than beans from other Ethiopian regions that I’ve tried. They don’t have wifi, if you’re curious, which did matter as I was trying to work on draft recaps by that point, although I still recommend the coffee.

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→ June 28, 2022
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Cha Cha Real Smooth.

Cha Cha Real Smooth subverts many of the conventions of the rom-com, throwing two people together in a situation that might lead to love and/or sex in most movies, but thanks to some smart, subtle twists to the formula, ends up a coming-of-age movie about being in your 20s.

It’s the second film from writer-director Cooper Raiff, whose 2020 debut Shithouse received very positive reviews, but this time he’s working with a bigger budget and much bigger names in the credits, including Dakota Johnson, who plays Domino, the single mom who lives near Raiff’s recent Tulane graduate Andrew. Domino is about ten years older than Andrew is, and has a daughter, Lola, who is autistic. (She’s played by autistic actress Vanessa Burghardt, making her first appearance in film or TV.) They all meet at a bat mitzvah, where Andrew, who works at a fast-food place in the mall called Meat Sticks, shows a knack for getting kids out on the dance floor, leading Domino to bet him a grand that he can’t get Lola to dance. He does, which leads some of the moms at the party to ask him to be the DJ and party starter for their kids’ b’nei mitzvah, a job that might overstate his readiness for prime time but also keeps him and Domino in each other’s orbits. She has a fiancé who’s often working out of town, while Andrew has a girlfriend studying in Barcelona. Andrew, meanwhile, still lives with his mom (Leslie Mann), stepdad Greg (Brad Garrett), and younger brother David (Evan Assante), the last of whom is trying to land his first kiss with his girlfriend, for which Andrew gives him a substantial amount of often-dubious advice.

Raiff has created some fantastic characters here, and while the dialogue can be a bit clunky, he seems to have a knack for seeing how different characters might react to and interact with each other. The Andrew-Domino dynamic is the beating heart of the film, especially in the way that Andrew tries to use his charisma on Domino and charm her the way he might have charmed women in college – to which she’s a little susceptible, but not in the way that he hopes. The same trick doesn’t work as well on everyone else, though, which is a part of Andrew’s challenge in the film: He thinks he’s a fully formed adult, and knows the ways of the world, but of course he doesn’t and is going to stub his toe or worse as he learns those lessons.

There’s a lot going on in Cha Cha Real Smooth, and it doesn’t always land. Andrew’s mom is bipolar, and had a manic episode at some point in the recent past, but that detail is dropped halfway through the film and never really returns, unless you want to count that as the reason she married Greg – but I don’t think that adds up. You can see where the Barcelona girlfriend thing is going pretty quickly, and the story would have worked just as well without it. It’s also really unclear why Andrew continues to get DJ/Party Starter gigs after his first fiasco, other than plot convenience, although it does lead to a very satisfying scene at what I presume is his final fiasco while also setting up a great denouement with the closest thing Andrew has to an antagonist. I also wish Mann and Garrett, who are both great in small roles, had a bit more to do, although the way the Andrew/Greg conflict (Andrew is just a dick to his stepdad for no apparent reason other than that he exists) resolves is also satisfying. I’ll add my wife’s criticism here, with which I agree, that this movie deserved better music; there are some good names in the soundtrack that indicate an attempt to get the right kind of indie artists into the film, but the songs are not that memorable.

Lola is a critical part of the story and the evolution of Andrew and Domino’s relationship, but to Raiff’s credit, she’s more than just a prop, and develops a relationship with Andrew that shows the audience more about each of them. Burghardt plays her like a whole person – she’s described it as portraying things she’s learned not to do as an autistic person. It’s the best kind of representation: A character with a disability is an integral part of the story, has normal interactions with other characters, building a real relationship with one of them, and deals with some of the problems that they might face in the real world – in this case, bullying by other kids. Lola is part of the fabric of the film, and her autism is not a plot point, but simply a characteristic.

If Raiff didn’t stick the landing here, Cha Cha Real Smooth would not have worked – it could have become too precious, or just unrealistic, with even small changes in how the Andrew/Domino relationship ends or where those two characters are in the coda that takes place six months later. But Raiff does get that part right, which helps mitigate some of the things that didn’t work in the middle of the film. It’s also frequently very funny, and Raiff has very good comedic timing that will probably carry him a long way. I don’t know that I need to see more of him playing this sort of character, but I enjoyed the two hours I spent with him. Your mileage may vary.

Cha Cha Real Smooth is streaming on Apple TV+.

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→ June 26, 2022
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The Enchanted.

I picked up a copy of Rene Denfeld’s debut novel, The Enchanted, just because I liked the look of the cover – it was one of the Harper Perennial Olive editions, with smaller dimensions and some subtle but lovely art on the cover. I’m rarely so suckered in by good artwork on a book, maybe taking one off the shelf but almost never just plain buying the book because of it; I figured at worst it would look nice on the shelves (and it wasn’t expensive, since it was a gently used copy from Changing Hands). And my God, am I glad I did. What a wonderful, ethereal novel, one that pulls hope out of the depths of its setting’s despair.

The narrator of The Enchanted is an unnamed prisoner on death row who cannot speak, and who views the world around him through a magical lens of sorts – not as something unreal, but as a world of possibilities, with hope and promise for other people even though he has no chance of either for himself. He explains the story of one of the other men on death row, known just as York, and the investigator, known just as the Lady, who works for York’s lawyers and tries to find information on his past that might earn him a reprieve from the electric chair. Within these stories, the narrator talks about one or two other denizens of the same ward, the incredibly brutal life in the prison, and, very obliquely, about how he came to be on death row, although he never explains what his initial crime was.

The prose starts out seeming a bit precious, what with the lack of proper names for most people in the book, but it suits Denfeld’s incredible gift for storytelling. The narrator’s view of the world comes through in the faint unreality around everything in the novel, even the graphic violence that appears quite frequently, as is fitting for a prison of this sort, where prisoners are killed and raped – and sometimes guards are as well – while no one on the outside really cares, because one more dead prisoner is one fewer mouth for the taxpayers to feebly feed.

The real narrative greed comes in the Lady’s story – her quest for answers about York, about how he came to become a brutal killer who’d get the death penalty, but also how she came to pursue this job, and what wounds this particular search opens up in her. She has an uneasy bond with the defrocked priest who serves as the chaplain for the death row inmates, if they choose to utilize him, which forms a weirdly sweet undercurrent in a novel of so much sorrow, even though her story turns out to be quite dark. Her efforts for York are complicated by the fact that he wants to die, and has asked his lawyers to stop making efforts to spare his life, so when she learns information that might be enough to get his sentence commuted, she has to decide whether to use it or abide by his wishes.

Denfeld worked as a chief investigator for a public defender’s office, often on death-row cases, and shows incredible empathy for her characters here, recognizing that there is humanity in everyone. Even the people who do the worst things might still have humanity in them. They’ve often have had the worst things done to them. Maybe that cost them their humanity. Denfeld isn’t writing them off. Neither is the Lady. And where it all ends up is quite something – perhaps I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t, not really, and the point Denfeld makes with the final reveal becomes the core message of the entire book. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say it’s a plea for empathy and understanding, and I found it extremely moving.

Next up: Jason Kander’s Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD.

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→ May 27, 2022
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Eating to Extinction.

Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them makes its important point – that declining biodiversity will impact our food supply in multiple ways – in unusual fashion: Rather than arguing the point in a straight narrative, Saladino gives the reader a tour of many of the rare foods at risk of extinction from environmental degradation, globalization, even over-regulation in some cases, presenting the scientific case for preserving them but relying more on emotional appeals. We’ll miss these foods if they’re gone, or maybe we’ll want to try them more for knowing they exist and might disappear.

The strongest arguments here come in the various sections on plants, because of the evolutionary case Saladino offers. Take the banana, probably the best-known sustainability problem in our food supply: Most of the bananas sold in the world are Cavendish bananas, every plant of which is genetically identical, because the plants themselves are sterile and must be propagated via clones. This deprives the plants of the opportunity to develop new defenses to pathogens or environmental changes via evolution; mutations are discouraged in monoculture farming. The Cavendish itself is now defenseless against a real threat to its existence: Panama disease, which previously wiped out Gros Michel banana plantations, has mutated and is in the process of wiping out Cavendish plantations as well. The banana you know and love is, to put it bluntly, fucked.

Saladino offers examples from the other side of the evolutionary equation, identifying rare fruits, vegetables, and other plants like wild coffee that offer both the genetic diversity these plants will need to survive – forever, even after our species is gone – and more immediate benefits to us, such as unique flavors or cultural legacies. Coffee is struggling in the face of climate change that is driving it to higher altitudes and pests like the fungus that causes coffee-leaf rust; the wild coffees of Ethiopia may provide genetic solutions, at least until the next crisis comes along. There’s a wild maize plant in Mexico that fixes its own nitrogen through a symbiotic relationship with a bacterium, a crop that could help address the world’s growing need for food. The wheat we’ve selected for easy harvesting and processing is close to a monoculture, and it wouldn’t take much to collapse the annual crop, even though there are hundreds of thousands of known varieties of wild wheat, like the wild emmer wheat of eastern Turkey known as kavilca.

He explores the impact that even so-called ‘sustainable’ solutions often have on wild populations, and how what works for our food supply in the short term leaves it even more vulnerable in the long term. We’ve nearly wiped out wild Atlantic salmon and are well on our way to doing the same in the Pacific, while farmed salmon fill our stores and plates, but when those farmed salmon get loose from their aquaculture pens, they interbreed with wild populations and can reduce genetic diversity, leaving those fish more vulnerable to diseases.

Some of these endangered foods are more closely tied to culture than to global food needs or biodiversity, such as the honey gathered by the native Hadza people in Tanzania, where local bee and bird populations are threatened both by habitat destruction and the loss of symbiotic relationships they’ve developed with humans. Certain birds would identify hives in baobab trees that contained honey, and humans would hear their calls and bring down the nests. The humans would eat the honey and parts of the honeycomb, while the birds would wait nearby to consume what the humans did not. This entire way of life is disappearing as native populations lose their land and become assimilated into urban life and dependent on processed foods.

Along the way, Saladino explains (several times) the presence of various seed banks around the world, including the critical one on the island of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, and the two great success stories of the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen in artificial fertilizer and the Green Revolution – the post-WWII adoption of high-yielding varieties of cereal and grain crops, notably dwarf wheat and rice, along with scientific methods of increasing yields through those artificial fertilizers and massive monocultures. (Not mentioned is how Haber’s research, which has helped accelerate climate change, also led to the development of Zyklon-B.) There’s quite a bit of science in here, which does help move things along in what amounts to a series of mini-essays on dozens of foods.

Saladino’s reference-work approach isn’t entirely successful for that last reason; sometimes, it’s like reading an encyclopedia. It’s often an interesting one, and Saladino went to all of these places to try the endangered foods and eat them with the locals who grow or gather or develop them. But such a broad look at the subject guarantees that some essays will be duds, and by the time we get to the end, Saladino’s epilogue, “think like a Hadza,” is so far removed from the opening essay on those people and their honey-gathering that the throughline connecting all of these foods has started to fray a bit. It works best as a call to action – we need to find and value these products, to keep them alive and protect those habitats or those cultures, and to stop relying on these monocultures to feed ourselves. You can find other wheat flours even at Whole Foods and similar stores, while there might even be local mills or growers near you offering unconventional (and thus genetically distinct) flours and grains and beans. Our diets will be richer for it, and we’ll be taking a small step towards protecting the future of humanity before we scorch the planet growing the same five crops.

Next up: I just finished Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

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→ May 9, 2022
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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the best 21st century books I’ve read, an epic work of historical and contemporary fiction full of three-dimensional characters, evocative places, and an exploration of how personal and generational trauma echoes through years and family trees. Winner of this year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction, it’s an actual heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

The novel follows two stories in the same family line, focusing on Ailey Pearl Garfield, who is three years old when the novel opens and a graduate student by the time it closes. She’s one of three sisters born into a well-off Black family in an unnamed northern city, but whose roots are in Chicasetta, a small town in rural Georgia that, as we learn over the course of the novel, went from Creek territory to slave plantation to village, with Ailey’s ancestors there throughout. Her narrative follows the traumas of her modern family, especially those of her sister, Lydia, and herself, as we learn early in the novel that both were molested by their grandfather over a period of several years.

Their ancestry traces back to the Creek people who originally lived on that land until white colonoists tricked them out of it, eventually kicking them off the land and building a brutal cotton plantation there. The primary slave owner, Samuel Princhard, was especially vile and his crimes seem to pass through subsequent generations like a genetic inheritance, although eventually some of the slaves escape the plantation and create new lives for themselves after the Civil War. Ailey’s connection to her ancestors runs through three aged relatives still living in Chicasetta, especially her great-uncle Root, a former academic and expert on Black history who loves to debate the relative merits of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. When Ailey makes her meandering way to graduate school, after an abortive attempt at pre-med to follow in her father’s and her oldest sister’s footsteps, it is Uncle Root who both opens doors for her in a predominantly white world and who coaches her through the worst moments. Along the way, characters die, come in and out of Ailey’s life, and dredge up old memories, all of which collides when Ailey’s research into her own lineage as part of her dissertation runs headlong into Princhard’s story and the many people who lived, worked, and died on that plantation.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois runs to nearly 800 pages, but Dr. Jeffers has created an immersive world – two of them, really – where, for me at least, the reader is as close to the scenes as possible. Few writers can evoke images and create characters this real and solid, let alone in a debut novel. Ailey and Uncle Root are the standouts, but they’re just the head of a wide cast, and even many of the secondary characters are still memorable and move beyond stock status. Jeffers also weaves a discussion of intersectionality throughout the book, mostly that of Black feminism and the roles of women in Black American society as well as in American society at large – and yes, the phenomenon of white women leaving Black women behind in their fight for rights appears several times, including in probably the weakest character in the book, Rebecca, who only appears briefly near the end.

The historical passages in Chicasetta, on the plantation and before the white settlers seized the land, have the same gauzy feel of some of the great works of Black American literature set in that time period, including Beloved, with elements of magical realism at play. Jeffers centers the slaves in the story, treating the brutality of their lives as a matter of fact, which I found increased the horror of it – this was just an accepted part of their reality, living under a capricious, vengeful god in human form. She still does give time to the slaveowning family, but that’s because telling their story becomes a critical part of telling Ailey’s.

Ailey herself is a beautifully flawed, realistic character, often exasperating in her choices or even words but ultimately the hero of the work – and the hero of her family, the one who doesn’t just survive her trials but steps forward to reclaim the family’s legacy and take it forward for future generations. I imagine someone will try to turn The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois into a movie, but this book has the rich storytelling of the best narrative television series we’ve seen. It deserves the longer treatment, or none at all. And of the candidates I’ve read for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – which includes the very good Hell of a Book, by Jason Mott, winner of the National Book Award – this is by far my favorite.

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→ April 15, 2022
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Playground.

I have what appears to be a false memory of an American movie critic  Playground, Belgium’s submission for this past year’s Academy Award for Best International Film, was the best movie of 2021. It made the Oscars’ shortlist, but didn’t get to the final five, and after a very limited theatrical release here this winter it hit streaming (amazon • iTunes • Google) this Tuesday. It is a marvel of small cinema – it tells a simple story, with few characters and no gimmicks, in under 80 minutes, and it’s just devastating.

Playground follows two kids, Nora (Maya Vanderbeque), aged 7, and her brother Abel, about 10, and takes place entirely at their school – mostly in the schoolyard, which is a brutal place, and Abel even tells Nora that he’s going to beat up some of the new kids with the school bully, Antoine. Nora has a very hard time leaving her father on the first day of school, and ends up clinging to her brother, which causes Antoine and the other bullies to turn on Abel. When Nora sees this, she wants to tell her father, but Abel orders her not to, for fear it will make things worse – and, it turns out, it does.

First time writer/director Laura Wandel shot nearly all of Playground at the kids’ height, and in soft focus, so Nora in particular is always centered in the shot and the story. Nora’s anguish is the beating heart of the story; the adults who ostensibly run the school let her down at nearly every turn, and even when she believes she’s doing the right thing by protecting her brother, he turns on her as well, blaming her for his switch from bully to victim and for his growing isolation from the other kids. Wandel declines to shift the focus to the adults – when we see them in full, it’s because they have bent down to talk to the children on their level – because the failure of the teachers and administrators is not the point of the story. It’s simply assumed. The adults are often kept out of frame entirely, and sometimes their words are muffled, to further evoke the overwhelming disorientation of being a young child in a new environment where the rules are unclear and adults don’t always fulfill their obligations to you.

Vanderbeque gives the best performance by a child actor I’ve seen since Brooklynn Prince’s in 2017’s The Florida Project. Her wide-eyed look conveys fear and determination in turns, and her facial expressions reveal the inner torment Nora faces as she realizes that none of her actions have unequivocally positive consequences. When Nora’s choices lead not to Abel’s liberation from bullying, but to his ostracism and her own isolation, Vanderbeque’s features tighten up as the character holds back tears, and if you’re a parent, just watching her doing that might rip you apart. Nora is forced to make decisions she’s not equipped to make, which only deepens her torment, and after several turns of the screw we see her start to feel the effects of this pressure. She’s still just seven and a young-looking seven at that, so despite her role as the protagonist, eventually her youth and immaturity take over and she begins lashing out at classmates and her brother – more so after her own few friends start taunting her over her brother’s unpopularity.

At a taut 72 minutes, Playground can move through its story without ever letting its foot off the gas – it’s as tense as a thriller and never telegraphs its direction, which also underscores that feeling of dread that most children experience in such apparently hostile settings. The playground of the school constitutes so much of the kids’ experience that the film’s original title, Un monde, means “a world.” It’s a nasty, brutish place, and perhaps Wandel’s way of showing us a microcosm of what awaits Nora and Abel when they grow up. You’re just hoping they make it okay until the bell rings at the end of the last class.

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