review

Review: Kindred, Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a novel that will hijack your mind, body and spirit for a while. And it will not return them in nice condition.

Seriously, this book will break you.

It begins when Dana, a black woman living in 1976 California, gets transported to a plantation in 1815 Maryland. She saves the life of an impetuous and accident-prone boy, Rufus Weylin, who is the son of the plantation owner. She learns that he will go on to father one of her ancestors, and it’s up to Dana to ensure he survives long enough to sire the child.

Butler’s genius is on display from the opening pages, and Kindred is perhaps her most powerful novel. Understandably, the antebellum south is a dangerous place for Dana, but the nature of her time jumps is unpredictable and equally hazardous. She doesn’t know when she’ll be displaced, or where she’ll be taken to, so when she’s back in 1976, she never leaves her home or drives a car for fear of what might happen.

This is a brilliant move on Butler’s part. Without agency in the present, Dana becomes enslaved in both timelines, simulating the forced relocation and dehumanization of slavery. It’s demoralizing, and to survive, Dana must endure the injustices and humiliations of history.

She remarks, “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”

However, Dana is the perfect foil for the plantation’s owner. She is educated and strong-willed — a writer who “dresses like a man” and is as much a culture shock to the people of the plantation as they are to her.

Kindred is the most horrifying yet pitch perfect novel I’ve ever read. It was impossible to put down, but at the same time I couldn’t wait until it was over. The hardest part to endure, for me, was the banality of it all. The atrocities are accepted as a matter of course, and for all his cruelty and ignorance, the plantation owner, Tom Weylin, is more dispassionate than hateful — at least relative to other slave owners at the time.

“[He] wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves,” Dana observes. “He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.”

The systemic nature of slavery makes it all the more horrifying. It’s not merely the theft of another’s freedom, but the institutional structure that codifies injustice and the extrajudicial violence that enforces the status quo.

More than four decades after its publication, Kindred remains an unflinching study of America’s greatest shame — and an indictment of a culture still unwilling to reckon with its past.

Review: The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky

The Broken  Earth Trilogy

N.K. Jemisin

“Just because something is horrible does not make it any less true,” the narrator of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy tells us in the closing pages of her epic tale. This would appear to be the guiding philosophy for the series, which takes an unflinching look at social injustice, environmental destruction and a global economy built on, and reliant upon, exploitation.

Dealing with reality is the only option for Jemisin’s characters, because survivors of a climate apocalypse don’t have the luxury of alternative facts.

Having reviewed the first novel in the series, The Fifth Season, I was going to discuss the second and third installments (The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky) separately, but I was so immersed in this world that I finished Sky before I could even begin to write about Gate.

To briefly summarize, the Broken Earth trilogy follows Essun, a mother with special talents who wants to improve a broken world for her young daughter. She lives in a future where Earth has become a barren, inhospitable planet prone to sudden tectonic cataclysms and unpredictable seasons.

When we first meet Essun, her husband has murdered their infant son and kidnapped their daughter, Nassun. This sends Essun on a quest to rescue her only living child. Both Essun and Nassun are “orogenes” — a race of people who can manipulate the earth’s energy to magical effect, such as quelling or generating earthquakes, or creating protective energy shields.

Orogenes are both feared by the majority (known as “stills”) and necessary to the survival of the community. Therefore, orogenes usually live only as long as they are useful, but as Jemisin writes in Gate, “being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.”

This results in brutal treatment and ostracization. Being an orogene in the wrong neighborhood can be fatal, and those with little talent are often killed in their youth. Orogenes with advanced skills are sent to special schools akin to the church-run American Indian boarding schools of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This injustice is best encapsulated in the following passage:

“They’re afraid because we exist. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing — so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives.”

Jemisin’s writing is moving, inspirational and tackles social issues without being didactic. She is also honest. There is no happy ending tacked on in the final pages. There is no ultimate justice.

There is no way to completely fix a broken world, even if Essun can successfully end the catastrophic “seasons.”

But beyond the social commentary is a thrilling tale of perseverance, adventure and familial bonds. The scenery is vivid and well-crafted, and the magical system is revealed with minimal exposition. I found the community-building aspects more engaging than the battle sequences, but there are no weaknesses to Jemisin’s game — evidenced by the fact that each installment in the series won the Hugo Award for Best Novel from 2016-2018.

The Broken Earth trilogy is an engrossing epic, but it is also a scathing indictment of humanity’s pathological reliance on exploitation in order to prosper. Fittingly, these novels emerged at a time of rising nationalism and white supremacist activity. Jemisin offers a concise description of the fear fueling these movements:

“There are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors… Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.”

We have seen the deadly consequences of this in recent years. The Broken Earth trilogy may not prescribe a sure-fire remedy to this struggle, but it is a piercing battle call to keep up the fight.

Review: Kill Creek

Scott Thomas

Kill Creek

I would categorize Kill Creek as a cozy horror novel, and I mean that in the best possible way. This is a book built for a windy night and a warm beverage. Sometimes I’m in the mood for a format-busting novel like House of Leaves, Horrorstor or Marabou Stork Nightmares. Other times I’m in the mood for a classic tale, well told, such as Kill Creek.

Scott Thomas plays the hits in his debut novel. He takes on classic themes and pays tribute to a long lineage of gothic/ghost stories: the writer protagonist with a troubled past; a house haunted by an historic injustice; curses that spread like a virus to destroy all infected; and a supernatural presence that preys on its victims’ emotional vulnerabilities.

Our protagonist is Sam McGarver, an author who has had some initial success but has hit a creative dead-end. He spends most of his time teaching at the local university and trying to keep his marriage from falling apart.

Out of the blue, he’s asked to participate in an online publicity stunt–a Halloween sleepover with three other horror authors in one of the most haunted houses in America. Reluctantly, Sam agrees.

Joining him are T.C. Moore, the take-no-shit weaver of extreme horror that likely would have been labeled splatterpunk three decades ago. Sebastian Cole, the elderly statesman/Stephen King type who has had decades of both commercial success and literary street cred. And Daniel Slaughter, who writes young-adult Christian horror with strong moral lessons.

The dynamic between the characters is intriguing, and I enjoyed the action when they were all together for the first time. For me, those were the strongest parts of the book. Unfortunately, their time together at the beginning is too short, and when they reconvene at the house for the final act, they don’t have the emotional bond that would’ve made me more invested in their outcomes.

There are some other shortcomings, such as the characters of Moore and Slaughter. Moore, at least, is an intriguing character, and I wanted more of her at centerstage. For the first half of the novel she’s a badass, but becomes more two-dimensional as the novel progresses. She more or less disappears in the final act, which is a shame.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much to Slaughter’s character. He’s likeable and pitiable when we first meet him, and his affection for his daughter is endearing. There seemed to be a lot of potential there that was left unfulfilled, and I found him to be sadly unbelievable by the end.

Overall, I found Kill Creek very fun and enjoyable, and for the first half of it, I considered it a five-star read. However, the second half really dragged due to an overlong action sequence and predictable plot points.

I was discouraged near the end, but ultimately Thomas delivers a solid ending with an unexpected turn.

Kill Creek was an incredibly fun book to read. It’s a fast and furious adventure as comfortable as a campfire tale. The nights are getting cooler, and pretty soon we’ll be in Halloween season. This is the perfect book to get you in the mood.

Review: The Invited

Jennifer McMahon

The Invited

Jennifer McMahon is one of my favorite contemporary horror authors, and her latest novel, The Invited, is one of her best. This time around McMahon inverts the traditional haunted house tale. Helen and Nate have purchased a plot of land in rural Vermont, unaware that it was so cheap because it’s believed to be haunted by the ghost of Hattie Breckenridge, who had been lynched for witchcraft.

We follow Helen and Nate as they take on the task of building the house themselves, learning as they go, and confronting numerous obstacles—from unwelcoming neighbors, gun-toting spiritualists and the precocious schoolgirl, Olive, whose story, for my money, steals the show.

The Invited is as much Olive’s story as Helen’s, and together they help each other deal with recently lost parents, the distrust of distracted male counterparts and share a love of history, justice and the otherworldly.

As the house takes shape, Helen fills it with artifacts from the many tragedies of Hattie and her extended family—and that’s when the unexpected house guests begin to arrive. Rather than buying a haunted house, they build one. But it turns out it’s not the ghosts Helen and Olive need to fear.

McMahon is a must-read author for horror fans, and The Invited is one of her finest books. I highly recommend this twisted little ghost story with a heart of gold.

I was first introduced to McMahon in 2014 with The Winter People, her first true horror novel after a string of thrillers.

It was a daring time for McMahon to make that transition. The current resurgence in horror literature (in terms of mainstream acceptance) was still a few years away, and despite the greatness of the writing, it wasn’t easy getting a book like that into people’s hands.

Case in point: Gillian Flynn.

I like to say that McMahon did a reverse Flynn. Whereas Flynn wrote two fantastic horror novels, it was a thriller/mystery novel, Gone Girl, that brought her mainstream success. This is not a knock on Gone Girl, but rather a critique of marketing. (See Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix for a deeper discussion of the shift from horror to thriller in the early 1990s.)

So what had changed? Only the design of the book cover and the book’s marketing. Unlike her titular character, Flynn’s dark subject matter hadn’t gone anywhere. But to get it into the hands of more readers, it was packaged differently than her first two books.

It’s refreshing to see Jennifer McMahon take the reverse course. Her first five novels were marketed firmly in the mystery genre, complete with nursery rhyme-ish titles (Promise Not to Tell, Don’t Breathe a Word) and cover art with imperiled girls.

However, the marketing belied the content of these wonderful novels, which were not about young girls being rescued but rather girls finding their strength and courage in terrifying circumstances. Despite the mystery packaging, these novels contained McMahon’s signature blend of spooky no matter the cover art.

It’s delightful to now see her books proudly displayed in the horror section, as I don’t think I’ll ever tire of reading New England ghost stories. Certainly not when they’re as well-written as The Invited.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others

De Beauvoir’s novel of romance and resistance, set against the backdrop of an advancing German war machine, is rich with tension, moral turmoil and philosophy. On the surface, there is a love story between Jean and Helene, but beneath the richly layered text is an Existentialist argument on personal responsibility and collective guilt.

First, we must address the style of writing. The ever-shifting tense and POV is jarring and unsettling, but as the first chapter resolves, it is breathtaking. It had such a profound effect on me that I went back to the beginning and started reading it all over again.

What first felt disjointed was ultimately evocative as it established the characters, setting and emotional tone in a far more effective manner than straight narrative. (I’m not comparing these two books, but an analog would be Slaughterhouse-Five, which is all the more powerful for its disorienting jumps in time and space.)

Beneath the stylized prose is the core of Existential thought: Life does not contain inherent meaning. We do not choose to be born, nor do we choose the conditions into which we are born, yet we are, to an extent, at the mercy of these conditions—whether one is born wealthy or poor, during a time of war and plague or one of peace and prosperity.

Whatever the conditions, the only truly objective fact is that we exist. Now what?

Jean is the son of a wealthy capitalist, but as he reaches adulthood he can’t bear the burden of unearned affluence. He cuts himself off from this family and their money and takes up a trade so as to live as a member of the working class. But as his working-class pals explain to him, he will never belong to that social class because he had the luxury of choosing that life.

So what is Jean’s obligation? Should he benefit from the accident of higher birth? Or should he toil for the sake of a solidarity that he knows he’ll never achieve?

As the Nazis advance across Europe, the debates about class and organized labor shift to whether France should intervene in Austria and Poland.

While those around him argue the virtues of pacifism and nonviolence, Jean offers a counterpoint.

“I’ve learned from this war that there’s as much guilt in sparing blood as in shedding it,” he says.

He argues that while killing German soldiers and French collaborators would make them guilty of murder, they are equally guilty for the Jews being murdered due to their inaction.

This is the moral crux of the novel: Both the actions we take and those that we don’t (either by choice or ignorance) have profound consequences on others, even those we will never meet. Therefore, if it is impossible to act in a way that doesn’t harm others, what is one’s moral obligation?

De Beauvoir has essentially created an Existentialist version of the trolley problem.

Or as Rush sang, “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.”

Another aspect of The Blood of Others that I really appreciate is that it provides a different perspective of WWII. Western culture clings tight to this time period because we see it as the last era of moral absolutism—the last time there was a righteous, uncontested war.

At least that’s how we choose to remember it.

While in hindsight, yes, WWII was a righteous cause, but choosing how to engage with Germany in advance was far more complicated than we think of it today. De Beauvoir shows us a different perspective of Paris both before and during the Occupation, when a western society that valued peace and nonviolence was forced to contend with fascism.

“What could we do if, by living up to the values in which we believed, we brought about their defeat? Were we to become slaves to remain free, or kill to keep our hands clean? Must we lose our freedom because we refused slavery, and sully ourselves with a thousand crimes because we would not kill? I no longer knew.”

The Blood of Others also transcends its era. Though set during WWII, it conveys an important message to our current times. Generally speaking, the west has spent the past 75 years basking in the glory of WWII, and has enjoyed the luxury of moral certitude.

But recently, fascism has taken hold in the west, just as Camus warned us it would at the end of The Plague. In describing how the west was at a crossroads, de Beauvoir could very well be speaking to the U.S. and England during the run-up to the 2016 elections:

“Is it possible to stop a country from committing suicide?”

While de Beauvoir masterfully represents the various arguments for and against France’s entry into the war, she is ultimately an Existentialist. We exist. Now what? The triumvirate of de Beauvoir, Camus and Sartre agreed that the only way for meaning to exist is by imposing it onto an absurd, meaningless reality. If there is as much guilt in sparing blood as in shedding it, Jean decides that it is better to accept that burden after acting on one’s conscience.

“You have not given me peace; but why should I desire peace? You have given me the courage to accept forever the risk and the anguish, to bear my crimes and my guilt, which will rend me eternally. There is no other way.”

Such is the nature of the absurd.

Sinclair Lewis: It Can’t Happen Here

Following the 2016 election, George Orwell’s 1984 was sold out online and rushed into sinclair_lewisanother print edition. Last year’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was a monster hit, and expectations are high for HBO’s stab at Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

If nothing else, the election has made dystopian fiction great again.

There is another classic that should be required reading for our times: Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here.

What sets this 1935 novel apart from the others is that there is no great cataclysm throwing the country into turmoil, and we are not dropped into a future dystopia with little understanding of how we got there. It Can’t Happen Here disturbs by how blasé the descent into fascism can be.

Before delving into the narrative, it’s important to distinguish between political philosophy and the rhetoric of politicians. Having particular opinions about fiscal policy, foreign diplomacy, and tax rates doesn’t make someone evil or racist or fascist.

Political philosophy is something that decent, intelligent people can debate with merit. They can share a common goal, but disagree on how to achieve it.

The rhetoric of politicians, however, is another matter, and this is what is most startling and prescient about It Can’t Happen Here. The novel begins at a Rotary meeting, with a populist speech by anti-suffragette Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, calling for a return to traditional values.

“We don’t want all this high-brow intellectuality, all this book-learning,” she says.

Seated in the crowd is the hero, Doremus Jessup, local newspaperman. He warns the crowd of the dangers of fascism disguised as nationalism, the likes of which was rising in Germany and Italy at the time. When members of the audience dismiss his warnings with the refrain that it can’t happen here, Doremus prophetically retorts, “The hell it can’t.”

It’s been more than 80 years since the book was published, but the populist rhetoric is eerily familiar. The outside challenger to FDR is Buzz Windrip, who, parroting the words of his chief strategist, appeals to the “Forgotten Men” who don’t feel appreciated now that women have the right to vote. Windrip goes after other populist bogeymen: labor unions, minorities, Commies, and the press.

While that is the rhetoric of modern Republicans, it is not proprietary to any party. Windrip runs on a socialist platform in the novel, and for a real-world example, read Democrat George Wallace’s disgusting 1963 inauguration address (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”).

As Lewis writes, “nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down.”

During the campaign, Jessup muses that President Roosevelt and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (the first woman appointed to a U.S. cabinet position) “were far too lacking in circus tinsel and general clownishness to succeed at this critical hour of the nation’s hysteria, when the electorate wanted a ringmaster-revolutionist like Senator Windrip.”

Jessup can’t understand Windrip’s appeal and how he can draw such large audiences. “The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.”

In one speech, Windrip vows “to make America a proud, rich land again.”

Cue the dystopia. Once empowered, Windrip erodes civil liberties and Jessup is torn between fighting as part of the resistance or fleeing to Canada. Resistance fighters (or those simply accused of this) are herded into camps.

Remember, this novel was published in 1935: before Pearl Harbor, before we learned of the concentration camps.

While Lewis can’t match Orwell, Atwood, and Bradbury for creative totalitarian societies, he bests them in verisimilitude—what Hannah Arendt would later call the “banality of evil.” There are no two-way TV monitors or book-burning firemen, but there are heavily armed militias editing all newspaper articles and “encouraging” loyalty from businesses and citizens.

Inevitably, there are camps, and there is a resistance force… but it is clear to Jessup that the resistance has come too late. What good could pamphlets do against propaganda? Not surprisingly, fatigue and hopelessness set in: “What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after righteousness in a world which so hated righteousness?”

Fast-forward 80-plus years, where daily scandals, transgressions, incoherent Tweets, and deceptions have become mundane. The inundation has numbed us to the absurdity. Whether it’s noble or naive, Lewis, through Jessup, encourages us to soldier on, even if the cause is lost.

Jessup answers his own query about why one should seek “after righteousness”: “He never did find any particularly good reason. He simply went on.”

Review: On Tyranny

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny is the most terrifying thing you’ll read this HalloweenOn_Tyranny (outside of a presidential Twitter feed, that is). This is the book for this moment, and even if you’re not much on politics or nonfiction reading, please set aside the hour it will take to read this book.

That’s not too much to ask for the defense of democracy.

Saving western civilization as we know it is a tall order for such a short book, but for On Tyranny, Snyder, a history professor at Yale University, doesn’t waste space on academic masturbation. He draws lessons from the 20th century for guidance on how to defend democracy in 2017 and beyond. This book is direct, intense, and a call to action.

The result is an instruction manual with 20 tips for fighting back against tyranny, ranging from the minute (“Make eye contact and small talk”), to the macro (“Take responsibility for the face of the world”). But even the most ambitious items on this to-do list come with practical, everyday advice:

“Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future.”

Lest you think this is a partisan polemic, Snyder does not target parties, but principles. Historically, the enemies of democracy have come from all over the political spectrum. Preventing tyranny requires a multi-party system and a vigilant, informed electorate.

“Any election can be the last,” Snyder writes, “or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.”

Other advice includes protecting a free press, being wary of paramilitary groups and coded speech, and actively reading a wide variety of material—preferably on paper, not a screen. After all, interactive screens were tools of oppression in classic dystopian works by George Orwell and Ray Bradbury.

In particular, beware the mechanisms of terror management. From false flags to opportunistic dictators, real or perceived enemies at the gates have permitted internal threats to flourish. Let the Reichstag fire of 1933 be a lesson, he writes, as it is the blueprint for how would-be tyrants seize unchecked power: When the German parliament caught fire under suspicious circumstances, Hitler used the event to suspend civil liberties on an emergency basis.

Of course, these liberties were not restored once the dubious emergency was over. Liberties, once surrendered, are seldom returned without force.

“For tyrants,” Snyder writes, “the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission.”

Fear is a powerful weapon. Politicians use it to gain power, and the media use it to boost ratings and readership. And fear is what makes our most-cherished institutions vulnerable.

“Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, when it seems most difficult to do so.”

Though the tyrants have their blueprint, Snyder has offered us a brilliant playbook for combating them. The important takeaway for me is that you don’t need to wait for the next election to do something productive. Simply engaging in the world beyond your head or screen (particularly in uncomfortable places) can make a difference.

“Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen,” Snyder writes. We should meet new people, go different places, and generally be present in the three-dimensional world.

And take to heart this bullet point from Snyder—tape it to your front door, hang it on your fridge, tattoo it inside your eyelids:

“We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen.”

Pleasuring the Collective Unconscious: A review of Chuck Palahniuk’s Beautiful You

I’ll start with a confession: This review has come along sluggishly. Time I’ve set aside for writing has instead been frittered away on mindless online gaming. It’s an affliction we’ll call Beautiful Youwritus interruptus, and it’s likely to become an epidemic worse than any zombie apocalypse.

(Speaking of, my current addiction is The Last Stand: Dead Zone, and before I completed this sentence I had to stop to check on the construction status of a barricade.)

This isn’t anything new, really. In the 1950s, scientists discovered that if a rat could stimulate its brain’s pleasure center by pressing a bar, it would do so furiously until it passed out from exhaustion and, in many cases, died for lack of food and water. Mind you, the rats had access to food and water, but they couldn’t keep their paws off that pleasure bar.

This should sound familiar to any gamer who has missed a meal in order to level up.

It’s sick and wrong. I know this, but I need someone to hold up a mirror to face this absurdity directly.

This is why I love Chuck Palahniuk, whose new book, Beautiful You, is his best in a few years.

Fittingly, it concerns arousal addiction, and serves an electric shock to our collective conscience (or perhaps unconscious would be the better term).

Palahniuk took on male malaise with Fight Club, and mocked cultural over-consumption with Choke. Snuff (ostensibly a novel about pornography) lampooned self-destructive excess and exploitation in a manner that could very well have served as a hyper-sexualized predictor of the impending financial crisis of 2008.

In Beautiful You, he wanted to write what he calls gonzo erotica, and in the process has penned an anthem for an overstimulated, multi-tasking, computer-coma society.

Penny Harrigan is a nice Nebraskan girl working in New York City when she catches the eye of the world’s richest man, C. Linus Maxwell. Next thing you know, Penny is the talk of the tabloids and the envy of her coworkers.

Behind closed doors, however, is where Penny is truly transformed. Maxwell introduces her to a world of unimagined, if clinical pleasure. Penny has her reasons to question Maxwell’s motives (especially after a bizarre bathroom tryst with his bitter ex-lover), but is too enraptured with her newfound fame and sexuality.

Oozing with plot twists only Palahniuk’s sardonic tone could make palatable, Beautiful You aspires to remarkable levels of absurdity, but is it any more absurd than the daily inundation of product and marketing? Many reviewers have criticized the gratuitous satire in this novel, but is the idea of world domination via dildo really that farfetched in a culture that has financially sustained multiple cable shopping channels for three decades?

Beautiful You put me in mind of Rancid’s “Born Frustrated,” which asked, “Is this human freedom, hedonistic excess? Junky consumerism, mass production, toxic sickness?”

It’s why Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was set inside a shopping mall—can you truly be sure there aren’t a few zombies among you inside the IKEA? Ever been to a restaurant where a group of supposed acquaintances are each focused on their own smartphone or tablet?

We are a culture of instant gratification. We are a culture of distraction.

We are the lab rats hammering away at the pleasure bar for a taste of sweet, sweet oblivion.

And much like Maxwell, Palahniuk is there wearing a lab coat, taking copious notes and holding up a funhouse mirror to our cage, so that we might catch a distorted glimpse of what we’ve become.