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As French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna visits the South Caucasus, Paris is accused of not using its influence on Armenia in the ongoing dispute with Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

More than ever before, humans seem to be inundated with stories. They pour out of our screens and social-media feeds, our books, and, of course, ourselves. The urge to create narratives in order to make sense of reality is matched only by the need to escape reality by the same means.

Amid this abundance, fairy tales have found renewed popularity in recent years. Best-selling authors such as Marissa Meyer cleverly recycle the likes of Cinderella and Snow White by hurling them into a science-fictional future. The hit 2010s television show Once Upon a Time remixed just about every fairy-tale character and trope. But what the best updated fairy tales have in common is the way they strike a careful balance between revisionist novelty and faithful takes on the familiar. Go too far one way or the other, and the story is likely to flop with audiences longing for that perfect paradox: comforting strangeness.

Kelly Link, the author of the new story collection White Cat, Black Dog, masterfully twists familiar source material into unexpected, new shapes. She combines everyday banalities with unsettlingly bizarre elements, ultimately showing how hazy the borders between magic and reality are. In doing so, she challenges readers to question the archetypes they take for granted. In her 2000 story “Swans,” for example, Link combines the darker elements of two of the most famous tales—“Cinderella” and “Rumpelstiltskin”—with the elegant horror of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Wild Swans.” In this mash-up, a young princess of magical provenance learns what it costs to retain her humanness in the arbitrarily cruel world of adults. Link complicates the evil-stepmother trope by showing that, in parenting, morality isn’t always black and white.

[Read: The book that teaches us to live with our fears]

At the same time, “Swans” manipulates its source material with precocious flair. Where the Brothers Grimm’s and Andersen’s stories take place strictly in the world of fantasy, Link’s young protagonist, Emma, seems to sense that she exists in a fairy tale, but she has no power to escape this morbid realm. Quotidian details place the story squarely in the real world (the protagonist’s deceased mother, for instance, sewed a quilt adorned with Star Wars characters for one of her children), yet Emma blithely acknowledges that she lives in a palace and has a “fairy godfather.” Link doesn’t go fully meta, but the story gives one the uncanny sensation of blurred lines, of slippage between the known world and the surreal.

Link’s new collection is just as conceptually twisty. Its seven stories draw from a mass of European fairy-tale influences, each stuffed with bewildering detail and brain-popping wonder. In “The White Cat’s Divorce,” based on the 17th-century French tale “The White Cat,” a tycoon’s heirs vie for their father’s love—and his wealth—in mysterious, offbeat ways. Link seems to take pleasure in toying with the loose, internal logic of a fairy tale; the story features, for instance, bipedal, talking felines that cultivate cannabis.

Throughout the book, Link alternates between anachronism and timelessness. But rather than feeling jarring or random, her dreamlike superimposition of fuzzy settings and different eras resolve into a sharper, more vivid image of her characters’ lives. In “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear,” an inversion of the German legend “The Boy Who Did Not Know Fear,” a modern-day woman swims in a hotel pool while meditating on the meaning of motherhood and reflecting on a book that she loved as a child, about archeologists in the year 4022 trying to decode the artifacts they’ve dug up. Floating on her back, the woman observes that “I was as liberated in time and place and purpose as I had ever been.” Like the woman, Link’s tales feel untethered. Do they take place in the past? The future? Some parallel present? The real world or an imagined one? All or none of the above? If Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell argued that fairy tales bear a universal familiarity, Link seems hell-bent on making them weirdly unfamiliar again—and the tension she creates in doing so makes the stories newly compelling.

Many of today’s more popular fairy-tale retellings—such as Meyer’s take on Disney classics and Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, a lush rendition of Polish folklore—primarily reupholster their source material. As good as they are, their expansions of existing stories feel familiar, like fresh comfort food made of leftover comfort food. Link’s retellings claim a more literary provenance: Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin’s chilling deconstruction of “Sleeping Beauty” in her short story “The Poacher” is what Link’s work most calls to mind. (Link herself has called it one of her favorite stories.) “The Poacher,” like much of Le Guin’s work, plumbs heavy issues such as gender, class, and consent with deadly earnestness in the tale of a comatose princess whose rescue by a peasant is far from a happily-ever-after. Link probes many of the same themes, but she does so with sly whimsy and lightness of touch. The quiet lyricism of “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear,” for example, veers into visions of swimming pools full of blood—and that contrast between dreaminess and dread makes the darkness feel even inkier.

That darkness owes a debt to the Brothers Grimm, and some of the best stories in White Cat, Black Dog—“The White Road,” “The Game of Smash and Recovery,” and “Skinder’s Veil”—lean on their bibliography. In these stories, Link really cuts loose, incorporating vampires, a vision of a postapocalypse, and a naturally occurring, druglike fog. Along the way, she distorts subjects such as thespianism and academia in a maze of fun-house mirrors. But where someone like Meyer might pull a fantastical gimmick, relocating Snow White to the moon, for instance, Link’s stories usually take place closer to home. In “Skinder’s Veil,” she follows a group of graduate students who are trying to find themselves, a storyline that would seem utterly realist, even banal, were it not for the unnerving appearances of sex toys, fear-stricken ghosts, and the music of Ariana Grande, all of which seem to serve as talismans. In Link’s stories, the trappings of ancient folklore and myth weave their way through our everyday lives.

[Read: A novel with a secret at its center]

“Fairytales are a very useful kind of storytelling shorthand,” Link told The Guardian in 2015. “You can use fragments of them in ways that add dimension and weight to whatever other kinds of story you’re telling.” Eight years on, she’s still proving this. “Prince Hat Underground,” arguably the best story in White Cat, Black Dog, stars a charming queer couple who frequent a café called Folklore—a downright normal restaurant that’s known for “the perfunctory briskness of its servers, the predictable savor of its eggs Benedict.” But it exists not far from a spa where massage therapists exorcise demons from their patients’ muscles. In Link’s stories, fairy tales are uniquely equipped to bring the mundane and the magical together. She beckons us into her gingerbread house in the cul-de-sac suburbs, hoping to entangle and provoke us. In “The Lady and the Fox,” Link writes that the 14-year-old protagonist has “outgrown fairytales”; meanwhile, she unknowingly populates one. For Link, modern literature can never outgrow the resilience and resonance of the fairy tale. And even if it could, what fun would that be?

Do French pensioners fare better than others in developed economies? It depends who you ask and what measure you use.

Compared with its wealthy peer nations, the United States is failing the most basic test of a civilization: keeping its denizens alive. As my colleague Derek Thompson wrote last week, U.S. life spans are shorter on average than in much of Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. I called Derek to discuss why the nation’s life-expectancy rate is falling behind, and what can be done about it.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The most telling moments from the Trump-Carroll depositions Joe Biden’s not popular. That might not matter in 2024. I ruined two birthday parties and learned the limits of psychology. The Mortality Tax

Kelli María Korducki: In your latest article, you repeat a turn of phrase that you used in a previous story, calling the U.S. a “rich death trap.” The rich part is pretty self-explanatory, but unpack the rest of it.

Derek Thompson: The appropriate context is that, over the past 30 years or so, U.S. life spans have increased a little bit, but way behind the pace of similarly rich countries like Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. This is a pretty shocking development because throughout economic history, people living in richer countries have generally lived longer. And yet in the U.S.—which is the richest country in the world—we're not getting the long lives that we would expect. So you could say that there is a mortality tax on being an American as opposed to being French or Japanese, for example.

Kelli: When does this mortality tax emerge in the data?

Derek: You start to see it in the 1980s, but it really picks up in the 1990s. That’s where we really start to see this life-expectancy divergence.

Kelli: What might have happened in the 1980s and ’90s to stagnate life-expectancy increases here in the States but not abroad?

Derek: You could look at guns. Clearly, we have more gun deaths here than in other countries. And you can look at car deaths, which we also have more of than in similarly rich countries. But gun deaths per capita and car deaths per capita haven’t clearly increased a lot in the past 30 years. So that leaves things like drug overdoses, obesity, and health inequalities. But the truth is that health-care access has actually probably gotten more equal in the past 30 years; we passed Obamacare, which has extended Medicaid and all sorts of health care to low-income individuals. My bet, then, is that the growing gap between American longevity and that of other rich countries, at least in the past 30 years, is being driven by our poor health, specifically, more drug addiction, more drug-overdose deaths, and a higher risk of obesity.

Kelli: And despite Obamacare and broadly expanded health-care access, there’s also still a pretty significant health-care gap in the U.S.

Derek: That’s absolutely the case, and health outcomes are much more unequal in the U.S. than in countries with universal health care, where you tend to see that life spans in poor areas and rich areas are pretty similar; in the U.S. they’re much more different. Where you’re born in the U.S., and how much income your parents have, is much more determinative of how long you’ll live.

Kelli: What would it take to make America less of a death trap?

Derek: It’s a really big question. I would say that this conversation needs to be about all of these things that are driving our mortality: thinking more about ways to reduce obesity in America and talking more about the importance of exercise for metabolic health. And we have to reduce  synthetic opioid overdoses (primarily fentanyl), which kill more than 70,000 people in the U.S. every year.

This is sort of an aside, but there are almost two separate opioid crises happening in the country right now. One is the opioid-prescription-addiction crisis with the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma at its center, and then there’s the fentanyl crisis. Nearly 17,000 people a year are dying of opioid-prescription addiction—that is, from the abuse of opioids that were prescribed by a doctor—and about 70,000 people died of fentanyl overdoses in 2021. So the fentanyl crisis is four times deadlier than the opioid crisis that we’re used to talking about, but it doesn’t really occupy that much attention from lawmakers. I think we could use some really hard thinking about how to bend the curve of fentanyl abuse.

Kelli: What about the other American death drivers you mention in your article? Cars, guns?

Derek: So far, it seems that a little bit more working from home is probably good for reducing car use and related deaths. More housing in downtown areas that would reduce the need for driving commutes would probably also be good. And when it comes to guns, I can think of some pretty clear policy ideas for reducing gun deaths but, man, I’m not particularly optimistic about their ability to be passed at the federal level.

Related:

America fails the civilization test. America is a rich death trap. Today’s News President Joe Biden formally announced his bid for reelection today. A fourth cease-fire attempt in Sudan has failed, as residents attempt to flee the country. E. Jean Carroll’s rape lawsuit against Donald Trump has gone to trial. Evening Read Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin

The Pandemic’s Surprising Effect on Suicide Rates

By Clancy Martin

In March 2020, my partner, Amie; our 2-year-old son, Ratna; and I, who usually live in Kansas City, Missouri, were visiting Kerala, India, about to be in the throes of the country’s first COVID outbreak. When it became clear that Kerala was going to be locked down, we drove up the coast as fast as we could and boarded a flight to Delhi. From there we set out for the most remote place we knew—a small village in the Himalayan foothills called Bir.

On our way there we were nearly turned around at a series of police checkpoints. To go where? That was never clear. Hotels and Airbnbs were sending foreigners away. On WhatsApp, rumors were spreading about fellow expats being rounded up into camps.

An initially reluctant Airbnb host took us in only a few days before a nationwide lockdown went into effect. “Really I should never have let you stay,” he told me. “But now you can’t leave.”

Read the full article.

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Read. “The Site of Memory,” a 1986 essay by Toni Morrison. A new exhibit of the author’s personal materials shows her capacious empathy.

Watch. Abbott Elementary’s season finale (available on Hulu). It’s a show that lets Black kids be kids.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

With Derek’s blessing, I’m hijacking this platform to recommend the new Laura Poitras documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about the photographer Nan Goldin and her fight to bring down the Sackler family by striking at the heart of their cultural credibility: the art-museum wings that bear the Sackler name. Although the documentary focuses primarily on the higher-profile prescription-drug crisis within the devastating sweep of U.S. opioid addiction that Derek and I discussed, it’s worth watching for how it captures the greed and cynicism that so often lie just beneath the surface of our national tragedies.

— Kelli

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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