A woman sent from Britain to Ireland as a baby speaks about repatriations of unmarried Irish mothers.

Irish police found an exhausted Woody lying across a pavement in County Tipperary last year.

Claudine Van Den Bergh Cooke, from Dublin, is hanging up her headdress to become a solicitor.

It comes after RTÉ admitted the presenter was paid €345,000 more than was publicly declared.

In 1883, Evert Nymanover, a Swedish scholar at the University of Minnesota, proposed a new invention that some thought would affect the future of humankind: a device that played recordings of books. Nymanover called the device a “whispering machine” and suggested that it could be placed inside of a hat so that someone walking down the street or reclining in bed “could be perpetually listening” to great works of literature.

Though mocked by some, Nymanover’s vision of a book recording in a hat wasn’t entirely far-fetched in 1883. After announcing the invention of the phonograph six years earlier, Thomas Edison turned almost immediately to the device’s implications for literature. He hoped to open a publishing house in New York that would sell novels recorded on six-inch circular plates. “The advantages of such books over those printed,” Edison wrote, “are too readily seen to need mention.” And Edison wasn’t the only one who thought listening to books would be obviously superior to reading. An 1885 essay in the influential British literary magazine The Nineteenth Century maintained that Nymanover’s whispering machine would be a “boon to our poor abused eyes,” and also that when we read print, “one half the power of literature is lost.”

It took a full century, but the technology finally did catch up to Nymanover’s vision of a world in which people could walk down the street listening to books. And yet, by the time portable cassette players became ubiquitous in the 1980s, the mood about listening to books had changed in a way that would have surprised 19th-century audio enthusiasts. Listening to novels no longer seemed like a utopian fantasy at all. To most, it seemed entirely unappealing. In a 1993 Wall Street Journal article on stagnating audiobook sales, one Random House executive lamented that “too many people still think audio books are only for the blind.”

Prominent literary figures tended to be particularly skeptical of listening to books. Strangely, the problem with the audio format was not that it made books less enjoyable. It was the opposite: Audio made books so relaxing and pleasurable that a listener couldn’t engage critically with the text in a way a serious reader should. Listening to literature, the essayist and critic Sven Birkerts argued in his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies, was like “being seduced, or maybe drugged,” a very different experience from “deep reading,” which Birkerts characterized as “the slow and meditative possession of a book.”

According to Matthew Rubery, the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, a fascinating history of the audiobook, the notion that listening to a book is too absorbing to lend itself to deep reflection is the “most enduring critique” of the format. “It was striking to me when I began researching audiobooks how many people in Edison’s time welcomed efforts to make books more entertaining,” Rubery, a literature professor at Queen Mary University of London, told me. “The idea of books needing to be hard work, difficult, and read firsthand in order to be deemed valuable only took hold in the next century.”

That audiobooks have tended to produce anxiety in literary critics is perhaps not surprising. As film and television became the dominant modes of storytelling in the 20th century, book lovers were forced into a defensive crouch, left to argue that the very aspects of reading that made it more rigorous than watching a movie or a show were, in fact, precisely what made reading superior. Audiobooks were suspect because they turned reading into an easier, more passive experience. As the Irish novelist and critic Colm Tóibín once put it, the difference between reading a book and listening to a book was “like the difference between running a marathon and watching a marathon on TV.”

The stigma associated with audiobooks hasn’t gone away since The Wall Street Journal published its 1993 article on audiobooks’ failure to catch on. Daniel T. Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who studies reading, says that the most common question he gets is whether listening to an audiobook for a book club is “cheating.” But if anxiety surrounding audiobooks lingers, it’s no longer stopping Americans from purchasing them. Audiobook sales have seen double-digit increases each year since 2012. Last year, the increase was 10 percent, amounting to $1.8 billion in sales. The trend is only likely to accelerate in the years ahead given that Spotify recently made a major push into the market, and Google and Apple are racing to produce AI-narrated books. (Even the dead can now narrate audiobooks.)

Still, if the audiobook moment has arrived, that doesn’t, of course, mean that all of the concerns about the format have been misplaced. I suspect that listening to a novel truly is less likely to elicit critical engagement. What I’m less sure about is whether that’s such a bad thing.

Like many fans of the format, I turned to audiobooks out of convenience. I was teaching a graduate course on contemporary American writers at Johns Hopkins, and it occurred to me that speeding through audio editions of the novels and memoirs I’d assigned could be a good way to refresh my memories of the books in the days before a class. But, along the way, something happened that surprised me: I started to fall in love with the audio novel. It took me a little while to admit it to myself—I had internalized the stigma so deeply that even entertaining the possibility felt heretical—but, in many cases, I was enjoying the books even more when listening to them.

The next surprise arrived when I began listening to audiobooks in bed. In recent years, I’d been reading much less at night. Exhausted from long days of parenting and emailing and Zooming, I would often end up watching a TV show I was not at all excited to watch rather than reading a book I was genuinely excited to read. Then, one night, I put in my earbuds and downloaded Maggie Gyllenhaal’s wonderful narration of Anna Karenina. Listening to a skilled actor read a literary masterpiece was every bit as blissful as the 19th-century utopians had imagined. “Netflix and chill” became “Tolstoy and chill,” and then “Jane Austen and chill,” “James Baldwin and chill,” “Kafka and chill!”

[Read: An ode to being read to]

Was I being seduced? Was I missing out on the wisdom these great authors had to offer by listening instead of reading? Maybe. There’s not a lot of science on the differences between reading and listening to books. The existing research suggests that adults score the same on reading-comprehension tests whether they read or listen to a passage. But it’s one thing to comprehend a book and another to think deeply about what you’ve comprehended. And Willingham, of the University of Virginia, told me there’s good reason to suspect that reading books does, indeed, lend itself to more intense critical engagement than listening to books does.

In one small study, college students were randomly assigned to either read a 3,330-word article or listen to a 22-minute podcast on a scientific topic. Two days later, when the researchers quizzed the students on the topic, those who had read the article did much better than the podcast listeners.

When you’re reading, Willingham explained, you’re in full control of the pace. You can stop and think before moving ahead. “Audiobooks,” he said, “make that harder to do.” Maryanne Wolf, a literacy scholar at UCLA’s school of education and information studies, likewise told me that although she sees advantages and disadvantages to various different book formats, reading—specifically reading on a printed page—is best for understanding something “at a deeper level.”

Audiobook skeptics are probably right. Listening to a novel will never be a substitute for reading, if the aim is to digest and analyze what we’re reading. Harold Bloom, the late critic and literary scholar, told The New York Times in 2005 that, for “deep reading,” you need the text in front of you in order to engage “the whole cognitive process.” And can we really argue with this? The harder question is whether we truly want to engage “the whole cognitive process” when we read novels or whether we want to be fully immersed in what we’re reading without the interruptions of our own thoughts, no matter how insightful. The harder question, put another way, is whether art should ultimately make us think deeply or feel deeply.

Fiction, which lies at the intersection of style and content, makes this question particularly tricky. There’s the music of the language, and also the concepts and ideas communicated through the music. There’s the story itself, and also all of the signs and symbols beneath it. As the critic James Wood says in How Fiction Works, when it comes to literature, “everything is at once a moral question and a formal one.”

The style and substance of a novel, of course, can never be fully disentangled. Someone who reads with more attention to a novel’s content doesn’t entirely miss out on its music, and someone who is drawn to a novel’s style is still fully capable of thinking about the scope of the book’s ideas. Reading, by allowing us to stop and ponder, might tilt the needle a little more toward content, but listening, by harnessing the emotional power of the human voice, might tilt the needle a little more toward style.

The content of a novel is typically what dominates the discussion, particularly in the classroom, but that might be only because it’s so much easier to talk about. We ask young readers to focus on a book’s themes, to write essays on what this or that image symbolizes, as though a literary work were merely a code containing hidden information. A novel, in the process, is often stripped for parts as opposed to appreciated as a form of entertainment.

Classroom lessons that focus more on style do little to solve this problem. Attention to how a writer makes use of foreshadowing or constructs a particularly brilliant metaphor can’t capture what the novelist and essayist Mary Gaitskill describes as a book’s “inner weave.” She notes that this aspect of the novel is “almost impossible to talk about,” and yet it determines “what the work is about as much as the plot or the theme or even the characters.” Gaitskill compares the inner weave of a novel to “a person’s unconscious.” I think of it as the rhythms of another mind, an animating intelligence that I want to spend time with less because of what it is thinking than the way it is thinking.

[Read: A podcast about the airport best sellers we can’t escape]

This anxiety about overanalysis is hardly new. Nearly 60 years ago, Susan Sontag described “interpretation” as “the revenge of the intellect upon art.” What’s new is the growing popularity of the audiobook and its potential to change the way we approach the novel. Some great filmmakers, Sontag pointed out, had avoided heavy-handed theoretical interpretations of their creations “by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be … just what it is.” Though there is certainly plenty of theory about film, I suspect that a film may be somewhat less susceptible to interpretation than a printed novel not because film is a visual medium but because a film dictates its own pace. When you’re watching a movie, you have little time to stop and think. And though one could repeatedly hit “Pause” when watching at home, few would find it an enjoyable way to experience art.

The true promise of the audiobook, I’ve come to think, may be that it brings the momentum of television and film to literature. By propelling us forward and keeping the intellect a little bit at bay, the audiobook allows the novel, too, to be “just what it is.” Listening is a more passive experience than reading, yes, but, for many, it’s also a more relaxing and pleasurable experience. And the pleasure can’t be overlooked. As the literary critic Laura Miller put it to me, “Why would you even care about allusions or techniques if you don’t actually enjoy novels to begin with?”

Utopian visions don’t often come to fruition. But the 19th-century fantasy whispering machines that could narrate books arrived almost exactly as the futurists predicted—minus, fortunately, having to be placed under our hats. At a moment when fewer and fewer students are choosing to major in English, an unapologetic embrace of audiobooks may be exactly what the literary world needs. After all, the public, as sales figures show, is making its fondness for them clear. Those who love the novel and want our children to love it as well would be wise to listen.

Wales and British and Irish Lions full-back Liam Williams will move to Japan next season as the financial pressures continue to bite regional Welsh rugby.

About 10 years ago, the critic James Wolcott suggested that Martin Amis (who died last month at 73) retire from writing novels and instead commit himself full-time to giving interviews—which were always funny, and crackling with insight and pleasure, even when the book he was selling was a bit of a stinker. I’d happily trade in Lionel Asbo for a dozen more Amis interviews. In one of these conversations, Amis explained that Vladimir Nabokov was the most hospitable of novelists, always offering you a nice drink and his finest chair. By contrast, Amis said, reading James Joyce’s work, with puns whose appreciation requires a knowledge of Old Norse and the names of minor Irish rivers, was like arriving at an entryway rigged for pratfalls, with mousetraps snapping at your feet as you struggled to find the light switch, only to discover that no one was home.

I have wondered where on this spectrum of hospitality one might find Cormac McCarthy, who died yesterday at 89. Had he taken Wolcott’s proposed form of literary early retirement, we would have been deprived of two great books—The Passenger and Stella Maris—and gotten essentially zilch in return, so arid and gnomic were his few public utterances. He was Joycean, by way of Faulkner, in his total unwillingness to spare the reader looking up an obscure word. (My copy of Blood Meridian has a slip of paper in it, with a list of words I had to look up and have never used since: weskit, anchorite, thrapple.) Like Joyce, he used such words, especially Germanic ones, without inhibition, although the effect was totally different. The McCarthy voice was timeless—not in the pedestrian sense of “will be read for generations,” but in the unsettling, cosmological sense that one could not tell whether the voice was ancient or from the distant future. The diction contributed to this effect, as the words were seemingly so unplaceably antique that it was as if he had excavated them from some prehistoric riverbed, where they were laid down like fossils from the earliest days of human speech.

He was equally unsubmissive to other human sensibilities: Harold Bloom, who thought Blood Meridian the best novel by a living American, wrote that he had needed a few false starts to get through the book, because the torture and death were so unrelenting. I first read Blood Meridian while sitting next to a cairn of stacked bones, the remains of victims of genocide in the Cambodian countryside. In such a setting, nothing in the book felt far-fetched. McCarthy’s middle romantic period, in particular the Border Trilogy, was humane, even tender at times, but it could also be overtaken by violence, unannounced and no doubt for many readers unwelcome. No one, however, could claim that the horrifying turns defied reality. And no matter how awful the turn, in any of his books, it always seemed tragically inevitable in the world McCarthy had made.

To me, reading McCarthy was like reading the work of some advanced alien intelligence. (His final novels suggest the existence of such a force.) Does an alien intelligence make you feel welcome? Does it mess with you, and set malicious little traps? McCarthy didn’t labor to comfort a reader, nor were his books elaborate pranks at the reader’s expense. The worlds depicted in Blood Meridian and The Passenger are not built for mortal humans like you and me. They are built instead as arenas of combat for godlike figures with little interest in providing temporary solace to the humans who pass through their worlds. These superhuman characters have plans and battles whose schedules are measured in millennia, and they regard the rest of us with only peripheral attention. The subject of his inhuman novels is ironically most humane: how to live and die as a mortal being, while in the crossfire of gods and demigods on a battleground that preceded human existence and will continue long after we are all gone.

On any given page of McCarthy, one is likely to find an unlucky minor character getting scalped, or tipsily holding court in the French Quarter. The Passenger will be the book for which McCarthy is remembered, I suspect, because unlike in Blood Meridian, these mortal bystanders are not inarticulate, spitting cowboys. When the Kid, the ragged mortal at the center of Blood Meridian, meets the demigod poised to kill him, he says, “You ain’t nothing”—an act of humane insolence so awesome that one wishes to build a statue to him, on behalf of our species. The characters of The Passenger talk back to the gods more eloquently. “The horseman it would seem has chalked my door,” writes one such character, the sublime John Sheddan, in a letter sent from his deathbed to the protagonist. “I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never understood in the slightest why I was here … More time would change nothing and that which you are poised to relinquish forever almost certainly was never what you thought it to be in the first place.” These are not the most comforting words I have read about death, but they seem as likely as any to be true.

The Dublin-born singer of Irish rock band Aslan has died at the age of 63, his family said.

Republicans seem to have suddenly alighted on an answer to the unpopularity of abortion bans in the post-Dobbs era: a “compromise,” styled on most European countries’ abortion regimes, which permit abortion only in the first trimester of pregnancy and restrict it thereafter, with a few exceptions. North Carolina recently passed a law in this vein, over its governor’s veto; it will permit abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape until 20 weeks, for fetal anomalies until 24 weeks, and to save the life of the mother throughout the pregnancy. As some states have enacted more restrictive abortion laws, banning abortion from the moment of conception or at six weeks, North Carolina lawmakers have been able to mark the contrast, characterizing the 12-week ban as a “mainstream” and “reasonable” approach that should become a model for the rest of the nation. After all, it allows about 90 percent of abortions that American women undergo to remain legal.

This “European compromise” approach has gained adherents at the federal level as well. Senator Lindsey Graham proposed a federal 15-week abortion ban after Dobbs, seeking a national consensus that he describes as “in line with other developed nations.” During a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on abortion in America after Dobbs, Graham noted that not one single European country permits abortion “on demand” after 15 weeks, insisting that only the most oppressive regimes, such as China and North Korea, permit the later-term abortions that Roe v. Wade appeared to protect. When it comes to protecting life, Republicans urge the United States to keep pace with its “civilized” European peers, rather than join the “inhumane” company of China and North Korea.

[David A. Graham: Has North Carolina found an abortion compromise?]

But Republicans are interested in only one part of the European approach to protecting life—the abortion restrictions. They seem to forget that every European country that protects unborn life by restricting abortion after the first trimester protects born life too, through prenatal health care, paid maternity leave, and a public infrastructure for child care and preschool. If Republicans are sincere in invoking Europe as a model, Democrats and other proponents of abortion access should seize this chance to find common ground on policies that would substantially improve the lives of mothers and children in this country. After Dobbs, Democrats should not let the outrage over losing Roe impede a new abortion compromise, one inspired by European countries that protect life not just by restricting abortion, but by ensuring healthy pregnancy and infancy.

Pro-life Republicans have long liked to criticize the United States as an outlier for legalizing pre-viability abortion without significant restriction under Roe v. Wade. But the country is an outlier in another sense as well: its abject failure to protect born, living children and the people who birth them. By comparison to similarly wealthy advanced democracies, the United States has higher rates of infant mortality. Maternal mortality rates are substantially higher in the United States as compared with these countries, especially for Black mothers. Studies have linked paid maternity leave to lower rates of infant mortality, but the United States is the only country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that doesn’t guarantee it. Senate Democrats recently introduced a paid-family-leave bill for the sixth time in 10 years. Thirty years after Congress guaranteed unpaid parental leave in the Family and Medical Leave Act, in 1993, the overwhelming majority of working mothers in America lack access to paid leave to cover the time off work necessary to give birth and care for a newborn. After a decade of legislative dysfunction, Congress finally passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act in December 2022, which guarantees reasonable accommodations to protect the health of pregnant workers and their wanted unborn children. Staying pregnant exacerbates women’s economic insecurity, a primary reason they seek abortions.

Beyond its restriction of abortion after 12 weeks, North Carolina’s Care for Women, Children, and Families Act makes modest gestures toward the European model: It expands paid leave for state employees, guaranteeing them eight weeks after giving birth or four weeks to care for a newborn. The law allocates $32 million the first year and $43 million the following year to child care. These measures fall significantly short of the infrastructures for universal health care, paid parental leave, and child care that are well established in nearly all the European countries that restrict abortion after 12 to 15 weeks. In Germany, for instance, the constitutional court has noted that a state can protect life through means other than abortion bans, such as by providing support for pregnant women. Protecting unborn life goes hand in hand with protecting lives when they are already born and in need of care. Therefore, a state that bans abortion without guaranteeing pre- and postnatal health care, paid parental leave, and child-care support is not genuinely protecting life.

If the North Carolina law is to be entertained as a reasonable model for national legislation, the provision of universal paid parental leave and child care must be seen as a bare-minimum part of the bargain. North Carolina’s steps in that direction are inadequate; Senator Graham’s proposed 15-week ban contains no such provisions. Furthermore, at the federal level, although Congress expanded child-care funding during the COVID-19 emergency, it was temporary. The Build Back Better package passed by the House in 2021 would have pumped $400 billion into child care, but it was blocked by Republicans, with the help of Joe Manchin, in the Senate. Ultimately, the Senate passed a much-modified Inflation Reduction Act without including a penny for child care.

Congressional Democrats’ primary response to Dobbs has been to seek to codify Roe in the Women’s Health Protection Act. But Roe was itself a compromise; it kept pre-viability abortions legal (about 20 to 24 weeks of gestation), but it allowed the Hyde Amendment’s withholding of public funds for abortions that were medically necessary to protect the pregnant person’s health. Roe’s constitutional reasoning was that childbearing is a private matter in which the government should not intervene, making it hard to justify a governmental duty to support childbearing through paid parental leave and child care. The Women’s Health Protection Act—which was passed by the Democratic House but filibustered twice by Republicans in the Senate last session—would reinstate that compromise, as its Democratic supporters have insisted that it would leave the Hyde Amendment intact. Although paid family leave and child care have some bipartisan support, these policies have not been the basis for a new abortion bargain at the federal level.

[Read: When a right becomes a privilege]

Now, following Dobbs, Democrats should take the European model in its entirety more seriously as an alternative to codifying Roe. Doing so would be more responsive to public opinion on abortion than either the near-total abortion bans adopted by some state legislatures on the one hand—such as South Carolina’s six-week ban passed last month—or Roe v. Wade on the other. A majority of Americans say abortion should be legal in many but not all cases. Even a lot of those who believe abortion should be illegal in most cases support exceptions, and even the most restrictive state abortion bans passed after Dobbs allow abortions when the mother’s life is threatened. A reasonable compromise responsive to Americans’ complex views could package a 12-to-15-week ban—which would protect 90 percent of all abortions and include humane and workable exceptions for the remaining later-term abortions—with universal prenatal and postpartum health care, paid leave, and child care, which should be considered basic protections for born life.

Furthermore, European countries that restrict abortion after 12 to 15 weeks include exceptions in their abortion laws for situations in later pregnancy deemed by physicians to pose risks to the pregnant woman’s health—beyond emergency life-threatening situations. Such broader constructions of the exceptions acknowledge that the line between a risk to the pregnant woman’s health and a risk to her life is hard to draw in complicated and rapidly changing actual situations of pregnancy. One woman’s testimony at the April Senate Judiciary Committee hearing told of her experience with an infection that developed during a spontaneous miscarriage, during which doctors could not intervene until the infection nearly killed her. In Ireland, the death of a woman under similar circumstances led the nation to rethink and eventually repeal its constitutional protection of unborn life. Irish law now permits abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and authorizes the procedure after 12 weeks when doctors deem it necessary to protect the health of the pregnant person. Such health exceptions are typical across Europe after 12 to 15 weeks, acknowledging that a real and serious commitment to the lives of pregnant women—the born, living people necessary for the unborn to be born—requires strong protections for their health. Furthermore, many European countries’ abortion laws construe the risk to the mother’s life and health to include mental health and suicide risks.

After Dobbs, a national 12- or 15-week abortion ban written to invalidate the state laws that ban abortion at conception or six weeks would allow the majority of the pre-viability abortions protected under Roe. Packaged with paid family leave and child-care expansion, as well as exceptions to save women’s lives and health in later pregnancy, a European-style compromise may be the only way out of the women’s-health crisis triggered by Dobbs. By prioritizing the needs of pregnant women and infants while protecting access to abortion in early pregnancy, many other countries found a more humane compromise on abortion than we had under Roe. After Dobbs, it is a path that Americans need to consider.

London Irish are suspended from the Premiership after missing a second deadline to pay staff and failing to complete a takeover.