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Reading short novels and encountering a range of characters’ worlds in quick succession can be a singular pleasure, especially in the summertime.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time. The last place on Earth any tourist should go The all-volunteer force is in crisis. Why Republicans keep calling for the end of birthright citizenship

Taut and Potent

My most controversial opinion is that most books should be either 100 or 1,000 pages. I am joking, obviously—sort of. Length is not a good proxy for quality, and a story should take the time it demands. But after years of gravitating toward baggy narrative journeys, I have lately become enchanted by novellas.

I admire short novels largely because I love witnessing the skill that goes into achieving an efficient word-to-idea ratio. But I also find it a lot of fun, especially in the summer, to dip into varied lives in rapid succession. I am not the only one turning to sparse texts: As Kate Dwyer reported in Esquire last week, slim volumes are having a moment. Dwyer identifies “a desire among general audiences for the concise, intense books that have been gaining momentum in the literary fiction and nonfiction categories in recent years.” She reports that Annie Ernaux’s Nobel win last fall played a role in calcifying the prestige of potent, short works.

I don’t think short books have intrinsic merit any more than long ones do. In recent years, I have read a number of sub-200-page novels that I found insufferable (another benefit of a short book: If it’s bad, it’s over soon). But many of the good ones, in my experience, rely on an intriguing sense of disorientation. The short novel can be an ideal format for narrative swerves.

Yesterday afternoon, lying in front of a box fan awaiting the humid summer rain, I finished Hanna Bervoets’s We Had to Remove This Post, a taut, haunting novel that weighs in at 144 pages. In the book, readers follow a content moderator as she navigates gory posts on the social-media site she works with and applies content rules that often feel arbitrary. This novel, in its singular focus on vulnerable workers and their relationships with one another, laces in a neat indictment of the corporation looming in the background. But the story is not about the technology, not really. It’s about the workers who suffer because of it. And late in the book, we discover darkness rooted more deeply in the protagonist than was apparent at the start. “You don’t get it, do you?” a former lover asks our narrator, confronting her. (As a reader, I too did not get it—until I did!)

By total coincidence, last month I finished another slim psychological novel in which our narrator is repeatedly told “You just don’t get it” by an ex: Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (163 pages). I will not pretend that this echo is meaningful to anyone besides me. But that’s part of the fun of reading short novels back to back: the delight of building a constellation of references and patterns only apparent to oneself. You can do this with any type of book, in theory. But reading a bunch of slight texts back to back is a sure way to swiftly build up your own arsenal.

If you are looking for some short novels to get you started, here are a few I’ve read and loved over the past year. I think near-constantly about Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino and Sagittarius, paired novellas about two fraught family relationships. In Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, which follows a boarding-school girl in Switzerland, death lurks on each of the 101 pages. Adrian Nathan West’s My Father’s Diet, the hilarious tale of a young man whose divorced dad gets into powerlifting, is packaged in the perfect container for the scope and ambition of the story: 176 pages.

Short novels are even sneaking into works of long, complex fiction: In Lucy Ives’s labyrinthine Life Is Everywhere, the protagonist’s eerie novella, a riff on Hamlet, pops up hundreds of pages in. (And to continue the theme of fun personal tie-ins, I am currently in the midst of another uncanny and wry retelling of Hamlet, this time from the point of view of a fetus: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, which at 208 pages is on the longer end of what I’d consider truly short.)

In spite of my zeal for short books, I still mostly read longer novels. This year, I moved away from Goodreads, which I only ever updated haphazardly, seeking to gain privacy and stanch the flow of my personal data to Amazon. Now I track what I read in a spreadsheet. A bit of number-crunching tells me that the average length of the books I’ve read in print this year is 256 pages. That strikes me as a truly average length. (I also found it sort of fun, looking back at my reading list, to find that I read three books that are exactly 288 pages this spring.) Everything in moderation including moderation, I suppose. I love a short novel whose every page promises to be thick with meaning, and I love a shaggy epic full of beautiful prose. I feel grateful, as a reader, to have such a range to choose from.

One more note of praise for the short novel: Part of the joy is that you can stumble into them and stumble back out, enriched, a few hours later. About a year ago, meaning to order the entire Copenhagen Trilogy, I accidentally ordered just the first volume. Childhood, by Tove Ditlevsen, arrived on my doorstep, all 99 pages of it. I was disappointed at first to realize my error. But then I read the book in maybe two sittings. It was lovely and brief. At some point I will probably read the other two volumes. But for now, I am content.

Related:

You can read any of these short novels in a weekend. Five books that’ll fit right into your busy schedule

Today’s News

Israeli forces launched drone strikes and deployed hundreds of troops in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. It’s their largest military operation in the region in almost two decades. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen plans to visit Beijing later this week to ease tensions between the United States and China. At least two shooters attacked a block party in Baltimore yesterday, wounding 28 people and killing two.

Dispatches

The Good Word: Our crossword-puzzle editor explains the thinking behind our new, diabolically difficult print puzzle.

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Evening Read

Mel D. Cole

Hip-Hop’s Midlife Slump

By Xochitl Gonzalez

In the summer of 1998, the line to get into Mecca on a Sunday night might stretch from the entrance to the Tunnel nightclub on Manhattan’s 12th Avenue all the way to the end of the block; hundreds of bodies, clothed and barely clothed in Versace and DKNY and Polo Sport, vibrating with anticipation. Passing cars with their booming stereos, either scoping out the scene or hunting for parking, offered a preview of what was inside: the sounds of Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Kim. These people weren’t waiting just to listen to music. They were there to be part of it. To be in the room where Biggie Smalls and Mary J. Blige had performed. To be on the dance floor when Funkmaster Flex dropped a bomb on the next summer anthem. They were waiting to be at the center of hip-hop.

What they didn’t realize was that the center of hip-hop had shifted.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Apple TV+; HBO; Netflix.

Read. Domenico Starnone’s novel The House on Via Gemito explores the psychic toll of class mobility.

Watch. Choose from 11 undersung TV shows that our culture writers wish had received more attention this year.

Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I somehow totally missed the high-seas literary romp Let Them All Talk when the movie came out in 2020, so it was to my great pleasure and amusement that I ended up watching it on a long flight last fall. In case you also missed it: Basically, a novelist (Meryl Streep!) is sent on a transatlantic voyage, and her agent (Gemma Chan!) secretly follows her aboard to try to find out what’s going on with her next book. Streep brings along her nephew, played by the charming Lucas Hedges, and she’s also joined by two friends, because why not? Antics of a sort, along with conversations about literary ethics and making a life as a writer, ensue on board. The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, was shot on the Queen Mary 2, and the actors improvise atop the story, which was written by Deborah Eisenberg. It’s a funny, if kind of unwieldy, tale that combines many elements I enjoy. I recommend it (streaming on Max) to supplement your short-novel reading on this holiday not-quite-weekend.

— Lora

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The ancient Greeks called it katabasis: a test of heroism by descent into the underworld. The deeper you go, the more difficult the journey becomes. But if you can withstand the heat as you approach eternal damnation, you return to Earth’s surface with the wisdom to transcend mortal fear. This mythic quest has long captured the cultural imagination, from Orpheus to Barbarian. It has the power to bestow superhuman glory on those who survive. And it’s also the concept behind my new crossword, appearing on the back page of each new print issue of The Atlantic.

The back page of a print magazine is consecrated space for a puzzle: one final flourish, like the cherry on a sundae or the outro of a power ballad. Even in our age of ephemerality, the essential experience of the crossword, to me, remains sitting around the breakfast table with loved ones and the Sunday New York Times Magazine, shouting answers, arguing, passing the puzzle around, pooling knowledge to forge ahead and collectively rise to the intellectual challenge.

To do justice to this tradition for The Atlantic’s elegant and historic print editions, I knew I needed to make something diabolically special. I wanted to give the classic print crossword a fresh narrative spin without changing the tried-and-true mechanics that have kept readers turning to the back page Sunday after Sunday for so many years. The Atlantic mini, which we publish every weekday and Sundays, gets larger and more difficult as the week progresses. This structure offers a gentle introduction to novice players, and it gives experienced solvers a yardstick they can measure themselves against week after week. It’s the cruciverbal journey that first hooked me: an ongoing test of acuity, contextualizing personal progress across a week, a month, a year. What if that same journey could be re-created over the course of one puzzle?

At first glance, Inferno might seem like your average, run-of-the-mill crossword puzzle. List of numbered clues? Check. Empty grid with corresponding numbers? Double check. You, the inveterate solver, using one to fill in the other? Duh. But look again: The grid you’ve come to know as perfectly square has been transmogrified into a tall, thin pillar, like a skyscraper. And once you start solving, you’ll see that the puzzle begins easy as pie, and gets tougher and tougher as you solve downward, until, I hope, you reach the bottom stumped and sweating. The puzzle is a slow descent into devilish difficulty, simple enough to slip into but nearly impossible to complete. That’s why it’s called an Inferno: Like Dante’s katabasis into hell, the deeper you go, the more severe the punishment.

Inferno taps into what I love about print puzzles. You solve as much as you can. Then you get stuck and stow the magazine somewhere safe while the frustrating blockade of clues burbles in your subconscious. A few days later, you pick the puzzle back up to find the knot of knowledge untied by some unseen cognitive force inside you. Your momentum returns, and you cruise along victoriously … until you hit the next impenetrable barricade. Lather, rinse, and repeat; before you know it, you’ve conquered the unconquerable, and another magazine with another unconquerable challenge arrives in the mail.

Can you plumb the very bottom of this puzzle’s infernal depths before the next issue hits the newsstands? Can you at least get a little closer each time? My advice, as with every crossword, is to be patient and build from what you know. A long “spine” answer will run down the center of the puzzle, traversing each tier of difficulty, which should help you gain a toehold in even the toughest tangles. Test your prowess starting in the July/August 2023 issue of The Atlantic. The puzzle will also be available to play online, and the answer key will be posted on www.theatlantic.com/inferno.

On the southernmost continent, you can see enormous stretches of wind-sculpted ice that seem carved from marble, and others that are smooth and green as emerald. You can see icebergs, whales, emperor penguins. Visitors have described the place as otherworldly, magical, and majestic. The light, Jon Krakauer has said, is so ravishing, “you get drugged by it.”

Travelers are drawn to Antarctica for what they can find there—the wildlife, the scenery, the sense of adventure—and for what they can’t: cars, buildings, cell towers. They talk about the overwhelming silence. The Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge called it “the quietest place I have ever been.”

All of these attractions are getting harder to find in the rest of the world. They’re disappearing in Antarctica too. The continent is melting; whole chunks are prematurely tumbling into the ocean. And more people than ever are in Antarctica because tourism is on a tear.

Four decades ago, the continent saw only a few hundred visitors each summer. More than 100,000 people traveled there this past season, the majority arriving on cruises. In the context of a land this size, that number may not sound like a lot. It’s roughly the capacity of Michigan Stadium, or about the attendance of the CES tech conference back in January.

But it’s also a record—and a 40 percent jump over 2019–20, the season before the coronavirus pandemic brought Antarctic travel to a near standstill. And although scientists who visit the continent to study its life and demise have a clear place here, many sightseers bring a whiff of “last-chance tourism”—a desire to see a place before it’s gone, even if that means helping hasten its disappearance. Perversely, the climate change that imperils Antarctica is making the continent easier to visit; melting sea ice has extended the cruising season. Travel companies are scrambling to add capacity. Cruise lines have launched several new ships over the past couple of years. Silversea’s ultra-luxurious Silver Endeavour is being used for “fast-track” trips—time-crunched travelers can save a few days by flying directly to Antarctica in business class.

Overtourism isn’t a new story. But Antarctica is different from any other place on Earth. It’s less like a too-crowded national park and more like the moon, or the geographical equivalent of an uncontacted people. It is singular, and in its relative wildness and silence, it is the last of its kind. And because Antarctica is different, we should treat it differently: Let the last relatively untouched landscape stay that way.

Traveling to Antarctica is a carbon-intensive activity. Flights and cruises must cross thousands of miles in extreme conditions, contributing to the climate change that is causing ice loss and threatening whales, seals, and penguins. By one estimate, the carbon footprint for a person’s Antarctic cruise can be roughly equivalent to the average European’s output for a year, because cruise ships are heavy polluters and tourists have to fly so far. Almost all travel presents this problem on some level. But “this kind of tourism involves a larger carbon footprint than other kinds of tourism,” says Yu-Fai Leung, a professor in the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University who has done extensive research on Antarctic travel.

Antarctic tourism also directly imperils an already fragile ecosystem. Soot deposits from ship engines accelerate snow melting. Hikes can damage flora that take well over a decade to regrow in the harsh environment. Humans risk introducing disease and invasive species. Their very presence, North Carolina State scientists have shown, stresses out penguins, and could affect the animals’ breeding.

Yet as tourism gets more popular, companies are competing to offer high-contact experiences that are more exciting than gazing at glaciers from the deck of a ship. Last year, for instance, a company named White Desert opened its latest luxury camp in Antarctica. Its sleeping domes, roughly 60 miles from the coast, are perched near an emperor-penguin colony and can be reached only by private jet. Guests, who pay at least $65,000 a stay, are encouraged to explore the continent by plane, Ski-Doos, and Arctic truck before enjoying a gourmet meal whose ingredients are flown in from South Africa.

All of this adds up. A recent study found that less than a third of the continent is still “pristine,” with no record of any human visitation. Those untouched areas don’t include Antarctica’s most biodiverse areas; like wildlife—and often because of wildlife—people prefer to gather in places that aren’t coated in ice. As more tourists arrive, going deeper into the continent to avoid other tourists and engage in a wider range of activities, those virgin areas will inevitably shrink.

The international community has banned mining on the continent, and ships aren’t allowed to use heavy fuel oil in its waters. Yet tourism is still only loosely regulated. “I think it’s fair to say the rules are just not good enough,” Tim Stephens, a professor at the University of Sydney who specializes in international law, told me. There’s no single central source of governance for tourism. The Antarctic Treaty System imposes broad environmental restrictions on the continent. Individual governments have varying laws that regulate operators, ships, and aircraft. The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators has extensive guidelines it requires its members to follow, out of genuine concern and, perhaps, to ward off more rigorous outside regulation.

Gina Greer, IAATO’s executive director, says the organization is proactive about protecting Antarctica. Visitors are asked to keep a distance from wildlife, decontaminate their shoes to keep novel bugs and bacteria at bay, stay on established paths, and more. Because tour operators visit the same sites repeatedly, they can spot changes in the landscape or wildlife populations and notify scientists.

This spring, IAATO added a new slow zone—an area where ships have to reduce their speed to 10 knots because whales have been congregating there in greater numbers—to those implemented in 2019. “It’s amazing to see how members come together and make decisions that may be difficult but are necessary,” Greer told me.

Still, these are all essentially voluntary behaviors. And some operators don’t belong to IAATO.

Accidents also have a way of happening despite the best intentions. In 2007, the MS Explorer, a 250-foot expedition cruise ship, sank near penguin breeding grounds on the South Shetland Islands, leaving behind a wreck and a mile-long oil slick. Most cruise ships are registered in what Stephens calls “flag-convenient countries” that are lax on oversight. “If you have a cruise ship going down in Antarctica, it’s not going to be the same seriousness as the Exxon Valdez,” he said. “But it’s not going to be pretty.”  

To reduce crowding and environmental pressure, modern-day tourists have been asked to think twice about visiting a slew of alluring places: Venice, Bali, Big Sur. But the calculus can get complicated—in almost any destination, you have locals who are trying to improve (or just sustain) their lot.

Most of the Maldives, for instance, lies just a meter above sea level. “Climate change is an existential threat,” Aminath Shauna, the minister of environment, climate change, and technology, said in an interview with the IMF in 2021. “There’s no higher ground we can run to.”  

Within decades, the decadent overwater bungalows that the islands are known for could be underwater bungalows. But more than a quarter of the country’s GDP comes from tourism. So this year, the Maldives hopes to welcome 1.8 million tourists—all of whom can reach it only by plane or boat rides that indirectly contribute to rising seas.

That conflict doesn’t exist in Antarctica. With no human residents, it’s the rare place that still belongs to nature, as much as that’s possible. It is actually most valuable to us when left wild, so that it can continue to act as a buffer against climate change, a storehouse of the world’s fresh water, and a refuge for birds, whales, seals, fish, and even the krill that the entire marine ecosystem depends on.

Some argue that tourists become ambassadors for the continent—that is, for its protection and for environmental change. That’s laudable, but unsupported by research, which has shown that in many cases Antarctic tourists become ambassadors for more tourism.

Antarctica doesn’t need ambassadors; it needs guardians. Putting this land off-limits would signify how fragile and important—almost sacred—it is. Putting it at risk to give deep-pocketed tourists a sense of awe is simply not worth it.

We have more than a continent—or even our planet—at stake. The treaties that govern Antarctica helped lay the foundation for space agreements. Space is already crowded and junked up with human-made debris. Tourism will only add to the problem; experts are warning that it is intensely polluting and could deplete the ozone layer. If we can’t jointly act to put Antarctica off limits, our view of the moon may eventually be marred. Imagine a SpaceX–branded glamping resort, or a Blue Origin oasis stocked entirely by Amazon’s space-delivery business.

As a species, we’re not very good at self-restraint (see: AI). And these days, few arenas exist where individual decisions make a difference. Antarctica could be one of them. Maybe, despite our deepest impulses to explore, we can leave one place in the world alone.

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.