Anytime I’ve felt adrift or lonely, literature has been a bridge leading me back to other people. When I moved to a new country after living in the same city for three decades, I sought out literary events to meet fellow artists. Back when I was a disillusioned law student, frustrated with the limitations of the curriculum, I convened a reading group that addressed the gaps in our education and breathed new meaning into my degree. Writing is an isolating and unpredictable line of work, so today, I consistently rely on the solidarity offered by others engaged in the same pursuit.

Many of us are bombarded with cultural messages insisting that we must be self-sufficient. Books can help us resist that idea. They are also one of the most powerful tools we have for building connections with others. Reading allows us to learn about history, discover new thoughts, join with like-minded people, and reimagine the world from how it is into how it could be. (Partly because of that subversive potential, the freedom to read is also under threat.)

The following six titles are a corrective to feeling like an island. By exploring a range of bonds—casual interactions over a shared hobby, say, or the knottiness of family ties—they remind us that, contrary to how it may seem at times, we are far from alone; our lives extend in multiple directions, influenced by and influencing those around us.

Ballantine

Son of Elsewhere, by Elamin Abdelmahmoud

At age 12, Abdelmahmoud moved with his family from Khartoum, Sudan, to Kingston, Ontario, “one of the whitest cities in Canada,” he writes in this memoir. “Over here, we’re Black,” a cousin told him about their new country. For Abdelmahmoud, this was an entirely different manner of thinking about himself; in Khartoum, he identified primarily as Arab. He explains that his Blackness presented an obstacle to fitting in, and at first he repudiated it by mimicking the speech of his white classmates, embracing cultural signifiers such as Linkin Park and wrestling, and even introducing himself as Stan. Although his teenage interests originate as attempts to belong, Abdelmahmoud develops authentic bonds with these pursuits—and with the people he meets through them. Wrestling leads him to e-federations—forums for fan fiction about fighters—and he finds his voice as a writer. Rock shows are cathartic, and let him work out his feelings in a crowd there to do the same. As he continues to think through his relationship to race, music and books by Black artists give him a more capacious way to understand his identity. Eventually, his jubilant, expansive love of pop culture becomes a path to genuine connection with his new neighbors.

[Read: Adjusting to life in a new country, with a friend]

Coach House Books

A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life, by Robert McGill

McGill’s propulsive, dizzyingly surreal third novel follows Regan, an 18-year-old with absent parents, a devastating athletic injury, and a pile of college rejections, who decides “that living wasn’t for her, maybe.” She heads to the dark web and orders an unexpected means of suicide: a person from a pandemic-ravaged country who has been flat-packed and shipped out like furniture. Once unpacked, the refugee will inflate and expel toxic packing gasses over several days, providing the recipient with a painless method of dying. Unfurling is a kind of second birth for Ülle, the woman delivered to Regan’s home. Her memories have been wiped clean; her English is elementary; one of her first actions, to Regan’s dismay, is to address her new companion as mama. As Regan waits for the gas to take effect, her plans begin to deviate: More mysterious packages arrive on her doorstep, Ülle’s past starts to come back to her, and she and Regan are surveilled by the organization that brought them together. The bond between the two women is initially meant to be transactional. But as Regan becomes Ülle’s de facto caregiver, the novel offers a surprising, deeply moving portrait of people finding an unconventional kind of family.

Pantheon

Thin Skin, by Jenn Shapland

In five lengthy essays, Shapland explores the idea that the borders between individual lives are not as fixed as we may like to believe. Rather, our behaviors inevitably affect others, and vice versa. For Shapland, the question of thin skin is quite literal—she was told by a dermatologist that she’s missing an epidermal layer. The human body’s vulnerable membrane provides a metaphor for the rest of the collection, which probes how our existence is neither autonomous nor inviolable, exemplified for Shapland by the polluted world, segregated cities, unequal resources. Believing that anyone is entirely self-contained, Shapland asserts, is a fantasy. Even someone who had no direct role in these ills may be affected by—or benefit from—the fallout. The essays unfold through association, sliding from subject to subject while implying the uneasy boundaries between them. “To be alive right now and to try to be aware of the broader impacts of my own actions feels like drowning,” she writes. By tracing these uncomfortable connections, Thin Skin repudiates the notion that we are wholly separate from one another.

[Read: Environmentalism was once a social-justice movement]

Haymarket

Rehearsals for Living, by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

During the initial wave of COVID-19 shutdowns in 2020, Maynard and Simpson, two radical writers, scholars, and activists, began exchanging the letters collected in Rehearsals for Living. Maynard is the author of the best-selling Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Present and has led a number of initiatives on police and prison abolition; Simpson has written seven previous books and spent decades teaching Indigenous forms of knowledge. At first, the letters simply enabled two friends to keep in touch during a dark time. As the year continued, both Maynard and Simpson joined the swelling, unprecedented Black Lives Matter and Indigenous land-defense movements, and their writing collaboratively imagined a society with, for example, no police and abundant shared resources. As they reflect on the many ways that the state has harmed their respective communities—including overpolicing and neglectful public-health responses to the pandemic—the letters contemplate what the future could look like, and writing becomes a form of coalition-building.

Ancestor Trouble, by Maud Newton

In this deeply researched memoir, Newton explores our connections with biological family. For Newton, that particular kind of relation can be vexed. She has long been fascinated by stories about the generations that preceded her, but she must also face the difficult parts of that history—for example, the virulent racism of her estranged father, the casual bigotry of her beloved grandmother, or, further back, her relatives who enslaved people. “It’s one thing to acknowledge bigotry and inhumanity where we expect it,” Newton writes; “it’s another thing to face and acknowledge it in the people we love most.” Her meticulous excavation of her family tree is both an engaging narrative and a clear-eyed reckoning. Ancestor Trouble asks not only what we owe those who came before us but also how the wrongs of our forebears inform what we owe those alive with us today. Newton has a passionate interest in the secrets of her bloodline and how they might erupt—genetically, dispositionally, psychologically—in her own life. Her research leads her into an exploration of the genealogy industry and global practices of ancestor worship, presenting a panoramic case for the value of honoring and reconciling one’s relationship to a challenging heritage.

[Read: Coming to terms with my father’s racism]

Coffee House Press

Alive at the End of the World, by Saeed Jones

Jones’s second book of poetry is a sharp, darkly comic celebration of Black life and art amidst the daily apocalypses of American life. His lucid lines mourn how mass shootings, the climate crisis, and rampant racism have made everyday violence feel normal: “In America, a gathering of people / is called target practice or a funeral, / depending on who lives long enough / to define the terms,” he writes. He makes art in response to his grief, and he connects our present moment, and his own poetry, to a longer history of Black artists who also worked under the collective weight of oppressive conditions. He invokes figures such as Little Richard, Paul Mooney, and Aretha Franklin, building a lineage of Black artistry while articulating how its output has been alternately fetishized, tokenized, and compromised. Jones places his work in this tradition and asserts its presence and depth, rejecting the patronizing notion that Black creative achievements are uncommon or exceptional. In a poem that takes the voice of the actress Diahann Carroll, he writes, “Let the pale reporters and their pointed questions about being / ‘the first and only’ hang from trees like the warnings they are.”

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The relationship between tech and sci-fi is closer—and messier—than observers might think.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Why married people are happier The real men south of Richmond The emptiness of the Ramaswamy doctrine

“A Spectrum of Futures”

I have some good news for readers of The Daily who are also active in the metaverse (if, indeed, you exist): Legs are on their way. Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, announced this week that its users would soon be able to add legs to their avatars in the VR versions of Meta Quest’s Horizon Home and Horizon Worlds. Before this update, figures in these virtual worlds were floating torsos that hovered above chairs and whooshed around conference rooms; legs were apparently a much-requested feature. Now the metaverse’s avatars will, in some ways, become more human, while also becoming more uncanny.

Reading about this news, I told my editor—mostly as a joke—that the metaverse users interested in accessing alternative realities and stepping into other lives should consider simply reading a novel. I stand by that cranky opinion, but it also got me thinking about the fact that the metaverse actually owes a lot to the novel. The term metaverse was coined in a 1992 science-fiction novel titled Snow Crash. (The book also helped popularize the term avatar, to refer to digital selves.) And when you start to look for them, you can find links between science fiction and real-world tech all over.

People often say that a new, hard-to-believe piece of technology (like eyeball-scanning orbs) seems plucked from science fiction. In many cases, the relationship between tech and sci-fi works both ways: Technologists might get ideas from sci-fi movies and books; scientists consult on sci-fi projects to make them more realistic. And creators of both tech and fiction are frequently sharing the same cultural anxieties and references. Sometimes the influence of sci-fi is explicit. The man credited with inventing the first cellphone reportedly drew inspiration from Dick Tracy; the government’s “Gorgon Stare” surveillance-drone technology can apparently be traced back to the Will Smith movie Enemy of the State. The name for the Taser references a young-adult science-fiction novel. The list goes on!

Often, though, the influence of science fiction on tech is less literal. Scientists are not generally reading novels and plucking new concepts for new inventions from them wholesale. But they may use pop-culture references to illustrate their ideas, or refer to science fiction in their research, Philipp Jordan, a lecturer in informatics at the University of Indiana, has found. His work has shown that nods to science fiction in computer-science papers have gone up in recent years, and that computer scientists have used fictional depictions of human-robot relationships—both positive, like with WALL-E, and dystopian, like with Skynet—as reference points in talking about the subject.

Jordan told me that there is a feedback loop between cultural output and technology. Science-fiction movies may reflect widespread fears about new technologies at a given moment—and then the public’s engagement with those films may be fed back into the scientific discourse. “I think [science fiction] is an extremely valuable asset for students, for the next generation of researchers, because it shows us a spectrum of futures, good and bad,” he said.

Ross Andersen, an Atlantic writer who covers science and technology, also told me he suspects that “a messy feedback loop” operates between sci-fi and real-world tech. Both technologists and writers who have come up with fresh ideas, he said, “might have simply been responding to the same preexisting human desires: to explore the deep ocean and outer space, or to connect with anyone on Earth instantaneously.” Citing examples such as Jules Verne’s novels and Isaac Asimov’s stories, Ross added that “whether or not science fiction influenced technology, it certainly anticipated a lot of it.”

The pattern of science fiction anticipating, or at least dovetailing with, cutting-edge real-world ideas is not new: In a 2016 article for The Atlantic, Edward Simon explored the sci-fi that was published during and before the peak of the scientific revolution, including such novels as Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Johannes Kepler’s Somnium. Literature helped spark curiosity as new scientific understandings were developing, he explained. “Science fiction alone did not inspire the scientific revolution, but the literature of the era did allow people to imagine different realities—in some cases, long before those realities actually became real,” Simon wrote.

Literature—even beyond pure science fiction—can help us imagine modes of living alongside new technologies. Don DeLillo’s work, notably White Noise, is freighted with the anxieties of the Cold War era. A more recent novel of his, Zero K, is laced with awe and longing about the capacity of science to ward off death. Works of climate fiction have attempted to reconcile enjoying life with living morally in a time of chaos and destruction, and many Silicon Valley novels throw the ethical shortcomings of dangerous inventions into relief. If art and technology have an invention feedback loop, perhaps they could develop an ethical one, too. Novels about technology tend to focus on the existence and the drama of dystopian tech itself—but they’re even more powerful when writers use narrative to examine the people that created those tools, and the human dynamics driving their existence. Writers have a unique power to explore moral questions about any new invention. Even more than new gadget ideas, the real world of tech could stand to learn from that.

Related:

The science fiction that came before science   What happens if China makes first contact?

Today’s News

According to an annual filing made public today, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has now formally disclosed taking three trips funded by the billionaire Harlan Crow. Joe Biggs, a former leader of the Proud Boys who assisted in the January 6 insurrection, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for seditious conspiracy, among other crimes. The attending physician to Congress said that Mitch McConnell was “medically clear” to continue with his schedule following an incident yesterday in which he appeared to freeze in front of reporters.

Evening Read

H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty

High-School English Needed a Makeover Before ChatGPT

By Daniel Herman

Maybe you have also experienced the distinctive blend of emotions elicited by first using ChatGPT—a deflating sense of wonder, a discomfiting awe. I certainly have. Since the emergence of generative AI last year, trying to envision the world we’re rapidly heading toward has been a vertiginous exercise. Coders may be replaced by algorithmically perfected, non-salary-receiving robots. In 2027, your favorite thing to listen to while walking the dog may be AI Taylor Swift giving you personalized affirmations about getting over your ex and moving on with your life.

At the moment, much of that remains in the distance. Meanwhile, teachers like myself are standing at the leading edge of comprehending what our jobs mean now.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

This hurricane season is unprecedented. How to pick the right sort of vacation for you Very, very few people are falling down the YouTube rabbit hole.

Culture Break

Corinna Kern / Reuters

Read. Two new books—The Emotional Life of Populism, by Eva Illouz, and Zionism: An Emotional State, by Derek Penslar—explore how emotions, such as love and fear, shape Israeli politics.

Listen. Tomorrow Texas will join the 20 or so other states that have banned all medical procedures enabling gender transition for minors. The latest episode of Radio Atlantic explores how the law changed one teenager’s life.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Bookforum is back! I am a subscriber to the magazine, which shut down for several months earlier this year, so I was delighted to find the new issue in my mailbox a few days ago. The issue contains many excellent reviews, but I especially recommend Tarpley Hitt’s essay on cryptocurrency’s “first celebrity anti-promoter,” and Ed Park’s writing on the rediscovered canon of a gossip columnist cum raconteur’s novels.

— Lora

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

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Friday's papers focus on the English school buildings that must close over fears of collapse.