Tourism to Joshua Tree National Park in California’s High Desert has exploded — it has seen a natural growth over the decades, but in recent years, both social media and the pandemic have created a surge in visitors, some unfortunately only interested in getting the perfect Instagram shot or defacing the park’s beloved trees (Yucca brevifolia). Brad Ressler reports that visitation has nearly doubled since 2014, but the budget and resources set aside for the park has stayed the same.
What can be done to ensure the preservation of the park? It’s up to David Smith, Joshua Tree’s superintendent, to figure out solutions, whether it’s building more roads, establishing a reservation system, prohibiting cellphones, or instituting more visitor rules. Ressler’s piece for Alta is an informative story about the current state of Joshua Tree, but also a great profile of Smith — a nature-loving California native who, naturally, became a ranger for the U.S. National Park Service.
Visitors pilfer rolls of toilet paper from the vault toilets or toss them into the sewage below. They heist or hew entire Joshua trees or decorate them using spray paint and pocketknife; boulders and interpretive signs, too. They drive off-road, creating furrows that will persist for decades and shredding the bacteria-rich cryptobiotic crust. An Andy Goldsworthy wannabe, or perhaps a hyperactive 10-year-old, has erected about 100 small cairns out by the Hall of Horrors, carbuncles in an otherwise unblemished landscape. Why do people do these things? While nobody knows why, they’re by-products of the park’s newfound popularity.
Today we are featuring stories about the decimation of a national park, the survival of Texas Monthly magazine, how a couple escaped slavery in Boston, choosing when to die, and the future of jelly.
Georgina Gustin | Undark | January 4, 2023 | 2,363 words
Once a wildlife paradise, Kenya’s Amboseli National Park has become a wasteland. Tourists on safari arrive excited but leave traumatized, reports Georgina Gustin, as carcasses of starved animals litter the terrain: “Wildebeests are gray-brown lumps with quote-shaped horns. Gazelles, small piles of suede. Zebras, bloated disco-era carpets.” Previously a lush wildlife sanctuary, Amboseli has been plagued by climate change-fueled drought for two years and braces itself for a third. In addition to a parched and changing landscape, clashes between herders and farmers and an increase in illegal poaching also contribute to the dire situation. Wildlife photographs by Larry C. Price accompany Gustin’s piece, and while they may be hard to look at, they’re an important reminder that no creature can escape a warming planet. —CLR
Stephen Harrigan | Texas Monthly | January 17, 2023 | 4,495 words
Fifty years used to be nothing for a magazine. Of course they lasted decades, they were bound collections of journalism printed monthly and delivered via newsstand and mailbox! But for Texas Monthly to hit that mark was in no way foretold — and for it to do so during the long slow decline of physical media is a miracle indeed. No wonder that the magazine commissioned some of its longtime writers to bear witness. What sets Stephen Harrigan’s dispatch apart, though, is its utter lack of nostalgia. Sure, Harrigan was there at the very beginning; sure, he wrote for TM as typewriters gave way to computers and fax machines gave way to computers and [checks notes] everything gave way to computers. This is no elegy to a bygone era, though; it’s an ode to evolution. Turns out that a publication needs to adapt to survive. But that doesn’t mean that its mission has to. “Morale was shaky, salaries were flat, the staff was shrinking,” Harrigan writes of a particularly lean period last decade. “It just didn’t seem like a world anymore where a writer would have the latitude to take three or four or six months to deeply report a feature story, where it was possible for a statewide magazine to maintain a national reputation. But at the same time, nobody wanted to give up on the idea.” Nobody wanted to give up on the idea. Nobody should. And in a time when launching new magazines is far too rare (and their demises far too frequent), it’s crucial to remember that. —PR
Ilyon Woo | The Boston Globe Magazine | January 5, 2023 | 5,786 words
Ellen and William Craft fled slavery not via the Underground Railroad but by actual train: They climbed aboard one bound for Savannah, Georgia, in December 1848 — she disguised as a white man, he as her property. They saw people they knew on their journey, including a friend of their master who sat right next to Ellen in a first-class seat. (She pretended to be deaf so she wouldn’t have to converse with him and risk exposing her identity.) But making it to Boston, where the couple built a new life together, didn’t guarantee their safety. Slave catchers came for them, and in an enthralling turn of events, Bostonians of all colors came out to defend the Crafts by any means necessary. This story, excerpted from Ilyon Woo’s new book, Master Slave Husband Wife, had me on the edge of my seat and, at various points, cheering. It feels as if it’s powered by a locomotive engine, but really the motor is Woo’s exceptional facility with pacing, scenes, and characterization. —SD
Robin Williamson | The Audacity | January 11, 2022 | 4,597 words
Robin Williamson’s mother had secondary progressive multiple sclerosis. A disease that ravaged her body for many years — before driving her to an attempt on her own life. Her family needed to find a different path. Williamson talks about her mother with love, tenderness, and sadness that never creeps into the saccharine. Instead, pragmatism overlays emotion: Faced with death, this family made a plan, wrote a schedule, and decided to face it together, not in secret. Despite her mother being “the strong, stoic sick person,” Williamson knew that — beneath this persona — there was misery and pain, with morphine now “like laying a thin blanket on a stone bed.” Not shying away from the reality of disease, Williamson still manages to write an essay more beautiful than maudlin. The final month the family spends together before heading to Dignitas to carry out “The Switzerland Schedule” is about the tiny, precious moments of nothing: “Picture my father, my brothers, and I spread across the sofas, beer bottles and wine glasses strewn around the room, with my mother on her scooter beside one of the sofas.” The time then spent in Switzerland is about grief, but it is also about finding peace. —CW
Bettina Makalintal | Eater | January 10, 2023 | 1,818 words
“I predict that we are on the threshold of a new aspic-forward aesthetic,” is something I would not have expected to read in my lifetime. I admit it. I’m a dessert fusspot. I have strong opinions: I love sticky toffee pudding and chocolate cake. The only acceptable pies are apple and pumpkin. Custard is bland. Tapioca is revolting. But Jell-O tops the many desserts on my “hard no” list. Way too squirmy! It’s always important to revisit your beliefs from time to time. (I guess.) Could Jell-O become a possibility for me? (Highly unlikely!) “I think that Jell-O, in a way, can be terrifying and delicious at the same time. There’s a little discussion in the book about the sublime: things that are really scary, but they kind of attract you anyway. It’s things that are in the liminal space between what’s acceptable and what’s really bizarre, and people find that fun from an aesthetic perspective.” —KS
Deprived of face-to-face contact with his parishioners during the height of the pandemic, Michael Coren, an Anglican priest, had to get creative to minister to the sick, the dying, the elderly, and the lonely.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the pandemic to shape the practice of my new ministry in profound ways. My daily tasks as a priest? Lead services at retirement and care homes; meet people who need housing, employment, money, and advice; visit the sick and housebound; help with feeding the hungry. I work as a priest independently (which also means that clergy anecdotes are, by their very nature, personal; there are no witnesses). A constant of all this activity is direct and personal contact. A constant of COVID-19, of course, was the absence of direct and personal contact. How do you counsel, listen to, pray with—and for—people if you can’t share the same space?
So I started two prayer groups and a bereavement group and chaired a meeting of parents of adult children with mental health issues. All on Zoom. I also started a telephone support group. Every week, volunteers called to check in with parishioners unable to leave their homes. Our job was to ask after people, be a friendly voice. Since there were certain things I couldn’t do, I had to compensate. You don’t need to embrace someone to show you care. Indeed, hugging is so common as to be drained of meaning. I tried to develop listening skills to reach further than where the usual words and actions could take me. One example remains: a young woman crying at the death of her mother. It was a phone call. I paused. A lot. When you can’t see the person, it’s hard to pace your moments. Instead, you give them plenty of time to complete their weeping, and you stay silent with them in their grief.
I don’t love January for the usual reasons: holiday festivities are over, work resumes, and the weather is gray and cold and depressing. In January the year in front of me feels like a void. Confronted with a blank calendar, my instinct is to fill everything in, to make it mean something, to schedule my life into being busy and full and loud.
I’m trying to cope with my January existential crisis, and the way I cope is to read. Lately, my favorite author is French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel prize in literature. I’d always had a book or two of hers lying around, always meant to read her in earnest, but it took me until this fall to get into her work — and now I’m obsessed. As she explores her memory and its reliability, Ernaux relaxes my melancholy into something closer to curiosity. As Sheila Heti writes in the New York Times: “Most memoirs operate as if the past were right there and can be looked at, like a painting on the wall. But Ms. Ernaux understands that one’s 18-year-old self is a stranger to one’s 70-year-old self.”
In Happening, Ernaux is haunted by an illegal abortion during her youth. She sets out to transcribe “an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me.” She writes, “I shall try to conjure up each of the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror or sweetness.” Ernaux’s works foreground the difficulty of writing about the self, showing memory as just another way to cope with the void: the blank page, the unknown future, the open calendar squares that haunt me. Reading her work exposes the futility of my efforts to force things to mean something just to stave off the blankness of a new year. But there’s a glimpse of hope for me: Ernaux reminds me that sometimes things find their meaning only in hindsight, not in the present. You can relax and return to something later, able to see anew what it was all about.
This reading list brings together essays that question the stories we hold about ourselves, how we make our lives meaningful. There’s love, sex, heartbreak, returns to childhood, and deep grief that structure how we see ourselves and our lives. These writers, like Ernaux, travel into their own memories and sensations, confronting old versions of themselves and dredging up hidden habits, to see what makes sense.
Of course there’s one thing that makes our lives so meaningful: desire. Noor Qasim’s essay considers the narrative potential of desire — the stories we tell ourselves about it — by placing Annie Ernaux alongside the genre of the millennial sex novel, including books by Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, and Alyssa Songsiridej. Qasim contrasts Ernaux’s novel Simple Passion, which appeared in 1991, with her recently published journals, Getting Lost, which she kept during the same period. What emerges is a picture of how desire moves us, how it makes our mind work, and how we might start to write about it.
As Ernaux lived the affair, she was aware of the sort of novel one might write — perhaps one rather similar to the novels of desire examined here. But she chose, instead, to craft a different story of desire, one based in fact, yes, though not in the particularities of her fraught and ultimately commonplace experience. In eschewing the logics of narrative, in refusing to even attempt to pin down the object of her desire and opting instead for something that might resemble a ‘testimony,’ Ernaux abdicates any responsibility to plot and its repetitive motions, freeing herself to focus fully on the phenomenon of desire instead. Getting Lost evokes the experience of desire through the mess of life; Simple Passion pares away context to reveal desire’s shape. And while the journals’ primary interest is as a supplement to the novel that arose from them, they also help to preserve a sort of elemental agony, the anxious movements of a mind that desires, and desires seriously.
Crush Fatigue (Alexandra Molotkow, Real Life Magazine, 2018)
I credit this essay by Alexandra Molotkow for introducing me to psychologist Dorothy Tennov, whose 1979 book Love and Limerence was quite a read. “Limerence” names an obsessive infatuation, and Molotkow examines how this infatuation can both bring us out of ourselves — “Limerence is a program running in the background of your days and nights, arranging your impressions in the shape of your fixation” — and how it also operates as a form of selfishness. We get drawn out of ourselves into the idea of another, but we only know that person through our own mind. Molotkow takes the messiness and ambivalence of a crush seriously, paying attention to how much we want to pay attention to someone.
I was born limerent, and my relationship to limerence itself is ambivalent. Crushes map life over with meaning and joy, and I’d always choose heartbreak over boredom. They can also gain on me like a frightening, unpredictable force that lifts me out of my life and drops me back, months later, with a lot of mess to clean. They feel disruptive and wasteful — a misallocation of emotional energies, a source of outsize pain for stupid reasons — and, though it’s partly the point, they alienate me from myself: crushing involves adopting a set of hypothetical standards against which I’m necessarily lacking.
A Glass Essay (Sarah Chihaya, The Yale Review, 2022)
Sarah Chihaya writes about reading Anne Carson in the wake of a devastating breakup. Every day for one summer in Oxford, she reread Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay” in the same spot every day. Her experience of rereading makes her question her own investment in reading as an academic and as a self-described “professional reader.” The practice of rereading Carson is both comforting and challenging, alienating and unifying all at once: It makes a stretch of time make sense, and Chihaya’s account of her own story reminds us what reading can do when it knits into the fabric of our lives.
After you walk away from a last good-bye, the terrain of everyday life is suddenly overlaid with the haunted geography of an entire relationship. Every space is layered with the fine sediment of recollection. Any time you trip and reach out for balance, your hand might accidentally slip “down // into time” and dredge up something beautiful or awful from those years or months or weeks past.
I love this Substack newsletter by Berkeley journalism student Kate Raphael, which reflects on the uncanny experience of being in your childhood bedroom, brushing up against the many past versions of yourself. Like Ernaux, Raphael’s access to the past is more complicated, more difficult to reach — until it’s not. She writes “I keep my distance from my younger self; I return home with my guard up,” but after sliding back into her past self, Raphael leans in. She rereads her childhood journals alongside watching the film Aftersun, which is set mostly within a child’s perspective and highlights a fragmented memory. Both the film and Raphael’s experiences foreground what returning to the past can give us, what meanings we can find there.
When I slip back into myself as a kid, when I snap at my parents or fall into an old pattern, I often think I am reverting to someone worse. I expect to react better and understand more now that I’m older, and I find that much of the time, I do not. In so many ways, I am still my younger self—a girl who surprises me by how much she understood, how deeply she felt things, while my current self surprises me by how much she still doesn’t understand.
In this essay for The Point, Elisa Gonzalez reflects on the death of her brother alongside artwork depicting resurrections, meditating largely on the biblical story of Lazarus. She considers the difficulty of writing about the dead, the pull the story of resurrection has on us, and the way grief reorders a life. Her attention to the way mourning morphs time takes on a distinctly Ernaux-like quality, Gonzalez reflecting that “Time, I suspect, will never move as it did before, even after I step back into it.”
Being thrown out of time or immured in a fixed point within it is a way of dying with the one who has died, an unwilled and yet welcome journey that brings us nearer to being dead. My brother was shot in the chest three times, and every day I shape a gun out of my hand and press it three times to my chest. This ritual is a way of entering the event that I can never live, though I survive it: his dying, not mine. That I go on living while he does not still surprises me. Yet I now think the living hasn’t been continuous. If I have found any resurrection for sure, it’s mine, not my brother’s: as soon as I said, to another sister, “Stephen is dead,” it was as if I, like Barthes, were one dead—and then I came back to life, changed, like Lazarus always and probably until my final death glancing at that vast distracting orb beyond.
***
Bekah Waalkes is a writer and PhD candidate at Tufts University. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Cleveland Review of Books, Bon Appétit, and more.
The search for life on other planets has been based on what we already know. But what if extraterrestrial life does not look like any beings we’re used to on Earth? It may even be unrecognizable to the scientists searching for it. In this essay, Sarah Scoles meets Sarah Stewart Johnson, who has been looking for “aliens” from a different perspective.
Even when scientists do discover biology unfamiliar to them, they tend to relate it to something familiar. For instance, when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek saw single-celled organisms through his microscope’s compound lens in the 17th century, he dubbed them “animalcules,” or little animals, which they are not.
Once a wildlife paradise, Amboseli National Park in Kenya has become a wasteland. For Undark, journalist Georgina Gustin and documentary photographer Larry C. Price document the stark and deadly conditions that animals at Amboseli have endured the past several years, caused by climate change-fueled drought. In addition to a parched and drastically changing environment, conflicts between herders and farmers and an increase in illegal poaching have contributed to an already dire situation. For some readers, Price’s photographs may be hard to look at. Gustin’s on-the-ground reporting, however, is essential.
The park draws tens of thousands of tourists a year and is a major economic engine for the region. Now these tourists pop their heads through the roofs of safari trucks, or sit inside, jabbing at their phones and looking blankly out the window, wondering how the trip of a lifetime turned into a vigil.
On the occasion of Texas Monthly‘s 50th anniversary, writer Stephen Harrigan looks back at his own milestone with the magazine, and in the process delivers a stirring reminder of what brought so many into the longform journalism fold. You report and write for the reader, yes, but every story is a crucial experience — and one that begets its own tributary.
The monthly editorial meetings represented, for me, a magic door opening to an unknown future. What story would I be assigned? Where would it take me? Who would I meet? There were stories that I reported by phone from inside my house, others that deposited me in the empty middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, or in the suffocating botanical abundance of the Big Thicket, or in the operating room with Denton Cooley, or a world away with a Dallas disaster consultant in the rain forests of Madagascar. Every magazine piece led to new interests, new expertise, ideas for more articles, and even sometimes a branching path to a new career. My first two novels were incubated in stories I wrote for Texas Monthly, and so was the first screenplay I sold.
The Crafts, a married couple in Macon, Georgia, fled bondage in plain sight: she disguised as a white man, he as her slave. In a riveting excerpt from her new book, Master Slave Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo documents their flight:
As dawn began to break, the station filled with travelers bound for Savannah. Ensconced quietly in the only car where a Black man was supposed to sit, William carried the cottage key and a pass. And he, or perhaps Ellen, carried a pistol. On this morning, William had to hope that they would not need to use it. He himself had resolved to kill or be killed, rather than be captured.
Traffic at the station thinned as travelers crowded about the train, ready to board. They said their goodbyes. For enslaved riders, this may have been the last time they would see the faces of loved ones, if their loved ones even had permission to see them off.
With the engine fed and the water tank full, the conductor made his final calls. William dared to peek outside. Linked to him, he knew, if only by way of rickety clasps between the cars, was Ellen, who by this time should have been seated in first class. It would be difficult for William to see her before the train stopped. But briefly, William could glimpse the ticket booth, where Ellen, as his master, would have purchased two tickets.
Instead of his wife, he saw another familiar figure hurrying up to the ticket window. His heart dropped. The man interrogated the ticket seller, then pushed his way through the crowd on the platform, with purpose. It was William’s employer — not his legal enslaver, but another white man who “rented” William’s labor in a cabinet shop. This man, who had known William since childhood, scanned the throng as he approached the cars.
“DNA is the gift that keeps on giving, whether you’re ready or not,” writes Dorothy Ellen Palmer. Palmer and her half-brother, Don Doiron, were born a week apart in 1955, in the same hospital, to different mothers: Florence McLean and Ana Cifuentes. It took 62 years before they learned that they were half-siblings, and were adopted into very different families. Palmer pens a poignant personal essay about searching for the truth, their buried family history in a time when “silence ruled” and “adoption was never discussed,” and their birth father. It’s a moving story about finding one’s place in the world.
Even as adults, adoptees have long been treated like children who need to be protected from our own truths. When we came of age in the 1970s, Don and I had to apply for the scant details, called non-identifying information, the government then permitted us to know. We received sparse biographies of our birth mothers (age, birthplace, education and occupation) and next to nothing about our birth fathers. It wasn’t enough for either of us.
Today, Don and I are still piecing together our stories. Not everything we’ve learned has been happy. Some of our shared history is heart-rending. But we claim every bit of our lives as our truth, as the story we have every right to know, to celebrate and to mourn, to pass on to our children.
“I call my cousin who lives in Crosbyton to find out what it looks like now and if people still swim there,” writes Bobby Alemán. “I ask him if there are still waterfalls. He laughs.”
Silver Falls, once an idyllic swimming hole and recreation spot for families in Texas, no longer exists. But why did the waterfalls go dry? Alemán went back home to investigate why, and on the trip unexpectedly uncovers memories of his father, who died in 2005 at age 50.
She struggles to put words together to tell me about a separate incident involving my father. It turns out my dad once saved a drowning child at Silver Falls. He pulled a 6- or 7-year-old boy out of the water and performed CPR. The boy’s parents were hysterical. Screaming. “They were sure he was gone,” she says. “He just pulled the boy out, right?” I say, puzzled. “No! Your dad brought the boy back,” my aunt emphasizes. “He was as limp as can be.”
I’d never heard this story, but it didn’t surprise me. My grandfather tells me a similar story from many years ago about my dad spotting an injured hiker stranded on a ravine, most likely in the Guadalupe Mountains, when he and his girlfriend were on their way to Mexico for a trip. He was able to flag down help and get aid to the woman. My dad died in 2005 at the age of 50—too young. But since he’s been gone, his stories keep finding their way to me.
When a show creates and airs more than 740 episodes of television, finding consensus about the best of those episodes is nearly impossible. Yet, 30 years after it first aired, The Simpsons‘ “Marge vs. the Monorail” might be closest to the crown. This piece from Alan Siegel isn’t the first time an outlet has examined the episode’s impact — see Vice‘s oral history from 2020 — but it gleefully dives into the origin and execution the way few others have. D’ohnt skip it.
The episode was the first true extravaganza for a groundbreaking animated series that was originally conceived as an intimate family comedy. Both visually and narratively, it was an installment that expanded the world of The Simpsons as it moved beyond its first few seasons. All the quotable lines, sight gags, pop culture references, ambitious set pieces, and catchy songs add up to something unexpectedly (and eternally) prescient. The episode is now synonymous with modern hucksterism: Whenever a fancy newtransportation system, or a billion-dollar eyesore, or a deal that enriches corporate executives and few others comes along, it can’t escape comparisons to Lanley’s genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail. “I get a kick out of the cultural reach of The Simpsons,” says television writer and producer Jeff Martin, who had a hand in making “Marge vs. the Monorail.” “Now if there’s some shorthand for a dishonest salesman, a flimflam man, it’s a monorail salesman.”
“It is difficult to build utopian housing in a non-utopian world,” writes Rachel Monroe in this feature on 3-D-printed construction. But Jason Ballard, the co-founder of Icon, a construction startup in Austin, Texas, is determined to do just that. Icon uses a largely automated process to create houses one layer at a time, typically with cement. The company is one of the biggest and most well-funded ventures in the construction space, and even has a NASA contract to develop technology to build lunar structures. It has the potential to show the world that 3-D-printing can be a less expensive alternative, and one that produces more resilient, sustainable housing.
But is the industry ready for this disruption?
A printer can create the shell of a simple building in as little as twenty-four hours, although real-world conditions (rain, cold temperatures, operator error) slow the process. In the past two years, as Icon has expanded, its fleet of printers, called Vulcans, has printed military barracks, disaster-resilient houses, a luxury residence, and, at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, a full-sized simulation of a Martian habitat, for nasa. Other 3-D-printing companies have produced an apartment building, a houseboat in the Czech Republic, and a house for Habitat for Humanity. Dubai has pledged that, by 2030, a quarter of its new construction will be printed.
Think you need to move to the woods to live off the grid? Joshua Spodek’s successful experiment proves that you can manage just fine on sustainable energy sources in the middle of a huge city.
I started my personal sustainability drive almost accidentally, when I challenged myself to avoid packaged food for a week. I expected deprivation and sacrifice from avoiding Manhattan’s abundant food options. If I’m honest, part of me hoped to find the challenge untenable so I could say the cure was worse than the disease and give up.
But constraints breed creativity. I learned to cook from scratch, which led to more of what I valued in food: flavor, variety, convenience, nutrition, and socializing, while lowering costs and pollution.
The unexpectedly rewarding results motivated me to keep going. I avoided flying for a year and experimented with unplugging my fridge. By May 2022, when I decided to disconnect completely, I hadn’t filled a load of trash since 2019, hadn’t flown since 2016, had unplugged my fridge for eight months, and had electric bills consistently under $2 (not counting fixed connection charges of about $18).
Attitude was more important than technology, though. Attitude made my setup doable. I’m not suggesting that “because I could do it, you can do it,” but I did tell myself that if humans could do without power for 300,000 years, then I could do so for a month.
I’m not able to make friends with Jell-O. Never have, never will. But maybe you’re more adventurous and curious than I am. Like it or not, Jell-O is enjoying a renaissance. At Eater, Bettina Makalintal interviews author Ken Albala about his new book “The Great Gelatin Revival.”
Eater: You write that you don’t choose book topics but that they choose you. What was your relationship to jelly like before you wrote this book?
Ken Albala: I didn’t like it, for one. [laughs] My mother made it when I was young. My parents were on Weight Watchers and they made this parfait that was lots of different colors, Cool Whip with Jell-O, just awful. I told my mother I figured out where Jell-O comes from — that it comes from calves’ feet — and I wasn’t gonna eat it anymore. That got me out of it.
I didn’t like it until a friend dared me to look at Show Me Your Aspics. I got sucked into it and I started making Jell-O here and there and realized that I was doing it every day. Some of them were good, some were not. I thought I might as well just get a book out of this.
