“This animal sleeps its whole life away. It’s never really awake.” The Spanish conquistador and mutineer Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) thus describes a sloth in the 1972 West German anti-epic Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The same lethargy cannot be ascribed to the film’s director. Werner Herzog’s unceasing activity as filmmaker, author, lecturer, world traveler, actor in other people’s movies, and rescuer of strangers on the highway makes the paltry accomplishments of other human beings look inadequate and lazy by comparison. He gives the impression of a tirelessness that does not allow for rest, of

Flushing, Queens, early 1960s, Saturday nights. The boy next door’s name was Eugene; he was overweight, attended the Bronx High School of Science, and was an amateur radio enthusiast. Home alone, a young Ellen Ullman would be watching TV when, “suddenly, Eugene’s ham radio hijacked our television signal—invaded the set with the loud white noise of electronic snow.” In a poignant piece in her new essay collection, Life in Code, Ullman describes how she could hear his voice, and in the sine wave that pierced the on-screen static she could see him, too. His message became as familiar as his call

At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the company’s preferred ‘metric’ when measuring its own size, means two billion different people used Facebook in the preceding month. It is hard to grasp just how extraordinary that is. Bear in mind that thefacebook—its original name—was launched exclusively for Harvard students in 2004. No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly. The speed of uptake far exceeds that of the internet itself, let alone ancient

It’s fair to say that Samantha Hunt doesn’t care much for straightforward realism. The protagonist of her first novel, The Seas (2004), is a young woman living in an isolated coastal town who’s convinced that she’s a mermaid. The Invention of Everything Else (2008) is set during the waning years of Nikola Tesla’s life, but includes a subplot wherein one of the supporting characters may have traveled through time. And her most recent novel, Mr. Splitfoot (2016), abounds with ghosts both literal and metaphorical.

For Hunt’s characters, belief in a thing may be enough to make it real. As an