The Hidden-Pregnancy Experiment

In today’s newsletter, The Weekend Essay, and then:
•Hope Hicks’s teary testimony at Trump’s trial
•The plight of the English apple
•“The Contestant,” reviewed

Shortly after I became pregnantwith my second child, in the fall of 2022, I decided to try a modest experiment. I wanted to see whether I could hide my pregnancy from my phone. After spending my twenties eagerly surveilling and sharing the details of my life online, I had already begun trying to erect some walls of technological privacy: I’d deleted most apps on my phone and turned off camera, location, and microphone access for nearly all of the ones that I did have; I had disabled Siri—I just found it annoying—and I didn’t have any smart devices. For the experiment, I would abide by some additional restrictions. I wouldn’t Google anything about pregnancy nor shop for baby stuff either online or using a credit card, and neither would my husband, because our I.P. addresses—and thus the vast, matrixed fatbergs of personal data assembled by unseen corporations to pinpoint our consumer and political identities—were linked. I wouldn’t look at pregnancy accounts on Instagram or pregnancy forums on Reddit. I wouldn’t update my period tracker or use a pregnancy app.

Knife, by Salman Rushdie (Random House). In August, 2022, more than thirty years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the killing of Salman Rushdie, an assassin came running at him. The man stabbed Rushdie as he was addressing an audience in Chautauqua, New York, and kept on doing so for nearly half a minute. Rushdie’s first thought was “So it’s you.” His second thought was “Why now?”Buy now onAmazonorBookshop.

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, by Anthony Bale (Norton). The late-medieval traveller, it was said, always needed two bags: one full of money, one of patience. Such wisdom fills the pages of this immensely entertaining history, which is constructed around medieval guidebooks and travelogues, and highlights dazzling destinations like Constantinople and Rhodes under the Knights Hospitaller.Buy now onAmazonorBookshop.

Neighbors and Other Stories, by Diane Oliver (Grove). In 1966, Oliver, an M.F.A. student at the University of Iowa, was killed in a motorcycle accident. This book, the first collection of her work, exhibits a unique delicacy in chronicling Black life in the nineteen-fifties and sixties—especially in the South amid the civil-rights movement.Buy now onAmazonorBookshop.

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton (Ecco). In this thriller inspired by true events, a journalist, Rika, becomes obsessed by the case of Manako Kajii, a sometime sex worker convicted of killing several men. Kajii reportedly seduced the men with her cooking—much to the confusion and chagrin of Japanese society, which tends to view Kajii’s “huge” body as an abomination. Rika interviews the wily Kajii in charged jailhouse meetings, and the two engage in an increasingly fraught game of cat and mouse.Buy now onAmazonorBookshop.

P.S. “He thought maybeshe was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley,” Alice Munro writes, inthis moving short story, from 1999, about a pair of lovers. “Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.” We encounter the couple again in old age, when the wife has begun to forget. What’s never lost is their commitment to caring for each other.