modern life

Novelist and memoirist Courtney Maum has built a career exploring ambition, identity, creativity, and the strange pressures of modern life. Her previous books include 'Touch,' 'Costalegre,' and the publishing-world favorite 'Before and After the Book Deal.'Her new novel, 'Alan Opts Out,' takes sharp aim at consumer culture and suburban status anxiety. The book follows a successful Connecticut advertising executive who suddenly decides to abandon capitalism after a disastrous pitch meeting — moving into his backyard playhouse to live off the land while his wife fights for social acceptance in elite Greenwich circles. It’s funny, pointed, and surprisingly tender.

Cities are humanity’s greatest invention. As indispensable engines for creativity, innovation, wealth, and connection, they are the loom on which the fabric of civilization is woven. But the global COVID crisis has redefined our relationship to cities in incalculable ways. How permanent are these changes? Are we on the brink of a post-urban world? In "Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation," Professor Edward Glaeser argues that city life will survive, but individual cities face terrible risks and waves of urban failure would be disastrous.

From train derailments and massive oil spills to bankruptcies and medical errors, system failures are all too common - and they’re becoming more frequent.…