“I love love,” our boss said to Sam and me. “But you have to keep it out of the office, O.K.?” I looked at the floor and nodded vigorously, my cheeks growing hot. What could have made him say that? All we’d done was giggle a few times during an intern meeting. I tried to laugh it off, but inside I was fuming. How dare he use the word “love” with us? What surer way to kill a summer fling, or whatever this was, than to call it love? Love was the furthest thing from my mind. After my first year at Yale, I had landed this summer internship at a lobbying organization in Washington, not far from where I had grown up, thinking I would live at home. But soon I was spending nights at Sam’s and telling my parents I was staying with friends. A fellow intern, he had just finished his junior year at the University of Iowa. After a few weeks, I asked him, “Are you going to hook up with other people?” “Why, do you not want me to?” “Not if you want to hook up with me.” He seemed to consider that for a moment. “O.K. then, I won’t.” And the matter was settled in what I considered a personal triumph, as I had been long on angst and short on assertiveness during my first year of college. When Sam took me to dinner at a fancy restaurant in Georgetown, I realized it was my first real date, ever. I liked it. And I liked him, probably too much. We had instant physical chemistry, and his old-fashioned values combined with just enough frat-guy attitude to keep me interested. Our almost diametrically opposed political views made for intense arguments. He opened up to me in the mornings, over egg and cheese sandwiches, about the girls who had messed with his head, and I told him about my past year of partying and bad judgment with men, even if I didn’t really regret any of it. With Sam I wanted to be the fun girl, the one who didn’t care if a guy ever spoke to her again after one night. I tried not to care that he would be leaving at summer’s end to return to college, and that I still had three years of school left. I didn’t ask if he thought we could make it long distance because I didn’t want to ruin what little time we had left. He took care of that worry when he stopped calling or asking me to sleep over. And I said nothing. After all, he didn’t owe me anything. He said he wouldn’t be with anyone else while he was with me, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t stop being with me. One night I went out dancing in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, had one too many tequila shots and kissed a stranger on the dance floor. Afterward, I went to Sam’s apartment and pounded on the door, waking him. He stood there in his boxers with cold eyes, as if he couldn’t remember who I was. “I kissed another guy at the club,” I said, sobbing. “Don’t be mad.” What I really meant was: Please be mad. His mouth twisted. “I don’t care. Just come to bed.” And we lay there in the dark, on the rickety futon in the living room, facing away from each other, trying not to touch. Continue reading the main story The next time I saw him outside of the office was to get a bottle of shampoo back from his apartment. I didn’t really need the shampoo, but I needed something. So I offered him a ride to the airport for his flight home in a few days, which he surprisingly accepted. That morning we loaded his suitcase into the trunk of my car and I silently drove over the bridge to Virginia, my heart racing. There was so much I wanted to say, and I was running out of time. Just before we pulled up to the departure area, I choked out, “Why?” “Why what?” “Why didn’t you want to be with me these last few weeks?” I don’t know if he turned to look at me; I was gripping the wheel, my eyes focused ahead. He sighed. “I guess I just figured, what was the point?” he said. “I knew I was leaving.” I had no response. And with that, he got out of the car, walked away and boarded his flight. I tried to forget. All through a cruise to Alaska with my family, the start of my sophomore year and the parties and guys that came along with it, I tried to forget. But I couldn’t. At the end of September, I was in a car accident on the way back to school from a trip home. My car crossed five lanes of traffic, bounced off the guardrail and crossed the same five lanes back to the other side, where it finally came to rest. Somehow, miraculously, not a single car hit me. When I got back to campus, I crawled into bed and stayed there, shaking, for hours, refusing visitors. Instead, I opened my laptop and gave in to the urge to contact Sam. I instant-messaged him to say I had been in a car accident, knowing he’d have to respond. And he did. And we talked, first about the accident, then over the next few days about other things. And soon, before I knew it, we were what I suppose you would call friends. He was different from how he had been in Washington — lighter, warmer, funnier. Happier. And with half a country between us, I was able to get beyond my fake fun-girl persona. When I couldn’t sleep, I spun out long fantasies of us getting back together and having a long-distance relationship, fantasies I told to no one. But my friends knew about us, and they were concerned that I stayed home to talk to him instead of going out. In November I discovered we were both attending the same one-day conference in Boston, and I began to obsess over seeing him there. My friend who drove me up from Yale asked what I wanted from Sam, and I couldn’t answer. For most of the day, Sam and I just glanced at each other across crowded rooms, and we only had time for a brief hello. The 10 hours passed quickly, and it was almost time to leave. But I was panicking. It was too anticlimactic. There was no way this was how the day would end — it just couldn’t, not this time. I told Sam I needed to talk to him, and he followed me into an empty hallway. He stood there patiently for what he must have thought would be some kind of dramatic speech. But once again I couldn’t find the words for what I wanted, so instead I stood on my toes, looked up and kissed him hard on the mouth. And he kissed me back. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story I broke away, out of breath, not able to hide my smile. He looked surprised and smiled, too. “I have to go,” I said. I don’t remember what he said because I was running to catch my bus, and then I was sitting and staring out the window in a daze the whole way home. The next time we spoke, I gave him an ultimatum: “Tell me how you feel about me, or I’m moving on.” And he said, “There’s a letter on the way.” I checked my mailbox three, four times a day during final exams until, on the last day before break, when it still hadn’t arrived, I begged him to email it. He initially refused but relented when I reminded him that I was about to leave the country for several weeks. When it came, it was an old-fashioned love letter of the most glorious kind. All the things I had hoped he would say were there on the page. How he loved me and didn’t want me to be with anyone else. But wrapped around those beautiful new words was the familiar refrain: “I’m far away” and “I don’t know if I want a long-distance relationship.” I didn’t know whether to be elated or devastated. This time I was not going to let it stand. The girl who kissed him in that hallway wasn’t going to give up. I called him and said: “No, it doesn’t work that way. You get to have me, or you have to give me up.” And yet he still would not commit. He said he wouldn’t be the one to define us and that he was ambivalent about a relationship. But I wasn’t. So I took the leap for both of us. “Let’s do it,” I said. “We can do it.” “O.K.,” he said, uncertainly. We called and chatted online. We boarded planes. We did whatever it took to make it work, until the distance between us closed. And here we are, still doing it, 10 years, one wedding and one child later. Sharon Goott Nissim is a lawyer in Chicago. When people bemoan the alleged ill effects of reading online, they often hold up reading a good novel as the more wholesome alternative. But a few hundred years ago, novels were the suspect medium, accused of leading people astray and ruining them for real life. In her Slate essay on the phenomenon of “reading insecurity,” Katy Waldman describes the current climate: “It is becoming a cliché of conversations between twentysomethings (especially to the right of 25) that if you talk about books or articles or strung-together words long enough, someone will eventually wail plaintively: ‘I just can’t reeeeeaaad anymore.’ The person will explain that the Internet has shot her attention span. She will tell you about how, when she was small, she could lose herself in a novel for hours, and now, all she can do is watch the tweets swim by like glittery fish in the river of time-she-will-never-get-back.” The feeling that Internet reading is lesser isn’t just in young people’s heads, she argues — “books and articles probe the Way We Read Now” and “a long train of studies suggests that people read the Internet differently than they read print.” She also puts disdain for e-reading in historical context, noting that spoken language has long been depicted as unreliable (this may be especially true of language spoken by women, a topic Mary Beard has examined in much greater detail). Ms. Waldman writes: “I can’t help thinking that the hoary debate around ‘orality and literacy’ — the slippery nature of one versus the stable authority of the other — is back, sort of. This time we’ve cast the new technology as the unreliable flibbertigibbet and the relic-like printed book as the trusty source.” But it’s not necessarily just any book that’s now treated as the trusty source. Ms. Waldman compares scrolling through Twitter to losing oneself in a novel. Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist who studies reading, told Michael S. Rosenwald at The Washington Post about trying to read Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game” after a day of heavy Internetting: “I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it. It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.” Even defenders of e-reading sometimes use the novel as a comparand. Here’s Nicole Dieker of The Billfold, responding to Ms. Waldman: “I wouldn’t go back to the ‘good old days.’ Getting lost in the Narnia books as a child may have felt like magic, but e-readers plus libraries equals actual magic.” But novels weren’t always seen as healthy alternatives to more mind-warping forms of media. In “Madame Bovary” (1856), Gustave Flaubert describes a teenage Emma Bovary who “made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.” Her novel-reading leads her to elaborate daydreams: “Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields.” And when Emma compares her life with what she reads, she finds the former disappointing: “Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.” “In Madame Bovary, I think Flaubert is channeling a century of worries about young women as particularly susceptible to the fantasies they find in novels and the seductions of reading,” Margaret Cohen, a professor of French language, literature and civilization, told Op-Talk. From the late 18th century through the middle of the 19th, she added, women “were considered to be in danger of not being able to differentiate between fiction and life.” Flaubert may have been working out some of his own anxieties in “Madame Bovary” (which is, of course, itself a novel). “Flaubert himself was really split between that romantic imagination and a kind of realism,” said Ms. Cohen, “and his friends kept on pushing him away from his romanticism. Part of ‘Madame Bovary’ is Flaubert trying to exorcise his own really powerful romantic imagination.” He wasn’t the only novelist to play with ideas about reading. Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” (1817) tells the story of Catherine Morland, a lover of novels whose reading makes her believe a man she’s staying with is a murderer. “Catherine is your typical young woman who can’t distinguish between fact and fiction,” said Ms. Cohen. But like Flaubert, Austen wasn’t wholly antinovel, as some of Catherine’s instincts turn out to be right: “Austen is kind of satirizing excesses of the wrong kind of novel-reading, but she’s also praising the ability of novels to cultivate judgment and taste.” “Jane Austen is actually mocking a lot of the anxiety that surrounded women reading novels,” Barbara M. Benedict, an English professor who has written on “Northanger Abbey,” told Op-Talk. “Novel reading for women was associated with inflaming of sexual passions; with liberal, radical ideas; with uppityness; with the attempt to overturn the status quo.” “Northanger Abbey” makes fun of “the stupidity of a social reaction that portrayed women as so stupid that they would not be able tell difference between reality and fiction, that they would really think when they were reading a novel that they were reading a blueprint for their own lives,” Ms. Benedict added. While she sees today’s fears as different from those of Austen’s time — more focused on what we find on the Internet than on how we read there — she does find one similarity. As in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, our contemporary anxieties about reading reflect a “distrust of the individual being able to differentiate good from bad material, or using the information that they absorb productively, constructively and safely.” Meanwhile, what was once seen as a hazard of novel-reading is now lauded as a strength. Today, many value novels for promoting sustained attention — for helping readers, in Ms. Dieker’s words, to get lost. But for some of the novel’s 18th- and 19th-century critics, getting lost was exactly the problem. “Novel reading was so absorptive,” Ms. Cohen explained, “and that was seen as one of its dangers, in that it would divorce you from everyday life. Whereas the problem that people seem to be talking about now is the opposite of absorption, it’s distraction.” We may still worry about some media absorbing too much of us — Ms. Cohen noted an echo of earlier concerns about young women and novels in the current discourse on young men and video games. But the idea that novels could be dangerous seems largely have fallen by the wayside, which does raise the question of how today’s newer sources of entertainment and information will look to the critics of the future. In 50 years, maybe we’ll be lamenting our failure to read enough Internet. This article is part of Op-Talk, a new feature of NYT Opinion. Get unlimited access to our expanded Opinion section and try our new NYT Opinion iPhone app for free. 'Emma Thompson was on a ship recently, bound for the Arctic, with 37 crew and her 14-year-old daughter, Gaia, part of a Greenpeace mission to highlight global warming. She has done a lot of trips like this, to Africa and south-east Asia – "raising awareness", as the exhausted phrase goes – but the ship cleaving through ice seemed particularly apt. Thompson, at 55, is regarded as formidable in almost the Edwardian style, the actor-activist more concerned with the cause than with what you might think of her – or, for that matter, with the niceties of the charity world. "When a disaster occurs," she says, "there can be a rather unsavoury rush to plant the flag of your NGO in the nearest head of whoever's surviving." She will not bite her tongue for anyone. Nor, for the most part, will she play the movie star card. We are in Thompson's work space in a semi-detached house in suburban north London, near where she grew up and where her family still lives. She looks like a graduate student in a Greenpeace sweatshirt, torn jeans, owlish glasses and trainers, her face fresh without makeup – an observation that, after spending an hour with Thompson, one hesitates to make for fear of letting the side down. Still, she is an actor, and pulls another version of herself out of the hat when necessary, appearing on talkshows and at awards ceremonies to promote, in the US at least, a highly stylised Englishness that the Americans find charming and the English, perhaps, find a little de trop. "Well, it's just energy. It's performance energy," she says. "It's not whatyou do, and you might regard it with some horror, but it's what I do. And it's what pantomime performers have done for centuries in our country. I don't have to do too much that's truly idiotic." This is true. Thompson's roles have, over the years, inspired an unusual devotion. A week before our meeting, I was at a US immigration office in New York where a harried, thirtysomething officer insisted on having a reason for my trip, and when I gave him one, transformed before my eyes.Sense And Sensibility, he said, was his favourite film. I thought he was going to cry. Even at 20 years' distance, Thompson's Elinor Dashwood in the Ang Lee adaptation of Austen's novel – especially the moment where she finds out that Edward Ferrars is not, after all, married – does something weird to one's system; so, too, her Margaret Schlegel in Howards End, and the scene (the only good one) in Love Actually, when she crumples on discovering her husband Harry (Alan Rickman) is lusting after someone else. Thompson is ordinarily so brisk, so seemingly sorted and amused, that when she goes, we all go. Anyway, she is in a mildly brisk mode today, on a mission to inform us about the planet which, of course, we should be thoroughly engaged with, but who has the time, and aren't there a million other things to be worried about? "It's your grandchildren," she says. "You've got skin in the game, mate. And if my daughter is lucky enough to have children, if she wishes them, and I have grandchildren, these are the people who are going to be dealing with the mess. So unless we get to grips with this instead of just wibbling on, it's going to be really hard." The nine-day voyage to the Smeerenburg glacier, part of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, was designed to flag up the environmental threats posed by climate change and oil drilling. "We have a dependency, in the same way we had a dependency on tobacco until we realised it killed us. Fossil fuels were a really good idea at the time. But they're not a good idea any more. It's so hard, because you've got corporations with trillions and trillions of dollars who see things that are trapped in the Earth's crust as their inheritance. And I think one of the reasons people zone out is they feel guilty and helpless." At one point in the Guardian's film of the trip, while standing on the ice in full Arctic gear, she holds up a sign addressed to Tony Abbott, the Australian prime minister who, though he has since softened his stance, once referred to climate change science as "crap". (The sign says: "Tony Abbott Climate Change is REAL I'm Standing In It"). Any word from his office? "No, no, sadly not. I'd be very happy to have a chat to Tony about his attitudes to women and abortion. Look at the things that Tony Abbott has said – oh, he's a corker." She bursts out laughing. "Tragic." It's embarrassing, I say. Thompson says drily: "People are embarrassing." Embarrassment is one of the emotions she plays well. Also, indignation and bafflement. Remember her in The Remains Of The Day, trying to wrangle a human response out of Anthony Hopkins' repressed butler? In her most recent role, as PL Travers in the biopic Saving Mr Banks, she went the full Edith Evans with a performance that tipped, here and there, into parody. But Thompson is always fascinating to watch, the frank intelligence of her performances somehow acknowledging the absurdity of the whole acting exercise without ever quite killing off suspension of disbelief. She will talk effectively about dwindling roles for women in their 50s, but is affronted by suggestions – even indirect ones – that she downplay her age. While on ship, her daughter made her tweet, something that doesn't come naturally. "No, no, I wouldn't dream of it, normally. It's not my generation." Really? "No. I'm 55. It's not my thing at all." She says this very firmly, as if countering a wrong but widely held assumption about 55-year-olds in general. "I mean, it took me ages to get used to using a computer." She is having a great decade, what with the success of the Nanny McPhee franchise, and plaudits for Mr Banks. But don't be fooled, she says. The reason she said yes to Greenpeace (apart from the fact that a great friend asked her) is that it met the stringent criteria she now applies to all projects: "Is the subject right and fascinating, and can I bring every best energy I have to it? Especially now, when time's running out. It's a different patch of life, your 50s." She feels that? "Yes. Absolutely. Sorry. Not in a horrible way, but…" I thought 50 was the new 35? "Can I just say, very loudly, bollocks. If you look after yourself and you're healthy, then you'll have the energy to do things. But not to recognise getting older for what it is? I do think the infantilisation of our generation is one of the huge issues of our time. People wanting to be 35 when they're 50 makes me think: why? Why don't you be 50 and be good at that? And also embody the kinds of choices that are sustainable at that age." What sort of choices? "Well, I see people starting life over and over again. And you want to say: just go deeper into the one you've got. Because you can skim very easily. It's set up for that because we're such a disposable society. And I think that relationships are regarded as more disposable than they were, and that's short-sighted of us." Thompson is married to the actor Greg Wise, whom she met on the set of Sense And Sensibility. Theirs is perceived to be a good union; I tell her that before our meeting, a friend said one of the reasons she admires Thompson is that she "has a great marriage". She gives me a rather dry look. "I think the first 20 years are the… bedrock. And then you can start having a good time." How many years has she been married? She smiles. "Nineteen." As a child, Emma Thompson was regarded as bossy. She has said, in interviews, that this impression continued into adulthood and that some, in the past, have found it hard to deal with – "mentioning no names, but my first husband". (She was married to Kenneth Branagh for six years from 1989.) Now, she says, "I saw 'bossy' used in reference to a man recently, which I thought was very encouraging. I wouldn't refer to myself as bossy in the normal run of things, but of course I was called bossy, constantly, when I was younger. As was and is everyone, as Rebecca West would say, who has an opinion that doesn't chime with that of a doormat." Her mother, Phyllida Law, and her father, Eric Thompson, were in the entertainment business, a jobbing actor and director. Their two girls, Emma and Sophie, grew up in the mild bohemia of 1970s north London, which Law has written about in two very charming memoirs, Notes To My Mother-In-Law and How Many Camels Are There In Holland? The kitchen table at dinner was a lively place. "We were surrounded by writers and directors and actors, so there was a lot of talk about theatre. But not, I would imagine, the sort of talk that was around Peter Brook's table. It was humbler, really. We talked about books, a bit. Mum's a great reader. But it wasn't a political atmosphere, in the way that our house now has a political atmosphere. I don't think I discovered politics of that kind until I was at uni." Both parents had to work, as did Thompson from her early 20s; one of the most useful things she learned from her parents is that it is OK to be out of the limelight. "Sometimes there was money and sometimes there wasn't. They weren't particularly famous, none of their friends was famous. It was just a job. It's just my job. Fame is a completely accidental by-product. I don't have any feeling of, you've got to keep your face up there." After Gaia was born, Thompson scaled back for many years. When she did re-engage, she was lucky to have Wise around to pick up the slack at home. "I could never have done any of my work that involved filming otherwise. Writing's great, but going off to work on something like Saving Mr Banks I couldn't have done. I'd have had to take her with me or something." Presumably she could go off with a clear conscience, though, because Gaia was with her dad. "Not really. There's always guilt." For the last few years, Thompson has been working on first the writing, then the filming of Effie Gray, the story of the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin and his long-suffering wife, played by Dakota Fanning; Thompson plays the imperious Lady Eastlake and Greg Wise plays Ruskin. The film was stuck in legal purgatory for years while Thompson successfully defended two plagiarism suits brought by American writers. It's a strange film, slow and a little thin, but beautifully filmed and the performances are terrific – especially from Wise, who makes Ruskin's rejection of his wife and adherence to his mother (Julie Walters) skin-crawlingly creepy. It's very British, in lots of ways, full of people failing to say what they think or mean, although, as Thompson points out, the Americans can be just as bad. "They're often very dishonest, especially in my business. 'Oh, yeah, great, you were fabulous!'" The Brits probably have it worse, though. "I think the British can be very twisted about their genuine feelings. Have you read [Edward St Aubyn's] Patrick Melrose novels? Oh my god! Talking of false identities and people's disguises." To Thompson's delight, Gaia loved the trip to the Arctic, and found the people on ship deeply sympathetic. They were all ages, all backgrounds, some optimists, some pessimists, which Thompson liked. (She is, unusually for someone promoting a cause, deeply sceptical about the aid world. "I liked the fact that you weren't with a load of people saying, 'We're going to save the planet!' The question of whether it's a form of make-yourself-feel-better tourism I think is a very fair one.") Gaia, meanwhile, said, "'I've found my tribe.' And I knew exactly what she meant." As a teenager of roughly the same age, Thompson was "very loud and angry". In the Guardian's video, her daughter comes across as a thoroughly nice kid. "Well, yeah, let's hope so. She's wonderful and I think she's fantastic. I think the proof will be on the analyst's couch in 30 years' time, if that occurs. I don't think so, though, because I think of Gaia and Tindy as being very much hand-reared. They've been checked, and picked out, like a little garden. They haven't been handed over to anyone. There's a lot of soil work." Tindy is Thompson's 27-year-old adopted son, a former child soldier from Rwanda whom she and Wise met at a Refugee Council event when he was 16. He has accompanied her on many aid trips and is now a human rights lawyer. Gaia was just two when he came into their lives, and the two regard each other as siblings, absolutely, she says. "For Tindy, Gaia's incredibly valuable, because she's a proper sister. And he drives her mad and they fight. They fight! Which is brilliant. When that happens, I'm secretly thrilled." At Cambridge in the early 1980s, Thompson shaved her head and grunged out, as the times permitted. Her feminism was uncompromising and it stayed that way after her hair grew back. It is absurd that, by talking without caveat about sexism, she is considered almost eccentrically radical by the standards of her industry. (She traces the destruction of the Arctic – the fact that we're "fucking the Earth over right, left and centre" – to patriarchal standards set during the industrial age. Most Hollywood actresses would rather die than use the word "patriarchy".) "Yes, it does baffle me. I don't understand. When you say, 'But feminism means equal rights for women' – sorry, what's the problem? You think it's done? Then think again and inform yourselves, because it isn't done. Don't be daft about it. So what's the issue? Is it that there have been feminists who have said things that shock and appal you?" Perhaps other actresses think they won't get jobs. "Well, I would not be in work if that was the case. It's very, very odd. I've worked with some young, brilliant women whom I would consider feminists, who don't like to use the word." Does she remonstrate with them? "Yes. I say, why? It seems to be out of fashion. Surely it's a bottom line thing that has nothing to do with fashion, one way or another." Parenting teens, Thompson says, strikes her as much harder than stewarding younger children. She and her oldest friend from university took Gaia and three other teens to the Reading festival last month, whereupon "the most important thing is that they know you're there, but that you can be picked up and used as and when needed. I think people sometimes think, oh, they're teens now, they're up and running. But this is the crucial time; when they're little, they just need feeding and cuddling. But not this later stuff. You have to be around." She thinks back to when she was 15, "reading Jackie fucking magazine. Reading articles like How To Find Your Man And Keep Him. I was wading through a huge heap of insidious twaddle." The insidious twaddle available to today's teens is much more pervasive. Like most sensible parents, Thompson keeps the computer in the kitchen, but you can't police your teen's phone. The sheer weight of sexual imagery to which they are exposed, she believes, means people growing up now "don't have any connection to their own sexuality. It'll be our children who will tell us later: why the fuck didn't you do something about this? Do you know I haven't had an erection since 1989 or whatever?" Has Thompson's strength of feeling, her willingness to campaign, interfered with her work? Would she use a film to proselytise? "Give me an example of a proselytising film. In The Name Of The Fatheror something?" Well, except that was a great movie. Could a script light her political fire but still be a bad film? "No, no, no, no, no. I get offered a ton of political stuff, and a lot of the time it's not good enough. There aren't very many films that are truly political and truly great. The Lives Of Others, City Of God. Some of Mike Leigh's are wonderful, and Ken Loach's can be fantastic, but sometimes a bit too proselytising for me. I need to be surprised. It's like reading Victor Hugo's Misérables. I got exhausted by agreeing with him. I thought, yes, I know, it's awful, the poor get shat on." She chuckles. She was heavily criticised, and called an IRA sympathiser, for In The Name Of The Father, Jim Sheridan's 1993 biopic of the Guildford Four, in which she played defence lawyer Gareth Peirce. And there was criticism when she publicly opposed the first Gulf war. Not all of her judgment calls are right, mind you; Thompson added her name to the ill-advised petition in support of Roman Polanski some years ago. "Yes, but then I had to take my name off it. Mike Nichols rang me up and said, sign this, and sent me a documentary about the utterly appalling [judicial] process. Made by a woman. And I thought, OK, well it's a tricky one. Then I spoke to a woman at Tindy's university who said no, rape is rape, and I thought about it and thought, mmm, yeah. Yeah. You're right. And it was such a messed up process of justice, it was rotten. But rape is rape. And you look at what's been going on recently here with Operation Yewtree and it makes your eyes water." Gaia pops her head round the door, very much following in her mum's sartorial style in DMs and a jacket that would look great on a demo. She is off out for the day. "Are you going to be warm enough, mate?" Thompson says cheerfully. "Take a scarf." She turns back to the kitchen table. Her political interests, she assumes, are tolerated in the US, "because they know I'm going to go away. I'm not going to live there and fiddle with their menfolk. Or indeed their women. I don't know." And she half-shrugs, as if to say, either way, it doesn't make the blindest bit of difference. • Effie Gray goes on general release next month. Emma Thompson will be speaking at the People's Climate March in London on 21 September, part of a global day of action on the climate crisis. To sign the petition in support of her campaign, go tosavethearctic.org/emma Emma Thompson wears shirt, £170, by Theory, from fenwick.co.uk. Jacket, £565, and trousers, £365, margarethowell.co.uk. Styling: Steph Wilson at One Represents. Stylist's assistant: Becky Cordrey. Makeup: Tania Grier using Sisley. Hair: Ken O'Rourke at Streeters London. The guardian 'Strange things happen in this world," Haruki Murakami says. "You don't know why, but they happen." It could be a guiding motto for all of hisfiction, but he is talking specifically about a minor character in his new novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. The character is a jazz pianist who seems to have made a pact with death, and is able to see people's auras. "Why that pianist can see the colours of people, I don't know," Murakami muses. "It just happens." Novels in general, he thinks, benefit from a certain mystery. "If the very important secret is not solved, then readers will be frustrated. That is not what I want. But if a certain kind of secret stays secret, it's a very sound curiosity. I think readers need it." The world's most popular cult novelist is sipping coffee in the sunny library of an Edinburgh hotel, which – perhaps disappointingly for admirers of his more fantastical yarns – is not reached through a labyrinthine network of subterranean tunnels. Murakami is relaxed and affable, rather than forbiddingly gnomic. "I'm not mysterious!" he says, laughing. Tsukuru Tazaki, as the author calls his own novel for short, sold a million copies in two weeks when it came out last summer in Japan. (Murakami was born in Kyoto to two literature teachers, and grew up in the port city of Kobe. These days he lives near Tokyo, having spent periods in Greece, at Princeton and Tufts universities – where he wrote his masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – and recently in Hawaii.) It contains passing mysteries like the pianist who sees auras, but it is also a mystery novel in a larger sense. Tsukuru, its 36-year-old protagonist, is still in mourning for the years before he went to university, when he was part of an inseparable group of five friends – until one day they told him, without explanation, that they never wanted to see him again. "In the first place I had the intention to write a short story," Murakami says. "I just wanted to describe that guy, 36 years old, very solitary … I wanted to describe his life. So his secret was not to be dissolved; the mystery was going to stay a mystery." But he hadn't reckoned on the inciting power of a woman to move the story forward, as Murakami's female characters so often do. "When I wrote that short-story part," he continues, "Sara, [Tsukuru's] girlfriend, came to him and she said, 'You should find out what happened then', so he went to Nagoya to see his old friends. And the same thing happened to me. Sara came to me and said, 'You should go back to Nagoya and find out what happened.' When I was writing the book, my own character came to me and told me what to do … The fiction and my experience happened at the same time, in parallel. So it became a novel." Murakami has often spoken of the theme of two dimensions, or realities, in his work: a normal, beautifully evoked everyday world, and a weirder supernatural realm, which may be accessed by sitting at the bottom of a well (as does the hero of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), or by taking the wrong emergency staircase off a city expressway (as in 1Q84). Sometimes dreams act as portals between these realities. In Tsukuru Tazaki there is a striking sex dream, at the climax of which the reader is not sure whether Tsukuru is still asleep or awake. Yet Murakami hardly ever remembers his own dreams. "Once I talked to a very famous therapist in Japan," he says, "and I said to him that I don't dream much, almost nothing, and he said: 'That makes sense.' So I wanted to ask him: 'Why? Why does it make sense?' But there was no time. And I was waiting to see him again, but he died three or four years ago." He smiles sadly. "Too bad." His novels thus far have generally divided into two types. There are the overtly magical-realist romances (A Wild Sheep Chase, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84), and the works on a smaller canvas, in which hints of the supernatural remain mostly beneath the mournful, mundane surface (South of the Border, West of the Sun; Sputnik Sweetheart). With its unresolved mysteries, tales-within-tales and maybe-dreams, Tsukuru Tazaki seems almost a hybrid of both styles. "I had been thinking my novels are divided into two categories, as you said," he agrees. "So it's just like Beethoven's symphonies, you know, odd numbers and even numbers. Three, five, seven, nine is kind of a big symphony, and two, four, six, eight is a kind of intimate work. I think my novels do the same thing. What do I think about this Tsukuru Tazaki? Yeah, it might be a new category." Such musical comparisons come naturally to Murakami, who along with his wife, Yoko Takahashi, ran a jazz bar called Peter Cat in Tokyo in his twenties, which he opened while still a drama student at Waseda University. Murakami sold the bar and concentrated on writing full-time after the publication of his second novel, Pinball. Since then, his life has been one of writing and long-distance running – as chronicled in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – and also collecting records. His novels almost always feature a thematic piece of music (his breakout Japanese bestseller, Norwegian Wood, was named after the Beatles song). The unusual harmonies of Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight" were perfect for this novel's haunted pianist, he thought: "Thelonious Monk's tune is full of mysteries. Monk plays some very strange sounds during the chords. Very strange. But to him it's a very logical chord. But when we are listening to his music it doesn't sound logical." How would you like to die, linguistically? When the lexicographers were compiling their citations for the Oxford English Dictionary, they came across this remarkable one, in a US graveyard: Caroline, wife of EJ Langston, born on March 23 1833. Passed out Dec 18 1867 It's the earliest recorded use of pass out meaning to die. The usage continued into the 20th century, but I doubt that it would be used now. Today we associate passing out with excessive tiredness, drugs, or drink. I don't want to be passed out on my gravestone. Nor do I want any of the glorious deathy lexicon that accompanied the customer who brought Monty Python's legendary dead parrot back to the shop: Customer: "'E's bleedin' demised!" Owner: "No no! 'E's pining!" Customer: "'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! 'E 'as ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you 'adn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushin' up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket! 'E's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!" This profusion of defunctive synonymy is not a modern phenomenon. An Anglo-Saxon equivalent to the Monty Python scriptwriters would have had more than 40 expressions in Old English to choose from. His customer could have described his parrot as gone (gegan), departed (leoran), fallen (gefeallan), died away (acwelan), parted from life (linnan ealdre), gone on a journey (geferan), totally died off (becwelan), with its spirit sent forth (gast onsendan), completely scattered (tostencan), or glided away (glidan). It's plain that the Anglo-Saxons were as concerned about finding different ways to talk about death as we are today. A remarkable creativity surrounds the vocabulary of death. The words and expressions range from the solemn and dignified to the jocular and mischievous, and they reflect the changing ways we have thought about life and death over the centuries. The early verbs are rather mundane and encompass literal notions of "leaving", such as wend, go out of this world, fare, leave and part. Only later do we get a sense of where one is going to, with an initial focus on ancestors evolving into the notion of a divine presence: be gathered to one's fathers, go over to the majority, go home, pass to one's reward, launch into eternity, go to glory, meet one's Maker, get one's call. The list of verbs for dying in the Historical Thesaurus displays a remarkable inventiveness, as people struggled to find fresh forms of expression. The language of death is inevitably euphemistic, but few of the verbs or idioms are elaborate or opaque. In fact, the history of verbs for dying displays a real simplicity: most consist of only one syllable. Even the euphemisms of later centuries have a markedly succinct character (slip one's cable, kick the bucket). There are more than a thousand words for death categorised in theThesaurus. People seem always to be searching for ways of renewing their stock of apt metaphors. The Bible is one source, as seen in Wycliffe's "disperish", Tyndale's "depart", Coverdale's "die the death", and the King James Bible's "give up the ghost" and "the silver cord is loosed". Classical texts are another: Greek mythology is the source of "take the ferry"; Latin the source of "pay one's debt to nature" and "go over to the majority". Shipping provides "slip one's cable"; the livestock industry "kick the bucket"; pastimes "peg out" and "cash in one's chips"; mining "go up the flume"; finance "hand in one's accounts". Wartime produces a wide range of slang expressions (pack up, cop it, conk, stop one, buy it) as well as more solemn idioms (shed one's blood, fall a victim). There's a lot of idiosyncrasy. Many coinages are known from just a single user. People seem to be quite discerning when it comes to judging the acceptable terminology of death, and several innovations simply never catch on. Some eras were clearly more inventive than others, reflecting times of major English lexical expansion, notably the end of the 16th century (relent, unbreathe, transpass, lose one's breath) and the euphemism-conscious 19th century, where a fifth of the items in theThesaurus appear for the first time (stiffen, drop short, step out, walk, perch, knock over). A significant strand also originates in individual authors and texts, such as Shakespeare's "shuffle off our mortal coil". We also see a great deal of stylistic variation. Class division is in operation: at one extreme, upper-class slang (walk and pip); at the other, the language of the underworld (croak, kiss off, perch). There are signs of journalese (succumb), because finding an appropriate way to report a death is a perpetual challenge. Formality and solemnity contrast with colloquialism and slang: "yield the ghost", "expire" and "pass away" versus go "off the hooks", "kick the bucket" and "zonk". Some constructions evidently have permanent appeal because of their succinct and enigmatic character, such as the popularity of snuff it, peg it, buy it, cop it, off it, crease it, have had it. It's possible to see changes in fashion, such as the vogue for colloquial usages of "off" in the middle of the 18th century (move off, pop off, pack off, hop off). But some things don't change. Pass away has been with us since the 14th century. And, in a usage that dates back to the 12th, we still do say that people, simply, died. That'll do me. One entertaining way to wind up a neuroscientist is to pretend to believe the popular notion that we use only 10% of our brains. This myth is the premise of Luc Besson’s new film, Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson as a woman who overdoses on a designer drug that supercharges her intelligence. The 10% figure, as Besson happily acknowledges, is utter cobblers. It persists, not because it’s true, but because it captures a nagging feeling that we could be doing vastly more with our minds, if only we knew how. The ideas in this edition of Do Something won’t change the percentage of your brain that you use, but they might improve your cognitive skills, while delivering the pleasing sensation of getting brainier. The key isn’t how much of your mental capacity you’re using: it’s what you’re using it for. To get smarter, of course, you need to decide what you mean by “smarter”. There’s little doubt that giving your mind a workout – on cryptic crosswords or sudoku, say, or memorising the capitals of US states – will make you better at that specific task. There’s also plenty of research demonstrating the benefits of treating your brain like the physical organ it is – which means plenty of aerobic exercise, a healthy diet, sufficient sleep, maybe some meditation. In studies on mice, it wasn’t mentally stimulating activities that spurred the biggest cognitive improvements: it was running on treadmills. Tweaking your surroundings, even your clothing, might help: in one intriguing study, wearing a lab coat, stereotypically associated with braininess, appeared to boost performance on certain tests. And if all you care about is appearing smarter to others, social psychology has all sorts of suggestions: speak confidently and expressively; smile rather than frown; wear glasses; and use a middle initial. (In a recent experiment, “David F Clark” was rated as a better intellect than “David Clark”; “David F P R Clark” did even better.) When researchers talk about improving brainpower, what they care about most is “fluid intelligence” – the general ability to manipulate information, solve problems and generate ideas. Unlike sudoku skills, fluid intelligence is transferable: if you could enhance it, you’d expect to reap benefits in multiple areas of life. So can you? Few topics in psychology are more controversial, but the most promising evidence comes from a remarkably unpleasant brain-training game called the “dual n-back”, which involves a visual and aural memory test – you can try it at soakyourhead.com. The key finding is that getting smarter entails doing things that feel uncomfortably hard. Once you’re a crossword champion, by all means carry on doing crosswords for fun. But if you want to get smarter, do something you’re not good at. This insight – that becoming brainier needs to feel a little tough – helps answer another fraught question: is technology making us smarter, or more stupid? It depends. Use it to eliminate cognitive tasks, and there could be a negative effect – that’s why it’s worth challenging yourself to navigate without GPS. Use it to expose yourself to demanding new material, on the other hand, and it’ll help. In his book Curious, Ian Leslie argues that we need to cultivate “epistemic curiosity” – not a scattered quest for novelty, but a focused, disciplined commitment to mastering new terrain. Instead of leaping from one topic to another online, pick one subject and plunge deeply; put down your tablet and seek out books, or others who share your interest; try to retain facts instead of relying on web searches. As Einstein put it, “one should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts”. And rumour has it he was pretty clever. Suggested readingExplorations of the limits of our brains, plus ways of thinking differently Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power by Dan Hurley (Penguin) A journey to the frontiers of “neural enhancement”, exploring everything from brain games and dietary supplements to “transcranial direct current stimulation”, which involves administering electrical jolts direct to the brain and shouldn’t be attempted at home. A less alarming but surprising path to increased intelligence, Hurley suggests, might be learning to play a musical instrument. Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential by Carol Dweck (Robinson) Dweck, a Stanford University psychologist, explores a basic distinction in how people think about learning: the “fixed” v “growth” mindsets, and offers advice on cultivating the latter. If we think of intelligence as an unchanging quantity, she argues, we avoid the very challenges that could improve it, because we fear falling short. Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson (William Collins) An optimistic but rigorous look at the effect of digital tools. Thompson probes the idea that computers and social networks form part of an “extended mind”: used wisely, he argues, Twitter and Facebook could be a key to getting smarter, not a fast track to distraction and shorter attention spans. Two and a half hours and still no sign of llamas. We should have been winding our way through lush forests and mountain lakes instead of the never-ending banana plantations we continued to see outside our rented four-wheel drive. It was time to turn our dying iPhone’s navigation system back on and confirm the inevitable. Somewhere between sprawling Guayaquil and the quaint cobblestone streets of Cuenca my husband and I had made a wrong turn. And now, on the second leg of our Ecuadorean road trip, with my mother consoling our hungry 4-year-old in the back seat, we had a decision to make: Do we turn back and take the well-trodden route through Cajas National Park we had originally planned to drive, or push onward, not knowing what the road conditions might be ahead, how long our journey would take or if our daughter would nap along the way? We kept going. And though the journey took six hours instead of three, the landscape was stunning, the roads were paved, and our daughter slept. Northeast toward Cuenca from Machala in El Oro province, banana fields gave way to winding mountain passes lined with cacao beans set out to dry on the pavement. At one point we crested an Andean summit and found ourselves in a lunar landscape before descending into a series of valleys, above which rose terraced hillsides dotted with cows and horses. “I have never been to this part of the country,” declared my mother, who was born and raised in Ecuador, as she marveled at the scenery. “I never would have seen this if we hadn’t gone the wrong way.” Indeed, the largely deserted and circuitous route ended up being exactly what we were after. Having visited my mother’s homeland over the years, beginning with family vacations when I was a year old, I had crossed some of the more typical tourist to-dos off my list: Straddle the yellow line that not so precisely represents the Equator at Middle of the World; bargain for handicrafts at the Indian market in the town of Otavalo; taste roasted guinea pig. But beyond my family ties, what keeps drawing me back to this small South American country is its geographical and cultural diversity. Roughly the size of Colorado and bordered by Colombia to the north and Peru to the south and east, Ecuador has snow-capped Andes Mountains, Amazon rain forests, sun-soaked Pacific beaches and, more than 500 miles offshore, the Galápagos Islands. But what many foreign travelers miss are the attractions in between: mountain lakes, cloud forests, volcano-heated hot springs and colonial cities. On our nine-day trip in July we focused on three of these offerings — beaches, mountains and colonial charm. The plan was to head north along the Pacific coast, then head east into the Andean highlands for high-altitude trails before spending time with family in the beautiful colonial city of Cuenca, where my mother was born. (We ended up doing it all, but not in that order, given our detour.) We started out on a Saturday heading westward from Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, and then north along the coastal highway promoted variously as La Ruta del Sol (Route of the Sun) or Spondylus Route, named for a spiny shell that was once used as currency by indigenous groups. The route is Ecuador’s equivalent of California’s Pacific Coast Highway except with speed bumps, stray dogs, donkeys and far fewer cars, extending almost the entire coastline from the Peruvian border to Esmeraldas in the north. Along the way it passes through fishing villages, resorts, tropical dry forest and deserted golden beaches. Continue reading the main story We (meaning my husband) drove about three and a half hours toward Montañita, a backpacker and surfer enclave. Fishing boats teeming with resting pelicans, bamboo shacks on stilts, shrimp farms, trucks laden with pineapples, and families sharing motorcycles were common sights. About halfway between Guayaquil and Montañita, we passed San Pablo Beach, a fishing village with roadside eating spots whose proprietors, eager for business, flailed at every car that passed by. We drove on, anxious to see the beachfront rental we had booked online. Rentals in Ecuador can be hit or miss. Even some of the more luxurious places have lumpy mattresses, spotty Internet service, cold showers and nonpotable water. That’s beginning to change in cities like Quito and Cuenca, which have become retirement magnets for United States expats. Renovated one-bedroom apartments with Wi-Fi, washer/dryer and DirecTV can be found for as little as $350 a week. (The U.S. dollar is the currency of Ecuador.) If you’re willing to pay more, you can get housekeeping, airport transfers, prestocked refrigerators and even cooks. We splurged on a $350-a-night three-bedroom beachfront home that advertised all of the above on the rental website Homeaway.com and were not disappointed. Sliding-glass pocket doors the length of the kitchen and living room opened to a veranda overlooking a hot tub, pool and the deserted beach beyond. Every bedroom had a flat-screen television set, crisp linens and a spalike bathroom. The refrigerator was stocked with the eggs, bread, peanut butter and other items we had requested. There was high-speed Wi-Fi throughout and a filtration system to ensure that every tap and shower had purified water. The water was a feature we would have killed for on a previous trip with our daughter, then 1; we had to buy gallons of filtered water at the local supermarket and, as the Ingalls family on “Little House on the Prairie,” might have done, heated it on the stove so she could take a warm bath without our having to worry about her drinking tainted water. Yet, what really set the place apart was the service. The on-site caretakers, Gilson and Kathy, who lived in an adjacent studio apartment with their adorable 3-year-old, greeted us warmly upon arrival. Every morning, Gilson, who spoke basic English, was up first, cleaning the pool and wiping down the lounge chairs. While we were out, the beds were made and the rooms swept clean. When we hinted that we might like shrimp for lunch or chicken for dinner, Gilson went off to the market to pick up the desired items. While we swam in the pool or collected shells, Kathy grilled up a meal and laid out a main dish with traditional platanos (fried green bananas) and rice. If laundry piled up, by the time we returned from sightseeing it would be washed, dried and folded. The couple offered to help coordinate day trips to nearby attractions, but we were content to explore on our own. And so we set out for La Playa Los Frailes, billed as the most beautiful beach in Ecuador, about 40 miles north of Montañita in the Machalilla National Park. Along the route, which twists through lush hillsides and scrubby forest dotted with cactuses, we stopped at Puerto López, a picturesque fishing village. It was the start of whale-watching season on the Pacific coast of Ecuador, where each year, June to October, humpbacks arrive from the Antarctic to breed. A typical $50 half-day whale-watching and snorkeling excursion from Puerto López includes a visit to Isla de la Plata, where Sir Francis Drake is said to have hidden treasure. The island is also dubbed the Poor Man’s Galápagos for up-close encounters with blue-footed boobies, frigates and other marine birds. Continue reading the main story In Puerto López, we stopped for lunch at Hotel Pacifico, which offered decent ceviches and bland fish and chicken. More satisfying was Pacha, an artisanal chocolate shop we stumbled across on our way out of town. Opened in October by an Argentine-Ecuadorean couple, Pacha offers handmade chocolate bars, cocoa “nibs” (bits of fermented, dried, roasted and crushed cacao bean) and brownies made with the heirloom cocoa beans known as the national variety. My mother gasped when she found a tub of pure cocoa butter lip balm. “I used to use this when I was a kid,” she said, taking a nostalgic whiff of the salve. Harvested nearby from small, organic farms, Pacha’s cocoa beans are fermented for four to eight days in large cedar boxes, then dried in the sun on elevated beds for 10 to 20 days. Shelled and roasted to bring out the complex flavors ranging from fruity or floral to earthy or even whiskey notes, the cocoa beans are then ground with a stone grinder. After tempering on a marble slab, the chocolate is ready to be molded, wrapped and sold. After indulging in a warm brownie, we were ready to hit the road again. Some six miles north of Puerto López, through a tunnel of spiny branches that form a canopy over the road, a dirt track leads to a gated park entrance where a guard jotted down our nationalities. We followed the sunbaked, potholed dirt road, to a parking lot. Beyond a handful of vendors selling souvenirs, bottled water and $3 umbrella rentals, a narrow path opens to a crescent-shaped inlet with turquoise water and gray-white sands framed by cliffs and forested hills. On the day we visited, thong-clad French-speaking tourists shared the beach with Ecuadorean families huddled under sheets draped across driftwood posts. Nearby, a group of pasty Germans slathered on sunblock, snapped photos and played Frisbee. Despite its popularity, the beach feels unspoiled, free of the vendors that pace the sands of unprotected resort-area beaches. Footpaths lead to adjacent beaches and up to clifftop lookouts. It’s a good idea to wear a hat and sturdy shoes. Signs warn hikers of poison manzanillo trees (Hippomane mancinella), which ooze a sap that can cause skin blistering and produce a toxic fruit. Back in Montañita, we strolled the compact grid of streets lined with Tiki-style restaurants and souvenir stalls manned by dreadlocked hippie-types. My daughter, flush with three weeks of allowance and some spending money from her grandfather, ogled the mystic crystals, hemp bracelets and I ♥Montañita T-shirts until she spotted a pink embroidered dress for $15, which my mother haggled down to $9. At Tagua 950, I scored a chunky bracelet made of tagua, a rain forest seed known as vegetable ivory. But there is more to the town than souvenir shops. Surfers are drawn to Montañita for its strong waves, cheap hostels, laid-back vibe and boozy beach parties. When the sun goes down, especially on weekends, discos blare reggaeton and salsa, and shops stay open well into the evening. There are rows of bars and thatched-roof restaurants. We grabbed a table at the open-air Diablos Mexican bar and restaurant where the nachos were lackluster but the margaritas were decent, and our perch, at the corner of cocktail alley, where more than 20 cocktail stands line the road down to the beach, was great for people watching. On our last day at the beach, we returned to town for lunch at Hotel Baja Montañita near where the sand dead-ends up against a rocky cliff. The sky was overcast and a cool, salty mist dampened our skin as we settled into beach chairs under a palapa. But after two blissful days beneath the perpendicular rays of the Ecuadorean sun, no one minded. A half a dozen surfers caught substantial waves and skillfully rode them toward shore. Pelicans dived into the surf, beak first, aiming for fish. And suddenly, way out on the horizon, a geyser-like spray shot up. A whale! Then, as if in response to my shrieks of excitement, it breached — not one, but three times. The next day we drove back to Guayaquil, spending a night at the Sheraton simply to break up the journey to Cuenca in Azuay province. Driving in Ecuador is not for the faint of heart. While the roads we took were well maintained and the speed limit was often respected, plenty of drivers ignore some basic rules of the road — like slowing down and forming lines along blind, mountainous hairpin curves lined with signs that read “PELIGROSO!” (Dangerous!) When stuck behind a slow-moving truck on such a stretch, it is not uncommon for the car behind you to attempt to pass. As that car speeds up, the driver in the vehicle behind it will often decide to pass both you and the other car. Then a third car will inevitably race ahead. Watching this maneuver, you will pray. If those prayers are answered, a tractor-trailer will not come barreling down the other side of the highway at that moment. If it does, you will be forced to slam on the brakes and allow those three passing cars to somehow fit into one lane in front of you lest you all fall off the cliff. Then there are the unexpected encounters with animals. Among the many that sent us swerving and slamming on the brakes were stray dogs, horses, donkeys, a horned cow and the proverbial chicken crossing the road. By the time we reached Cuenca, roughly 8,000 feet above sea level, we were ready to ditch the car. Thankfully, its historic center — a Unesco World Heritage site filled with terra-cotta-tile roofs, domed churches, plazas, tempting bakeries and cobblestone streets, all set above the grassy banks of the Tomebamba river — is a perfect place for strolling. When we arrived around 4 p.m., most restaurants were closed for lunch and not yet open for dinner. So we hauled our starving child to Raymipampa, which serves uninspiring Ecuadorean fare in a superb location: facing Parque Abdón Calderón, the city’s central square. Marked by eight towering Chilean pine trees, the plaza, commonly referred to as Parque Calderón, is sandwiched between the Iglesia del Sagrario, known as the Old Cathedral, built in 1567, and the massive Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, with rose-colored marble floors and three sky-blue domes that dominate Cuenca’s skyline. It was completed in 1967 as part of the New Cathedral, the name more commonly used by locals. Ecuador’s third largest city, Cuenca is a hub for local artisans, with indoor and outdoor markets offering high-quality handicrafts like Panama hats, hand-painted ceramics, embroidered dresses, heavy ponchos, intricate silver jewelry, leather jackets and other goods. You can barter with the street vendors at the Plaza de San Francisco or browse the indoor Casa de la Mujer, in the Municipal Handicraft Center between Mariscal Sucre General Torres and President Córdova Streets. If you’re short on time, Galeria El Tucán (Antonio Borrero 7-35, near the corner of Presidente Córdova) offers a nicely curated selection of traditional goods. A regular stop for my family is the Panama Hat Museum and Workshop (Museo del Sombrero Paja Toquilla) in the house of the Paredes Roldán family, which has been producing classic Panama hats (originally from Ecuador, not Panama) and other styles for more than 60 years. Each time we visit, there are more styles and colors to choose from, woven by hand, and offered in varying grades of toquilla straw. Nearby, stone stairways lead down to the tree-lined Barranco, where old-world homes with wrought-iron balconies cling to the bank above the Tomebamba River, one of four tributaries that crisscross the city. Though many of the outdoor markets and traditional shops are still going strong, it’s a different place from the one I remember as a child, striding arm in arm with my aunt. The cobblestone streets were not the pristine paths they are today. Beggars were a common sight. The markets were dirty, ramshackle labyrinths. Today seesaws and slides dot the well-manicured riverbanks of Parque Paraiso, Cuenca’s largest city park. Restaurants, art galleries and bars line Calle Larga. Buildings have been restored and turned into boutique hotels, including our own family home, built by my grandfather in 1952, which my aunt lovingly restored, weaving family heirlooms throughout. While tourism has blossomed and arguably helped maintain much of the historic center, the area has lost some of its residential feel as families (like mine) have left old homes for newer ones in the more modern city outskirts. Today, many of the people moving in are expatriate retirees. Outside the city, artisans continue to churn out exquisite crafts. Near Gualaceo, about 40 miles east of Cuenca, weavers of the ikat tradition use hand looms to create wool shawls, sweaters and bags in brilliant colors. In Chordeleg, silversmiths specialize in fine filigree jewelry. For a traditional meal in a magnificent setting, there is no place like Hosteria Dos Chorreras, a half-hour drive from downtown Cuenca through mountain passes and grassy slopes dotted with cattle and eucalyptus trees. The air turns cool and ears begin to pop as the altitude climbs to roughly 12,000 feet, near the entrance to Cajas National Park. Facing two streams that cascade down a mountainside, the eclectic restaurant has oversize windows overlooking a brook filled with rainbow trout that at one point runs through the building past moss-covered boulders. A strong, hot canelazo drink, often made with sugar alcohol, cinnamon and orange juice, will warm you up if the huge fireplaces aren’t ablaze. We explored the numerous dining and lounge areas, each one its own enchanting fairyland with touches like a pool of rainbow trout or a purple couch next to a rock wall dripping with ivy, mosses and bromeliads. After a satisfying meal of grilled trout, we climbed back into the car. The road climbed higher toward Cajas National Park. Pines and eucalyptus gave way to high grassland, scrubby bushes and gnarly trees clinging to a jagged mountain landscape dotted with lakes. Pulling through the gated park entrance my daughter suddenly gasped, “a llama!” Standing regally on the side of the road, its fluffy gray head held high, the llama batted its long eyelashes at us. Wild llamas, reintroduced to the park in the 1980s, are perfectly suited to the area’s fickle weather. We had been warned to dress in layers and were glad we had bundled up with wool hats and scarves when we stepped onto a hiking trail off the main road. Cajas, which spans about 110 square miles and ranges in altitude between 9,500 and 14,400 feet, is roughly twice the elevation of Denver. We huffed and puffed up a gentle slope alongside a glassy lake. Signs offered not-so gentle reminders to “walk slowly” to avoid altitude sickness and avoid long treks “if you suffer of hear problems.” The ground was a spongy carpet of succulent plants. Gnarly quinoa trees, or Polylepis, also known as paper trees for their flaky bark, were entwined in tangled groves. In the cold, quiet wilderness of the Andean páramo the heat and golden sands of the Ecuadorean coast seemed a million miles away. But here we were at the end of our trip, winking at llamas high in the Andes. To think that only days before, we had been waving to humpback whales. The New York Times MAFRAQ, Jordan — The bride-to-be was so young and shy, she spent her engagement party cloaked in a hooded robe that swallowed her slim figure but could not quite hide the ruffled pink dress her fiancé’s family had rented for her. As the Syrian women celebrating her coming wedding to an 18-year-old cousin chattered around her in the Zaatari refugee camp, she squirreled herself in a corner, perking up only when a photo or message from a friend popped up on her cellphone. The girl, Rahaf Yousef, is 13. Speaking wistfully of her days at school, she declared herself throughout the day to be “indifferent” to the marriage she says will keep her from finishing her education. But no one seemed to be listening. For many Syrians stuck in Jordan’s squalid and sometimes dangerous refugee camps, marrying girls off at younger and younger ages is increasingly being seen as a necessity — a way of easing the financial burden on families with little or no income and allaying fears of rape and sexual harassment in makeshift living spaces where it is harder to enforce the rule of law. As a result, Unicef says, the number of marriages involving girls younger than 18 has ballooned since the war in Syria started. “The parents feel a man can protect” their daughters, said Ola Tebawi, an official at Jordan Health Aid Society, a nonprofit that provides primary health care for refugees with United Nations support. “These families feel marriage would be the best option for a girl growing up as a refugee.” But the trend — even among displaced Syrians who live outside the camps — is increasingly worrying international aid groups and women’s advocates who say that the Syrians are simply trading immediate dangers for longer-term ones. They tick off a laundry list of threats for women worldwide that accompany marrying before they are 18. High on the list, they say, are increased risks of being the victims of domestic violence and an abrupt end to the young women’s education. The aid workers also worry about pregnancies among girls whose age makes them more vulnerable to certain life-threatening complications like eclampsia, which is characterized by seizures. During the first six months of this year, 32 percent of all registered marriages of Syrian refugees in Jordan involved a girl under the age of 18, according to the Jordanian government. That percentage was up from 25 percent during all of 2013 and, according to Unicef, more than twice as high as the 13 percent of marriages in Syria just before the war that included girls younger than 18. A majority of the Syrian girls marry into Jordanian families, Unicef reported, ensuring themselves a place in Jordan outside the refugee camps, and a new home country for the long term. Although the marriage of girls as young as 13 is not unheard-of in parts of the Middle East, including rural Syria, that practice has not been common in areas of Syria or Jordan with higher levels of education. Jordanian law allows marriages for girls and boys 15 to 18 years old, but it requires that a chief justice of a Shariah, or Islamic, court determine that all sides agree to the match. Continue reading the main story In an attempt to ensure the same level of scrutiny for Syrian marriages, the Jordanian government — which has struggled to accommodate more than 600,000 of the more than three million Syrians who have fled their country — has opened a Shariah court in the Zaatari camp. But the minister of social development, Reem Abu Hassan, said that it was difficult for judges to say no to early marriages given the circumstances — and difficult to ensure even that all the marriages were registered. “We have to be practical and see the challenges the Syrians are facing,” she said. Human rights advocates say many of the women arrived in Jordan terrified of rape because, as the United Nations has reported, sexual violence had become a “persistent feature of the Syrian war.” And they struggled to adjust to living circumstances in Jordan that were different from peacetime Syria, where men often did the shopping and other chores outside the home to avoid having their women exposed to the public. Even in urban areas outside the crowded camps, many women who are widowed or without their husbands, who stayed in Syria to fight, report being sexually harassed or living in fear that men will prey on them. Outour al Khasara, 45, a refugee who lives on a farm near the Zaatari camp, said she saw firsthand that counting on marriage as protection against such threats might be illusory. She married off her 15-year-old daughter, Jazia al Barhoum, last year to a distant cousin to protect her from “the uncertainty that continues to plague our future.” The New York Times The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria released a video Saturday of the third beheading of a foreign hostage, a British aid worker. The execution was a clear message to Britain, a vital ally of the United States as it builds an international coalition to target the militant group, which has made stunning advances across Syria and northern Iraq in recent months. The video shows the aid worker, David Cawthorne Haines, kneeling on a bare hill under the open sky, in a landscape that appears identical to where two American journalists were killed by the group in back-to-back-executions in the past month. In the moments before his death, the 44-year-old Mr. Haines is forced to read a script, in which he blames his country’s leaders for his killing. “I would like to declare that I hold you, David Cameron, entirely responsible for my execution,” he said. “You entered voluntarily into a coalition with the United States against the Islamic State.” He added: “Unfortunately, it is we the British public that in the end will pay the price for our Parliament’s selfish decisions.” |
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