Alphabet Soup Newsletter

My best friend has a new friend, which is exciting because at our age you rarely make new friends. I met my best friend when we were three. It was love at first sight. The appliance repairman got stuck without a babysitter that afternoon, and so he brought his little stepson with him. While he hooked up our brand new black-and-white TV to the rooftop antenna, my new best friend and I fought valiantly against a giant, evil skull—a sticker that my big brother had stuck on our wardrobe.

Christopher, a cat I’ve just met At my very first soccer practice with the local youth team, the young and enthusiastic coach explained to us that there are two kinds of players in the world: the ones who want to enjoy the game, and the ones who want to win it. And while the first kind charge after the ball like a bunch of jackasses, the second kind examine the various options available to them and choose the most effective one, the one that’ll get them on the scoreboard.

Sometimes a story starts with a dream. The dream that birthed this story was at least as strange at the story itself. In the dream, I’m hiding in a treetop watching my wife, Shira, who is working as an attendant at an improvised gas station.

A few days ago, PEN America’s president, Dinaw Mengestu, resigned from his position because of an article about the boycott of Jewish and Israeli writers following the Gaza war, for which I was interviewed.

Technology will soon be able to make all our wishes come true, and it’s going to be a catastrophe. This story takes place shortly after that catastrophe, and here’s how it goes: It was a simple modification: instead of trying to make human beings’ greatest dreams come true, from now on the AI overlord would settle for each person’s second-greatest. It worked like a charm.

Surgeons probably have it before they perform surgery, bus drivers have it when they get to a busy intersection, and I bet pilots feel it in their gut before takeoff and landings: that weighty knowledge that they’re about to do something tricky, and if they don’t do it well, someone could die. As a writer, I’m exempt from this predicament, but as a boy I experienced a similar sense of petrifying responsibility every time I took our dog Maggie for a walk.

“Polar Bear” is the last story in my most recent collection, Autocorrect, which just came out in paperback. The main reason I chose to end the book with this story was that I didn’t think any of the other stories could follow it. It was originally commissioned for The Library: An Open Book, an anthology edited by Ido Bruno in honor of the new National Library building in Jerusalem.

screenshot from Alphabet Soup stats I’ve always had a problem with world conquerors of all shapes and sizes. Whether it’s Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan or Hitler, it doesn’t matter how non-judgmental I try to be, I always end up feeling just a tad disgruntled. My negativity doesn’t only come from a controversial standpoint – that you shouldn’t go around invading other people’s lands – but also from my astonishment at the very fact that someone would want to conquer a world.

I’m writing this story exclusively for you. If you didn’t exist I’d probably be taking a nap or smoking a cigarette on the balcony right now. I don’t need this story anymore. Or any story. After forty years of writing, I’m made of nothing but stories: I breathe them, I spit them, I shit them. The last thing I need is yet another story to get stuck to the bottom of my shoe. Stories—I have plenty. And it’s not that I have plenty of everything. I’d be happy to pick up some more health, money and justice.

The street I live on is short and narrow. When I walk out of the old apartment building where I’ve lived for the past thirty-three years, I can go either north or south. On such a tiny street, this is a pretty inconsequential choice—thirty yards this way or the other. Still, the logical thing would be for my destination to dictate which way to turn: if the destination is north of my apartment, I should turn left; if it’s to the south, then right.