But the opinion need not be viewed solely through this lens. Significantly, the court rejected the usual framing of national security versus the First Amendment, and instead cast TikTok itself as the First Amendment villain. This approach could have long-term consequences for the government’s ability to regulate the internet.
Historically, when courts have considered cases involving national security and free speech, they’ve treated them as a zero-sum game: either protect national security at the expense of First Amendment rights, or preserve First Amendment freedoms despite potential security risks. Legal observers (myselfincluded) expected the case to follow this familiar pattern, with the court weighing TikTok’s free-speech claims against the government’s national-security concerns about data privacy and information manipulation.
But in its decision, the court did something unexpected. In addition to crediting the government’s national-security arguments, it highlighted an important tension within pro-free-expression arguments: the right to access and speak on the platform of one’s choosing versus the right to have platforms free from foreign manipulation and control. The court explained:
In this case, a foreign government threatens to distort free speech on an important medium of communication. Using its hybrid commercial strategy, the [People’s Republic of China] has positioned itself to manipulate public discourse on TikTok in order to serve its own ends. The PRC’s ability to do so is at odds with free speech fundamentals. Here the Congress, as the Executive proposed, acted to end the PRC’s ability to control TikTok. Understood in that way, the Act actually vindicates the values that undergird the First Amendment.
This anti-distortion rationale for government speech regulation used to be central to the First Amendment, especially in campaign-finance cases, until the Supreme Court rejected it when striking down corporate campaign-contribution limits inCitizens United v. FEC.Recently, in last term’sMoody v. NetChoice, the Court criticized state laws limiting social-media content moderation by invoking an (in)famous 1970s precedent that the government cannot “restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others.”
But the anti-distortion rationale lives on in national-security cases. For example, only a year after Citizens United, the Supreme Court affirmed a decision by then–D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh that foreigners have no First Amendment right to contribute to U.S. elections.
The anti-distortion argument also figured in the concurring opinion by Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, which focused on the long history of legislation restricting foreign ownership of key sectors of the U.S. economy, including radio, broadcast TV, and cellular networks. These restrictions were motivated by the same legitimate concerns as the TikTok law: the possibility for covert manipulation of the American information environment. The emphasis here is on covert because, as Srinivasan pointed out, “counterspeech”—responding to objectionable speech with more speech—“is elusive in response to covert (and thus presumably undetected) manipulation of a social media platform.”
TikTok has few good options; the law prohibits app stores and cloud-service providers from hosting TikTok and its app unless ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, divests, which it is unlikely to do. Donald Trump campaigned against the law (despite trying to ban TikTok during his first administration), but he has backed away from his promises to save TikTok. Even if he wants to help the beleaguered company in his second term, his options are limited, because the key players are private companies, such as Apple and Oracle, that would face penalties for providing services to TikTok.
This leaves the Supreme Court, to which TikTok plans to appeal the D.C. Circuit’s decision. Although the justices aren’t required to hear the case, they may be inclined to, given the high legal and policy stakes. They will also probably pause the law while they deliberate, giving TikTok a reprieve until the Court’s decision this summer. But TikTok may not find that the Court is any more receptive to its cause than the cross-ideological panel of judges at the D.C. Circuit.
Thus, as soon as this summer, TikTok as we know it may not be America’s leading short-form video platform anymore. The longer-term effects of the litigation are less clear. If the Supreme Court embraces the D.C. Circuit’s reasoning that banning TikTok complies with and indeed advances First Amendment principles—especially if it extends this reasoning beyond the national-security context—it could open the door to more assertive government regulation that curtails some speech rights in favor of safeguarding the First Amendment more broadly. Although this would, in certain ways, vindicate a long-standing goal of liberals and progressives to address the flaws of unregulated speech environments, it matters greatly who in the government wields that power—and with the incoming Trump administration, the implications could be unsettling.
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about happiness and music but didn’t mention perhaps the most famously joyful work ever written: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, composed in 1824, which ends with the famous anthem “Ode to Joy,” based on Friedrich Schiller’s poem “An die Freude.” In the symphony’s fourth movement, with the orchestra playing at full volume, a huge choir belts out these famous lyrics: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken / Tochter aus Elysium / Wir betreten feuertrunken / Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!” In English: “Joy, thou shining spark of God / Daughter of Elysium / With fiery rapture, goddess / We approach thy shrine!”
You might assume that Beethoven, whose 254th birthday classical-music fans will celebrate this coming week, was a characteristically joyful man. You would be incorrect in that assumption. He was well known among his contemporaries as an irascible, melancholic, hypercritical grouch. He never sustained a romantic relationship that led to marriage, was mercurial in his friendships, and was sly about his professional obligations.
Perhaps all of that seems only natural, given the fact that Beethoven progressively lost his hearing and was therefore deaf when he wrote his later works (including the Ninth Symphony). But we have ample evidence that his unhappy personality predated his deafness. Even before his hearing loss set in, for example, he complained bitterly about his music’s shortcomings, as he saw them. He is said to have reviled what was probably his most popular early composition, the Septet in E-flat Major, as “that damned thing! I wish [the score] were burned!”
At the same time, he clearly saw—and regretted—the effects of his unhappy personality. “I can easily imagine what you must think of me,” he wrote to an “esteemed friend” in 1787, “and I cannot deny that you have too good grounds for an unfavorable opinion.”
Perhaps you can relate to Beethoven: You recognize that you have some unhappy personality traits—and, like him, you regret that. If you would like to know how to change and acquire a happier personality, here’s how.
Personality is a focus for many social scientists, myself included, and I have written about it in severaldifferent columns. The most common way to measure personality is by using the so-called Big Five Personality Traits, which can be remembered via the acronym OCEAN: openness (to experience), conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. You can take this test yourself online and see how you rank on each dimension, compared with the overall population of test-takers.
Scholars have used the Big Five assessment in novel ways. For example, they have found that high conscientiousness is a good predictor of job performance, academic performance, and longevity. Extroversion, openness, and neuroticism are predictive of higher-than-average social-media use; the first two of these (but not the third) also correlate with leadership effectiveness. Risk-taking behavior is associated with high openness and low conscientiousness. Creativity is most related to openness—which makes sense, because a willingness to experiment and try new things is typically part of a creative process.
Scholars have also studied the role personality plays in happiness. Two psychologists writing in the Journal of Personality in 2024 found that up to 54 percent of well-being is explained by the combination that a person has of these personality traits. Researchers have also looked at what causes unhappiness; they identify high neuroticism (which typically makes people feel misunderstood), low extroversion (which can reduce people’s sense of excitement about life), and low conscientiousness (which tends to make a person indecisive).
Thanks to such studies, we can also break down life satisfaction into three components and see how different personality traits affect our happiness in various ways. For example, relationship satisfaction (with an intimate partner) is best predicted by high agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness, and low neuroticism. Meanwhile, high conscientiousness best predictswork satisfaction, while agreeableness and extroversion are associated with highest social satisfaction. Very conscientious people tend to have good marriages and jobs; very agreeable people tend to have plenty of good friends.
Based on all of this, we can reconstruct a personality portrait of Beethoven. We know that he was generally unhappy, struggled with intimate relationships and close friendships, was intensely creative, and was passionate about his work, but unreliable and dissatisfied with it. So he probably scored very high in openness, fairly low in conscientiousness, low in extroversion, very low in agreeableness, and extremely high in neuroticism.
What does your own personality profile say about your well-being? Mine is an accurate predictor of high happiness—though also of moderately high unhappiness. This is because I rate near the top in openness, conscientiousness, and extroversion, but am in the middle in agreeableness and neuroticism.
If, like my colleague Olga Khazan, who tried to change her personality, you suspect that your personality is keeping you from living your best life, you may want to accentuate the positive elements and dial down the negative parts. The research on this is clear: With targeted effort, you can do so.
To begin with, realize that what you do matters a lot more than what you feel. For example, just because you feel disagreeable doesn’t mean that you must inevitably behave disagreeably. To do so is to hand management of your life over to your limbic system (which processes emotions) rather than your prefrontal cortex (which enables you to make conscious decisions).
Being ruled by the limbic system is how your dog lives. You can do better.
Feelings aside, make a resolution to behave as a happier person would—someone who enjoys a good intimate relationship, close friendships, and their work. To follow that model, scholars recommend such habits and practices as taking an interest in others and engaging in acts of kindness, counting your blessings and savoring good moments, committing to goals, learning to worry less, increasing your faith or meditation practice, forgiving others, and taking positive steps to get physically healthier.
Easy, right? You don’t, in fact, need to do all of these things, but the research shows that happier people do many of them. And that effect can hold true regardless of your attitude toward doing them: You may feel no desire to do any of them, but if you can manage it anyway, that will probably make you happier.
Amazingly enough, getting happier in this way can change your personality, emphasizing the traits that make happiness easier to achieve and initiating an upward spiral. Researchers writing in the Journal of Personality in 2015 showed that people who score higher in well-being tend over time to become more conscientious, emotionally stable, and agreeable—all of which in turn makes happiness more available to them. Curiously, happiness also tends to make people less extroverted: I’d posit that this simply means that as satisfied people age, they prefer to stay home with loved ones and do their own thing.
We have no data on Beethoven’s happiness level as he grew older, nor about how his personality changed. A pleasing notion is that perhaps he followed something like the program I suggest above: To become happier, he chose to do something a happier composer might do, and wrote an “Ode to Joy.”
He may even have succeeded. On May 7, 1824, he conducted the premiere to a packed house in Vienna. (In case you are wondering how a deaf man could conduct an orchestra, Beethoven had, standing behind him, another maestro whom the orchestra and chorus could follow.) At the end of the performance—culminating in what was the last movement of the last symphony he ever composed—the audience was jubilant. The attendees rose five times to give Beethoven a standing ovation, and threw their hats in the air, which the composer saw only when the musicians physically turned him around to face the audience.
There Beethoven stood, with an expression of amazement and, for a moment at least, of real happiness.
On Instagram, the wellness women don’t seem like a political movement. Their pictures scroll by like snapshots from heaven. Angels with luminous skin offer glimpses into their lives—earth-toned vignettes of gleaming countertops and root vegetables. You can look like us, feel like us, their chorus goes, if you follow our rules and purchase our powders.
Here, an influencer named Kendra Needham, known to her 369,000 followers as the Holistic Mother, recommends a red-light-therapy gadget for pain and thyroid problems. There, Carly Shankman, who posts as CarlyLovesKale, evangelizes about the healing powers of hydrogen-rich water and a probiotic oral-care regimen. Courtney Swan, the host of a health-trends podcast called Realfoodology, links to a menstrual-cycle-tracking app and her own line of immunity boosters in minimalist-chic packaging.
Scrolling through these accounts, I try to reassure myself: I eat vegetables and exercise. My body is fine the way it is, sturdy and practical like a short-bed pickup truck. But I am susceptible to retail therapy, and, boy, are these ladies selling—products, yes, but also anxiety that perhaps you haven’t been doing wellness very well at all. Linger long enough on any of their pages, and you will start to feel afraid: of seed oils, children’s cereal, hormonal birth control. Above all, you will grow more suspicious of doctors and scientists.
Cultivating such feelings has been key to the merger between Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters and the wellness world that has resulted in the formation of the “Make America healthy again” campaign. Although many Americans are skeptical of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of America’s most famous political family, as the potential next head of the Health and Human Services Department, his supporters see him as the supreme commander in the battle against Big Food and Big Pharma. Kennedy is not merely a man who has stumbled into the spotlight; he is a leader with a legion behind him.
Trump’s election win has been quickly written up as evidence of his campaign’s success in reaching young men via podcasts and the right-wing mediasphere. What that narrative misses is how Instagram became a rallying point of “crunchy moms” for a contest in which the predicted wave of women for Kamala Harris never materialized. Influencers such as these wellness women brought hordes of voters to Trump.
People who have, until this point, mostly been outsiders beating against the barricades of the health-care establishment, have at last been let inside. Now MAHA leaders see a chance to usher in their version of a wellness revolution.
The wellness movement has always been about individual autonomy and responsibility—an effort to take charge of one’s own physical and mental health, through diet change, the use of specialized products, or the adoption of new habits. The appetite for such health-care individualization is tremendous: Earlier this year, McKinsey estimated the global market for what it calls “consumer wellness” products at $1.8 trillion—making it roughly twice the size of the pharmaceutical industry. The sheer scaleof the movement suggests “a culture of people feeling very out of control in their own lives—and fearful of people who they deem as being in control,” Mariah Wellman, a communication professor at Michigan State University who studies the wellness movement, told me.
In September, I went to Capitol Hill to cover an early MAHA event, a roundtable on “American health and nutrition” involving “health experts” moderated by Ron Johnson, the Trump-aligned senator from Wisconsin. Kennedy attended, alongside a dozen other leaders in the wellness biz, most of whom did not have relevant degrees but did have a product or a program to promote. Realfoodology’s Swan and Vani Hari, the Food Babe, were there; so was Alex Clark, a podcaster for the conservative-youth organization Turning Point USA. Also present were the close Kennedy advisers and sibling co-authors of a new book about how to hack your metabolism, Casey Means, a former ear, nose, and throat surgeon, and Calley Means, a former food and pharma lobbyist who now runs a wellness company.
The panelists had a combined Instagram following of more than 16 million people, including many in my high-school and college circle. I get it: People want to be healthy, and America has a serious health problem.We spend nearly twice as much on health care per person as any other wealthy nation, yet our rates of obesity and diabetes are higher than most other countries’. People feel seen by the wellness world, and often scolded by conventional health-care providers’ advice: Exercise more; eat your greens; get your shots.
Different versions of the wellness movement have permeated both the left and the right, and social media has drastically expanded its reach on both sides. COVID-19 exploded that influence: Masking rules, school closures, and vaccine mandates led to plummeting trust in doctors and scientists as well as frenzied “do your own research” expeditions.
Republicans, in particular, have benefited from that surging distrust. This summer, in Texas, I attended Turning Point’s annual gathering of young conservative women, where party activists and commentators mingled with anti-vax homesteaders and sourdough-making tradwives. They sold supplements and detox guides, and chanted for Trump. It was a precursor to the MAHA movement, which solidified in August when Kennedy officially endorsed Trump. Although Kennedy had also apparently been willing to endorse Vice President Harris in exchange for a role in her administration, his ultimate alliance with Trump makes more sense. Both have branded themselves as disruptors of the status quo: Down with expertise, up with matching hats. And both Kennedy and Trump are promising cure-alls for the country’s most grievous ailments.
The typical MAHA Instagrammer, according to Wellman, is a middle-to-upper-class mom between 20 and 40 years old, with a similarly situated audience of followers. For most of these influencers, their scope of expertise knows no limit. Kendra Needham, who calls herself a “holistic health practitioner,” posts information about mammograms, pink eye, autism,and natural remedies for curing your child’s toe-walking.On her landing page, she also recommends a $47 tick-removal kit.
Like Needham, most MAHA influencers are skeptical of vaccines and critical of America’s pediatric-vaccine schedule. They allege that medical professionals oppose their ideas because they have been bought by Big Pharma, and that nutritionists are in bed with Big Food. They argue that, as Wellman summarizes it, all of the money in U.S. politics “has led to the takeover of our public-health system, and that has led to increasing numbers of cancer and diabetes and heart disease and obesity.” The wellness women are constantly reminding their followers that they understand the strain mothers are under—the overwhelming pressure to look good, feel good, and keep their families healthy. In their posts, they offer messages conveying solidarity. “You got this, mama!” they say. “It’s so hard to unlearn everything you’ve been taught.”
How Kennedy would actually translate wellness into action at HHS remains to be seen. The Make America Healthy Again PAC, which isn’t affiliated with Kennedy but is led by former Kennedy campaign advisers, is light on policy specifics and heavy on hopeful ambiguities about ending the “chronic disease epidemic” and “removing toxins from the environment.” That vagueness is likely an intentional effort to make Kennedy, a longtime anti-vax crusader, more palatable to skittish Republican lawmakers as they ponder his confirmation. But the MAHA influencers see no need to tread so lightly.
For months, they’ve liberally peppered presidential politics into their messaging, and laid out their expectations of Kennedy and the other Trump appointees charged with fixing America’s health. Online, a groundswell has formed around a few key priorities: restricting food additives such as high-fructose corn syrup, artificial dyes, and seed oils; tap-water safety; and childhood vaccines. Their understanding is that “we’re going to get rid of everything,” from toxins to government corruption, Wellman said.
And they couldn’t be more excited to get started. Clark, the Turning Point podcast host, described her vision of an America under Trump and Kennedy: “Organic food in abundance. Breathe free without chemicals falling from the sky. Paychecks fat, people aren’t.” Needham expressed incredulity at the idea “that all parents aren’t filled with so much gratitude right now.”
Kennedy himself seems eager to “go wild” at HHS, per his charge from Trump. Given recent statements, he may urge Americans to cook with beef tallow instead of canola oil and push for the removal of fluoride from tap water, ideas that some cardiologists and dentists say would increase rates of heart disease and tooth decay. Doctors are even more concerned about the consequences of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism. If vaccination rates drop, expect a return of highly preventable childhood diseases such as measles. Kennedy has already been linked to a deadly measles outbreak in 2019 in Samoa, where local health officials said he contributed to a disinformation campaign about vaccines.
Kennedy’s other wellness-inspired priorities—such as his plan to ban TV advertising by pharmaceutical companies—could have an anti-corporate, pro-consumer appeal.The challenge, of course, is that the party with which Kennedy and his followers have aligned with is, quite famously, opposed to the kinds of regulation and funding these plans would require.
During Trump’s first term, he demonstrated his unwavering commitment to deregulating both the food and agricultural sectors. A similar approach this time around could poison the Trump-Kennedy alliance and alienate the incoming president’s MAHA supporters. Or perhaps, eternally uninterested in policy detail, Trump will choose to indulge them.
For now, the MAHA influencers will continue operating as an Instagram booster club for the Trump-Kennedy agenda. And if Kennedy is ultimately confirmed at HHS, expect them to wield their following to support whichever policy he champions first—especially if he faces resistance. “Prepare for the bad guys to completely gaslight so many American people and convince them to defend their toxic products,” Needham wrote on Instagram. “We saw it happen with c0v!d and we will certainly see it again. We aren’t falling for it.”
The prospect of a MAHA takeover at HHS is alarming to the people who have spent their lives studying public health. In recent months, many have launched their own countermovement—despite how Sisyphean that task looks right now.
The MAHA movement, its critics say, obscures the systemic problems with American health in favor of minor details—and profits from doing so. They point to figures such as Hari, the Food Babe, who has long decried various artificial food ingredients and whose recent quest has been to force Kellogg’s to remove certain additives from Froot Loops. The additives in question, four dyes and a preservative, have been linked to health problems in larger doses, though the FDA has deemed them safe in the smaller amounts of a typical portion. Hari’s project has spawned petitions and protests; meanwhile, she promotes her own, additive-free products to her 2 million followers on Instagram.
Americans are not unhealthy because of individual ingredients, Jessica Knurick, a dietician with 186,000 Instagram followers, told me—and other professionals in the field tend to agree. Americans are unhealthy because they consume too many calories, don’t move enough, and aren’t getting enough fiber. And because nutrient-dense foods aren’t affordable for families, and schools are reimbursed only about $4 for every lunch a student eats. Programs that help families access and afford healthy food are constantly being cut—typically by Republican politicians.
“The social determinants of health are never talked about by this movement,” Knurick said. Of course, social determinants don’t sell supplements. “This is not a movement to make America healthy,” Knurick said. “They’re trying to erode trust in health experts”—and their motive for doing so, she argues, is to make money, secure votes for Republicans, and distract from the new administration’s coming bonfire of regulations.
Communicating all of this is a complicated job—one too complicated for Instagram—but that hasn’t stopped Knurick from trying. She and other health experts on Instagram—including the Food Science Babe, a chemical engineer and food scientist whose name is a rejoinder to her wellness nemesis, the Food Babe; Andrea Love, an immunologist and a microbiologist; and the nutritionist Adrian Chavez—have made hundreds of videos and posts in recent weeks responding to MAHA claims, point by point. Getting audience and attention is a tough task, because accurate science communication is nuanced. And frankly, nuance is kind of boring.
Right now, MAHA is on offense—and any criticism of the movement guarantees days of harassment, emailed death threats, and accusations of corruption. “Even though we’re called paid shills all the time, we’re doing these videos in our free time, after we get home from work,” Love, the immunologist, told me. It’s the consequence of MAHA’s ascendance that she and other critics fear most: a society not only distrustful of science and expertise, but actively hostile toward both.
Since Trump’s win last month, the wellness influencers have been celebrating. “It’s our time,” CarlyLovesKale wrote on Instagram. “This is the shift our world needs.” But they are frustrated, too, to be facing so much scrutiny. Resistance is wrong, they say, and questioning their motives makes you complicit. “If you had told me that in 2024 we would have people actively against making America healthy again, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Swan, of Realfoodology, wrote. “If you are against a healthier food system,” she added, “you’re def not on the right side of things.”
After all, the MAHA victors insist they are selling a healthier America. Who wouldn’t want to buy that?
Day 12 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: a clash of titans. This mid-infrared image of colliding galaxies IC 2163 and NGC 2207 from the James Webb Space Telescope shows two large, luminous “eyes” at the galaxies’ cores, some 80 million light-years away. Webb’s mid-infrared image excels at showing where the cold dust glows throughout these galaxies—and helps pinpoint where stars and star clusters are buried within the dust. Find these regions by looking for the pink dots along the spiral arms. Many of these areas are home to actively forming stars that are still encased in the gas and dust that feeds their growth.
See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.
Some years after his theory of relativity changed our fundamental understanding of the concept of time, Einstein wrote that “there is no audible tick-tock everywhere in the world that can be considered time.” What he meant was that timekeeping as we understand it—the seconds, minutes, and hours meted out to us precisely by our clocks—does not exist in any physical way. Clock time is a human invention, a system that we impose upon the world in an attempt to maintain, for our own sanity, some semblance of order.
Time in fiction works in a similar way—except that in books, the writer alone controls the organizational system, measuring out time through sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, and moving it in service to the plot. It is only in fiction that time travel—or the stopping of time altogether—is really possible; the reader can start a page on one day and end it in a different year. In her seven-part novel On the Calculation of Volume (the first two books of which are now out in English, as translated by Barbara J. Haveland), the Danish writer Solvej Balle pushes the writer’s privilege to its limit. Balle’s protagonist, Tara Selter, is a rare-book dealer in France who has found herself trapped within a time loop, a ruminative version of Groundhog Day that sees her endlessly repeating one day, the same day, over and over: November 18.
“Every night when I lie down to sleep … it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November,” Tara explains near the beginning of Balle’s first installment (which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Translated Literature this year). On the Calculation of Volume is a book of hours in its most literal sense, a diary in which Tara tallies each of her November 18ths and her attempts, both hopeful and despairing, to break free from the cycle she is trapped within. Having left the northern French town where she and Thomas, her husband and business partner, run an antique-book business in order to attend an auction in Paris, Tara inexplicably wakes up one morning in a baffling scenario. Time “has fallen apart,” and Tara’s days are repeating themselves, a fact that becomes clear to her when she watches a fellow hotel guest drop a piece of bread at breakfast at the exact time and place he had done so the morning before. Tara’s observations display an increasing sense of desperation over the course of the first book and some of the second as she tries to come to terms with her new reality.
There are no more yesterdays in Tara’s life, and no tomorrows either. Instead, there is a fluid but constant present with its own internal set of rules. Certain objects travel with Tara as she repeats her November 18ths, like the notebooks—part captain’s log and part prison diary—in which she records each day’s events. Yet, in contrast with most popular iterations of the time-loop genre, her physical location remains unconstrained: If she falls asleep in a different city from the one in which she began her day, Tara will remain in this new place come morning, rather than be transported back to her hotel room in Paris.
But these rules apply only to Tara, not to anyone else. To the other characters, time seems to be progressing normally, but each time the clock strikes midnight, the day spins backwards and wipes the slate—and their memories—clean. Only Tara is able to remember what happened during the previous iteration of November 18; Thomas, for instance, approaches each November 18 as if it were his first. In a poignant sequence in the first book, Tara is confronted, each morning, with having to explain to Thomas what has happened, and what will occur again. “We could not find the mistake,” Tara writes. “We could find patterns and we could find inconsistencies.” In the second volume, she will have to do this with her parents too. A listless acceptance will follow, as Tara attempts to forget herself as an individual with a past. “This is how I pass my days: I throw myself into the crowd, I let myself be carried along, I am in motion … once I have emerged from the metro stations or landed on the sidewalk at a bus stop, I lose momentum. I slow down, stop.” The meaning is clear: Without external cues that time is passing, life—even on the page—pauses.
On the Calculation of Volume’s premise could, in other hands, be reduced to a gimmick. But in Haveland’s rendering, Balle’s stripped-down prose has an understated clarity that lends philosophical resonance to this fantastical setup. Both of these volumes move swiftly; their briefness (each is less than 200 pages) is at odds with the feeling of unendingness that attends Tara’s predicament. Balle’s work disrupts one of the foundational laws of the universe: that time moves forward. Only the act of writing allows Tara to feel some control over her time again. “That is why I began to write,” Tara notes near the beginning of the first novel. “Because time has fallen apart. Because I found a ream of paper on the shelf. Because I’m trying to remember. Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.” But without other people experiencing the same events beside her, do any of her actions matter? Without time, life becomes static, a repetitive series of journal entries all marked with the same date.
In the first volume, Tara is still attempting to understand the new order in which she must now structure her life; by its end, she is resigned to her fate and yet proactive about how she will exist within it. “There is something underneath my November day,” she muses toward the first book’s conclusion, “and the woods tug at me as if it wishes me to stay. It clings to the soles of my boots, it wants to tell me about September and October.” A different sort of time exists outside the one dictated by the calendar: the cycle that belongs to nature, reflected in the changing seasons. Tara will, in the second book, devise a clever plan to experience a year’s worth of weather thanks to Europe’s varying climates. By traveling via train to different countries in tune with imagined seasons—both the warmer southern locales and the colder northern ones—Tara will find a way to feel time passing. But this is, of course, only an imitation of linearity.
As an antiquarian book dealer, Tara makes her life’s work out of the written word, but her connection to books is passive; her profession demands that she regard them as purely physical objects. “My relationship with books has always lain in the eyes and the hands,” she admits at one point. But by recording her days, Tara becomes a writer herself. And though the plot of her life may have run away from her, her diary keeping imposes order once again. In chronicling the events of her repeating days, Tara performs the kind of time travel that only writing—not science or technology or engineering—can. She creates a beginning and a middle—and hopefully, eventually, an end.
