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Last October, Sanae Takaichi became Japan’s Prime Minister after being elected as head of the Liberal Democratic Party, the conservative political party that has governed Japan for most of its postwar history. And on Sunday, after calling a snap election last month, she secured a supermajority in Japan’s lower house of parliament, giving her significant power to increase both military and domestic spending, push a harder line against China, and pursue a more restrictive immigration policy. Like Margaret Thatcher, whom she frequently invokes, Takaichi is her country’s first female Prime Minister, and she is operating in a largely male-dominated political system. She has already received strong support from President Trump, whom she will likely pressure to maintain a hawkish stance against China.

I recently spoke by phone with Andrew Gordon, a professor of modern Japanese history at Harvard, about the significance of the election. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Takaichi’s landslide victory will mean for Japan’s relationship with China, the changes that have pushed Japanese politics rightward in recent decades, and how this election fits into the broader narrative of rising global populism.

Does this election feel significant in the context of postwar Japanese politics?

The scale of the L.D.P. victory is unprecedented since the Second World War. It marks the first time a party has secured a supermajority on its own. And it is especially impressive in the context of the last thirty years, when there’s been some degree of parity between the L.D.P. and the opposition. The 2005 election, where Junichiro Koizumi led the L.D.P. to a major victory, was also a large margin, but this was bigger.

The other thing that’s notable is that there’s a stereotype, which I think has many kernels of truth to it, that Japanese politics is not heavily driven by personality. And a lot of the politicians who have been Prime Minister, and led the L.D.P. or other parties, haven’t done so with a lot of charisma. But Takaichi’s victory seemed to be largely driven by the surprising spike in the popularity of the Prime Minister. So that’s pretty unusual. The Koizumi election is the closest analogy I can think of, because of his persona. He had this rapid-fire way of speaking in short sentences, bluntly and clearly, that seemed to attract people, and he successfully made the election a referendum on him as much as on policy.

But that is really unusual. I was in Japan from October through part of January. And the gap between Takaichi’s popularity and her party’s popularity seemed to be either as high or higher than it has ever been between a Prime Minister and their party. Usually, the popularity levels of the Prime Minister and the party are close. And sometimes the Prime Minister’s popularity is underwater compared to the party. So the big question was whether Takaichi could individually raise the profile and increase support for the L.D.P. And she succeeded.

Do you think it is helpful to view Takaichi’s success through the prism of right-wing nationalism’s rise across the world?

There is no question that it is absolutely part of the story. And the surprising success of the far-right Sanseito Party in last summer’s House of Councillors election, which determines the makeup of the upper house of parliament, seemed to come from their xenophobic, hard-line, anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner attitude, which is of a piece with what we see not only in this country, but in a growing number of countries. So it seemed pretty clear that the L.D.P. was going to try to move in that direction and to co-opt that support for the far right, which is a political strategy the L.D.P. has been very good at in the past. They will shift their own policies in the direction of the new sentiment among voters, and in both right and left directions. The best case for the other direction was in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, when environmental protection was very popular on the political left and left-of-center, and the L.D.P. moved in that direction effectively and co-opted that. But they are moving right now, especially on immigration.

The other major issue is the economy and inflation. And although it’s hard to trust that anyone has a good answer for reducing the inflation of the past three or so years, including the L.D.P., nobody else seemed to have a convincing case of what they were going to do. So voters seemed to say, “O.K., well, this new person, let’s give her a chance.”

Well, increased nationalism and hostility to immigrants, combined with concern about inflation, is obviously a widespread political reality. But, in this case, the Party that benefitted is the largest and most successful Party in postwar Japan, whereas in other countries, you have had older, more established parties struggle.

Right. Although, the other aspect of Takaichi’s rise that doesn’t exactly fit into the worldwide rightward drift is her hawkishness. As we see in the United States, much of that rightward drift has been isolationist.

We’ll see about that, but go on.

Yes, it may not have turned out that way here in the U.S. But it is interesting how readily Takaichi has been willing to provoke China. Last year, in response to a question from a member of parliament, she stated that the Japanese government would act in defense of Taiwan in the case of a Chinese attack. Her answer is a departure in terms of how publicly it was stated. I think what she meant to say, which also would have been provocative, was that Japan would defend Taiwan because it has an alliance with the United States, who, of course, would be involved. Her answer amounted to saying we would stand with the United States, but that was left implicit. So it was a very provocative statement, even though nobody really knows what the United States will do these days, because Takaichi could have, if she wanted to, signalled to the Chinese government not to fool around with Taiwan through a back channel and easily avoided all of this fuss. But, because she said it publicly in the national legislature, it led the Chinese to respond with fury.

The Chinese government reacted by telling Chinese citizens not to travel to Japan, threatening economic retaliation, and pulling the plug on meetings that were long planned, putting a pretty deep freeze on China-Japan relations. So, to many people, including some people in the Japanese Foreign Ministry whom I talked to, Takaichi’s answer was a terrible mistake and the sign of an amateur.

However, even though I’m not sure how calculated it was, her anti-China stance seems to have done well with the public. There’s a lot of fear of China in Japan, economically and militarily, and, even though people understand there’s interdependence between the two countries, Takaichi is seen as being willing to stand up to China, which inspires a kind of nationalism. So, her hawkishness does fit the nationalism narrative.

Japan struggled for a long time with deflation and, in fact, welcomed the surge in global inflation in the earlier part of this decade. Now, it seems like the Japanese electorate is tired of it. My understanding is that, despite Takaichi’s reputation as being on the right, at least in an American context, her economic policies include heavy government spending. I know some of it is on the military side, but how do you understand her economic policies from an ideological standpoint?

I think that her economic policies are within a realm of normalcy, unlike perhaps the United States today. She’s not looking to fight inflation by raising tariffs or something like that. But what’s strange is that the government got part of what it wanted, when deflation ended and prices started going up, but what it really wanted was for wages and incomes to be going up as well. And the thought was that, with the Bank of Japan keeping interest rates negative, you can give people more money through greater pay increases. But inflation ended up outpacing those increases.

The puzzle to me is that, as far as I can tell, what Takaichi is promising to do isn’t necessarily going to keep prices down. She’s talking about what she calls an aggressive financial policy, which actually means the return of low or negative interest rates and easy money, so it’s the opposite of fighting inflation. And then big increases in military spending. It’s hard to see what is anti-inflationary in what she proposes.

I was talking to a friend who has travelled to Japan regularly, and he told me that he was quite worried about things like the intimidation of immigrants and the erosion of press freedom, which has included the government threatening to cancel broadcast licenses of TV stations that are critical of the L.D.P. I said that my perception was that Japan’s institutions were perhaps stronger than they are in the United States, and could resist such things. He responded that he thought those institutions had rarely been tested in the past, because they depended on the idea that the L.D.P. historically divided up its control of institutions between different factions, so you don’t have the same centralized control that you would have in a more authoritarian setup. But he was concerned that could be coming to an end because of Takaichi’s popularity and centralized control of the L.D.P.

Your friend is right about how the L.D.P. historically functioned. The question is whether Takaichi’s victory will give her such a lock over the Party and its actions that they’ll go along with policies that will be controversial with the public. Your friend could be right. There’s a possibility that Takaichi is going to move very aggressively. I think she will on some military-spending plans.

But will she go after opponents in a Trumpish way? I don’t think so. And I also don’t think her anti-immigrant moves will be the same as Trump’s. First of all, there are very few undocumented immigrants in Japan, so even the most aggressive policy toward foreigners isn’t so much going to be rounding people up and sending them home as shutting the doors to more people coming, and perhaps making life more difficult for foreigners who are in Japan in terms of access to social services and things like that. But you’re not going to see the type of scenes that we see in the U.S.

What were some of the differences among L.D.P. factions?

One issue has always been about Japan’s history, and whether you see Japan as a country that has something to apologize for in its conduct during the Second World War. The L.D.P. has shifted toward a policy of denial that Japan has any need to keep apologizing, but not entirely. There remains a portion of the L.D.P. that resists that idea. But Takaichi has considered the Second World War a war of survival and of self-defense, which is a view that’s held on the Japanese right wing. So that’s one place where I think a divide in civil society and some divide in the Party was a check on the hawkish wing. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was going to make a statement on the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 2015, and there was a lot of fear that he was going to disavow any contrition or apology or self-reflection. And in the end, he didn’t do that. You can quibble, and I do quibble with some of the things Abe said, but he responded to a combination of foreign and domestic pressure and did something that I think fell short of what he would have liked to say in his heart. Will Takaichi feel constrained in that regard? I think she might, because international relations matter, and the last thing she needs now is a huge fight with South Korea.

I think Trump has given a boost to Japan’s relations with South Korea, and probably made her less likely to pick a fight on the history issue with South Korea.

How so?

Because Japan and South Korea both have to deal with this unpredictable President who may or may not defend them. So it’s in their interest to be buddies.

Despite the fact that South Korea is obviously, for very understandable reasons, suspicious about Japanese nationalism.

Yes, it is, but I think they have a lot of economic interdependence and, in terms of security and military issues, there’s a lot of ties that bind the two countries together, especially when the U.S. is seen as an unreliable partner.

I hear what you are saying about the ways Takaichi may be constrained. But my understanding is that when she was communications minister of the L.D.P. about a decade ago, press freedom in Japan declined. And I know that there are incidents in her past, like posing for a photograph with a neo-Nazi politician and blurbing a book that was euphemistic about Hitler. Do you think these authoritarian leanings are a core part of who she is?

For a young politician to rise in the Party, you need a patron. Many politicians are children of members of the legislature, and they’ve got family ties and somebody to nurture and protect them. But she didn’t. She comes from a family with no political background or connection. In that sense, she raised herself up. So she had to attach herself to somebody, and she decided that Prime Minister Abe was the person to attach herself to earlier in her career. And he nurtured and brought her along and allowed her profile to rise. And so, maybe there is an opportunistic aspect to her early political decisions.

But at the moment, these positions don’t strike me as a pose. Her nationalism, her view on the Second World War, her concerns about immigrants—all of this strikes me as pretty deeply felt, and it’s become, I think, a core part of her identity and also of her base. So does that mean she’s going to go full bore in imposing things that are going to be really controversial, both at home and with Japan’s neighbors, especially China and Korea? Not necessarily. Abe, too, suppressed his core ideological convictions. Not completely, but to some extent, because he was also a pragmatist.

Do you see the hawkishness of some members of the L.D.P. toward China as a continued expression of the Second World War-era nationalism, or do you see it as something newer, spurred by China’s position as a rising power?

I absolutely see it as newer. I don’t think the ideas that motivated Japan’s invasion of China and the atrocities committed in the Second World War are the primary factors. It has to do with the sense that China is a rising military power that might threaten Taiwan, is allies with North Korea, and is acting aggressively. The anti-Chinese feeling in Japan today is, I think, almost entirely related to China’s international activities, economically and militarily.

Takaichi is also the first female Japanese Prime Minister. How important was that to her campaign, and how important does it seem to you that Japan has elected a woman?

That is not how she defines herself. The fact that she’s the first Japanese Prime Minister, who happens to be a woman, is not something she’s putting front and center, and her own views are basically anti-feminist. But it’s been interesting to see a divide among Japanese women, with some saying, “It’s great that a woman has gotten to this level because this will be an inspiration to other women.” And others who say, “No, you’ve got to look at what somebody says and does and not who their identity is.” And so has inspired a kind of anti-identitarian feminist push from some people.

She styles herself on Margaret Thatcher, and it’s clear that to rise in the L.D.P., there is no way you could rise as a feminist. She had to win the support of the old male guard, and Abe and the older politicians like him were dead set against doing things that feminists want. For instance, one very controversial current issue is whether women can keep their original names, the names they’re born with, after getting married.

At the moment, the answer is no. And Takaichi agrees with that. A married couple can only have one family name legally. The husband can take the wife’s name or the wife can take the husband’s name, but only one family name. Women can do it informally. In the academic world, a number of female scholars, even after they marry, continue to use their maiden name professionally. But legally speaking, for a passport, for any government activities, that’s not their name.

To go back to the importance of this election, from everything you’ve said, it seems like there are ways in which Takaichi represents something new, but you don’t see her rise as some sort of fundamental break with the politics of postwar Japan.

Yeah. I think that in the context of Japanese politics, this is a very unusual result and a rightward tilt, but the L.D.P. has tilted right in the past. So it’s not a profound rupture with the existing mode of Japanese politics. It’s just a strong shift in a direction that, in many ways, things were already moving toward.

It is also important to note that the L.D.P. remains a minority party in the upper house. This will be somewhat of a check on the Party. I say somewhat because the House of Councillors is a weaker body than the lower house, and it is possible for the government to pass a budget that the lower house supports, even if the upper house does not approve it. But revising the constitution, specifically Article 9, which much of the L.D.P. dislikes, and which essentially outlaws Japan from waging war, requires a two-thirds vote in each body. Then a majority of voters must approve it in a referendum. So although the L.D.P. win will certainly bring the idea of revision into play, I see no chance for it to actually happen until the L.D.P. secures a comparable majority in the Councillors. The next election of that body is not until 2028, and only half the members stand for reëlection each time.

So there are reasons for caution and doubt about how aggressively she could transform things. ♦

There’s a curious redundancy to the new film of “Wuthering Heights,” and not just because Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, like many literary classics, has already spawned its share of adaptations. This latest effort comes from the English director and screenwriter Emerald Fennell, who previously made “Saltburn” (2023), a garish eat-the-rich satire that is best appreciated, in retrospect, as a warmup for this movie. In unleashing her camera on the fictional grounds of Saltburn, a centuries-old estate in the English countryside, Fennell was perhaps already testing out visual ideas for Thrushcross Grange, where Brontë’s heroine, Catherine Earnshaw, dooms herself to a comfortable, loveless marriage with the wealthy Edgar Linton. And, in casting Jacob Elordi as the much coveted object of desire in “Saltburn,” the director must have known that she had found her Heathcliff—a softer, more sleepy-eyed dreamboat than Laurence Olivier (in William Wyler’s adaptation) or Ralph Fiennes (in Peter Kosminsky’s), but one no less gifted at glaring magnetically into the Yorkshire wind.

The nadir of “Saltburn” was an interminably jejune sequence in which Oliver, a horndog psychopath played by Barry Keoghan, stripped down and rubbed himself against a freshly tilled grave. It was also perhaps the movie’s most morbidly Brontë-esque moment, and, settling into “Wuthering Heights,” I braced myself for a similarly debauched interpretation of the novel’s famous exhumation scene. Would Heathcliff (Elordi), digging up his late, beloved Catherine (Margot Robbie), subject her casket to desecration by dry humping? On that score, at least, the film proves uncharacteristically restrained. Elsewhere, Fennell indulges a familiar impulse to shock, or at least to jolt us awake. She deploys a heavy-breathing visual and musical style that embraces anachronism and exaggeration at every turn, and she infuses the action with a heightened sexual candor that’s meant to make past tellings of the tale look primly buttoned-up by comparison.

The film begins with a black screen and an aural Rorschach blot: are we hearing a man masturbate on a worn-out mattress? No, actually; he’s being hanged, and what we hear are his agonized groans and the steady creak of the gallows. His identity is of no consequence; among those who have gathered for his execution is a spirited young girl, Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), who lives with her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), at a craggy estate called Wuthering Heights. Catherine has pale blond hair, a love for the color red, and a habit of sprinting across the moors with wild abandon. She will soon be joined on these windy cardio workouts by a scruffy urchin named Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), whom her father brings home one day. Brontë purists will click their tongues at Fennell’s liberties: Catherine’s older brother, Hindley, is nowhere to be found, and her father, who dies early in the novel, lives to a miserable old age. The roles of father and son have effectively been merged; it is Mr. Earnshaw who will torment the young Heathcliff—and live to see the older Heathcliff bring about his undoing.

Catherine and Heathcliff—now played by Robbie and Elordi—will prove each other’s undoing as well. Fennell teases out the tricky evolution of the characters’ deep bond, from steadfast sibling affection toward a combative, quasi-incestuous desire. Catherine, incensed by Heathcliff’s treatment of her, slips several eggs into his bed; it’s a childish prank with an erotic undertone, to judge by how intently the camera scrutinizes the gooey, yolky mess beneath the blankets. Fennell has a fluid fixation; she wants passion to leave a stain. This much was clear from “Saltburn,” in which Oliver laps up a man’s cummy bathwater one moment and smears his lips with a woman’s menstrual blood the next. “Wuthering Heights,” for its part, is not to be out-slurped. In one especially heated sequence, Catherine, overcome with lust, dashes off to the moors and pleasures herself ferociously against the rocks. Along comes Heathcliff, who, aroused by what he sees, lifts the little onanist up by her bodice straps and licks her fingers clean, like someone in a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial.

You might chuckle, as I did, and also wonder if Fennell is courting your laughter. It’s as if, in her determination to grant these immortal characters a feral, forthright sexuality, she couldn’t help but suppress a nervous snicker. There’s a reason for this tonal confusion: underneath Fennell’s brazen streak, I think, is a certain wobbliness of conviction—a failure of nerve. The film’s advertising materials have placed the title in quote marks (perhaps I should be referring to it as “ ‘Wuthering Heights’ ”), an affectation that Fennell explained, in a recent interview, as a show of humility—an acknowledgment that her interpretation is hers alone, and couldn’t possibly capture the depths of Brontë’s masterwork. Confronted with the film itself, though, I can’t help but read the punctuation ironically, as a halfhearted signifier of mockery or camp. Is Fennell being snarky, sincere, or both? She’s blurred those boundaries before, notably in her Oscar-winning début feature, “Promising Young Woman” (2020), an archly stylized rape-revenge thriller that was, depending on whom you asked, either righteously transgressive or noxiously coy. This “Wuthering Heights” feels similarly divided against itself, and to less thematically pertinent ends.

This is hardly the first “Wuthering Heights,” good or bad, to fall short of its source material’s ambitions. Up to a point, the story unfolds as it always has: Catherine, in an ill-advised fit of pragmatism, agrees to marry Edgar (Shazad Latif), a decision that sends the rejected Heathcliff storming off into the night. He returns five years later, with a sizable fortune, the deed to Wuthering Heights, and dark-hearted motives that fall somewhere between revenge and reclamation. His ensuing scheme will ensnare Edgar’s naïve ward, Isabella (an amusing Alison Oliver), in a nightmare of a marriage, whose sadomasochistic undercurrents Fennell literalizes and carnalizes. She also shows us Catherine and Heathcliff repeatedly giving in to their desires, in the bedroom, in a horse-drawn carriage, and, most hotly and unhygienically, in the rain. (As I said: up to a point.)

Like some other adaptations—including those directed by Wyler, Luis Buñuel, and Andrea Arnold—this one steers clear of the novel’s second half, in which the torments of Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed romance rebound, cruelly, on their descendants. Fennell has also dropped the elaborate framing devices that make Brontë’s book, among other things, a feast of unreliable narration. Everything that happens in its pages is relayed to us by Mr. Lockwood, a nosy tenant at Thrushcross Grange, or Nelly Dean, the Earnshaws’ ever-watchful housekeeper. (Fennell dispenses with Lockwood entirely; Nelly is played, with formidably chilly side-eye, by Hong Chau, but her narrator function has been excised.) The impact, on the page, is of a ghostly melodramatic hearsay: Catherine and Heathcliff, for all their vividness, can seem more like spectres than characters. They flicker in the darkness like candlelight, incandescent yet ephemeral.

Fennell, it’s safe to say, has little interest in ephemera; she wants to emblazon her Catherine and Heathcliff on our brains. To that end, she and her collaborators, including the cinematographer Linus Sandgren and the production designer Suzie Davies, paint in the broadest of strokes. They unleash a full-blown stylistic assault roughly halfway through the film, around the time that Catherine becomes mistress of Thrushcross Grange. The hallways take on the gleaming aspect of a fashion runway, and in one room the floor is such a thick, gaudy shade of red that you half expect to find the elevator from “The Shining” around the corner. A dining table overflows with jellied extravagances; I’ve never seen a film with a greater aspic ratio. As for Catherine’s bedchamber, the walls almost qualify as body horror; they match her skin tone perfectly, right down to the blue-vein marbling. If Heathcliff won’t lick them, Hannibal Lecter surely would.

I haven’t yet broached the subject of Catherine’s wardrobe, which, courtesy of the costume designer Jacqueline Durran, swells to astonishing and undeniably lovely proportions. One gown mimics the hard shimmer of latex; another looks as crackly and translucent as cellophane. (I won’t forget the cleverly matched images of Catherine dressed for her wedding and, later, a funeral; on both occasions, her veil, whipping in the wind, does nothing to obscure her sorrow.) None of this remotely fits the period, and that is surely the point: Fennell means to present Catherine and Heathcliff’s love story as something transcendent, unfolding beyond the limits of time and history. (This idea is borne out by the music, which toggles between a lush orchestral cushion of a score, by Anthony Willis, and a series of synthy, swoony ballads, by Charli XCX.) The movie seems inspired by the approach—though not the poise or finesse—of Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” (2006), which deftly used its own ahistorical details to line its heroine’s gilded cage. Fennell pushes the aesthetics of entrapment even further: Catherine is given an enormous doll house, modelled on Thrushcross Grange. A shot from inside this replica, with an enormous hand manipulating the figurines within, frames her as a kind of “Alice in Wonderland” figure, navigating an otherworldly prison that can feel too vast and too small at once.

These are clever visual conceits, and Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is certainly something to behold. I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel. Robbie and Elordi, gorgeous and gifted actors both, incarnate an Old Hollywood glamour; she can do fierce, irrepressible romanticism, and he can smolder as sensitively as the best of them. But the actors don’t connect onscreen in an emotionally revealing way, and the gargantuan excess of the production reduces them, in the end, to life-size paper dolls. (Or perhaps plastic dolls: Robbie’s frequent wardrobe changes made me feel as though I were watching a gothic “Barbie” sequel.) The actors generate sparks of passion, but no deeper air of tragic or romantic inevitability, no sense of a bond forged between souls, and only a smidgen of the corrosive rage that makes “Wuthering Heights” as much of a hate story as it is a love story.

Nevertheless, Fennell landed the megastar Catherine and Heathcliff that she clearly wanted—and, in the case of Elordi, to somewhat controversy-stirring effect. Over the years, the question of Heathcliff’s ethnicity has generated no shortage of debate; he is described in the book as “dark-skinned,” a “gypsy in aspect,” “a little Lascar,” and “an American or Spanish castaway”—all terms that have been deemed ambiguous or inconclusive enough that the character has been played onscreen, almost invariably, by white actors. (A rare and worthwhile exception: Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights,” from 2012, in which Heathcliff is played by the Black actors Solomon Glave and James Howson.) Fennell has been forced to defend herself for casting a white male lead, and it struck me that her deployment of two actors of color, Chau and Latif, in key supporting roles could have been a calculated kind of insurance against criticism, a way of still laying claim to a token measure of diversity. But I was also reminded, once more, of “Saltburn,” in which a young biracial Black man, Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), tries and fails to solidify his position within his aristocratic white family, which ultimately sidelines him, admonishes him, and expels him from its ranks. The intersection of race and class, and the sense of grudging familial obligation finally reaching its breaking point, proved by far that movie’s most intriguing wrinkle, and it, too, retroactively suggests a dry run for “Wuthering Heights,” if surely a richer, thornier one than this. ♦

A very small snowflake, you
As if dancing
As if slowly dancing, approach
My face

Instead of falling straight down like all the other snowflakes
Somehow, you spread your wings toward my face

But where did you get to, after that?
I never saw you again.

This is drawn from “Light and Thread.”

On November 21, 2020, a young woman in Brooklyn named Tanya Bush began to keep a diary of sorts. On Instagram, under the handle @will.this.make.me.happy, she posted a photo of a craggy yellow pastry that fit perfectly in her palm. “No. Buttermilk scones with lemon zest do not alleviate anxiety,” she captioned it. On December 4th, she posted again, declaring, beneath an image of a sugar-ringed cookie perched between her thumb and forefinger, “No. Pecan shortbread did not help me reconcile my massive ego with my meager sense of self.” January 7, 2021: “No. Milk chocolate tart with hazelnut praline, devoured in the wee hours of the morning in a stress-induced panic, did not begin to ease my outrage at a congressional adjournment less than twenty-four hours after an attempted coup.”

Baked goods were not making Bush happy, she affirmed repeatedly in the following months, compiling a deadpan catalogue of tantalizing desserts. And yet, as she details in her forthcoming cookbook, “Will This Make You Happy: Stories & Recipes from a Year of Baking,” her commitment to baking, and to recording what she produced and ate, ultimately changed her life. “I was twenty-three, depressed, unemployed, and adrift. I just wanted to make something,” she writes. “Sometimes a single year can mark a sudden and definitive shift. In this one, I decided to become a baker.”

The book forfeits the puckish immediacy of Bush’s Instagram dispatches for more earnest, effortful prose. “I devoured slice after slice alone, feeling sticky, ethereal joy,” she writes, about baking banana bread during a spell of malaise. She charts her aspirations—and her romances, with characters she calls The Boyfriend and The Crush—through the seasons, as she moves from her home kitchen to an ill-fated internship in Italy to her first professional baking gig. (She is now the pastry chef at the Brooklyn restaurant Little Egg and married to The Boyfriend.) Recipes for dark-chocolate-and-toasted-coconut cake, soba-cha panna cotta, Concord-grape clafoutis, and other confections punctuate her drifting between listlessness and purpose.

The conceit of narrating a year in one’s life through the toils and sensations of the kitchen is one that many have taken up before. In the early two-thousands, the British cookbook author Nigel Slater set out to write a daily guide to seasonal eating; the resulting book, “The Kitchen Diaries” (2005), reads more like a travelogue, inviting the reader into the dulcet rhythms of Slater’s life in North London. “It is not unusual for the little stone terrace outside my kitchen doors to have a pall of smoke over it at supper time,” he writes in the entry for August 18th, introducing a recipe for whole chickens on the grill. “Smoke imbued with thyme, garlic and rosemary that wafts around the ripening tomato plants and pots of geraniums.”

Often, the year of cooking is undertaken as a quest for meaning, as it was for Julie Powell, a bored twenty-nine-year-old secretary who, in 2002, started a blog about trying to make all five hundred and twenty-four recipes in the first volume of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Powell was writing about a quarter-life crisis as much as she was writing about food, threading profane asides and meandering tangents between her experiments with flaming crêpes and butter-slicked calf liver. On day one hundred and eight, Powell, who married her high-school sweetheart, presented poulet en gelée à l’estragon to a friend who happened to be in the middle of a steamy office romance. “Gwen has a weekend of explosive sex, then comes over to my house depressed and complains about being served aspic,” Powell wrote. “This is a situation that Julia would no doubt handle with aplomb. But Julia doesn’t hate aspic as I do. And she probably gets more sex.” (Child, who died in 2004, was said to have been turned off by Powell’s salty language.)

When Ruth Reichl began recording a year of cooking, in 2009, she was despondent: Condé Nast had abruptly dissolved Gourmet, of which Reichl had been the editor-in-chief. Her cookbook, “My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life,” released in 2015, expanded on the melancholic, haiku-like tweets with which she’d chronicled her sudden glut of free time. “Chilly gray morning. Empty day looms. I will make ma po tofu sparked with the strange prickly heat of Szechuan peppercorns,” Reichl wrote, nine weeks after the magazine folded. The book illustrates how cooking, and writing about cooking, became therapeutic for her, how taking stock of tangible pleasures became an antidote to grief.

It was in a similar spirit that, in the fall of 2023, the food writer Tamar Adler, struggling with depression, began keeping a daily journal of things that delighted her: the “numbing bitterness” of a grapefruit, the “tongue tip” of a lit burner in a dark kitchen. Adler, a Chez Panisse-trained cook, is best known for her 2011 book “An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace,” a reimagining of M. F. K. Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf,” from 1942, a manual for eating resourcefully during wartime shortages. Adler’s version, as elegant and lyrical as Fisher’s, enumerates ways to use every last scrap, bone, and core—and introduced her as a writer who made art out of the marginal.

Last December, Adler published her journal as “Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day.” The book’s vignettes are all food-related, but it contains few recipes; though it’s personal, it reads less like a memoir than like a gently philosophical prose poem—a model for invigorating one’s life with sustained and granular attention. “The sound of my little bone-handled knife scraping butter across brown toast this morning reminded me to listen,” she writes, in the entry for January 31st. “Sometimes I think bells and sirens are the only things grown-ups hear.” What we do in the contained, tactile environment of the kitchen, Adler suggests, can ground us in reality and give us a sense of place in the world. “Ants, bees, mites, flies, birds, squirrels are all in constant motion,” she writes on June 2nd. “Perhaps this is why cooking feels so primitive and vital when one is in the act—not worrying about something else, but inhabiting the act of cooking. It’s when we, like ants, bees, mites, flies, birds, and squirrels, are in natural timeless motion.”

At the dawn of Twitter and Instagram, when the internet was newly awash in photos of avocado toast and latte art, the Luddite rejoinder was “No one cares what you had for breakfast.” Nearly two decades later, this has been roundly disproved. For the past ten years at least, I have begun every Friday in eager anticipation of a new installment of “The Grub Street Diet,” one of New York’s most beloved columns, for which some person of note keeps a chatty, descriptive record of everything they’ve eaten in the course of a few days. We learn which celebrities are passionate cooks—Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick save their Parmesan rinds and shrimp shells—and who eats solely to survive. (The novelist Jonathan Ames claims that vitamin gummies are enough to satisfy his sweet tooth.) Recently, I found myself moved to tears while reading an entry by the comedian Mary Beth Barone, whose contribution doubles as a disarming portrait of eating-disorder recovery. “I snack briefly on some chocolate-covered gluten-free pretzels from Brooklyn Harvest before I have to leave for soundcheck,” Barone writes, likening the challenge of eating “real meals” to “arm wrestling with myself. Either way, I lose.”

The food-diary form thrives on TikTok, where “what I eat in a day” is an extremely popular genre. There, you can ride along with a thirty-two-year-old stay-at-home mother sipping sugar-free Red Bull and making baked-potato casserole for five children, or a self- described “fat girl who isn’t succumbing to diet culture” enjoying a slice of vanilla-coconut cake topped with a jewellike smashed persimmon. (As her defiant framing suggests, “thinspo” and calorie counting are endemic to the genre.) One of my favorite accounts belongs to a grade-school teacher who eats lunch every day with an unfailingly cheerful group of colleagues, showcasing their foil-wrapped tuna sandwiches, Tupperwares of leftover chicken Marsala, and trays of pizza and fruit cups from the cafeteria. The videos sate a curiosity, held in amber from childhood, about what those figures of great and mysterious authority get up to when students aren’t around.

A colleague recently remarked that, while reading a “Grub Street Diet,” he thought about how horrible it would be to drop dead right then—if the last thing he ever read was someone logging a piece of toast. To me, this is exactly the appeal. We spend our lives in a cycle of having eaten and then needing to do it again; how we feed ourselves reflects our relationship to money, time, pleasure, place. If the food diary pushes its practitioners toward solipsism, or toward showing off, its popularity also evinces something encouraging: a curiosity about how other people live, the texture of their days.

In radio, it’s common for reporters to test sound levels—and break the ice—by asking their interview subjects what they had for breakfast. A segment that aired on “This American Life” last year documents a radio producer named Talia Augustidis posing the question to the same woman over several days.“The answer is probably I can’t remember,” the woman says the first time, in a tone of resignation. Then she brightens: “Oh, no—porridge, porridge. Porridge and blueberries.” “You always have the same thing for breakfast,” Augustidis replies, laughing. “It’s not hard to remember.”

The exchange repeats, the woman wrestling with her memory. “Porridge and delicious berries.” “Honestly, I can’t remember—oh, yes I can. It’s porridge, as usual.” We hear the scrape of a spoon against a bowl, the wet sound of food in her mouth. “It tastes absolutely delicious,” she says one morning, unable to summon what it’s called. “I’m flattered,” Augustidis says, laughing again. We never learn who the woman is or what happens to her—only that, one day, she barely touches her porridge, and she and Augustidis decide that it’s time to stop recording. ♦

Leaving Guantanamo, by Eric L. Lewis (Cambridge). With procedural exactitude and mounting anger, this book recounts how Kuwait extracted twelve of its citizens from the “forever prison.” Lewis, a lawyer who helped shepherd those cases through the State Department, the Pentagon, interagency task forces, and federal habeas litigation, makes clear that Guantánamo is part of an offshore detention regime built to evade ordinary adjudication, nourished by unverified intelligence, and maintained as a result of politics. As he shows how a small Middle Eastern state learned to negotiate with America’s security bureaucracy, the limits of litigation become painfully apparent; releases arrive only through diplomacy and assurances that the detainees will be subject to travel bans and surveillance. The book’s bleak contemporary lesson is that stranding people in a quasi-legal black site is easier than releasing them.

The Wall Dancers, by Yi-Ling Liu (Knopf). China’s first private internet provider launched in 1995. Today, more than one billion people in the country use the web. This sensitive début depicts the Chinese internet as a kind of “walled garden,” closed off from the outside world, pruned by government censors, yet filled with life. Liu, a Hong Kong-born journalist, profiles people on the fringes of Chinese society—a feminist activist, a gay entrepreneur, a sci-fi writer, a rapper—who find purpose and community online even as the space for free expression narrows. Foreign observers, Liu argues, tend to portray Chinese people as either the enablers or the victims of their government’s excesses. But reality, her book suggests, is messier, as the state and its citizens participate in a “dynamic push and pull.”

What We’re Reading

Illustration by Henri Campeã

Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Eating Ashes, by Brenda Navarro, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Liveright). In this grief-ridden novel, a nameless narrator mourns the loss of her younger brother Diego. When they are children, their mother leaves the two of them in Mexico City, where they live in poverty, to go to Madrid, in hopes of improving their circumstances. Nine years later, the siblings finally go to join their mother, but find themselves marginalized and still poor. Avoiding melodrama, Navarro writes in a matter-of-fact tone, using short, clipped sentences suited to the wretchedness of her subject. This is a book that treats its characters and incidents seriously and—at its best—ruthlessly.

The Infamous Gilberts, by Angela Tomaski (Scribner). This droll yet mournful début novel, set in 2002, is constructed as a tour of a grand English manor on the occasion of its surrender to “hotel people.” At every stop, the narrator, Max, relates events—marriage, death, banishment—that precipitated the downfall of its last owners, the Gilbert family. Mysteries emerge: Why are there bloodstains all over one room’s floor? And what is Max’s connection to the family? He teases these questions while encouraging the reader to submit to the story’s melancholy. As he says in the estate’s pet cemetery, “Linger awhile. Linger, linger. Absorb a little pain.”