Each week, the Sunday Post highlights just a few things we loved reading and want to share with you. Settle in with a cup of coffee, or tea, if that's your pleasure — we saved you a seat! Read an essay or an article online that you loved? Let us know at submissions@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Need more browse? You can also look through the archives.

In memory of the critic's trade

I’d give a pretty penny to know whatMark Athitakis wrote in his “too-earnest” unpublished response to this essay on the diminishment of classical music coverage. What caught my attention was the idea that critical coverage can be a history of otherwise ephemeral arts. More obviously applicable to live performance than words on a page — but books are ephemeral in the moment that they’re read, and that moment is what we hope reviewers (including ourselves) will capture.

... a lot of history has already been lost – and the private recordings that find their way onto YouTube can only tell us so much. Many local newspapers have either folded or been taken over by big companies with minimal interest in presenting any sort of intellectual record of a given place. The critics are mostly gone and – as astonishing as it may seem to some of those we have tossed and gored – I think we will be missed. Maybe composer and critic Virgil Thomson said it best: “Perhaps criticism is useless. Certainly, it is often inefficient. But it is the only antidote we have to paid publicity.”

How cities reshape the evolutionary path of urban wildlife

There’s something very Annihilation about the idea that the real evolution of wildlife is happening not in the wild — the traditional locus for ecologists and biologists — but in urban spaces, where killfish develop dioxin-resistant DNA, white-footed city mice outpace the immune systems of their country cousins, and brown rats become super-smellers, ready for anything New York can throw at them. And something hopeful and desperate and very New Weird about, as one scientist puts it, “reconciling with our changed world.”

Like so many of their scientific peers, urban evolution researchers are grappling with the question of how their work can help us make this new environmental reality a bit less grim. On the surface, at least, their inquiries can seem largely aimed at addressing theoretical matters—notably the issue of whether the evolution of complex organisms is a replicable phenomenon, like any ordinary chemical reaction. Cities provide an accidental global network of ad hoc laboratories to test this question: Office towers the world over are fabricated from the same glass panels and steel beams, night skies are illuminated by the same artificial lights, auditory landscapes thrum with the noise of the same cars, food waste comes from the same KFCs and Subways.

D'Amico inspiration for a character in his lawyer's 'prepper' novel

Receiving someone else’s mail after a move provides an unsettling glimpse outside the bubble, especially when the post office delivers a stack of prepper catalogs: “ghillie suits” modeled by the world’s most awkward-looking white men, no-prescription-required antibiotics (the trick: order for your fish), guns, guns, guns, guns.

Right on time, here’s Port Townsend resident Joe D’Amico, starring as a prepper (which he is) in a series of novels authored by his lawyer, Greg Overstreet (also a prepper, also a character in the series, and, startlingly, a one-time state government employee). In the book, D’Amico’s alter ego sells guns inscribed with the coordinates of a “rally point” where buyers can unite after society collapses. In real life, D’Amico sells guns inscribed with the coordinates of a “rally point” where buyers can unite after society collapses — or he did until just a few years ago and plans to again.

I cannot find any lesson or pithy point to pull from this one — it just seems monstrously silly and terrifying all at once. Watching for the end of the world, sure! I’ve seen who’s in the White House. But there’s a little-boy glee to the prepper movement, combined with grown-up brutality, that’s as scary as anything I can imagine.

During that interview, Overstreet held a military-style rifle and wore a fake beard, hat and sunglasses to disguise his identity. “Glen Tate is not my real name,” he tells the interviewer. “It’s a pen name. I have to cover up my identity because I work in government, in politics and law. Writing a book about the collapse of the United States and all the dirty stuff in my state capitol of Olympia where I live and work in Washington state is not really looked upon highly.”