the old man and the sea critical essay

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Critical Insights: The Old Man and the Sea

Tags: Critical Readings Critical Contexts Critical Insights

Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea , a late work in this important writer's long career, has often been examined not only in relation to his previous works but also as a new departure. An unusually brief novel, this book has been discussed not only in relation to the novella genre but also in connection to Hemingway's own life, with the author himself often being compared to the "old man" of the title. This volume offers a wide range of approaches to the text, exploring it in terms of history, psychology, sociology, and—last but not least—artistic achievement.

This volume, like all others in the Critical Insights series, is divided into several sections. It begins with an introductory “About This Volume” essay, followed by another work titled “ The Old Man and the Sea as Life Hack: Recommended Reading for Those of Us Still Setting Sail,” by Susan Norton. This is followed by a Biography of Ernest Hemingway written by volume editor Robert C. Evans.

A collection of four critical contexts essays are intended to treat the novel

• From a historical vantage point
• In terms of its critical reception
• Using a specific critical lens
• And by comparing and contrasting it with another important work.

This section opens with an essay by editor Robert C. Evans titled, “Old Age in the 1940s AND 1950S and in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea , ” followed by another piece by Robert C. Evans, “Early Newspaper Reviews of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea ,” This essay discusses and adds to Linda Welshimer Wagner’s 1977 book Ernest Hemingway: A Reference Guide by adding to Wagner’s listing and descriptions of early reviews of the novella and focusing on newspaper reviews not covered in the bibliography. The following two articles are written by Edwin Wong and Robert C. Evans. The first, “The Gambling Fisherman and the Shapes of Chance in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea ,” by Wong explores the main character Santiago’s quest to catch fish to bring home after eighty-four days of no luck and the way that chance presents itself in the novella. In the final essay, “Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: Two Treatments of Youth and Age in the Early 1950s,” by Evans compares the two works while drawing comparisons to the shared prevalent theme of relationships between old people and young people in two distinct cultures throughout the two stories .

Following these four Critical Context essays is the Critical Readings section of this book, which contains the following essays:

• Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea : A Pluralistic Approach Rooted in the Work of Linda Wagner-Martin and Kelli A. Larson, by Robert C. Evans
• Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea : A Survey of Modern Criticism, by Joyce Ahn
• Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea : A Roman Catholic Reading, by Laura Kathleen McClain
• Hemingway’s Religion: How Hemingway’s Views on Fishing Relate to The Old Man and the Sea , by Will Arndt
• Ernest Hemingway and the Art of the Fishing Story, by Jericho Williams
• “Everything is a sin”: Anthropocentrism and the Environment in The Old Man and the Sea , by Matthew M. Thiele
• A Most Worthy Opponent: Man Against Nature in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea , by Courtney Petrucci
• Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea on the Screen: Three Versions, by Philip Booth
• Santiago Goes Hollywood: The Old Man and the Sea and the 1958 Screen Adaptation, by James Plath
• Closing Episodes in Three Film Versions of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea , by Jordan Bailey
• Appendix: Ernest Hemingway’s Life in Photographs

Each essay in Critical Insights: The Old Man and the Sea includes a list of Works Cited and detailed endnotes. In the final section, Resources , easy-to-follow lists are provided to help guide the reader through important dates and moments in the author’s life, beginning with a Chronology of Ernest Hemingway’s Life . This is followed by a list of Works by Ernest Hemingway and a Bibliography . Finally, this section closes with an About the Editor section, Contributors , and a detailed Index .

The Critical Insights Series distills the best of both classic and current literary criticism of the world’s most studies literature. Edited and written by some of academia’s most distinguished literary scholars, Critical Insights: The Old Man and the Sea provides authoritative, in-depth scholarship that students and researchers will rely on for years. This volume is destined to become a valuable purchase for all.

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• The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

• Literature Notes
• Hemingway's Style
• Book Summary
• About The Old Man and the Sea
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Character Analysis
• Character Map
• Ernest Hemingway Biography
• Critical Essays
• Themes in The Old Man and the Sea
• Foundations of Behavior in The Old Man and the Sea
• Full Glossary for The Old Man and the Sea
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Hemingway's Style

Hemingway's writing style owes much to his career as a journalist. His use of language — so different from that of, say, his contemporary William Faulkner — is immediately identifiable by most readers. Short words, straightforward sentence structures, vivid descriptions, and factual details combine to create an almost transparent medium for his engaging and realistic stories. Yet without calling attention to itself, the language also resonates with complex emotions and larger and larger meanings — displaying the writer's skill in his use of such subtle techniques as sophisticated patterns; repeated images, allusions, and themes; repeated sounds, rhythms, words, and sentence structures; indirect revelation of historical fact; and blended narrative modes.

In The Old Man and the Sea , nearly every word and phrase points to Hemingway's Santiago-like dedication to craft and devotion to precision. Hemingway himself claimed that he wrote on the "principle of the iceberg," meaning that "seven-eighths" of the story lay below the surface parts that show. While the writing in The Old Man and the Sea reflects Hemingway's efforts to pare down language and convey as much as possible in as few words as possible, the novella's meanings resonate on a larger and larger scale. The story's brevity, ostensibly simple plot, and distance from much of this period's political affairs all lend the novella a simplistic quality that is as deceptive as it is endearing.

For example, Hemingway conveys one of the novella's central themes by repeatedly yoking religious conviction with a belief in luck. These repeated images and allusions, juxtaposed so often, suggest more than an appropriate sketch of Cuba's Catholic culture, affection for games of chance, and passion for baseball. Both religion and luck rely on ritual and have the power to engender the hope, dreams, faith, absorption, and resolution that ultimately take people beyond themselves. Supporting these repeated images and allusions is the repetition of certain rhythms and sentence structures that signal a kind of ritual or catechism in, for example, the conversations between Santiago and Manolin or the description of Santiago's precise actions in his fishing or in laying out the fish that will nourish him.

Hemingway the journalist also relies on resonances from historical and factual references to enrich the story and advance its themes — a technique used by T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. For example, the novella's many baseball references enabled critics such as C. Harold Hurley and Bickford Sylvester to determine the exact dates in September when the story takes place; to infer a great deal about Cuba's cultural, economic, and social circumstances at the time; and to establish Manolin's exact age. These references do more than provide background information, establish the story's cultural context, and advance the plot. These references also indirectly reveal the characters' motivation, inform the dialogue, and uncover the story's integral thematic dimensions.

Hemingway also relies on blending narrative modes to achieve a shifting psychic distance. The story begins and ends with a third-person, omniscient narration that doesn't dip into Santiago's thoughts. The two parts of the story that take place on land benefit from this controlled reporting. For example, the poignancy of Santiago's circumstances at the story's beginning and the tragedy of his defeat at the story's end are not lost on readers, but instead resonate within them without melodrama because of this psychic distance. On the other hand, the part of the story that takes place at sea draws closer to Santiago's perspective by letting him talk to himself, by presenting a third-person narration of his thoughts, or by drifting subtly from either of these methods into a kind of interior monologue or limited stream of consciousness. This perspective is essential to the story's middle part at sea, which is an odyssey into the natural world, a coming to grips with the natural order, an acceptance of the inevitable cycle of life, and a redemption of the individual's existence. As the transition into Santiago's thoughts seems logical and intuitive because he is alone at sea, with no one to talk to, so does the transition back out again because he returns to land so deeply exhausted.

Previous Ernest Hemingway Biography

Next Themes in The Old Man and the Sea

• The Hemingway Review

Critical Insights: The Old Man and the Sea ed. by Robert C. Evans (review)

• J.A.R. Acevedo
• The Hemingway Foundation and Society
• Volume 43, Number 1, Fall 2023
• pp. 138-142
• 10.1353/hem.2023.a913505
• View Citation

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The Old Man and the Sea

By ernest hemingway.

'The Old Man and the Sea' is a story of man versus nature, hardship, poverty, and himself. At the beginning of the novella, Hemingway takes a reader directly to the life and struggles of Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman.

About the Book

Written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

He’s making his way back to shore after what is his eighty-fourth day without catching a fish. This hardship, and its reverberating impact, consume Santiago’s life . Fishing is everything to him. It is both his passion and the way he makes a living. Read The Old Man and the Sea  summary here .

In his failure, I felt every impossibility of my own life. In his hope and perseverance: something of the human spirit. His character drives the novella, without the incredible character-building Hemingway engaged in, the story would be a shell of itself.  

While Santiago’s luck might be down, his ability to look towards the next day and find a reason to keep going is persistent. These are features of Hemingway’s main character that endeared him to me. I felt, almost instantly, an attachment to Santiago and a stake in his day-to-day hardship.  

Santiago and Manolin

As The Old Man and the Sea  progresses , the reader is treated to a clear look into Santiago’s mind and the purity of his drives. He cares about simple things, fishing first and foremost, but also his young friend Manolin, and baseball, specifically Joe DiMaggio. I felt that this, as have critics since it was written, is Hemingway at his best, his most articulate and most engaging.  

When the character of Manolin is introduced, the already growing empathy and commitment I felt towards Santiago’s character were expanded. To care for one, and feel tied to his fate, is to care for the other. Manolin is connected to Santiago through friendship and mutual interest in fishing and sports.  

The investment I’d already developed in these characters and their fight against poverty, hunger, and failure, was taken out to sea alongside Santiago. He endeavors, hoping against hope that this time on the eighty-fifth day, things will be different. He has faced streaks of bad luck before and refuses to believe this one will be his longest.  

The Pursuit  

With joy and relief, I greeted the news that a fish had taken the old man’s hook. “Oh, thank goodness,” I said out loud, surprising myself with my attachment to the fictional events put on paper more than sixty years ago. This was it, I thought, f inally relief for this infinitely deserving man is in reach. But, as with all great fiction, my satisfaction was prolonged. What followed was a struggle beyond my comprehension. Days passed with the fish dragging Santiago further and further out to sea. To make it all the more frustrating, for some time he didn’t even know what had taken the bait.  

Hemingway’s depictions of pain, perseverance, and fortitude are unmatched in this memorable section of The Old Man and the Sea .  Through Santiago’s thoughts and the words he spoke aloud to himself, a reader is pulled into a world of suffering and determination. In my own hands, it seemed as though I could feel the weight of the line. Across my back, I tried to imagine its pressure. The dragging hours as one day moved into the night and day again, weighed on my own mind as I considered the reserves of strength the old man had.  

Character Motivations and Considerations

At this point in The Old Man and the Sea,  I found myself considering Santiago’s motivations and what I would do in his place. I knew without a doubt that I couldn’t withstand the miserable forces he did as the marlin dragged him out to sea. Nor could I return to the ocean after the devastation the sharks wrought on the long labored for fish later in the novella. This, of course, made his efforts all the more impressive.  

But what, I asked myself, kept him going? How could he, an old frail man, pursue the marlin so single-mindedly? While I could never say for sure what Ernest Hemingway was thinking, or what Santiago might say for himself, I concluded that I think speaks to the root of the old man’s character.  

When the marlin took his hook and he saw the prize within his grasp, he felt everything—all the impossibles in his life—merge into one single, physical possibility at the end of his line. He knew that he had to catch this fish or die trying. It was the culmination of his simple life and the experiences he’d drawn on to get where he was. He wanted to prove himself worthy, as a man, but also as another life form, suffering and surviving as the myriad of fish and birds do around him.  

The Old Man and the Sea : A Conclusion

In conclusion, this achingly short novella, which speaks so clearly on what it means to be human in a cold, and hateful world, brings me hope. Finishing it for what is not the first time, I found myself entranced by Santiago’s continued fascination with his past. Specifically, the lions on the beach. The memory imprinted itself onto my own mind, and I tried to place myself in his shoes and figure out what it was about the scene that had so captured him.

I believe now it was the purity of the moment. The world was in alignment, with nature acting in accordance with its own laws and at the same time displaying Santiago the two of the possibles that consume human life—joy and community.  

The Old Man and the Sea Review: Earnest Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel

• Writing Style
• Lasting Effect on Reader

The Old Man and the Sea Review

Even though The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel, it has a powerful impact. Santiago’s world, although simple, is incredibly moving and memorable. He suffers through poverty and hardship for little reward. His few pleasures, being on the sea, speaking with his young friend, and baseball are meager. But, all that makes him somehow easier to connect with.

When Santiago goes on to sea, trying once again to break his streak of unsuccessful fish trips, he embarks on a journey that pushes him to his absolute limits. The reader is asked to consider the value of life, their own capacity for suffering, and how if long they could persevere in the face of what Santiago stands up against.

• Hemingway’s writing style is incredibly effective.
• The characters are vibrant easy to connect with.
• Hemingway successfully uses imagery and memories to create a moving inner narrative when Santiago is at sea.
• Limited dialogue. Most of the actions play out through narration.
• Disappointing conclusion for Santiago who suffered for nothing.
• Reader is left wondering what happens to Santiago at the end of the novel.

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

Cite This Page

Baldwin, Emma " The Old Man and the Sea Review ⭐ " Book Analysis , . Accessed 2 April 2024.

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The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest hemingway, everything you need for every book you read..

Resistance to Defeat

As a fisherman who has caught nothing for the last 84 days, Santiago is a man fighting against defeat. Yet Santiago never gives in to defeat: he sails further into the ocean than he ever has before in hopes of landing a fish, struggles with the marlin for three days and nights despite immense physical pain and exhaustion, and, after catching the marlin, fights off the sharks even when it's clear that the battle against…

Pride is often depicted as negative attribute that causes people to reach for too much and, as a result, suffer a terrible fall. After he kills the first shark , Santiago , who knows he killed the marlin "for pride," wonders if the sin of pride was responsible for the shark attack because pride caused him to go out into the ocean beyond the usual boundaries that fishermen observe. Santiago immediately dismisses the idea, however…

The friendship between Santiago and Manolin plays a critical part in Santiago's victory over the marlin . In return for Santiago's mentorship and company, Manolin provides physical support to Santiago in the village, bringing him food and clothing and helping him load his skiff. He also provides emotional support, encouraging Santiago throughout his unlucky streak. Although Santiago's "hope and confidence had never gone," when Manolin was present, "they were freshening as when the breeze rises."…

Youth and Age

The title of the novella, The Old Man and the Sea , suggests the critical thematic role that age plays in the story. The book's two principal characters, Santiago and Manolin , represent the old and the young, and a beautiful harmony develops between them. What one lacks, the other provides. Manolin, for example, has energy and enthusiasm. He finds food and clothing for Santiago, and encourages him despite his bad luck. Santiago, in turn…

Man and Nature

Since The Old Man and the Sea is the story of a man's struggle against a marlin , it is tempting to see the novella as depicting man's struggle against nature. In fact, through Santiago , the novella explores man's relationship with nature. He thinks of the flying fish as his friends, and speaks with a warbler to pass the time. The sea is dangerous, with its sharks and potentially treacherous weather, but it also…

Christian Allegory

The Old Man and the Sea is full of Christian imagery. Over the course of his struggles at sea, Santiago emerges as a Christ figure. For instance: Santiago's injured hands recall Christ's stigmata (the wounds in his palms); when the sharks attack, Santiago makes a sound like a man being crucified; when Santiago returns to shore he carries his mast up to his shack on his shoulder, just as Christ was forced to bear his…

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• The Old Man and the Sea

Read our complete notes on the novel The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway. Our notes cover The Old Man and the Sea summary and analysis.

Introduction

The Old Man and the sea, published in 1952 is a novella written by renowned novelist Ernest Hemingway. The novel wins the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for fiction. This novel was Hemingway’s last major work of fiction. The plot of the novel revolves around an old fisherman who engages himself in a heroic encounter to hook a giant fish, marlin.

The central character of the novel is an old fisherman, named Santiago, who fishes alone in the sea. Initially, he was joined by a young boy who comes to him to learn fishing. Being unable to catch the fish, Santiago asks him to join the lucky boat. The old man went eight-four days without catching a single fish. The plot of the story moves with the old man catching a great marlin and his heroic encounter with sharks. His strong determination and sportsman spirit never allow him to move to other remote places.

The Old Man and the Sea Summary

The Novel, The Old man and the Sea open with an old fisherman named Santiago, who for eighty-four days has not trapped a single fish. A young boy, Manolin, at first shared with him the bad fortune, however, after forty days the boy’s father asks his son to join another boat. Since then, Santiago sails alone. On daily basis, Santiago clamors his net in the stream of big fishes but is unable to catch single and returns empty-handed every evening.

Manolin loves Santiago and pities his state. When the boy has no money with him, he either begs or snips just that Santiago has sufficient to eat. Though the old man has accepted his kindness but misinterprets it with his humility that illustrates his pride nature. During their dinner, they either talk about the luckier time during which they would catch the fish or about the American baseball plus the great Joe DiMaggio. Alone in his hut, at night, the old man dreams of beaches of Africa, where he had sailed ships a few years back and lions over there. His dead wife no longer comes in his dreams.

On the eighty-fifth day, Santiago clamors out of the port in the calm and cool dark before dawning. When parting the aroma of land after him, he arranges his lines. He has two fresh tunas of his baits that was given by the young boy. Along with it, he has sardines as well to cover his hooks. Into the deep dark water, the lines descend straight down. Towards the only low green line on the sea, Santiago sees other boats soon as the sun rises. A flying man-of-war bird signals him the location of the dolphins chasing the school of fish, however, the school is far away and is too fast. The birds encircle again and the old man sees tuna jumping in the sunlight. A trifling one grosses the knob on his harsh line. Carrying the trembling fish onboard, the old man contemplates it a good portent.

A marlin begins gnawing at the bait toward noon, which is almost one hundred measures down. The old man slightly plays the fish that is a really big one, as known through the weight in the line. Finally, he attacks to settle down the hook. However, the fish does not come on the surface, instead starts hauling towards the northwest. Santiago stretches the line across his shoulder and supports himself. He, being a skilled fisherman and knows many tricks, waits patiently so that the fish exhaust.

After the sunset, the cold increases and the old man starts shivering. He suddenly feels that something has taken one of the remaining baits with him and immediately cuts the line with his sheath knife. The fish suddenly starts motions due to which Santiago is pushed towards it, and his check is cut. His left hand becomes rigid and cramped by down. The fish again starts motion towards northward and now his right hand is cut by the strong pull online. He is now hungry and cut some strips from the tuna and gnaws them, waiting to get warmed by the sun relax his cut fingers.

In the morning, the fish jumps. Santiago, seeing it jump, acknowledges that he has captured the biggest fish ever. The fish goes inside water and turns in the east direction. In the hot afternoon, he sparingly drinks water from the bottle. Meanwhile, an airplane buzzes above his head on the way to Miami. In order to forget his cut hand and hurting back, he tries to remember the scene when men mischievously called him El Campeón and he started a fight with them at Cienfuegos in the tavern.

Santiago rebated the hook and close to nightfall, a dolphin took the hook. He carefully lifts the fish on board so that he does not jolt the line. After taking some rest, he slices the dolphin and cut its bone. He also keeps the two fishes that he discovers in its jaws. He sleeps that night, however, is awakened by the movement of lines in his fingers as the dolphin moves. He tries to fatigue the dolphin by feeding the line slowly. Soon when fish slows down its movement, Santiago washes his hands and eats one on the flying fish that he caught in the dolphin’s jaw. He is very tired and gets faint while bringing the big fish nearer. When he is completely exhausted, he drives his harpoon. The fish is almost two feet longer than his boat. In Havana harbor, no one has ever experienced such a big catch. While setting his course towards the southwest, he thinks of the fortune that the fish will make.

Just an hour later, Santiago witness the first sharks that violently comes towards the dead dolphin with its raking teeth. Fearing his failing fortune, the old man hits the shark with his harpoon. Leaving the dolphin bloody and injured, the sharks roll down and sinks in the water taking the harpoon with it. The old man knows that the smell with spread inviting may predators. He soon watches two sharks approaching towards the dolphin. He hits one with the knife while the other sinks down into the deep water. One after the other shark attacks the dolphin. The old man, fighting with all, is now very tired and fears that sharks will eat all the dolphin, leaving a skeleton for him.

When the old man goes in a boat to the coast, all the lights are gone. In the dark, Santiago only manages to understand the backbone and the tail of the fish. He starts pushing the fish and the boat. Once he falls down due the weight, however, lays tolerantly till he can collect some courage and strength. In the shelter, he immediately goes to sleep after falling in his bed.

Later that morning, the boy discovers him while the other fishermen are gathered around the skiff wondering at the giant dolphin that is eighteen foot long. Manolin brings Santiago a hot coffee while he wakes up. Santiago offers the boy the spear in the fish. Manolin asks him to have some rest so that he can make himself appropriate for the coming days in which they will sail together. While the old man sleeps all that afternoon, dreaming of lions, the boy sits beside him.

The Old Man and the Sea Characters Analysis

He is an old fisherman, the protagonist of the novel, belongs to Cuban. He is a humble, modest man who adores and respect the sea and spent all his life near the sea. Initially, a young boy accompanies him in his search for the great marlin, dolphin. But after forty days, he fishes alone in the sea.

The old man patience is rewarded after a long eight-four days without catching a single fish. He catches a huge marlin of eighteen foot long from head to tail but then again engages in a three-day struggle to place it in a right place.

In his encounter with the marlin, the old man starts recognizing himself and identify himself with the fish. He feels a sense of brotherhood with it and guilty for the idea of killing it. The action of the story suffuses through this feeling of unity and interdependence between the fish and the old man. Through the novel, the heroic individualism of the old and his love for the other creatures around him is quite evident.

He after catching it completely, attaches it with his boat, however, the sharks, one after another, attacks it. The old man’s next encounter the sharks proves to be impossible to win and Santiago is only left with the skeleton of the marlin that is insignificant but a sign or his victory. Santiago forces himself to both the physical and mental survival in a struggle with the great dolphin. Santiago, a man having innate intelligence and a sturdy will for survival, accepts tragedy with great self-effacement and dignity.

He is a young boy, who lives in Cuban. He learns to fish from Santiago, the old man. He would fish with the Santiago and became his fishing partner till his father stops him. With the passage of time, the young boy becomes the closest and the most devoted friend of the old man and the old man turns out to be his ancillary father.

Manolin is so attached and devoted to Santiago that he often steals and begs for the old man food. Moreover, for the old man, he also discovers the fresh bait. The old man and the young boy talks about fishing, American baseball, and many other things when they are together. In their discussions, the old man, Santiago, often wishes to teach Manolin mental and physical survival, about the sportsman spirit and about being a victor.

It is the eighteen-foot long fish that weighs more than a thousand pounds. It is the largest fish that is ever caught in the Gulf Stream. Marlin, to Santiago, is a mixture of unbelievable beauty and lethal strength. Both Santiago and the marlin are identical in the war against nature and both of them emerges as heroes.

He is the processor of the Terrace who gives food to the young boy, Manolin, to give it to Santiago.

He is a fisherman to whom the old man, Santiago, gives the big fish’s head so that he can use it in his fishing for trapping.

He is a young little boy who on one occasion facilitated Santiago with his fish nets.

Themes in The Old Man and the Sea

From the start novel, Santiago, the central character of the novel and the protagonist, is characterized by someone who is struggling against his fortune. Initially, he is struggling against his defeat: he hasn’t caught a single fish since eighty-four days and soon is going to pass his own personal best of eighty-seven days.

Moreover, the sail of his boat identifies the “flag” of enduring defeat. However, the old man, having a strong will, at every turn rejects defeat. He decides to sail in that part where the largest fish are found. He hooked the marlin and encounters sharks for the next three days before landing the fish. He wards off sharks from his hooked marlin, although he knows that it is worthless.

  As Santiago sympathizes against the sea creature, various readers also read the novel form as an account of an old man’s battle against the natural world. However, more accurately, the story of the novel is “the place of man in nature”. Santiago and marlin, both, presents the characteristics of honor, pride, and bravery.

Both of them are subjected to everlasting law: kill or be killed. Santiago reflects the idea of predators when he watches the exhausted tired warbler’s fly towards shore, where he will fall prey to the hawk and will be killed. He illustrates the idea of the world filled with predators that will one day lead to death despite the inevitable struggle. Hemingway, through Santiago, reflects the idea of the unconquerable will of the man. According to him, a man can be devastated but not overwhelmed. Death, to him, is inevitable, however, the best of man lies in his refusal to give into its power.

The novel proposes that it is conceivable to exceed this expected regulation. Indeed, the actual certainty of obliteration generates the standings that permit a well-intentioned man or beast to exceed it. It is indeed over the determination to fight the unavoidable that a man is able to attest himself. In fact, the worthiness of the opponent that a man chooses can attest his determination to fight over and over again.

Marlin, to Santiago, is worthy to fight with. The way he admires and adores his opponents brings respect into a reckoning with death. Even if they are destroyed, they are not humiliated, but their destruction brings honor and courage that proves and assures the old man’s heroic characteristics. The protagonist of the novel, though is destroyed, at the end of the novel, however, is not defeated. His struggle doesn’t make him change the place is worth, rather provide him a more honorable fortune.

Pride: the Source of Greatness and Determination:

The novel,  The Old Man and the Sea , resembles mostly to the classical tragedies. Many characteristics parallels between the protagonist and the classical heroes.

Many resembling qualities occur among  Santiago and the classic heroes of the ancient world. Besides displaying enormous power, valor, and ethical conviction, they also have a tragic flaw. Though this quality is usually admirable, however, leads to the downfall of the character. Santiago is strongly aware of his tragic flaw-pride. The old man, time and again, apologizes from the marlin, when sharks destroyed it. He concedes that he ruined both, the marlin and himself, sailing beyond his limit.

Being a skillful fisherman, though it is true that it is an insult to the pride of the old man to live eighty-four days without a single catch. The novelist, Hemingway, doesn’t convict his protagonist for his flaw, however, he presents him the evidence that pride inspires greatness in men. Since Santiago recognizes that he murder the enormous marlin mainly out of pride plus as his detention of the marlin hints in a chance to his valiant perfection of downfall, pride turn out to be the foundation of Santiago’s utmost asset. Deprived of a vicious intellect of pride, that combat would never have tussled, or further, it would have been reckless before the end.

The old man’s pride also encourages his craving to excel in the damaging forces of nature. The old man, throughout the novel, struggles and determines to bring the great marlin to the shore. He encounters the sharks, however, was only left with the skeleton. He even didn’t abandon the skeleton, but bring it with him to his shelter as an award or trophy. The splendor and integrity the old man accumulates originate not from his fight itself yet from his pride and willpower to combat.

The Old Man and the Sea Literary Analysis

The Old Man and the Sea  is a short novel and unlike other novels, it is not divided into chapters. Nevertheless, it is not suitable to call it a short story with 27,500 words approximately. Determinations to fragment it into identifiably distinct portions are disorganized at greatest since its action transfers laterally a timeline of sunrise, midday, dusk, nighttime, and dawning that is then and there reiterated, plus through slight recollecting by the character and no interruptions by the novelist.

The action of the novel is subjective, however, it is divided into various parts: the introduction, three melodramatic segments, denouement, and coda. The readers, in the introductory part, learn about the first forty days of the old man’s fishing aided by the young boy in the Gulf Stream.

After forty days, the old man fished alone. He went fishing for eighty-four day without catching a single fish. In the first, the real action of the story begins on the eighty-fifth day when he hooked a giant male marlin. Part two of the novel deals with the efforts of Santiago with the strong fish that tows him northwest into night and more.

The subsequent afternoon, Santiago first sees his victim when the fish unexpectedly surfaces. It tows the old him through the second night. The old man hands are cut and back is stressed, still, he efforts to catch the fish completely. Part three of the novel deal with Santiago’s encounter with sharks.

A number of sharks attacks and devour parts of the marlin. Santiago fights with all the sharks however, at the end left with the skeleton of the marlin that he brings to the shore. He was very tired and fell asleep soon after falling into his bed. In the last part, the coda Manolin brings him coffee and both of them resolute to fish again.

In the novel, Santiago is the only central character of the novel whose words and thoughts are often recorded. His words are often put into quotation marks when he speaks loudly with himself, and sometimes, Santiago’s thoughts are recorded without the use of quotation marks. The pronouns “I” and “he” are used without obvious discrepancy.

The novel  The Old Man and the Sea  shows faithfulness to the classical unity of time, place, and action that is with a discrete start, extended middle, and termination. The plot includes three days and nights that mostly occurs on the sea and illustrates one series of events. The events are interwoven with clever prophecy, mainly done through Santiago’s recurrent exhortation of going out too distant, his often calling his excavation his “brother,” his views about baseball and his envisaging about spirited lions that he saw years before on African seashores.

We see Manolin in the first part of the novel and in the last part. Hence, the novel or novella has a masterpiece form, with Manolin founding the little first and third subjects and an old man pitted in contrast to the sea and its mortals as the further extravagant subsequent subject.

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Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control

The private and public seductions of the world’s biggest pop neuroscientist..

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For the past three years, one of the biggest podcasters on the planet has told a story to millions of listeners across half a dozen shows: There was a little boy, and the boy’s family was happy, until one day, the boy’s family fell apart. The boy was sent away. He foundered, he found therapy, he found science, he found exercise. And he became strong.

Today, Andrew Huberman is a stiff, jacked 48-year-old associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is given to delivering three-hour lectures on subjects such as “the health of our dopaminergic neurons.” His podcast is revelatory largely because it does not condescend, which has not been the way of public-health information in our time. He does not give the impression of someone diluting science to universally applicable sound bites for the slobbering masses. “Dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or it’s released volumetrically, but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the density of those G-protein-coupled receptors,” is how he explains the effect of coffee before exercise in a two-hour-and-16-minute deep dive that has, as of this writing, nearly 8.9 million views on YouTube.

In This Issue

Falling for dr. huberman.

Millions of people feel compelled to hear him draw distinctions between neuromodulators and classical neurotransmitters. Many of those people will then adopt an associated “protocol.” They will follow his elaborate morning routine. They will model the most basic functions of human life — sleeping, eating, seeing — on his sober advice. They will tell their friends to do the same. “He’s not like other bro podcasters,” they will say, and they will be correct; he is a tenured Stanford professor associated with a Stanford lab; he knows the difference between a neuromodulator and a neurotransmitter. He is just back from a sold-out tour in Australia, where he filled the Sydney Opera House. Stanford, at one point, hung signs (AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY) apparently to deter fans in search of the lab.

With this power comes the power to lift other scientists out of their narrow silos and turn them, too, into celebrities, but these scientists will not be Huberman, whose personal appeal is distinct. Here we have a broad-minded professor puppyishly enamored with the wonders of biological function, generous to interviewees (“I love to be wrong”), engaged in endearing attempts to sound like a normal person (“Now, we all have to eat, and it’s nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact”).

This is a world in which the soft art of self-care is made concrete, in which Goop-adjacent platitudes find solidity in peer review. “People go, ‘Oh, that feels kind of like weenie stuff,’” Huberman tells Joe Rogan. “The data show that gratitude, and avoiding toxic people and focusing on good-quality social interactions … huge increases in serotonin.” “Hmmm,” Rogan says. There is a kindness to the way Huberman reminds his audience always of the possibilities of neuroplasticity: They can change. He has changed. As an adolescent, he says, he endured the difficult divorce of his parents, a Stanford professor who worked in the tech industry and a children’s-book author. The period after the separation was, he says, one of “pure neglect.” His father was gone, his mother “totally checked out.” He was forced, around age 14, to endure a month of “youth detention,” a situation that was “not a jail,” but harrowing in its own right.

“The thing that really saved me,” Huberman tells Peter Attia, “was this therapy thing … I was like, Oh, shit … I do have to choke back a little bit here. It’s a crazy thing to have somebody say, ‘Listen,’ like, to give you the confidence, like, ‘We’re gonna figure this out. We’re gonna figure this out. ’ There’s something very powerful about that. It wasn’t like, you know, ‘Everything will be okay.’ It was like, We’re gonna figure this out. ”

The wayward son would devote himself to therapy and also to science. He would turn Rancid all the way up and study all night long. He would be tenured at Stanford with his own lab, severing optic nerves in mice and noting what grew back.

Huberman has been in therapy, he says, since high school. He has, in fact, several therapists, and psychiatrist Paul Conti appears on his podcast frequently to discuss mental health. Therapy is “hard work … like going to the gym and doing an effective workout.” The brain is a machine that needs tending. Our cells will benefit from the careful management of stress. “I love mechanism, ” says Huberman; our feelings are integral to the apparatus. There are Huberman Husbands (men who optimize), a phenomenon not to be confused with #DaddyHuberman (used by women on TikTok in the man’s thrall).

A prophet must constrain his self-revelation. He must give his story a shape that ultimately tends toward inner strength, weakness overcome. For Andrew Huberman to become your teacher and mine, as he very much was for a period this fall — a period in which I diligently absorbed sun upon waking, drank no more than once a week, practiced physiological sighs in traffic, and said to myself, out loud in my living room, “I also love mechanism”; a period during which I began to think seriously, for the first time in my life, about reducing stress, and during which both my husband and my young child saw tangible benefit from repeatedly immersing themselves in frigid water; a period in which I realized that I not only liked this podcast but liked other women who liked this podcast — he must be, in some way, better than the rest of us.

Huberman sells a dream of control down to the cellular level. But something has gone wrong. In the midst of immense fame, a chasm has opened between the podcaster preaching dopaminergic restraint and a man, with newfound wealth, with access to a world unseen by most professors. The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you.

Some of Andrew’s earliest Instagram posts are of his lab. We see smiling undergraduates “slicing, staining, and prepping brains” and a wall of framed science publications in which Huberman-authored papers appear: Nature, Cell Reports, The Journal of Neuroscience. In 2019, under the handle @hubermanlab, Andrew began posting straightforward educational videos in which he talks directly into the camera about subjects such as the organizational logic of the brain stem. Sometimes he would talk over a simple anatomical sketch on lined paper; the impression was, as it is now, of a fast-talking teacher in conversation with an intelligent student. The videos amassed a fan base, and Andrew was, in 2020, invited on some of the biggest podcasts in the world. On Lex Fridman Podcast, he talked about experiments his lab was conducting by inducing fear in people. On The Rich Roll Podcast, the relationship between breathing and motivation. On The Joe Rogan Experience, experiments his lab was conducting on mice.

He was a fluid, engaging conversationalist, rich with insight and informed advice. In a year of death and disease, when many felt a sense of agency slipping away, Huberman had a gentle plan. The subtext was always the same: We may live in chaos, but there are mechanisms of control.

By then he had a partner, Sarah, which is not her real name. Sarah was someone who could talk to anyone about anything. She was dewy and strong and in her mid-40s, though she looked a decade younger, with two small kids from a previous relationship. She had old friends who adored her and no trouble making new ones. She came across as scattered in the way she jumped readily from topic to topic in conversation, losing the thread before returning to it, but she was in fact extremely organized. She was a woman who kept track of things. She was an entrepreneur who could organize a meeting, a skill she would need later for reasons she could not possibly have predicted. When I asked her a question in her home recently, she said the answer would be on an old phone; she stood up, left for only a moment, and returned with a box labeled OLD PHONES.

Sarah’s relationship with Andrew began in February 2018 in the Bay Area, where they both lived. He messaged her on Instagram and said he owned a home in Piedmont, a wealthy city separate from Oakland. That turned out not to be precisely true; he lived off Piedmont Avenue, which was in Oakland. He was courtly and a bit formal, as he would later be on the podcast. In July, in her garden, Sarah says she asked to clarify the depth of their relationship. They decided, she says, to be exclusive.

Both had devoted their lives to healthy living: exercise, good food, good information. They cared immoderately about what went into their bodies. Andrew could command a room and clearly took pleasure in doing so. He was busy and handsome, healthy and extremely ambitious. He gave the impression of working on himself; throughout their relationship, he would talk about “repair” and “healthy merging.” He was devoted to his bullmastiff, Costello, whom he worried over constantly: Was Costello comfortable? Sleeping properly? Andrew liked to dote on the dog, she says, and he liked to be doted on by Sarah. “I was never sitting around him,” she says. She cooked for him and felt glad when he relished what she had made. Sarah was willing to have unprotected sex because she believed they were monogamous.

On Thanksgiving in 2018, Sarah planned to introduce Andrew to her parents and close friends. She was cooking. Andrew texted repeatedly to say he would be late, then later. According to a friend, “he was just, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be there. Oh, I’m going to be running hours late.’ And then of course, all of these things were planned around his arrival and he just kept going, ‘Oh, I’m going to be late.’ And then it’s the end of the night and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry this and this happened.’”

Huberman disappearing was something of a pattern. Friends, girlfriends, and colleagues describe him as hard to reach. The list of reasons for not showing up included a book, time-stamping the podcast, Costello, wildfires, and a “meetings tunnel.” “He is flaky and doesn’t respond to things,” says his friend Brian MacKenzie, a health influencer who has collaborated with him on breathing protocols. “And if you can’t handle that, Andrew definitely is not somebody you want to be close to.” “He in some ways disappeared,” says David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who calls Andrew “prodigiously smart” and “intensely engaging.” “I mean, I recently got a really nice email from him. Which I was touched by. I really was.”

In 2018, before he was famous, Huberman invited a Colorado-based investigative journalist and anthropologist, Scott Carney, to his home in Oakland for a few days; the two would go camping and discuss their mutual interest in actionable science. It had been Huberman, a fan of Carney’s book What Doesn’t Kill Us, who initially reached out, and the two became friendly over phone and email. Huberman confirmed Carney’s list of camping gear: sleeping bag, bug spray, boots.

When Carney got there, the two did not go camping. Huberman simply disappeared for most of a day and a half while Carney stayed home with Costello. He puttered around Huberman’s place, buying a juice, walking through the neighborhood, waiting for him to return. “It was extremely weird,” says Carney. Huberman texted from elsewhere saying he was busy working on a grant. (A spokesperson for Huberman says he clearly communicated to Carney that he went to work.) Eventually, instead of camping, the two went on a few short hikes.

Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,” says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a memory that one feels the need to watch what one says; a stray comment could surface three years later. And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but I can tell something I said sent him down a path that he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I need to wait for him to come back. ”

Andrew Huberman declined to be interviewed for this story. Through a spokesman, Huberman says he did not become exclusive with Sarah until late 2021, that he was not doted on, that tasks between him and Sarah were shared “based on mutual agreement and proficiency,” that their Thanksgiving plans were tentative, and that he “maintains a very busy schedule and shows up to the vast majority of his commitments.”

In the fall of 2020, Huberman sold his home in Oakland and rented one in Topanga, a wooded canyon enclave contiguous with Los Angeles. When he came back to Stanford, he stayed with Sarah, and when he was in Topanga, Sarah was often with him.

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man. “I experienced his rage,” Sarah recalls, “as two to three days of yelling in a row. When he was in this state, he would go on until 11 or 12 at night and sometimes start again at two or three in the morning.”

The relationship struck Sarah’s friends as odd. At one point, Sarah said, “I just want to be with my kids and cook for my man.” “I was like, Who says that? ” says a close friend. “I mean, I’ve known her for 30 years. She’s a powerful, decisive, strong woman. We grew up in this very feminist community. That’s not a thing either of us would ever say.”

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”

Sarah was not the only person who experienced the extent of Andrew’s anger. In 2019, Carney sent Huberman materials from his then-forthcoming book, The Wedge, in which Huberman appears. He asked Huberman to confirm the parts in which he was mentioned. For months, Huberman did not respond. Carney sent a follow-up email; if Huberman did not respond, he would assume everything was accurate. In 2020, after months of saying he was too busy to review the materials, Huberman called him and, Carney says, came at him in a rage. “I’ve never had a source I thought was friendly go bananas,” says Carney. Screaming, Huberman threatened to sue and accused Carney of “violating Navy OpSec.”

It had become, by then, one of the most perplexing relationships of Carney’s life. That year, Carney agreed to Huberman’s invitation to swim with sharks on an island off Mexico. First, Carney would have to spend a month of his summer getting certified in Denver. He did, at considerable expense. Huberman then canceled the trip a day before they were set to leave. “I think Andrew likes building up people’s expectations,” says Carney, “and then he actually enjoys the opportunity to pull the rug out from under you.”

In January 2021, Huberman launched his own podcast. Its reputation would be directly tied to his role as teacher and scientist. “I’d like to emphasize that this podcast,” he would say every episode, with his particular combination of formality and discursiveness, “is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.”

“I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts to repair that,” Huberman would say on an episode in 2024. “Loneliness,” his interviewee said, “is a need state.” In 2021, the country was in the later stages of a need state: bored, alone, powerless. Huberman offered not only hours of educative listening but a plan to structure your day. A plan for waking. For eating. For exercising. For sleep. At a time when life had shifted to screens, he brought people back to their corporeal selves. He advised a “physiological sigh” — two short breaths in and a long one out — to reduce stress. He pulled countless people from their laptops and put them in rhythm with the sun. “Thank you for all you do to better humanity,” read comments on YouTube. “You may have just saved my life man.” “If Andrew were science teacher for everyone in the world,” someone wrote, “no one would have missed even a single class.”

Asked by Time last year for his definition of fun, Huberman said, “I learn and I like to exercise.” Among his most famous episodes is one in which he declares moderate drinking decidedly unhealthy. As MacKenzie puts it, “I don’t think anybody or anything, including Prohibition, has ever made more people think about alcohol than Andrew Huberman.” While he claims repeatedly that he doesn’t want to “demonize alcohol,” he fails to mask his obvious disapproval of anyone who consumes alcohol in any quantity. He follows a time-restricted eating schedule. He discusses constraint even in joy, because a dopamine spike is invariably followed by a drop below baseline; he explains how even a small pleasure like a cup of coffee before every workout reduces the capacity to release dopamine. Huberman frequently refers to the importance of “social contact” and “peace, contentment, and delight,” always mentioned as a triad; these are ultimately leveraged for the one value consistently espoused: physiological health.

In August 2021, Sarah says she read Andrew’s journal and discovered a reference to cheating. She was, she says, “gutted.” “I hear you are saying you are angry and hurt,” he texted her the same day. “I will hear you as much as long as needed for us.”

Andrew and Sarah wanted children together. Optimizers sometimes prefer not to conceive naturally; one can exert more control when procreation involves a lab. Sarah began the first of several rounds of IVF. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies that he and Sarah had decided to have children together, clarifying that they “decided to create embryos by IVF.”)

In 2021, she tested positive for a high-risk form of HPV, one of the variants linked to cervical cancer. “I had never tested positive,” she says, “and had been tested regularly for ten years.” (A spokesperson for Huberman says he has never tested positive for HPV. According to the CDC, there is currently no approved test for HPV in men.) When she brought it up, she says, he told her you could contract HPV from many things.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about truth-telling and deception,” Andrew told evolutionary psychologist David Buss on a November 2021 episode of Huberman Lab called “How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in Short & Long Term.” They were talking about regularities across cultures in mate preferences.

“Could you tell us,” Andrew asked, “about how men and women leverage deception versus truth-telling and communicating some of the things around mate choice selection?”

“Effective tactics for men,” said a gravel-voiced, 68-year-old Buss, “are often displaying cues to long-term interest … men tend to exaggerate the depths of their feelings for a woman.”

“Let’s talk about infidelity in committed relationships,” Andrew said, laughing. “I’m guessing it does happen.”

“Men who have affairs tend to have affairs with a larger number of affair partners,” said Buss. “And so which then by definition can’t be long-lasting. You can’t,” added Buss wryly, “have the long-term affairs with six different partners.”

“Yeah,” said Andrew, “unless he’s, um,” and here Andrew looked into the distance. “Juggling multiple, uh, phone accounts or something of that sort.”

“Right, right, right, and some men try to do that, but I think it could be very taxing,” said Buss.

By 2022, Andrew was legitimately famous. Typical headlines read “I tried a Stanford professor’s top productivity routine” and “Google CEO Uses ‘Nonsleep Deep Rest’ to Relax.” Reese Witherspoon told the world that she was sure to get ten minutes of sunlight in the morning and tagged Andrew. When he was not on his own podcast, Andrew was on someone else’s. He kept the place in Topanga, but he and Sarah began splitting rent in Berkeley. In June 2022, they fully combined lives; Sarah relocated her family to Malibu to be with him.

According to Sarah, Andrew’s rage intensified with cohabitation. He fixated on her decision to have children with another man. She says he told her that being with her was like “bobbing for apples in feces.” “The pattern of your 11 years, while rooted in subconscious drives,” he told her in December 2021, “creates a nearly impossible set of hurdles for us … You have to change.”

Sarah was, in fact, changing. She felt herself getting smaller, constantly appeasing. She apologized, again and again and again. “I have been selfish, childish, and confused,” she said. “As a result, I need your protection.” A spokesperson for Huberman denies Sarah’s accounts of their fights, denies that his rage intensified with cohabitation, denies that he fixated on Sarah’s decision to have children with another man, and denies that he said being with her was like bobbing for apples in feces. A spokesperson said, “Dr. Huberman is very much in control of his emotions.”

The first three rounds of IVF did not produce healthy embryos. In the spring of 2022, enraged again about her past, Andrew asked Sarah to explain in detail what he called her bad choices, most especially having her second child. She wrote it out and read it aloud to him. A spokesperson for Huberman denies this incident and says he does not regard her having a second child as a bad choice.

I think it’s important to recognize that we might have a model of who someone is,” says Dossett, “or a model of how someone should conduct themselves. And if they do something that is out of sync with that model, it’s like, well, that might not necessarily be on that person. Maybe it’s on us. Our model was just off.”

Huberman’s specialty lies in a narrow field: visual-system wiring. How comfortable one feels with the science propagated on Huberman Lab depends entirely on how much leeway one is willing to give a man who expounds for multiple hours a week on subjects well outside his area of expertise. His detractors note that Huberman extrapolates wildly from limited animal studies, posits certainty where there is ambiguity, and stumbles when he veers too far from his narrow realm of study, but even they will tend to admit that the podcast is an expansive, free (or, as he puts it, “zero-cost”) compendium of human knowledge. There are quack guests, but these are greatly outnumbered by profound, complex, patient, and often moving descriptions of biological process.

Huberman Lab is premised on the image of a working scientist. One imagines clean white counters, rodents in cages, postdocs peering into microscopes. “As scientists,” Huberman says frequently. He speaks often, too, of the importance of mentorship. He “loves” reading teacher evaluations. On the web, one can visit the lab and even donate. I have never met a Huberman listener who doubted the existence of such a place, and this appears to be by design. In a glowing 2023 profile in Stanford magazine, we learn “Everything he does is inspired by this love,” but do not learn that Huberman lives 350 miles and a six-hour drive from Stanford University, making it difficult to drop into the lab. Compounding the issue is the fact that the lab, according to knowledgeable sources, barely exists.

“Is a postdoc working on her own funding, alone, a ‘lab?’” asks a researcher at Stanford. There had been a lab — four rooms on the second floor of the Sherman Fairchild Science Building. Some of them smelled of mice. It was here that researchers anesthetized rodents, injected them with fluorescence, damaged their optic nerves, and watched for the newly bright nerves to grow back.

The lab, says the researcher, was already scaling down before COVID. It was emptying out, postdocs apparently unsupervised, a quarter-million-dollar laser-scanning microscope gathering dust. Once the researcher saw someone come in and reclaim a $3,500 rocker, a machine for mixing solutions.

Shortly before publication, a spokesperson for Stanford said, “Dr. Huberman’s lab at Stanford is operational and is in the process of moving from the Department of Neurobiology to the Department of Ophthalmology,” and a spokesperson for Huberman says the equipment in Dr. Huberman’s lab remained in use until the last postdoc moved to a faculty position.

On every episode of his “zero-cost” podcast, Huberman gives a lengthy endorsement of a powder formerly known as Athletic Greens and now as AG1. It is one thing to hear Athletic Greens promoted by Joe Rogan; it is perhaps another to hear someone who sells himself as a Stanford University scientist just back from the lab proclaim that this $79-a-month powder “covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.” In an industry not noted for its integrity, AG1 is, according to writer and professional debunker Derek Beres, “one of the most egregious players in the space.” Here we have a powder that contains, according to its own marketing, 75 active ingredients, far more than the typical supplement, which would seem a selling point but for the inconveniences of mass. As performance nutritionist Adam McDonald points out, the vast number of ingredients indicates that each ingredient, which may or may not promote good health in a certain dose, is likely included in minuscule amounts, though consumers are left to do the math themselves; the company keeps many of the numbers proprietary. “We can be almost guaranteed that literally every supplement or ingredient within this proprietary blend is underdosed,” explains McDonald; the numbers, he says, don’t appear to add up to anything research has shown to be meaningful in terms of human health outcomes. And indeed, “the problem with most of the probiotics is they’re typically not concentrated enough to actually colonize,” one learns from Dr. Layne Norton in a November 2022 episode of Huberman Lab. (AG1 argues that probiotics are effective and that the 75 ingredients are “included not only for their individual benefit, but for the synergy between them — how ingredients interact in complex ways, and how combinations can lead to additive effects.”) “That’s the good news about podcasts,” Huberman said when Wendy Zukerman of Science Vs pointed out that her podcast would never make recommendations based on such tenuous research. “People can choose which podcast they want to listen to.”

Whenever Sarah had suspicions about Andrew’s interactions with another woman, he had a particular way of talking about the woman in question. She says he said the women were stalkers, alcoholics, and compulsive liars. He told her that one woman tore out her hair with chunks of flesh attached to it. He told her a story about a woman who fabricated a story about a dead baby to “entrap” him. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies the account of the denigration of women and the dead-baby story and says the hair story was taken out of context.) Most of the time, Sarah believed him; the women probably were crazy. He was a celebrity. He had to be careful.

It was in August 2022 that Sarah noticed she and Andrew could not go out without being thronged by people. On a camping trip in Washington State that same month, Sarah brought syringes and a cooler with ice packs. Every day of the trip, he injected the drugs meant to stimulate fertility into her stomach. This was round four.

Later that month, Sarah says she grabbed Andrew’s phone when he had left it in the bathroom, checked his texts, and found conversations with someone we will call Eve. Some of them took place during the camping trip they had just taken.

“Your feelings matter,” he told Eve on a day when he had injected his girlfriend with hCG. “I’m actually very much a caretaker.” And later: “I’m back on grid tomorrow and would love to see you this weekend.”

Caught having an affair, Andrew was apologetic. “The landscape has been incredibly hard,” he said. “I let the stress get to me … I defaulted to self safety … I’ve also sat with the hardest of feelings.” “I hear your insights,” he said, “and honestly I appreciate them.”

Sarah noticed how courteous he was with Eve. “So many offers,” she pointed out, “to process and work through things.”

Eve is an ethereally beautiful actress, the kind of woman from whom it is hard to look away. Where Sarah exudes a winsome chaotic energy, Eve is intimidatingly collected. Eve saw Andrew on Raya in 2020 and messaged him on Instagram. They went for a swim in Venice, and he complimented her form. “You’re definitely,” he said, “on the faster side of the distribution.” She found him to be an extraordinary listener, and she liked the way he appeared to be interested in her internal life. He was busy all the time: with his book, and eventually the podcast; his dog; responsibilities at Stanford. “I’m willing to do the repair work on this,” he said when she called him out for standing her up, or, “This sucks, but doesn’t deter my desire and commitment to see you, and establish clear lines of communication and trust.” Despite his endless excuses for not showing up, he seemed, to Eve, to be serious about deepening their relationship, which lasted on and off for two years. Eve had the impression that he was not seeing anyone else: She was willing to have unprotected sex.

As their relationship intensified over the years, he talked often about the family he one day wanted. “Our children would be amazing,” he said. She asked for book recommendations and he suggested, jokingly, Huberman: Why We Made Babies. “I’m at the stage of life where I truly want to build a family,” he told her. “That’s a resounding theme for me.” “How to mesh lives,” he said in a voice memo. “A fundamental question.” One time she heard him say, on Joe Rogan, that he had a girlfriend. She texted him to ask about it, and he responded immediately. He had a stalker, he said, and so his team had decided to invent a partner for the listening public. (“I later learned,” Eve tells me with characteristic equanimity, “that this was not true.”)

In September 2022, Eve noticed that Sarah was looking at her Instagram stories; not commenting or liking, just looking. Impulsively, Eve messaged her. “Is there anything you’d rather ask me directly?” she said. They set up a call. “Fuck you Andrew,” she messaged him.

Sarah moved out in August 2023 but says she remained in a committed relationship with Huberman. (A spokesperson for Huberman says they were separated.) At Thanksgiving that year, she noticed he was “wiggly” every time a cell phone came out at the table — trying to avoid, she suspected, being photographed. She says she did not leave him until December. According to Sarah, the relationship ended, as it had started, with a lie. He had been at her place for a couple of days and left for his place to prepare for a Zoom call; they planned to go Christmas shopping the next day. Sarah showed up at his house and found him on the couch with another woman. She could see them through the window. “If you’re going to be a cheater,” she advises me later, “do not live in a glass house.”

On January 11, a woman we’ll call Alex began liking all of Sarah’s Instagram posts, seven of them in a minute. Sarah messaged her: “I think you’re friends with my ex, Andrew Huberman. Are you one of the woman he cheated on me with?” Alex is an intense, direct, highly educated woman who lives in New York; she was sleeping with Andrew; and she had no idea there had been a girlfriend. “Fuck,” she said. “I think we should talk.” Over the following weeks, Sarah and Alex never stopped texting. “She helped me hold my boundary against him,” says Sarah, “keep him blocked. She said, ‘You need to let go of the idea of him.’” Instead of texting Andrew, Sarah texted Alex. Sometimes they just talked about their days and not about Andrew at all. Sarah still thought beautiful Eve, on the other hand, “might be crazy,” but they talked some more and brought her into the group chat. Soon there were others. There was Mary: a dreamy, charismatic Texan he had been seeing for years. Her friends called Andrew “bread crumbs,” given his tendency to disappear. There was a fifth woman in L.A., funny and fast-talking. Alex had been apprehensive; she felt foolish for believing Andrew’s lies and worried that the other women would seem foolish, therefore compounding her shame. Foolish women were not, however, what she found. Each of the five was assertive and successful and educated and sharp-witted; there had been a type, and they were diverse expressions of that type. “I can’t believe how crazy I thought you were,” Mary told Sarah. No one struck anyone else as a stalker. No one had made up a story about a dead baby or torn out hair with chunks in it. “I haven’t slept with anyone but him for six years,” Sarah told the group. “If it makes you feel any better,” Alex joked, “according to the CDC,” they had all slept with one another.

The women compared time-stamped screenshots of texts and assembled therein an extraordinary record of deception.

There was a day in Texas when, after Sarah left his hotel, Andrew slept with Mary and texted Eve. They found days in which he would text nearly identical pictures of himself to two of them at the same time. They realized that the day before he had moved in with Sarah in Berkeley, he had slept with Mary, and he had also been with her in December 2023, the weekend before Sarah caught him on the couch with a sixth woman.

They realized that on March 21, 2021, a day of admittedly impressive logistical jujitsu, while Sarah was in Berkeley, Andrew had flown Mary from Texas to L.A. to stay with him in Topanga. While Mary was there, visiting from thousands of miles away, he left her with Costello. He drove to a coffee shop, where he met Eve. They had a serious talk about their relationship. They thought they were in a good place. He wanted to make it work.

“Phone died,” he texted Mary, who was waiting back at the place in Topanga. And later, to Eve: “Thank you … For being so next, next, level gorgeous and sexy.”

“Sleep well beautiful,” he texted Sarah.

“The scheduling alone!” Alex tells me. “I can barely schedule three Zooms in a day.”

In the aggregate, Andrew’s therapeutic language took on a sinister edge. It was communicating a commitment that was not real, a profound interest in the internality of women that was then used to manipulate them.

“Does Huberman have vices?” asks an anonymous Reddit poster.

“I remember him saying,” reads the first comment, “that he loves croissants.”

While Huberman has been criticized for having too few women guests on his podcast, he is solicitous and deferential toward those he interviews. In a January 2023 episode, Dr. Sara Gottfried argues that “patriarchal messaging” and white supremacy contribute to the deterioration of women’s health, and Andrew responds with a story about how his beloved trans mentor, Ben Barres, had experienced “intense suppression/oppression” at MIT before transitioning. “Psychology is influencing biology,” he says with concern. “And you’re saying these power dynamics … are impacting it.”

In private, he could sometimes seem less concerned about patriarchy. Multiple women recall him saying he preferred the kind of relationship in which the woman was monogamous but the man was not. “He told me,” says Mary, “that what he wanted was a woman who was submissive, who he could slap in the ass in public, and who would be crawling on the floor for him when he got home.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.) The women continued to compare notes. He had his little ways of checking in: “Good morning beautiful.” There was a particular way he would respond to a sexy picture: “Mmmmm hi there.”

A spokesperson for Huberman insisted that he had not been monogamous with Sarah until late 2021, but a recorded conversation he had with Alex suggested that in May of that year he had led Sarah to believe otherwise. “Well, she was under the impression that we were exclusive at that time,” he said. “Women are not dumb like that, dude,” Alex responded. “She was under that impression? Then you were giving her that impression.” Andrew agreed: “That’s what I meant. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put it on her.”

The kind of women to whom Andrew Huberman was attracted; the kind of women who were attracted to him — these were women who paid attention to what went into their bodies, women who made avoiding toxicity a central focus of their lives. They researched non-hormone-disrupting products, avoided sugar, ate organic. They were disgusted by the knowledge that they had had sex with someone who had an untold number of partners. All of them wondered how many others there were. When Sarah found Andrew with the other woman, there had been a black pickup truck in the driveway, and she had taken a picture. The women traced the plates, but they hit a dead end and never found her.

Tell us about the dark triad,” he had said to Buss in November on the trip in which he slept with Mary.

“The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics,” said Buss. “So narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” Such people “feign cooperation but then cheat on subsequent moves. They view other people as pawns to be manipulated for their own instrumental gains.” Those “who are high on dark-triad traits,” he said, “tend to be good at the art of seduction.” The vast majority of them were men.

Andrew told one of the women that he wasn’t a sex addict; he was a love addict. Addiction, Huberman says, “is a progressing narrowing of things that bring you joy.” In August 2021, the same month Sarah first learned of Andrew’s cheating, he released an episode with Anna Lembke, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Lembke, the author of a book called Dopamine Nation, gave a clear explanation of the dopaminergic roots of addiction.

“What happens right after I do something that is really pleasurable,” she says, “and releases a lot of dopamine is, again, my brain is going to immediately compensate by downregulating my own dopamine receptors … And that’s that comedown, or the hangover or that aftereffect, that moment of wanting to do it more.” Someone who waits for the feeling to pass, she explained, will reregulate, go back to  baseline. “If I keep indulging again and again and again,” she said, “ultimately I have so much on the pain side that I’ve essentially reset my brain to what we call anhedonic or lacking-in-joy type of state, which is a dopamine deficit state.” This is a state in which nothing is enjoyable: “Everything sort of pales in comparison to this one drug that I want to keep doing.”

“Just for the record,” Andrew said, smiling, “Dr. Lembke has … diagnosed me outside the clinic, in a playful way, of being work addicted. You’re probably right!”

Lembke laughed. “You just happen to be addicted,” she said gently, “to something that is really socially rewarded.”

What he failed to understand, he said, was people who ruined their lives with their disease. “I like to think I have the compassion,” he said, “but I don’t have that empathy for taking a really good situation and what from the outside looks to be throwing it in the trash.”

At least three ex-girlfriends remain friendly with Huberman. He “goes deep very quickly,” says Keegan Amit, who dated Andrew from 2010 to 2017 and continues to admire him. “He has incredible emotional capacity.” A high-school girlfriend says both she and he were “troubled” during their time together, that he was complicated and jealous but “a good person” whom she parted with on good terms. “He really wants to get involved emotionally but then can’t quite follow through,” says someone he dated on and off between 2006 and 2010. “But yeah. I don’t think it’s …” She hesitates. “I think he has such a good heart.”

Andrew grew up in Palo Alto just before the dawn of the internet, a lost city. He gives some version of his origin story on The Rich Roll Podcast ; he repeats it for Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia. He tells Time magazine and Stanford magazine. “Take the list of all the things a parent shouldn’t do in a divorce,” he recently told Christian bowhunter Cameron Hanes. “They did them all.” “You had,” says Wendy Zukerman in her bright Aussie accent, “a wayward childhood.” “I think it’s very easy for people listening to folks with a bio like yours,” says Tim Ferriss, “to sort of assume a certain trajectory, right? To assume that it has always come easy.” His father and mother agree that “after our divorce was an incredibly hard time for Andrew,” though they “do not agree” with some of his characterization of his past; few parents want to be accused of “pure neglect.”

Huberman would not provide the name of the detention center in which he says he was held for a month in high school. In a version of the story Huberman tells on Peter Attia’s podcast, he says, “We lost a couple of kids, a couple of kids killed themselves while we were there.” ( New York was unable to find an account of this event.)

Andrew attended Gunn, a high-performing, high-pressure high school. Classmates describe him as always with a skateboard; they remember him as pleasant, “sweet,” and not particularly academic. He would, says one former classmate, “drop in on the half-pipe,” where he was “encouraging” to other skaters. “I mean, he was a cool, individual kid,” says another classmate. “There was one year he, like, bleached his hair and everyone was like, ‘Oh, that guy’s cool.’” It was a wealthy place, the kind of setting where the word au pair comes up frequently, and Andrew did not stand out to his classmates as out of control or unpredictable. They do not recall him getting into street fights, as Andrew claims he did. He was, says Andrew’s father, “a little bit troubled, yes, but it was not something super-serious.”

What does seem certain is that in his adolescence, Andrew became a regular consumer of talk therapy. In therapy, one learns to tell stories about one’s experience. A story one could tell is: I overcame immense odds to be where I am. Another is: The son of a Stanford professor, born at Stanford Hospital, grows up to be a Stanford professor.

I have never,” says Amit, “met a man more interested in personal growth.” Andrew’s relationship to therapy remains intriguing. “We were at dinner once,” says Eve, “and he told me something personal, and I suggested he talk to his therapist. He laughed it off like that wasn’t ever going to happen, so I asked him if he lied to his therapist. He told me he did all the time.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.)

“People high on psychopathy are good at deception,” says Buss. “I don’t know if they’re good at self-deception.” With repeated listening to the podcast, one discerns a man undergoing, in public, an effort to understand himself. There are hours of talking about addiction, trauma, dopamine, and fear. Narcissism comes up consistently. One can see attempts to understand and also places where those attempts swerve into self-indulgence. On a recent episode with the Stanford-trained psychiatrist Paul Conti, Andrew and Conti were describing the psychological phenomenon of “aggressive drive.” Andrew had an example to share: He once canceled an appointment with a Stanford colleague. There was no response. Eventually, he received a reply that said, in Andrew’s telling, “Well, it’s clear that you don’t want to pursue this collaboration.”

Andrew was, he said to Conti, “shocked.”

“I remember feeling like that was pretty aggressive,” Andrew told Conti. “It stands out to me as a pretty salient example of aggression.”

“So to me,” said Huberman, “that seems like an example of somebody who has a, well, strong aggressive drive … and when disappointed, you know, lashes back or is passive.”

“There’s some way in which the person doesn’t feel good enough no matter what this person has achieved. So then there is a sense of the need and the right to overcontrol.”

“Sure,” said Huberman.

“And now we’re going to work together, right, so I’m exerting significant control over you, right? And it may be that he’s not aware of it.”

“In this case,” said Andrew, “it was a she.”

This woman, explained Conti, based entirely on Andrew’s description of two emails, had allowed her unhealthy “excess aggression” to be “eclipsing the generative drive.” She required that Andrew “bowed down before” her “in the service of the ego” because she did not feel good about herself.

This conversation extends for an extraordinary nine minutes, both men egging each other on, diagnosis after diagnosis, salient, perhaps, for reasons other than those the two identify. We learn that this person lacks gratitude, generative drive, and happiness; she suffers from envy, low “pleasure drive,” and general unhappiness. It would appear, at a distance, to be an elaborate fantasy of an insane woman built on a single behavior: At some point in time, a woman decided she did not want to work with a man who didn’t show up.

There is an argument to be made that it does not matter how a helpful podcaster conducts himself outside of the studio. A man unable to constrain his urges may still preach dopaminergic control to others. Morning sun remains salutary. The physiological sigh, employed by this writer many times in the writing of this essay, continues to effect calm. The large and growing distance between Andrew Huberman and the man he continues to be may not even matter to those who buy questionable products he has recommended and from which he will materially benefit, or listeners who imagined a man in a white coat at work in Palo Alto. The people who definitively find the space between fantasy and reality to be a problem are women who fell for a podcaster who professed deep, sustained concern for their personal growth, and who, in his skyrocketing influence, continued to project an image of earnest self-discovery. It is here, in the false belief of two minds in synchronicity and exploration, that deception leads to harm. They fear it will lead to more.

“There’s so much pain,” says Sarah, her voice breaking. “Feeling we had made mistakes. We hadn’t been enough. We hadn’t been communicating. By making these other women into the other, I hadn’t really given space for their hurt. And let it sink in with me that it was so similar to my own hurt.”

Three of the women on the group text met up in New York in February, and the group has only grown closer. On any given day, one of the five can go into an appointment and come back to 100 texts. Someone shared a Reddit thread in which a commenter claimed Huberman had a “stable full a hoes,” and another responded, “I hope he thinks of us more like Care Bears,” at which point they assigned themselves Care Bear names. “Him: You’re the only girl I let come to my apartment,” read a meme someone shared; under it was a yellow lab looking extremely skeptical. They regularly use Andrew’s usual response to explicit photos (“Mmmmm”) to comment on pictures of one another’s pets. They are holding space for other women who might join.

“This group has radicalized me,” Sarah tells me. “There has been so much processing.” They are planning a weekend together this summer.

“It could have been sad or bitter,” says Eve. “We didn’t jump in as besties, but real friendships have been built. It has been, in a strange and unlikely way, quite a beautiful experience.”

Additional reporting by Amelia Schonbek and Laura Thompson.

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This Whale Has Something to Say

A novel about a young man and the orca named Lolita who knows him better than he knows himself.

Remember the orca revolt? Late last spring, media outlets began reporting that a group of orca whales were ramming seacraft near the Strait of Gibraltar. Although most encounters ended without incident, a number of boats were damaged. Three sank from the attacks. The phenomenon went viral, especially after more than one observer suggested that the attacks appeared to be coordinated. “Experts suspect,” a reporter for the website Live Science wrote , that a female orca, which researchers had dubbed “White Gladis,” “suffered a ‘critical moment of agony’—a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing—that flipped a behavioral switch.” Possibly, she was pregnant. In the aftermath of such a trauma, it was conjectured, she may have initiated an orcan resistance, vengeance as open-ocean passion play.

I’d like to imagine White Gladis as a spiritual godmother of Lolita, the captive orca who plays an outsize role (no pun intended) in Jennine Capó Crucet’s second novel, Say Hello to My Little Friend . Crucet is also the author of a story collection and a book of essays, My Time Among the Whites: Notes From an Unfinished Education , that explores her experience as the first-generation child of Cuban refugees and the complex, and often contradictory, challenges of immigration and American identity. A related set of concerns motivates Say Hello to My Little Friend , although here Crucet applies a broader filter to the narrative, creating something of a chorus in which point of view shifts from character to character: a collective consciousness, if you will. And central among those voices is Lolita, who for many decades has been confined to a small tank not much larger than her body at the Miami Seaquarium. There, she essentially dreams—I know no other way to describe it—the story we are being told in this novel.

“And Lolita is here now too: anyone, anyone?” the narrator wonders. “She’s become just as much a part of this city and this narrative as anyone born here, hasn’t she? She’s been trapped in Miami over fifty years, knows all too well its sunrises and sunsets and storms and dirty seawater. At what point would you say her perspective counts as a local one?”

The passage illustrates Crucet’s method in the novel, which is written in a close third person that swoops in to encompass different, overlapping perspectives, upending our expectations about voice and storytelling in an exhilarating way. In part, her method works because of the proximity of the events here, which take place in 2017 and involve a number of recognizable realities—climate change, for one, and the toxicity of the Trump presidency. Lolita, for her part, also existed. Taken in 1970 off the coast of Washington State, she was the second-oldest orca in captivity at the time of her death, in 2023. Crucet expands her story, filling out the details of the whale’s biography to give Lolita cognition, a consciousness that becomes the defining intelligence of the book.

This is not to say that Say Hello to My Little Friend is Lolita’s story—not entirely. Equally essential is a second protagonist, 20-year-old Ismael (Izzy) Reyes, who can feel (if not quite verbalize) the orca’s thoughts in his own head, as he struggles to find his place in the world. As the novel opens, Izzy, who impersonates the rapper Pitbull for a living, has just received a cease-and-desist order in regard to his act. He decides as a result to pursue what he believes to be his true destiny: “to embrace his Cuban birth and his huge balls; he would remake himself into Tony Montana for the new millennium, Miami’s modern-day Scarface.” He draws up a checklist (“Get grad suit dry-cleaned,” “Get hooked up with shady dudes who hire us for a job of some sort”) and goes in search of his Manolo, the sidekick Montana ultimately murders near the end of the 1983 Brian De Palma film.

If this sounds over-the-top, it is, and gloriously so. Yet to read Say Hello to My Little Friend merely through such a lens is to overlook the deeper movements of the book. Yes, Izzy is adrift, uncertain of who he is or what he wants, other than an amorphous desire for notoriety. His sense of self is defined by external manifestations that are themselves derivative. De Palma’s Scarface , after all, is “a remake of a 1932 film of the same name, and that film is an adaptation of a 1929 novel, also titled Scarface —a book that bears little resemblance to any iteration of the finished film.” Not only that, but much of the De Palma film wasn’t shot in Miami; after pushback from the city commissioner and the Cuban community, the studio finished principal photography in Los Angeles. Izzy himself can’t even watch it; when he tries to do so, in the company of his new sidekick, the two eventually switch from the movie to a Miami Marlins game. He is a lost boy, in other words, an idea Crucet makes explicit in the character’s history: As a child, he watched his mother—a devoted comunista , so what were they even doing on the raft?—drown in open ocean during their exodus from Cuba, although the circumstance of it, his memory of what happened, remains unclear.

Now Izzy is a high-school graduate living in his Tía Tere’s tricked-out garage. The city around him is returning to the water, which not only falls from the sky but also seeps up through the pavement: “Sunny day flooding,” this is called. Tony Montana? Izzy’s not even Pitbull. In his attempts to move through the world as these two figures do, he only reveals his own inauthenticity. And yet, with no real sense of self, what other choice does he have? This is a key move of the novel, to reveal the thinness of the fantasies by which Izzy seeks to frame himself, to show his lack of insight, his inability to know himself, as less a character detail than a character flaw.

Contrast that with Lolita, who always knows precisely who and where she is. “She knows she’s in Miami, Florida,” the narrator declares, “but that she’s not from here, that such a thing is impossible. She knows roughly the location of her still-living family members—and so, of her mother—though this is less known than felt, which is the case for much of what you’d call knowing .” That uneven parallel, the orca’s understanding of where her mother can be found, is no coincidence. Rather, it opens Say Hello to My Little Friend to what is, perhaps, its most audacious point of connection, as Lolita begins to communicate with Izzy via a kind of telepathic transference, neither thought nor conversation, exactly—more like touch.

Read: AI could help translate alien languages

Izzy knows that something unusual is happening, but he cannot understand it. “What if she’s a metaphor?” he wonders about the whale during a visit to the Seaquarium, although the answer we receive is from Lolita, or the more expansive narrative voice she represents. “Of course she’s a metaphor. Of course she is,” this voice explains, before segueing into an extended single-sentence passage that references both the mammal’s expatriate status (“She is el exilio; she is Cuba under the embargo; she is a generation of Cubans born in the United States”) and that other, famous magnum opus about a whale and a human (“She is Ishmael and she is Melville’s clear authorial voice.”)

For Crucet, this is an essential turning point, a shift from representational to metaphoric thinking, or—to frame it in the terms of the novel—from human to cetacean consciousness. “So much of the human brain is devoted to language,” she notes, channeling the orca. “How limiting, how pathetic even, to have evolved toward speaking rather than sensing. An evolutionary wrong turn: the limits of talking, the circling and circling in a tank too small—in a tank at all.”

What’s that about the whale as metaphor?

And yet, in a thrilling paradox, this allows Crucet to crack the novel open, moving from Lolita and Izzy through a nuanced weave of points of view, from the insignificant (a server who takes over the book for a page or so as she waits on Izzy and the woman he hopes will become the Michelle Pfeiffer to his Al Pacino) to the encompassing (the Cuban diaspora of South Florida). “She is Ahab and she is Tony,” the narrator says, describing not just Lolita but also the psychic terrain of Say Hello to My Little Friend ; “she is Miami—beautiful, improbable, doomed; she is, like every single one of you, an accident of history.”

One tragedy is that Izzy is too unconscious to understand this. Another is that Lolita is not. She recognizes the full scope of her situation, the unnatural state of living as a captive in a small concrete tank, while her mind, her senses, remain aware of everything . Such a contradiction is central to the novel’s larger conflict, which is the tension between artifice and authenticity. That’s true in regard to not only Izzy, but also the entire human landscape of the narrative. Consider Miami in all its artificiality, preserving itself by raising existing roads and buildings even as Biscayne Bay continues to rise. Consider Izzy, captivated by a rapper his aunt refers to as “a hack and a clown,” and then by a third-generation iteration of a character in a movie he cannot watch.

The miracle is not that Say Hello to My Little Friend works, so much as that it enlarges our sense of the possible, recalling the vanity of human aspiration not through a lens of ridicule but through one of empathy. The chorus of voices, the point-of-view shifts—all of it allows Crucet to imagine her way to a larger authenticity, where the absurd nature of Izzy’s fantasies reflects a more universal disconnection, afflicting every character and setting in the book. The world is dying, the novel wants us to realize; can’t we see that? Or the human world, at any rate. I’m reminded of Robinson Jeffers’s concept of inhumanism : “a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.” Crucet, I want to say, is after something similar. Not a world without humans, necessarily, but one where there is trans-species integration, where our dreams, like Lolita’s, collectivize.

“And so it is here,” the narrator observes of the orca, “that she returns in her worst waking moments, which is every moment she is not eating or performing or calling for her mother or now, for Izzy. She imagines herself as his mother. She senses—in the tank’s filtered and too-warm saltwater that was once in the very nearby sea—his mother’s bones, her cells, the atoms of her memories and thoughts. She absorbs each particle, and with each comes the promise and the threat: she’ll tell him exactly what he wants to know.”

I’m not naive enough to believe that a work of fiction can change the way we live. Yet throughout these pages, Crucet insists that we rethink our models for engagement, with one another and with the world at large. Say Hello to My Little Friend is a social novel, a climate-change novel. It is a coming-of-age story. It is a city novel, a sprawling satire. And it is a commentary on identity and longing in a 21st-century America obsessed with its own ephemera, in which the consciousness of a single orca might bring us closest to a collective, and sustaining, reality.

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17 New Books Coming in April

New novels from Emily Henry, Jo Piazza and Rachel Khong; a history of five ballerinas at the Dance Theater of Harlem; Salman Rushdie’s memoir and more.

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The Cemetery of Untold Stories , by Julia Alvarez

After decades in America, a Dominican writer named Alma Cruz “retires” to a scrappy piece of real estate she’s inherited in her homeland. But a riot of stories — historical, magical, irrepressible — are still fighting to be told, so she builds a graveyard where their spirits can rise once more.

Algonquin, April 2

The Mango Tree , by Annabelle Tometich

The felony that opens Tometich’s sweet, sharp memoir sets the tone for the whole story: Her mother has been arrested for brandishing a gun at a would-be mango thief. No one is shocked — Tometich’s mother is a force of nature, and her beloved mango tree is the metaphorical center of their sometimes chaotic, often complicated family.

Little, Brown, April 2

The Sicilian Inheritance , by Jo Piazza

Twinned narratives guide the fizzy, food-y latest from Piazza: the modern-day saga of a flailing Philadelphia chef who honors the dying wish of a beloved great-aunt by journeying back to her ancestral Italian homeland, and flashbacks to the plucky great-grandmother whose battle against the constraints of early-20th-century Sicilian womanhood may have ended in her murder.

Dutton, April 2

Sociopath , by Patric Gagne

“Rules do not factor into my decision-making,” the author, a Ph.D. in psychology, writes. “I’m capable of almost anything.” Her new memoir argues that this personality type is more common, and more complicated, than we think.

Simon & Schuster, April 2

Fi , by Alexandra Fuller

In her fifth memoir, Fuller writes about the sudden, unexplained death of her 21-year-old son. She also writes about his too-short life, and explores the adage about life going on. Does it, really? And if so, how?

Grove, April 9

The Limits , by Nell Freudenberger

There’s little limit to the ambitions of Freudenberger’s hefty new novel, which skips from a small volcanic island in the South Pacific to the concrete canyons of Manhattan in a complex tale of co-parenting, second marriages, class and climate change. (Also, coral reefs.)

Knopf, April 9

Somehow , by Anne Lamott

“Thoughts on Love” is the subtitle of Lamott’s 20th book, which considers the subject in its romantic, platonic and spiritual varieties.

Riverhead, April 9

The Wide Wide Sea , by Hampton Sides

When the British naval officer James Cook set off for his voyage across the globe in 1776, his ostensible goal was to ferry Mai, a handsome and witty Tahitian man, back to Polynesia. But, as Sides shows in this vivid recounting, the leitmotif of what became Cook’s final journey was his confrontation with the dire results of his meddling in the region.

Doubleday, April 9

The Wives , by Simone Gorrindo

When Gorrindo’s husband joined an army unit and was promptly deployed overseas, the New York-based journalist was not just relocated to a base in Georgia, but to a completely new life. “The Wives” — both memoir and love letter — is a tribute to the community of women she found there, a unique source of support unlike any she had ever known.

Scout Press, April 9

Knife , by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new memoir is a detailed account of the harrowing events of Aug. 12, 2022, when he was attacked onstage at a public talk. More than 30 years after the supreme leader of Iran issued a fatwa on his life, the writer turns to his craft to “make sense of the unthinkable.”

Random House, April 16

A Body Made of Glass , by Caroline Crampton

Crampton, a British journalist, weaves her own cancer diagnosis, and its cure, into this cultural history of hypochondria, which also considers such literary figures as Charles Darwin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Philip Larkin.

Ecco, April 23

Funny Story , by Emily Henry

Henry’s latest contribution to the library of lightheartedness is a novel of opposites. What happens when spurned lovers team up against the people who hurt them? Bonus points because one character in this love square happens to be a small town librarian.

Berkley, April 23

Reboot , by Justin Taylor

This satire of modern media and pop culture follows a former child actor who is trying to revive the TV show that made him famous. Taylor delves into the worlds of online fandom while exploring the inner life of a man seeking redemption — and something meaningful to do.

Pantheon, April 23

The Demon of Unrest , by Erik Larson

Abraham Lincoln hadn’t even settled into his new job as president of the United States when the country he was narrowly elected to lead began to crack apart. Larson, a best-selling historian, traces the figures who tried to stop the American Civil War from happening in the lead-up to the attack on Fort Sumter.

Crown, April 30

A Life Impossible, by Steve Gleason and Jeff Duncan

In 2011, Steve Gleason, a former safety for the New Orleans Saints, learned that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S.) and was told he had three years to live. “A Life Impossible” is his memoir of marriage, fatherhood, his football career and surviving the last decade.

Knopf, April 30

Real Americans , by Rachel Khong

Khong’s sophomore novel is a tale about the evolution of one family over the course of generations. As the story opens, Lily, who is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, begins a love affair with Matthew, the wealthy son of an aristocratic family. But as Lily and her child eventually learn, their family history is more complicated than it seems.

The Swans of Harlem , by Karen Valby

In the wake of M.L.K.’s assassination, the George Balanchine protégé Arthur Mitchell felt compelled to establish a space where Black bodies could break the lily-white codes of ballet and hold center stage. And so the Dance Theater of Harlem was born — and with it, the careers of five “swans” whose journey through the cultural, political and physical tumult of the times Valby chronicles here.

Pantheon, April 30

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

James McBride’s novel sold a million copies, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that, as he considers the critical and commercial success  of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.”

How did gender become a scary word? Judith Butler, the theorist who got us talking about the subject , has answers.

You never know what’s going to go wrong in these graphic novels, where Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it .

When the author Tommy Orange received an impassioned email from a teacher in the Bronx, he dropped everything to visit the students  who inspired it.

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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March 27, 2024 - Baltimore Key Bridge collapse

By Kathleen Magramo , Antoinette Radford, Alisha Ebrahimji , Maureen Chowdhury , Elise Hammond , Tori B. Powell and Aditi Sangal , CNN

Our live coverage of the Baltimore bridge collapse has moved here .

Here's what you should know about the Key Bridge collapse

From CNN staff

Officials recovered the bodies of two construction workers who were on Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed early Tuesday morning after a 984-foot-long cargo ship collided into a pillar.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore called the collapse Wednesday " a global crisis ."

"The national economy and the world's economy depends on the Port of Baltimore. The port handles more cars and more farm equipment than any other port in the country," Moore said.

Here's what you should know:

• The victims: The six people who are presumed dead were from Mexico Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, according to Col. Roland L. Butler Jr, the superintendent of Maryland State Police. Two bodies were recovered and have been identified as Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes from Mexico and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera from Guatemala. The two workers were filling potholes on the bridge and were later found trapped in a red pickup truck in about 25 feet of water, Butler said. The FBI is handling notifying the victims' families, Butler said.
• Recovery efforts: Authorities are pausing search efforts for the four other workers who are presumed dead, because additional vehicles are encased in concrete and other debris, making it unsafe for divers, Butler said. Once salvage operations clear the debris, divers will search for more remains, he said.
• The investigation: The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation into the fatal incident, according to the agency's chair Jennifer Homendy. During a Wednesday news conference, Homendy said there were 21 crew members and two pilots on board the Dali cargo ship when it crashed into the bridge. She also said a senior NTSB hazmat investigator identified 56 containers of hazardous material, and that some containers are in the water. The agency received six hours of voyage data from the ship and the investigation could take 12 to 24 months to complete, Homendy said. She emphasized that NTSB will not analyze information collected or provide conclusions while on scene of the collapse.
• Looking forward: Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said rebuilding the bridge will not be "quick or easy" but that it will get done. He said there are four main focus points ahead: reopening the port, dealing with supply chain issues until its reopening, rebuilding the bridge and dealing with traffic issues until the bridge is rebuilt. Biden  pledged the full support  of the federal government in the response and recovery efforts. His administration has already conveyed a sense of urgency to open up federal funding to remove debris and ultimately rebuild the bridge. Maryland has submitted a request to the Biden administration for emergency relief funds "to assist in our work going forward," Moore said Wednesday.

It's almost impossible to place people on the bow of ship due to the unstable structure, fire official says

 From CNN's Sarah Engel

Baltimore City Fire Chief James Wallace said Wednesday that the cargo ship's bridge structure and containers at the bow remain unstable.

"It's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, and very dangerous, to place people on the bow of that boat right now," Wallace told CNN's Kaitlan Collins.

"Naturally, we're still very cognizant of the fact that there are hazardous materials on board the vessel itself," Wallace said, alluding to the National Transportation Safety Board saying earlier that 56 containers were carrying hazardous materials.

Wallace said his team is relying heavily on aerial recognizance, including drones. "That's the only way we're able to see in," he said.  

He added that the aerial surveillance has "been able to really assure us right now we have no [chemical] reactions on board." 

"It's just utter devastation," NTSB chief says of the bridge collapse site

From CNN's Aditi Sangal

Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, called the site of the Key Bridge collapse "devastating."

"It's pretty devastating, certainly, seeing not just what's going on with the cargo containers, but just looking at what was a bridge span — three bridge spans that is pretty much gone. It's just utter devastation," she said at Wednesday evening's news briefing.

She added that she is thinking of families who lost loved ones and those who are waiting to reunite with their lived ones.

NTSB interviewed the Dali's captain and some other crew members today, agency chief says

The National Transportation Safety Board has interviewed the ship's captain, his mate, the chief engineer and one other engineer today, according to Chair Jennifer Homendy.

The two pilots on board the Dali at the time of collision will be interviewed tomorrow, she added.

Cargo ship's voyage data recorder is basic when compared to an airplane's, NTSB chair says

From CNN's Tori B. Powell

The voyage data recorder on the cargo ship Dali was a "newer model" but is considered basic when compared to that on an airplane, according to National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy.

"But it is very basic compared to say, a flight data recorder, where we would have 1,000 parameters," she said at a news conference on Wednesday.

The NTSB chief investigator Marcel Muise added:

"It's not a ship-wide system recorder, so most of the sensors that are being recorded are from the bridge. So things like GPS, the audio, rudder feedback, rudder commands are recorded on there. But not engineering, the temperature of each cylinder, power distribution sensors."

There were no tug boats with Dali at the time of the collision. That's normal, NTSB chief says

There were no tugs with Dali when the cargo vessel collided with Baltimore's Key Bridge, which is normal protocol, according to National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy.

Remember: At 01:26:39 on Tuesday, Dali's pilot made a general very high frequency (VHF) radio call for tugs in the vicinity to assist, the NTSB investigator Marcel Muise had said.

"The tugs help the vessel leave the dock, leave the port and get into the main ship channel. And then they leave. Once it's on its way, it's a straight shot through the channel. So there are no tugs with the vessel at the time. So they were calling for tugs," she said.

NTSB chair says she saw some containers that were carrying hazardous materials in the water

National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said she did see some of the 56 containers that were carrying hazardous materials in the water.

When asked how many

When asked how many containers of hazardous materials were in the water, Homendy said:

"I did see some containers in the water, and some breached significantly on the vessel itself," she said. "I don't have an exact number, but it's something that we can provide in an update."

Homendy said that a preliminary report should be out in two to four weeks.

This post has been updated with more quotes from Homendy.

Bridge did not have any redundancy, unlike the preferred method for building bridges today, NTSB chair says

Baltimore's Key Bridge did not have any redundancy, which is included in the preferred method of building bridges in the present day, according to National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy.

"The bridge is a fracture critical," she explained. "What that means is if a member fails that would likely cause a portion of, or the entire bridge, to collapse, there's no redundancy. The preferred method for building bridges today is that there is redundancy built in, whether that's transmitting loads to another member or some sort of structural redundancy. This bridge did not have redundancy," Homendy said.

There are 17,468 fracture critical bridges in the United States out of 615,000 bridges total, she said, citing the Federal Highway Administration.

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