The best question

Do you ever feel like there's a cloud floating above your head and swirling inside it are all the things you want? And if you could just figure out the right tools and steps you could maybe bring the whole thing down to your level where you could capture all of the elusive things and make them your own, but right now you've only managed to graze your fingertips across some amorphous slippery surfaces?  I made a tomato. I'm trying to grow other things in my life—a new very personal book, for starters, and an audio project that has given me the chance to work closely with a friend with whom I missed working, and that will hopefully be the start to more deep-dive collaborative projects—but the week never feels long enough to divide evenly between my job, my personal and home life, and my creative work.   Nora, our dog, has bad allergies—just like everyone else in this city—and they've flared up in an ugly way this month, which means vet visits and lots of extra work of the caring kind to help her heal and feel better, plus the heartache of witnessing her little moments of anguish because she doesn't know what pollen is or why she's miserable or why I'm doing all of these things that in the moment seem to her to make it worse. It's love labor and it's one more thing on top of the things that distract me from the other things.   But I did make a tomato. And I have an outline for the book, and an agent who's on board, and a writing partner who shares her work with me and gives me insightful feedback and together we scheme up ways to be better at what we're trying to do. If you make things and you don't have another maker-person to exchange work with on the regular, I really can't recommend it enough.   And I have a stack of books going right now that are keeping me fed. I just finished reading a haunting new novel, R.O. Kwon's debut The Incendiaries. It's a propulsive and poetic blend of two of my literary interests: cults and campus misfit stories. Two students at an elite private East Coast university—Phoebe, a former musical prodigy who blames herself for her mother's death, and Will, a refugee from his evangelical past who hides his working class scholarship status from his peers—both begin to unravel as she becomes involved in a fanatical religious group led by a (yes, charismatic) former student who brought his extreme brand of faith home from a stint in a North Korean prison. Things get violent. Could Phoebe have been involved? I am fascinated by faith in general—how do people believe in what they believe?—and cults and other extremist groups just magnify the terms to a wild degree. And like Teddy Wayne did in Loner, Kwon turns the idyll of the college campus upside down, forcing us into the hearts of lonely hurting people who do terrible things to themselves and others in the shadows of all that worn brick and ivy. The book drops July 31, just in time for those long, air-conditioned, shade-seeking August days.  I'm drawn to novels like The Incendiaries that try to make sense of the world by engaging deeply with a specific question: what kind of person does that? — whatever the that is. It's a question that can be asked about damn near anything a person can do, which is why for my money it's one of the all-time best questions, and also one you can rarely ask outright and hope to hear a useful answer. It's probably why I love reporting, and why I'm so nervous and excited to dig deep into the research phase of writing this book, where I get to ask questions that will hopefully lead me to an answer over and over.   In the meantime, I did make a tomato, and it's perfect. I bought a Roma seedling in the spring as you do and planted it in a bourbon barrel on our front porch, and now it's a heaving staked and caged thing, finally ready to feed me. I can hold this ripe tomato in my hand, feel its sunwarmed weight, and take a break from thumbsucking over my sad lack of tangible creative product. I made a tomato out of a good start and the right dirt and regular watering. I can make the other stuff, too. (And so can you.)  Other questions asked:

• Can Bono and U2 still be a force for change in 2018? The one and only Caryn Rose takes a long hard necessary look at the politics of their current tour

• Is it still OK to laugh about dark things? "Cult Faves" is a (darkly funny) new podcast about cults by Gwenda Bond and Cher Martinetti

• Whither the middle children? My people are apparently going extinct

• Is there a book club for everyone? Wiley Cash has started the Open Canon Book Club, with the goal of promoting literary diversity. "Literature is the great equalizer of experience," he says. The first book is the one and only Crystal Wilkinson's Birds of Opulence, so get on that

• Who thought this was a good idea? On the other hand, when I watch "The Handmaid's Tale" I do need a drink

• Are you an unreliable narrator? There's a (hilarious) t-shirt for you from the good folks at Barrelhouse

• How many books is enough? That's not the right question