Nam Y. Huh/AP

A woman checks prices as she shops at a grocery store in Wheeling, Illinois, Jan. 19, 2024. The current inflation rate of 3.1% is higher than the Federal Reserve's target, but down considerably from as high as 9.1% in mid-2022.

The paradox has gone on for so long that it has become a cliché: If the economy is so good, why do Americans feel so bad? This dourness even acquired a name: the “vibecession.”

But the bad vibes are dissipating, and optimism has returned.

On Friday, the S&P 500 closed above 5,000 for the first time. The unemployment rate has stayed below 4% for 24 months, a streak not seen in more than a half-century. On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that the annual inflation fell to 3.1% in January, although the number was higher than many economists expected.

“This is a much more rosy scenario than my data had ever predicted,” says David Blanchflower, economics professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who made his reputation in Britain with early warnings about the 2008 financial crisis. “The sentiment stuff predicted a hard landing, and we got a soft landing.”

Many Americans are also scratching their heads. Over the past year or more, comparing consumers’ mood with data has sometimes felt like trying to figure out who’s kidding whom. Were people just not getting how good the economy really was – as inflation decelerated even while jobs continued to grow? Or were official numbers failing to reflect a reality that was bad and maybe about to get worse? Add in dueling political narratives about these issues, and it could feel hard to know which economic perspective to trust. 

SOURCE:

University of Michigan, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Bureau of Economic Research

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

In recent weeks, however, the gap between mood and data has narrowed significantly. The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index – which hit a record low in mid-2022 and remains below its historical average – has climbed 29% since November. That’s the largest two-month rise in more than 30 years.

One lesson of these times may be that perception gaps don’t last forever. Yes, sometimes people can swing too far toward pessimism, and at other times what economists call “animal spirits” can propel optimism into dangerous recklessness. But quite often people’s attitudes line up pretty well with the story told by official numbers. 

The alignment is important because in years when the numbers and sentiment agree that times are good, more growth is almost always assured. “The correlation is huge,” says Michael Lewis-Beck, professor of political science at the University of Iowa. Only once since 1948 has that combination failed to lead to higher economic output. Consumers usually pull back their spending when they feel uncertain, or pessimistic. 

Today, while risks remain, economists say the threat of recession really has receded. And the more trust consumers have in good times, the more likely those good times will continue, they add.  

Gene J. Puskar/AP

Shoppers hold bags after shopping in Bradenton, Florida, Feb. 9, 2024. Consumer sentiment has rebounded in the past two months.

One of the big mysteries of this era is why the “vibecession” didn’t lead to recession. Plunging consumer confidence has accurately predicted six of the last six U.S. recessions, Dr. Blanchflower says. This time, consumers kept spending despite their dour outlook, which kept the economy humming. No one’s quite sure why.

Many economists suspect that the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled the picture, serving as a mental weight on the national psyche that somehow did not affect American pocketbooks. Or perhaps the recession is simply delayed.

Others point to the recent bout of high inflation – which consumers experienced daily when they shopped for groceries, bought office supplies, or priced new cars – as a pessimism enhancer.

“The recent experience strongly suggests that inflation – or people’s perceptions of inflation – plays a more powerful role ... than we had known before,” says Christopher Carroll, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University and research affiliate with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Still others suggest surveys increasingly reflect a society riven by persistent inequality and lagging upward mobility. 

“I don’t think we should be as surprised as we are by the disconnect between good, economic indicators on average, and how people who are either in despair or very vulnerable economically rate what’s happening,” says Carol Graham, a senior fellow for economics at the Brookings Institution and author of the 2023 book “The Power of Hope.” “What I can tell you would definitely increase happiness is more security. ... Compared to other countries, we don’t have very generous safety nets.” 

The “vibecession” has also spilled over into politics. Supporters of Joe Biden worry the president is getting little credit for an improving economy.

Amira Karaoud/Reuters/File

A hiring sign is seen at the register of Burger Boy restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, June 7, 2021. Hiring has remained strong even as the Federal Reserve has jacked up interest rates to restrain inflation.

It’s long been true that voters whose candidate occupies the White House are more sanguine about the economy than those whose party is out of power. And Americans are more politically polarized than before, says Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Still, actual economic conditions continue to affect consumer optimism, she adds. “Even Republicans are at their highest [level] in two years.”

Plenty could upset the new optimism. Some analysts worry that inflation could prove more intractable than expected. The layoffs now piling up in the technology sector could spread. Global issues including a slower Chinese economy or a wider Middle East conflict could tug against growth.

But for the moment, pay hikes are again outpacing inflation, which means Americans have more money to spend, despite high prices. The Federal Reserve, which was tightening financial spigots in 2022 and 2023 to tame high inflation, is now talking about loosening them by cutting interest rates later this year. And the United States appears on the cusp of accomplishing something rare – a slowdown in inflation without a job-destroying recession, a feat known as a soft landing for the economy.

Whitney Eulich

A neighborhood dog kept running onto the field in lower Las Cañas during the final match of this year's Las Cañas Free From Violence soccer tournament, Jan. 21, 2024.

There are two soccer fields just 10 minutes apart on foot in this small community east of San Salvador.

One sits in the “upper” part of town, the other in the “lower.” And for more than a decade, neighbors from one side would not dare cross into the other – not for school, not to visit family or friends, and certainly not to kick a soccer ball.

Yet today it is these two pitches – as sloping, ragged, and dusty as both might be – that the community is banking on to help forge trust and unity after being divided by gang control, threats, and extortion.

El Salvador was riven by brutal violence at the hands of gangs until President Nayib Bukele took office in 2019 pledging a hard-line approach to crime. In the past five years, homicide rates have plummeted, and citizens are opening their doors to a new sense of security and freedom.

But as residents here know well, rebuilding trust takes much more than a fall in crime statistics. So it was a love of soccer that neighbors leaned into in a novel, if still nascent, attempt to reconnect in shared public space: tournaments to bring the lower and upper parts together.

“Thank God the gangs are gone,” says Miguel Angel Segovia, whose daughter Katherine was raped and decapitated by gang members here when she was just 15 years old. And even though the soccer competitions faced a setback this winter, he’s behind the attempt to use sport as a way to transcend lingering mistrust. “It’s really important that people get involved,” he says.

The trauma and violence that so many have lived in El Salvador “has caused the social fabric to break down,” says Verónica Reyna, director of human rights at the nongovernmental organization Servicio Social Pasionista. The gang violence made “people very individualistic. They focus on the survival of themselves or their family,” she says. “We don’t have practice working together.”

In Reparto las Cañas they are trying – at least on the soccer field.

Whitney Eulich

Miguel Angel Segovia (left), who lost his 15-year-old daughter to the brutal gang violence that controlled this small community for more than a decade, poses with his father, Carlos.

A tentative peace

This quiet commuter town of one-story brick homes painted in a rainbow palette was until very recently split along M and N streets. Warring gangs would keep watch from rooftops, sometimes shooting indiscriminately, wielding such control that even blood relatives divided by the barrier wouldn’t acknowledge one another on the street or while riding the same bus home from work. Katherine’s attackers showed up at her funeral to express their condolences, says her father, highlighting the impunity and cynicism that flourished under gang control.  

In March 2022, Mr. Bukele’s government launched a “state of exception,” arresting and imprisoning suspected criminals en masse. More than 75,000 people have been put behind bars.

The crackdown has been criticized as anti-democratic. But Mr. Bukele remains wildly popular, recently winning a second presidential term, because finally, Salvadorans say, they are living in peace. In Las Cañas, residents say it’s as if the intimidation that kept them apart for years seemingly disappeared overnight.

But the absence of violence against one another didn’t translate into confidence in one another – and that’s how soccer came to be seen as a community solution.

Following the government’s crackdown, primary school students from the lower part of town slowly started attending the public school in the upper area, almost tripling the student body year on year, says Principal Daniel Diaz Guzmán.

Aside from walking kids to school, however, most adults would stick to their sides. Mr. Diaz remembers walking in to a parent meeting last year to find the adults self-segregated into groups from above and below. But after school, the kids would linger – playing pick-up soccer – sparking an idea for a soccer tournament and a future for this town. “It’s our responsibility to lead our young people toward hope, a better reality. We can’t do that relying on fear,” Mr. Diaz says.

Last year a group formed – with equal representation from upper and lower – that imagined several teams from each side traveling to the upper and the lower parts of the neighborhood to play, drawing family members and friends into formerly no-go areas to cheer.

And it worked. The first tournament, Unifying Las Cañas, which ran from March to July in 2023, was an overwhelming success. Douglas Flores, who goes by the nickname Chucho, grew up in the upper part. The more than 10 years he was cut off from his friends and family in the lower section were full of “overwhelming anxiety,” he says. “It was just horrible, horrible what we suffered.”

Whitney Eulich

Douglas Flores, known locally as Chucho, found soccer opened doors to reintegrate his long-divided neighborhood. He was one of only a handful of residents from the upper part of town to participate in this year's tournament, Jan. 21, 2024.

“But I come and play soccer because ... I have friends here [in the lower section] who I never thought I’d get to see again in my life,” he says. “Now, through sport, soccer, the tournaments,” incredibly, we’re together again, Chucho says.

“The vision was always to unite, because with the [gangs], we’d always been divided” says Pedro Rojas, a member of the organizing committee from the lower part of town.

A setback

On a recent Sunday afternoon, scores of residents gather around the lower soccer field for the community’s second annual tournament, headlined as “Las Cañas Free From Violence.” Neighbors, young and old, eat shaved ice while corridos blast from a tent of spectators.

Despite the festive atmosphere, a shadow lingers over this year’s tournament: While some players from the upper zone participated, no full teams did. Suspicions by some in the lower area that some organizers and players in the upper had retained gang affiliations led to a police investigation, sapping the incipient reserves of trust between both sides built up over the past year.

Beatriz Mejía Restrepo, executive director of Grupo Internacional de Paz, a Colombia-based NGO focused on international development and peace, isn’t surprised. Sport can be helpful in the peace-building process, but communities require state support and outside investment, to combat unemployment and poverty, and mediation. “Collective decisions, empathy, assertive communication, conflict resolution. As a medium, sport can sharpen a lot of these skills,” she says. “But what happens when players take off their jerseys?”

The Salvadoran government has paid lip service to using soccer for rebuilding trust, setting up a program to try to tackle issues of community building. But it has yet to launch, and the government declined to make officials available for interview.

Whitney Eulich

Trophies crowd the announcer's table on the final day of the Las Cañas Free From Violence soccer tournament, organized to build trust in a community divided by gangs for more than a decade.

Community leaders are steadfast in their vision to continue. Already they are trying to organize another communitywide tournament this spring, says César Bonifacio, a member of the tournament planning committee. He played alongside Chucho in the late January tournament for one of the few teams with members from the upper part of Las Cañas. “The vision for community integration is still there,” he says.

Up the steep main road, men, families, and young people gather on the upper soccer field at dusk on a recent evening. Jorge Calles stands near the far edge of the dusty hilltop field with a group of older residents, looking down across the lower part of town.

Before the gangs and the violence, these men recall how united their community once was. “We used to share our lives, crisscross the neighborhood with friends in all corners,” says Mr. Calles. Like so many here, he looks to soccer as the key to bringing everyone back together, dreaming up ways to improve the field, perhaps by adding fencing and providing balls and other equipment.

“It’s going to be a process,” he says, “to get to a point where we stop thinking in terms of upper and lower.”

Metal dragons roam the streets of Manila. 

They came here decades ago from North America, and have since evolved into something uniquely Philippine. Every day, millions of people hop on and off the ornate beasts, derived from surplus World War II U.S. jeeps. In fact, the country’s transit system depends on them.

Not only are jeepneys the most popular form of public transportation in and beyond the capital, but these abandoned U.S. military jeeps-turned-mega cabs have also come to symbolize Filipino resilience and creativity. 

Now, operators say, this heritage is under threat. In an effort to streamline transportation, the government is requiring jeepney operators to surrender their individual franchises to larger cooperatives, and replace traditional jeepneys with more energy-efficient vehicles. The deadline to comply was recently extended – for the last time, say officials – to April 30. While most jeepney drivers say they support the program’s environmental and public safety aims, many argue that its implementation will wipe out thousands of small-scale operators – and with them, jeepney culture. 

Carlos Conde, senior researcher at the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch, says the jeepney system has always been flawed, known as much for reckless driving and overcrowding as it is for colorful cars and cheap fares. It thrived, Mr. Conde says, because the government left the burden of public transit planning to the private sector.

“Jeepney, and the extensive use of it, was supposed to be a Band-Aid solution,” he says, “but it has become a way of life.”

Mark Saludes

Rodolfo Molina poses for a photo during a protest rally at the House of Representatives, Jan. 24, 2024. He has been driving a jeepney since he was 20 years old.

Ode to Filipino maximalism

Rodolfo Molina was raised by a jeepney driver. Over the decades, he has witnessed the four-seater surplus army jeeps get stripped down and reinvented into today’s iconic passenger transporters, which can hold up to 30 people. More, if passengers sit on the roof.

“My childhood life practically revolved around the jeepney,” he says. “Everyday, I watched them come and go. Some with artful designs, some with anime characters or religious images painted on the walls.”

Historian Francis Gealogo says jeepneys are a reflection of “Filipino maximalism,” their vibrant embellishments “derived from the way Filipinos designed their carriages during the Spanish era.” 

“We used to call [the jeepney] the horseless carriage,” he says. 

Kitschy aesthetics aside, jeepneys played a critical role in meeting the country’s postwar transit needs, and have offered many families a path to prosperity.

Mr. Molina, now a board member of the Pasig Pateros Jeepney Operators and Drivers Association, says the two jeepneys he owns helped send his four children to college. 

That kind of success story may not be possible under the government’s Public Utility Vehicle (PUV) Modernization Program. First announced in 2017, it involves upgrading or replacing PUVs over 15 years old with Euro-4-compliant engines or with electric jeepneys.

Individual operators are also required to join a transport corporation or cooperative of at least 15 drivers. The cooperative assumes both operational control and ownership of the drivers’ franchises.

Modesto Floranda, chairperson of PISTON (Solidarity of Drivers and Operators’ Organizations Nationwide), says this will smother individual operators and smaller cooperatives.

“We are not against the modernization program, but its implementation,” he says.

Mark Saludes

Since its inception in the 1940s, the jeepney has become the main mode of public transportation in the Philippines. The vehicles come with colorful, kitschy designs or plain iron-sheet casing.

Costs of modernization

Mr. Floranda notes that although drivers were not consulted in the program’s development, they are expected to bear the costs of upgrading the Philippines’ jeepney fleet.

Compared with traditional jeepneys that cost about $4,500 per unit, imported modern vehicles, which look like minibuses, cost up to $50,000. Locally made replacements cost roughly $16,000. Even if cooperatives can cut that price to $12,500 with government subsidies, “we cannot afford that,” says Mr. Floranda. 

Some operators will take on debt to keep up with new requirements, says Mr. Molina, while big businesses benefit. Indeed, the University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies warns that the PUV program could open “a window of opportunity for ... corporate takeover.”

And although replacing diesel-fed jeepneys with electric models will certainly reduce pollution, some environmentalists are skeptical about the impact.

Government data indicates that jeepneys make up just 2% of the 9 million registered vehicles in the country. Rodne Galicha, executive director of the faith-based environment group Living Laudato Si Philippines, says that if the government were genuinely concerned about the environment, “it should not focus solely on jeepneys, but should address all vehicles, including private fossil fuel-powered automobiles.”

Still, officials stress that fleet upgrades and consolidation will benefit all stakeholders, particularly the riding public. Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista argues that streamlining jeepney operations will allow the government to allocate PUVs efficiently across routes, rather than the ad hoc, driver-designed routes that are currently in place.

For this reason, the government won’t budge on the new deadline. He says that jeepney franchises are a privilege that’s granted by the government, not a right.

“This time,” says Mr. Bautista, “we will be very firm.”

Garry Monteiro pauses and looks down, twiddling his thumbs. He contemplates the biggest change to his life last year. There’s a glint in his eye that wasn’t there before.

“To be honest with you, the refrigerator was a big deal,” Mr. Monteiro chuckles, speaking in a community room at the 140 Clarendon building in Boston’s upscale Back Bay neighborhood. “I can get anything I want from the grocery store now that I have a refrigerator and my own cabinets.”

But, he adds, the biggest change is having somewhere to call his own. Before moving into his apartment, the former mail courier spent nearly every night for two years on an assigned bunk at a men’s shelter.

His routine was dictated by the shelter’s hours. He had to be out by 5:30 a.m. and back before 8 p.m. He spent his days looking for jobs or with his siblings. Every day, he worried about making it back by curfew. If he didn’t, he’d have to sleep outside.

In the shelter, his only place for privacy was the restroom. Now, Mr. Monteiro has his own studio with a bathroom, kitchenette, and of course, the refrigerator. “The solitude is priceless after sleeping in a room with 30 or 40 people,” he says. “Right now I have $4 sitting on my nightstand. I’ve come and gone all week, and it’s still there.”

The 140 Clarendon building is the rare story of a wealthy community finding solutions to homelessness. When private hotel plans stalled at the address in 2020, the neighborhood took charge. Community associations and developers backed a permanent supportive housing community – complete with on-site social services – in the heart of one of Boston’s most expensive neighborhoods.

“With homelessness numbers rising everywhere and the lack of affordable housing overwhelming, this project in the Back Bay is a welcome development,” says Howard Koh, faculty chair of the Initiative on Health and Homelessness at Harvard University. Dr. Koh and his team say that 140 Clarendon is “highly unusual,” because instead of worrying about property values, residents in a high-end neighborhood rolled out the welcome mat.

Dr. Koh calls it “a laudable development that offers leadership lessons for all cities.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

When plans for an upscale hotel were scrapped in 2020, the neighborhood worked with nonprofits to create affordable housing and apartments for formerly unhoused people, at 140 Clarendon.

Permanent supportive housing communities often face opposition from residents. In Los Angeles County, renovation plans for an abandoned motel have become a battleground for homeowners concerned about property values, who say not in my backyard (NIMBY). In Austin, Texas, residents halted the development of a housing community over fears about traffic congestion.

“The collaboration of all the partners, public and private, to make such progress is a great example of how people can ... rise to the challenge,” Dr. Koh says of 140 Clarendon.

Housing-first solutions

The 111 studio apartments that now house Mr. Monteiro and his new neighbors also come with support services and case managers. The idea isn’t new, experts on “housing-first” solutions say. Studies have shown the most cost-effective way to combat homelessness is to prioritize putting people in homes before securing other services. Permanent supportive housing is found in almost any city, from the buildings operated by the Skid Row Housing Trust in Los Angeles to Cooper House in Fargo, North Dakota.

What’s remarkable about 140 Clarendon is that Back Bay’s neighborhood and business associations signed letters of support, inviting the project onto their streets. It’s the opposite of NIMBY – and an example of what can happen when wealthy neighborhoods say yes.

“It is one of those all-too-rare occasions when the public sector, the private sector, and nonprofits were able to come together and provide at least some relief,” says Martyn Roetter, chair of the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, who signed one of the letters.

In the United States, Boston is the third-most-expensive city for renters, according to January data from the rental platform Zumper. In 2020, Boston was ranked the third-most-gentrified city, according to a study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. As housing prices rise, shelters across the state say they are at or over capacity.

For nearly 100 years, 140 Clarendon has anchored the neighborhood’s educational and cultural character. The building was owned by the YWCA and, at various points, has housed the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, the Snowden International School, and a 210-unit boutique hotel.

In 2019, the YWCA decided to sell the property. The first buyer planned to evict all tenants and face-lift the exterior to make way for a ritzy private hotel. When the pandemic sank the hotel market, a new developer – Beacon Communities – stepped in, while Pine Street Inn agreed to provide on-site services to formerly houseless tenants. “It checked all our boxes, and the location couldn’t be better,” says Jan Griffin, vice president of Pine Street Inn. The 13-story brick-faced building has elevators and is easily accessible to public transit, grocery stores, the Boston Public Library, and churches. 

John Rich/Pine Street Inn

At 140 Clarendon, 111 units were turned into studio apartments for formerly unhoused residents.

Pine Street Inn has been a trailblazing nonprofit in combating chronic homelessness. Aside from having the largest overnight shelter in New England, the nonprofit owns and manages more than 440 permanent supportive housing locations for close to 900 men and women in Greater Boston. 

“It’s the right thing to do”

The Back Bay neighborhood associations – which wanted to preserve the historic brownstone and its commercial tenants – had caught wind of the development plans. In two public letters of support, the associations advocated for affordable housing to be expedited in the neighborhood.

“We’re often accused of being NIMBYs, but we’re not an island to ourselves,” says Mr. Roetter. “It’s the right thing to do. And it’s also a vehicle through which we inform ourselves of what the problems really are.”

In addition to 111 apartments for people experiencing homelessness, 99 other units were made into affordable housing. All the commercial tenants supported the plan, which allowed them to remain in the building. “The fact that the local businesses and the neighbors wanted it is a really nice testament to how that neighborhood is leaning in to trying to end homelessness on their streets with housing rather than criminalizing people for existing in their neighborhood,” says Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance To End Homelessness.

When Mr. Monteiro arrived at Pine Street’s shelters in 2021, his only possessions were the clothes on his back and a canvas messenger bag from his past life as a courier.

Born in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, Mr. Monteiro handled deliveries and worked his way up to overnight dispatcher. After 20 years of working, Mr. Monteiro left it all behind to take care of his parents. “I knew basically that once they passed away, I would have to start over,” he says. “And I’d still do it again.”

Mr. Monteiro gave up his job, his three-bedroom apartment, and his van. Supported by his siblings financially, he cared for his parents for 15 years until they died in 2020. He stayed with his brother first and then made his way to Pine Street’s shelters. Now, he wants to take advantage of a computer class at 140 Clarendon. With his second chance, he hopes to return the favor to family members who have helped him.

“I just can’t wait to get a job and have them rely on me again,” Mr. Monteiro says.

While romantic love receives top billing on Valentine’s Day, there are many types of love. We asked contributors to write about a book that stood out because of an unexpected love story. They came back with tales of deep affection, from a long marriage to a passion for the movies. 

– April Austin, books editor

Karen Norris/Staff

Unexpected love

The best literary love stories take characters by surprise. They’re especially wonderful when they involve a previously closed-off person opening up and becoming receptive to another living being, whether human or not. 

Such is the case in Sigrid Nunez’s “The Vulnerables.” Her narrator is a writer who finds herself more alone than usual in locked-down New York City during the coronavirus pandemic. She shares many characteristics with Nunez – yet the story is fiction. In the book, the writer’s friend asks her to take care of a macaw named Eureka; she’s happy for something to give shape to her days. Like the writer who becomes attached to an orphaned dog in Nunez’s earlier novel, “The Friend,” her latest narrator is charmed by this needy creature. 

But things get complicated when the troubled college student who was supposed to take care of the parrot returns as unexpectedly as he had abandoned the job. At first the writer is furious and resents the young man’s sloppy intrusion, seeing him as a rival for the bird’s affections. But what starts as a gradual thaw, when she sees how good he is with Eureka, progresses to tender warmth. The student takes it upon himself to provide tempting meals for the older woman when he notices she’s unwell and isn’t eating properly.

“The Vulnerables” isn’t a romance, but it’s a joy to watch two such different people find solace in unlikely companionship. We watch with delight as, over pints of ice cream, they share coping mechanisms for stress and confidences about what they want out of literature and life. 

– Heller McAlpin   

Karen Norris/Staff

A singular, stellar marriage

Diving into “The Frozen River,” Ariel Lawhon’s unputdownable tale of a midwife in 1780s Maine, I thought I had a good idea of what lay in wait: an intriguing protagonist, a twisty mystery, rich period detail, lashing weather, and (hopefully minimal) depictions of why labor is often, ahem, labor.

What I didn’t think I’d encounter is a singular, stellar marriage.

Martha Ballard – smart, industrious, and widely respected for her remarkable midwifery record – has been married to Ephraim for 35 years. A Welsh woodworker and falconer who runs the local lumber mill, Ephraim is the warm, clearheaded calm to Martha’s fierce, determined will. In their Hallowell home along the Kennebec River, the couple work, tend, fix, and craft alongside their brood of children, ages 11 to 27. It’s a life full of the extremes of its time and place – aching loss, unending demands, fits of violence, and brutal winds – and yet their partnership is daringly, and surprisingly, tender. There’s gentleness. Patience. Even playfulness. They banter and tease, parry and flirt. 

Make no mistake: Martha and Ephraim fling words they regret. There’s disappointment, frustration, and anger. But what feels revolutionary as the book’s turmoil mounts is their bedrock care and kindness. And trust.

One night Martha encounters a rare fox on her return home. The face-off feels mysterious and important. “Ephraim will neither laugh at me or be alarmed,” she realizes when determining what to share. “He will simply nod and think on it.

“His head is all rivers and streams,” she muses, “and with a mind like that a thought could run anywhere.”

In a novel focused on weighty issues and worthy struggles, it was a joy to stumble across this standout, satisfying love story.

– Erin Douglass 

Karen Norris/Staff

Fierce, maternal love

Celeste Ng’s “Our Missing Hearts” gripped me with the – at times – irrational intensity of a mother’s love. The novel’s protagonist, a 12-year-old boy named Bird, is a curious child navigating a futuristic society in which information is highly controlled and xenophobia abounds. His mother disappeared when he was 9 years old, leaving him confused, angry, and heartbroken. As he tries to find out what happened, I was struck by the lengths his mother went to liberate not just Bird but every child and family. In one powerful moment, she reflects on the regrets and choices she made. As she tries to justify the magnitude of her actions to her son, she admits, “But in the end every story I want to tell you is the same. ... Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his mother loved him very much.” As I, myself, am a mother to a son, the book’s final pages left me in tears. 

– Samantha Laine Perfas

Karen Norris/Staff

Beyond “happily ever after”

Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the “after” part of fairy tales. What exactly was meant by “they lived happily ever after”? How did it apply to a life lived together after the wedding bells had stopped pealing? 

I wasn’t thinking about any of this when I picked up Ron Chernow’s compelling biography “Grant,” about Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. I just wanted to know more about the man and his history. But Grant’s long marriage to his beloved Julia Dent is one of the unexpected through lines of the story. Chernow offers multiple examples of their devotion. But their marriage, like Grant’s military career, was not one triumphal march from pinnacle to pinnacle. There were many rough valleys in between, years of obscurity and isolation. They did not always agree. Julia could be willful. Grant smoked excessively. And he drank. Yet the unexpected beauty (to me) of Chernow’s biography is how their love and intrinsic care for each other never faltered, even during the most trying times. In fact, their partnership became a beacon of hope not only for Grant on the battlefield but also for Julia at home – and ultimately extended out from them to become a symbol of respect and unity for a nation mired in fraught and divided times. 

The Chernow biography includes a poignant photograph of Grant. It was taken many years after the Civil War, and the former president is bankrupt and ill with cancer. The photographer captures him as he is sitting on his porch on a hot summer’s day, shrouded in hat and scarf. There’s a blanket across his lap. Grant is obviously in extreme pain. Yet there is a pen in his hand, and he is furiously at work on his memoirs. With no other way of providing for his wife and children, he needs to finish writing before he dies. He does not want to leave his family destitute. Chernow (and others) has described the “Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant” as “probably the foremost military memoir in the English language.” It is still required reading on many campuses today. In it, Grant does not go into his private life. He does not mention his wife. But his love for her was obviously the guiding force behind this monumental, and even heroic, work. The unexpected discovery of this splendid union has said much more to me about love and what can come “after” than any fairy tale.

– Deborah Johnson

Karen Norris/Staff

A valentine to movies

Tom Hanks, what can I say? He’s brilliant, and his ode to moviemaking, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” contains a big cast, but there are no bit players in his world. In the novel, Hanks honors characters with their own backstories, hopes, and dreams and then shows how these characters come together to make a movie. The film’s cast and crew become like a family, dysfunctional at times, but at the core there is pure collaboration.   

The outrageous ego of the lead male character is played to the hilt, and the director has the patience of a saint, which made me think this must be how Hanks comports himself in real life, as a director and writer as well as a star. The director in the book often finishes workdays by announcing to the cast and crew, “You are loved!”  

By the end of Hanks’ book, I understood why the credits go on and on at the end of a movie: It truly takes a cast of thousands to pull off a feature film. With a tip of the hat, and a genuine affection for not just the process but also the people, Hanks has created a love letter to the movies.

– Stefanie Milligan

Reuters

A man does a haircut on a child in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 14, amid the conflict between Israel and Hamas,

Asma Mustafa, a Palestinian English teacher in Gaza, has been dislocated three times by war during the four months since a brutal Hamas attack on Israeli civilians. She and her family now live in a tent in Rafah, the enclave’s southernmost city, amid other displaced families. Her circumstances have only strengthened her resolve to practice her profession.

“I look at the children around me and think of them as a treasure,” she told Middle East Eye, explaining why she gathers eager young learners each day despite the makeshift conditions. “They should never stop learning.” When classes end, the children often linger and play.

Rafah is now the latest focus of intense diplomacy to end the war in Gaza to prevent greater humanitarian harm and end the threat of Hamas to Israel. Those efforts hinge on finding a balance between Israel’s right to defend itself and the imperatives of international law to protect innocent life. But the quiet, often unseen work of people like Ms. Mustafa reflects something different: the healing impact of preserving innocence during war.

That is about something more than sheltering childhood from the emotional or physical trauma of conflict. Innocence, writes anthropologist Miriam Ticktin, “helps to create a pure space for humanity” rooted in sincerity and dignity. It “intimately shapes why and how we should care” about one another. Its resilience is evident even in the world’s most difficult wars.

In Sudan, for example, where a civil war has displaced more than 5.5 million people in less than a year, youth groups have set up networks to distribute humanitarian supplies, challenge disinformation, and care for their society’s most vulnerable people. Their work is grounded in sacrifice and an adherence to the principle of nonviolence, Ahmed Osman, a youth leader, told the United States Institute of Peace.

Last week, the exiled Iranian singer Dara released a rendition of a beloved Israeli song entitled “The Eucalyptus Grove.” It spread rapidly across social media in Iran and rattled the regime in Tehran. Moved by the song’s beauty, Dara recorded it to express the “love and respect” the Iranian people have for Israelis. “It’s incorrect to say that the Iranians hate Israel,” he told Haaretz. “The serious distress can be felt in my voice.” But he added that the song “was pure and clean.”

In a Stanford University webinar last week, Mohammad Darawshe, an Israeli Arab scholar, shared accounts of Arab citizens of Israel who, during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, “remembered their humanity and not their ethnicity.” That reflects a shared sentiment revealed in a recent poll he conducted. While nearly a third of Arab and Jewish Israelis have lost trust in the other since the start of the war in Gaza, 83% of Arabs and 71% of Jews remain willing to work or study together.

During war, “happiness hides in minutiae,” wrote Pavlo Matyusha, a Ukrainian writer who joined the armed forces when Russia invaded his country two years ago, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Such glimmers of innocence may more often go unrecorded. But to the extent that they counter hatred, aggression, and fear, they prepare the way for peace.