A surging crowd pressed up against the high metal gate at the entrance to a government compound, desperate for clues about disappeared loved ones. Politely but firmly, uniformed soldiers belonging to the victorious Islamist group now governing Damascus pushed them back.

“Give us time, just a little bit of time, to organize things,” one fighter pleaded.

For now, most Syrians seem ready to indulge Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose forces swept through the country almost unopposed and seized the capital, Damascus, last weekend from Bashar al-Assad. The deposed president fled to asylum in Moscow.

The city is caught up in seemingly endless waves of celebrations. Small steps toward normality are still sufficient, after decades of despotic rule that brought suffering to almost every household.

“Our men can move freely again – what is more beautiful than that?” marvels Huda, a woman joining the crowds in central Damascus Thursday. Like others interviewed for this story, she withheld her full name.

As she spoke, rebels handed out chocolates, and flower vendors sold pink Damascene roses at a discount to celebrate the fall of “Assad, the donkey.”

Not everyone trusts their new leaders, whose radical Islamist past gives many, inside and outside Syria, cause for concern. But the almost universal joy unleashed by the departure of Mr. Assad, bringing an end to 54 years of brutal family dictatorship, is overwhelming.

Dominique Soguel

Syrians buy flowers sold at a discount to celebrate the fall of the Assad regime, in Damascus, Dec. 12, 2024.

“Whatever comes next cannot possibly be worse that what came before,” says Yasmine, a Damascene woman with long graying hair, soaking up the festive atmosphere. “We were petrified. Now, we just want to be out on the streets and keep celebrating.”

“We hope for safety”

Syrians are now faced with the huge challenge of emerging from half a century of dictatorship and more than a decade of civil war.

Building a functional society here on the foundations of their unbridled joy and deep traumas will be especially hard. Syrians are still digesting the systemic brutality of the regime, now that prisons and torture chambers – chief among them Sednaya – have been opened.

The suffering of disappeared families was one of many grievances that sparked the 2011 antiregime protests. Syria is a country where sectarian and social divides have been reinforced by war, and where the one common denominator was raw fear of a state whose suffocating security apparatus turned institutions into instruments of terror and abuse.

In Damascus, citizens are watching carefully to see how HTS goes about creating a semblance of order in a multifaith city where fear of militias and security services has long ruled everyday life. The group has limited resources to rise to the challenge and to cope with a traumatized population, but it is having some impact.

In Bab Touma, traditionally the Christian quarter of Damascus, bearded fighters clean up a destroyed police station and people line up for bread from a bakery that never shut, as church bells ring on Friday morning, the day of Muslim prayer.

“We were suffocating,” says Hasan, a merchant selling flatbread, dropping his dough for a moment and clutching his throat to indicate the mood in the neighborhood before it fell to HTS. He recounts how he paid $5,000 to evade mandatory military service.

Now, he says, “The situation is slowly inching toward progress. We hope for safety.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Syrians stand in line for bread in the capital's ancient Old City, as they adjust to life just days after a change of regime that followed years of civil war, in Damascus, Dec. 12, 2024.

As it took control of the capital, HTS swiftly fanned out fighters and officials to protect key installations. Some came from Idlib, a province in northern Syria where HTS has run a ministate for several years. Their faces reflect the joy of victory but also the stress of navigating a massive city with which they are not familiar.

As the new authorities in town, they are hounded at every turn by civilians airing grievances ranging from the price of bread to conflicts over property to thieves taking advantage of the security vacuum.

Some hospital doctors and nurses are back at work, but they have had few casualties to care for. Instead, they are overwhelmed by relatives looking for traces of their loved ones who they hope may have emerged from the former regime’s notorious jails.

Concerns about Islamists

HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who has now dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has asked public services to resume, and many medical workers have heeded that call, says Dr. Mohammed Abdelkareem, a gastroenterologist.

“We are not scared about the new rulers,” he says. “On the contrary, people are happy. If people don’t show up, it is not out of fear, but lack of transport.”

At the same time, the composition of the new government – comprising only bearded men – has sparked dissent online, expressed by the hashtag “this government does not represent me.” Voicing such discontent – felt not only by minorities but also by Sunni Muslims, from whose ranks HTS draws its fighters – marks a major break with the past, when a Facebook post could get one arrested.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Vehicles pass a burned Syrian security building in Damascus, as Islamist rebels seek to reestablish order from the chaos of years of civil war, Dec. 12, 2024.

Whether such freedoms will take root is not yet clear. One son of former military officers who gave the name Nowar took his wife and daughter to enjoy fireworks and revolutionary singing at Ummayad Square in central Damascus Thursday evening.

His parents are very happy, but also worried about Islamic governance, he says. “People can’t accept seeing [Islamist] flags on the streets.”

Nowar himself is optimistic, despite contradictory signals. Syrian state TV, now under the control of HTS, puts the group’s black-and-white Islamist banner above the new three-starred Syrian national flag on-screen. But it has stopped playing the Islamist songs that were popularized by Sunni Islamist hard-liners.

Competing factions

Outside the headquarters of the Baath Party, long the Assad family’s political machine, Yaman Mohamed sits in a chair he has salvaged and guards the entrance, dressed in black and sipping sweet tea to ward off exhaustion. His job is to prevent looting and destruction, but that task requires substantial human resources that are not always in sufficient supply. Many official buildings have been damaged, and fires were still burning Friday afternoon.

Mr. Mohamed, who played the role of guard for two days in Aleppo and for another two days in Hama before reaching Damascus, is disciplined. He has stayed at his post even though he could be resting with family members he has not seen for eight years due to the war.

He is also optimistic, believing that the mosaic of military groups that overthrew Mr. Assad can stick together, despite variations in their hard-line interpretations of Islam.

“The difference now is that the factions understood that they have to stop fighting” among themselves, he says. “We had friction among factions and entities like ISIS that brainwashed us. Fortunately, now we have clerics who are guiding us on a better path.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A Syrian army tank rests where it was stopped after crashing into highway lane barriers on the road from Lebanon to Damascus, Dec. 11, 2024.

Which is not to say that there are no tensions among the various armed groups that competed for power during Syria’s civil war.

Outside Damascus stands the hilltop military base that houses the 4th Armored Division, commanded by former President Assad’s brother, Maher. On Wednesday, the body of the division’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Ali Mahmoud, still lay in his office where, rebels say, they found him dead already. He had been killed by a grenade explosion that had also left its mark on a ceramic fruit bowl, charring apples and bananas.

A fierce dispute broke out between armed men from different factions over who had the right to inspect General Mahmoud’s remains, a dispute that worsened when men sporting the armbands of a radical Islamist group arrived and tried to calm the argument.

“If we don’t kill each other now, I am certain one day our children will be fighting each other in battle,” one Syrian man roared at another.

Modeling a new Syria

HTS, considered a terrorist group by the United States and others, appears keen to stamp out such sentiment. The new authorities would rather point to Damascus Airport, southeast of the capital, as the right model for Syria. It remains untouched by recent events, even though looters have been active in other state facilities.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Untouched by civil war and the toppling of the Assad regime by Islamist rebels, Syria's Damascus International Airport is protected by its new rulers as they take steps to resume flights and reestablish order.

Airport guards stick to a strict entrance policy, and rebels here suggest that domestic flights could resume soon, before international flights to Qatar and Libya.

Syrian Air planes wait on the tarmac in the meantime, and a polished black Mercedes from the presidential fleet is parked in front of the ornate VIP lounge, although it is missing its tires.

“We consider the international airport of Damascus as a gate to the world, which needs to see the new Syria,” says a senior HTS security official at the airport, who asked not to give his name.

The airport “is the political face of this country, this new country that we are trying to create.”

European SPS Tower concept/ESA

Artist's impression of a solar power satellite.

Picture a vast field of solar panels, ranging in an unbroken array across nearly a square mile of land. Now shift that image into outer space, with the giant structure sitting tens of thousands of miles above Earth’s surface, and you have a sense of what space-based solar power seeks to achieve.

The drive for this energy source comes not just from its advantages over land-based solar, but also from characteristics that set it apart from most other energy sources.

Proponents say it can help power parts of the world that struggle to tap into more traditional forms of energy – either because of their remote location, or because the related infrastructure simply doesn’t exist.

“Solar, fusion, nuclear, coal – you name it – you have to have a plant somewhere and provide infrastructure to support it,” says Paul Jaffe, a former electronics engineer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. “With space solar, you have potential to redirect the energy from a satellite to anywhere on Earth.”

Technology is advancing

In a sign that the technology is stepping beyond the realm of science fiction, Space Solar, a British startup, recently penned a world-first partnership with an Icelandic energy company to supply solar power from space by 2030 – envisioning satellites sufficient to power around 3,000 homes.

Space Solar has also blazed past another milestone in being the first to demonstrate 360-degree power beaming technology – meaning solar panels can beam energy back to Earth, no matter how they rotate to continue facing the sun.

A California-based startup, meanwhile, says it will launch a constellation of orbiting mirrors by 2025 to extend the hours of available sunshine to solar panels on Earth.

And last year, a prototype from the California Institute of Technology gathered solar energy in space and beamed back a detectable amount for the first time. China and Japan have plans to follow suit – by 2028 and 2025, respectively.

“I’m very optimistic indeed,” says Martin Soltau, co-CEO and co-founder of Space Solar. “There are much more complicated robotics in space at the moment, like the Mars rover – we don’t need anything near as complicated as that.”

The idea of space-based solar is to harvest the sun’s energy far beyond the vagaries of our planet’s weather systems, and so high up that the solar panels’ view of the sun is almost never eclipsed.

The energy captured by these solar arrays would be converted to radio waves (or, in some cases, lasers) and beamed to a receiving station on Earth, using a concept of wireless power transmission, where the radio waves would, in turn, be converted into electricity.

In some versions, the hardware would simply act as giant mirrors, reflecting the sun’s rays down to solar panels on the planet’s surface, allowing them to convert energy into electricity before the sun hits them directly in the mornings, or deep into dusk. 

These sunlight-harvesting structures would be incomparable in scale to anything currently in orbit: 3,000 times the area of the International Space Station, according to a NASA study of representative designs.

Cost is the biggest hurdle. Indeed, the NASA report found that space-based solar could be 12 to 80 times more expensive than terrestrial alternatives. But the report says it had to make assumptions because the technology is so new. 

“We found that cost is really dominated by launch and manufacturing,” says Erica Rodgers, director of advanced programs for NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, and lead author of the report.

Joe Skipper/Reuters

SpaceX's next-generation Starship spacecraft, atop its powerful Super Heavy rocket, is launched on its sixth test at the company's Boca Chica launchpad in Brownsville, Texas, Nov. 19, 2024.

With respect to launch costs, a boost came in mid-October, with the fifth test flight of SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built. In a world-first, the booster section reached the edge of space and then descended to be caught by two steel arms at the launchpad tower.

A repeat effort in November was less successful, but the smaller SpaceX Falcon rockets have already demonstrated reusability. However, those rockets return to platforms out at sea and need to be towed back to land and refurbished over a course of weeks. The Starship’s aspiration of relaunching within hours, along with its enormous capacity, could significantly reduce the cost of accessing space.

“Starship is the sort of capability that’ll be needed,” says Mr. Soltau of Space Solar. “We need to have a number of launch providers for resilience and to keep them competitive, but rapidly, that market is evolving.” 

One worry some critics cite is the level of greenhouse gas emissions that would be produced by putting a space-based solar power system into orbit. But the NASA report concludes that, per unit of electricity generated, emissions are likely to be in line with those produced by the construction of ground-based clean energy systems.

And, though it is likely to be expensive, space-based solar’s capabilities could mitigate the cost.

For example, a remote mining operation, far from any electric grid, would have to pay much more than average for its power. It could prove cheaper to build a receiving station for space-based solar power, rather than forking out for the infrastructure to either connect to the grid or to generate its own power.

Equally, in the wake of a natural disaster, when the grid has suffered catastrophic damage, temporary receivers could be shipped in to source energy from space-based solar installations. 

It is in such scenarios, say some, that this technology could find its initial niche, even if costs remain high in the early days.

Concerns include effect on human health

But even if the price tag is acceptable and the technology develops smoothly, there are still issues that cause concern. 

Setting up international regulation and standards will be critical for a variety of reasons. One, says Mr. Soltau, is to ensure interoperability “so that a country in Africa, for example, can build an antenna and know that it’s built to the standard so they can receive power from any solar power satellite.” 

Other concerns include whether beaming energy to Earth will cause interference with communications, for example, or harm to human health.

Frequencies used by space-based solar radio waves can be set on a bandwidth that will cause minimal disruption to other systems. Operators can ensure the equipment used emits a maximum beam intensity well below anything that would be harmful. Space Solar, for example, states that its technology could transfer nothing more powerful than one-quarter of the sun’s intensity at midday.

“The analogy here is if you have an electric drier in your house, the electricity coming into that would obviously be very dangerous if you didn’t have insulation and regulations,” says Dr. Jaffe, now at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “We may have to do something similar for space-based solar.”

When Florida voters banned gill nets – fishing nets that hang in the water and trap fish by catching their gills – in 1994, Greg Miller felt the weight of public scorn that portrayed commercial fishers like him as ruthless exploiters.

Mr. Miller sold his nets. Some gill-netters burned their skiffs. Fishing villages from Matlacha to Mayport foundered, and bankruptcies and divorces followed. It amounted to taking away a crucial tool for his livelihood, he says.

On Nov. 5, that perception shifted.

Florida voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that counters the narrative that those who love hunting for dinner in woods and streams – instead of in grocery aisles – are morally suspect. In fact, hunters and anglers like Mr. Miller now find themselves at the forefront of conservation policy, not just here but in a growing number of states across the country. And with the passage of Florida’s Amendment 2 last month, the ability to hunt animals in traditional and sometimes contested ways is now preserved “forever … as a public right and preferred means of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife.”

For Mr. Miller, passage of the new amendment shows that the public is coming around to his way of thinking. Commercial fishers aren’t barbaric roughnecks, he argues, but key cogs of wildlife management. “Fishermen are really gardeners,” he says. “We have the best view of the garden.”

Balancing freedom and order

In places like Mayport, Florida’s new amendment adds to current debates about the viability of traditional industries, like commercial fishing, which are already battered by government regulations and cheap imports.

But the amendment also reflects a deeper tension in America’s cities and towns over the push-pull between freedom and responsibility, especially as it impacts conservation. Some two dozen states have, in the past decade, passed right-to-hunt amendments that preserve the fundamental right for licensed hunters to pursue game and fish. In short, unless and until a different amendment is passed, these states cannot ban hunting.

Florida voters OK'd expansive hunting rights while rejecting an effort to allow recreational marijuana, and falling just short of the 60 percent majority needed to protect abortion access. The support for hunting stood as a reminder that the freedom to hunt in America has long ranked alongside the right to vote and own property as “a sacred democratic expression,” as Jack Davis writes in his book “The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea.’’

Environmentalists, who argue that hunting and fishing are not under threat, say the amendment putting hunters at the forefront of game management is unnecessary.

Over 4 million anglers ply Florida waters yearly, catching over 100 million pounds of fish. Yet the state has a relatively low percentage of hunters. (In Georgia, 7 out of 100 residents are hunters, versus only 1 in 100 in Florida.) Meanwhile, Florida’s robust environmentalist streak has allowed interest groups to advance nonlethal management methods.

Dive tour operators and anglers wrangle

In St. Petersburg, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) temporarily closed pier fishing on the Sunshine Skyway Bridge after brown pelicans, ensnared by fishing lines, died. The bounceback of goliath groupers in the state has pitted dive tour operators against fishers wanting to market more of their catch for consumption.

Additionally, protection for “traditional methods” raises concerns that outdated and unpopular fishing and hunting methods, such as gill-netting or steel leg-traps to hunt bears, could return, setting controversial precedents for how wildlife are viewed and treated.

“Using hunting and fishing as the first-rung approach for managing wildlife could have a catastrophic effect on wildlife populations throughout the state,” write Macie J.H. Codina and Savannah Sherman in the Florida Bar Journal.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

A fall squall moves over the docks at Mayport, Florida, in mid-November. Local authorities have vowed to expand the village's waterfront to bolster a struggling fishing fleet.

Florida law gives all wildlife management rights to the FWC, a board that solicits stakeholder input to make decisions about closures and quotas. Florida’s newest amendment, Amendment 2, safeguards the FWC’s authority, meaning outlawed practices like harpooning manatees won’t return.

But for hunters and anglers, the amendment serves as a political shield against movements like those in Oregon and elsewhere to criminalize some forms of hunting.

In July, for example, a citizen-led effort in Oregon to criminalize hunting, fishing, trapping, and certain livestock practices failed to qualify for the 2024 ballot. The proposal defined artificial insemination of livestock as sexual assault.

In reaction to such proposals, two dozen states, like Florida, now have “right to hunt” constitutional amendments. “Science is going to continue to drive wildlife policy,” says Travis Thompson, the founder and executive director of All Florida, a nonprofit conservation group based in Winter Haven, Florida, and a co-author of Amendment 2.

John Brownlee, former finance chair for the “Save Our Sealife” campaign against gill nets, has expressed support for Amendment 2, saying that citing “traditional methods” doesn’t mean the nets are now OK to use.

But former gill-netters like Mr. Miller say that if science is key, the amendment could open the door to legal challenges to the controversial fishing method. After all, fishery biologists have been unable to attribute positive shifts in fish stocks exclusively to the net ban.

Gill nets are among the earliest human-made fishing implements. Thousand-year-old fragments from such nets built by the Calusa tribe using palm frond fibers have been found on Marco Island, near Naples, Florida. Modern gill nets can be incredibly destructive and indiscriminate. But they can also be used responsibly, as tightly regulated fisheries in Alaska, North Carolina, and Georgia suggest.

Gill nets, native fishers, and commercial boats

In Washington state, Native tribes opposed a 2023 gill-net ban proposal that would have negatively impacted several hundred non-native commercial fishers.

What drew tribal disapproval was the light in which ban proponents placed the gill net. “We oppose it on the grounds that it stigmatizes gill nets as a bad type of fishing gear,” Gerald Lewis, chairman of the Yakama Nation Tribal Council, told the state fisheries commission.

Mr. Lewis argued that the proposal eventually failed and didn’t adhere to science. The bill, he said, was less about conserving salmon than allowing more permits for recreational fishers.

Likewise, “the net ban [in Florida] was strictly orchestrated by sports fishermen trying to get rid of competitors,” says University of Washington fisheries biologist Ray Hilborn. As a result, allocation politics had wide-ranging impacts on communities and livelihoods. In short, who gets to harvest fish? Commercial or recreational fishers?

“That’s what happened in Cedar Key [on Florida’s Big Bend],” says Prof. Hilborn. “It was a fishing town that stopped being a fishing town” after the net ban.

For his part, Mr. Miller survived the net ban and now skippers the shrimp vessel Redemption, which travels from North Carolina’s Outer Banks to Brownsville, Texas, to hunt for shrimp.

He says President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to place tariffs on imports could shift the economics of fishing – though it could also drive up seafood prices.

Here in Mayport, a struggling fishing village settled by Spanish Minorcans in the mid-1700s, scrapped plans for a cruise ship terminal have given way to an effort by nearby Jacksonville to add to the slowly disappearing waterfront. A newly built fish-processing facility now anchors Mayport.

As for the amendment, it “is not going to improve regulation of the stock,’’ says Steve Murawski, a fisheries biologist at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. “But fisheries management is by its nature a quasi-political construct. So this is probably good politics for [hunters and fishers] to look at this allocation decision and say, ‘We’ve got primacy.’”

The best art books lend themselves to exploration, exhilaration, and contemplation. They open you up to other cultures and eras without leaving the comfort of home. No jostling for an unobstructed view in crowded museum galleries, and no rush. You can spend hours happily turning pages or being absorbed in a single image. 

These five books will transport you to early-19th-century Japan, late-19th-century England, and mid-20th-century America. They will heighten your appreciation for the magnificence of the planet’s tallest plants – and the soaring possibilities of human creativity.

Prolific Japanese master 

"Hokusai," by Andreas Marks, Taschen, 722 pp., $200

You’re going to need a big coffee table to accommodate two magnificent large-format books on the life and work of Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). The prolific master of Edo period woodblock ukiyo-e art – “images of the floating world” – is best known for his series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji,” but as these books demonstrate, he was proficient in other media. 

Hokusai’s work, rooted in naturalism, is said to encompass some 30,000 prints, drawings, and paintings (including scrolls in ink and color on both paper and silk, book illustrations, and mass-produced copies). His subjects include landscapes, seascapes, bridges, cranes, warblers, mystical lions, and floral blossoms. He features scenes of daily life, including rituals and ceremonies, as well as portraits and caricatures of actors, poets, sumo wrestlers, courtesans, and laborers. 

"Hokusai: A Life in Drawing," by Henri-Alexis Baatsch, Thames & Hudson, 224 pp., $125

“Hokusai: A Life in Drawing,” published by Thames & Hudson, offers 150 detailed, full-color illustrations. Taschen’s monumental “Hokusai,” which runs to more than 700 oversize pages, encompasses a more comprehensive, chronologically arranged selection of his work. 

Hokusai frequently incorporated poetry into his art, though neither book provides translations. Much of his early work featured crowds of people painted in earth tones accented by touches of pink, pale green, and burnt orange. His later, more familiar woodblock landscapes are rich in graduated shades of blue and green. One particularly alluring example depicts a group of men and women clad in blue-patterned kimonos gazing from a temple deck toward Mount Fuji.

Giving women their due

"Women Pioneers of the Arts and Crafts Movement," by Karen Livingstone, Thames & Hudson, 288 pp., $45.00

Publishers are continuing their initiative to honor long-overlooked women artists with several books this year, including “Great Women Sculptors” and the photography monograph “Consuelo Kanaga.” Particularly beguiling is “Women Pioneers of the Arts & Crafts Movement” by Karen Livingstone, which features 33 innovative women whose work helped shape British home decoration between 1880 and 1914.

Among the artists profiled are cousins Agnes and Rhoda Garrett, who co-founded the first woman’s interior design business in England in 1874 to create wallpaper, carpets, and furniture. Ethel Mary Charles, the first professional female architect in Britain, designed houses and cottages in the arts and crafts style in the early 20th century with her sister, Bessie Ada Charles. Kate Faulkner created the still-popular Mallow wallpaper design in 1879 for Morris & Co.

The range of crafts featured in the book encompasses painting, weaving, jewelry making, enamel and metalwork, bookbinding, stained glass, wood carving, and hand-painted pottery for big studios such as Minton. But many women, including those who operated the tapestry looms at Morris & Co., did not receive credit for executing the work of husbands and other collaborators. So it’s good to see Scottish artist Margaret Macdonald given her due for her significant contributions to the work of her husband, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.  

Celebrating trees

"Tree: Exploring the Arboreal World," by Phaidon Editors, with an introduction by Tony Kirkham, Phaidon, 352 pp., $64.95

“Tree,” the 10th title in Phaidon’s Explorer series, which also includes “Bird” (2021) and “Garden” (2023), offers a stunning visual survey of arboreal history in art and culture that spans continents and millennia. The sheer breadth and variety of the more than 300 images are phenomenal, with works as disparate as a 3,400-year-old Egyptian bas-relief and a 20th-century painting by David Hockney, “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011.” 

There are lovely botanical drawings of chestnut leaves by John Ruskin dating from 1870 and chestnut flowers by Mary Delany from 1776. Familiar works include Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “Adam and Eve” from about 1526 and Walker Evans’ gnarly rooted “Banyan Tree, Florida” from 1941. But there are also plenty of happy surprises and witty juxtapositions, such as Keith Haring’s “Tree of Life,” which shares a spread with Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax.” 

More sobering are several works that show the devastating effects of clear-cutting rainforests, including Niklaus Troxler’s “Dead Trees, 1992” and Jacques Jangoux’s bleak, monochromatic Amazon landscape, “Destroyed Rainforest, c. 2015.”  

A handy timeline tracing the history of trees from 470 million years ago to the present strengthens this book’s compelling case for conserving these magnificent woody plants, which provide 28% of the Earth’s oxygen and absorb about 30% of carbon emissions.  

Mid-century modern geometrics

"Alexander Girard: Let the Sun In," by Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee, Phaidon, 408 pp., $125

You may not recognize the name Alexander Girard (1907-1993), but if you’re a fan of mid-century modern design, chances are you’ll recognize his abstract and geometric-patterned textiles. 

Highlights of Girard’s long and varied career include collaborations with Charles and Ray Eames during the years he led Herman Miller’s textile department, which still produces many of his bold designs. Concurrently, Girard created chic, modern furniture for private clients. His brightly colored, folk art-inspired design for the Latin American-themed restaurant La Fonda del Sol brought a ray of sunshine to Manhattan’s Time & Life building in 1960. In creating a distinctive new look for Braniff International Airways in 1965, Girard perked up the company’s image with a custom typeface and 56 textiles in stripes, checks, solids, and a futuristic black-and-white fabric that incorporated the airline’s new logos. 

Girard is also known for his collection of folk art, which has been displayed since 1982 in a wing he designed in Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art. It is impossible to capture in photographs the scale of this exhibit created to “disturb and enchant the eye.” But there’s enchantment aplenty to be found in this book.

Laura Lean/PA Wire/AP/File

The portrait of novelist Jane Austen by James Andrews that appears on the Bank of England’s £10 note.

It is a truth universally recorded that no writer since Jane Austen has been in want of an opinion about her. “Of all great writers,” observed Virginia Woolf, “she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.”

As Austen fans start a yearlong celebration of her birth on Dec. 16, 1775, society has not bored of the challenge. The novel “Pride and Prejudice” has been adapted to film at least 17 times. Oxford University launched a special course this summer called Love and Longevity: 250 Years of Jane Austen. Book clubs are planning a year of seminars in bodices and britches.

Part of Austen’s enduring appeal rests in her verbal swordplay of enamorment. As C.S. Lewis put it, she teases from human attraction a tangle of “good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, ‘some duty neglected, some failing indulged’, impropriety, indelicacy, generous candour, blameable distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason.” What’s not to enjoy?

Yet beneath all that runs a deeper current that springs from her childhood Bible lessons around the family hearth. “The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible,” Lewis wrote. “‘Principles’ or ‘seriousness’ are essential to Jane Austen’s art.”

She wrote not just novels, but prayers beseeching God “to quicken our sense of Thy mercy in the redemption of the world,” as she put it. These behests, shared with family and friends, reveal a desire to express more gratitude, to be more conscious of the divine presence, and to “feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes, and earnestly strive to make a better use of what Thy goodness may yet bestow on us.”

That redemption, which is never far from love in her novels, may be more relevant than ever. Gen Zers are abandoning dating apps for the old-fashioned joys of chance encounters and make-it-up-as-you-go courtship. A recent study by the Springtide Research Institute found that 68% of this generation’s members consider themselves religious and 77% say they are spiritual, yet they “define spirituality as autonomous and faith unbundled ... inclusive of all faiths and practices.”

Those findings help explain why the TikTok channels of this emerging generation are abuzz with references to Austen and the many spinoffs inspired by her works. Unbundled faith, the Springtide study described, reveals a desire to ground identity in spiritual beliefs and community.

“Union of the masculine and feminine qualities constitutes completeness,” wrote Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of this newspaper. A writer’s greatness rests in the acts of observation and description. Like William Shakespeare long before her and Nora Ephron long after, Austen found in love a blending of the comedic with the spiritual. No wonder her works keep finding new audiences. Whenever two hearts flutter, sense and sensibility blend anew.