Novels by Caro Claire Burke, Emma Straub and Laurie Frankel prove gusty and entertaining : NPR

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Yesteryear, American Fantasy, Enormous Wings

Penguin Random House; Macmillon

Sometimes, girls just wanna have fun, right? I’ve been in a springtime mood of wanting to dive into a cartoon-colored ball pit of comic novels with spunky heroines. And I found some good ones; but what I also found is that, much like the classic screwball comedies of yore, escapism in these playful novels links arms with edgy social commentary.

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

Yesteryear, an intricately-plotted debut novel by Caro Claire Burke, has been getting lots of attention — and deservedly so. The main character here is an online trad wife named Natalie Heller Mills. On camera, Natalie revels in activities like spending four hours making a loaf of sourdough bread and then adorning it with a nativity scene made out of herbal stick figures — from her own garden, naturally.

A little of this goes a long way for those of us who share the attitude of the late Joan Rivers. Rivers famously quipped: “I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later you have to start all over again.” Amen.

So imagine my glee when Natalie — who only plays at being a pioneer woman — wakes up one morning to the realization that she’s been transported back to the year 1855! Welcome to the real pioneer life where, if you want milk for your morning gruel, you’d better hustle out to the barn and find a cow.

If Burke had only stuck to this plotline, Yesteryear would be a fun one-note snark at retro lifestyle influencers; but instead, it tells a more ambitious, suspenseful, and, yes, ultimately melancholy story of its heroine’s aspirations and capitulations to ideas of how women should live their lives.

American Fantasy, by Emma Straub

I thought Gary Shteyngart‘s brilliant 2024 essay in The Atlantic about his agonizing seven nights aboard The Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world, had ruined me for all other tales of enforced frivolity on the ocean; but I was wrong. Emma Straub’s latest novel, American Fantasy, starts off sharing Shteyngart’s cynicism and ends up affirming the right of women — especially middle-aged women — to party without self-consciousness or apology.

Our main character here is a 50-year-old divorced woman named Annie who’s been persuaded by her younger sister to join her on a four-day themed cruise. The “theme” is on board: namely, a gone-soft-’round-the-middle boy band of the ’90s named Boy Talk that both Annie and her sister loved.

Almost every other passenger aboard is a woman of a certain age, otherwise diverse in “race, political views, ability, income bracket,” even sexual orientation. All were rabid Boy Talk fans. The cruise production manager, a gay woman named Sarah, reflects that:

These were the guys who had launched a million sexual awakenings, and even if they had awakened something other than heterosexuality, they had still been present, like distant guardian angels of puberty.

For her new novel about boy bands, Emma Straub took a page from New Kids on the Block

Straub tells the story of the cruise through the eyes of Sarah, Annie and one of the band members, a thoughtful guy named Keith who, like Annie, is at a crossroads. This is a novel that makes the radical move of honoring, rather than ridiculing, female fandom. Here’s Straub’s description of Annie’s epiphany about her own fandom as she’s standing in a packed crowd during a Boy Talk performance:

[T]he music was a direct vein to her own childhood, the least complicated part of her life. …
All around Annie, women were dancing and singing, and for a second, she closed her eyes and thought, No one else will ever understand this, except, of course everyone standing beside her, who all understood it perfectly.

Enormous Wings, by Laurie Frankel

I’ve shared the premise of Laurie Frankel’s forthcoming novel, Enormous Wings with a few friends. Based on how instantly they entered the book’s title into their cellphones, the premise is all you need to know about this wild-but-all-too-timely story about female autonomy or lack thereof. So here goes:

Frankel’s heroine, Pepper Mills, is 77 and a reluctant new resident of the Vista View Retirement Community in Austin, Texas. Surprisingly, she meets a nice man there and has sex. And, then, through a medical fluke that Frankel almost makes plausible, Pepper finds herself pregnant. Her doctors expect the pregnancy to end in miscarriage; when it doesn’t, Pepper seeks an abortion. But, she lives in Texas and she’s now such a media sensation that it’s almost impossible for her to leave the state.

Complicated, gutsy and entertaining, Enormous Wings pokes fun at life’s unpredictability and stokes anger at situations that aren’t at all funny.

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Chinese ant with deadly sting sweeping US

Another deadly Asian superbug is invading the US.

Officials are raising the alarm as invasive ants from Asia are sweeping their way across the US, threatening people with their potentially deadly sting.

Originally hailing from China, these social insects were first discovered in the US in 1932, when they cropped up in Georgia — although officials suspected the bugs were present stateside before then.

Since then, the population has swarmed across 20 states with the highest concentrations reported in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, according to Antmaps.org.

However, there have also been significant surges in Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Wisconsin and even New York.

The needle ant also reared its antenna’d head in Texas, where bioscience expert Scott Egan said told Click2Houston that it’s “important to be aware of this new invader, but we need to learn more.”

A needle in a haystack

These ants are especially insidious as they resemble many other species, making these chameleonic critters difficult to distinguish from their local counterparts.

According to researchers, they’re generally mottled brown or black with long, slender bodies that measure between 1/4 and 1.8 of an inch long.

Perhaps their most notable attribute is their giant stinger, which was earned them the Japanese moniker Oo-hari-ari, meaning “giant needle ant,” USA Today reported.

A gi-ant pain

Getting stung is excruciating. “Imagine somebody inserting a needle directly into your flesh,” said Benoit Guénard, an entomology professor at the University of Hong Kong who studied needle ants in North Carolina. “It’s a very sharp, acute pain, but it’s quite local.”

Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture reports that the pain comes and goes “over the course of several hours.”

To make matters worse, envenomation can result in a host of symptoms, ranging from redness at the sting site to hives and even anaphylaxis — a potentially deadly allergic reaction marked by respiratory problems, swelling in the throat and a rapid heartbeat.

In 2024, three people in Georgia died from this condition after getting tagged by their stinger, which is reportedly sharp enough to pierce clothing.

Along with threatening human health, they also pose a risk to the environment as well. Asian needle ants outcompete species that are crucial for seed dispersal, which can cause ecological mayhem.

“Thus, this invasive species could have dramatic, long-term negative effects on forest understory,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.

Here to stay

Unfortunately, getting rid of these Asian invaders could be an uphill battle, as among other characteristics, they’re extremely hard to detect. Unlike invasive South American fire ants, which erect obvious dome-like mounds, needle ants prefer to reside beneath stones or in rotting wood.

They also don’t form visible foraging trails or march in obvious columns, making them doubly difficult to spot.

In addition, experts haven’t outlined a formal method of eradicating these invaders. While protein-based pesticide baits seem to be most effective, according to North Carolina State University, they generally only mitigate the threat rather than eliminating it entirely.

“Unfortunately, as with many invasive species, it appears Asian needle ants are here to stay,” the USDA stated.

Fortunately, experts say we could learn to live in harmony with these stinging critters, just as we have with the other invaders.

“They’re not aggressive, they don’t swarm the way fire ants do,” said Andrew Johnston, an insect diagnostician at Purdue University’s Department of Entomology. “Wear gloves and pay attention to what you’re grabbing.”

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Taylor Swift Eras Lawsuit, Tupac Shakur Case, Spotify Ruling: Law News

THE BIG STORY: Congress loves a “backronym” — awkwardly forcing certain words into the name of new legislation to create a catchy acronym. Want to call your sweeping new surveillance bill the USA PATRIOT Act? Easy peasy: just call it the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. What could go wrong?

But such creative branding does not have the force of law — at least according to a new ruling last week on the federal BOTS (Better Online Ticket Sales) Act and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

The Federal Trade Commission sued ticket broker Key Investment Group LLC last year, claiming it had violated the statute by using “illegal means” to purchase more than 379,000 event tickets on Ticketmaster, including 2,280 for Swift’s record-shattering Eras concerts.

The BOTS Act, passed in 2016, was clearly named to riff on “bots” — automated crawlers that buy up tickets before real humans can do so. And in response to the FTC lawsuit, Key Investment argued that it had never used any such methods.

But in his ruling, the judge said bots were never actually mentioned in the law: “The statute unambiguously applies to ‘any person’ and not just to ‘bots,’” the judge said. “Courts have rejected relying on a statute’s name or acronym as evidence of the law’s plain meaning.”

You heard it here first: BOTS — it’s not just for bots.

You’re reading The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between. To get the newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday, subscribe here.

Madrid Open: Anastasia Potapova becomes first lucky loser to reach WTA 1000 semi-final

Meanwhile, in the men’s tournament, world number one Sinner is through to the Madrid semi-finals for the first time.

The Italian beat 19-year-old home favourite Rafael Jodar 6-2 7-6 (7-0) in just shy of two hours.

He is bidding for his fifth ATP Masters 1,000 title in a row, having won in Paris late last year and already secured the Indian Wells, Miami Open and Monte Carlo titles in 2026.

But the four-time Grand Slam champion was made to work in the quarter-final as Madrid-born Jodar showed why there are such high hopes for what he can achieve in the coming years, going toe-to-toe with Sinner in the second set.

“Tough challenge, I knew before the match that he was going to be very tough to beat, especially here, he’s from here and he knows exactly how to play in these conditions,” Sinner told Sky Sports.

Sinner quickly took control, saving a break point when 2-1 down before reeling off five straight games to win the first set.

The second was much more closely contested though, with Jodar earning break points at 3-2 and 4-3. But each time Sinner held firm.

Jodar saved three break points himself to hold and go up 5-4 and held serve again to ensure at least a tiebreak.

But Sinner showed his class, swiftly holding to love before putting on a masterclass in the breaker, winning it without dropping a point.

“I’ve got a little bit more experience and in the second set got a little bit lucky at times with a couple of lines and net cords,” he added.

“But I tried to keep the level as high as I could… I’m happy with how I ended the match.

“[Jodar] is an incredible player. Spain has one more incredible player so it’s great for the sport.”

Sinner will face Arthur Fils in the last four after the Frenchman beat 11th seed Jiri Lehecka of the Czech Republic 6-3 6-4 in the later quarter-final on Wednesday.

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