Listen now (6 min) | A couple of neighbors and I had recently finished Richard Powers, Bewildered, and were, well, quite bewildered. Tom built a fire in the pit out back, Malia came with tea and whiskey, and we gathered under the stars to hash it out. The conversation wound round and round, as all good ones do–helped along by the primordial calming of the flames and the absence of screens or time limits. Just three humans living in a broken world, trying to figure out what Powers was saying about that. Why all the dead mothers in his novels? Why all the disconnected dads? Are the alternate planets in