I didn't know what to make of this story. It explores a narrator's personal and societal disorientation in a disorienting world. She wonders about the nature of evil and challenging previous notions that it stems solely from fear, misunderstanding, or ignorance (perhaps political), and ideas and concepts arising namely from her research work of bees.
The unnamed narrator in this story is a mother of two daughters, a 21-year-old Heidi and a 10-year-old Grace. She is also an excellent scientist at a lab that studies the diversity of bees. This is 'Unreasonable' by Rivka Galchen, published in The New Yorker on September 21, 2025.
The narrator views her work as perhaps her third daughter. There's so much information about bees in this story. Solitary bees, carnivorous bees, scout bees, etc. About all sorts of bees and their hierarchies, foraging habits and problem-solving behavior, and if they can be trained, or tracked with tiny trackers. She loves classifying things, and classification helps her to be logical and calm.
The head of her lab is Bogdan, who moved to here from Serbia 25 years ago. He wants his team to turn away three of the five Ph.D candidates that they have accepted because there's a cut in federal funding for their research projects and lab work. The narrator had to personally fire an intern; she knows that it would be a matter of time before she will be let go too.
We are with the narrator as she thinks her way through her own ongoing storm, be it as a mother or as a scientist, or as an employee at the lab. We live in the narrator's mind and thoughts. We see her train of thoughts at work, when dealing with interns, and even when talking to her daughters. She doesn't quite know how to communicate with them. She's currently not keen on engaging with her unemployed 21-year-old who's just graduated and broken up with her boyfriend and is in moping around at home. She doesn't understand why her 10-year-old is so addicted to an online game about wolves.
When he is out of sight, I am overwhelmed with a need to lie down on the sofa. I’m not a lie-down person, I’m a do-many-things person. But maybe I am not a person to be classified. It is wrong to classify people. At least sometimes. For example, my twenty-one-year-old daughter, the one who seems to have committed a crime, or certainly a wrong, is a person named Heidi. She spent years drawing lions. She still has her box of things that are yellow that she collected over the years. I was once so lovesick that I switched schools to get away from the person I thought about from morning to night. That young man in my seminar; the alien my daughter loves; that too-pliant fired intern—aren’t they trying to reimagine manhood? The generally acknowledged truth that the world is going to hell should remind us that we do not currently live in Hell. I have three daughters, and my three daughters all have a mom—that’s nice. As I lie on the sofa attempting to untangle many knots in my mind, and to get all the wolves to howl together, as an ensemble, Bogdan knocks and enters. Could we have a word? he says. In my office.
The narrator sees her world as a 'macro environment'. Her rational scientist mind can't acquiesce with the growing pains of her children, and the effects of political winds on funding and cuts that directly affect her work. Parental anxieties are at a high from political instability and digital over-stimulation. Like being addicted to drugs, the narrator calls it. She literally deletes the game apps off of her children's gadgets without their permission. Her daughters tell her why they're upset with her. There is a crisis of reason going on here.
When the narrator's thoughts come at me jumbled, I feel rather jumbled too. What am I supposed to make out of her thoughts? What should I think about the point of this story? Rational and scientific thinking is being challenged as we navigate the chaos of the current 'macro-environment'. This is an unreasonable world we live in. The paradox of knowledge versus personal emotional and moral challenges. This is what we have to deal with daily. Adulting is painful.
In an interview with the same magazine, the author mentioned about Raymond Carver's 'Elephant' (1988) that is crowded with 'threes', and how it has inspired her to write this story.
When I wrote “Unreasonable,” I was interested in (among other things) better understanding, artistically and emotionally, what made that change credible. I also wondered how a different sort of narrator would think her way through her own ongoing storm. In my nonfiction writing, I have lengthy conversations with a lot of scientists. One of those scientists recently explained why something was unlikely to happen, “given our current macro-environment”—the cuts in funding that followed the election of Donald Trump. That phrasing stayed with me. I put my character into that “macro-environment,” and also gave her the shifting pressure systems of two children, students, and colleagues. Not long ago, I read scientific research about the varied dialects and disposition of bees—so I realized that my character studied bees. She was someone who could take seriously the mind of a creature smaller than a penny, or someone who, maybe, felt smaller than a penny herself.
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