Each summer, we choose a novel and unpack its themes through conversations with leading thinkers working where science and culture meet. This year, we’re reading Flights by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature. Flights is a puzzling, genre-blurring work—part memoir, part short story collection, part ethnography of travel—that probes the human drive to move; the constant pull between venturing somewhere new and remaining in place. “Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so when you linger in a place you start to put down roots,” Tokarczuk’s elusive narrator confides in the opening pages. “My energy derives from movement—from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.” Often described as a book about travel, Flights dazzles with sharp, unforgettable reflections on what it means to be in transit—the people you meet and the settings in which you meet them. Yet to label Flights simply as a travel novel is to miss the urgency with which Tokarczuk presses us: What are you fleeing? What are you seeking? By turns playful and uncanny, morbid and wondrous, Flights invites us to examine our own journeys. And as we move—across space and time, in our imaginations, and throughout our lives—what do our experiences and memories add up to? Do they cohere into a meaningful whole? Or are they merely scattered fragments, shaped more by entropy and chance than by our own intentions?…