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What underlies the use and abuse of performance-enhancing drugs is an American obsession with self-improvement that will always find new targets and tools. And most recently, “plasticity”—another term for cognitive flexibility or the brain’s ability to adapt and change—has become a signifier of success in a time when constant productivity is an expectation. 

With Yellowjackets, the so-called “puzzle-box show” achieves a kind of maturity by doing away with the conspiratorially furrowed brow of the masculine heroes who are obsessed with, and eventually resolve, whatever metaphysical conundrum that has made life unlivable.

Plasticity has historically been denied to the racialized “whose bodies are seen as rigid, inflexible, overly reactive, and insufficiently absorptive, contagions to the potential growth of the population.” Whiteness is defined by plasticity, by the capacity for change and growth. The land is allowed to change and grow, but only when it serves the interests of the state.

The James Beard award winner Mayukh Sen’s first book invites trouble, but more questions come up in the process.