It’s April 1, 1911, and 32-year-old Albert Einstein — former bureaucrat at the Swiss Patent Office, with a half-decade old doctorate in physics from the University of Zurich — sits in a train car with his two sons and his wife, fellow physicist and mathematician Mileva Marić. They are travelling from Zurich to Prague, where Einstein has landed a job as a full professor in theoretical physics, teaching in the German section of what is now Charles University. He has a few things on his mind, including money troubles, but most critical is his unfinished theory of relativity. When they leave the city 15 months later, Einstein will have cracked the code.

What happens over the course of this long, mysterious year in Prague is the question driving Ken Krimstein’s new graphic novel Einstein in Kafkaland. Part biography, part historical fiction, Krimstein playfully explores the possibilities, building, with footnotes, on a thorough archive of letters, diaries, and other research. The result, a thought-provoking work made up of comics suffused in a gentle mix of aquamarine watercolors, is equal parts joyful and ruminative. (Think: Alice in Wonderland meets The Lives of the Poets meets Krazy Kat.) The full subtitle to the book — How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe — signals the lavish whimsy that goes a long way towards making this such a delightful, inspiring read.

Throughout, cartoon-Einstein sports his characteristic pipe alongside a signature frizzy head of hair. But it’s his obsessive ruminations that perhaps most effectively signal what has become Einstein-the-character, a culmination of all the gossip, public appearances, private words, and first-hand accounts of one of the best-known scientists to have ever lived. Krimstein pairs Einstein’s story with that of Franz Kafka, who was 28, virtually unpublished, and living with his parents in a house in Prague when Einstein arrived for his short but impactful stay. What binds the two together, in addition to an alleged one-time meeting at a weekly salon, is a complementary preoccupation with getting at the truth — “the true truth” — against all odds, and against many other people’s better judgements. For both, a journey to find this truth, whether in science or literature, is one that will sometimes alienate as painfully as it may ultimately bind them to others.

During Einstein’s time in Prague, a time in which he works out his theory of relativity, Kafka will have his own breakthrough. In one long feverish night he will pen the short story, most often known in English as “The Judgment,” which will launch an unparalleled writing career forever transforming art and literature. Like Einstein’s completed theory of relativity, Kafka, too, will offer the world a new way of thinking. It’s a way of thinking that, our narrator assures us, “we’re all still struggling to catch up to.”

Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe by Ken Krimstein

Ken Krimstein/Bloomsbury Publishing

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Ken Krimstein/Bloomsbury Publishing

Despite his title, Krimstein centers his book unevenly, focusing mainly on Einstein, and taking us step by step through the meditations that lead to his discovery. Nonetheless, along the way he also provides readers with glimpses into the life of the perpetually melancholic insomniac insurance clerk, Kafka. We witness, for example, an early morning swimming routine with his best bud — and future literary executor — Max Brod. But what Kafka’s presence in the narrative most crucially enables are imagined conversations between him and Einstein. In these, the two puzzle, and sometimes commiserate, over what it means to see the world differently from everyone else. What happens when you believe so confidently in your own hard-won perceptions that you risk killing the heroes that brought you there?

Krimstein, a well-published cartoonist whose previous work includes another delightful graphic biography, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, luxuriates in intellectual history shoulder to shoulder with juicy biographical details. He depicts Einstein debating with his foe, Max Abraham; taking fantastical trips into a four-dimensional world with Euclid; and walking and talking with Austrian physicist, and dear friend, Paul Ehrenfest. And he exposes, too, scenes of the future Nobel Prize winner in the bath, trying to kill off bedbugs; or engaging with his young children, and wife, in Gedankenexperiments (thought experiments), to help him think through the problems that continually occupy him.

At its heart, Einstein in Kafkaland is the story of ordinary genius. It unwraps the ways in which genius so often arises out of ordinary circumstances. Perhaps even more compellingly, the book tracks how unimaginable discoveries develop following exchanges with others — friends and family, colleagues and nemeses, neighbors and role models. Aberrations aside, works of genius most wholly emerge in dialogue.

Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar specializing in memoir as well as graphic novels and comics. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

As the Latin trap anthem “Singamo” rings over the speakers at the Echo in Echo Park, more than 50 people sing along and twerk on stage. Dina Ben-Nissan and Courtney Hollinquest take turns spinning tracks by artists from around the globe while images of flags from countries such as Puerto Rico, Brazil and Mexico rotate on a projection screen behind them. Off on the side of the stage, La Goony Chonga, a Cuban American rapper and singer from Miami, snaps selfies with fans.

This is what it’s like to attend ¡BAILE!, a world music dance party that’s been taking place in L.A. since 2022. Named after the Spanish slang word for dancing, the party focuses heavily on sounds from Latin and South America, but also delves into music from other parts of the world such as soca and Gqom, which has roots in South Africa.

Dina Ben-Nissan, left, jams out at Baile World.

(Jett Lara / For The Times)

“Being Black and Latina, I’ve never been in a space where I can play all things at once,” says co-founder Hollinquest (a.k.a DJ CQUESTT), who is of Puerto Rican, Mexican and Black descent. “It’s either Latin music or hip-hop, so the idea for [“¡BAILE!”] was to create a space where I can play everything that kind of represents me and all of these club sounds that I’ve been hearing throughout my travels.”

The party is one of several in L.A. that transports attendees to other countries — sans a passport. On any given night, Angelenos can hear sounds spanning from as far as Southeast Asia to Mexico. Adding to the experience are the cultural details — the food, the decor, the attire. For example, you can enjoy sambusa and other traditional Ethiopian bites at “Motherland Sounds.” At an Afro Caribbean party known as “Carnival Tabanca,” some attendees wear modern and traditional Carnival costumes.

Such events have been rising in popularity in recent years as once-niche genres like West Africa’s Afrobeats have become more mainstream.

“It used to be like if you know, you know,” says Kwabena Anfo, a Ghana-born DJ and producer who goes by Blaq Pages and throws a traveling party called “Afrobeats to the World.” “But now with social media, you can find the right community that you want to be in and find the music that you want to enjoy.”

Part of what makes music so powerful is its ability to introduce people to cultures different from their own, and to make people who are far away from their birthplace feel a slice of home. Here are six L.A.-based rhythmic dance parties that do just that.

Scenes from First Fridays, jam-packed with music and miches.

(Julian Mercado)