When Quentin Farmer was getting his startup Portola off the ground, one of the first hires he made was a sci-fi novelist. The co-founders began building the AI companion company in late 2023 with only a seed of an idea: Their companions would be decidedly non-human. Aliens, in fact, from outer space. But when they asked a large language model to generate a backstory, they got nothing but slop. The model simply couldn't tell a good story.
Over 600 pages this memoir of sorts ranges from her childhood growing up in the Canadian backwoods to her grief at the death of her partner of 48 years, the writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019, with many friendships, the occasional spat and more than 50 books (including Cat's Eye, Alias Grace and the Booker prizewinning The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) in between.
There's an old myth that Inuit cultures have as many as a hundred words for snow. I remember learning about it in school, and there was just something wonderful about the idea that people's perceptions can be so deeply rich and different. I guess that's why, although it has been debunked many times, the story keeps getting repeated. There is also a lot of truth to the underlying concept.
For more than half a century, Tom Stoppard's plays have left audiences entranced, whether those works were his earlier comedies like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound or more ambitious historical works like and Leopoldstadt. Stoppard's long literary career has reached its conclusion; The Guardian's Claire Armitstead and Chris Wiegand reported that Stoppard died on Saturday at home at the age of 88.
The story begins with the narrator recalling Emily Grierson's death as many of the town's residents attended her funeral in her once refined and grand home, which had fallen into disrepair. While alive, Emily had not permitted any of these folks to enter the house for the past decades, except her servant Tobe. "What secret was she concealing" thought many in the town?
that the story opens with a Christmas holiday celebration. As it happens, dramaturg Kamilah Bush's show notes for Portland Center Stage, where the play continues through December 21, include some helpful analysis of how the celebration of Christmas in American culture changed during the very Civil War time period in which Little Women is set. But this adaptation by Lauren Gunderson, directed by Joanie Schultz, mostly isn't aiming so directly at holiday traditions.
When arriving paramedics ask Eitan for his details, he declines to give his real name, instead giving them the name of his work supervisor and nemesis, Douglas Moran. Eitan is a hard-partying consultant rheumatologist who has just returned to work after several months off following a mental health crisis, and who uses liquid cocaine secreted into a nasal inhaler to get through the working day.
The worst heartbreak and most riveting triumph of Anne Rice's life happened in relatively quick succession, each beginning when the US novelist's daughter Michele, then about three told her she was too tired to play. Rice had never heard such a comment from a child that age, and subsequent blood tests ordered by a doctor revealed that her beloved Mouse had acute granulocytic leukemia, considered untreatable for her.
Two actors are wriggling across the stage on their bellies. They're earthworms, or maybe simply brothers, Cricket and Coyote, who want to become earthworms. They're planning to write a screenplay together, and one suggests making their movie about worms. But "I thought we were writing something about what it means to come from the same root," the other brother complains. "A movie, a Western, brothers killing men and running amuck in the desert."
This, I learned, is known as a B'nei Mitzvah. Through a series of misadventures, it fell on the day of the Australian Rules Football (AFL) Grand Final, a day that is, in essence, the Australian equivalent of Super Bowl Sunday. I have three older brothers who all love the AFL, but it's my younger sister who is our family's most devoted fan.
A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin isn't a typical exhibition. Ursula Kroeber Le Guin wasn't a typical artist. Curated by her son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, the new show installed at Oregon Contemporaryis, by his definition, "nonobjective"-a sprawling love note unembarrassed by its devotion. Braiding her personal and creative worlds, the exhibition pulls together interactive installations, a working typewriter, and hand-drawn maps of Earthsea. And that's just scratching the surface.
Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a key role in modern neuroscience and inspired our continuing efforts to understand the biological basis of consciousness. Crick once said the two questions that interested him most were the borderline between the living and the non-living,
Then one day, Caroline discovered a map which documented the amount of arsenic in the soil in the Tacoma region. The map was the first of many clues she used to try to make sense of what plagued the Pacific Northwest of her childhood. What Caroline found was this: the 70s and 80s were the heyday of the mining and smelting of heavy metals in America-metals like copper, lead, and zinc, which all released huge amounts of toxic fumes like lead, arsenic, and asbestos into the air.
Missing You Did you know the moon was so old It might have to go into a home? It keeps edging nearer The way old people do. Goya wore candles on his hat But Humphrey Davy invented the miner's lamp. On Enceladus a day is longer than a year. Tonight, we have the Spanish Civil War. You can't go on like this, moon, Peering into people's bedrooms And the stars have their own lives to lead. When did you last think of Cassiopeia? Really? Think!
This Is for Everyone reads like a family newsletter: it tells you what happened, recounting the Internet's origin and evolution in great detail, but rarely explaining why the ideal of a decentralized Internet was not realized. Berners-Lee's central argument is that the web has strayed from its founding principles and been corrupted by profit-driven companies that seek to monetize our attention. But it's still possible to "fix the internet", he argues, outlining a utopian vision for how that might be done.
Speaking from her book-lined New York apartment, Goldstein tells me that she chose to translate There's No Turning Back because of its intensity. It's the sort of novel, she says, like Forbidden Notebook (the first De Céspedes' novel Goldstein translated) that pulls you in immediately. Indeed, from its first line, There's No Turning Back propels the reader into the midst of daily life at the Grimaldi pensione-convent: 'As the nun read the last words of the evening prayer, an indolent chorus of girls responded: "Amen"'.
Levi, a young chemist from Turin, went on to become a major chronicler of life in the camps, but at the time he didn't believe that he had what it took to survive. He thought too much. He was hollow with hunger and painfully aware that his hands were covered in sores and that he smelled. Worst of all, he felt that the things he'd seen would leave him dead inside even if he survived.
We have to understand economics for ourselves, or we're at the mercy of any charlatan, warns writer Michael Goodwin. He himself has contributed his two cents: first, he delved into decades of treatises and thinkers; then, in Economix (2012), he summarized in comic strips with illustrations by Dan E. Burr what he had gleaned: theories, practices, and pitfalls of the last two centuries of development.
As girls, we may find it difficult to picture our mothers-especially if they are stern Caribbean mothers-as anything other than the poised ladies they're so determined to mold us into. We struggle to imagine that they were ever little girls themselves, flying kites, climbing trees, playing hopscotch and marbles with their siblings. As mothers, some of us are so fearful for our daughters that we issue long lists of instructions that we hope will shield them from a hostile and menacing world.
Bayazid never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the streets of Rawalpindi. He had a memory more of forces than of people, a crowd, a hand, a hand no more. Yet the bazaars in those early nineteen-fifties were not so crowded as that, and Rawalpindi a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found.
Tom was a working historian or, perhaps, an experimental archeologist of the book, said Nicholas Yeager, who for many years taught bookbinding at San Francisco's Center for the Book. Not only did he train as a librarian, he studied bookbinding and conservation as well as practiced those skills. He also wrote about 19th century toolmaking for bookbinding and woodworking. There will be a huge gap in original research and synthesis of practical experience without his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the book.
For while Erpenbeck adopted some of the features of the form apparently throwaway observations on daily life, such as minor irritation at the difficulty of sourcing proper splitterbrotchen, an unpretentious pastry now pimped for a more elaborate and wealthy clientele she consistently enlarged and complicated it. Into that recognisable tone of ennui and mild querulousness with which journalists hope to woo a time-pressed but disenchanted or nostalgic readership, Erpenbeck smuggled metaphysics, politics and history.
"It feels like a circus," Hoover says. "I'm just trying to stay removed from the negativity. I have my own story I could tell ... but I don't want to bring attention to it, and I don't want to have to put someone else down to lift myself up. So I'd rather just ignore it and let people think and say what they're going to say."
