“Time says ‘Let there be,'” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote shortly before her death in her splendid “Hymn to Time,” saluting the invisible dimension that pervades and encompasses the whole of life: “the radiance of each bright galaxy. And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse. And death, and chance.”
Recipe books that could almost double as celebrity memoirs
Now is the perfect time to catch up on the best books, films, television shows, music and podcasts you might have missed.
How not to fall for coronavirus BS: avoid the 7 deadly sins of thought – Luke Zaphir, Researcher for the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project, posits that amid the panicked flurry of the pandemic, employing concepts from the field of critical thinking called vice epistemology can be demonstrably useful. This theory argues our thinking habits and intellectual character traits cause poor reasoning. Zaphr targets for discussion 7 “intellectual sins” of which we should be mindful in these challenging times.
NPR – Social Media Usage Is At An All-Time High - That Could Mean A Nightmare For Democracy: “America’s new socially distant reality has warped the landscape of the 2020 election. Candidates aren’t out knocking on doors, and U.S. election officials are bracing for a record surge in mail ballots. But another subtler shift is also occurring — inside people’s brains. Four years after Russia’s expansive influence operation, which touched the feeds of more than 100 million userson Facebook alone, Americans’ usage of social media has only increased — and drastically so, as a result of the pandemic. More people are more online right now than at any point in human history, and experts say the Internet has gotten only more flooded since 2016 with bad information. “It’s far, far worse in terms of quantity,” says Steven Brill, a former journalist and now the CEO of NewsGuard, a browser extension that helps users discern the quality of what they’re reading online….A study out last week from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading messages about the coronavirus pandemic are likely bots — automated accounts designed to make it appear that more humans are acting a certain way than truly are…”
They've announced the winner of this year's prix mondial Cino del Duca, a €200,000 prize that has gone to everyone from Andrei Sakharov (1974) to Jorge Luis Borges (1980), Mario Vargas Llosa (2008), Milan Kundera (2009), and Patrick Modiano (2010). The 2020 prize goes to Joyce Carol Oates; no word yet at the official site, as best I can tell, but see, for example, the Livres Hebdo report.
At Radio Prague International Tom McEnchroe reports on how Various initiatives seek to support Czech book market recovering from coronavirus lockdown.
Some interesting ideas -- and also impressive to hear that:
Some interesting ideas -- and also impressive to hear that:
Meanwhile, the Czech Literary Centre (Czech Lit), a relatively new public institution aimed at propagating Czech literature at home and abroad has announced its own form of support. Czech Lit Director Martin Krafl told Czech Television that the organisation has dedicated CZK 560,000 from its budget to provide 16 Czech authors with a monthly stipend of CZK 20,000.(CZK 20,000 is a bit more than US$800 -- not a huge amount, but certainly welcome, I'd imagine.)
What Will Post-COVID Novels Be Like? For Possible Answers, Look To Post-9/11 Fiction
Chris Bohjalian: “If 9/11 is a literary precedent, it could be years before we will see our first rush of novels about the coronavirus pandemic.” (The first such major titles, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, appeared in 2005.) “Some will no doubt take place in the innermost ring of Dante’s Inferno that has been New York City’s emergency rooms, and some will be about the chaos of home schooling twin 8-year-olds while your toddler crashes your corporate Zoom meeting. Some will be about claustrophobia and the idea that hell really is other people. Or jigsaw puzzles.” – The Washington Post
A Song Criticizing A Politician Tops The Charts In Poland – And Moments Later, It’s Completely Disappeared
Kazik Staszewski is a rock legend in Poland, and his song, “Your Pain Is Better than Mine,” hit a chord last week – or perhaps too many chords when it hit number 1 on a popular show. “Within minutes of the show ending, the results disappeared from the website of the show’s state-run broadcaster. Mr. Staszewski’s anthem had vanished, along with the rest of the chart.” One of the radio station’s many now-resigned hosts says, “even the Communist regime had more respect for the freedom of speech at Trojka than the current government has.” – The New York Times
Herd Of Fuzzy Green ‘Glacier Mice’ Baffles Scientists NPR (dk). Original. Like science fiction, except on Earth!
Simulated Sunlight Rapidly Inactivates SARS-CoV-2 on Surfaces Journal of Infectious Diseases. From the abstract: “The present study provides the first evidence that sunlight may rapidly inactivate SARS-CoV-2 on surfaces, suggesting that persistence, and subsequently exposure risk, may vary significantly between indoor and outdoor environments. Additionally, these data indicate that natural sunlight may be effective as a disinfectant for contaminated non-porous material
At Frieze Francesca Wade writes about The Man Who Made the News Novelesque, Félix Fénéon; he's been getting more attention recently because of the alas-only-accessible-online-for-now exhibit at the New York Museum of Modern Art, Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde -- From Signac to Matisse and Beyond.
The New York Review Books collection Novels in Three Lines is certainly worth picking up, too.