MyAppleMenu Reader

Saturday, December 1, 2018

N.K. Jemisin Is Trying To Keep The World From Ending, by Joshua Rivera, GQ

The most critically acclaimed author in contemporary science fiction and fantasy made history this year. Now she's trying to make the future.

Yes, The Octopus Is Smart As Heck. But Why?, by Carl Zimmer, New York Times

For decades, researchers have studied how certain animals evolved to be intelligent, among them apes, elephants, dolphins and even some birds, such as crows and parrots.

But all the scientific theories fail when it comes to cephalopods, a group that includes octopuses, squid and cuttlefish. Despite feats of creativity, they lack some hallmarks of intelligence seen in other species.

“It’s an apparent paradox that’s been largely overlooked in the past,” said Mr. Amodio. He and five other experts on animal intelligence explore this paradox in a paper published this month in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

What Am I If Not Employed?, by Maryam Banikarim, New York Times

I’ve worked nonstop since I was a teenager. Now, at 50, I’m hitting pause. It feels scary but necessary.

A Life Of Cy Twombly Brings A Poet’s Eye To The Artist’s Mythic Work, by Holland Cotter, New York Times

Some artists — Picasso, say — are limelight junkies. As such, they’re a gift to the popular press and a boon to biographers. Others, for whatever reasons, stay out of sight, keep mum and edit their paper trails. The American artist Cy Twombly, who died in 2011 at 83, held the personal details of his life close to his chest, and his survivors have respected his discretion, making any detailed account of his life almost impossible to write. That hasn’t deterred Joshua Rivkin, a poet and essayist, from trying. “Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly,” the most substantive biography of the artist to date, is the result.

Amparo Dávila's Short Stories Are Beautifully Wrought Nightmares, by Juan Vidal, Los Angeles Times

In a 1984 interview in the Paris Review, novelist Julio Cortázar likened the art of writing fiction to playing a game: “For me, literature is a form of play,” he said. “But I’ve always added that there are two forms of play: football, for example, which is basically a game, and then games that are very profound and serious. … Literature is like that — it’s a game, but it’s a game one can put one’s life into.”

In “The Houseguest and Other Stories,” Amparo Dávila seems to hold to a similar ethos and tradition. It is the first collection by the 90-year-old Mexican writer to appear in English. Translated by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson, Dávila’s stories contain a playfulness that, not unlike the work of Cortázar, can be intense and deeply unsettling in the best ways.

Is Chess A Sport? A New Book Says Yes, by Jonathan Eig, New York Times

We understand why. Chess is intensely cerebral. It drives men mad, as Butler documents in vivid detail. But by remaining so deep in thought, Carlsen and Karjakin shut out their fans, shut out the author and shut out the reader. At the tournament’s end, one man emerges triumphant, or at least relieved, the other dejected. The rest of us watch through one-way glass, unmoved.