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Saturday, August 8, 2020

What Truths Can You Divine From Instagram Paintings?, by Barry Schwabsky, The Nation

And yet, being unable to see real works of art in person for months has made me realize just how much I have come to depend on seeing works online—and how I get more from that experience than I’d been willing to admit. I have not felt much desire to delve into the online offerings of galleries and museums, but nonetheless I have been seeing lots of art onscreen—it’s just that I’ve been getting it straight from the artists, mainly via their Instagram accounts.

A Star Went Supernova In 1987. Where Is It Now?, by Dennis Overbye, New York Times

If that heat source proves to be a neutron star, it would be the youngest example yet found of one of nature’s most extreme creations. Neutron stars are the densest stable configurations of matter in the universe — typically with half again as much mass as the sun, compressed into a ball the size of Boston. Think of all of Mount Everest shrunk into a teaspoon. Any more mass falling on a neutron star could tip it into the endless collapse of a black hole.

How Much Things Can Change, by Rodney Brooks

I was born in late 1954 so I am 65 years old. I figure I have another 30 years, with some luck, of active intellectual life. But if I look backward and forward within my family, I knew as an adult some of my grandparents who were born late in the nineteenth century, and I expect that both I will know some of my own grandchildren when they are adults, and that they will certainly live into the twenty second century. My adult to adult interactions with members of my own direct genetic line will span five generations and well over two hundred years from the beginning to the end of their collective lives, from the nineteenth to the twenty second century.

I’m going to show how shocking the changes have been in science throughout just my lifetime, how even more shocking the changes have been since my grandparents were born, and by induction speculate on how much more shock there will be during my grandchildren’s lifetimes. All people who I have known.

Act Of Grace By Anna Krien Review – A Hugely Impressive First Novel, James Smart, The Guardian

Krien resists easy conclusions, following her flawed characters with sharp, sympathetic eyes, before leaving them without fanfare, still compromised and still uncertain, but with the chance to rework the angry echoes of the past into a song of their own.

The Deafening Choir Of Oncoming Fate: On Jan Eliasberg’s “Hannah’s War”, by M. G. Lord, Los Angeles Review of Books

What sets Hannah’s War apart from other spy thrillers is its moral compass, as well as its probing of Hannah’s connection to her work. The reader debarks from the roller coaster of its suspense plot pondering questions of love, loyalty, morality, and identity.

The Unreality Of Memory & Other Essays By Elisa Gabbert, by Lindsey Weishar, Ploughshares

In a style reminiscent of the commonplace book, Gabbert interlaces the voices of scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and other thinkers to help explore disaster in greater relief. The myriad voices lend Gabbert a variety of entryways for exploring the problems of our world and make the book less a collection of worries than a highly-informed conversation that invites readers to consider our role in the world’s eventual end.

The Museum Of Whales You Will Never See By A Kendra Greene – Review, by Gavin Francis, The Guardian

Iceland “rose up from these waters in the first place precisely because of those plates, their penchant to slip and grind and spill their molten heart”. The island is its own centre, a place geologically and culturally unique, but Greene is from Boston and to her it feels like an edge. “Not just here but always, something happens at the edges,” she writes. No other country has so many small museums, 265 by her count, in a nation of 330,000 and her book is an exploration of the “territory staked out under the name ‘museum’”. She’s interested in what museums mean, as well as what they might become.

How To Do Absolutely Nothing, by Barbara Kingsolver, The Guardian

Rent a house near the beach, or a cabin
but: Do not take your walking shoes.