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Saturday, December 26, 2020

‘Box’ Or Gem? A Scramble To Save Asia’s Modernist Buildings, by Mike Ives, New York Times

In cities across Asia, residents and design buffs are rallying to save or document postwar buildings that officials consider too new, too ugly or too unimportant to protect from demolition. Many of the structures were municipal buildings that served as downtown hubs of civic life. The campaigns, in a sense, are an attempt to preserve the collective memories stored inside.

The Complicated Reality Of Travel In Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, by Franny Zhang, Ploughshares

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed like everyone loved to travel. Photos of smiling people in exotic locales had become an internet staple, their popularity indicating just how high the cultural premium on getting out and getting away was—and is. Travel lust may be rampant, these days more than ever, and travel itself may broaden the mind, but there’s more to a journey than good cheer. In ZZ Packer’s 2003 short story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, being somewhere else is built directly into the title, and the stories often feature characters in new environments, struggling to navigate their changed surroundings; travel pervades this collection, but the stories refute fantasies in favor of more complex realities of what can happen on a journey.

Luster By Raven Leilani Review – A Debut Of Exceptional Power, by Diana Evans, The Guardian

The visual descriptions are a notable feature of the beauty of this particular cathedral, with its sharp, crystallised prose segments. It enfolds you, is even a little claustrophobic in its darkness, but you could stay in there all day, swathed in the magnificence of its language, the surprises of the sentences and their psychedelic, uncharted destinations. Each one travels somewhere worthwhile and earnestly considered, carrying the story on its back, leading the way. This is a book of pure fineness, exceptional.

The Shadowy Spirits That Helped Advance Science, by Jess Keiser, Washington Post

“Bedeviled” admirably insists on recording the plain history of science. It just so happens that the history of that most rational of human endeavors reads at times like a Gothic tale, one replete with evil geniuses, time travelers and uncanny intelligences lurking in reality’s obscure corners.