Dear reader, we write this to you from the rapidly chilling environs of Brooklyn, where the leaves are turning to gold and our eyes are turning to all the books we are stockpiling to get us through the winter months. (Yes, we briefly thought of saying “turning our eyes to page-turners,” but that felt like a bit much.) Some of these titles touch on the influence of sci-fi on NASA, others illustrate life in Canada’s oil sands. All of them go down smooth with a pumpkin spice latte—if you’re into that sort of thing. Also, don’t worry: If you’re in the southern hemisphere and your spring is just getting started, these books are just as fun in the warmer months. Enjoy!
Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…
When good Americans die, wrote Oscar Wilde, they all go to Paris. Of course, Americans can be impatient people, and quite a few, hoping to beat the queues, don’t wait for death. Many good American writers, plus quite a few British and Irish writers, have made their way to Paris with the idea that in the City of Light they will be able to find their literary voice in a way that would not be possible in Des Moines or Darlington or Dublin. Or at least get a seat on the terrasse of Café de Flore.
A hundred years ago, Ernest Hemingway, arguably the most famous of the American literary expatriates, first climbed the stairs with his wife Hadley, past the shared toilets on each landing, to their cramped fourth floor flat in 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The apartment, Hemingway wrote to a friend back home in Chicago, “would not be uncomfortable to anyone used to a Michigan outhouse”. Hemingway was only 22, and hadn’t yet written anything of note. The couple were sustained by Hadley’s small trust fund and by news stories that Hemingway filed to the Toronto Star.
While Google Maps has evolved to become a stand-alone platform that offers super-advanced capabilities, many people out there still use it solely for the navigation component.
In other words, they still believe that Google Maps is, first and foremost, a piece of navigation software, and without a doubt, they aren’t wrong.
Google Maps offers an impressive feature lineup on this front, as it’s able to get you from point A to point B safer, faster, and more convenient. And with features like eco-friendly routing, Google Maps can also reduce the carbon footprint of each vehicle, therefore, contributing to fuel saving and more economical driving.
But on the other hand, what truly makes Google Maps the best navigation app is… the satellite mode.
While some people out there might think otherwise, satellite navigation makes the experience behind the wheel a lot more convenient. And it’s all because of the way it works.
Lopez, a Los Angeles Times columnist and four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, isn’t collapsing into the grave just yet, but he is 69, with two artificial knees and a pacemaker.
“Although this is a scary thought, when you get to where I am, statistically speaking, you’re in the last quarter of your life and most of it is behind you,” he said.
But there are still so many bullets on his to-do list.
He could retire and start crossing some off, but he is hesitant. “Being a columnist I’ve had a quasi-public life,” he said. “After that, who am I going to be?”
He wanted to find out before the health problems that affected his parents interfered.
“I mentioned it to everybody who I considered a peer age-wise, and they were all having the same conversations with themselves and others about when is the right time to go.”
The X-Files is known for its sci-fi storylines but every so often it reaches out a toe and dips it squarely into the horror genre. The more horror-focused episodes tend to be the self-contained monster-of-the-week outings, largely separate from the series’ overarching alien mythology story arc. This makes them perfect to view as standalone stories—and also perfect to watch on a crisp October night in the lead-up to Halloween.
There’s an X-Files episode for every mood, so some of the episodes on this list are truly scary—the show’s writers knew exactly how to get in your head and fuel some memorable nightmares—while others have creepy elements that are lightened by comedy. So come join Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Sculley (Gillian Anderson) for some classic spooks and scares—but be warned, there are spoilers ahead!
Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
—Italo Calvino
from article…
What makes a literary character immortal? There are only a handful: instantly recognizable, immeasurably plastic, timeless beings that have grown larger than life—they have captured our imaginations in ways that only a few flesh and blood beings may have.
Often, their creators were envious or oblivious of their creation’s merit. For example, Mary Shelley regarded Frankenstein as her “hideous progeny,” Arthur Conan Doyle despised his tales of Sherlock Holmes as distractions from his worthier pursuit of writing historical fiction, and Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in no small part as a tribute to his idol Sir Henry Irving. Certainly none of these creators imagined that their creations would live for centuries, firing the imaginations of millions of readers, stage-goers, and movie fans.
In 1886, Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde joined this elite company. (1) Unlike the other authors, Robert Louis Stevenson was hardly a “one-hit wonder”: His adventure novels Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Master of Ballantrae are highly regarded and treasured by generations of readers, as is his poetry (A Child’s Garden of Verses). Though he died at age forty-four, his fame was already established, and he was lionized by many other popular writers of the day, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton.
While his literary reputation ebbed and flowed in academic and critical circles over the succeeding century, Stevenson is viewed today as a writer of “originality and power.” (2) Yet Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is unlike anything else Stevenson wrote, weaving a compelling condemnation of Victorian ideals into a shocking story of crime detection. (3) Hailed today as a potent blend of mystery, science fiction, and horror, the novella, like Frankenstein before it, has been too often simplified, distorted, and refashioned into a warning about good defeated by evil. The true nature of Stevenson’s tale is far more complex.
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