Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the poetry collection […] by Fady Joudah, which will be published by Milkweed Editions in March 2024. Preorder the book here. Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, […] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or…
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Where’s my DeLorean? Backward time travel is still in the realm of science fiction, but manipulating quantum entanglement allows scientists to design experiments that simulate it. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/FlashMovie) Have you ever wished you could go back in time and change your decisions? If only knowledge from today could travel back in time with us, we could alter our actions to our advantage. For now, such time travel is the stuff of fiction, but a trio of researchers have shown that by manipulating quantum entanglement, one can, at least, design experiments that simulate it. Writing in Physical Review Letters, David Arvidsson-Shukur…
Amy Jo Burns’ second novel, Mercury, is a heartfelt portrait of a working-class family set in an unsuspecting industrial town in Pennsylvania in the 1990s that follows the lives of the Josephs—Mick, Elise, Baylor, Waylon, and Shay—and the light in their darkness, Marley West. The novel opens with Marley, the wife every man wants, coaching her son’s little league team, while her husband, Waylon, hides beneath the bleachers for reasons yet unknown. The story then thrusts readers back in time, to the fateful day when Marley and her mother, Ruth, rode into town one summer afternoon and changed everything. While…
In the six years since I began writing the Unfinished Business column here at Electric Literature, I’ve explored the incomplete works of fifteen authors, but these have, until now, always been novels lost decades ago—some over a century gone. That gulf of time tends to soften the loss of the author themselves. While I might find it sad that F. Scott Fitzgerald died at the age of 44, the fact that his fatal heart attack occurred well before I was born tends to take some of the sting out of it. But this is not the case with writer Anthony…
Closing the loop: An autonomous system (shown here in its conceptual form) can identify how to synthesize “best-in-class†materials for specific applications in hours or days. (Courtesy: Milad Abolhasani, NC State University) A new autonomous laboratory system has enabled researchers to identify the highest-performing materials for certain applications in a matter of hours or days, compared to years using conventional wet-chemistry techniques. The system, dubbed SmartDope and devised by researchers in the US, also uses machine learning to analyse the results of experiments. According to its creators, it could accelerate the process of discovering and developing advanced materials for optoelectronics…
How many stories does it take to get to know a place? Lifelong residents may write confidently of their homeland, but among the travelogs and novels and poems and memoirs that give shape to a city, I’m partial to books written from the perspective of those still calibrating their relationship to a place. These include children, wide-eyed visitors, and locals caught in the midst of historic transformations. My debut novel Holiday Country follows a young Turkish American woman who spends her summers on the Turkish Aegean. Not yet all that comfortable with the country’s culture and customs, she’s hyper-aware of…
In America, I Am Whole Wheat Bread My America Is Bagels My America is skin. Hide. The red hair periodically in my mustache. The sun’s inability to burn me past the color of bread, whole wheat. My America is Guatemala. El salvador. My America is Chile. My America is unsure whether to pronounce Chile like the country or the admonishment you give the child misbehaving on the front porch. Chile. The Texas home my great-great-grandfather built to be burned down in my lifetime. The cemetery where he is buried with all the others with Mexican last names in that flea…
Quantum logic: Dolev Bluvstein (left) and Mikhail Lukin with their quantum processor. (Courtesy: Jon Chase/Harvard University) A quantum processor with 48 logical qubits that can execute algorithms while correcting errors in real time has been unveiled in the US. It was created by Mikhail Lukin and colleagues at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and QuEra . Their success could lead to the development of quantum computers that offer large numbers of logical qubits. In principle, quantum computers can solve some problems that cannot be computed on conventional processors. However, the quantum processors available today are very susceptible to…
Today #TheSimonettaLeinShow returns from its annual holiday break with its highly anticipated 6th Season and kicks off the New Year of 2024, as the show welcomes one of America’s favorite faces of television, Howie Mandel! You all of course know Howie as a beloved comedian, television personality, actor, producer and host, who has remained a constant force in show business for more than 30 years. He has served as a judge for over 13 seasons on NBC’s flagship series America’s Got Talent and is now a judge on the new extension AGT: Fantasy League, which premiered on Monday, January 1st on NBC. Howie is also an executive producer on NBC’s…
I find the idea of starting something new thrilling. I have learned to embrace the fear that comes along with it. Every time I sit down to begin a project, I always think about those people who go to Coney Island on New Year’s Day—the members of the Polar Bear Club—for a swim. In the chilly sunshine, they rip off their clothes and run into the water. How do they find the courage? I’m sure they don’t think about it too much. You just have to go for it. Don’t psych yourself out. It’s going to sting no matter what—but…
A confession: I very nearly quit putting this list together. Throughout the year I keep a running list, adding new names whenever I learn about an upcoming queer book—from Tweets, publicist pitches, endless NetGalley scrolls—and I usually start writing the blurbs for each book a few months before the list is due. Let me also add that, because I am a novelist myself, someone who works very hard to put words on the page in a good-enough order for someone to respond to them, I try and read at least a little of each book featured. And here’s an incredible…
BALANCE7: BRINGING HOPE AND RELIEF TO THOSE UNDERGOING CHEMOTHERAPY THIS NEW YEAR Balance7 is generously donating their acclaimed product to those grappling with the side effects of chemotherapy treatments. In a heartwarming initiative this holiday season, Balance7, in collaboration with Al Siamon and Dr. Nooristani, is reaching out to support individuals undergoing the strenuous journey of chemotherapy. Committed to making a difference, Balance7 is generously donating their acclaimed product to those grappling with the side effects of chemotherapy treatments. “During the busy holiday period, it’s easy to overlook health, but it’s the most precious gift one can cherish, 
Day and night: as sunlight wanes, the fabric can switch from cooling to heating mode. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/PK-Studio) Researchers in China have unveiled a new concept for solar-powered clothing that can regulate its wearer’s body temperature. Created by Ziyuan Wang and colleagues at Nankai University, the design combines electrocaloric devices with state-of-the-art flexible solar cells. The team describes its approach in a paper in Science. Thermoregulating clothing aims to keep the body at a safe and comfortable temperature in a wide range of environments. Broadly, it falls into two categories, passive and active. Passive thermoregulation uses materials that exploit effects including…
Is it possible for a terrorist group to secretly “weaponize†the most anticipated new electronic video game? And on the night of its nationwide launch, will thousands of unsuspecting kids and their parents be slaughtered? These questions haunt Blair Anderson, the game’s distributor; and he alone can possibly uncover the truth and prevent the carnage. But that’s only for starters. Anderson’ s daughter has been kidnapped and unless he cooperates, she’ll be tortured in the worst imaginable way. Blair can save her, or stop the terrorists – not both; and he has scant minutes to decide. Beacon Audiobooks has just…
The FamilyMart on the corner of Yingchun Road and Changliu Road, right across from my middle school in Shanghai, was no larger than 25 square feet, but had all the necessities swarms of middle-schoolers needed to self-soothe after marathon test prep: fish balls on skewers bathing in a perpetually bubbling brown broth, mini Taiwanese sausages roasting under a heat lamp, plastic-wrapped onigiri bursting with mayo and pork floss. Though no one dared to test this during peak student hours, I knew the market sold alcohol to minors: my mom had been sending me on beer runs since I was nine…
Perfection Sketches Easily for the Young Eileen Chang Share article Young at the Time by Eileen Chang When Pan Ruliang was studying, he had a bad habit: the pencil in his hand would not stay still—right there in the margins of his book, it was always sketching a little person. He’d never studied drawing and it didn’t interest him much, but the moment his pencil touched paper, a line would start bending around, all on its own, drawing a face in side-view profile. Always the same face, always facing left. He’d been drawing that profile since he was little, it…
Hot and cold: schematic showing the nanoribbon waveguide between the hot and cold reservoirs. (Courtesy: Yu Pei et al/Nature Communications) Materials with high thermal conductivity are sought after for use in electronic devices because they swiftly remove excess heat, allowing for optimal performance. However, as devices become smaller and run faster, removing heat is becoming increasingly challenging. Recent studies have suggested that surface phonon polaritons (SPhPs) – quasiparticles that arise from the coupling between phonons and photons – could enhance thermal conductivity in certain materials. Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego have demonstrated this for the first…
Photomolecular effect: At the water-air interface, light can, under certain conditions, induce evaporation without the need for heat, according to a new study by researchers at MIT. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Valenty) Under certain conditions, light can cause water to evaporate directly, without heating it first. The process works by cleaving water clusters from the water-air interface, and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US have dubbed it the “photomolecular effect†in analogy with the well-known photoelectric effect. “The conventional wisdom is that evaporation requires heat, but our work shows that another evaporation mechanism exists,†explains MIT nanotechnologist and…