The world within Nathan Hill’s newest novel Wellness reflects and refracts parts of our own: the firehose of Facebook posts veering toward conspiracy; the research studies that offer insight into the development of adolescents or how to sleep better or how to eat; belief in the power of manifestation; articles that beg us to click with their claims that this one trick might save you from x, y, or z; the turmeric shots or crystals we might incorporate in the hopes of healing; and smartwatches that tell us, well, everything we might want to know about a body. Wellness pulls…
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The WGA had been on strike for months, with SAG-AFTRA joining the picket line fray just days earlier, when Bethenny Frankel, former star of Real Housewives of New York City, took to Instagram to say her piece: reality TV stars needed a union. It wasn’t fair that networks aired reruns of their shows for years or could use their faces in promotional materials for forever, all without paying the people who owned those faces once cent in residuals. Soon, Bethenny upped the ante: She was suing The Real Housewives’s network, Bravo, and parent company, NBC, in a class-action suit alleging…
Simple setup: The iodine vapour cells used in Vector Atomic’s portable optical atomic clock. (Courtesy: Vector Atomic) Atoms are the world’s most precise timekeepers – so much so that the second is defined as exactly 9 192 631 770 ticks of a caesium-based atomic clock. Commercially-available versions of these atomically precise clocks underpin GPS, navigation, data transfer and financial markets, and they run at microwave frequencies, or billions of tick-tocks per second. After a day, their timekeeping is out by less than ten nanoseconds. As good as this is, though, the next generation of atomic clocks is even more precise.…
The short story is an entirely different pleasure than the novel. For writers, the form demands precision and intense scrutiny of craft choices. The short story is constrained by its brevity but remains limitless in the opportunities it presents to challenge notions of craft. The short story collection, then, is an art form in and of itself. In conversation, stories produce something new and thrilling. We are let in to linger and marvel at the writer’s world, to listen to its chorus of voices telling us something urgent. This interview features three writers who published their debut short story collections…
Brotherhood Is a Life Sentence Bill Cotter Share article Collision by Bill Cotter The two brothers met by chance near the ice machine in the hallway of the seventh floor of the Marriott Hotel on Liberty Avenue. Liberty, if followed north for eleven miles, led to a squat stone building, two hundred yards from the main prison campus, in which was contained the chamber, the apparatus, and the drugs used to put prisoners to death. The two-lane road was colored by hardy wildflowers growing through cracks in the median, and was lined with street signs warning travelers not to litter…
Quiet conductor: scanning electron microscope image of a long nanowire made of the strange metal. The scale bar at the bottom right is 10 micron long. (Courtesy Liyang Chen/Natelson research group/Rice University) Noise measurements suggest that a “strange metal†does not conduct electricity via discrete charge carriers, according to researchers in the US and Austria. Doug Natelson at Rice University, Silke Paschen at the Technical University of Vienna and colleagues have measured low levels of shot noise in nanowires made of a strange metal. Their discovery could open a new area of research into these intriguing materials. Since the 1950s,…
This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features a lively discussion about our Top 10 Breakthroughs of 2023. Physics World editors discuss the merits of research on a broad range of topics including particle physics, quantum technology, medical physics and astronomy. The top 10 serves as the shortlist for the Physics World Breakthrough of the Year award, the winner of which will be announced on 14 December. Links to all the nominees, more about their research and the criteria for the award can be found here. Physics World‘s coverage of the Breakthrough of the Year is supported by Reports on…
My most transformative reading experiences have been ones in which I see the worst parts of myself in full display on the page. From the time I was a teenager, I’ve gravitated toward women characters and writers whose behaviors, addictions, and ailments were at odds with their “potential.” Esther in The Bell Jar, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Tove Ditlevsen, to name a few, spoke and continue to speak to me. Because I was the girl who got scholarships and hid empty magnums of Yellowtail in her childhood bedroom. Because I’d sneak into my bedroom at 5 in…
All wars have their own brutal logic, but only a few manage to make an entire country disappear. The former Yugoslavia was still a one-party socialist country under General Tito when I came to Macedonia from Australia in the 1980s to learn Balkan and Romany folk music. When I returned two decades later, this time as a playwright guest of Belgrade-based theater artists and anti-war activists Dah Teatar, the wars had broken the country into pieces. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead; millions more were displaced. In researching my novel Nadia, about a young queer Bosnian refugee living in…
Sky high: new research has shed light on how higher carbon dioxide levels in the stratosphere contributes to global warming. (Courtesy: iStock/magann) The effect of doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide on the climate becomes more pronounced as carbon dioxide levels rise – researchers in the US have shown. This effect, which had not been factored into previous estimates of the Earth’s radiation budget, explains about half the variation between estimates of the climate’s sensitivity to increased carbon dioxide. It also suggests a potential new approach to geoengineering. The surface of the Earth is warmed by solar radiation and it emits infrared…
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the novel Atta Boy by Cally Fiedorek, which will be published by University of Iowa Press on April 2, 2024. Preorder the book here. In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner’s son from Flushing, Queens, in the throes of a major quarter-life crisis. Cut out of the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens. Jacob “Jake” Cohen, the fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of financiers…
Dear Reader, Each snow globe in this illustration by Alli Katz depicts one of Electric Literature’s achievements this year. We reached important milestones, launched new projects, and continued to expand the ways that we connect with over 3 million readers and advocate for our writers (536 published so far in 2023). Over the next few weeks, my colleagues and I will be sharing more about each of these achievements, but a brief summary is included below. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, and we’ve got even more in store for next year. Please take a moment to support our work…
Espresso eruption: static electricity affects your cup of coffee. (Courtesy: iStock/radu984) What do volcanic eruptions and grinding coffee have in common? According to a team of coffee chemists and geophysicists in the US and the Republic of Korea, they both produce a fair amount of static electricity, so much so that volcanologists are now examining the espresso-making process. It is well-known that static electricity is created when grinding coffee beans due to the fracturing and friction that occurs. This causes coffee particles to clump together and stick to the grinder. However, not much was known about how this impacts the…
Diana Whitney’s second poetry collection, Dark Beds, is a rich text built of the many narratives that comprise middle age for caregivers: the demands of young children growing into themselves, parents aging away from themselves, a marriage suffering from the stress of relentless obligations. Through these poems, Whitney explores the ache of desire that is often the backdrop of these caregiving years—the desire to be on the receiving end of tenderness and to be witnessed as a whole being rather than attendant. In the poem “The Long Goodbye” the speaker asks, “How can you savor what you have when it…
Legendary actress Linda Gray, star of “Dallas†and “Ladies of the 80’s: A Divas Christmas†guests on Harvey Brownstone Interviews. Linda Gray is a beloved, multi-award winning actress, director and author who became a global superstar with her portrayal of ‘Sue Ellen’, in the blockbuster TV series “Dallasâ€, for which she won numerous international awards and was nominated for 2 Golden Globe Awards, an Emmy Award and 4 Soap Opera Digest Awards. But her career extends far beyond “Dallasâ€. On the big screen, she’s appeared in many movies including “Dogsâ€, “Oscarâ€, “Star of Jaipurâ€, “Expecting Maryâ€, “The Flight of the…
There’s no denying that this year has been an embarrassment of riches when it comes to truly extraordinary, life-changing novels. From books that quietly interrogate the nuances of life among the elite, to stunning panoramic works that imagine a more physically and spatially flexible world, the authors on this list took a classic literary form and reimagined it from the inside out, even bringing us tales from the future—some green lights, some warning signs. The books on this list tell family stories, love stories, stories of ambition and lust and power and greed, and stories of rest, relaxation, and meditation.…
Hot topic: US climate envoy John Kerry announces a new international fusion plan at the UN Climate Change Conference, COP28, in Dubai (courtesy: Dean Calma / IAEA) The US government has announced ambitious plans to boost collaboration with international partners on commercializing fusion energy as a tool to tackle climate change. The initiative was outlined on Tuesday at the UN Climate Change Conference, COP28, which is taking place between 30 November and 12 December in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “We are edging ever closer to a fusion-powered reality,†US climate envoy John Kerry told the COP28 meeting on Tuesday. “At…
A lot of us talk the talk about what’s wrong with book publishing today—but who among us is walking the walk and actually effecting change in the world of literature? On Missing Pages, which I host for The Podglomerate, we look into past and present situations and processes (even scandals and trials!) that have different kinds of outcomes, some powerful and helpful, some scammy and disappointing, in the sometimes-secretive realm of publishing. We hope that learning more about the entire industry helps our audience understand that there are things that do need to change. I’ve chosen the podcasts on this…