“It’s brave of us to die!” writes Melissa Broder in Death Valley, a desert survival story. The woman in Broder’s third very funny novel, like Broder’s other characters, is recognizable by her need to “control the uncontrollable,” as well as her wit, occasional panic, deep and unrelenting introspection, and love affair with Best Westerns (“Where the wood can be fake, make it fake. Where linoleum can be used, use linoleum. If a geometric shape can be incorporated into any wall, rug or floor tile, it’s going in”). The woman’s father has recently come out of a coma after a very…
Author: Admin
Today #TheSimonettaLeinShow continues its highly anticipated 6th Season, as they welcome none other than Shark Tank’s very own, Daymond John, who they are so proud and elated to celebrate Black Entrepreneurs Day with. Daymond is known to be a quintessential self-starter, beginning his journey selling hats on the streets of New York City. He transformed his hustle into creating FUBU, a brand that not only transformed urban fashion but also became a symbol of entrepreneurial triumph. Daymond’s remarkable career spans beyond fashion as a bestselling author, motivational speaker, and philanthropist, not to mention iconic business tycoon. He’s not just a…
I Dressed Up as a Husband for My Wedding Marriage I was married once, at least we thought about it, it was in b&w, we were tiny, walking in a forest, the trees dwarfed us—the trees had been married forever, moss hung from their fallen branches, we had to step over them. We put on the costumes—groom, bride— these are jobs, I realized, that only last a couple hours. Why not try it, what could we lose, we were already deep inside the forest, we were already lost, marriage was just where the path was headed—I thought it would make…
Hot topic: For over the past decade, JET has been carrying out “ITER relevant†experiments, in anticipation of the opening of giant fusion reactor in Cadarache, France (courtesy: EUROfusion) More than 750 people have signed a petition against the planned closure of the Joint European Torus (JET), a major fusion experiment that has been running in the UK for almost 40 years. The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), which operates JET, plans to shut down the nuclear fusion reactor in early 2024. The petition says the closure of JET would be “a serious scientific blow†that will have a “negative…
For me, it all started with Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Then came the tales of Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, Ursula LeGuin. Storytelling that takes vivid imagination combined with some devastating reality to add up to something that is unsettling and disturbing. You can get your socks spooked off by the supernatural, the ghostly, the otherworldly. But a story can also be really freaky even by just nudging at the thin veil between reality and fantasy. As stories like “The Lottery,” “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” show, sometimes the most alarming…
“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover”—Mary Shelley I skipped the day we discussed Frankenstein in my Romantics Literature seminar in my sophomore year of college. It was the late 90s, a time when email existed but was only used for the most urgent and timely emergencies, text messaging was charged per send, and a professor could still reasonably request that you make up for a missed class by visiting them during office hours. I wish I could remember what I believed Frankenstein to be before that lecture, but those impressions escape me. Like Frankenstein…
While automation and machine-learning technologies hold great promise for radiation oncology programmes, speakers at the ASTRO Annual Meeting cautioned that significant challenges remain when it comes to clinical implementation. Joe McEntee reports Automation for the people The challenges around automated treatment planning proved to be a talking point for speakers and delegates at the ASTRO Annual Meeting. Above: Laura Williams, a dosimetrist at Cone Health, reviews an automated treatment plan. (Courtesy: Cone Health) The automation of core processes in the radiation oncology workflow is accelerating, creating the conditions for technology innovation and clinical upside – at scale – across the…
Darrin Bell didn’t set out to write his much anticipated graphic memoir, The Talk. He’d initially sold another project delving into the lives of three generations of men in his family, all descendants of an enslaved man named Addison Bell, in a two book deal to Henry Holt and Co. But as he was working on the original project, George Floyd was murdered and the Black Lives Matter protests began. “My editor Retha called me,” Bell explained, “And she apologized and said, ‘I think maybe we should put this book on the backburner and do another book that deals with…
You Can’t Raise a Daughter on Hope and Junk Food Alone Kristen Gentry Share article A New World by Kristen Gentry Parker stares at his niece Zaria’s stomach, covered by a stretched-out white tank top. Her belly is a dingy full moon creeping on the horizon of the kitchen table. She carries a whole new person, a whole new world. Zaria, sixteen, sits with Parker’s daughter, JayLynn, who is fifteen and wears a new hickey on her neck. It’s smaller than the last one, which was actually two, neighboring islands that were fading by the time Parker saw them. The…
Mitigating skin tone bias Conventional (top rows) and SLSC (bottom rows) photoacoustic images of volunteer 1 (light skin tone) and volunteer 18 (dark skin tone) at 750, 810 and 870 nm. The green arrows indicate the radial artery location; the white arrows show a smaller blood vessel enhanced with SLSC imaging. (Courtesy: CC BY 4.0/G S P Fernandes et al Photoacoustics 10.1016/j.pacs.2023.100555) Photoacoustic (PA) imaging is a non-invasive diagnostic technique that can visualize anatomic structures – such as arteries and blood vessels – up to several centimetres deep into tissue. But while this imaging modality works well for people with…
Join the audience for a live webinar at 2 p.m. GMT/3 p.m. CET on 14 November 2023 exploring MRI-guided radiotherapy quality assurance Want to take part in this webinar? We will delve into the world of MRI-guided radiotherapy systems and the critical role of quality assurance in delivering precise, personalized cancer treatments. This webinar will address the unique challenges and considerations that MRgRT QA presents. From image distortion and system calibration to complex workflows, understanding and mitigating these challenges is vital for every healthcare professional working with MRgRT systems. Moreover, the webinar will delve into well-established quality assurance protocols and procedures…
From trees and mortality to colonialism and FaceTime sex, Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence investigates a restless range of subjects with a truth-finding precision that would be breathtaking for a single poem but is present here across an entire collection. What unites this book is the question of how to speak when one’s personhood or subjectivity is assumed to be nothing and nowhere—when one can’t be plotted on the neat graph of normative racial categories. Further, how does one provide an account of oneself when both account and self are either supposed blank spaces or forever in flux? These concerns are…
Multiple qubit platform: in this diagram, an STM tip coated with iron (top) operates the sensor spin qubit. Also shown are the remote spin qubits, which are aligned by the magnetic fields of nearby iron atoms. (Courtesy: Institute for Basic Science) A quantum computing platform that is capable of the simultaneous operation of multiple spin-based quantum bits (qubits) has been created by researchers in South Korea. Designed by Yujeong Bae, Soo-hyon Phark, Andreas Heinrich and colleagues at the Institute for Basic Science in Seoul, the system is assembled atom-by-atom using a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). While quantum computers of the…
Since Walt Whitman, the American sentence has shape-shifted in and out of forms, from race-car lyrical lines that drive off the page, to fields of hailstorm words floating in white space in a way that resembles visual art, and back to semi-formal stanzas that lilt and groove around a pentameter-like beat. I’ve designed my poetry collection Tiny Extravaganzas around experiments that push against the boundaries of the American sentence. There’s a quiet thrill in being part of a tradition that turns away from the English iambic pentameter line and tries to define the characteristics of a sentence that is uniquely…
We’re celebrating peak fall with this interactive choose-your-own-journey which will let you decide where the story goes, with book recommendations for each chapter! Apple picking or pumpkin picking? Haunted house or Halloween party? Make up or break up? The choice is yours and every answer leads to a different story. The full list of books and stories is linked below. Short stories: Mary Robinson’s Minimalist Sorcery My Slut-Shaming Ghost Can Go to Hell Don’t Trust a Guy Who Promises You the Moon I’m the Wrong Ghost for This Haunting A Wax Man Lit a Fire in My Heart A 5-Star…
[embedded content] Earlier this year, the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World, launched a campaign to persuade journalists to stop using the outdated slang term “boffin†when referring to scientists. The initiative was aimed at the red-top tabloids such as The Sun as well as The Daily Star, who have a particular soft spot for the word. The IOP says that using the term in their coverage has a negative impact and puts people off from studying science. This is because boffin conjures up the image of a scientist being a slightly dishevelled, elderly white man. In this new…
In Myriam Gurba’s latest essay collection Creep, the Mexican American author interrogates both those who deceive, exploit, and oppress others as well as the culture that enables them. “People who hurt other people can be charming,” Gurba notes in the title essay. “It works in their favor.” In Creep, Gurba moves beyond the memoir she became known for with 2017’s critically acclaimed Mean “to writing family history, and in some senses also genealogy. I’m locating myself within literary genealogies and also pedagogical genealogies related to education,” she tells me. Creep’s eleven essays address, among other topics, femicide, the criminalization of…
I have a set of cigarette burns zagging up my right arm. I don’t talk about them to friends—there are mainly two reasons you get burned in that particular way, and neither are good. They’re red and angry-looking, like wasps’ stings, and they’re right above my wrist which means I can’t hide them. The burns sit out in the open for everyone to see. I could say they’re beautiful, but there are some things that should never be recuperated. I will say the cigarette burns are stunning, though. As in: they stun. They stun others when they realize what they…