In some ways, The City of Devi is so perfectly on-trend you’ll roll your eyes. It’s the story of a dystopian future, and of a woman called Sarita who just wants to find her husband. There’s even a love triangle! And a superhero movie for everyone to be obsessed with! But in other ways, The City of Devi is like nothing I’ve read before. Pakistan (or some third party claiming to be as Pakistan) has vowed to drop a nuclear bomb on Mumbai / Bombay (the book’s agnostic as to which name it prefers) on a particular day, and the city is…
17 CommentsTag: SCIENCE
Some links that have caught my eye over the past two weeks! Enjoy! Are you familiar with the Kennewick Man? Spend some time on his Wikipedia page — it’s a fascinating story — and then read about why the scientists should feel like dicks now. Awesome zookeepers awesomely doing Chris Pratt’s raptor-taming move. Poetry coopted for Supernatural fanfic: An interview with poet Richard Siken that just fills me with joy for the utter weirdness of the world we live in. A linguist explains how we convey sarcasm typographically. LANGUAGE FINDS A WAY. Alyssa Rosenberg on how white supremacists in pop…
18 CommentsIn my post last year about reading diversely, I forgot to mention another side effect of more diverse reading: gaining new areas of interest. Sri Lanka came onto my radar when I read the beautiful-covered On Sal Mal Lane last year, but it also left me uncertain about the particulars of the country’s civil wars. The difficulty is that when there are no hooks in your brain for new information to grab onto, you’re less willing to take in that information in the first place; and once you have taken it in, you’re less likely to retain it. (This is…
9 CommentsHere is a book I checked out on the recommendation of a few-years-old Best Books of the Year list, the others on the list having appealed to me very little (or else I already read them). It is about a bunch of scientists working at a lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discover cures for cancer by trying different things on rats. One researcher, Cliff, begins to have dramatic results with his experiments, and the lab explodes with excitement and papers and research grants. Gradually his colleague and ex-girlfriend, Robin, begins to believe that his results are fraudulent; and her accusation…
9 Comments