![]() Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” - John Powers, Fresh Airĭeeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. “Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. ’” - O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020 “While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential. The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” - TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 “ slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. ![]()
0 Comments
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() That is, until a late-night explosion levels a high-tech office parkhome to some of the nations topclandestine programsand provides Nikwithan opportunity to reverse his fortunes.As Nik tries to unravel the mystery at the heart of the explosion, he suddenly finds himself confronting domestic terrorists, rogue American and Chinese spies, mercenaries, and a brilliant but temperamental computer expert.With the help of a small team of colleagues and his new girlfriend,Samantha Whytethe chief investigator for the Northern Virginia Sheriffs Department, who has her own secrets to concealNik follows a bloody trail of bodies from DC to the upper Midwest. Relegated to scut work and the graveyard shift, Niks career and emotions are in a tailspin. But a disruptive corporate merger and a vengeful boss quickly dash his plans. 1st place award in the 2023 Feathered Quill Book Awards, Mystery/Suspense categoryWhen a top secret and powerful US surveillance technology is stolen and offered for sale on the black market, an exiled reporter races to expose the theft and untangle the plotbefore the story is spiked,and he is silenced for good.Coming off a successful investigation into a major banking scandal,Newshoundreporter Nik Byron arrives in Washington, DC, with high hopes for his career. ![]() ![]() Our whole family loved it and it will become a staple in our house. The illustrations are simple yet so effective in getting the message of the story across. The text is repetitive and simple which allowed my daughter, who is at the beginning stages of learning, to read most of it own her own. But it is NOT a box and there is no limit to what it is. In Not a Box a little rabbit defends his imagination each time the narrator wonders what he is doing with what appears to be a box. The author Antoinette Portis creates a world of imagination in the simple line drawings and five colors of Not a Box. The book has been translated into dozens of different languages and has a place on store shelves all over the world. ![]() It has won endless honors including the ALA Theodor Geisel Honor Book, A New York Times Best Illustrated Book for 2007, and has sat on top of the New York Times and Publishers Weekly Best Seller Lists. This little book brings the imagination to life in a big way. ![]() ![]() As each sister finds her path in life, though, one thing remains clear: family means everything to these women. ![]() Each finds love, of a sort, and tragedy is not in short supply-the Great Depression hits one sister’s husband is lost another’s is cast off miscarriages occur. ![]() The four leave their home in the small New South Wales town of Corunda, each with different goals: Grace wants to be a wife and mother Tufts wants independence, Kitty wants to be known for more than her beauty, and Edda longs to be a doctor. Since career options for women are sparse, the sisters enter nursing school, encouraged by their father, the Reverend Thomas Latimer. ![]() Edda and Grace are twins, as are Heather (dubbed Tufts) and Katherine, (called Kitty). In this sweeping historical saga, McCullough ( The Thorn Birds) explores the lives and loves of four sisters in 1920s Australia. ![]() ![]() Reading this in the central plaza of Oaxaca during a sunny week preceding the Day of the Dead made the experience a vital one, and a really embarrassing one as well. ![]() ![]() doom and good fortune are doled out plentifully. it is a jacobean soap opera writ large, candide placed in his trashiest adventure yet: the always-horny narrator moving constantly through varied scenes of destruction, despair, bawdy comedies of manner, periods of learning and excitement, times of cold anger and lingering resentment, from youth to infirmity. some enjoyments inspire only guilt: the numerous, excitedly engorged accounts of atrocity and bloodshed, the overripe sex scenes that become almost ridiculous in their frequency and comically graphic, often grotesque detail. ![]() ![]() some enjoyments are guilt-free: the sense of wonder, the lavish details, the description of native civilizations - so many aspects of so many cultures, all so clearly well-researched and engagingly depicted. If a guilty pleasure can elevate itself to the level of transformative epic, and then come plummeting back down to farce and depravity, and then up again, and then down again, and around and around and around. ![]() ![]() ![]() How have they changed? How do their different lifestyles clash with each other? Can they find their way back to each other? These were all questions I knew I had but didn’t know that I wanted to explore until recently. It’s been 10 years since the end of Champion. And I also wanted to explore my own thoughts for how they get back together, and how they find each other again, and whether they can reconnect. I wanted to see how they had changed and grown. She graduated from the University of Southern California and jumped into the video game industry, working for Disney Interactive Studios as a Flash artist. “Good luck, don’t drink too much!” That was very much how I felt at the end of Champion. Marie Lu (is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels Legend, Prodigy, and Champion, as well as The Young Elites. Not that I have a college-aged kid, but it felt like when you send your kids off to college. I didn’t actually know if they were going to reconnect again. That was how I left them in my head as well. ![]() They had met each other again, but I left it to the reader, what happened to them in the future. ![]() It was the same - a little intimidating! I left them in an open spot at the end of Champion. What was it like returning to those characters’ head-spaces, especially given the reader interest in their dynamic? ![]() ![]() ![]() There are 36 plays collected in the First Folio, divided into 14 comedies, 10 histories, and 11 tragedies-plus Troilus and Cressida, which for some reason is not listed in the table of contents. This seemingly simple question turns out to be hard to answer definitively. Which one is correct? Exactly how many plays did Shakespeare write? ![]() If you search online, you may find different counts-38 or 39. But the number they give for Shakespeare’s plays differs from other lists. At one point, the trio of intrepid performers do some quick math to see how quickly they have to work through Shakespeare’s body of work to achieve this goal, multiplying the time it took to do Romeo and Juliet by 37. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), which will open the Illinois Shakespeare Festival’s 2022 season, attempts to present all of the Bard’s plays in a single evening. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Producers and writers, when adapting books, often use visual shortcuts to convey messages to viewers. ![]() As of early 2022, however, Miranda was off the project, saying he wished he could have brought what he called the "insane Russian nesting doll structure of a book" closer to fruition (via FanSided). It was optioned as far back as 2013 by New Regency and 20th Century TV (via Deadline) but, following a few hiccups, by 2017, was being produced by Showtime as a project spearheaded by Lin-Manuel Miranda (per Entertainment Weekly) and then was dropped, moving to Lionsgate. The series features a rich world full of magic and music that is still awaiting a conclusion following the publication of 2007's "The Name of the Wind" and its sequel, 2011's "The Wise Man's Fear" (along with an offshoot focusing on a supporting character, "The Slow Regard of Silent Things").įans of the series have been following the adaptation for years as it lingered in development hell. And then, of course, there's the unfinished "Kingkiller Chronicle" by author Patrick Rothfuss. There's plenty of rich material left in the fantasy genre to mine, from Brandon Sanderson's "Mistborn" series (which is rumored to be coming) to R.F. ![]() ![]() What will happen if we develop a computer program that forecasts with 100 per cent accuracy the price of oil tomorrow? The price of oil will immediately react to the forecast, which would consequently fail to materialise. Markets, for example, are a level two chaotic system. ![]() ![]() Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately. ![]() Though it is influenced by myriad factors, we can build computer models that take more and more of them into consideration, and produce better and better weather forecasts. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. Not only that, but history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes. ![]() History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. ![]() |