"I've done a lot of time-dilated travel." This statement encapsulates the essence of Grace's journey, highlighting the profound effects of traveling at speeds approaching light, where time for the traveler slows down significantly compared to those remaining on Earth.
I belong to a current of poetry that is meant to be read in public. Houellebecq's statement reflects his philosophy on artistic expression, emphasizing the performative nature of his work across multiple mediums. His musical recordings and public performances demonstrate this commitment to bringing poetry and artistic vision directly to audiences through various channels beyond traditional literary publication.
Stewart Brand thinks big and long. He thinks on a planetary scale as suggested by the title of his celebrated Whole Earth Catalog and on the longest of timeframes, as with his Long Now Foundation, which looks forward to the next 10,000 years of human civilisation. He has had a lifelong fascination with the future, and anything that could get us there faster, from space travel to psychedelic drugs to computing.
This is a shame, because his best work belongs with the greats of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. Summer of Night is a tighter, more satisfying version of Stephen King's It. Carrion Comfort is a brick-sized epic about psychic vampires that reads as breezily as a trade paperback. The Terror, which inspired the well-regarded show, is for its first three-quarters a brilliant and non-supernatural speculative take on a real doomed Arctic expedition.
A study found that reading banned books predicted civic engagement more strongly than personality traits. Reading banned books showed zero correlation with grades, violent crime, or nonviolent crime in adolescents. Reactance theory explains why censorship backfires: Restricted freedoms activate curiosity and thinking.
Peter Drucker saw this symbiosis first. He realized that the new industrial order would depend on a worker who produced ideas instead of widgets. The knowledge worker became the engine of prosperity, and management became the social technology that synchronized millions of minds. The modern firm was as much an invention as the transistor it depended on. Three decades later, Tom Peters caught the next wave.
Back in December, when SFWA announced that it was updating its rules for the Nebula Awards. Works written entirely by large language models would not be eligible, while authors who used LLMs "at any point during the writing process" had to disclose that use, allowing award voters to make their own decisions about whether that usage would affect their support.
Sophia wasn't particularly talkative that evening. Earlier that day, she'd been onstage at the conference I was attending and had been teased for a gesture that looked as though she were flipping off the audience. Now she was in the hotel lobby, in a black gown, holding court. She stepped in front of a bright-orange wall. I had brought an 85-mm. portrait lens, the kind that flatters human lineaments.
Books rise to the level of enduring art, I believe, when their writers take something ordinary and reintroduce it in a way that radically transforms it. The right work can make a subject that's never crossed my mind, or that strikes me as aggressively boring, into something incantatory, pulsing with meaning.
Trained as a historian of medieval warfare, Yuval Noah Harari has become one of the most influential public intellectuals in the world, shaping global debates about artificial intelligence, human identity, and the future of society. Richard Utz traces how a medievalist moved from specialist scholarship to cultural prophecy-and why the habits of medieval history still matter for understanding his voice today.
February 2026 issue.When I was a child I was terrifiedof the space between One and Zero vast as the ages before my birthstrait as my death-late at night I heard my parents arguinglovingly in their locked room, the angora cat coming homewith a sparrow in her mouth, and the raindrops on the shinglescounting themselves-how to sleep, how to cross the empty placebetween the name "sparrow" and that limp thing crying,adamant, creating me with its cry
The world hasn't gotten any less dystopian, and so it makes sense that Netflix has greenlit Black Mirror for Season 8. No release date or episode count has been confirmed for the dark anthology series, which has been a Netflix staple since its third season, but creator Charlie Brooker says that "That chunk of my brain has already been activated and is whirring away."
Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.
A drawn circle is at least something physical. You can see it, touch it, erase it. The skeptic can still say, "Circles are grounded in physical reality. Justice is different; it's just an idea in your head." So let's talk about the number two. Point to it. Not two apples, not two fingers, not a numeral on a page-that's just a symbol.
They escaped persecution in the form of violent antisemitism and came to Canada with next to nothing. They built their lives from the ground up and understood, through lived experience, what the normalization of cruelty did to the human spirit, how quickly people can be swayed by the opinions of the day, and how easily one could forfeit the human capacity to stop and truly think about what one is doing.
What is available is the daydream-a limitless realm of freedom. In this other world, one might be famous or rich, finally catch the attention of their beloved, or simply sit on a beach as a waiter brings them cocktails. They might fly or speak to animals, heroically save a child, tell off their boss with no consequences, win the Super Bowl at the whistle, or travel to another continent, planet, or time period. No one can stop them; no one can even object.
Texas A&M University last week banned a philosophy professor from teaching about Plato's Symposium because it's too gay, and, while obviously philosophy classes should be allowed to teach about Plato and state lawmakers and administrators shouldn't be interfering in curricula... they are right that the specific texts that they banned are pretty gay. If the legislators' and administrators' goal is to make LGBTQ+ people feel more isolated and alone as a way of getting them to conform and pretend to be cisgender and heterosexual,
