Category Archives: New Utopia

Katie Holmes and musician Bobby Wooten III are still going strong and look pretty smitten.

The two were photographed out together in New York City again just before the start of the weekend, and both were all smiles as they walked hand-in-hand. Katiewore a tan sleeveless jumpsuit and black sneakers while the Broadway starsported a gray T-shirtover a pair ofkhakis and black shoes as they strolled through Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

Their outing comes more than two months after they made their red carpet debut as a couple at the Moth's Silver Ball in the city. The event honoredsinger-songwriterDavid Byrne, who Bobby worked with on the BroadwayrecordingofAmerican Utopia.

Katie, 43, and Bobby, 41, took their romance publicin April, when they were photographed showing PDA in New York City. During their day out, the couplestrolled through Central Park andvisited the Guggenheim Museum. They also spent time withthe actress'momKathy Holmes.

In May, Katie and Bobby were seen again out in New York City over Mother's Day.

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Katie Holmes and Bobby Wooten III Are All Smiles on Romantic NYC Stroll - E! NEWS

Imagine a world where plants evolved and became walking, talking creatures.

Thats director Anand Rajarams invitation to audiences in As You Like It, one of the headline events in this summers Dream in High Park series. Rajarams 90-minute version of Shakespeares comedy officially opens on August 4 and runs through September 4 at the High Park Amphitheatre.

Rajarams goal is to make the production accessible to the widest possible audience and that meant starting from a place where children will understand it, as well as those for whom Shakespeare is foreign or English is a second language, or anyone who just understands cinematically, visually, by pictures, he said.

The idea that the characters are more than human came out of discussions with Anne Barber and Brad Harley of Shadowland Theatre, who are designing sets, costumes and props for the show. I told Shadowland that I dont want there to be human beings onstage because I want the audience to be in a place of What is this? said Rajaram. And Shadowland said, Well, what if everyones a plant of some kind?

He believes audiences will buy into the conceit quickly because weve got Pixar, weve got Monsters, Inc., weve got Cars, weve got Toy Story. Weve got all these things that are heightened reality, said Rajaram. Theres a very strong cartoon esthetic to the show. The idea is its a live cartoon.

Shakespeare aficionados who come in expecting something close to published versions of the script might initially be disoriented. But the people who approach it with an open mind, I think, will see it very differently, said Rajaram. The show features new music by five contemporary recording artists, including Serena Ryder, Kiran Ahluwalia, Lacey Hill, Maryem Tollar and an anonymous contributor.

This is a full-circle moment for Rajaram, whos never directed a major production before. His first professional acting job was in a High Park production of A Midsummer Nights Dream in 1996, a gig he pursued doggedly because the Shakespeare in High Park productions he saw in high school were the only ones in which he felt there could be space for him onstage. Because of the openness of the space and the openness of casting, (High Park) was the first place I went to when starting his career, said Rajaram.

As You Like It is a story of overturnings and reinventions: Duke Senior and his daughter Rosalind are banished from the court by Duke Frederick, Seniors brother. Before leaving, Rosalind falls in love with Orlando, who pursues her to the Forest of Arden. In the forest there are multiple and overlapping romances, including Rosalind dressing as a boy and inviting Orlando to woo her as if she were Rosalind (which of course, she is). Meanwhile, Duke Senior tries to remake his life in a new setting.

When approaching the play, Rajaram started with the title: What does As You Like It mean? I think it means the world as you would like it to be, he said.

He turned to Thomas Mores book Utopia, published in the mid-16th century, which proposes another land which has different rules than the present and shows some things that are good and some things that are bad, but just shows alternate ways of living, said Rajaram.

So if its As You Like It and we start in a place where everybodys destabilized, everybodys trying to find stability, peace, whatever, then when they get to the forest, then thats their opportunity to figure that out.

Rajaram found contemporary resonance in the idea of trying to rebuild a society without duplicating existing power structures. Were in a time of great destabilization, financially and socially, and all the paradigms that we knew are kind of crumbling and new ones are arising. We are actively seeking utopia but tearing down a statue doesnt attain it, he said. The building after is the hard part and thats where all the characters are.

To reinforce this idea of breaking down hierarchies, Rajaram came to rehearsals with a gold crown on his head, wearing a costume: a big velvet peacock puppet with its head in front of him and tail behind.

Ive seen directors who will show up at rehearsal wearing a suit because its a mark of authority, he said. This is kind of a playful upturning of the idea. Im the king in the room, but Im also riding a peacock. Its to maintain a sense of play in the room and maintain a sense of not taking things too seriously.

Everyone responds differently to his costume, Rajaram added, but nobody has a negative response.

Working on the show has allowed Rajaram to explore the concept of utopia in depth.

When we go to the forest, its all things dying and decaying and mushroomy and fungusy, and thats scary. But thats where the richness of everything really is, where its free and abundant, he said.

Utopia ultimately is reconciling mortality. Once you arent afraid of death anymore, thats when you achieve utopia. Thats what love is, fundamentally, is when its timeless and theres no fear of death.

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Shakespeares As You Like It is reimagined as a utopia with talking plants for the Dream in High Park - Toronto Star

Published: August 4, 2022

MSNBC Op-Ed Proposes New Kind of Atheism Will Solve Americas Moral Woes

By Movieguide Staff

According to Zeeshan Aleem, not only are women across the country being held hostage by a conservative Christian conception of life, but the solution is a new style of Atheism.

In a new op-ed Why America needs a new kind of atheism right now,: Aleem posits that an energetic, organized atheist movement would help guard against intensifying religious extremism on one end, and the atomizing social consequences of a plunge in conventional religiosity on the other.

Aleems motion towards communitarian atheism, as he calls it, was spurred on by the recent Supreme Court Ruling that overturned the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade.

Aleem, a former Muslim, said that his conversion to atheism enlivened him:

Some people think of atheists as rudderless and living in a cold, meaningless world. My experience was the opposite. Atheism enlivened me and spurred me to develop a broader skepticism of all manner of received wisdom. The displacement of heaven inspired me to think about achieving utopia on earth; my reading skewed in a radically left-wing direction, and I pivoted toward political activism.

While Aleem claims that his new atheism offers a gateway for many Americans to contemplate important questions, form community, and think about how to collectively better the only world we can be sure we have, mere contemplation is not enough to find purpose.

The central pitfall of atheism, even the new version that Aleem proposes, is that it lacks any moral basis that can be used to establish a purpose to live.

Movieguide founder Dr. Ted Baehr wrote on atheism:

Atheism is the disbelief or denial of the existence of God or a supreme intelligent being. Atheism is a ferocious system that leaves nothing above us to excite awe, nor around us to awaken tenderness.

Because the atheist rejects any belief in the supernatural, he must view man as an evolutionary creature with no objective basis of morality. Ethics can only be subjective and self-defined, leading to the survival of the strong and destruction of the weak.

Aborting babies in the womb, infanticide, euthanasia, and totalitarianism are common practices in an atheistic culture.

Popular podcaster and political pundit Ben Shapiro echoed this in a recent statement: It is no coincidence that the most militantly atheistic governments communist and fascist governments of the 20th century have been far more murderous and tyrannical than any religious theocracy in history. Atheism promotes a vision of mankind entirely at odds with the building of a productive society.

As the former atheist turned theologian C.S. Lewis once said: A man can no more diminish Gods glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word darkness on the walls of his cell.

David addresses the same idea in Psalm 14:1, which simply reads: The fool says in his heart, There is no God.'

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MSNBC Op-Ed Proposes 'New Kind of Atheism' Will Solve America's Moral Woes - Movieguide

The superstar author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks is finally coming to Christchurch kind of.

In a parallel universe where the Covid-19 virus did not rearrange the human world in 2020, my novel Utopia Avenue was published in the regular manner and I visited New Zealand and Australia to appear at literary festivals. I was especially looking forward to the Word Christchurch Festival. Its director, the writer Rachael King, had suggested a joint event with a musician to complement UtopiaAvenues musical themes. To my surprise and delight, Hollie Fullbrook of the combo Tiny Ruins accepted our invitation to appearin anodd gig presenting her songs and my readings from my novel. I met Hollie and her music on my last visit to New Zealand in 2016 and divined something truly special in her ethereal, grounded, witty, yearning songs.

In this universe, alas, the virus did its grimworst. Flights were grounded, quarantine barriers went up and few of us went anywhere. Rachael and I agreed to see how next year looked when it arrived. When it did, we agreed that my coming to Christchurch in August wasnt going to happen. But could I attend virtually? If so, how? We werent sure, but we both felt it would be worth Zooming with Hollie to see if any ideas emerged.

All I knew, going into that conversation, was what Ididntwant to do. During my virtual book tour for Utopia Avenue, I discovered with countless other authors that reading scenes from novels doesnt really work the way it does when youre reading live on stage. Its as if the presence of the author is needed to compensate for the episodic nature of that exercise. Without that authorial presence, readings excised from a bigger narrative feel a bit flat, truncated and meh. What works better, I believe, are short, complete narratives with their own beginnings, middles and ends. These look and feel more like visual audiobooks or even story time, when youre a kid.

During Hollies and my long and winding Zoom, pieces of a new idea for a half-virtual, half-corporeal show emerged. First, I would send Hollie a few unpublished stories to see if they might give her ideas for some new songs. Second, Id go metal-detecting in Tiny Ruins discography for ideas for possible stories. If stages one and two went well, we would film me reading my new Tiny Ruinous Stories as well as the stories Hollie had chosen to respond to musically. These videos of me reading would form the words half of a words and music event on stage where Hollie sings the songs live and in person, interspersed with me reading the stories not live and not in person, but kind of. Like a ghost.

Id never tried anything like this before. I dont really know how I write stories, but They just sort of come is the best description of the process Ive ever been able to muster. Which is less of a description and more of an evasion. Certainly, Ive never tried foraging for stories in other peoples songs without their permission, it would feel like a bit of a liberty. How would I go about it? I began with One Million Flowers off Tiny Ruins Olympic Girls LP of 2019, just because it is impossibly beautiful and makes me glad to be alive so I can listen to it. I asked myself two questions: If the narrator of this song was a fictional character, who would they be? and Under what circumstances might this character think the lines and experience the emotions present in this song?

By answering those two questions, by using clues in the songs, my story One Million Flowers came pretty quickly. It felt natural to embed fragments of song lyrics into the story, so I did. Attentive listeners will be rewarded, Easter egg-like, by flashes of recognition when Hollie sings the song alongside my reading of the story. Since this method worked I think I repeated it for other Tiny Ruins songs that weave a particular bewitchment: Carriages, Priest With Balloons and Bird in the Thyme. The stories have to be concise prose tends to take longer to read than songs take to sing and as a writer, I go on a bit. (Try editing me: Im a nightmare.)

So I arranged my four stories into a connected quartet. Like batteries in a row feeding voltage into the next battery along, my hope is that the four add up to more than the sum of the parts. The narrator of each story is the same woman a pianist, as it happens and the stories track her relationship with love, music and reality at four different stages in her life. My hope is that, when combined with Hollies songs, the Tiny Ruins Quartet (as I called the folder on my laptop) will be the strangest mini-musical ever witnessed on the venerable boards of The Piano in Christchurch.

How Hollie went about growing songs out of the compost of my stories is a question for Hollie to answer, as, when and if. At the time of writing this, however, she had shared the demo of a song responding to a story I wrote called Lots of Bits of Star and I love it. Im excited by her choices of the stories I sent. She has chosen narratives that are close to my heart.

My stories are recorded against a suitably trippy backdrop (youll see what I mean) at the De Barras Folk Club in my hometown of Clonakilty, Ireland where, with pleasing symmetry, Hollie has performed in previous years during the Clonakilty Guitar Festival.

Covid did us in again in 2021, but its finally happening in 2022. I wish I could be present in Christchurch on September 1 to see Hollies and my 12,000-mile collaboration in person. Then again, if I could be present in person, what Hollie and I have imagined into being a 90 minute trip through a landscape of songs and stories that reflect, echo, amplify, harmonise with and above all, trust eachother would not have happened in the first place. Even a global pandemic can bring gifts, and the chance to work with and learn from Hollie is a gift I cherish. So. Ill be present at The Piano in spirit, in story and onscreen, and Ill hope to visit Christchurch the next time I publish. In this universe. Please.

Go raibh maith agat, kia ora and thank you to De Barras owner Ray Blackwell and recording team John Fitzgerald and Sean Phair, plus the Irish Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, and APRA AMCOS in New Zealand.

David Mitchell appears in two events at Word Christchurch Festival(31 August 4 September): hes in conversation with Rachael King for The Faraway Near, followed by the collab with Tiny Ruins, If I Were a Story and You Were a Song, both on 1 September.

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David Mitchell on his extraordinary collab with Tiny Ruins' Hollie Fullbrook - The Spinoff

This August, the theme of NHK WORLD-Japan is Idealism+AI=Utopia? Is.

Also on the show: the science fiction drama Three Reigns, the English language version of which celebrated its world premiere at the Nippon Connection Film Festival this year.

Teenage Reign Japan is in deep stagnation. To revive the country, the government is relying on the Utop-AI experiment, in which the selection of new leaders is left to an artificial intelligence.

The program aims to combine the idealism of the youth with the wisdom of the past provided by AI. Ultimately, the choice of artificial intelligence falls on a 17-year-old boy who leads a management team of other youngsters.

Miracle: Sunday August 21 Episode 1 Sunday August 28 Episode 2

Subtitles 2:10 / 14:10 . with Sync version 8:10 / 20:10

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Artist Against War

The new episode of the Artists Against War series follows Japanese contemporary artist Morimura Yasumasa and his reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Known for his own paintings, the internationally acclaimed artist has clear ideas on how artists should react to recent events.

Miracle: Wednesday August 3rd at 3:30 AM / 8:30 AM / 2:30 PM / 7:30 PM / 12:30 AM

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Daily Life in Time of War

The documentary Daily Life in Times of War is about young peoples diverse efforts to preserve the knowledge of those who survived World War II for generations to come. They interview survivors to learn what it was like to be in the war. To prevent their stories from being forgotten, they ban it, for example, in video games or animations.

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Miracle: Saturday August 6th at 2:10 am / 8:10 am / 2:10 pm / 8:10 pm

Sharing the Future

Sharing the Future is a collection of inspiring stories about the people of Japan trying new ideas and efforts to support communities in developing countries around the world.

Talent Wednesday August 3 at 4:30 AM / 9:30 AM / 3:30 PM / 9:30 PM

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NHK World-Japan: Focus In August - Nation World News

Few things are harder than hurling a robot into space and sticking the landing. On the morning of July 4, 1997, mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., were hoping to beat the odds and land a spacecraft successfully on the Red Planet.

Twenty-five years ago that little robot, a six-wheeled rover named Sojourner, made it becoming the first in a string of rovers built and operated by NASA to explore Mars. Four more NASA rovers, each more capable and complex than the last, have surveyed the Red Planet. The one named Curiosity marked its 10th year of cruising around on August 5. Another, named Perseverance, is busy collecting rocks that future robots are supposed to retrieve and bring back to Earth. China recently got into the Mars exploring game, landing its own rover, Zhurong, last year.

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Other Mars spacecraft have done amazing science from a standstill, such as the twin Viking landers in the 1970s that were the first to photograph the Martian surface up close and the InSight probe that has been listening for Marsquakes shaking the planets innards (SN Online: 2/24/20). But the ability to rove turns a robot into an interplanetary field geologist, able to explore the landscape and piece together clues to its history. Mobility, says Kirsten Siebach, a planetary scientist at Rice University in Houston, makes it a journey of discovery.

Each of the Mars rovers has gone to a different place on the planet, enabling scientists to build a broad understanding of how Mars evolved over time. The rovers revealed that Mars contained water, and other life-friendly conditions, for much of its history. That work set the stage for Perseverances ongoing hunt for signs of ancient life on Mars.

Each rover is also a reflection of the humans who designed and built and drove it. Perseverance carries on one of its wheels a symbol of Mars rover tracks twisted into the double helix shape of DNA. Thats to remind us, whatever this rover is, its of human origin, says Jennifer Trosper, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab, or JPL, who has worked on all five NASA rovers. It is us on Mars, and kind of our creation.

Sojourner, that first rover, was born in an era when engineers werent sure if they even could get a robot to work on Mars. In the early 1990s, then-NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin was pushing the agency to do things faster, better and cheaper a catchphrase that engineers would mock by saying only two of those three things were possible at the same time. NASA had no experience with interplanetary rovers. Only the Soviet Union had operated rovers on the moon in 1970 and 1973.

JPL began developing a Mars rover anyway. Named after the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, the basic machine was the size of a microwave oven. Engineers were limited in where they could send it; they needed a large flat region on Mars because handling a precision landing near mountains or canyons was beyond their abilities. NASA chose Ares Vallis, a broad outflow channel from an ancient flood, and the mission landed there successfully.

Sojourner spent nearly three months poking around the landscape. It was slow going. Mission controllers had to communicate with Sojourner constantly, telling it where to roll and then assessing whether it had gotten there safely. They made mistakes: One time they uploaded a sequence of computer commands that mistakenly told the rover to shut itself down. They recovered from that stumble and many others, learning to quickly fix problems and move forward.

Although Sojourner was a test mission to show that a rover could work, it managed to do some science with its one X-ray spectrometer. The little machine analyzed the chemical makeup of 15 Martian rocks and tested the friction of the Martian soil.

After surviving 11 weeks beyond its planned one-week lifetime, Sojourner ultimately grew too cold to operate. Trosper was in mission control when the rover died on September 27, 1997. You build these things, and even if theyre well beyond their lifetime, you just cant let go very easily, because theyre part of you, she says.

In 1998 and 1999, NASA hurled a pair of spacecraft at Mars; one was supposed to orbit the planet and another was supposed to land near one of the poles. Both failed. Stung from the disappointment, NASA decided to build a rover plus a backup for its next attempt.

Thus were born the twins Spirit and Opportunity. Each the size of a golf cart, they were a major step up from Sojourner. Each had a robotic arm, a crucial development in rover evolution that enabled the machines to do increasingly sophisticated science. The two had beefed-up cameras, three spectrometers and a tool that could grind into rocks to reveal the texture beneath the surface.

But there were a lot of bugs to work out. Spirit and Opportunity launched several weeks apart in 2003. Spirit got to Mars first, and on its 18th Martian day on the surface it froze up and started sending error messages. It took mission controllers days to sort out the problem an overloaded flash-memory system all while Opportunity was barreling toward Mars. Ultimately, engineers fixed the problem, and Opportunity landed safely on the opposite side of the planet from Spirit.

Both rovers lasted years beyond their expected three-month lifetimes. And both did far more Martian science than anticipated.

Spirit broke one of its wheels early on and had to drive backward, dragging the broken wheel behind it. But the rover found plenty to do near its landing site of Gusev crater, home to a classic Mars landscape of dust, rock and hills. Spirit found rocks that appeared to have been altered by water long ago and later spotted a pair of iron-rich meteorites. The rover ultimately perished in 2010, stuck in a sand-filled pit. Mission controllers tried to extract it in an effort dubbed Free Spirit, but salts had precipitated around the sand grains, making them particularly slippery.

Opportunity, in contrast, became the Energizer Bunny of rovers, exploring constantly and refusing to die. Immediately after landing in Meridiani Planum, Opportunity had scientists abuzz.

The images that the rover first sent back were just so different from any other images wed seen of the Martian surface, says Abigail Fraeman, a planetary scientist at JPL. Instead of these really dusty volcanic plains, there was just this dark sand and this really bright bedrock. And that was just so captivating and inspiring.

Right at its landing site, Opportunity spotted the first definitive evidence of past liquid water on Mars, a much-anticipated and huge discovery (SN: 3/27/04, p. 195). The rover went on to find evidence of liquid water at different times in the Martian past. After years of driving, the rover reached a crater called Endeavour and stepped into a totally new world, Fraeman says. The rocks at Endeavour were hundreds of millions of years older than others studied on Mars. They contained evidence of different types of ancient water chemistry.

Opportunity ultimately drove farther than any rover on any extraterrestrial world, breaking a Soviet rovers lunar record. In 2015, Opportunity passed 26.2 miles (42.2 km) on its odometer; mission controllers celebrated by putting a marathon medal onto a mock-up of the rover and driving it through a finish line ribbon at JPL. Opportunity finally died in 2019 after an intense dust storm obscured the sun, cutting off solar power, a must-have for the rover to recharge its batteries (SN: 3/16/19, p. 7).

The twin rovers were a huge advance over Sojourner. But the next rover was an entirely different beast.

By the mid-2000s, NASA had decided it needed to go big on Mars, with a megarover the size of a sports utility vehicle. The one-ton Curiosity was so heavy that its engineers had to come up with an entirely new way to land on Mars. The sky crane system used retro-rockets to hover above the Martian surface and slowly lower the rover to the ground.

Against all odds, in August 2012, Curiosity landed safely near Mount Sharp, a 5-kilometer-high pile of sediment within the 154-kilometer-wide Gale crater (SN: 8/25/12, p. 5). Unlike the first three Mars rovers, which were solar-powered, Curiosity runs on energy produced by the radioactive decay of plutonium. That allows the rover to travel farther and faster, and to power a suite of sophisticated science instruments, including two chemical laboratories.

Curiosity introduced a new way of exploring Mars. When the rover arrives in a new area, it looks around with its cameras, then zaps interesting rocks with its laser to identify which ones are worth a closer look. Once up close, the rover stretches out its robotic arm and does science, including drilling into rocks to see what they are made of.

When Curiosity arrived near the base of Mount Sharp, it immediately spotted rounded pebbles shaped by a once-flowing river, the first closeup look at an ancient river on Mars. Then mission controllers sent the rover rolling away from the mountain, toward an area in the crater known as Yellowknife Bay. There Curiosity discovered evidence of an ancient lake that created life-friendly conditions for potentially many thousands of years.

Curiosity then headed back toward the foothills of Mount Sharp. Along the way, the rover discovered a range of organic molecules in many different rocks, hinting at environments that had been habitable for millions to tens of millions of years. It sniffed methane gas sporadically wafting within Gale crater, a still-unexplained mystery that could result from geologic reactions, though methane on Earth can be formed by living organisms (SN: 7/7/18, p. 8). The rover measured radiation levels across the surface helpful for future astronauts wholl need to gauge their exposure and observed dust devils, clouds and eclipses in the Martian atmosphere and night sky.

Weve encountered so many unexpectedly rich things, says Ashwin Vasavada of JPL, the missions project scientist. Im just glad a place like this existed.

Ten years into its mission, Curiosity still trundles on, making new discoveries as it climbs the foothills of Mount Sharp. It recently departed a clay-rich environment and is now entering one that is heavier in sulfates, a transition that may reflect a major shift in the Martian climate billions of years ago.

In the course of driving more than 28 kilometers, Curiosity has weathered major glitches, including one that shuttered its drilling system for over a year. And its wheels have been banged up more than earthbound tests had predicted. The rover will continue to roll until some unknown failure kills it or its plutonium power wanes, perhaps five years from now.

NASAs first four rovers set the stage for the most capable and agile rover ever to visit Mars: Perseverance. Trosper likens the evolution of the machines to the growth of children. We have a preschooler in Sojourner, and then your happy-go-lucky teenagers in Spirit and Opportunity, she says. Curiosity is certainly a young adult thats able to do a lot of things on her own, and Perseverance is kind of that high-powered midcareer [person] able to do pretty much anything you ask with really no questions.

Perseverance is basically a copy of Curiosity built from its spare parts, but with one major modification: a system for drilling, collecting and storing slender cores of rock. Perseverances job is to collect samples of Martian rock for future missions to bring to Earth, in what would be the first robotic sample return from Mars. That would allow scientists to do sophisticated analyses of Martian rocks in their earthbound labs. It feels, even more than previous missions, that we are doing this for the next generation, Siebach says.

The rover is working fast. Compared with Curiositys leisurely exploration of Gale crater, Perseverance has been zooming around its landing site, the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero crater, since its February 2021 arrival. It has collected 10 rock cores and is already eyeing where to put them down on the surface for future missions to pick up. Were going to bring samples back from a diversity of locations, says mission project scientist Kenneth Farley of Caltech. And so we keep to a schedule.

Perseverance went to Jezero to study an ancient river delta, which contains layers of sediment that may harbor evidence of ancient Martian life. But the rover slightly missed its target, landing on the other side of a set of impassable sand dunes. So it spent most of its first year exploring the crater floor, which turned out to be made of igneous rocks (SN: 9/11/21, p. 32). The rocks had cooled from molten magma and were not the sedimentary rocks that many had expected.

Scientists back on Earth will be able to precisely date the age of the igneous rocks, based on the radioactive decay of chemical elements within them, providing the first direct evidence for the age of rocks from a particular place on Mars.

Once it finished exploring the crater floor in March, the rover drove quickly toward the delta. Each successive NASA rover has had greater skills in autonomous driving, able to identify hazards, steer around them and keep going without needing constant instructions from mission control.

Perseverance has a separate computer processor to run calculations for autonomous navigation, allowing it to move faster than Curiosity. (It took Curiosity two and a half years to travel 10 kilometers; Perseverance traveled that far in a little over a year.) The rover drives pretty much every minute that we can give it, Farley says.

In April, Perseverance set a Martian driving record, traveling nearly five kilometers in just 30 Martian days. If all goes well, it will make some trips up and down the delta, then travel to Jezero craters rim and out onto the ancient plains beyond.

Perseverance has a sidekick, Ingenuity, the first helicopter to visit another world. The nimble flier, only half a meter tall, succeeded beyond its designers wildest dreams. The helicopter made 29 flights in its first 16 months when it was only supposed to make five in one month. It has scouted paths ahead and scientific targets for the rover (SN Online: 4/19/22). Future rovers are almost certain to carry a little buddy like this.

While the United States has led in Mars rover exploration, it is not the only player on the scene. In May 2021, China became the second nation to successfully place a rover on Mars. Its Zhurong rover, named after a mythological fire god, has been exploring part of a large basin in the planets northern hemisphere known as Utopia Planitia.

The landing site lies near a geologic boundary that may be an ancient Martian shoreline. Compared with the other Mars rover locations, Zhurongs landing site is billions of years younger, so we are investigating a different world on Mars, says Lu Pan, a planetary scientist at the University of Copenhagen who has collaborated with Zhurong scientists.

In many ways, Zhurong resembles Spirit and Opportunity, in size as well as mobility. It carries cameras, a laser spectrometer for studying rocks and ground-penetrating radar to probe underground soil structures (SN Online: 5/19/21).

After landing, Zhurong snapped pictures of its rock-strewn surroundings and headed south to explore a variety of geologic terrains, including mysterious cones that could be mud volcanoes and ridges that look like windblown dunes. The rovers initial findings include that the Martian soil at Utopia Planitia is similar to some desert sands on Earth and that water had been present there perhaps as recently as 700 million years ago.

In May, mission controllers switched Zhurong into dormant mode for the Martian winter and hope it wakes up at the end of the season, in December. It has already traveled nearly two kilometers across the surface, farther than the meager 100 meters that Sojourner managed. (To be fair, Sojourner had to keep circling its lander because it relied on that lander to communicate with Earth.)

From Sojourner to Zhurong, the Mars rovers show what humankind can accomplish on another planet. Future rovers might include the European Space Agencys ExoMars, although its 2022 launch was postponed after Russia attacked Ukraine (SN: 3/26/22, p. 6). Europe terminated all research collaborations with Russia after the invasion, including launching ExoMars on a Russian rocket.

Vasavada remembers his sense of awe at the Curiosity launch in 2011: Standing there in Florida, watching this rocket blasting off and feeling it in your chest and knowing that theres this incredibly fragile complex machine hurtling on the end of this rocket. It just gave me this full impression that here we are, humans, blasting these things off into space, he says. Were little tiny human beings sending these things to another planet.

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How Mars rovers have evolved in 25 years of exploring the Red Planet - Science News Magazine

One of the most remarkable occurrences in recent Irish economic history is how quickly the Irish labour market recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic. As recently as January there were still restrictions on aspects of the Irish economy, but now just a few months on we effectively have full employment.

f course, Ireland was at full employment before the pandemic commenced, yet the sheer speed of the recovery has been astounding.

While data shows that pubs, hotels and restaurants have recovered the least, normally there would be even more extensive scarring after such a tumultuous event, yet here we are.

Most European countries recovered in a similar fashion, but by no means all. Unemployment in Spain still stands at 12.6pc, in Greece its 12.3pc, in France 7.2pc, and in Italy 8.1pc.

Clearly there are structural issues at play in these countries and many of them have been buffeted by stagflationary headwinds as a result. Spain is not just grappling with a sapping unemployment problem, but in June it was also dealing with inflation of 10.2pc, while in Greece inflation is running at an eye-watering 12pc.

The ability of a society to absorb such punitive price rises is heavily influenced by the level of employment and, on that front at least, Ireland currently sits in a comfortable position. Nobody likes to see their real wages falling, but its substantially less painful if you keep your job.

Now that full employment has been reached it prompts one obvious question. Who is getting the jobs?

For many years asking such a question ran into a brick wall of local politics. During and after the economic crash it seemed every TD and councillor worth their clientelist salt proclaimed their area to be an unemployment blackspot, woefully neglected by the State agencies and central Government.

While local political representatives have a duty and a right to represent their constituents, much of the commentary was preposterously overblown, particularly when certain politicians claimed their area was not just neglected, but uniquely so.

One variation on the theme was that Dublin was hoovering up jobs at the expense of other regions, that we had lopsided job growth, that all roads led to Dublin, and if they didnt lead to Dublin, well then they led to Cork and, at a stretch, Limerick.

Much of this commentary was based on reductively seeking out job and site visit numbers for foreign-owned companies, rather than factoring in all ownership forms, which might produce a more balanced and less polemical picture.

But looking at the current job market and the data on who doesnt have a job, rather than who does, its obvious that there isnt much fertile territory for those trying to manufacture a political conspiracy.

For example, June live register data show there were just shy of 187,000 people signing on. Dublin had 26pc of this group, broadly in line with Dublins share of national population overall.

The Midlands, meanwhile, had 7pc of the jobless, again broadly in line with its national demographic distribution. The Border region, which has acquired a reputation as a tough region to create jobs due to its proximity to competitor Northern Ireland, has a slightly higher proportion of jobless than its portion of national population, but not hugely so. Such a prosaic picture emerges even more strongly when all the components of job creation are included and more selective accounts are ignored.

This is because the area where the lopsided jobs theory gets its greatest airing is in connection with foreign direct investment. Here thinking over recent years has become slightly surreal at times. For example, in recent weeks one local newspaper in Co Louth suggested that State agencies were failing in their mission to the county by not splitting evenly all the foreign derived jobs between Dundalk and Drogheda. The idea that State agencies, and the assorted companies involved, should work towards splitting jobs 50:50 between two towns is truly in the realm of the fantastical and betrays some of the outmoded and parochial thinking that arguably damages some towns more than helps them.

Much of this thinking has deep historical roots. In the early days of foreign direct investment in the 50s and 60s foreign-owned factories would as if from the sky land in a Midlands or Border town. Few then, and it seems now, ever had to ask why the factory was coming in the first place. As a result, a sort of employment cargo cult developed.

It seems few believe its worthwhile, or important, to create a compelling narrative about why their town would be the ideal host for an expanding enterprise, domestic or foreign. One reason such narratives are needed more than ever is because the idea of a physical office itself is being actively questioned around the world and, in a full employment landscape, its possible towns and cities with surplus labour will carry an advantage.

In any case, the most recent data on foreign direct investment and regional locations actually undermines the idea that certain regions are progressively falling behind or being deliberately neglected. For example, the recently published IDA annual report shows that Dublin has not been the biggest winner from inward investment over recent years in employment growth terms at all. That accolade went to the Midlands which grew foreign company employment by 9.6pc over the last five years, with Dublin stuck back on 8.6pc. Admittedly the figures for the Midlands are from a low base, but they certainly do not speak of deliberate neglect or lack of effort.

Other regions however are continuing to face a difficulty with the Border region only growing its foreign-company jobs by 2.7pc over five years. But looks again can be deceiving. Northwest region was the best performer in terms of domestic employment growth via Enterprise Ireland companies in 2021, ahead of Dublin and the Munster region for example.

Dublin certainly remains the cockpit for foreign investment with over 40pc of employment overall, but its worth remembering that foreign-owned corporations are not the main sector of the economy when measured by employment. For example, just 32pc of domestic Enterprise Ireland-backed firms are located in Dublin with a vibrant 68pc outside the capital.

Ultimately death by data point serves nobody and is of almost zero interest to anyone coming to Ireland to make an investment. I know this from the direct exposure I had to decision makers from overseas companies when I worked at IDA Ireland several years ago. This was made clear on several occasions.

What many towns could usefully try to do is create a new narrative that talks less about the unfairness of a competing location winning all the investment, and more about the persuasive reasons someone should invest in their town, city orregion. Also never forget the reach of Google. When a region tells the world its an economic blackspot without much of a demographic or commercial future, its should be no surprise when the outside world starts to believe it.

Original post:

Local clamour for FDI jobs ignores the reality of our employment utopia - Independent.ie

A new 4 million investment will deliver a second phase of the LawtechUK programme, supporting modernisation through the development of new technology like machine learning and data analytics tools.

This will help ensure the UK retains its competitive global edge, create jobs and boost access to legal services for individuals and businesses through technology.

LawtechUK is a government-backed initiative, launched in 2019, with an initial 2 million investment to transform the UK legal sector through technology, providing resources, programmes and courses to promote new ways of delivering and accessing legal services via digital solutions.

Justice Minister Lord Bellamy QC said:

A thriving lawtech sector will help ensure the UK continues as a world-leading legal services centre and attracts the very best talent.

This investment will support the market to develop the technology it needs to drive modernisation and deliver first-class legal services.

The LawtechUK programme has been delivered by growth platform Tech Nation in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice and the LawtechUK Panel, a board of industry experts.

The previous funding for Tech Nation has already seen results like the launch of the Lawtech Sandbox a research and development programme for UK entrepreneurs and start-ups to test and develop products or services looking to address the legal needs of businesses and society.

One start-up to benefit from the sandbox is Legal Utopia, an app designed to help people understand their legal issues and access lawyers.

Director of LawtechUK Alexandra Lennox said:

Technology has the potential to transform business and peoples experience of law, meet unmet legal needs and support professionals to deliver the next generation of legal services.

We have seen great progress towards this future since LawtechUKs inception and this next phase of funding will build on those important foundations, helping cement the UKs position as a global hub for technology and law.

Lawtech Amplified Global also participated in the Sandbox.

Founder of Amplified Global Minesh Patel said:

Accelerators, incubators and sandboxes are a lifeline for start-ups bringing novel solutions into the market. Its fantastic to hear about the next series of MoJ funding, which will enable pioneering solutions to push the boundaries within the legal space.

Without the Lawtech Sandbox, an organisation of our size and stage would have found it really difficult to be working, or even engaging, with a telecoms giant and the cross section of stakeholders and regulators that we did.

The LawtechUK programme has rapidly accelerated our growth and helped us to get the product to market quicker than we could have ever imagined.

LawtechUK aims to improve understanding and awareness of legal technology and has produced a free online learning and research hub as well as a website to allow the sharing of experiences of remote alternatives to traditional court hearings.

The investment will also continue to support and promote the work of the LawtechUKs Jurisdiction Taskforce to ensure English law keeps pace with technological developments - helping the UK to maintain its place as an international hub for emerging technologies. This builds on previous work to increase market understanding of smarter contracts and digital assets by showcasing real life examples of where these technologies are being used.

Tech Nation will continue to deliver the LawtechUK programme until December 2023. Details of a competitive process to award the next stage of funding will be announced in the autumn. The new provider will deliver the programme from January 2023 to March 2025.

See more here:

Further investment in digital transformation of UK's legal sector - GOV.UK

The internet concluded, and Snopes has half-heartedly acquiesced, to the idea that the fictional but beloved cartoon character George Jetson of TV's "The Jetsons" was born earlier this week, on July 31, 2022. George J. Jetson, a digital index operator at the fictional Spacely's Space Sprockets company (valued by Forbes at over a billion dollars) was the patriarch of the Jetsons, the eponymous and ubiquitous Hanna-Barbara cartoon that aired around 70 episodes on television intermittently between 1962 and 1989. The show was set 100 years in the future in a space-age 2062.

Despite its relative paucity of episodes, the show arguably had a huge cultural impact that spanned generations of Saturday morning sugary cereal munching kids and future engineers, even though it was initially cancelled after just one season.

2 View gallery

The Jetsons' robot maid Rosy with Astro

(Credit: meunierd / Shutterstock)

What stands out about the Jetsons was that unlike much of the science fiction canon, the show didnt create a future that was dystopian, like Black Mirror, or utopian, like Star Trek. Rather the Jetsons presented the future that mirrored a society that was familiar during the second half of the twentieth century, just with amazing technology, much like Hanna Barbaras other cartoon hit, the Flintstones, albeit set in the stone age.

Part of that Star Trek utopia coincidentally also had a milestone this week with the passing of Nichelle Nichols, aka Lt. Uhura, who was a member of the multi-racial, multi-gender Star Trek bridge. Like the Jetsons influence on innovation, Nichols impact from the show has been credited with helping draw the first US woman astronaut Sally Ride and the first black woman astronaut Mae Jemison to the [NASA astronaut] program.

While the technologies presented in both Star Trek and the Jetsons tended towards the helpful and the useful for humanity, in reality many innovative technologies are inherently double-edged swords, capable of doing both good and evil. To wit, also this past week, the UN's chief administrative officer, secretary-general, Antnio Guterres announced that humanity was just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.

Nuclear power which is one of the cleanest and safest forms of energy, is also the destructive force in over 13,000 weapons held in arsenals around the world. Arguably, this association between the good and the bad of nuclear energy has also led to laws and decisions to decommission many of Europes nuclear power plants. The bad timing of which coincided with Russias war with Ukraine and the resulting power crunch felt by many European nations that could have turned to locally produced nuclear energy rather than rising uncertainties related to natural gas from Russia.

However, we need not necessarily look down into the Minuteman ICBM silos to see danger to humanity from various forms of innovation. This past week also saw reporting on two separate incidents where space debris from a Chinese Rocket and a SpaceX rocket landed in Indonesia and Malaysia and Australia respectively. Given these and a growing number of uncontrolled rockets falling back to Earth, a new study in Nature Astronomy has shown an increasing chance of someone getting killed from a rocket from above over the next ten years. Space debris continues to be a non-trivial problem in space exploration. Space debris is so endemic that researchers have even recently proposed that we can spot other planets hosting intelligent life by looking for their orbiting space debris fields.

Many non-governmental organizations have aimed to tackle this issue. For example, the EPFL Space Center (eSpace) just launched a Space Sustainability Rating system, a tiered scoring system that recognizes efforts and incentivizes sustainable building and operation practices, such as the mitigation of space debris.

Still, space debris remains such an intractable issue because every space mission leaves a signature debris field relating to any of the numerous steps involved in getting a payload into space, and we currently lack both the international incentive and enforcement structures to meaningfully curtail this problem, although some countries do have relevant national laws and regulations.

To wit, the just published McGill Manuel on International Law Applicable to Military Uses of Outer Space a comprehensive multinational six year project to clarify international law as it relates to the military use of outer space sets out in rule 129: International law does not contain explicit rights and obligations regarding the creation of space debris. However, to the extent necessary to comply with other rules of international law, States and international organizations shall limit the creation of space debris when carrying on space activities, including military space activities.

Prof. Dov Greenbaum is the director of the Zvi Meitar Institute for Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies at the Harry Radzyner Law School, at Reichman University.

Read the original:

Re-meet George Jetson: Innovation inspiration goes back to the future - CTech

July was spent at home reading and working on the new essay collection, and at the very end flying to Albuquerque for Mythcon, where very excitingly my novel Or What You Will won the Mythopoeic Award! (I never expect to win awards, Im so thrilled to be nominated for them and on the ballot next to such great books, so its always an exciting surprise on the occasions when I do win.) I had a great time at Mythcon, seeing people, through masks, but seeing people, and having conversations. Before that,I read 21 books, and some of them were great and some of them were not. The good ones make up for all the others, and Im glad I get to burble to you about the excellent ones and warn you off the terrible ones!

The Plus One Pact,Portia MacIntosh (2020)Funny romance novel in which two people meet, become friends and then roommates while pretending to be dating to provide plus ones for awkward family events, and then inevitably end up realising they are perfect for each other. Fun, funny, cheering, but perhaps a little predictable.

The Grand Turk, John Freely(2007)Biography of Mehmet II, by the same man who wrote the biography of Mehmets son Cem that I read in April. Mehmet II was the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople, he was a complex, interesting man who had himself painted by Venetian Renaissance painters and who was interested in Greek and Roman antiquity as well as Islam. The book is solid, good on facts and places and times, but not lively. I have yet to find a lively book about the Ottomans.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C.S. Lewis (1955)He was an odd duck, Lewis, and this is a deeply odd book. It had a strangely compelling quality; once I started it I raced through. Lewis writes about his childhood and early manhood with deep observation and sympathy, but from the perspective of an intellectual historyno, thats not fair. A spiritual history? Hes focusing on the moments when he experienced what he calls joy, the rush that went through him when he read the words Baldur the beautiful is dead and which he found elusive and hard to recapture. He had a very strange childhood, and a terrible school experience, and he was in fact a very peculiar person. It may be because I read the Narnia books early and often, but I feel there are some ways I resonate to him very deeply, and others where he seems completely alien. Hes never less than interesting, and hes honest and coy in weird and unexpected ways. I really like the parts of this where hes trying to dissect what joy is and how it isnt lust and how he figured out the difference. Its fascinating that he hated the trenches of WWI less than boarding school because at least he wasnt supposed to pretend to like it. Glad Ive read it.

Utopia Avenue, David Mitchell (2020)This is a story about an imaginary band in the sixties, and its perfect. It is structured in the form of albums, with side one and side two, and the point-of-view character as the person who wrote the track that is the chapter. It is a direct sequel to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Its got this thing going on where the three main characters are all quirky strongly drawn people, and its doing a great thing with pacing. Im not especially interested in the sixties or rock music (though I was charmed to meet Leonard Cohen in the lift of the Chelsea Hotel), but I loved this book for its sharpness, its observation, the things its thinking about and connecting up delightfully. Writing this now and thinking of the moments of this book, I want to read it again straight away. This is as good as the best of the other Mitchell I have read, absolutely compelling. ForgetCloud Atlas. Read The Thousand Autumns and then read this.

Mappings, Vikram Seth (1980)Delightful early poetry collection from Seth as he was finding his voice, lovely poems about trying to work out who he is and where he wants to be, unsure of everything but his powerful scansion. I loved this, and was sorry it was so short.

The Company, K.J. Parker(2008)This was Parkers first book as Parker rather than Holt. The events of this book add up to more futility than most of his later ones, but theres plenty of the fantasy of logistics that I want. Sadly there are some women, who behave very strangely. Mr Holt is alive, and its possible that at some point I could meet him and say, look, really, women, were people, we do things for the same reasons men do, not for the kinds of mysterious reasons you think, really. But I suspect he wouldnt be able to hear me, that perhaps the pitch of my voice would be inaudible to him. Some of his men are pretty peculiar too, especially in this book. Dont start here, even though he did. But having said that, technical details of gold panning, farming disasters theres a lot going for it.

Something Fabulous, Alexis Hall (2022)A gay regency romance with twins, by an author whose contemporary romances I enjoyed, how could I not love this? Good question, and one thats hard to answer. I didnt love it, it failed to convince me. Unlike K. J. Charles Society of Gentlemen books, this wasnt a version of the Regency that I could suspend my disbelief in. At best I was smiling where I was supposed to be laughing, and often I was rolling my eyes. Disappointing.

Elizabeth of the German Garden: A Literary Journey, Jennifer Walker (2013)This is a biography of Elizabeth von Arnimwhose actual name was Mary Beauchamp, who married Count von Arnim and who used both Elizabeth and von Arnim as names but never together. Walker talks about Elizabeth the author persona as Marys creation and mask. She had a very interesting life, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, and wrote a number of books I esteem highly. This is a good biography, well written and thoughtful. It seems to be Walkers first book. Ill watch out for more by her.

Love the One Youre With, Emily Giffin(2008)I have enjoyed a lot of Giffin but I hated this one. The thing that sometimes annoys me about her work is the slavering love of wealthAmerican unexamined brand-name suburban wealth. This is a book about settling, and its in favour. Skip it.

Miss Angel: The Art and World of Angelica Kauffman, Eighteenth Century Icon, Angelica Goodden(2005)Interesting contrast with the von Arnim bio, because I already knew von Arnims books well but picked this up after seeing one self-portrait of Kauffmans in an exhibition at the Uffizi last year. So when Walker delved into the books alongside the life, that was really interesting, but when Goodden did the same with art history detail I was tempted to skim. Kauffman was absolutely dedicated to her art, despite doing a self-portrait where she depicts herself choosing between art and music. Her father was a painter, she got the best art education she could (though people claimed she suffered from not having done anatomy and life drawing), and successfully managed her work and image to support herself entirely by her own production in several different countries, all of which considered and still consider her a local, or adoptive local, artist.

The Blue Sapphire,D.E. Stevenson(1963)I think this is the only book Ive ever read where speculation in shares goes well. Charming romance that feels as if its set much earlier than the publication date. It begins in London and continues in Scotland. It has good found family and growing upbut a young woman not knowing what she wants to do and getting a job in a hat shop seems more 1933 than 1963. Still, I suppose there are still hat shops today, and certainly uncles, and maybe even sapphire prospectors, who knows?

Enough Rope, Dorothy Parker(1926)Delightful well-turned collection of Dorothy Parkers poetry, free from Project Gutenberg, containing all the poems of hers I already knew and many I did not. Very much one note, that note being And I am Marie of Romania, but as its a note otherwise utterly missing from English poetry Ill take it and giggle.

The School at the Chalet, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer(1925)Re-read. After reading that disappointing modern school story last month, it occurred to me to look at what might be available as ebooks and this was. This is in the special category of re-reads that are things I read as a kid and havent revisited. There are lots of Chalet School books, this is the first. Madge and her close female friend Mademoiselle set up a school in a chalet in Austria so that Madges invalid but madcap sister Jo and Mademoiselles niece Simone can live healthily while being educated in English, French, and German, and other pupils will pay for rent and food. They acquire other pupils with ease, and proceed to have school adventures in the Austrian Tyrol. In 1925. I remember impending war forcing them out of Austria and then Italy in later volumes.

Theres a thing about a book like this where its gripping even though theres no actual suspense. There was one moment where I was reading fervently with tears in my eyes when something interrupted me and as I picked the book up again I thought a) I have read this before, b) its a kids book, the character will survive, c) the peril is entirely implausible, and d) I really, really cared nevertheless and wanted to get back to it and let all the things I was supposed to be doing go hang. Id happily re-read all the other volumes if they were available.

Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch(2011)Second in the Rivers of London series, just as gripping as the first which I read in April, and dealing well with both having a new adventure and the consequences of the first book. Great voice. Great worldbuilding, consistent with first book and widening implications and scope. Good characters. Slightly too much blood and horror, just about where its worth it, but I can already see how much more I will enjoy re-reading braced. Ill definitely keep reading this series. Start at the beginning, though.

Guilty Creatures: A Menagerie of Mysteries, Martin Edwards(2021)Ive read a bunch of these British Library Crime Classics themed Golden Age of Mystery short story collections, and I always enjoy them. They often, as here, have one Sherlock Holmes story and a bunch of things by other writers. It was fun seeing what animals Edwards managed to findjust one nobbled racehorse! My favourite was a jackdaw. Its also a good way of finding new-to-me mystery writers. This isnt the best in the series, but I enjoyed it anyway.

London With Love, Sarra Manning(2022)I love Manning, everything except last years lacklustre book about the dog. This one was excellenta romance that begins in 1987 with sixteen-year-olds and comes forward in time to the day last year that Britain allowed people out of their bubbles to meet up with people again. Most of the chapters take place a couple of years apart. All of them feature stations on the London Underground or New York subway. All of them feature our protagonist Jenny/Jen/Jennifer as she reinvents herself and grows up, and her friend Nick as he finally also grows up. This is such a great lifetime book, and such a great London book, and the history of the time as it affects the people living through it. I couldnt stop thinking about it. Its also the first time Ive seen the pandemic in a romance novel, though I doubt it will be the last. (Manning was writing this in lockdown. I am in awe.) This is the kind of romance that many people would enjoy and deserves to be more widely read.

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco(1980)Re-read. I read it when I was in university, and its funny, I no longer think its weird to have a book set in a monastery, or about the questions of knowledge and pride and heresy. I didnt understand this book properly when I was eighteen. I still found parts of it slow and hard going, and it certainly is very peculiar. It has the form of a mystery, but thats just the thread to open it up to the wider questions Eco is interested in examining. Weird, fascinating novel.

Wedding Bells At Villa Limoncello, Daisy James(2019)Do you want a romance novel set in Italy? Did you actually want the forty-eight romance novels set in Italy Ive read since March 2020? (I just counted.) Maybe you didnt. Youve been very patient. I didnt know I did. This is not a good book. Its not terrible. Ill be reading the sequels, indeed Ive already bought them. But this one is absolutely classictheres an unhappy person, and she goes to Italy, and everything gets fixed, just because its beautiful and there is good food and Italian people and therefore suddenly everything is therefore fine. However, I didnt read this book in 2020 because it contains a dead sister, and thats a hard subject for me. But now I did read it, and it was fun.

The Memory Theater, Karin Tidbeck(2021)Brilliant novel that takes ideas about fairyland and ideas about other worlds and pulls off a terrific fantasy. Tidbeck is a Swedish writer who writes in both Swedish and English; this is an English original, with very delicate, precise use of language that reminded me of Angela Carter. Theres fairyland, theres Sweden, theres a theatre troupe, theres a girl whose mother is a mountain and a truly conscienceless villain. Unforgettable. This is the kind of European fantasy we need more of.

Saplings, Noel Streatfeild(1945)Re-read. Streatfeild is known for her childrens books. This is not one. This is a book where she takes her ability to write brilliantly from childrens POV and also from the POV of adults and gives us a book about how WWII destroyed a family even though only one person in it is killed. Its really good, and absolutely compelling, but also a tragedy. But its written just like her childrens books, which makes reading it an experience more comparable to L.M. MontgomerysRilla of Ingleside than anything else I can think of.

The Bookseller of Florence, Ross King(2021)Delightful, readable biography of Vespasiano da Bisticci, bookseller and producer of manuscripts. If you are interested in the history of books, in the Renaissance classical revival, in Florence in the fifteenth century, in Marsilio Ficino, you want to read this. Kings best book sinceBrunelleschis Dome and full of useful fascinating information. Absolutely splendid, loved it to bits, and I think almost anyone would, because he assumes an intelligent reader without much background knowledge.

Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. Shes published two collections of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections, a short story collection and fifteen novels, including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Among Others. Her novel Lent was published by Tor in May 2019, and her most recent novel, Or What You Will, was released in July 2020. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal. She plans to live to be 99 and write a book every year.

Read more here:

Jo Walton's Reading List: July 2022 - tor.com