In Lapland, just inside the Arctic Circle, you can visit Santa Claus at any time of year, because that’s where he lives. No doubt this requires a plentiful supply of Santas (I hope nobody under the age of seven is reading this), some of whom may be graduates of a course in Santa Claus studies you can take at the University of Lapland. Like Santas everywhere, you need a generous girth, a certain facility with the ho-ho-hos, a lack of lurid facial tattoos and no history of paedophilia. I once saw such a generous-girthed image of Santa Claus in a shop window in Beijing, at a time when a newly modernising China was getting to grips with Christmas. The fact that he was pinned to a cross suggested that they still had some way to go.
Andrew Parker, an English inventor, artist and zoologist at the University of Oxford, thinks color is not a thing. The world’s best colors, he says, come not from pigments or dyes, but from materials arranged into crystalline nanostructures that scatter light into “structural colors.” And when the $36 billion color industry—which is focused on dyes and pigments—takes notice, Parker think, we will have hues far richer and more dazzling than the comparatively drab tones that surround us today.
I love cooking with Mom. Food is a big thing in our family, but my cooking and so much of how I think about it comes straight from her. She's a better, more intuitive baker than I am by a long shot, so when I found a cookie cookbook that blends science and creativity, I timed my review testing to line up with a trip home to see her.
The End of Nightwork is a novel rich in provocative and timely ideas, yet seductively readable. While the fashionable narrative method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company. And despite the novel’s complex philosophical and theological underpinning, its characters are always vividly alive. There’s a rare originality here, and a willingness to take risks, that promises great things.
In this generous, sprawling work, the Spanish historian and philologist Irene Vallejo sets out to provide a panoramic survey of how books shaped not just the ancient world but ours too. While she pays due attention to the physicality of the book – what Oxford professor Emma Smith has called its “bookhood” – Vallejo is equally interested in what goes on inside its covers. And also, more importantly, what goes on inside a reader when they take up a volume and embark on an imaginative and intellectual dance that might just change their life. As much as a history of books, Papyrus is also a history of reading.
After we leave New York, I read a book about how to not
let the internet destroy my brain. I think
the answer is to have been raised in California,