One by one, astronomers marched to the podium and, speaking rapidly to obey the 12-minute limit, blitzed through a cosmos of discoveries. Galaxies that, even in their relative youth, had already spawned supermassive black holes. Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that might harbor habitable planets.
[...]
Between presentations, on the sidelines and in the hallways, senior astronomers who were on hand in 1989 when the idea of the Webb telescope was first broached congratulated one another and traded war stories about the telescope’s development. They gasped audibly as the youngsters showed off data that blew past their own achievements with the Hubble.
The sound is inescapable. Wherever you are in Taiwan – be it three beers deep at a city bar, floating in the Taiwan Strait, or hauling yourself up a mountain – you’ll still hear the tinny, off-key classical jingle, and it will trigger a Pavlovian surge of panic: I have to take the bins out.
In the last few decades, Taiwan has transformed itself from “garbage island” to one of the world’s best managers of household trash, and it’s done so with a soundtrack. Armies of yellow trucks trundle through the streets five days a week, blasting earsplitting snippets of either Beethoven’s Für Elise or A Maiden’s Prayer by Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska.
I had never considered Vegas a town lacking in anything. I had come for a few days this past fall, dutifully overloading my senses and depleting my wallet every time I left my hotel room. But at a dinner one night with a large group of colleagues, I heard the first rumblings of discontent, and unfulfilled wishes. "You wouldn't," the woman next to me at our table asked the waiter gently, "just happen, by any chance, to have Coke?" He shook his head. She'd already guessed as much.
"Am I tripping or is everything here Pepsi products?"
“Have you eaten yet?,” a familiar Chinese greeting, might be the title of this book, but for the author and director Cheuk Kwan — and for almost every restaurateur he interviews in his tour of Chinese restaurants across 15 countries and five continents — food is only the entry point. Because “running a Chinese restaurant is the easiest path for new Chinese immigrants to integrate into the host society,” Kwan writes in his memoir-cum-travelogue, “there’s no better way to tell the story of the Chinese diaspora than through the stories of Chinese restaurant owners.”
My grandmother cored them
with a serrated knife
with her hands that had come
through the slaughter -