“As the age of handwriting comes to an end,” Joel Warner asks in his new book, “what is the value of the original texts left behind?” As it turns out, quite a bit. Warner’s The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History tells the story not of the narrative to be found in Sade’s book The 120 Days of Sodom, but of the manuscript itself. This 40-foot scroll, made up of sheets of paper pasted end to end, which Sade wrote while imprisoned in the Bastille, subsequently embarked on a strange and fantastical journey involving a level of criminality that rivaled the life of Sade himself.
At its best, paleontology opens windows into trillions of other lifetimes spent swimming, scuttling, stomping and soaring across this planet. Scientists, the press and the public alike tend to tell and retell these success stories, lionizing intrepid researchers. The most impressive specimens are enshrined in museums. But possibly just as important is when scientists get something wrong, badly, and somebody sets the record straight.
At first, it may seem difficult to explain how the distance between our Milky Way and CEERS-93316 has grown to 35 billion lightyears, given the Universe has only been expanding for 13.8 billion years.
How can it be that the size of the Universe is bigger than its age?
“I Have Some Questions for You” asks us to examine many things: high school, the ’90s, privilege, justice, sexual harassment, what we owe the dead. Like the true-crime podcasts it’s modeled on, it’s addictive, well told and a little bit unsettling.
In English the versatile suffix “ish” captures the somewhatness of something, as when we call a cloud “whitish” or say “Life is normal. Ish.” In Dorothy Tse’s whimsical satire about a version of contemporary Hong Kong going through hellish transformations, Owlish – “something like an owl but also not like an owl” – is a wise and elusive character who quotes from the Bible, speaks in a coded language, and appears and disappears randomly. Regardless of who or what Owlish is, they must find a way “to survive” as “who knows what will happen next? Everything is changing.”
No one could stand it the métro was so slow later halted a man started
Strumming a guitar making patter I couldn’t hear how could
There be room for a guitar I should be like him tell you things I’m