MyAppleMenu Reader

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Cockroach Sex Took A Strange Turn. Now More Mutations Have Emerged., by Bethany Brookshire, New York Times

Cockroaches Are Changing Up Their Sex Lives, and It’s All Our Fault. Faced With Sweet Poisoned Bait, Roaches First Ended Up With a Mutation That Made Them Hate Sweets, Hindering Their Mating Strategies. Now, More Roach Mutations Are Emerging, Showing You Can’t Keep a Good Pest Down.

The Haunted Journey Of Vietnam's "Wandering Souls," In An Intricate Novel Of Refugee Flight, by Stuart Miller, Los Angeles Times

in the Vietnamese Culture, if Someone Doesn’t Receive a Proper Burial in Their Hometown, “Their Souls Are Cursed to Wander the Earth Aimlessly, as Ghosts.” This Is According to an American Soldier, Explaining the Macabre Tactic of Playing Tapes of Loud Voices During the Vietnam War to Terrify the Enemy.

in “Wandering Souls,” Cecile Pin’s Subtle and Gripping Debut Novel, Such Americans Are Bit Players, as Are the Ghosts of Those Who Die Fleeing the Country. The Wanderers in Question Are Anh, Minh and Thanh, Three Young Orphans Who Travel Overseas, From One Refugee Camp to Another, Before Finally Beginning to Piece Together a Life.

Everything She Knew About Her Wife Was False — A Faux Biography Finds The 'Truth', by Maureen Corrigan, NPR

Feeling Put Off by All This Experimental Genre-Bending? Don't Be. For as Much as Lacey Has Written a Postmodern Miasma of a Novel About Deception and the Relationship of the Artist to Their Work, She's Also Structured That Novel in an Old-Fashioned Way: Via a Scheherazade-Like Sequence of Stories. Most of These Stories Are About the Charismatic X's Life and Fabrications; All of Them Are Arresting in Their Originality; And, the Final Story That CM Is Led to, Housed in a Storage Facility, Is Devastating in Its Calculated Brutality.

It’s Easy To See What’s Wrong With Car Culture. Fixing It Is Harder., by Peter C. Baker, Washington Post

Daniel Knowles Hates Cars, and He Wants You to Hate Them Too. Or, to Put a Finer Point on It, Knowles — the Midwest U.S. Correspondent for the Economist Magazine — Hates What Cars Have Done to the World, and Especially to Our Cities. His New Book, “Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It,” Shows How They Pollute the Air, Inefficiently Consume Enormous Amounts of Natural Resources, Take Up Too Much Space, and Kill and Injure Too Many People. They Make Cities Into Worse Places: Less Pleasant, Less Walkable and Bikeable, Harder to Enjoy, Dirtier, and Louder. They Stress Us Out and Make Our Lives More Sedentary. We Need, Knowles Argues, to Get as Many of Them Off the Road as We Can, as Quickly as Possible.

Book Review: Writing Landscape, By Linda Cracknell, by Roger Cox, The Scotsman

Like Doubling Back, Writing Landscape consists of a series of essays inspired by direct experience of the natural world; however, whereas the earlier book was almost always on the move ("I enjoy the sense of walking a storyline" Cracknell writes at one point), this time we frequently find her focusing all her attention on a single location.