As an avid book-lover, he found himself dissatisfied with the way many books were being presented and sold on Instagram, believing the platform’s full potential to showcase “the beauty, quirkiness and oddness of different books” was not being fully utilised.
And this was how I came across his Instagram page while idly scrolling one morning. On the site, Lloyd presents individual books for sale in a specific way: showing the front and back covers, as well as the contents page and the first page of the book. Books don’t come with a “if you liked X, then you will like Y” type of message, which is a sentiment that is gaining popularity as social media-driven algorithms begin to dictate tastes online, which often spills over into our day-to-day lives. Instead, bookrunnermelbourne encourages an element of surprise, simulating an experience not unlike bookstore browsing: often, when shoppers don’t know a book or an author but are attracted to the cover or title, they find themselves reading the blurb, and then flipping to the first page to see if the book continues to hold any interest.
Despite our decades of technology and centuries of civilization, we are children in the gaze of these beings. But there’s something reassuring about that; it’s the same as how I still want my mom when I’m sick. If we’re children, then our mistakes are just the messy path of learning; if we’re children, the grown-ups can still come and help. We don’t want this violent, greedy, suffering version of humanity to be our final form. Transcendent outsiders give us hope and, hopefully, guidance. But even just knowing they are out there—and that they are reaching toward us—could be enough to change the world.
As my hosts showed off one of their prized telescope mirrors — 20 feet of shiny, immaculately curved aluminum-coated glass — I couldn’t help noticing a small, suspicious smudge. It looked like the kind of smear you might find on your windshield in the morning, especially if you had parked under a tree.
“Birds,” one astronomer grumbled when asked what it was.
I personally don’t identify my cooking with the concept of “fusion” cuisine, but describe it as classic Somali cuisine “reimagined.” To me, reimagining is rooted in respecting and knowing the classic form of the cuisine, and then building on it. It is fluid in its adherence to classicism and its flirtation with creativity. But it also comes from a cuisine’s ability to expand depending on what new shore it meets: So what, then, of the impact of migration?
What would happen if we were to examine human history through the wiliness and will of bacteria and viruses instead of the brains and brawn of men? Could great conquests — the fall of the Roman Empire, the Revolutionary War, the rise of capitalism — have been wrought not from brilliant strategy and innovation but because of certain populations’ susceptibility or resistance to pathogens? What if germs have been humans’ puppeteers all along? That is the gripping premise of Jonathan Kennedy’s debut book, “Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues.” By tracing evolution and history from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens today, Kennedy re-excavates the past, one in which we are much less significant than we think.
Freud did not discover the unconscious – Goethe, Schopenhauer and the ancient Greeks had all written about it. He was certainly right to stress the importance of early childhood in our later psychological development and the role of sexual repression in turn-of-the-century Vienna, but his theories of psychosexual development and neurosis now seem absurd. Nevertheless, despite a century of progress in neuroscience since Freud, the relationship between what is conscious and unconscious in our brains remains deeply mysterious.
Cultural identity, Stuart Hall wrote, is “a matter of becoming.” Although derived from our many histories, both personal and collective, identity is not some inherent essence, rooted in the past. It is instead, according to Hall, in “constant transformation.” Julia Lee’s memoir, “Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America,” examines this process, and in particular the forging of her identity as a Korean American woman in a country that still operates under a racial hierarchy.