This simplifying ethos applies to everything from understanding how dark matter weighs down galaxy clusters to estimating how common life-friendly conditions might be throughout the cosmos, and it allows astronomers to simplify their mathematical models of the universe’s past as well as their predictions of its future. “Everything is based on the idea that [the cosmological principle] is true,” Lopez says. “It is also a very vague assumption. So it’s really hard to validate.”
Validation is especially challenging when significant evidence exists to the contrary—and a host of recent observations suggest indeed that the universe could be stranger and have larger variations than cosmologists had so comfortably supposed.
Disappoint Me is a novel structured around meals, whether assembled distractedly or seasoned with care, and people making strained conversation over birthday barbecues or overpriced small plates in Hackney restaurants. Like her cult debut Bellies, Nicola Dinan’s highly readable and engrossing second novel paints mealtimes as a sociocultural ritual as much as a means of giving characters something to chew on while they reach new understandings or fail to connect. Food and sex, talk and pointed silence, the heart and the stomach are deftly entwined in this deeply contemporary story which explores friendship, queerness, the pacifying allure of couplehood and evolving social mores among millennial Londoners.
Ben Yagoda’s lexicon is a spin-off from his popular blog Not One-Off Britishisms, an unwieldy title for a fun experiment in which the professor emeritus of English at the University of Delaware tracks British usages in the US. Like all popular books about language, Gobsmacked! does several things at once: it offers a lot of “fancy that!” facts about the origin of popular words and phrases. (Did you know the word “cushy” derives from Persian and Urdu, and was a military term popularised by British soldiers during the first world war?) It also gives the broader historical context of why certain phrases took off at certain times. (A combination of Geri Halliwell and a single episode of South Park is blamed for the introduction of the pejorative “ginger” to the American lexicon – which Pagoda records Ed Sheeran among others lamenting.) Above all, though, it provides a starting point for pedantic language nerds to argue over the specific meaning and provenance of words (the section on “posh” is divine).
There are some major movie stars that have had so much written about them over the years that you really feel there is simply nothing left to learn (but still, if it’s about Marilyn Monroe, you can bet your bottom dollar there’ll be another offering in the offing any time soon). Then there are actors like Al Pacino. We’ve seen him in a bucket load of movies and he’s been around for decades. We probably think we know him too. But do we, really? Sonny Boy (a childhood nickname that stuck) is Pacino’s autobiography and it tells the actor’s story comprehensively and entertainingly.