Ascending the steps, you climb toward a spot of light that shines down from somewhere far above. At seventy feet up — assuming that you’re lucky enough to visit after everything has been fully installed — you reach the lowermost part of the clock. Suspended from a rod is the driveweight of the power system, a gigantic concrete oval, edged in bronze, that weighs something like five tons. As you continue onward, you start to get a sense of the clock’s enormous size — the mechanism alone is over two hundred feet high.
Next is a platform equipped with a horizontal windlass, like a capstan on a ship, with three curved bars at chest level. By walking in a clockwise circle, visitors can wind a rack gear to slowly raise the counterweight over the course of eight hours. For now, you move past the steel and titanium gears to the eighty-foot Geneva drive — a very slow computer with twenty notched wheels — that controls the chimes. At noon, if the clock is wound, ten bells ring in one of 3,628,800 unique patterns, enough for a different sequence nearly every day for ten thousand years.
My room is Swedish simplicity at its most minimal: a bed, a chair and a bedside table. No television, and not much else to distract me from the pristine tranquillity of my surroundings. This is just as well as I am here, primarily, to sleep.
In an age of relentless connectivity, sleep has become the ultimate luxury and spawned a new travel trend: sleep tourism, where sleep-deprived travellers are choosing their hotel on the basis of its pillow menu or booking themselves into away-from-it-all sleep retreats with tailored sleep-inducing activities.
With the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the uncertainty of the geopolitical moment, it seems appropriate to start 2025 with some surreal fiction.
So how about “Blob: A Love Story,” starring a Taiwanese-American named Vi, who stumbles upon a “beige gelatin splotch” with mouth, eyes, and lips, next to a trash can outside a dive bar, takes it home, feeds it and helps it morph into a real man?
Butler’s 1993 science fiction novel, Parable of the Sower, crafts a vision of Los Angeles in 2024 — a city ravaged by climate change, economic inequality, political corruption, and racism. As the initial shock of this month’s wildfires subsides, Parable of the Sower has gained significant attention for supposedly predicting the devastation. Unfortunately, less attention has landed on the themes of Butler’s work. Parable of the Sower not only provides an eerily accurate vision of the world in 2025 but also a blueprint for existing within it.
It is clear from reading Imani Perry’s “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People” why she is adept at chronicling the history of the Black diaspora: She weaves stories like a village griot or a grandparent sitting on the porch recalling the past. Her latest offering is a series of essays that takes readers from coastal western sub-Saharan Africa to the American South to demonstrate why the colors black and blue can’t be separated when describing the experience of Black people.