All posts tagged: strange

The Strange Music of Mario Vargas Llosa | Ariel Dorfman

The Strange Music of Mario Vargas Llosa | Ariel Dorfman

Published by Jenni Sidey

When Mario Vargas Llosa announced in October 2023 that his new novel, Le dedico mi silencio—now published in English as I Give You My Silence—would be his last, I was intrigued by what that farewell to fiction might involve. How would this prodigious author of eighteen other novels—among them the most adventuresome in the Latin American literary canon—conclude his career? (He died in April 2025 at the age of eighty-nine.) I had been enthused by The Feast of the Goat (2000), his antidictatorial tour de force, but disappointed by the six subsequent novels, which lacked, I thought, his inventiveness and stylistic brilliance.1 Refreshingly, his swan song, albeit a minor achievement compared to the exceptional works of his younger years, is charming and thought-provoking, again addressing the dilemma of Peru’s identity that he had pursued since The Time of the Hero (1963), his groundbreaking first novel. If Balzac is right (and Vargas Llosa has insisted that he is) that “the novel is the private history of nations,” then how to write about a heterogenous Latin American …

Jon Ronson’s ‘Castle’ and its strange, idle men

Jon Ronson’s ‘Castle’ and its strange, idle men

Published by Daniella Wilson

Like many Millennial men, I used to be pretty invested in Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West—primarily because of his music, but also because of his unique position as the one celebrity who seemed empowered to behave however he wanted. He interrupted Taylor Swift at the Video Music Awards; he said “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” at a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser; he brought a Jesus look-alike onstage. I would shrug, and keep listening. Then his do what I want ethos went very bad. Ye called slavery “a choice”; he came out as a fan of Hitler; he wore a KKK-style hood. With escalating horror, I questioned what had happened. Was it about having too much money? Untreated mental illness? I wondered when logic and shame might kick in—when someone might get him to stop. But the more he was rejected by his peers, the media, and some fans, the more Kanye seemed to act out. Eventually, I accepted, grimly, that I was watching someone who, feeling abandoned and misunderstood, was determined …

Trump Demands ‘Strange Modernist’ José de Rivera Sculpture be Replaced

Trump Demands ‘Strange Modernist’ José de Rivera Sculpture be Replaced

Published by Jenni Sidey

President Donald Trump has released his latest list of demands for the Smithsonian Institution, beginning with the installation of a monumental statue of George Washington outside the National Museum of American History. In a flurry of Truth Social posts late Friday, Trump also called for an exhibition honoring the nation’s first president to open imminently and run through February 22, 2032, the 300th anniversary of Washington’s birth. The statue, Trump said, should be erected on September 17, Constitution Day in the United States. Standing at 11 feet, the work was featured at the recent Freedom 250 IndyCar race in the museum’s Flag Hall. Related Articles Writing en route to his golf course in Ireland, Trump also called for a 30-foot statue of Washington to replace Infinity, a kinetic sculpture by New York artist José de Rivera, dedicated by the federal government in 1967 and currently located at the south entrance of the National Museum of American History.  “Replace a sculpture that says nothing about America with the man who, more than anyone else, says everything …

Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig

Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig

Published by Jenni Sidey

The copyright page is the tell. Text copyright is held not by the author but by LW Entertainment Limited, and the acknowledgments close with a letter of thanks addressed to Andrew. Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig is not a fan retelling published in the gap where the source is out of copyright. It is a sanctioned continuation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, written inside the estate, and that single fact governs almost everything the book can and cannot do. Which makes the interesting question not “is the plot good?” but “what was she allowed to change?” What Our Strange Duet Is Allowed to Change Not the events. The beats arrive in order and on schedule: the dressing room, the disembodied voice, Hannibal and a soprano storming out, the boat across the lake, the unmasking, Il Muto, the chandelier, the masquerade, the graveyard, Don Juan Triumphant. Anyone who has seen the show will spend four hundred pages knowing exactly what happens next. What Craig gets instead is the inside of …

Strange behavior in focused laser light could change how quantum computers control qubits

Strange behavior in focused laser light could change how quantum computers control qubits

Published by Jenni Sidey

Physicists have directly observed the optical Magnus effect for the first time by mapping how a tightly focused laser interacts with a single trapped calcium ion. The strongest atom-light interaction shifted sideways by several hundred nanometers instead of occurring exactly at the laser beam’s center. The effect could create unwanted errors in laser-controlled qubits, but the same forces may also provide a new way to connect qubits during quantum computations. A spinning table tennis ball can veer sharply across a table even when its forward motion seems to point elsewhere. The same basic phenomenon helps bend football shots and curve baseballs. Physicists call it the Magnus effect, a sideways force produced when a rotating object moves through a surrounding medium. Now an international team has observed an optical counterpart at the scale of a single trapped ion. Instead of watching an atom curve through space, the researchers found that a tightly focused laser interacts most strongly with the ion slightly away from the beam’s center. The finding matters because tightly focused lasers are increasingly used …

Could information be a fifth form of matter? Strange matter-antimatter experiment aims to find out

Could information be a fifth form of matter? Strange matter-antimatter experiment aims to find out

Published by Jenni Sidey

A University of Portsmouth physicist has proposed an experiment to test whether elementary particles contain measurable information with an associated mass and energy. The experiment would collide electrons with positrons and search for two unexpected infrared photons appearing alongside the standard gamma rays produced by annihilation. Detecting those photons at the predicted wavelengths, including a temperature-dependent shift, would support a controversial hypothesis that information is a physical component of matter. Information fills hard drives, crosses computer networks and describes the properties of physical systems. One physicist argues it may also have something far more surprising: measurable mass. Dr. Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth has proposed an experiment designed to test that idea using collisions between matter and antimatter. If the predicted signal appears, Vopson argues it would support two related hypotheses. One says information has a mass-energy equivalent. The other says elementary particles contain a fixed amount of information about themselves. Together, those ideas lead him to describe information as a fifth form of matter alongside solids, liquids, gases and plasma. Schematic diagram …

Oldenburg Fest to Open With Wordless Elbe Island Doc Strange Neighbors

Oldenburg Fest to Open With Wordless Elbe Island Doc Strange Neighbors

Published by Daniella Wilson

Strange Neighbors, an art-house nature documentary with no narration, no interviews and no human protagonists will open this year’s Oldenburg Internationales Film Festival, the first time a doc has launched the German indie fest. The directorial debut of cinematographer Mi Steinbach, Strange Neighbors was shot over three years on Schwarztonnensand, an island and nature preserve on the German Elbe river, smack in the middle of one of Europe’s busiest waterways. The island, just over 2 miles long, was created in the late 1960s from sand dredged during the deepening of the Elbe shipping channel that serves the port of Hamburg, then left to itself and gradually planted over. It lies directly on the fairway line, closer to the shipping lane than any other land on the river, so container vessels pass within meters of it. It is a protected area. Humans are banned on the island, and Steinbach has banned them from her film. Strange Neighbors has no commentary track and no dialogue, though it features a soundtrack and sound design from Robert Nacken. “It …

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 solved a 60-year-old Star Trek mystery

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 solved a 60-year-old Star Trek mystery

Published by Daniella Wilson

*Warning: Spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 6 ahead.* The sixth episode of Strange New Worlds season 4 sees the USS Enterprise trapped by a slipstream wormhole. In the chaos that follows, Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) ends up sliced in half, held together just by the sheer weight of the table that severed his body in Med Bay. Yet honestly, that’s far from the most shocking thing about this episode. With the Chief Medical Officer out of action, another practitioner named Dr Philip Boyce steps up to help in M’Benga’s absence. Sound familiar? Boyce was actually the first Chief Medical Officer to work aboard the USS Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike. He was played by John Hoyt in the first pilot developed for the original Star Trek series in 1964. That pilot was scrapped, however, and Hoyt was replaced by Paul Fix who played a new doctor character named Dr Mark Piper in a second pilot. NBC picked Star Trek up after that, but Fix was then replaced by DeForest …

The Strange Case of a Nearly Doomed Looney Tunes Movie

The Strange Case of a Nearly Doomed Looney Tunes Movie

Published by Daniella Wilson

Perhaps the starkest sign that Coyote vs. Acme isn’t your typical children’s movie is that it’s based on a New Yorker article. Yes, it features many Looney Tunes characters that multiple generations know and love, interacting alongside real-life actors in a style similar to prior big-screen efforts, such as Space Jam or Looney Tunes: Back in Action. But the director Dave Green’s film—which opens August 28, after a protracted saga that almost saw it kept from audiences forever—draws from a slyly funny “Shouts & Murmurs” story from 1990. Written by the humorist Ian Frazier, “Coyote v. Acme” has a wry and self-aware premise: What would happen if Wile E. Coyote, the Looney Tune on a constantly unsuccessful hunt for the ever-chipper Road Runner, filed a lawsuit against the (fictional) Acme Corporation for selling him faulty products? “I thought the baseline idea for the movie was just, like, the funniest thing in the world,” Green told me in a recent interview, reminiscing about when he first signed on to direct the film, back in 2019. He …

Star Trek needs silliness but not a Strange New Worlds puppet episode

Star Trek needs silliness but not a Strange New Worlds puppet episode

Published by Daniella Wilson

Star Trek can be silly – but when does a gimmick hinder the story? Strange New Worlds has certainly lived up to Star Trek’s promise to “boldly go where no one has gone before” this season. We’ve had a dinosaur dilemma, a horror-inspired outing, a noir, The Hangover-esque antics and now puppets. But at what point does the show’s willingness to experiment become more about the gimmick than serving the story? There’s no denying that Strange New Worlds is one of the most frivolously fun Star Trek shows to date, and showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are undoubtedly taking bigger creative swings than almost any other modern Trek series. The show hasn’t been afraid to experiment with different formats and incorporate the high-concept sci-fi elements which the franchise has popularised over the years. We’ve had the Lower Decks crossover, a musical, a body-swap episode and even Q/Trelane hijinks. However, the puppet-centric “Level-Five Transporter Accident” – despite Jim Henson’s Creature Shop puppets looking amazing – feels like an episode where the writers have prioritised …