Audrey Wollen at The New Yorker:
“The Edge of the Alphabet” is the third in a sequence of novels published after Frame left the hospital, following “Owls Do Cry,” in 1957, and “Faces in the Water,” in 1961. The novels’ deep-sea dive into her experience, the years of institutionalization, of forcible detachment from the social world, of being written off, made disposable—until she was suddenly holding the pen, writing, writing, writing. They haunt the alleys of the autobiographical, but never fully step onto the recognized thoroughfares of memoir, or even autofiction. Despite clear reference to the events of her life, the novels remain shadowy and irreverent, winding behind the normative façades of storytelling.
The loose trilogy begins with something like the truth, but molded by a stark counterfactual: in “Owls Do Cry,” for example, the protagonist, Daphne, undergoes the lobotomy that Frame herself narrowly avoided. The Withers family, presented first in “Owls Do Cry” and then picked up again in “The Edge of the Alphabet,” refracts Frame and her siblings: Daphne, locked up and deemed insane; her sisters, Chicks and Francie (who dies by falling into the fire pit at their local dump); and her brother, Toby, who struggles with epilepsy, are versions of Frame; her sisters Myrtle and Isabel, who each accidentally died by drowning, years apart; her surviving sister, June, and her brother, George, who was epileptic.
more here.
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In 2020, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson used a corpus of writing and lyrics from her late husband, Velvet Underground’s co-founder Lou Reed, to create a generative program she interacted with as a creative collaborator. And in 2021, the journalist James Vlahos launched HereAfter AI, an app anyone can use to create interactive chatbots, called ‘life story avatars’, that are based on loved ones’ memories. Today, enterprises in the business of ‘reinventing remembrance’ abound: Life Story AI, Project Infinite Life, Project December – the list 
The women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s inspired the first professional historians of sexuality. Many of them specialized in the modern histories of Europe and the United States, and they theorized mainly from the modern Western experience. This is beginning to change: the field has expanded to incorporate premodern histories and histories in all regions of the world, becoming increasingly transhistorical and global.
With his unprecedented effort to push the limits of executive power, 
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Before Althea Gibson could play — much less win — major tennis tournaments, another opponent had to be defeated. But Gibson had less control against this foe, which went by the name segregation. Jackie Robinson played in the major leagues (1947) before a black was permitted to play tennis at the U.S. National Championships. But cracks soon developed in the lily-white sport. And finally, in 1950, when Gibson was 23 years old, she was permitted to play at the U.S. Nationals, becoming the first black to compete in the tournament.
When the composer, Jake Heggie, said to the Dallas Opera, “We want to do Moby-Dick,” the artistic director Jonathan Pell asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to do?” So, yes. It was a daunting prospect, and it took a long time to figure out a way into it. For the first six months of the process, I just read and reread the book, which I hadn’t done since high school—and back then I probably skipped some chapters. I was also reading criticism about it. I was concerned not just with how to cut it down but also with how to really adapt it for the stage. The nature of Moby-Dick, or any novel, is that it’s telling a story. The narrator is very prominent. In the theater, we’re in the business of showing a story. Rather than what the characters are saying, it’s a question of what they’re doing and how the action can bring life to the story. But I could also see the possibilities immediately for the adaptation. There’s so much about Moby-Dick that is operatic—the language, the themes, and the power of the story. Throughout the book, there are these dramatic, incredibly poetic passages that I could imagine being sung, especially if they were distilled down. And the thing about Moby-Dick is that while it is a very long book and one that’s deep and dense, it does have a very compelling adventure story at the center of it. I knew we could exploit that.
Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was arguably the finest English travel writer of his generation. Other contenders for the title – Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, say – were all Oxford-educated, but Lewis was a product of Enfield’s grammar school and its public library. A devotee of the classics – Herodotus, Suetonius, Chekhov, Turgenev – he was attracted southwards. Federico García Lorca was his favourite poet. He gracefully reconfigured his first book, Spanish Adventure, written at twenty-six, into his last book, The Tomb in Seville, at the age of ninety-four. Just as a matador conceals his sword behind a bright muleta cape, he masked a tragic sensibility with a comic style.
The jewelry designer Lola Oladunjoye remembers that she was sketching in the studio of her Paris apartment one day in late May 2020. She looked up at the television and, on CNN, watched in horror a video of George Floyd being fatally restrained 
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To keep my vocabulary from shrinking, I signed up for one of those 
Researchers and companies have been working for years to build quantum computers, which