Charlotte Andersen in Reader’s Digest:
The chance of meeting a person like you is the only reason I talk to strangers.
- Being friends with you is like peeing my pants: warm, a relief and something the whole world will eventually see.
- You inspire me! Not enough to cure cancer but enough to load the dishwasher. And the dishwasher is definitely my most pressing problem.
- You’re the only one I let control the music when I drive.
- No one understands me like you do—not even me.
- You’re so efficient, you can cook Minute rice in 30 seconds.
- I saved a sample of your DNA … just in case cloning ever becomes legal.
- I brag to all my friends about you.
- I love your weird so much, it has become my normal.
- Thanks for inviting me over. You’ve got a real nice joint here—your elbow, specifically.
- You’re my rock when I hit rock bottom. Thanks for softening the fall.
- One of my favorite hobbies is hanging out with smart people. I got into it after I met you.
- Whenever I’m upset, you’re the first person I want to talk to … which probably sucks for you, but you handle it like a champ!
- You’re the only person who understands my sign language when I’m crying.
- Confession: You make me laugh so hard I pee a little.
- Are we bad at being good or just really good at being bad? Not that it matters.
- I love you like waffles love Nutella.
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Do you find it easy to wake up early? You may have Neanderthals in your ancestry.
Now it was June, and we were at the National Hot Rod Association’s Nostalgia Nationals at Beech Bend Raceway in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The weather was brutal, and it was forecast to remain so: sunny, low to mid-nineties, wiltingly humid. In the distance, an antique roller coaster creaked along wooden tracks, and I wondered who would choose to ride it when there were so many cars to ogle and races to watch and people to meet.
Like the writing of book reviews, the live author interview has been placed under the sign of “marketing and publicity,” and treated less as a distinct skill than part of an ethos of service—something that “professional” writers do for other writers and for their publishers—as well as signaling everyone’s support for the perennially endangered small bookstores and event spaces that host them. The assumption is that the interviewer, like the interviewee, has something to sell. Since everyone is engaged in promotion, no one has to be paid. The sense that the interview is a devalued form, anyone can do it, especially if they published a book a year before the book under discussion, makes it a kind of professional corvée for writers whose value accrues elsewhere. This can often have a corrosive effect on the quality of the events. I have been to evenings where it appears the interviewer hasn’t even read the author’s book. More recently they have become another opportunity to indulge in guilty feelings and remind everyone in attendance that something more important and painful is happening elsewhere. In general, people come to these things to look rather than to listen and they do them to be seen rather than heard. The author will be signing books afterwards; there will be free drinks before you go out to pay for drinks; you can take a selfie if you want.
The number of neurons in the human brain is comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Unlike the stars, however, in the case of neurons the real action is in how they are directly connected to each other: receiving signals over synapses via their dendrites, and when appropriately triggered, sending signals down the axon to other neurons (glossing over some complications). So a major step in understanding the brain is to map its wiring diagram, or 
In 2016, an essay arrived in our offices from John J. Lennon, then incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility in New York. “
Jaime Teevan joined
Trump’s political rebirth is unparalleled in American history. His first term ended in disgrace, with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results culminating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was shunned by most party officials when he announced his candidacy in late 2022 amid multiple criminal investigations. Little more than a year later, Trump cleared the Republican field, clinching one of the fastest contested presidential primaries in history. He spent six weeks during the general election in a New York City courtroom, the first former President to be 
Annie Rauwerda: I started back in high school editing typos and adding things that I noticed were missing — like items to lists. But I had never done anything more than that because I was afraid of it because there are so many rules. Like, I’d seen the talk pages. And many of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and essays are very wordy.
An optical fibre technology can help chips communicate with each other at the speed of light, enabling them to transmit 80 times as much information as they could using traditional electrical connections. That could significantly speed up the training times required for large artificial intelligence models – from months to weeks – while also reducing the energy and emissions costs for data centres.
In the fall of 2012, when Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the military power now in charge of Syria, was a mere minor terrorist organization, a band of their fighters in Aleppo took me prisoner. Back then they were known as Jabhat al-Nusra. I remained in the group’s custody for two years—often in solitary confinement cells, but not always. During this time, it often happened that news of some stupendous victory would make its way, via the fighters’ two-way radios, into our prisons. It was a surreal experience then to listen as a government checkpoint got blown into the sky, for instance, or a truckload of government troops fell into my captors’ hands.
The thing that had precipitated Warner into the literary limelight, and earned her quite a lot of money, was her novel of 1926, Lolly Willowes. As an assertion of female autonomy and idiosyncrasy, it was both timely and captivating. It was also prescient, with its theme of decamping to the country about to be enacted in the life of its author (though perhaps without so sorcerous a resolution). Laura (Lolly) Willowes is a wry old-maidish lady occupying a rather put-upon role in the London household of her married brother, when she suddenly takes flight to a hamlet in the Chilterns called Great Mop, enters into a compact with the Devil and becomes a witch. Despite its subject matter, the book is not excessively whimsical – or its whimsey is tempered by a stern ironic overtone. A style at once mischievous and elegant is one of Warner’s hallmarks, whether it’s applied to a mediaeval nunnery beset by money worries (The Corner That Held Them, 1948), the beguiling and ruthless Cat’s Cradle Book (1960), or the distinctly unfairylike Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), her last subversive flight-of-fancy, carried out with an eldritch inventiveness.
A
Nicole Kidman’s eyes widened. “Haven’t you been to the Rockettes?” she asked. “I go every year. Oh yeah, I’m obsessed!”