Nojang Khatami in the Boston Review:
From street demonstrations to song, dance, film, and poetry, women are advancing a long legacy of struggle against authoritarianism in Iran.
A powerful wave of protests in Iran has shown the world, again, the resilience of a people fighting against authoritarian government, economic inequality, and gendered violence.
The uprisings have continued for over a month and grown to encompass student demonstrations and workers’ strikes, but women have been at the forefront of the movement since the beginning. Triggered by the killing of Mahsa (Jina) Amini at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s morality police (the gasht-e ershad, or “guidance patrol”) in September, the movement soon mobilized under the chant of zan, zendegi, azadi—“women, life, liberty”—and has used social media posts alongside street demonstrations to critique the government’s violent apparatuses of control over women’s bodies and life choices.
More here.
Everyone has a type they can’t resist. For the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s old men. Old men secretly worried they’ve spent entire lives on the wrong side of history. Old men born in a world of certainty, transplanted to a different, more dubious one. Old men asking themselves, as so many of us will do (if we haven’t already): ‘What was it all for?’
I have a suggestion: Forget London. Forget, for now, the nineteenth century, forget the whole assertion that the value of the “late” or “mature,” Dickens—a construction whose first evidence is usually located by commentators here, in Dombey and Son—rests on his placement of his sentimental melodramas and grotesques in an increasingly deliberate and nuanced social portrait of his times, of his city. Forget institutions, forget reform. Please indulge me, and forget for the moment any questions of psycho-biographical excavation, of self-portraiture, despite Dombey’s being the book which preceded that great dam-bursting of the autobiographical impulse, David Copperfield (and, in fact, Dombey contains a tiny leak in that dam in the form of Mrs. Pipchin, the first character avowed by Dickens to have been drawn from a figure from his life). Forget Where’s Charles Dickens in all this fabulous contradictory stew of story and rhetoric? What does the guy want from us? What does he really think and believe? Forget it all, and then forgive what will surely seem a diminishing suggestion from me, which is that you abandon all context, ye who enter here, and read Dombey and Son as though it were a book about animals.
In 1665, the British polymath Robert Hooke published an unexpectedly popular picture book, “Micrographia.” It featured drawings of household objects and inhabitants that were normally barely visible—pests in particular. But they were presented at enormous magnification, having been detected by means of the cutting-edge technology of the day: a compound, two-lens microscope.
For years, if you asked a scientist how they pictured the inner workings of a cell, they might have spoken of a highly organized factory, with different departments each performing specialized tasks in delineated assembly lines. Ask now, and they might be more inclined to compare the cell to a chaotic open-plan office, with hot-desking zones where different types of cellular matter gather to complete a task and then scatter to other regions.
Rather than repel or frighten him as it might a conventional English gentleman travel-writer, this “atmosphere of entire strangeness” calls to Fermor, pulling him into the fray. Not only does he foray into the local market before even reaching his hotel, but soon afterward he investigates all things Créole—the language, the population, and the dress. Within a mere two days—and despite the fact that Guadeloupe ends up his least inspiring destination—he has so thoroughly immersed himself in the very things whose strangeness had captured his attention that he can bandy Créole patois terms with ease and has decoded the amorous messages indicated by the number of spikes into which the older women tie their silk Madras turbans. What is striking is the thoroughness of his inquiry and his capacity to explain the exotic without eviscerating its alluring quality of otherness.
The Criterion Channel is hosting a retrospective of films featuring the late John Garfield, a superstar of the nineteen-forties whose body of work has long gone under-recognized. In the course of a career that stretched from the height of the studio system to the depths of the Red Scare, Garfield pioneered a new, naturalistic approach to acting for the camera, one rooted in the same techniques that would soon be called the 
At the dawn of the third millennium, the American novelist Annie Proulx was living in Wyoming and saw a perfect but terrible storm brewing. Extended droughts and warmer winters were providing the optimal conditions for the mountain pine beetle to thrive, and its ongoing infestation—as well as wildfires continuing to ravage the state’s old dense forests, including those of Yellowstone National Park—was turning towering lodgepole pines into ashen tombstones. “That was the first moment when it really sank in that something momentous is going on,” Proulx, who is 87, recently told me over the phone. “I’m a great believer in keeping notes on what you see from year to year. Repetitive observation is my idea of the way to live. This is not a once-in-a-lifetime chance, but a once-in-a-species existence, to observe these huge changes.”
Growing between the tides around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean, are clusters of what look like tiny, green mushrooms. In fact, this is a type of seaweed, or algae – each one made from a single, gigantic cell.
For most of the last 40 years, U.S. policymakers acted as if the world were flat. Steeped in the dominant strain of neoliberal economic thinking, they assumed that capital, goods, and people would go wherever they would be the most productive for everyone. If companies created jobs overseas, where it was cheapest to do so, domestic employment losses would be outweighed by consumer benefits. And if governments lowered trade barriers and deregulated capital markets, money would flow where it was needed most. Policymakers didn’t have to take geography into account, since the invisible hand was at work everywhere. Place, in other words, didn’t matter.
Perched on a leaf in the rainforest, the tiny golden mantella frog harbors a secret. It shares that secret with the fork-tongued frog, the reed frog and myriad other frogs in the hills and forests of the island nation of Madagascar, as well as with the boas and other snakes that prey on them. On this island, many of whose animal species occur nowhere else, geneticists recently made a surprising discovery: Sprinkled through the genomes of the frogs is a gene, BovB, that seemingly came from snakes.
When the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was ten, he lost his father, Wyatt, to heart disease; when he was twenty-one, his older brother Carter died by suicide. In 2019, his mother, the artist and clothing designer Gloria Vanderbilt, passed away at ninety-five, of stomach cancer. (Vanderbilt had watched, desperate and helpless, as Carter leapt from the terrace of the family’s fourteenth-floor apartment in Manhattan.) For Cooper, who is now fifty-five, loss has become an unexpected beacon in his life—a way of constantly reaffirming his humanity. “My mom and I would talk about this a lot,” Cooper said recently. “No matter what you’re going through, there are millions of people who have gone through far worse. It helps me to know this is a road that has been well travelled.”
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