From The Washington Post:
What’s a reader to do? Even with the promise of holiday downtime ahead, there’s only so much room on your nightstand. And it can only hold so much weight. The author of one hulking title quipped that while his book had been compared to “a brick,” that wasn’t quite right, because bricks start around four pounds and his tome came in at less than that. Only slightly, it turned out.
More here.
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Erik Vance in the New York Times:
On the Well desk, we see a lot of exercise fads. And while all movement is good, plenty of trending workouts aren’t worth your time. “Japanese walking,” a form of interval walking that took over social media this summer, was a rare exception.
The idea is simple: Walk fast for three minutes, then walk slow for three minutes, alternating back and forth for at least 30 minutes. Some research suggests that varying your walking intensity in this way may improve blood pressure, cardiovascular health and leg strength more than keeping the same pace.
If you feel comfortable walking fast for a few intervals, consider increasing the challenge by mixing in some running. Or, if you are a runner looking to go even longer distances, the run-walk method can help you get there.
More here.
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Andrej Karpathy at his own blog:
2025 has been a strong and eventful year of progress in LLMs. The following is a list of personally notable and mildly surprising “paradigm changes” – things that altered the landscape and stood out to me conceptually.
At the start of 2025, the LLM production stack in all labs looked something like this:
This was the stable and proven recipe for training a production-grade LLM for a while. In 2025, Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerged as the de facto new major stage to add to this mix. By training LLMs against automatically verifiable rewards across a number of environments (e.g. think math/code puzzles), the LLMs spontaneously develop strategies that look like “reasoning” to humans – they learn to break down problem solving into intermediate calculations and they learn a number of problem solving strategies for going back and forth to figure things out (see DeepSeek R1 paper for examples). These strategies would have been very difficult to achieve in the previous paradigms because it’s not clear what the optimal reasoning traces and recoveries look like for the LLM – it has to find what works for it, via the optimization against rewards.
More here.
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Hal Foster at The MIT Press Reader:
Austere like her prose and engaged like her subjects, Sontag was my first inkling of avant-garde culture, my initial point of access to an edgy alternative to the Anglophonic modernism — Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce — that represented high literature. Her European protagonists — Lukács, Sartre, Camus, Leiris, Artaud, Weil, Sarraute, Pavese, Cioran, Ionesco, Godard, Bresson, Resnais, Bergman — were exotic to me, and the notion that philosophers, writers, and filmmakers could be political was even more so. I didn’t understand the many differences among these figures, but I sensed a shared posture, one that pointed to a way around the given terms of American culture, mass versus elite, and American politics, liberal versus conservative. I, too, wanted to be against. If Sontag could cross over to my living room, maybe I could cross over to her New York downtown (which even then I took to be the name of an elective affinity as much as an actual place), and I was hardly alone in wanting to do so.
It was her combination of lucidity and ambition that made Sontag so attractive; hers was a “style of radical will,” and we didn’t understand then that her emphasis on style might also be her limitation. Certainly, it prepared her critical success, which left Sontag, like other prominent women of her generation, somewhat unmoved by feminist critiques: smart and “serious” (her preferred term of approval) knew no gender for her.
more here.
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Stephen Johnson at Big Think:
When amateur writers pitch headlines to The Onion, their jokes often flop. One reason may surprise you: They use too many funny words that wink at the reader, “wacky” elements that sabotage any chance at good parody, former Onion editor Joe Randazzo told our sister site Big Think in 2012.
“It’s counterintuitive, but it’s that dry tone and that straight tone of the newspaper article — of the kind of AP style of writing, or New York Times style of writing — is what we strive to achieve,” Randazzo said. “Sometimes just deleting an extra little funny word makes the joke that much better because it’s really emulating that style.”
Parody requires verisimilitude: the act of mirroring the style, tone, and conventions of your target as closely as possible — “down to every syllable and punctuation mark,” Scott Dikkers, a cofounding editor of The Onion, explains in his book How To Write Funny.
More here.
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Jon Repetti at the LARB:
IT’S 2025, and the turn to genre is old news. Since at least the 1980s, writers of “literary fiction” have been adopting the forms and techniques of popular “genre fiction”—a huge category that includes detective novels, sci-fi, spy thrillers, fantasy, horror, Westerns, and all varieties of romance. By 2012, China Miéville could tell the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference that it had already become “a cliché to point out that generic tropes are infecting the mainstream.” As ever, it seems that the academics are the last to know. Thirteen years after Miéville’s much-cited remark, Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction can still advertise itself as “the first monograph to address this phenomenon.” (We’ll take the author at his word, while noting that the institutional history of this turn has been told and retold, with the usual variations and hair-splitting, by a number of Rosen’s colleagues: Mark McGurl, Dan Sinykin, and Sarah Brouillette, among others.)
The basic story goes something like this. With the rise of mass culture in the late 19th century, certain prose writers sought to distinguish themselves as makers of “serious art,” cordoning off their work from the crowd of potboilers, bodice rippers, and other products of Grub Street. Building on the example of a few forebears (Gustave Flaubert and Henry James chief among them), the modernists systematized this great divide as a collective project of resistance to market logics in the realm of art.
more here.
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Before you came
I knew my world
Things were in place
The sky steady to the end of sight
The street its familiar self
The glass of wine just a glass of wine
And now
They circle and cavort
Blur so fast
I cannot tell
What is which
And which is what
Stay
If you may
So that again
Time and space
Slip back in place
The sky steady to the end of sight
The street its familiar self
The glass of wine just a glass of wine
by Anjum Altaf
from More Transgressions
Poems inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
LG Publishers, Delhi, 2021
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Chris Zimmerman in Plough:
Penned in August 1925, Eberhard Arnold’s “First Law of Sannerz” is the oldest written rule of the community now known as the Bruderhof, and members have been attempting to practice it ever since. It is no exaggeration to say that without it, the community probably would have succumbed by now to one of the many crises it has weathered over the last one hundred years. Here it is:
There is no law but that of love. Love is joy in others. What, then, is anger at them? If we have joy in the presence of others, we will convey it with words of love. It follows that words of irritation or annoyance about members of the community are unacceptable. This is why we can never allow talk against brothers or sisters or their character traits, whether openly or by insinuation – under no circumstances behind their backs. Gossiping within one’s own family is no exception.
Without the commandment of silence, there is no loyalty and therefore no community. The only possibility, when someone’s weakness has caused something in us to rise up against them, is to speak to them directly, in the sense of performing a service of love.
An open word, directly addressed, deepens friendship and will not be taken amiss. Only when two people cannot find one another in this manner will it be necessary to draw in a third person whom both parties trust; and this will lead to a mutual understanding at the highest and deepest levels.
Members of our household should hang this admonition at their places of work, where they always have it before their eyes.
In writing the “First Law,” Arnold, a founder of the Bruderhof, drew inspiration from a passage in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus advises his followers to solve quarrels “just between the two of you” (Matt. 18:15) and to forgive someone who angers you not just once, nor even seven times, but “seventy times seven” (Matt. 18:21).
More here.
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Dana Stevens in Slate:
Bilge’s description of Matthew Lillard’s facial journey in the actor’s single scene in The Life of Chuck—a movie I have yet to watch—brought to mind another highlight of 2025 face acting: Billy Crudup’s one-scene wonder of a performance in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Crudup’s character, Timothy, is the long-ago roommate and acting-school rival of George Clooney’s eponymous movie star. When they catch up over a drink at a dive bar they used to frequent, the energy between them keeps shifting: warm and nostalgic one minute, prickly and combative the next. At one point Jay persuades Timothy to perform his old trick of reading a menu aloud in such a way as to demonstrate his acting range. After taking a moment to find his emotional choice, Timothy delivers a tragicomic ode to truffle Parmesan fries and Brussels sprouts with balsamic glaze, ending on a sobbing salute to iceberg lettuce that leaves both Jay and the audience first cackling, then in awe.
More here.
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Robert Archambeau at The Hudson Review:
Gatsby’s pink suit is, of course, a sign of his vulgarity, every bit as much as his lavish, show-off parties. And it is the vulgarian character of these parties that ties Fitzgerald’s hero to the character Trimalchio from Gaius Petronious Arbiter’s first-century literary burlesque, the Satyricon. Fitzgerald’s publisher had the good sense to reject Trimalchio in West Egg, the initial title of the novel. Fitzgerald’s commercial sense had certainly failed him when he proposed that title, though the allusion itself was sound. Both Jay Gatsby and Petronius’ Trimalchio are social upstarts—“Mr. Nobodies from Nowhere,” to steal Tom Buchanan’s phrase. Both use lavish parties in misguided attempts to pull themselves closer to the glamorous lives they desire.
Trimalchio, though, was an upstart in a way that Gatsby could never be. I don’t mean that Trimalchio, as a Roman freedman, rose from lower social depths than did Gatsby, who knew poverty and obscurity but not enslavement. I mean that a strong case can be made that Trimalchio was the first modern literary character—a new sort of literary figure, different from the flatter figures of classical narratives who came before, characters who were, generally speaking, more social types than they were individuals.
more here.
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Chelsea Leu in The Guardian:
At first glance, the protagonist of Gish Jen’s latest novel seems like many of the other Chinese American immigrants Jen has portrayed so astutely in her decades-long career. Loo Shu-hsin is born into privilege in 1924 – her father is a banker in the largely British-run International Settlement of Shanghai – but her life is marked by her mother’s constant belittlement. “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk,” she’s told, after speaking out of turn. “With a tongue like yours, no one will ever marry you.” Her only solace in the household is a nursemaid, Nai-ma, who vanishes one day without warning – a psychic wound that lingers even as she grows up, emigrates to the US and enrols in a PhD programme.
In one striking way, however, Loo Shu-hsin is different from Jen’s previous protagonists: she happens to be Jen’s own mother. Bad Bad Girl is in part a fictionalised reconstruction of Jen’s mother’s life, in service of a searching attempt to excavate their troubled relationship. “All my life, after all,” Jen writes, “I have wanted to know how our relationship went wrong – how I became her nemesis, her bête noire, her lightning rod, a scapegoat.”
More here.
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Gregory Martin at The American Scholar:
Charlotte’s Web, however, is a perfect book, a masterpiece about living and dying well. There should be some universal magic spell that prevents a child from seeing any Charlotte’s Web movie before reading the book. Evan is 22 now, a college senior studying psychology and philosophy, but he has still not read Charlotte’s Web. I read aloud to him so many books when he was little and later, well into his elementary years. I loved this, and he loved this. I loved reading to him as much as anything I have loved. That I did not read Charlotte’s Web aloud to Evan has to be considered one of the real failures, among many, of my parenting career.
How else to do right by one’s favorite authors than to pass them on, read them aloud, urge them on the ones we love? On anyone who will listen?
more here.
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Jasna Hodžić at Big Think:
Neuroscientists have been studying more cognition-based questions — like how the brain recognizes patterns, remembers information, or learns rules to get a reward — for some time now. “Studying tasks that tapped into real cognition opened up whole sets of neural properties you simply don’t see in basic sensory tasks,” says Miller. But the experimental setup rarely changed, and the strengths of classical neuroscience — precision and control — limited the reach of these studies.
Ethology and related fields such as behavioral ecology have the opposite strengths and weaknesses. Primatologists can observe and track natural behavior in extraordinary detail and develop ecological theories about how certain behaviors impact survival. While classical neuroscience might reveal how the brain creates behavior, ethology reveals why a behavior might matter.
One case offers a clear example of the kinds of questions that neither primate ethology nor neuroscience can answer on its own.
More here.
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Molly Davidson at SupercarBlondie:
The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge isn’t just long, it’s complicated in a way most bridges never had to be before.
Spanning roughly 34 miles across the Pearl River Delta, it forms the first direct road link between Hong Kong, Zhuhai, and Macau.
And it doesn’t do it with one continuous strip of concrete.
Instead, the system stitches together three cable-stayed bridges, a four-mile undersea tunnel, and four artificial islands that act as transition points between bridge and tunnel sections.
More here.
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“Nature is part of our humanity, and without some awareness
and experience of that divine mystery, man ceases to be man.
The world today is sick to its thin blood
for lack of elemental things, for fire
before the hands, for water welling
from the earth, for air, for the
dear earth itself underfoot. In
my world of beach and dunes these
elemental presences lived and had
their being, and under their
arch there moved an incomparable
pageant of nature and the year…
Hold your hands out over
the earth as over a flame.
To all who love her, who
open to her the doors
of their veins, she gives
of her strength,
sustaining them with
her own measureless
tremor of dark life.
Touch the earth, love
the earth, honor the
earth,
her plains,
her valleys,
her hills,
and her seas;
rest your spirit
in her solitary places.
For the gifts of life
are the earth’s and they
are given to all, and they
are the songs of birds at
daybreak, Orion and the Bear,
and dawn seen over ocean
from the beach.
by Henry Beston
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From Newsweek:
Kate Winslet has made a career out of playing strong, confident, forthright women: Lee Miller, Mare Sheehan, Rose DeWitt Bukater, Clementine Kruczynski. Her resume is studded with awards recognition (an Academy Award for Best Actress for 2008’s The Reader, a pair of Emmys for playing the eponymous characters in HBO’s Mare of Easttown in 2021 and Mildred Pierce in 2011, an armful of BAFTAs across a 27-year span) and boasts cumulative box-office earnings in the billions (working with James Cameron on a couple of Avatar sequels and Titanic certainly helps there).
The native of Reading, England, is practiced at toggling between those large-scale productions with swollen budgets and smaller, independent fare. Her filmography is loaded with prestige literary adaptations—Sense and Sensibility (1995), Revolutionary Road (2008), The Reader, to name a few—as well as several daring originals, like 2004’s amnesiac-romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the first movie in which she appeared, the 1994 true crime tale Heavenly Creatures.
More here.
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Traditionally, autumn is when publishers bring out their most ambitious novels: the buzziest debuts, the most hotly anticipated returns, the heaviest hitters. This year, many of them were also physically heavy, with page counts that climbed, dizzyingly, into the high hundreds and even four digits. (One independent press told us that producing these books broke their printer.)