Yagnishsing Dawoor at The Guardian:
António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese novelist who died this week in Lisbon at 83, had little patience for discussing his craft. The mechanics of writing were, he liked to say, “such a bore!”. Yet few writers of his generation showed greater stylistic daring – when José Saramago was awarded the 1998 Nobel prize in Literature, many in Portugal felt the honour had gone to the wrong writer.
Over the course of more than 30 novels, Lobo Antunes honed an exacting modernist style all his own, using it to explore Portugal’s relationship with its fascist past, and to confront the tragic futility of its final colonial campaigns in Africa. Often dismissed as a difficult writer, Lobo Antunes crafted prose that was stubbornly flirtatious, at once inviting and resisting the reader. His sentences, lush with intricate metaphors and similes, bristly with ideas and provocations, brazenly flout the rules of grammar, syntax and punctuation, determined to preserve their idiosyncrasy. Texturally, his stories are a feat, combining discordant elements to exhilarating effects: nihilism paired with political gusto; farce shot through with horror; realism grading into the weird and the surreal.
more here.
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The road up to and through the White House is a partisan one. But when a President retires from the Oval Office, their path becomes much less so. That’s why the institution of the post-presidency has traditionally functioned as a genteel club in which constraints of professional courtesy restrain former presidents from commenting on the work of the current officeholder. And rightfully so: the underlying assumption has always been that while the sitting president may be doing things differently, he is nonetheless doing his best to serve the American people.
IT IS HARD to finish Heated Rivalry (2025– ) and simply move on. It has been more than a month since the first season’s finale, but people cannot stop talking about Jacob Tierney’s series for Crave, which follows two hockey superstars—the Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and the Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams)—who are forced to keep their relationship private while their rivalry plays out in public. As one viewer, a 43-year-old woman, shared online: “I found out about this series on TikTok the day after the first two episodes came out, and since November 29 I haven’t had a moment’s peace. I’ve become obsessed. I rewatch every episode every day.” Another described the show’s aftertaste as something stranger than satisfaction: “After the finale, what’s left isn’t the euphoria you get from so many series. It’s the opposite: emptiness, and the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the story again, already knowing how much pain and, at the same time, tenderness is hidden inside it.” A third viewer framed the show less as escapism than as something closer to solace: “Heated Rivalry arrived in the midst of a crisis of meaning and a global epidemic of trauma and loneliness, where the hunger for intimacy and the fear of it go hand in hand. For many viewers, the series had a therapeutic effect.”
Around 4,000 years ago, one of the world’s oldest civilizations emerged: The 
ITRI is an applied R&D lab, founded to rapidly elevate Taiwan’s technological capabilities, particularly in electronics.
A 
Less famous than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece and deserves to be better known. Here, she goes back to the Brussels material that she had already used at a tangent in The Professor – and which was rooted in her real-life experience of studying and teaching there in 1842-4. Reworking those memories from a first-person female perspective, she now incorporated her own secret into the story: the unrequited love she had felt for her Belgian writing tutor Constantin Heger.
When neuroscientists gather in the Spanish city of Seville in May for the annual Dopamine Society meeting, one discussion could be unusually lively. Session 31 will feature a debate between researchers who fundamentally disagree about the role dopamine has in the brain.
Burying memory and melting into forgetfulness are sometimes necessary conditions for continued coexistence when faced with a history of hatred. This raises the question of why and how a people—or peoples—can nurture animosity. The eighteenth-century lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was a good hater, was asked by a friend whether, if he visited Ireland, he would be as hard on the Irish as he had famously been on the Scots. To his interlocutor’s surprise, Johnson forcefully denied that this would be the case. For one thing, he said, while the Irish could annoy you in a teasing way, like a fly, the Scots got at your blood and sucked it, like a leech. And unlike the despised Scots, he retorted, “The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, Sir [he concluded]; the Irish are a fair people—they never speak well of one another.” Johnson’s prejudices were not exercised to the detriment of the Irish; in fact, he rather favored them. He believed that the study of Irish literature should be cultivated and that Ireland’s traditions of piety and learning showed them to have been “both an ancient and an illustrious people.” Above all, Johnson believed that the record of history showed how badly the Irish had been treated by the English, though he did not conclude that this was the reason why they abused 
Since her debut
No doubt Paul Mescal, playing Shakespeare, wanted to say “To be, or not to be”—what actor wouldn’t want his turn? And it’s not surprising that Hamnet’s director, Chloé Zhao, wanted to include it for general audiences that might not recognize any of the movie’s other Shakespearean lines. But it’s nowhere in Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel on which the movie is based. And here it’s a mistake.
A few weeks ago, a curious story began circulating among software developers. 
Besides invading other countries, there are other ways to defy international law. The U.S. embargo of Cuba, begun in 1960 and continuing to this day, has caused incalculable suffering. It is flatly, unambiguously illegal. Every year the UN General Assembly votes, virtually unanimously, to require the United States to end it. But Florida’s electoral votes are far more important in Washington than international law. The U.S. embargo of Iran is also illegal—embargoes and blockades are acts of war, which can only be authorized by the Security Council. And every year since 1967, the General Assembly has voted—again near-unanimously—to require Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territories it has illegally occupied. But thanks to unflagging American support, Israel, too, can ignore international law, on the West Bank and, apocalyptically, in Gaza.
In a hotel room in Santa Clara, Calif., five members of the AI company Anthropic huddled around a laptop, working urgently. It was February 2025, and they had been at a conference nearby when they received disturbing news: results of a controlled trial had indicated that a soon-to-be-released version of Claude, Anthropic’s AI system, could help terrorists make biological weapons.