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A World Appears by Michael Pollan review – a kaleidoscopic exploration of consciousness

The journalist and polymath probes the mysteries of the mind in this unsettling yet life-affirming investigation

The brain, wrote Charles Scott Sherrington, is an “enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern”. The British neuroscientist created this striking image more than 80 years ago, a time when mechanised looms, not computers, embodied the idea of technology. Even so, the symbolism feels relevant. We struggle to talk of our brains or minds without recourse to the machine metaphor: once it was clocks, then looms, and now computers. We say that our brains are hardwired; we talk of our ability to process information.

The quote appears as merely a footnote in Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, a fabulous and mind-expanding exploration of consciousness: how and why we are self-aware. But the whole thing can be read as a lucid and impassioned riposte to Sherrington’s conception of the mind as a machine. In Pollan’s view, we have become imprisoned by such narratives, which have obscured the richness and complexity of human and non-human consciousness. Bridging both science and the humanities, Pollan mines neuroscientific research, philosophy, literature and his own mind, searching for different ways to think about being, and what it feels like.

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Are we hard-wired for infidelity?

Monogamy may be held up as an ideal, but evolution has other ideas

Most of us know people in committed relationships, even lifelong marriages. And we also know stories about relationship transgressions, of partnerships tested or broken by infidelity.

As an evolutionary biologist who studies sex and relationships, I’m fascinated by these two truths. We humans make romantic commitments to each other – and some also break those commitments by cheating.

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‘She dared to be difficult’: How Toni Morrison shaped the way we think

The Beloved author’s refusal to conform made her a hero to many – and the only black female writer to have won a Nobel prize in literature

There are many ways to be difficult in this world. You can be demanding, inconvenient, stubborn, complicated, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is one place where all these forms of difficulty overlap. I feel like I have always known this; I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count. But I only began to understand – to discover the meanings and uses of – my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison.

Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything from literature to politics, criticism to ethics, to the responsibilities of making art. In 1993 she became the only black woman ever to win the Nobel prize in literature. But the facts remain: she is difficult to read. She is difficult to teach. Notwithstanding the voluminous train of profiles, reviews and scholarly analysis that she drags behind her, she is difficult to write about. More to the point, she is our only truly canonical black female writer – and her work is highly complex.

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‘There’s only one bed’, ‘fake dating’ and ‘opposites attract’: how tropes took over romance

They’re all over blurbs and social media, but do these bite-size labels lead to formulaic fiction? Plus the classics reimagined for a modern reader

Opposites attract. He falls first. Coffee shop. Forced proximity. Sports romance. University sports romance. Ivy League university sports romance! Best friend’s brother. Brother’s best friend. Slow burn. Age gap. Amnesia. Wounded hero. Single father. Single mother. Language barrier. The bodyguard. Fake dating. Marriage of convenience.

If this list means nothing to you, you’re not a romance reader. Tropes, as these bullet-point ideas have come to be known, have taken over romance. Those who write, market and read romantic fiction use them to pinpoint exactly what to expect before the first page is turned. On Instagram, Amazon and bookshop posters you’ll find covers annotated with arrows and faux-handwritten labels reading “slow-burn” or “home-town boy/new girl in town”. Turn over any romance title and they’ll be there listed in the blurb.

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‘His favourite book was by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick’: how books perform on dating apps

Mentions of reading in Tinder bios are up 29% in the last year. But is searching for a fellow fan of one’s favourite author really a shortcut to compatibility?

‘One of my Hinge prompts is: ‘What’s the best book you read this year?’ and I swipe left on anyone who says a book I don’t like,” says 29-year-old Ayo*. “Someone once replied with a book by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick.”

It’s a blunt approach to romance, but Ayo is far from alone. Books have long functioned as cultural shorthand for personality – signals of taste and worldview – but dating apps have accelerated and intensified that process. In an attention economy that rewards speed, these signifiers have to be legible at a glance.

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Good People by Patmeena Sabit review – addictive mystery caters to modern attention spans

Who killed Zorah? Snippets of gossip expose the divisions in a migrant community in this polyphonic portrait of contemporary America

There has been debate lately about whether novels should cater for our cauterised attention spans. If that means narratives constructed in short chunks that can be consumed in five-minute bursts on a phone – intelligent, but with plenty of cliffhangers and well-timed packets of information to keep us coming back – then Good People ticks all the boxes.

Patmeena Sabit’s debut is constructed from a chorus of short testimonies – none more than a few pages, some just a few lines – about the death of Zorah Sharaf, an Afghan American teenager who has drowned in a canal at the wheel of the family car. We hear from family, friends and those in the wider community – neighbours, teachers, schoolmates, journalists, the guy who found the body – as well as those involved in the investigation (though very little from the police), and bites of media commentary. A picture slowly forms of a devastated family, but what kind of family was it? Versions are multiple and contradictory. The Sharafs are perfect, loving, tight-knit. They are dangerously dysfunctional.

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The Uncool by Cameron Crowe audiobook review – memoir of an awestruck insider

The film-maker and author narrates this vivid account of his wide-eyed adventures as young music journalist in 70s America, hanging out with heroes from David Bowie to Led Zeppelin

The title of The Uncool refers to rock critic Lester Bangs’s assessment of Cameron Crowe, whose adventures as a music journalist were loosely depicted in his 2000 movie, Almost Famous. Long before he became a film-maker, the teenage Crowe travelled around the US interviewing some of the biggest rocks acts of the era, among them Gram Parsons, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Eagles and the Allman Brothers Band. Crowe’s memoir reveals him as the perennial outsider who, unlike his interviewees, cared little about sex, booze and drugs and who lacked a certain savoir-faire. Yet rock stars liked having him around, enjoying his sincerity and the fact that he was more admiring fan than dispassionate reporter.

Crowe is the reader, delivering a warm and vivacious narration that conveys the wide-eyed astonishment of his youthful self as he is thrust into the orbit of his heroes. He also paints a vivid picture of an era in which bands weren’t protected by gaggles of PR representatives and a writer could spend 18 months with an artist – as Crowe did with Bowie in the mid-1970s – to write a single profile.

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Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald review – a joyful celebration of the gaming giant

A portrait of the company whose ‘toymaker philosophy’ stands in contrast to the tech giants that rule our lives

What is the highest-grossing entertainment franchise of all time? You might be tempted to think of Star Wars, or perhaps the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Maybe even Harry Potter? But no: it’s Pokémon – the others don’t come close. The Japanese “pocket monsters”, which star in video games, TV series and tradable playing cards, have made an estimated $115bn since 1996. Is this a sign of the lamentable infantilisation of postmodern society?

Not a bit of it, argues Keza MacDonald, the Guardian’s video games editor, in her winsomely enthusiastic biography of Nintendo, the company that had become an eponym for electronic entertainment long before anyone had heard the words “PlayStation” or “Xbox”. Yes, Pokémon is mostly a children’s pursuit, but a sophisticated one: “Like Harry Potter, the Famous Five and Narnia,” she observes, “it offers a powerful fantasy of self-determination, set in a world almost totally free of adult supervision.” And in its complicated scoring system, “it got millions of kids voluntarily doing a kind of algebra”.

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The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine review – drag fabulousness in war-torn Beirut

Spanning eras of conflict and Covid in Lebanon, this irresistible queer coming-of-age tale explores what it means to be truly free

Meet Raja, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s new novel. A 63-year-old gay philosophy teacher and drag entertainer, he is a stickler for rules and boundaries, living in a tiny Beirut flat with his octogenarian mother, the nosy and unfettered Zalfa. Invited to a writing residency in the US, Raja will use the occasion to relate his life – that is, if you don’t mind him taking the scenic route. “A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it’s true,” Raja tells us. “Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks and distributaries.”

Winner of the 2025 US National Book Award for fiction, Alameddine’s seventh novel opens and closes in 2023, but the bulk of its action takes place earlier: encompassing the lead-up to and aftermath of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), the Covid pandemic, Lebanon’s 2019 banking crisis, and the Beirut port explosion in 2020. If this timeline makes the book sound like a punishing tour of Lebanese history, I promise it isn’t. More than a war chronicle or national exposé, it is a queer coming-of-age tale, an exploration of the bond between a mother and a son, and a meditation on storytelling, memory, survival and what it means to be truly free. Told in a voice as irresistibly buoyant as it is unapologetically camp, this rule-breaking spin on the trauma plot holds on to its cheer in the face of sobering material. Poignant but never cynical, often dark but never dour, wise without being showy and always eager to crack a joke, this is a novel that insists that the pain of the past need overwhelm neither present nor narrative, identity nor personality. With Sartre as his guide, and a drag fabulousness all his own, Raja shows us how.

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Arundhati Roy and Sarah Perry longlisted for Women’s prize for nonfiction

Sixteen authors – including Lea Ypi, Lyse Doucet and Barbara Demick – are in contention for the £30,000 award, launched to address a historic gender imbalance in nonfiction prizes

Arundhati Roy, Sarah Perry and Lea Ypi are among the writers longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Sixteen authors are in contention to win the £30,000 award, launched in 2024 to address the persistent gender imbalance in UK nonfiction prize winners.

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