Category Sách & Tri thức

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Everything Evolves by Mark Vellend review – can Darwin explain JD Vance?

Why evolutionary theory should be applied to peacocks, politics, iPhones and quite a lot in between

Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but then again no one could have predicted the giraffe, the iPhone or JD Vance. The laws of physics don’t demand them; they all just evolved, expressions of how (for better or worse) things happened to turn out.

Ecologist Mark Vellend’s thesis is that to understand the world, “physics and evolution are the only two things you need”. Evolution, here, refers in the most general sense to outcomes that depend on what has gone before. Thus the world can be divided into things that are inescapable and things that are contingent, depending on circumstances. In the terminology he borrows from evolutionary biologist Graham Bell, the study of physical necessity is the “first science”; that of historical contingency the second. So, the periodic table of 90 or so natural elements, which are inescapable given the laws of physics, would fall under the first science. Dung beetles and vice presidents, which aren’t, fall under the second.

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Helm by Sarah Hall review – a mighty epic of climate change in slow motion

A Cumbrian wind is the central character in this hugely ambitious, millennia-spanning novel, which was 20 years in the making

Even if Sarah Hall did not begin her acknowledgments by saying that it’s taken her 20 years to write Helm it would be evident. Not from a cursory glance at her bibliography, perhaps: in that time Hall has published six other novels and three volumes of extraordinary short stories. But in every other way, and the moment you begin reading.

There’s the subject, for starters. Ever since the first paragraph of her first novel, Haweswater, in which an early 20th-century man drives his horse and cart through the waters of a Cumbrian valley recently drowned by a dam, Hall has been concerned with landscape, with weather, with nature in all its forms, with the ways in which we affect each other. In The Carhullan Army, climate change has already happened. Cumbria is semi-tropical, temperate England a folk memory; a dystopian vision that feels, this baked summer, uncomfortably close to reality. The Wolf Border, published in 2015, was, among many other things, about the ethics and unpredictabilities of rewilding an apex predator, while Hall’s last novel, Burntcoat, written in the first lockdown, was set in and after a pandemic. Her story Later, His Ghost is set in a perpetual windstorm of total climate breakdown; in One in Four, a virologist writes to his wife, apologising for getting things wrong. In this new novel, weather and climate are not just potent settings but the main event. The central character in Helm is the Helm, Britain’s only named wind.

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Sally Rooney could be arrested under Terrorism Act after pledging royalties to Palestine Action

The bestselling novelist promised to financially support the group proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government

The Irish novelist Sally Rooney could be arrested under the Terrorism Act after saying she intends to use proceeds from her work to support Palestine Action, which was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK last month, a legal expert has warned.

Meanwhile, No 10 said that supporting the group was an offence under the act, after Rooney had made her pledge.

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Author Rie Qudan: Why I used ChatGPT to write my prize-winning novel

Sympathy Tower Tokyo attracted controversy for being partly written using AI. Does its author think the technology could write a better novel than a human?

“I don’t feel particularly unhappy about my work being used to train AI,” says Japanese novelist Rie Qudan. “Even if it is copied, I feel confident there’s a part of me that will remain, which nobody can copy.”

The 34-year old author is talking to me via Zoom from her home near Tokyo, ahead of the publication of the English-language translation of her fourth novel, Sympathy Tower Tokyo. The book attracted controversy in Japan when it won a prestigious prize, despite being partly written by ChatGPT.

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From V to Vineland and Inherent Vice: Thomas Pynchon’s books – ranked!

With fans eagerly awaiting the reclusive author’s first book in more than a decade, the noir caper Shadow Ticket, we assess his best fiction of the past 60 years

A collection of early short stories that is chiefly of interest for the introduction, in which the author spells out why he thinks they fail. Pynchon does not spare himself but, unfortunately, he is right. For aficionados only.

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Poem of the week: Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border by Suji Kwock Kim

Kim’s meditation on the disruptions experienced by family members during the Korean war and North Korean dictatorship explores absence, searching and separation

Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border

By which a strip of land became a hole in time – Durs Grünbein

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Decolonizing Language by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o review – final words of literary giant

An exhilarating collection distills the late writer’s thinking on power, exile and the importance of the mother tongue

On 17 July 1979, the great Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o gave a speech in Nairobi in which he questioned the logic of an African literature in European languages. He had recently been released from prison, where he had been held after his critiques of corruption and inequality had touched a nerve among leaders of the recently independent nation. But his address provoked strong reactions for another reason: up until that moment, Ngũgĩ had been closely associated with the emergence of an African tradition of writing in English and acknowledged as a key figure in the rise of the novel as a major genre on the continent; his fictional work was often cited as an example of how English was being remade in formerly colonised societies. His early novels, from 1964’s Weep Not, Child onward, struck a chord with a global Anglophone audience partly because they echoed the English novelists he had read as a student at Makerere University College, the Ugandan branch of the University of London, and Leeds University, the seat of “Commonwealth” literary studies in the 1960s.

By the time of his speech, Ngũgĩ was a member of the literary establishment in Africa, a leading figure in world literature, and a leader in postcolonial thought. And while it is true that he had challenged what he saw as the hegemony of English in a 1968 manifesto, On the Abolition of the English Department, co-written with two of his colleagues at the University of Nairobi, Ngũgĩ assumed that the abolition of English did not mean dispensing with the colonial language. In fact, for most of the 1960s and 1970s he shared a belief, common among the postcolonial elite, that a literature in the ex-coloniser’s language could indeed be revolutionary. But now the novelist had decided to break away from English, to depart, as he put it, “from Anglo-Saxon literature in order to reconnect to the patriotic traditions of a national and culture literature rooted among the people”. He would henceforth write in his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ (known to Swahili and English-speakers as Kikuyu).

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Why antibiotics are like fossil fuels

They helped create the modern world but are dangerously overused. How can we harness them sustainably?

In 1954, just a few years after the widespread introduction of antibiotics, doctors were already aware of the problem of resistance. Natural selection meant that using these new medicines gave an advantage to the microbes that could survive the assault – and a treatment that worked today could become ineffective tomorrow. A British doctor put the challenge in military terms: “We may run clean out of effective ammunition. Then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.”

More than 70 years later, that concern looks prescient. The UN has called antibiotic resistance “one of the most urgent global health threats”. Researchers estimate that resistance already kills more than a million people a year, with that number forecast to grow. And new antibiotics are not being discovered fast enough; many that are essential today were discovered more than 60 years ago.

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‘Animal Farm was my parents’ teamwork’: Orwell’s son on 80 years of the satirical classic

Richard Blair on the role his mother played in developing the 1945 political fable – and how it nearly didn’t get published

As the second world war reached its height, the winter of 1943-4 was one of the coldest of the century. My parents were living in a poorly heated flat in Kilburn, north-west London. My mother was working at the Ministry of Food. She was deeply involved in BBC Radio’s Kitchen Front which tried to help people conjure nutritious meals from their rations. My father became literary editor of Tribune magazine in November 1943. He was only required in the office three days a week, which gave him the time to write Animal Farm.

Every evening, my father would read what he’d written to my mother under heavy blankets in bed. It was the only warm place in the flat. They would discuss the developing story and where it might go next. Lettice Cooper, the novelist and my mother’s Ministry of Food colleague, remembered my mother updating them every morning with the animals’ latest adventures. That my father and mother worked together so closely is no surprise. My father respected my mother’s talents greatly and later told a friend she had helped plan Animal Farm.

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Look up: five hopeful novels about the climate crisis

Can fiction make us more optimistic about tackling Earth’s environmental emergency? These eco-focused books have hope at their core

‘Can literature be a tool to encourage something better – creating eco-topia on the page, so it might be imagined off it?” asks the novelist Sarah Hall in this weekend’s Guardian magazine. Climate fiction – or “cli-fi” – continues to grow as a genre in its own right; the first Climate fiction prize was awarded this year. And while the roots of environmental fiction are in apocalypse and despair, these five writers are moving beyond dystopia to hopeful possibilities.

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