Hong Kong’s Protest Movement and the Fight for the City’s Soul

Hong Kong’s Protest Movement and the Fight for the City’s Soul

Machine learning has revealed exactly how much of a Shakespeare play was written by someone else

Machine learning has revealed exactly how much of a Shakespeare play was written by someone else

The 50th anniversary of ARPANET, the internet’s predecessor

The 50th anniversary of ARPANET, the internet’s predecessor

The Lasting Legacy Of Bob Ross And His Colorful World Of 'Happy Accidents'

The Lasting Legacy Of Bob Ross And His Colorful World Of 'Happy Accidents'

Number Theorist Fears All Published Math Is Wrong

Number Theorist Fears All Published Math Is Wrong

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What3words: The app that can save your life

What3words: The app that can save your life

Artificial Intelligence - The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

Artificial Intelligence - The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

Wang: How To Grieve In Front Of Millions Of People

Wang: How To Grieve In Front Of Millions Of People

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Free Throws Should Be Easy. Why Do Basketball Players Miss?

Free Throws Should Be Easy. Why Do Basketball Players Miss?

The Mathematical Phrase that Melts My Brain

The Mathematical Phrase that Melts My Brain

Loveology - Regina Spektor with the National Symphony Orchestra | LIVE at The Kennedy Center

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My Dad's Friendship With Charles Barkley

My Dad's Friendship With Charles Barkley

Gary Keith and Ron, the Magi of Mets Nation

Gary Keith and Ron, the Magi of Mets Nation

Yo-Yo Ma: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Yo-Yo Ma: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Why Taiwan deserves a formal representative in the WHO

Why Taiwan deserves a formal representative in the WHO

Remarks on the Way Forward for the United States Regarding Syria

Remarks on the Way Forward for the United States Regarding Syria

Let Taiwan finally just be Taiwan

Let Taiwan finally just be Taiwan

The Gulf Crisis and a Pariah’s Fling with Islamism

The Gulf Crisis and a Pariah’s Fling with Islamism

If at First You Don't Succeed, Show Your Baby Again

If at First You Don't Succeed, Show Your Baby Again

Can Your Best Friends Be Books?

Can Your Best Friends Be Books?

Why Saudi Arabia hates Al Jazeera so much

Why Saudi Arabia hates Al Jazeera so much

If you want to understand why many Arab world leaders hate Al Jazeera, consider “Sharia and Life.” For years, the call­-in show was one of the network’s most popular, reaching tens of millions. Viewers would call in and pose their faith questions to Yusuf al­-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric and a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. People would ask all kinds of things: Is it all right to smoke during Ramadan? Does a female Palestinian woman have to wear a hijab while carrying out a suicide bombing? Before Al Jazeera, a show like this would have been unusual in the Arab world, where media is tightly controlled. But the Qatari­-owned network has a mandate to produce ambitious journalism on a wide range of subjects (some taboo). It offers, too, a broader range of opinions than most Arab media. These qualities have made it the most popular network in the Middle East. It’s also attracted a lot of enemies. Rulers in places such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt resent the station’s broad reach and its willingness to rile up opposition. They don’t like its Islamist bent, and they’re angry that their populations are exposed to reporting critical of their regimes (and supportive of the Qatari agenda). For years, they’ve called on the station to evolve, or go away. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have kicked Al Jazeera bureaus out of their countries. Saudi Arabia has also banned hotels from offering the channel. And now Qatar is embroiled in a diplomatic war with a group of Arab states, and shuttering Al Jazeera appears to be one key demand. * * * There are about 350 million Arabic speakers across the Middle East. As far back as the 1950s and ’60s, radio stations tried to reach this group. Sawt al­-Arab radio, for example, was created by Egypt to spread Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan­-Arabist ideas. (It was so effective that Nasser’s political opponents in Saudi Arabia jammed the station. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.) In the 1990s, the Saudi royal family began buying Arabic newspapers and sharing them across the region. They also developed a satellite station, MBC, intended for a broad audience. That never quite caught on, but it did show would­-be moguls the potential of pan­-Arabic media. It taught the region’s leaders something else, too: that they might well lose their death grip on the information their populations were able to consume. As Shibley Telhami, who wrote a book on Arab media, explained, “this simultaneous sense of inspiration and threat is likely what inspired the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, to start Al Jazeera . . . in 1996.” Since then, the country has poured billions into the network. Thani had come to power only a year before, and he faced fierce criticism from the Saudi­-run newspapers. Al Jazeera, he hoped, would offer a different perspective, and maybe cut into the people consuming Saudi media. To build an audience, the channel produced content that would appeal to people. As Telhami explained: “Viewers were exposed to programming that most Arabs hungered for, from opposing opinions to more information on issues they cared deeply about as Arabs and Muslims. This included live footage of bloodshed in Israeli confrontations with the Palestinians — footage that Arab national television broadcasts limited so as not to awaken their public’s passion.” The station broke other important barriers, too. It sent reporters to the Israeli Knesset and aired debates live. During the 2008 war in Gaza, Al Jazeera had more reporters on the ground than anyone else, and it was the only station with live coverage. It also, Telhami writes, pushed for “presentation of multiple views, including presenting Israeli views dating back to the 1990s, when few other Arab stations dared do so, as well as airing Bin Laden tapes, Iranian views, and hosting or covering speeches and news conferences of American officials — including then­-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, American military commanders and spokesmen, and White House and State Department officials — during the Iraq war.” These qualities were major selling points. By 2001, it had become the most­-watched Arab television station for news. By 2006, more than 75 percent of Arabs called the network their favorite or second-­favorite news source. The network’s success, however, made it a target of criticism, both from the outside and from within. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans accused the channel of stoking anger and fear about U.S. foreign policy. In 2012, China took action against Al Jazeera English. Indeed, the channel has probably alienated every regional leader at one point or another. Al Jazeera Arabic (which is run separately from Al Jazeera English) has also got a reputation for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. Hugh Miles, the author of “The Al Jazeera Effect,” compared the network with Fox News, telling the Telegraph, a British newspaper, that “Al Jazeera Arabic is very partisan and it supports Islamists. I think that’s a defensible position because there are lots of Islamists and it’s a popular view in many parts of the world. It’s not accepted by other Arab countries, which regard it as seditious and threatening, but they offer another perspective.” “Al Jazeera is sensationalist, Islamic, and pan-­Arabic, but it mirrors Doha’s policy concerns in more ways than it might care to acknowledge,” Simon Henderson, director of the Washington Institute’s Gulf and Energy Policy Program, wrote just four years after the network’s launch. “Many Arab governments would prefer Al Jazeera to simply disappear.” The latest diplomatic kerfuffle has some of the station’s reporters worried that that is what is going to happen. While the station released a statement calling the demand for its closure “nothing but an attempt to silence the freedom of expression in the region,” its staffers worry that Qatar might agree to, say, restructure things so that the network has less freedom. Some of its foreign reporters from places such as Egypt or Syria worry that they might be sent back to their home countries. Still, the network’s journalists say they’re staying positive. “There may be things going on at higher diplomatic and political levels,” Al Jazeera English editor Giles Trendle told the Telegraph. “But from Al Jazeera’s side, I would just say we are confident that we’re here to stay and we’re committed to carrying on with our jobs and carrying on with our journalism.”

How Mother Nature and a Pentagon mathematician created the world’s largest instrument

How Mother Nature and a Pentagon mathematician created the world’s largest instrument

You Look Familiar. Now Scientists Know Why.

You Look Familiar. Now Scientists Know Why.

Adobe semaphore code cracked by Tennessee high school teacher

Adobe semaphore code cracked by Tennessee high school teacher

The Uses and Abuses of Pachelbel’s Canon

The Uses and Abuses of Pachelbel’s Canon

This is how American health care kills people

This is how American health care kills people

In Battle Over Band Name, Supreme Court Considers Free Speech And Trademarks

In Battle Over Band Name, Supreme Court Considers Free Speech And Trademarks


Lee vs. Tam (argument transcript)

Lee vs. Tam (oral argument - audio)

Mathematics for Human Flourishing

Mathematics for Human Flourishing

Nets at Sixers, December 18, 2016

Nets at Sixers, December 18, 2016

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Entrepreneurship Strengthens a Nation

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Shedding Light on the World in Edward Yang's 'A Brighter Summer Day'

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The Decades Long Dance Between China and Taiwan

Neil Gaiman on Why We Read and What Books Do for the Human Experience

Neil Gaiman on Why We Read and What Books Do for the Human Experience

run!

How a new source of water is helping reduce conflict in the Middle East

How a new source of water is helping reduce conflict in the Middle East

Digging into the Archeology of the Future

Digging into the Archeology of the Future

How the N.B.A.’s Salary Cap Favors Talent-Rich Teams

How the N.B.A.’s Salary Cap Favors Talent-Rich Teams

Beautiful Math

How fiction ruined love

How fiction ruined love

Have representations of romance from ‘Madame Bovary’ to ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ ruined the real thing?

To fall in love feels like such a personal and spontaneous process, it is strange — and a bit insulting — to suggest that we’re only copying what the novels and the movies tell us to do. However, the differences in how people have loved throughout history suggest that our style of loving is to a significant extent determined by what the prevailing environment dictates. In certain eras, we’ll swoon at the sight of the beloved’s ankle; in others, we’ll coldly put romanticism aside for the sake of dynastic or practical concerns. We learn how to love by copying a range of more or less subtle cues emitted by our culture. Or, as that brilliant observer of human foibles, François de La Rochefoucauld, wickedly put it: “There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.”

Crucially, over the centuries, the most important factor to have shaped how we love is art. It is through novels, poems, songs and, latterly, films that we have acquired our ideas about what aspects of our feelings we should value and where our emotional emphases should fall.

This is unfortunate. It’s not that the art has been bad; indeed a lot of it has reached the highest aesthetic pitch. It’s simply that representations of love in culture have frequently been profoundly misleading at the psychological level. That we are quite so bad at loving — and the statistics on relationship breakdowns suggest we really are — is a problem that can at least in part be laid at the door of culture. The primary impediment to having better relationships may be the quality of our art.

To call for “better” art doesn’t mean art that is more moving or colourful or impassioned. The art that deals with love is already all those things and more. What it is lacking are crucial elements of wisdom, realism and maturity. Our love stories excite us to expect things of love that are neither very possible nor very practical. The narrative arts of the romantic tradition — everything from the poetry of Keats to films such as Before Sunrise (1995) and Lost in Translation (2003) — have unwittingly constructed a devilish template of expectations of what relationships are supposed to be like, in the light of which our own love lives often look grievously unsatisfying. We may break up with our partners or feel romantically cursed because we have been systematically exposed to the wrong sorts of love stories.

In western literary culture, the book that has most generously and deeply explored the issue of how love stories affect our relationships is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Early on in the novel, we learn that Emma Bovary spent her childhood in a convent immersed in heady Romantic fiction. As a result, she’s expecting that her husband will be a transcendent being, someone who understands her soul perfectly, a constantly thrilling intellectual and sexual presence.

When she eventually does get married to the kind, thoughtful but in the end human (and therefore often humdrum) Charles, she is set up for a fall. She is quickly bored by the routines of married life. She has no interest in domestic chores, she hates having to prepare dinner, organise the linen cupboard and have quiet nights in with her spouse. Her dissatisfaction gets even worse when her first child arrives on the scene. She is convinced that her life has gone profoundly wrong for one central reason: because it’s so different from what the novels she knows told her it would be.

In a clumsy search to bring her reality in line with art, she embarks on a series of misguided affairs with louche figures, spends too much money, neglects her child and eventually commits suicide — bankrupt and in disgrace. Flaubert lays the blame squarely at the door of literature: a certain kind of Romantic novel is responsible for Emma Bovary’s death. He is writing the novel that she should have read in order to tolerate the reality of marriage — though sadly, she is the only one not to be able to benefit from Flaubert’s wry, realistic wisdom.

We are all, at points, as deluded as Emma Bovary, for our art is full of omissions. For example, in so many romantic tales, the whole business of work is rarely viewed as relevant to the enduring of a relationship. Yet of course, in reality, part of the rationale of any relationship is to enable two people to function as a stable joint economic unit for the education of the next generation. This is in no way banal. There are opportunities for genuine heroism here. Especially around laundry. We don’t hear much about this in art.

One of the central manuals of Romanticism — the book that more than any other taught people how to love in a new way — was The Sorrows of Young Werther, written by the German poet and philosopher Goethe in 1774, when he was in his mid-twenties. The book was an instant bestseller in Germany, England and France; Napoleon read it seven times. The novel tells the story of a student, Werther, and his doomed love for a young (betrothed) woman, Charlotte. The tone is intense and ardent. Yet, crucially, as his love for Charlotte grows, Werther is not distracted by the demands of an occupation. Romantic love is a leisured experience.

Romanticism and capitalism are the two dominant ideas of our time, guiding the way we think and feel about the two things that usually matter most in our lives: relationships and work. But combining romanticism and capitalism, as we are actually expected to do, can be arduous in the extreme. It’s an unhappy historical clash. We live under two very powerful but oddly incompatible systems — and art doesn’t help us here. The impressive philosophy of romantic love in art — with its emphasis on intimacy and openness and spending lengthy, carefree days together (often in nature, sometimes next to cliffs or waterfalls) — sits very badly with the requirements of working routines that fill our heads with complex demands, keep us away from home for long stretches and render us insecure about our positions in a competitive environment.

In Richard Linklater’s irresistible film, Before Sunrise, two young lovers meet on a train, fall in love and spend hours talking about their feelings while walking the streets of Vienna at night. Like so many romantic works of art, the film suggests that love involves very close communication about pretty much everything. But the level of openness this assumes is wholly at odds with the realities of day-to-day life.

After a tricky day (or week), one’s mind is likely to be numb with worries and duties. We may not feel like doing much besides sitting in silence, staring at the kitchen appliances, or running through a series of dramas and crises at work. Such preoccupation is not pleasant to witness, and it risks expressing itself in a range of not very endearing symptoms: grunting, brooding silence and a short-fused temper. The most innocuous-sounding question about how the day might have gone can elicit a growl — then, if it is repeated, an explosion. None of this we’ll be prepared for if we stick to the romantic script.

When romantic writers have explored the troubles of relationships in their works, they have tended to draw attention to important, but notably limited, issues. The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin depicted the challenges faced by rational, self-possessed people in revealing their true desires in Eugene Onegin (1825-32). Jane Austen was acutely attentive to how differences in social status could pose obstacles to a couple’s chances of contentment. In Italy, the most widely read novel of the 19th century — The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni — discussed how political corruption could overwhelm love. All these great writers were — in different ways — deeply interested in what might make it hard for a relationship to go well.

And yet there has tended to be something major missing from their list. There has never been very much interest in any of the challenges that fall within the realm of what we can call the “domestic”, a term that captures all the practicalities of living together and extends across a range of small but crucial issues, including whom one should visit on the weekend, what time to go to bed, and whether or not towels should be hung up in the bathroom.

From the romantic point of view, these things cannot be serious or important. Relationships are made or broken over grand, dramatic matters: fidelity and betrayal, the courage to face society on one’s own terms, the tragedy of being ground down by political opposition. The day-to-day minutiae of the domestic sphere seem entirely unimpressive and humiliatingly insignificant by comparison.

In Haruki Murakami’s outstanding 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood, we are taken through every nuance in the emotions of unrequited or doomed love. What is ignored, as it almost always is in art, is the business of sharing a life with someone who isn’t married to someone else, distant, dying or out of reach. What we have come to think of as a “love story” tends — ultimately — frequently to comprise only the obstacles that lie in the way of a love story starting. But once a relationship properly begins, the film or novel ends.

The good-enough ordinary love stories that do exist are therefore all the more remarkable. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s cataloguing of his daily life comes to mind, or, to pick a mid-20th century example, Evan Connell’s Mrs Bridge, which looked at the everyday unhappiness of married life. In cinema, we have the films of Eric Rohmer in France or those of Joanna Hogg in the UK, as well as American indie movies such as Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013), which catches up with the lovers fromBefore Sunrise in discontented middle age, and acts as a brilliant corrective to his earlier romanticism. These haven’t fundamentally changed our views of love, but they offer a welcome counterpoint to our more starry-eyed predilections.

Until our art changes more completely, we won’t go into relationships ready to perceive domestic issues as important potential flashpoints to look out for and pay attention to. We won’t acknowledge how much it may end up mattering whether we can maturely resolve issues around the eating of toast in bed or the conundrum of whether it is stylish, or a touch pretentious, to give a cocktail party.

Films like When Harry Met Sally … (1989) and Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) are typical in centring the action entirely on the run-up to the start of a relationship. But for most of us, our life’s problem isn’t finding a partner (that’s just one very important and at points thrilling phase), it is tolerating the candidate one eventually finds, and being tolerated by them, over time. A wiser culture than ours would recognise that the start of a relationship is not the high point that romantic art assumes; it is merely the first step of a far longer, more ambivalent and yet quietly audacious journey on which we should direct our intelligence and scrutiny.

There’s another thing missing from a lot of art about love: children. In films such asAmélie (2001), children are incidental, sweet symbols of mutual love, or naughty in an endearing way. They rarely cry, take up little time, and are generally wise, exhibiting an unschooled intelligence. But in life, we come to see that relationships are often fundamentally oriented towards the having and raising of children — and, at the same time, that children tend to place the couple under unbearable strain. They may kill the passion that made them possible. Life moves from the sublime to the quotidian. There are toys in the living room, pieces of chicken under the table, years of rebellion and no time to talk. Everyone is always tired. This, too — unlike what Shelley or Baudelaire tell us — is love.

Our culture is full of skilful depictions of love. But at the same time, many of these tales are very unhelpful. We learn to judge ourselves by the hopes and expectations fostered by a misleading artistic medium. By its standards, our own relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation or divorce so often appear to be inevitable. They shouldn’t be. We merely need to tell ourselves more accurate stories about the progress of relationships, stories that normalise troubles and show us an intelligent, helpful path through them.

Alain de Botton has written an un-Romantic love novel, ‘The Course of Love’, out now from Penguin.

The ‘Human Computer’ Behind the Moon Landing Was a Black Woman

The ‘Human Computer’ Behind the Moon Landing Was a Black Woman

Vast double standard on American college campuses

Vast double standard on American college campuses

A Brighter Summer Day: Coming of Age in Taipei

A Brighter Summer Day: Coming of Age in Taipei

The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google's AI Play Go

The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google's AI Play Go

Baby

Baby

Pipelines

Pipelines

How Melinda Gates got her daughters excited about science, and slept in on Saturday mornings

How Melinda Gates got her daughters excited about science, and slept in on Saturday mornings

River City Ransom

Music: "River City Handsome"
A collaboration by:
Mega Ran
The MC Type
Phillip Morris
Toussaint Morrison

released November 19, 2014

Produced by Lazerbeak of Doomtree
Mixed by Jeff Tune at Undercaste Studios, Seattle, WA
Conceptualized by Adam J Dunn

Lyrics


This is River City ransom (unh)
Everybody get your hands up (unh)
It's the beat 'em up anthem (unh)
Act tough, you might get hit with a trash can

(Mega Ran)

The Man Ran hit em with a grand slam
I don't like to grandstand but
y'all know who I am fam
rolling like a boulder over whoever you rolling with
controlling this, I'm on the sticks - It's over with
pay your debts, we rated X
walking in my shoes and you lose, cause they're called Fatal Steps
You know what it is, I'm a vet
past scuffles involved
steel pipes rocks bats and brass knuckles
you have trouble, my international staff
on Capital Ave, swinging and crackin the class
We back alley brawlin' till you falling
Everything is on the line tonight, we going all in

CHORUS
I don't know about y'all
but I'm about to post up at the Oak Hill Mall
My cousin told me bout a scuffle going on
I wish I had a view from the school rooftop
Living like the king of River City, River City
packing brass knuckles this is River City, River City
Getting gritty, getting gritty

(MC Type)

Stupid Cyndi, she's always held hostage
These lame street gangs interrupt her shopping
Rolling with the bosses, downtown where the Jocks is
MegaRan will let a man get knocked out with boxes
Separating jaws in this land of the lawless
My Acro Circus might act as a problem
We don't use revolvers, just kicks and punches
Phil Mo is still broke and coming for your coin purse
The boy's hurt, emerge Turk from the darkness
Kids in Sticksville will get ill and barf up
It's hard luck living in a city always battling
I want to abandon it like the 3rd Wheel Factories
Damages coming at ya quick with my dragon feet
Lazerbeak on the beat, "That guy's a freak!"
We never come weak, unlike generic dudes
Dunn's on the video, Kid Fresh will sing to you

CHORUS
I don't know about y'all
but I'm about to post up at the Oak Hill Mall
My cousin told me bout a scuffle going on
I wish I had a view from the school rooftop
Living like the king of River City, River City
packing brass knuckles this is River City, River City
Getting gritty, getting gritty

(Phillip Morris)

I stepped out the sauna, smoking marijuana
that's when i saw the n*****s Benny and Clyde
throat grabs and choke slams, I'm known to throw jabs
resin on his fingertips I better go to Stone Hands

(oh snap) another stranger to fight wow
he's quite loud 'til i pulled this chain and he piped down
I whipped that ass, no mistaking it's lights out
i live in River City, got my training in Chi-town

Alex, I've got a rare crisis (what?)
a hairline fracture but also an appointment with my f*cking hairstylist (damn)
Ryan keeps affairs private but I'll fight you in
public if I am eating lunch and you decide to interrupt him

Murdering hoardes of fraternity guys
leave em yearning for their mama like maternity wards
that's the type of drama that you don't prefer to be yours
blunt head trauma that you'll need some surgery for

CHORUS
I don't know about y'all
but I'm about to post up at the Oak Hill Mall
My cousin told me bout a scuffle going on
I wish I had a view from the school rooftop
Living like the king of River City, River City
packing brass knuckles this is River City, River City
Getting gritty, getting gritty

Agents of Asian Ancestry

Agents of Asian Ancestry

Letter from Paris

Letter from Paris

Paint It, Black

This Desktop Edible Insect Hive Grows Your Daily Protein At Home

This Desktop Edible Insect Hive Grows Your Daily Protein At Home

President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa

President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa

21st Annual Armydillo Run

results

What The NY Times Didn't Tell You In Its Amazon Workplace Expose

What The NY Times Didn't Tell You In Its Amazon Workplace Expose

You Should Be Coding in Your Physics Course

You Should Be Coding in Your Physics Course

Why Is Russia Destroying Food?

Why Is Russia Destroying Food?

Proverb of the day

Proverb of the day: Your tongue is your horse; if you respect it, it will respect you; and if you humiliate it, it will humiliate you

لسانكحصانك ان صنته صانك و ان هنته هانك 

Lesanakhosanak, ensontusanak wen hentuhanak 

Translation: Your tongue is your horse; if you respect it, it will respect you; and if you humiliate it, it will humiliate you. 



Meaning: Be careful what you say, or you may suffer the consequences. The equine metaphor in this proverb suggests an Arabian or at least Bedouin provenance. Educators are fond of this particular saying due not only to the content but to the easily-memorised rhyme. 

Source: Egyptian Proverbs, (Al-Ahram Center for Translation and Publishing, 1986) by Ahmed Taymour Pasha, 

Translated by: Nabil Shawkat 

http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/136476.aspx

Before Beane

Before Beane

The Really Big One

The Really Big One

OSU researchers discover the unicorn – seaweed that tastes like bacon!

OSU researchers discover the unicorn – seaweed that tastes like bacon!

America's 10 biggest cities, in every decade going back to 1790

America's 10 biggest cities, in every decade going back to 1790

Why Mathematicians Are Hoarding This Special Type of Japanese Chalk

Why Mathematicians Are Hoarding This Special Type of Japanese Chalk

Man with the ‘golden arm’ has saved lives of 2 million babies

Man with the ‘golden arm’ has saved lives of 2 million babies

Resource Prospector

100 novels everyone should read

100 novels everyone should read
A Telegraph selection of the essential fiction library
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4248401/100-novels-everyone-should-read.html

100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewellery was a “masterpiece”.
99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama.
98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.
97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic.
96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon
A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution.
95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he!
94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth.
93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
Nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances. “Something nasty” has been observed in the woodshed.
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the world’s first novel?
90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Lessing considers communism and women’s liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls “inner space fiction”.
88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love.
87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Beat generation boys aim to “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”.
86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero “Rastingnac” became a byword for ruthless social climbing.
85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his “force d’ame”.
84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
“One for all and all for one”: the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady.
83 Germinal by Emile Zola
Written to “germinate” social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts “the gentle indifference of the world”.
81 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastery.
80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400 km.
79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice to the madwoman in the attic.
78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Carroll’s ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy?
76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But “innocent of what”?
75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
Protagonist’s “first long secret drink of golden fire” is under a hay wagon.
74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier.
72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
Three siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation.
71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the “jackals” ousting the nobility, or “leopards”.
69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
68 Crash by JG Ballard
Former TV scientist preaches “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology”.
67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds “The world is what it is.”
66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.
63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson’s “bogey tale” came to him in a dream.
62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Swift’s scribulous satire on travellers’ tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).
61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
59 London Fields by Martin Amis
A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
57 The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.
56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key text of European magic realism.
55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent “nymphet” is complicated by her mother’s passion for him.
53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
After nuclear war has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding.
52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Expelled from a “phony” prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here.
50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.
49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
“Okies” set out from the Depression dust bowl seeking decent wages and dignity.
48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
Explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community.
47 The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it can’t matter.
46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.
45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach. If so, who heard?
44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum “sivilisation”.
41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.
39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.
38 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman with “a voice full of money” gets him in trouble.
37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” said W?H Auden.
36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
An ex-convict struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly.
35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.
34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” in this hardboiled crime noir.
33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated character wears “the wrong kind of overcoat”.
31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.
30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
Puts the “c” word in the classic English country house novel.
29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sowing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Human endeavours “to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” have tragic consequences.
26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Hailed by T.S. Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels”.
24 Ulysses by James Joyce
Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391 words.
23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end.
22 A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India.
21 1984 by George Orwell
In which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman.
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off.
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Every proud posh boy deserves a prejudiced girl. And a stately pile.
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party.
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
“The conquest of the earth,” said Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.”
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”.
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale which ate his leg.
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf.

For Persi Diaconis’ Next Magic Trick …

For Persi Diaconis’ Next Magic Trick …

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40 maps that explain the Middle East

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Why Pi Matters

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High noon for Gary: why is the once-popular name on the verge of extinction?

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How'd A Cartoonist Sell His First Drawing? It Only Took 610 Tries

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Big Sur Half Marathon on Monterey Bay

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The Four Types of Sleep Schedules

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The Secrets of ‘Pulp Fiction’: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About the Movie on Its 20th Anniversary

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The Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Most Popular Physics Book Ever Written, Now Completely Online

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A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces

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Running 101: The 8 Basic Types of Runs

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The Black Iron Cage: Taiwanese Protesters in an Age of Global Unrest

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“Take the Good Life and Be Happy”: On “The Americans”

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What Is the Time Signature of the Ominous Electronic Score of The Terminator?

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Scientific method: Statistical errors

P values, the 'gold standard' of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume.

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Reflections on Things That Go Bump in the Night

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Assessing Robert Gates's Memoir

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Sometimes it's necessary to think "outside of the box."

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River City Ransom: A NES classic is back

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What ‘The Simpsons’ Teaches Us About Math

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Headlines

Rhetological Fallacies

Rhetological Fallacies

In heaven...

In Heaven, the English greet you at the door, the French do the cooking, the Italians provide the entertainment, and the Germans organize everything. In Hell, the French greet you at the door, the English do the cooking, the Germans provide the entertainment, and the Italians organize everything.

Stanislav Petrov: The man who may have saved the world

Stanislav Petrov: The man who may have saved the world

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How Far Did Rocky Go in His Training Run in ‘Rocky II’?