Blog Mark as Read The Joy of Reading Books You Don’t Entirely Understand It really should be acceptable and normal to say “I don’t entirely understand what I just read, but I loved it.” By Molly Templeton | Published on June 27, 2024 Woman Reading in the Studio by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (c. 1868) Comment 0 Share New Share Woman Reading in the Studio by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (c. 1868) At present, I have an alarming number of tabs open. I’m absolutely not going to tell you how many, or how many are open on my phone. There are 15 pages of notes in my now-finished notebook that are about the same subject that led to all these tabs. A lot of these tabs concern the history of a country I don’t live in. Some are mythology. It’s a real cornucopia of delights, and it’s also very distracting. There are so many rich and fascinating rabbit holes a person might fall down.  This is all because I’ve been reading a book that I don’t entirely understand, and frankly, it’s wonderful. A very long time ago, I read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, one at a time, as the books came out. I am—I cannot stress this enough—very bad at remembering historical details. Part of this I blame on high school. Part of this is just the way my brain works. I can tell you the basic plot of most books I’ve ever read, but I cannot tell you the names and dates involved with specific moments in the world’s past. While I read Stephenson’s sprawling series, I spent a lot of time referencing the encyclopedia, because I did not know, necessarily, which characters were based on real humans and which were entirely made up. It was really quite educational. (I also learned about kidney stones, which was less pleasant. But still kind of interesting.) I could have just let it go, let the books roll me along in blissful ignorance. I understood the story structure and the characters just fine. I knew what he was getting at. It was just all that history that kept throwing me: Who? When? Why? But what happened, as I looked up names and places and dates and wars, is that I began to take almost as much joy in that process as I did in reading the books. The two things remain twined in my head, all these years later, and maybe some part of me is always looking for something else like that—something that will offer me a book, a story to read and inhabit, but also an adventure in not-knowing. In recent years, I feel like it has been less common to find books to challenge me, and by me I mean their readers, and by “books” what I really mean is “publishing,” which can feel very focused on the sure thing, the brand name, the splashy debut that somehow speaks to millions and millions of people. Still, there are challenging, mystifying, weird-ass books being published all the time. To be fair, a weird-ass, mystifying, challenging book isn’t inherently a good book, or a book you want to spend your finite reading time on. We only get to read so many books in a month, or a year, or a life. There is value in escapism and familiarity and comfort. But I still want to advocate for sometimes, at least sometimes, going out on a limb, out on a genre vacation, or just out into the wilds of a tale you don’t feel like you entirely understand.  It can feel, too often, like these books bobble and vanish in the big world of Book Discourse. I have searched weird corners of the internet for people talking about Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Library of Broken Worlds, which requires patience, and a willingness to trust her incredible, vivid, dizzying worldbuilding. I think sometimes about how many books there are that American, English-language readers will never get to see, simply because they were too something to get translated here. I think about how lucky we are that Riverhead keeps publishing the great and unmatched Helen Oyeyemi, whose books are works of art that I can’t ever quite fit my head around—which is as it should be, for there is always something else to find in them. I think about how lucky we are that we get to read trippy and furious books like Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, which is both deceptively easy to read and hard to fully fathom. Or perhaps what’s “hard” about it is that it’s hard to accept exactly how clearly it speaks to this moment in time.  McGhee’s Twitter bio used to say something about how literary and genre fiction ought to touch tongues more often, and I think about that, too: About the science fiction and fantasy that appears in the other section of bookstore, about all the SFF writers overlooked by the mainstream even as their prose is crystalline, elegant, looping, rich, just stunning. We build so many walls for ourselves about what we do and don’t do, read and don’t read. Some of it is simply practical: We’re back to the question of time, and how much of it we do or don’t have. When someone says “I am only reading X kinds of books,” they are drawing boundaries around their time as much as their taste. I want, though, for us to have the time, the space, the mental bandwidth to welcome uncertainty, to crank up our curiosity and give the weird or confusing or just slightly unexpected books a chance. And I want it to be totally okay and acceptable and normal to say “I don’t entirely understand what I just read, but I loved it.” When I started writing reviews, in the mid-2000s, there was a real pressure to be authoritative. To speak with your whole chest, even if you didn’t really know what you were on about. I’ve always been a little suspicious of this tendency—of an unwillingness to be transparent about the fact that every reader (and writer!) is coming from their own specific background and none of us knows everything about everything. Subjectivity is inevitable.  Maybe, just maybe, this requirement that we all pretend to know what we’re talking about at all times is a limiting thing. On today’s bookternet, a lot of us can go off about tropes and western story structure and the hero’s journey and probably also several other kinds of story structure we read about once or twice and maybe even there’s some of that Save the Cat guy baked in there, too. So it’s easy, in a way, to keep reading books from this sort of narrative tradition, because we know a bit of what we’re talking about. I can pick up a retelling of a Greek myth and know the basic beats because I grew up steeped in those stories. But there are so many other stories, and so many other ways to tell them. What set me off on this path of delirious not-knowing is that I read Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall. I read it on a plane, and I felt, later, like I dreamed it. Whole scenes existed in my mind stripped of any context, the way you might remember dreams. And then I read it again, with a pen and a notebook and my phone and laptop at hand. I opened a million tabs, and revisited the general outline of the Ramayana, which I know as a Penguin Classic I read in book group some years back, not at all the way I know the stories and myths I met in textbooks as a child. I put off drafting a review of the book in favor of reading every interview with the author I could find. I put pieces together and, outside of my airplane dream-state, began to see where the story restarted, where it looped, where it ate its own tail and then birthed itself again. There is so much I don’t entirely understand in this book, because I can’t; I’m a white American who does not have the cultural context to fully understand all the things that this story encompasses. And what I’m saying is: Good. Good, let me bask in that. Good, let me admit to that. There is real joy to be found in not immediately understanding exactly what a book is doing. Joy in seeing that something outside of the narrative structure we’re familiar with is at play; joy in discovering a different sense of vastness and fluidity. Joy in waiting, patiently, with rich anticipation, for the seemingly disparate pieces of a narrative to mesh, to become something huge and beautiful. Joy in realizing, several chapters into a book, that you could not possibly say what it was “about” until reading to the end, and maybe not even then.[end-mark] The post The Joy of Reading Books You Don’t Entirely Understand appeared first on Reactor.

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, better known as Project 2025, is the effort of a broad coalition of more than 100 conservative organizations working together to ensure a successful new presidential administration begins Jan. 20. Project 2025, spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation, seeks to restore democracy, to loosen it from the grip of the political elites in Washington, D.C. But the fiercest attackers of Project 2025 are lining up to protect the deep state. In recent months, the project has faced outlandish, hyperbolic attacks. The Biden-Harris campaign, talk show host Stephen Colbert, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., are just a few examples of those on the Left claiming that Project 2025 will be the end of America as we know it. The Biden-Harris campaign even launched a large advertising buy to “expose” the dangers of Project 2025’s “far-right manifesto.” A group of House Democrats, including Reps. Ted Lieu, Jamie Raskin, and Pramila Jayapal recently established a “Stop Project 2025 Task Force.” Lieu, a far-left California Democrat, said: “Project 25 [sic] is a radical, extreme, pro-authoritarianism plan pushed by conservatives who are desperate to take our country backwards.” Although the project certainly would reform how the federal bureaucracy operates, the Left’s extreme fearmongering, misrepresentation, and outright lies are a gross exaggeration of its aims.   Here are five of the most outlandish myths the Left presents about this ambitious effort: Myth 1: Project 2025 is part of Donald Trump’s campaign. Project 2025 was launched in spring 2022, before any major presidential candidate, including Donald Trump, announced he or she was running for office. “Mandate for Leadership,” which outlines conservative policy proposals for the executive branch and is available to the public for free online, was offered to all major presidential candidates, including Democrat Joe Biden and independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Although individuals who served in the Trump administration participate in the project, they are not the only ones involved. Officials who served in different presidential administrations going back 50 years are involved. Project 2025 is about people and policy. It isn’t advocating any particular candidate, but rather conservative ideals. Democrats and independents are welcome to its reform proposals as much as Republicans are. The commonsense ideas in “Mandate for Leadership” transcend any one individual. They represent the solutions that millions of conservative and independent-minded Americans need after years of failed liberal leadership and bureaucratic bloat. Myth 2: Project 2025 calls for a nationwide ban on abortion, in vitro fertilization, and contraception. This claim is an outright lie. There are no calls for a nationwide ban on abortion or contraception anywhere in “Mandate for Leadership” or any other Project 2025 materials. In vitro fertilization isn’t even mentioned. This would be easy to confirm for the politicians and TV hosts parroting claims of an imminent “Handmaid’s Tale” dystopia, but they are either too lazy or dishonest to do the homework. Many of the attacks on Project 2025 are false attributions that are simply smears. Myth 3: Project 2025 endorses the “authoritarian” unitary executive theory. Project 2025 doesn’t mention the unitary executive theory. Although many Americans throughout our history have debated the constitutional extent of executive authority, the Constitution makes it clear that the executive branch should be under control of the executive. The Constitution also makes clear that the administrative state is not a fourth, unaccountable branch that may undermine the president and ignore congressional and judicial oversight—the situation America now faces. The “authoritarian” and “unconstitutional” fearmongering is simply a projection. Many on the left have ignored constitutional rights, including those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, to pursue their political goals. The Biden administration has increasingly used the administrative state to attack the Left’s political enemies, from Trump to pro-life fathers and grandmothers. Project 2025 would rein in rogue and authoritarian elements within the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and other parts of the U.S. government. Myth 4: Project 2025 is the effort of a small group of elites to subvert and control the American people. Project 2025, while organized by The Heritage Foundation, is the effort of over 100 conservative American organizations from across the broad spectrum of the Right. Organizations associated with Project 2025 are united in their efforts to ensure a competent, conservative administration. Over 400 Americans contributed their policy expertise to “Mandate for Leadership,” coming from a variety of backgrounds and answering the call to propose real solutions to the bureaucratic swamp that is holding America back. These organizations and contributors represent the views of and solutions for the millions of Americans who are unsatisfied with the ineffectiveness and even subversiveness of our administrative state. Importantly, not each organization in the Project 2025 coalition agrees with each policy proposal set forth in “Mandate for Leadership.” Myth 5: Project 2025’s proposals to shrink the bureaucracy would harm Americans and are contrary to American values. The Left claims that Project 2025 proposes to vastly shrink and in some senses “weaken” the government. On this point, the Left is correct. However, those on the left are incorrect that these efforts would harm Americans. In fact, the efforts would make life much better. As Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Many Americans agree. The federal government is bloated and inefficient and has not been reformed in nearly 50 years. Making it easier to fire obstructive, lazy, or incompetent civil servants would save Americans money and make the government run better. Removing and reorganizing redundant and obsolete offices would do the same. The United States has a federal system, but the role of the states in governance has been increasingly coopted by the U.S. government’s bureaucracy. Winding down and eventually abolishing the Department of Education would ultimately be in the interest of Americans, increasing the quality of education. Reforming the FBI would protect Americans from the politically corrupt leadership that runs the agency today. These are just a few of the ways in which Project 2025’s implementation would serve Americans. The U.S. government isn’t a jobs program—it exists to serve the interests of the American people, not the other way around. Finally, there’s nothing sinister about Project 2025. It is an open book. It works out in the light and respectfully engages American citizens rather than gaslight them. It’s all available to the public at project2025.org. And while the Left fearmongers about the project, coalition partners have received feedback from many Americans, the great silent majority, that the solutions offered by Project 2025 are exactly what this country needs. The post Top 5 Things the Left Gets Wrong About Project 2025 appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Many people listen to music for nothing more than the catchy tune, not thinking to look deeper into the lyrics or facts behind the music. A shame, too, considering many songs have hidden messages or were written by legends using pseudonyms, such as The Bangles "Manic Monday" being written by "Christopher," aka Prince. And that's not even the most show-stopping musical fact out there... Source

The Star Wars series is undoubtedly one of the greatest contributions to cinematic history. The release of Episode IV: A New Hope in 1977 set the tone for future decades of sci-fi films while launching the careers of the cast into outer space, just shy of literally. Countless people have become lifelong fans of George Lucas' masterpiece series, but some of the greatest movie magic lies in the... Source

Released in 1993, What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a drama starring Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Juliette Lewis, and Darlene Cates. Based on the novel of the same name, it follows Gilbert Grape, a grocery store clerk living in a small town, who cares for his obese mother and mentally disabled younger brother. See how such a simple concept for a movie was a major success and learn behind-the... Source

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Those still using Microsoft Windows (now in version 11) as their operating system in 2024 have a lot of experience being left out of the “decision-making process” concerning their own computer and their own data. This is what closed-source, proprietary software gets you (in addition to a lack of innovation and overall technical quality); but there are even more ways to avoid transparency, and, frankly, disrespect paying customers. And one is introducing questionable features without even announcing them. OneDrive – Microsoft’s cloud service – is also available to back up Windows folders like Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos… and as it turns out, users don’t even have to agree to this – or even know it’s happening. Namely, if you are installing Windows 11 (signed into the Microsoft account, as Microsoft prefers), the default is now to upload content from those folders to Microsoft’s cloud. And Microsoft didn’t bother informing their users about this change, compared to the previous installation process, Neowin reported. “Informing” here means, not with a press release, and not even with prompts during installation and setup. The backup, i.e., the syncing of the files is now already ongoing or done as soon as a fresh install is finished, and users are reportedly only (slowly) becoming aware of the change because of new visual indicators on their desktop shortcuts and folder icons (showing that the backup is in progress or done). Windows users can still be grateful there are several ways to deal with the situation. One is to go to the OneDrive settings, and then go through several steps (Sync and Backup>Manage Backup…) and uncheck whatever folders should not sync with the Microsoft cloud service. (But there are also older versions of OneDrive, where the way is, Manage Backup>StopBackup.) Another way to remedy the situation is to install Windows offline, that is, not signed into the Microsoft account (although, it’s not clear what happens once a user signs in after the install – or what might start happening at some later date). The third method is to delete OneDrive from your Windows. And the fourth and best – stop using Windows. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Windows 11’s Sneaky OneDrive Sync appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Miss Maryland Contestants Speak Out About Transgender Winner

Back in the early days of the trans-Atlantic postal service, British packages were taking weeks longer than expected to reach the east coast of North America. With customs officials growing increasingly confused and frustrated at these slow delivery times, it fell to future Founding Father of the United States Benjamin Franklin to solve the problem by creating the first ever nautical chart of the Gulf Stream.An eastward-flowing Atlantic Ocean current, the Gulf Stream was first noticed by Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon in the early 16th century. Sailing towards the Caribbean, the famous explorer and his crew found that the current pushing them back was stronger than the wind propelling them forward, thus preventing them from progressing when their ships were in the midst of the Gulf Stream.By the second half of the 18th century, this vital stumbling block still did not appear on any nautical charts and was apparently unknown to the captains of the British packet boats that carried mail to North America. However, while serving as Postmaster General of British America in 1769, Benjamin Franklin received a complaint from the board of customs in Boston that the packets traveling from England to New York took two weeks longer to arrive than the American merchant ships.Franklin discussed the matter with his cousin Timothy Folger, who happened to be a whaler and the captain of a Nantucket merchant ship and who explained that while American sailors were generally aware of the Gulf Stream, the British packets were not. According to Folger, these postal vessels often attempted to sail straight through the middle of the Gulf Stream and ignored the advice of American whalers who explained that they would travel much faster if they got out of it.Using sketches produced by Folger on a nautical chart, Franklin then had the first-ever map of the Gulf Stream printed, with the intention of distributing it among British sailors. Unfortunately, however, his chart was largely ignored by these arrogant navigators, who continued to plot their course straight down the middle of this natural impediment.A few years later, while crossing the Atlantic as the United States minister to France, Franklin had the opportunity to observe the Gulf Stream for himself, using a thermometer to register its temperature. “I find that it is always warmer than the sea on each side of it, and that it does not sparkle in the night,” he later wrote in a letter to French scientist Alphonsus le Roy.Based on this observation, Franklin deduced that the air immediately above the Gulf Stream is likely to “receive so much warmth from it as to be rarified and rise,” causing cooler air to be drawn in. All of this, he surmised, may lead to the formation of “tornados and waterspouts”, thus revealing for the first time how ocean dynamics can affect weather systems.Returning to the issue of trans-Atlantic travel, Franklin wrote in his letter that “the conclusion from these remarks is, that a vessel from Europe to North-America may shorten her passage by avoiding to stem the stream in which the thermometer will be very useful; and a vessel from America to Europe may do the same by the same means of keeping in it.”Interestingly, this same correspondence includes advice for sailors to always travel with extra personal supplies of wine, cider, rum, and chocolate, but not to bother bringing chickens on board.

The sample collected by OSIRIS-REx on asteroid Bennu continues to deliver unique insights into the history of this small space rock and the early Solar System. In the first few weeks following the opening of the sample, evidence began to show that Bennu might have had a wet past. A new discovery now adds to that.Researchers have reported the detection of magnesium-sodium phosphate. This came as a shock, as it was not detected by the spacecraft from orbit. It makes an even stronger case for Bennu being a splintered-off chunk of a much larger primitive ocean world.Phosphate minerals were found on the asteroid sample from Ryugu collected by the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa-2. They have also been found in meteorites. But the Bennu sample is outstanding due to the size of the grains and their purity.“The presence and state of phosphates, along with other elements and compounds on Bennu, suggest a watery past for the asteroid,” Dante Lauretta, co-lead author of the paper and principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson said in a statement. “Bennu potentially could have once been part of a wetter world. However, this hypothesis requires further investigation.”“OSIRIS-REx gave us exactly what we hoped: a large pristine asteroid sample rich in nitrogen and carbon from a formerly wet world,” added Jason Dworkin, a co-author on the paper and the OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.        There are multiple reasons for the team to consider Bennu a piece of an ocean world. One is the presence of serpentinite, a type of rock that forms when molten rocks meet water, like in the mid-ocean ridges on Earth. There are also a lot of soluble substances, which appear to have been shifted by fluids. And we can add to that the confirmation of phosphates.The team proposes a body with abundant liquid water, possibly under an icy or rocky exterior. The icy moon of Saturn called Enceladus is a good analogy, although Bennu’s parent body would be about half its size, 250 kilometers (155 miles) across. Collisions in the past separated the 500-meter (1,630-foot) wide Bennu.“We're still coming up with ideas on how to test [the wet parent body hypothesis]. But to me, it's the leading candidate for the geologic environment that these rocks formed in,” Professor Lauretta told IFLScience in an exclusive interview back in March.The sample continues to be distributed to labs in the US and around the world (the transport of the precious material was practiced long before the sample landed). In March the team presented 58 findings from the initial analysis, and new insights come out every week. As the pool of scientists expands, we will be getting even more science from it.“The Bennu samples are tantalizingly beautiful extraterrestrial rocks,” said Harold Connolly, co-lead author on the paper and OSIRIS-REx mission sample scientist at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. “Each week, analysis by the OSIRIS-REx Sample Analysis Team provides new and sometimes surprising findings that are helping place important constraints on the origin and evolution of Earth-like planets.”The study is published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

Bornean elephants, best known as the world’s smallest living elephants, have now been classified as “Endangered” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), following decades of habitat destruction, conflict with humans, and debate over their status as a subspecies.Unique to the island they’re named after, Bornean elephants are characteristically small compared to their relatives, standing at around 2.5 to 3 meters (8.2 to 9.8 feet). They’ve long been suspected to be a subspecies of Asian elephants, with some suggesting that they were isolated from their mainland relatives around 300,000 years ago and others putting forward it was closer to somewhere between 11,400 to 18,300 years ago.That’s only part of the debate around the place of Bornean elephants within the animal world, which has made it much harder to provide them with the protection that they need. It’s thought there are only around 1,000 Bornean elephants left, with the population continuing to decline following clearance of the forests they inhabit – for logging and palm oil plantations – and a recent increase in conflict with humans. Thankfully, new research conducted by a team at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London has stepped in to support their classification as a subspecies of Asian elephant and consequently, their place as endangered on the IUCN Red List. The research involved comparing over 120 Asian elephant skulls in the NHM’s collection, which revealed some key differences seen in Bornean elephants compared to their larger relatives; their heads are wider, and in the region of the skull where the trunk would be, the gap was narrower.One of the skulls used in the research.Image credit: © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, LondonCombine this with genetic studies that also showed clear differences between the two, and bam – you’ve got yourself a confirmed subspecies.It’s hoped that through this research and the classification of Bornean elephants as a subspecies, efforts to conserve them will ramp up. “Conserving biodiversity means conserving natural variation at all levels – not only different species but also unique populations within species,” Professor Adrian Lister, a palaeobiologist at the NHM and member of the team that conducted the research, said in a statement sent to IFLScience.“The inclusion of Bornean elephants on the Red List is pivotal in galvanizing conservation efforts and directing resources to areas of utmost importance,” added Dr Cheryl Cheah, a conservation ecologist with WWF-Malaysia. And, as in many cases of conservation, protecting just one group of animals may well end up being beneficial on a much larger scale. “Elephants are a keystone species, playing a crucial role in maintaining the health of rainforests,” said Lister. “By conserving these elephants, we’ll be protecting many other species and the broader ecosystem.”