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"Beauman, Ned"
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The teleportation accident : a novel
In the declining Weimar Republic, Egon Loeser works as a stage designer. His hero devised the so-called Teleportation Device for whisking actors from one scene to another--a miracle, until the thing malfunctions, causing numerous deaths and perhaps summoning the devil himself.
Book
Never suspected such dreadfulness
Article looking at whether there is a connection between Ford Madox Ford's novel \"The Good Soldier\" and the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft. Ned Beauman peels back the skin of a genteel melodrama to reveal the beating existential fear at its heart. qot
Journal Article
Go ahead, cyberpunk, make my day
William Gibson's \"Neuromancer\" originated a sub-genre of science fiction called cyberpunk, which later withered away, redundant, because cyberpunk had become the condition of the real world. Gibson could therefore be credited with anticipating the information age, with the result that for the last 30 years he has regularly been pressed into service as a prophet. Yet you would not be giving his fiction its due if you just scored it on the accuracy of its predictions like a six-horse accumulator. His latest book, \"The Peripheral\", is a two-headed dystopia in which it is impossible to decide who has got the worst deal, the Londoners of 2100s or the the rural American southerners of the 2030s, two eras which become entangled by a sort of trans-temporal Skype running on a mysterious Chinese server.
Journal Article
How ‘Factorio’ seduced Silicon Valley — and me
“Because part of Shopify is building warehouses and fulfilling products for our customers. [...]building a factory is like growing an organisation and shipping a product, so much so that many people regard Factorio as an invaluable teaching tool. For systems-builders and problem-solvers, Factorio is a sort of utopia, without bosses, without paperwork, where you’re always free to do the best work you’re capable of; and it’s the product of Kovařík creating this utopia in his own life. Because Factorio has such a nerdy fan base, many of its obstacles have been tackled with a level of collective brainpower more reminiscent of the Manhattan Project than of video games such as Fortnite or Call of Duty. “The beauty of Go is that you have super-simple rules, super-simple building blocks, but then the depth of all the ideas and strategies you can discover in the game is almost endless.”
Newspaper Article
A quick gig - then bed
David Bowie loves them. Karen O has recorded with them. Yet they still have to be tucked up in bed by nine o'clock. Interview with eleven-year-old Ada and thirteen-year-old Ivan of the Tiny Masters of Today. (Author abstract - amended)
Journal Article
Your appendix is more useful than you think
Because I'm not a permanent resident of the US, I'm not eligible for Obamacare, so when I'm over there as a tourist I take out travel insurance. [...]this was in 1900, a long time before any of us were being misled at school. Because lymphatic tissue is important to our immune system, subsequent biologists speculated that the appendix might have some immune function. [...]our immune systems, to borrow a metaphor from Parker, become like bored teenagers: they have nothing to do so they find something stupid to get up to, which in this case is causing an inflammation in your appendix for no good reason. [...]your immune system is much less likely to become deranged by tedium, which means your appendix is much less likely to swell up until it either kills or bankrupts you.
Newspaper Article
Down mezcal way in Oaxaca
It's late morning 20 miles outside the city of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, and I'm staring at what looks like a meteor crater filled with giant pine cones. The cones -- from the agave plant -- are still warm to the touch, and there's a sweet smell in the air, like pineapple and caramel. The crater looks like something prehistoric, almost primordial, but it is, in fact, an agave oven, used to make mezcal -- the drink sometimes called tequila's father -- and I'm on a day-long mezcal tour to find out more about it. Those who don't want to leave the city itself -- an absurdly pleasant, walkable place known for outstanding street food -- don't need to. Mezcal is everywhere. In the square outside the Basilica de la Soledad, you can buy mezcal sorbets; at the Mercado de Abastos you can take a chance on gut-rot mezcal sold in jerrycans by roaming vendors; and at the annual Noche de Rabanos -- one of the world's strangest Christmas festivals -- you can admire elaborate scale models of mezcal palenques carved out of nothing but radishes. There's a new wave of bars dedicated to the drink too: Mezcaloteca, Los Amantes, Cuish and In Situ. In the last of these I meet Susan Coss, one of the founders of website mezcalistas.com. Coss grew up in West Virginia and remembers driving around with her grandfather as he bought moonshine in jugs, so it doesn't faze her to drink mezcal that's been distilled in, say, cow hide or an old radiator.
Newspaper Article
Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair by Christopher Oldstone-Moore review
For [Christopher Oldstone-Moore], however, beards repay our fixation. \"Considering facial hair,\" he argues, is a way of \"tracking and explaining\" the \"mutability and variety of ideas of manhood within a given period, and across time\". So presumably what we can expect paragraph by paragraph is fun trivia about beards, and what we can expect chapter by chapter is the sort of substantive insight into \"ideas of manhood\" that only beards can provide. A book such as this needs to deliver on both levels. I'm not quite sure it delivers on either. We learn that in 1860 an 11-year-old girl called Grace Bedell wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln encouraging him to grow a beard because \"you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.\" Lincoln took her advice. The following year, on his inauguration tour, he met Grace in her hometown. \"Look at my whiskers,\" he told her. \"I have been growing them for you.\" Isn't that a lovely story? Yes, it is. Are there enough stories of that quality to keep the average reader entertained for 300 pages? No, there are not. What about \"ideas of manhood\"? Much depends here on how persuasive you find the entailments that Oldstone-Moore draws between historical circumstances and barbal fashions. Some of these are a bit feeble. Here's the Enlightenment: \"Only a few years before Newton's [ Principia Mathematica ] appeared, King Louis XIV of France and his court abandoned their pencil-thin mustaches, the last remnants of the Renaissance beard movement. The turn to reason and the razor were not directly linked, nor were they mere coincidences. As the mastery of nature now seemed more necessary and possible, it was fitting that authoritative masculinity was being redefined as a matter of refinement and education.\" What causal structure is being proposed by a word like \"fitting\"? Or is it not so much a causal structure as just, you know, a vibe?
Newspaper Article