Eels are fascinating creatures, and after centuries — make that millennia — of study, they continue to puzzle scientists. In the past, they’ve piqued the curiosity of Greek philosopher Aristotle, over two thousand years ago, and more recently, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud.
Visitors to Sydney’s Centennial Park, may have spotted the long-finned eels who reside in some of the park’s ponds. But they are not Sydneysiders by birth, they were spawned in waters some two-thousand kilometres away, near New Caledonia. Seeking out fresh water, they make the perilous journey to the park, by way of canals, stormwater systems, and even briefly slithering over land from one waterway to another. Once in the park’s ponds, they remain there for decades before returning to the ocean waters they were born in.
The European eel is the subject of Swedish arts and culture journalist Patrik Svensson’s book, The Gospel of the Eels (published by Pan Macmillan, May 2020). These eels are born in the Sargasso Sea, a sprawling area of ocean within the Atlantic Ocean, approximately off the east coast of Central America. They then gradually migrate towards Europe, a journey of over six thousand kilometres, taking about two years. Like the long-finned eels of Centennial Park, the European eels also eventually return to the waters of their birth to reproduce.
Almost two-thirds of readers surveyed by London based magazine The Facereported missing pandemic imposed lockdowns, with many reporting “significant improvements in day-to-day-life.”
You might be surprised to learn that an overwhelming majority of respondents reported that, yeah, actually, they did miss lockdown life – 66.9 per cent of them, to be exact. For all the sadness and boredom born out of the pandemic, many of you experienced significant improvements in day-to-day-life.
As an introvert who enjoyed lockdowns, I couldn’t go passed this thought:
“[Lockdown] was an introvert’s paradise. I miss it immensely,” says 23-year-old Sarah, who also described the most challenging thing about the pandemic was “it ending”.
Diana the Musical, directed by Christopher Ashley, was adjudged Worst Picture. With a lowly Metacritic score of twenty-nine though, I guess that wasn’t hard to see coming.
LeBron James was named Worst Actor for his part in Space Jam: A New Legacy, with Jeanna de Waal collecting Worst Actress for her part in the aforementioned Diana the Musical. Meanwhile Jared Leto picked up Worst Supporting Actor for his role in House of Gucci, a film that had been the talk of the town prior to its release.
American actor Bruce Willis won the Golden Raspberry in Worst Performance By Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie, a special category this year, for his work in Cosmic Sin. Willis received eight nominations in this category and must’ve surely been sweating on the outcome.
Update: The Razzies have withdrawn their award for Bruce Willis in their special category “Worst Performance By Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie”, following news of his aphasia diagnosis. Quite right. As a humourous dig, it seemed like a little light-hearted fun, but not anymore.
The Australian Feature Film Summit (AFFS) takes place in Sydney on Thursday 12 May 2022, with the goal of bringing all involved in the feature film production process, including exhibitors, distributors, producers, and investors together for the first time.
The mission of the AFFS is to harness the current success of the Australian feature film sector and strategise how to make more commercially successful and culturally relevant films going forward.
The program for the 2022 Sydney Writers’ Festival was unveiled on Thursday, and refreshingly for the lockdown-fatigued is choke full of face-to-face, in person events. Spread across venues including Sydney Town Hall, City Recital Hall, and Carriageworks, the festival opens on Monday 16 May, and concludes on Sunday 22 May 2022.
The theme of this year’s festival, explains artistic director Michael Williams is change my mind. How perfectly apt, because what is writing, if not transformative?
Change my mind with a stanza or a couplet, a jarring dissonance, a beautiful echo or a rhyme. Change it with a flight of fancy, an intricate, imagined world, a compelling character I’ll never meet but never forget. Turn it upside down with searing rhetoric, impeccable research, the knock-out argument that has me questioning everything I know and all that I believe.
My book won’t win a prize because my friend Sandra Newman wrote a book. The premise of her book is “what if all the men disappeared.” When she announced the book on twitter, YA twitter saw it. This is the single most terrifying thing that can happen to a writer on twitter. YA twitter, presumably fans of young adult fiction, are somehow unfamiliar with the concept of fiction. YA twitter doesn’t do nuance. They don’t understand metaphor or thought experiment. They expect fictional characters to be good and moral and just, whether antagonist or protagonist. They expect characters and plot to be free of conflict. They require fiction to portray a world without racism, bigotry, and bullies. And when YA twitter gets wind of a book that doesn’t meet their demands, they respond with a beatdown so unrelenting and vicious it would shock William Golding. They call it “call-out culture” because bullying is wrong, unless your target is someone you don’t like, for social justice reasons, of course.
The problem of plots free of conflict isn’t restricted to “YA Twitter” though. Scanning through a range of book reviews on aggregator websites reveals a similar pattern. Readers will fault a novel if they find a character “unlikable”. Never mind said character’s unpleasantness is a crucial plot device, creating a challenge of some sort for a protagonist to overcome.
Others have stopped reading a book after learning a character is, say, engaged in an extra-marital affair. Sure, it’s behaviour not to be condoned, but it still happens, every day, all over the world, no doubt since people first walked the planet. Refusing to read a book where such an activity is occurring is surely akin to burying one’s head in the sand.
I don’t know how that author identified the most prolific reviewer at the time but I found one reviewer with 20.8k reviews since 2011. That’s just under 3,000 reviews per year, which comes out to around 8 per day. This man has written an average of 8 reviews on Amazon per day, all of the ones I see about books, every day for seven years. I thought it might be some bot account writing fake reviews in exchange for money, but if it is then it’s a really good bot because Grady Harp is a real person whose job matches that account’s description. And my skimming of some reviews looked like they were all relevant to the book, and he has the “verified purchase” tag on all of them, which also means he’s probably actually reading them.
I like to think I’m a somewhat avid book reader, but I could not — in a million years — come close to matching this sort of… output. Grady Harp, the subject of Alexander’s post, must read in a week what I do in a year. But we’re talking about reading and reviewing eight books daily. I know of some fast readers who can tackle a novel in a day, but this feat is truly incredible.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud writing for BuzzFeed News, about what he refers to as “that funny feeling.” New normal was a term bandied about at the beginning of the COVID pandemic two years ago. At that point many of us took “new normal” to be a temporary state of affairs. But in light of other recent events, the Russian invasion of Ukraine for one, new normal is going to be ever changing, and far more permanent than some of us thought.
We are undergoing a colossal vibe shift that extends beyond taste, aesthetics, politics, fashion, or policy. The world as we knew it is not coming back, and it’s entirely reasonable that we may find ourselves plagued with a general restlessness, a vague notion of disorder. It’s that funny feeling.
From BBC Earth Lab. Many millions of years ago, one of Saturn’s erstwhile moons, strayed a little too close, crossed a line, the Roche Limit, and shattered into billions of pieces, having been torn apart by the immense gravity of the Solar System’s second largest planet.
Saturn’s incredible ring system was the result of this cataclysmic event, once the remnants of the moon, some seventeen trillion tons of icy material, spread out in orbit around the planet. It would have been an incredible spectacle to witness, had anyone been around to see it all happen.