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Paul Yoon Wins 20th Annual Story Prize

The Hive and The Honey is a collection of astonishing breadth, offering a panoramic portrait of Korean diaspora, of lives rescued from the margins of history. These characters reveal themselves most acutely through intimate gestures, moments that infuse the ordinary with lasting wonder and could only be achieved by a writer as patient, curious, and masterful as Paul Yoon… Read more

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Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe

This superb study by University of Cambridge particle physicist Cliff (How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch) examines contemporary physics’ most intriguing mysteries through profiles of the scientists trying to solve them … Cliff’s lucid explanations do a remarkable job of making the complicated physics accessible and even exciting, and the focus on the scientists’ stories ensconces the heady ideas in approachable, human narratives. This is a first-rate dispatch from the cutting edge of physics. Read more

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Lorrie Moore Is Among National Book Critics Circle Award Winners

The awards, which were announced at a ceremony at the New School in New York City, are among the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States. Unlike other major awards, the recipients are chosen by book critics instead of committees made up of authors or academics. Read more

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Vernor Vinge Has Died at Age 79

As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for the novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004). As Mike Glyer’s File 770 blog notes, Vinge’s novella True Names (1981) is frequency cited as the first presentation of an in-depth look at the concept of “cyberspace.”

Vinge first coined the term “singularity” as related to technology in 1983, borrowed from the concept of a singularity in spacetime in physics. When discussing the creation of intelligences far greater than our own in an 1983 op-ed in OMNI magazine, Vinge wrote, “When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.” Read more

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The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers

Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Read more

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‘3 Body Problem’ Premieres on Netflix on March 21st

A young woman’s fateful decision in 1960s China reverberates across space and time to a group of brilliant scientists in the present day. As the laws of nature unravel before their eyes five former colleagues reunite to confront the greatest threat in humanity’s history. Watch trailer

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