Vigilance has its limits… and it’s not good news for early afternoon meetings! Discover more about the science of good and bad timing in Daniel Pink’s new book WHEN.
“Post-apocalyptic fiction too often pays lip service to serious problems like climate change while allowing the reader to walk away unscathed, cocooned in an ironic escapism and convinced that the impending disaster is remote. Not so with Lidia Yuknavitch’s brilliant and incendiary new novel, which speaks to the reader in raw, boldly honest terms. “The Book of Joan” has the same unflinching quality as earlier works by Josephine Saxton, Doris Lessing, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin and J. G. Ballard. Yet it’s also radically new, full of maniacal invention and page-turning momentum…”
Jeff Vandermeer
New York Times
The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning
Margareta Magnusson and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning in this Guardian longread on death, how we obsess over it and how we prepare for it: “Life will become more pleasant and comfortable if we get rid of some of the abundance.”
Guardian
Margareta Magnusson is somewhere between 80 and 100 years old, she’s death cleaned for herself and many others, and here she explains a little about what death cleaning is, and why it’s such a positive, useful thing to do.
What is the myth of responsibility, and what could we gain by challenging it? Watch this wonderful short RSA video, with Raoul Martinez, author of Creating Freedom.
“Rolling Stone began in November 1967, with a photo of John Lennon on the first page and a subscription offer that included a roach clip. In his biography of its founder, Jann Wenner, Joe Hagan writes that the first issue “arrived on newsstands like a handshake”. Fifty years later, as the magazine industry continues to shrink, this excellent biography arrives like a eulogy – not for Wenner, who is 71 and still at it – but for the days when magazine journalism was adventurous and irreverent, muscular and confident rather than plagued by evidence of its own doom.”
Emily Witt
Guardian
“An absolute tour de force about old age and dying” – Linda Grant picks Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises as one of the best books of the year in the Guardian.
How Jean-Michel Basquiat met his muse. A short extract from the audiobook of Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement, narrated by Noma Dumezweni.
Take a look around in this 360° video with Mark Cousins, writer of The Story of Looking. “We know that we’ve got love lives, we know we’ve got working lives—but what if we think of our looking life? What does that mean?”