Curtis Sittenfeld’s Help Yourself, hilarious and insightful new collection of three short stories, illuminates human experience, combines a potent blend of biting truths, entertainment and upends our assumption about race, class, envy, and disappointment, gender and celebrity. Suburban friends fall out after a racist encounter at a birthday party is caught on video and…
Human nature has the instinct to fight but War – organised violence – with organised society shaped humanity’s history, social and political institutions, its values and ideas. MacMillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us explores the glory and misery of war which brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity and reveals the…
An epic story of peoples, cultures and adventures among the world’s highest mountians Himalaya, home to an astonishing diversity of indigenous and local cultures, crossroads of trade, meeting point and conflict zone for the world’s superpowers, where Jesuit missionaries exchanged technologies with Tibetan Lamas, Mongol Khans employed Nepali craftsmen, American merchants exchanged musk and gold…
Clarity of statistics amid disinformation and mutant algorithms The threat of pandemic had made us crave data: Millions pore over R numbers, the technicalities of vaccine trials and testing accuracy, once of interest only to biostatisticians, are now daily front page news. Can we really trust the statistics our governments are publishing about the virus? Does…
New History of humankind through the prism of work from the origins of the life on Earth to our ever-more automated present. The work we do bring us meaning, moulds our values, determines our social status and dictates how we spend most of our time. How did work become the central organisational principle of our…
Firefighters in South Korea have brought a devastating fire in a tower block under control. Hundreds of people had to evacuate as the fire broke out between the 8th and 12th floors of the 33-floor Samhwan Art Nouveau commercial and residential building which has about 120 households and shopping units. More than 80 needed emergency…
Amanda De George has discovered a new species of spider with 8 eyes after spotting it on her backyard in Australia. She posted the picture of the spider on Facebook, to be told by spider expert Joseph Schubert that the species was unknown and asked her send it to him for examination. The spider is…
A 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, nicknamed Stan after the paleontologist who discovered it in 1987m sold for £25m ($31.8m) at an auction in New York. The sale set a new world record for any dinosaur fossil ever sold at an auction. Standing 13 feet tall and 40 feet long, Stan is one of the most…
The World Bank in its report said as much as 150 million people are likely to be in extreme poverty because of the Covid-19 pandemic by 2021. “Countries will have to prepare for a different economy post-COVID-19 by allowing capital, labour, skills, and innovation to move into new business sectors,” World Bank Group said further.…
Louise Gluck, a US Poet has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. She was recognised for “her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence Universal” said the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award. Gluck born in 1943, in New York, lives in Massachusetts, and a professor of English at Yale University.…