James Frey's Blog, page 26
November 5, 2023
November 4, 2023
Aliens Inside
The long-lost remnants of the planet Theia are far beneath our feet.
Scientists have proposed that the wreckage of a long-lost alien world is buried about 1,800 miles under our feet, reports a new study. This mind-boggling hypothesis suggests that strange anomalies in Earth’s interior may be relics of a world that smashed into our planet some 4.5 billion years ago, and that similar ancient remnants may lurk inside other celestial bodies.
The infant solar system was much wilder and more tumultuous than it is today, with lots of crashes between small embryonic worlds called protoplanets. Scientists have long suspected that an ancient protoplanet known as Theia, which could have been as large as Mars, hurtled into Earth in this period. This catastrophic collision ejected debris from Theia and Earth into space, where it eventually coalesced into the Moon, so the theory goes.
November 3, 2023
Boom Bust
The auction record for a Bouchardon bust was set in 2012 by the Louvre.
[image error]Bouchardon Bust, 1728, Edmé Bouchardon. Image: courtesy Highland Council.A 18th-century bust created by artist Edmé Bouchardon, who served sculptor to French King Louis XV, and was later bought by a Scottish local government for just a few pounds may soon be sold for millions to benefit public programs—but not before the public has had its say.
Scotland’s Highland Council will allow members of the local community to voice their opinion on the fate of the multimillion-dollar bust, currently held by the Invergordon Common Good Fund. The port town in eastern Scotland has a population of fewer than 4,000.
In 1930, Invergordon Town Council spent £5, roughly $500 today, on a marble sculpture of Sir John Gordon, an 18th-century Scottish landowner and political figure, by the French artist Bouchardon.
Sotheby’s, which is acting on behalf of the Council, recently received an offer of more than $3 million for the bust, an amount the auction house believes represents close to peak value. The record for a Bouchardon bust is €3 million (about $3.2 million), which the Louvre paid at French auctioneer Aguttes for the bust Marquis de Gouvernet in 2012. As part of any deal, the council is requiring that the buyer provide a museum-quality replica.
November 2, 2023
November 1, 2023
Big Books
A new book argues that corporate publishing has transformed what it means to be an author.
By Kevin Lozano
n 1989, Gerald Howard had been a book editor for about ten years, and his future filled him with dread. His primary fear, he wrote in a widely read essay for The American Scholar, was “a faster, huger, rougher, dumber publishing world.” He had entered the industry during a time of profound change. In the course of a few decades, American publishing had transformed from a parochial cultural industry, mostly centered on the East Coast, into an international, corporate affair. Starting in the nineteen-sixties, outfits like Random House and Penguin were seen as ripe targets for acquisition by multinational conglomerates like RCA and Pearson, which wanted to diversify their revenue streams, whether through oil, textbooks, calculators, or literary fiction. These parent companies changed the business of books, inciting an arms race that encouraged publishers to grow larger and larger, consolidating and concentrating the industry into a few giant players. Howard’s career had overlapped with this period of flux, and he saw before him a brutal, profit- and growth-obsessed landscape, inimical to his work. Corporate publishers like Penguin moved and grooved “to the tune of big-time finance,” he wrote. This dance was no “fox-trot; it’s a bruising slam dance,” he observed. “From down here on the shop floor, the results often look ludicrous and disastrous.”
Last year, shortly before the antitrust trial that successfully blocked a planned merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, Howard, who had recently retired, wrote for Publishers Weekly looking back on how the industry had changed in the course of his career. The slam dance had continued, its pace only more harried. The corporate houses had grown exponentially since the eighties, and swallowed up their competitors. Trade publishing was dominated by an even smaller group of companies that exerted an immense influence on the reading habits of Americans. When Penguin merged with Random House, in 2013, Howard took to calling the resulting behemoth Cosmodemonic Publishing. The scale of the company, the thousands of employees and hundreds of imprints, were, he says, “simply too large and abstract for a mere editor to get his head around.”
October 29, 2023
Devil 12/P Pons-Brooks
Comet 12/P Pons-Brooks does not pose a threat to the planet, but there’s a chance it will be visible to the naked eye this June.
By Denise Chow
iTelescope T24 13 x 60 sec, left inset 5 x 60 sec T24 in red channel to better resolve nucleus, and right inset T2 24 x 60 sec for color showing green coma. Eliot HermanComet chasers: Give the devil his due.
A comet with two distinct “horns” of gas and ice, earning it the nickname “devil comet” is speeding through the inner solar system and may be visible to the naked eye in the spring when it reaches its closest point to Earth.
The celestial object, formally known as Comet 12/P Pons-Brooks, does not pose a threat to the planet. Instead, the cosmic interloper provides an opportunity for skywatchers to try to spot the comet as it nears Earth on its 71-year orbit around the sun.
Comet 12/P Pons-Brooks will reach perihelion, or the point in its orbit closest to the sun, on April 21, 2024. Shortly after that, on June 2, the comet will pass closest to Earth. During that time, if conditions are clear and skies are dark enough, astronomers have said that the comet may be bright enough to see with the naked eye.
October 26, 2023
‘Goosebumps’ and ‘Fright Krewe’
BY TRACY BROWN
Stanley, left, Pat and Soleil in an episode of “Fright Krewe.” (DreamWorks)Many coming-of-age stories are reminders that being a teenager is a terrifying time.
Is your crush going to notice you today? (Do you even want them to?) How long until your classmates forget about the time you accidentally called your math teacher “mom”? Is your future really going to be decided by how you score on one test? Do people talk about how your hobbies are weird or — even worse — boring?
Adolescence can be a fraught time when these everyday dilemmas feel like the end of the world, which makes it a gold mine for stories that blend these metaphorical monsters with supernatural ones. Just look at shows from “Stranger Things” to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Timed to America’s favorite spooky season, two new teen-led horror shows launched earlier this month: DreamWorks’ New Orleans-set animated series “Fright Krewe,” first season available now on Hulu and Peacock, and Sony Pictures Television’s “Goosebumps,” a new adaptation of R.L. Stine’s popular book series, streaming on Hulu and Disney+. New “Goosebumps” episodes land Fridays.
October 25, 2023
Downtowns Near Dead
Lonely sidewalks and closed storefronts inspire proposals to recast office districts into neighborhoods where people live, work and raise families
Workers renovating the Northstar building in downtown Minneapolis.MINNEAPOLIS—Downtown streets were so crowded in the 1960s that developers conjured up a maze of elevated walkways between buildings, providing winter-proof avenues for office workers who filled the central city Monday through Friday.
Stores, fast-food spots, bakeries and barber shops lined the covered, temperature-controlled walkways, which linked new glass skyscrapers sprouting one after the next. Workers racing to cubicles in the morning kept to the right to avoid crashing into each other, recalled convenience store clerk Monica Bray.
Bray sees only a trickle of passersby these days and lots of empty storefronts. Downtown streets also are quiet, leaving plenty of room for homeless people, police and the occasional tourist. “It’s spooky,” she said.
For decades, downtown office districts across the U.S. powered local economies, generating commerce, tax revenue and an aggregation of ambition, talent and disposable income. Many cities riddled with half-empty office buildings hope to survive the new remote-work era without bulldozing swaths of downtown and starting from scratch.
October 24, 2023
Mothman, Wampus Cat, and Raven Mocker
The supernatural creatures said to roam these forests are intimately tied to the landscape, which is older than most of life on Earth.
BY OLIVIA CAMPBELL
Legend has it the forest is full of cryptids and the paranormal—horror stories set in the Appalachian Mountains are rampant on social media, particularly on TikTok under #HauntedAppalachia. PHOTOGRAPH BY GERD LUDWIG, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTIONFrom the Mothman, Wampus Cat, and Raven Mocker to the Grafton and Flatwoods Monsters, the Appalachians are teeming with supernatural creatures. TikTok is flooded with stories of #hauntedappalachia. And many people believe the high rate of mysterious phenomena in the Appalachian Mountains, a 2,000-mile range that spans Newfoundland to northern Alabama, is due to their geological age.
How old, you ask? Older than Saturn’s rings. Older than the ozone layer. Older than sexually reproducing organisms. Old enough to remember when days on Earth were shorter than 24 hours. The rocks at the core of the Appalachians formed nearly 1.2 billion years ago when all the continents were still one.
“About 750 million years ago, the supercontinent began to thin and pull apart like warm taffy because of expansion of the continental crust,” Sandra H.B. Clark, U.S. Geological Survey research geologist eloquently explained in the story of the birth of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. When the continents eventually broke off, a deep basin from the Carolinas to Georgia filled with seawater. (The rest of the mountain range shoved off to become the Scottish Highlands.)
October 23, 2023
James Frey's Blog
- James Frey's profile
- 3309 followers
