What We Are Reading Today: Cinema Speculation

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Updated 13 November 2022
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What We Are Reading Today: Cinema Speculation

Author: Quentin Tarantino

The book reads like a series of lectures that Quentin Tarantino might give on his favorite films, and it is very entertaining in that light.
Tarantino is an Academy Award-winning American film director, screenwriter and actor.
He rose to fame in the early 1990s as an independent filmmaker whose films used nonlinear storylines and stylized violence.
His films include “Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Jackie Brown” and “Death Proof.”
“Cinema Speculation” is a very entertaining set of pieces on 70s cinema that’s eminently readable and brimming with passion.
It’s a must-read for 1970s film buffs or movie fans in general, loaded with recommendations and tips of the hat to films that fly under the radar.
Tarantino’s screenplays are also muscular acts of film criticism and revisionist history.
His take on 1960s and 1970s Hollywood, for instance, is already firmly embedded in his 2019 film, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
The book also weirdly acts as a unifying theory of his own movies, even though he doesn’t really talk about them.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Physical Nature of Information’

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Updated 24 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Physical Nature of Information’

Author: Gregory Falkovich

Applications of information theory span a broad range of disciplines today.
It teaches the tools universally used by physicists working on quantum computers and black holes, engineers designing self-driving cars, traders perfecting market strategies, chemists playing with molecules, biologists studying cells and living beings, linguists analyzing languages, and neuroscientists figuring out how the brain works.

No matter what area of science you specialize in, “The Physical Nature of Information” unlocks the power of information theory to test the limits imposed by uncertainty.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Organic Line’

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Updated 23 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Organic Line’

  • Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge

Author: IRENE SMALL

What would it mean to treat an interval of space as a line, thus drawing an empty void into a constellation of art and meaning-laden things? In this book, Irene Small elucidates the signal discovery of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in 1954: a fissure of space between material elements that Clark called “the organic line.”

For much of the history of art, Clark’s discovery, much like the organic line, has escaped legibility. Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge.

 


What We Are Reading Today: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold

Updated 22 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold

In Citizen Marx, Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism.
Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism.
One of Marx’s principal political values, Leipold contends, was a republican conception of freedom, according to which one is unfree when subjected to arbitrary power.
Placing Marx’s republican communism in its historical context—but not consigning him to that context—Leipold traces Marx’s shifting relationship to republicanism across three broad periods. One of Marx’s great contributions, Leipold suggests, was to place politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of socialism.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elusive Cures’ by Nicole Rust

Updated 21 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elusive Cures’ by Nicole Rust

Brain research has been accelerating rapidly in recent decades, but the translation of our many discoveries into treatments and cures for brain disorders has not happened as many expected. 

We do not have cures for the vast majority of brain illnesses, from Alzheimer’s to depression, and many medications we do have to treat the brain are derived from drugs produced in the 1950s—before we knew much about the brain at all. 

Tackling brain disorders is clearly one of the biggest challenges facing humanity today. What will it take to overcome it? Nicole Rust takes readers along on her personal journey to answer this question.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Atlas of Birds’ by Mike Unwin

Updated 20 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Atlas of Birds’ by Mike Unwin

“The Atlas of Birds” captures the breathtaking diversity of birds, and illuminates their conservation status around the world.

Full-color maps show where birds are found, both by country and terrain, and reveal how an astounding variety of behavioral adaptations—from flight and feeding to nest building and song—have enabled them to thrive in virtually every habitat on Earth.

Maps of individual journeys and global flyways chart the amazing phenomenon of bird migration, while bird classification is explained using maps for each order and many key families.