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Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 197, Umberto Eco
Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 197, Umberto Eco Eco began his career as a scholar of medieval studies and semiotics. Then, in 1980, at the age of forty-eight, he published a novel, The Name of the Rose. It became an international publishing sensation, selling more than ten million copies. The professor metamorphosed…
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The list below contains 100 pieces of short fiction – short stories, novelettes and novellas – by women writers, published between 1927 and 2012. Each author appears only once. The stories are by no means the best by each writer. In most cases, I’m simply not familiar enough with an oeuvre to choose the best;…
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Introductory note: Mary Robinette Kowal’s novelette “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” was first published in 2012 as part of RIP-OFF, an original audiobook anthology from Audible.com. It was later published in text form in early 2013 on Kowal’s personal blog, along with a (few) “stage directions” the author had provided to the audio producers. In…
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It was Huxley’s genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity. Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense. Rover the Dog cannot imagine a future world of dogs in which all fleas will have been eliminated and doghood will finally have achieved its full glorious potential. But thanks to…
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The Soft Robotics Toolkit is a collection of shared resources to support the design, fabrication, modeling, characterization, and control of soft robotic devices. The toolkit was developed as part of educational research being undertaken in the Harvard Biodesign Lab. The ultimate aim of the toolkit is to advance the field of soft robotics by allowing…
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futurescope: Harvard Biodesign Lab: Soft Robotics Toolkit Several Harvard University labs in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin have developed a collection of shared resources to support the design, fabrication, modeling, characterization, and control of soft robotic devices, called the Soft Robotics Toolit. The toolkit was developed as part of educational research being undertaken in the…
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we’ve gotten too wrapped up in trying to make solar power compete with fossil fuels, distracting us from its real advantage, which is that it’s right on the roof, independent of the grid. You don’t need wires, or power plants, transformers, or dispatchers. “Doing away with high-voltage lines is not a Luddite view,” says Perlin,…
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He worked with a design team that prototyped an educational television set that could be utilized in the developing countries of Africa and produced in Japan for $9.00 per set (cost in 1970 dollars). His designed products also included a remarkable transistor radio, made from ordinary metal food cans and powered by a burning candle,…
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Fifty thousand Hong Kong residents (the equivalent of 3 million Americans) have taken to the streets to protest the democracy that we have too. We should stand with them. This was the focus of my Zeitgeist talk early in the month (linked above). It was the subject of the talk Time wrote about this weekend.…
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This is what it means to be an artist in capitalism. You might make any art you want about any number of things, talk and write critique all day, organize against it all night. But you are still forced to live in the midst of it. You can either let this destroy you, or you…