1940s

Thwaites Glacier, western Antarctica, 2019. Credit: Robert Larter Among the vast expanse of Antarctica lies the Thwaites Glacier, the world's widest glacier measuring about 80 miles on the western edge of the continent. Despite its size, the massive landform is losing about 50 billion tons of ice more than it is receiving in snowfall, which places it in a precarious position in respect to its stability.…

Kevin Jared Hosein, 36, is a teacher and writer from Trinidad, where he lives and works. He won the Commonwealth writers’ prize in 2018 for his story Passage and he has written two novels for young adults, The Repenters and The Beast of Kukuyo. His first novel for adults, Hungry Ghosts, is set in 1940s Trinidad and concerns the wife of an overseer who goes missing and the attempts by one of his employees to move up in a highly stratified society. Hilary Mantel called it “a deeply impressive book… and an important…

Since her father is a longtime music journalist and her mother is a musician, it was inevitable that my 10-year-old daughter would fall in love with music. But I never imagined that the music she would fall in love with would be enka.Enka is often considered “traditional” Japanese music – its early roots are in the 19th century and most enka singers dress in traditional kimonos. But modern enka was actually born in the postwar period of the late 1940s as Japan was learning about western music from the settling US troops.…