21stcentury

Population exposures to four climate extremes in different climate regions at the beginning (BOC) and the end (EOC) of the 21st century, and effects of 21st-century climate change versus urban land expansion on such exposures. Credit: Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-42084-x Weather extremes, such as heat waves and torrential rainfalls, are becoming more frequent and more intense across the United States…

In the wave of glitterball-dazzled pop-dance albums that sparkled a little light into 2020’s gloom, Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia was the world-beating monster smash – No 1 in 15 countries, 10bn streams and counting on Spotify. Kylie Minogue’s Disco, meanwhile, was the career-boosting critical and commercial hit, restoring its author to her natural habitat after forays into country and Christmas albums. But Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? was the classiest. In contrast to the neon-hued Future Nostalgia and Disco, it…

Simon Fraser University geography professor Nick Hedley. Credit: Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University researchers are learning more about ancient graffiti—and their intriguing comparisons to modern graffiti—as they produce a state-of-the-art 3D recording of the Temple of Isis in Philae, Egypt. Working with the University…

1When Jay LeRette preaches the Word, he transforms from a mild Midwesterner—one who loves country gospel, rides a horse he has trained to roll over and grin, and has, himself, a whinnying laugh—into a human incandescence. Sixty-four, 5' 5", and dressed like a cowboy, he increases in stature; his voice crescendos to cracking. “The devil’s learned to use us and abuse us, to beat the snot out of us,” he says, then uppercuts the air. “Amen, Chuck?” A man in the second row with a great, ZZ Top–like beard croaks amen. “The…

A new version of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, reimagined by people who have experienced homelessness, is to go on display alongside the original.A leather-bound copy of Refuge from the Ravens: New Lyrical Ballads for the 21st Century, will be presented this afternoon to the archive at Wordsworth Grasmere, a visitor attraction run by the Wordsworth Trust in the poet’s former home of Grasmere in the Lake District, by some of those who contributed to the book.Their work is also part of…

At the heart of every fantasy is something unreal, impossible, or at the very least, so extraordinary as to take us outside the universe we think we live in. Fantasy world-building surrounds those unreal things with recognisable furniture and plausible emotion, so that Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” can kick in. As writers from Tolkien to Pratchett have taught us, the task for both writers and readers is easier when the impossible involves motifs and storylines we recognise from oral narratives such as…