Essays

I read Tsitsi Dangarembga’s debut novel Nervous Conditions in 2016, nearly 30 years after it was first published. I was 23 and hungry for literature that reflected my reality as a black woman. I found it a compelling but deeply uncomfortable read, and was shocked by the almost violent emotions it inspired. I put it on my bookshelf and tried to forget about it, but, like great literature always does, it stayed with me.The story, set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the turbulent 1960s and 70s, follows teenager…

This article is part of our coverage of the latest in AI research. Large language models like GPT-3 have advanced to the point that it has become difficult to measure the limits of their capabilities. When you have a very large neural network that can generate articles, write software code, and engage in conversations about sentience and life, you should expect it to be able to reason about tasks and plan as a human does, right? Wrong. A study by researchers at Arizona State University, Tempe,…

Since his death in 2017, Mark Fisher has reputationally ascended to the status of dissident national treasure. His work as a leftist cultural critic continues to inspire the young in particular – Fisher murals adorn Birkbeck University in London, where he used to teach – who have adopted him as one of their heroes. His books were not widely reviewed in his lifetime, however, and his influence has been a largely word-of-mouth phenomenon. Now his publisher, the tiny indie press Zero Books, is reissuing Fisher’s 2014 essay…

In 2019, an American novelist of slender renown named CJ Hauser scored a viral hit with an essay about calling off her wedding and embarking on an ornithological field trip. The Crane Wife described a relationship in which she was cheated on more than once, though what finally brought her to her senses was the realisation that she couldn’t sustain the ludicrously “low-maintenance” persona demanded by her husband-to-be. On one occasion, he even presented her with a blank birthday card, explaining that it could be filed…

Managing Expectations opens with the young Minnie Driver leaning out of her mother’s car window and screaming: “Help me, I am being abducted!” It is Sunday night and, after spending the weekend at home, she is being returned to her Hampshire boarding school. “We live three miles from the school. It makes no sense,” she says.Read with verve and humour by Driver, the book comprises a series of essays on the pivotal moments in her life. These include the time her father sent her home from Barbados, aged 11, as a punishment…

NONFICTION The Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time: The Arctic Mission to the Epicenter of Climate Change by Markus Rex, translated by Sarah Pybus Greystone Books, 2022 ($28.95) On October 4, 2019, the Polarstern, a German icebreaker the length of a football field, sidled up to a thick ice floe above the Arctic Circle and turned off its engines. Soon the sun would set for months. The remaining open ocean around the boat would ice over, and three million square miles of liquid would turn solid in the span…