Feast

When you hear, what do you see and feel? Filmmaker Sam Green (“The Weather Underground”) asks that question with an affable intensity in his immersively designed documentary “32 Sounds.” This philosophically minded trip across life’s vast sonic array also elucidates why paying better attention to what enters the ears — and how it fuels our understanding of the world — might just make our whole damn journey through time and space that much more meaningful.Music sparks memories, noises can quicken movements, and someone…

Oyster mushrooms feature in cuisines around the world, but they should be off the menu for hungry worms—which these delicious fungi kill and devour with abandon. Now researchers finally know how they do it. A study published in Science Advances details how oyster mushrooms use a particular toxin to paralyze and knock off fungus-eating roundworms called nematodes. The fungi, which grow on nutrient-poor rotting wood, then consume the nitrogen-rich worms. “Nematodes happen to be the most abundant animals these fungi…

By Jake Coyle | Associated Press “Renfield” is not Nicolas Cage’s first blush with a vampire. In 1988’s “Vampire’s Kiss,” he played a New York literary agent who thought he was an immortal bloodsucker. His bug-eyed performance was essentially the birth of the over-the-top, kabuki-inflected mythology of Cage. Years later, it would launch a thousand memes — a kind of digital version of becoming undead. Thirty-five years later with “Renfield,” Cage is finally playing the genuine article, complete with bloodthirsty fangs and…

Since the new year, holidays keep cropping up as a surprise. Time’s flying by so fast that I keep forgetting the season’s important milestones that are great excuses to cook something different, whether I celebrate the holidays or not. It could also be the particularly gray and rainy winter we had in California that left me feeling like an ostrich with its head in the sand, waiting for the sun to come back out again (thankfully, it finally has). And the timing couldn’t be better because, as is my current M.O., I had…

Even Nawab Asaf-ud-daula, who shifted his capital from Faizabad to Lucknow, had no inkling that the latter city would become the nucleus of a unique culture. The Lucknow Durbar reached the peak of its cultural glory under the Nawabs of Awadh up until Wajid Ali Shah. This year, the Mahendra Sanatqada Lucknow Festival (3-7 February) showcased the city’s rich tradition of Raqs-o-Mausiqi (dance and music), which includes a range of flourishing forms like khayal, thumri, ghazal, soz, marsiakhwani and dastangoi with an…

BTS’ Jungkook sways to ‘Naatu Naatu’ during live session(Photo Credit –Instagram/Facebook) K-pop superband BTS member Jungkook was seen grooving to the track ‘Naatu Naatu’ from SS Rajamouli’s magnum opus ‘RRR’ during a live session with his fans on Weverse. A clip from Jungkook’s live while grooving and “vibing” to ‘Naatu Naatu’, originally picturised on Jr NTR and Ram Charan, has taken over social media. Some could not even control themselves as Jungkook said ‘RRR’ while talking. ‘Naatu Naatu’ has been a flavour of…

By this time in February, I’ve usually had enough distance from the winter holidays that I feel finally ready to make a celebratory dinner. Thankfully, this typically coincides with Mardi Gras, a holiday that I was raised celebrating where I grew up in Mississippi, which is smack in the middle between Mobile, Ala., and New Orleans, where it’s celebrated in the most famous, bombastic fashion.Growing up, we’d have a weekly party at school where we’d all vie for finding a tiny plastic baby (a.k.a. Jesus) in a king cake. A…

Scottish trio Young Fathers have spent the past decade fusing industrial bass with rap, soaring gospel choruses and thundering drums. Theirs is heavy music worn with a melodic lightness, a potent combination that won them the 2014 Mercury prize for their debut album, Dead. After 2018’s Cocoa Sugar, which produced some of the group’s most accessible work in the yearning single In My View, their fourth album is a joyful career highlight.Over 10 tracks, Heavy Heavy retains the band’s urgent energy – the yelps and driving…

This month brings a deluge of new books, including the latest from genre titan John Scalzi, as well as tales involving dark magic in post-apocalyptic America, a very high-stakes intergalactic talent competition, and ex-con construction workers trying to avoid getting murdered on Mars. Read on!The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories by Arthur Machen, edited by Aaron WorthA newly-assembled and edited collection of works by the influential 19th century occult horror author and mystic, including his 1894 novella The Great…

Publishers are very naughty. Even as many of them seem increasingly to disdain journalism, they’re often perfectly happy to repackage the stray bits and pieces of their luckiest writers as “essays” before sticking them opportunistically between hard covers. In the case of the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, I’ll give Viking a semi-pass for doing precisely this. He is a beloved and celebrated novelist. But I should also say that subscribers to the London Review of Books may feel a bit miffed should they cough up for A Guest at…