latch

American author Kathryn Scanlan has won this year’s Gordon Burn prize for her “desperately consumable” novel about horse training.Kick the Latch is based on a series of interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer from the midwest. The novel is “a thundering achievement, liberated from hard lines of genre and form by a laser-focus on not just excavation, but building of voice,” said judging chair and journalist Terri White.Scanlan said it is “a thrill and an honour to receive this prize, which is unique in its recognition of…

BEIJING (AP) — Tesla is recalling more than 1.6 million Model S, X, 3 and Y electric vehicles exported to China for problems with their automatic assisted steering and door latch controls. China’s State Administration for Market Regulation announced the recall on Friday. It said Tesla Motors in Beijing and Shanghai would use remote upgrades to fix the problems, so in most cases car owners would not need to visit Tesla service centers. The recall due to problems with the automatic steering assist function…

Fiction – so close to lying – has always been a suspicious enterprise, not least to those undertaking it: from the elaborate frame narratives of the 18th century (all those found texts and epistolary novels) to the research expeditions of Victorian realists to the autobiographical turn of the present, authors have long found ways to avoid seeming to make things up, or what Rachel Cusk once called the “fake and embarrassing” business of “making up John and Jane and having them do things together”.US writer Kathryn Scanlan…

NASA has announced it will not be making any further attempts to latch the solar array of its Lucy spacecraft, at least for now. Launched in October 2021 on a mission to visit the Trojan asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter, Lucy had problems deploying one of its two circular arrays, and various attempts to address the issue over the past year have not managed to fix the problem entirely. However, NASA says that the spacecraft should be able to operate on its mission as planned. Illustration of NASA’s Lucy spacecraft…

In her 2019 book, Aug 9 – Fog, Kathryn Scanlan cut up, edited and arranged an elderly woman’s diary found at an estate auction in a small Illinois town. The accretion of brief, broken details about food, weather, people, illness – the stuff of life – had knockout poignancy. As in The Dominant Animal, her collection of 40 very short stories which came out the following year, reduction and compression facilitated a largeness. Kick the Latch, Scanlan’s novel based on the experiences of Iowa-born horse trainer Sonia, is…

There are now more than 800 zero-emission buses roaming the streets of London in a bid to cut into the city’s carbon footprint, and the introduction of new fast-charging infrastructure should help speed things along. The move involves the purchase of 20 new electric tram buses, which will rely on cutting-edge fast-charging arms to stay topped up and on the road.As it works toward a decarbonization goal of net-zero by 2030, London has been rolling out not just electric buses but the advanced charging infrastructure to go…