Lonely

When debut author Chelsea Banning vented on Twitter about no one showing up at her book signing, she didn’t expect that some of the world’s most famous authors, including Stephen King, Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman, would respond with tales of their own nightmare public appearances.“At my first Salem’s Lot signing, I had one customer. A fat kid who said, ‘Hey bud, do you know where there’s some Nazi books?’” King wrote to her.“Terry Pratchett and I did a signing in Manhattan for Good Omens that nobody came to at all. So…

A decade after Bowie’s Starman moment on Top of the Pops, a South Asian teenage girl extended a hand from BBC Television Centre to her own audience of dreamers. It was 1982 and a sari-clad Sheila Chandra was fronting Monsoon, whose debut single Ever So Lonely, an otherworldly confection of tablas and sitars topped by Chandra’s ethereal voice, had hit No 12 in the UK singles chart. Mesmerised second-generation Asians, battling the dynamics of our parents’ cultural values while trying to fit in amid a climate of racial…

The James Webb Space Telescope Early Release Science (ERS) program – first released on 12 July 2022 – has proven to be a treasure trove of scientific finds and breakthroughs.Among the many areas of research it is enabling, there's the study of Resolved Stellar Populations (RSTs), which was the subject of ERS 1334.This refers to large groups of stars close enough that individual stars can be discerned but far enough apart that telescopes can capture many of them at once. A good example is the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte (WLM)…

THIS WEEK: Old Lady Selina gets the ending she deserves in Catwoman: Lonely City #4. Note: the review below contains spoilers.  If you want a quick, spoiler-free buy/pass recommendation on the comics in question, check out the bottom of the article for our final verdicts. Catwoman: Lonely City #4 Writer, artist, colorist, letterer, and cover: Cliff Chiang When we were divvying up weeks for the Round-Up, I originally picked this week because it was the final issue of a Black Label series that I had been long awaiting.…

How did you sleep last night? For many people, the answer is “not great.” In the U.S., about a third of people get fewer than seven hours of shut-eye, which is the minimum recommendation. Most of us are familiar with the unpleasant results. We may feel groggy and grumpy, and everything gets just a bit harder to do. But sleeplessness also impairs parts of the brain that affect our social lives and abilities to relate to other people, according to research by neuroscientist Eti Ben Simon, a postdoctoral fellow at the…

According to Deep Longevity, the effects of mental health can be as important as physical health on the pace of aging. In fact, vulnerable mental health has a stronger effect on the pace of aging compared to smoking.Deep Longevity has bridged the gap between the concepts of biological and psychological aging. According to the new aging clock, vulnerable mental health has a stronger effect on the pace of aging compared to a number of health conditions and smoking.As we age, molecular damage accumulates and contributes to…

Fernanda, the only known living Fernandina giant tortoise (Chelonoidis phantasticus, or “fantastic giant tortoise”), now lives at the Galápagos National Park’s Giant Tortoise Breeding Center on Santa Cruz Island. Credit: Courtesy of the Galápagos ConservancyThe discovery of a lonely tortoise doubles the number of known individuals of the “phantasticus” species.Evolutionary scientists were perplexed by the finding of a single, little female tortoise in 2019 that lives on one of the Galapagos Islands’ most isolated islands.…

Credit: Xiaoqi Feng, Author provided One in four Australian adults feel lonely, and the impacts can be dire. Loneliness increases our risks of depression, diabetes, dementia, self-harm and suicide. But likening it to a disease and proposals to treat it with a pill miss the point: we've been building for loneliness over many decades and decision-makers have been asleep at the wheel.…

In 2018, Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina was longlisted for the Booker prize, the first graphic novel in its history to be so. And no wonder. Drnaso’s story, about a missing woman and the effect her disappearance has on those close to her, deals with subjects many traditional novelists continue to be wary of tackling, gun control and conspiracy theories among them. Unlike many seemingly of-the-moment books, however, its power has only grown in the years since. Four years on and, following the US Capitol riots, it reads, at moments,…

Rising Atlanta rapper and Opium Records signee Destroy Lonely has delivered his vibrant new project, No Stylist.Featuring production that recalls some of Playboi Carti’s more playful material, No Stylist serves as a strong introduction to colorful sound. The production is bass-heavy, and consistently gravitates to fast-paced BPMs. The bit-crushed synthesizers and almost constant barrage of manic samples makes it clear what led Carti to sign Destroy to his record label.Destroy Lonely signed with Opium last year, and No…