Unwritten

Natasha Bedingfield, singer, songwriterMy brother Daniel had three No 1s at the start of the noughties. In every interview, bless him, he’d go: “Listen to my sister – she’s great too!” It helped me get a foot in the door. I got a record deal by singing over some demos I’d done. “We don’t like your songs,” the guy said, “but we like you.”I was whisked off to Los Angeles to work with songwriting mentors, which upped my game but meant I missed my younger brother Joshua’s 14th birthday. I hadn’t had a moment to send him a…

We've in a bit of a soundtrack renaissance as of the last year, between the resurgence of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" from Stranger Things, Sophie Ellis-Bextor's "Murder on the Dancefloor" from Saltburn (complete with that infamous Barry Keoghan naked dance scene) and most recently Natasha Bedingfield’s "Unwritten," which played a prominent role in Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s rom-com, Anyone but You. That mid-2000s bop, which was pulled off Bedingfield's 2004 debut album of the same name, has been utilized in…

As you grow up, you start to notice that there are little things one can do to make everyone’s life easier. More often than not, these aren’t exactly laws and regulations, just emotional intelligence and life experience all rolled into one. Someone asked “What's an 'unwritten rule' of life that everyone should know about?” and netizens shared their best examples. So get comfortable as you read through, upvote your favorites, and share your own examples in the comments below. And if you want to see some other examples,…

Being a tourist entails a number of things. On the one hand, you have adventure and excitement, but on the other—there’s the notorious reputation of tourists heeding zero warnings and taking no guff in terms of respecting rules, laws, and customs. To an extreme degree, it seems.Redditors have recently been discussing unwritten rules in their respective countries that tourists always seem to break. And it sounds like some of these are often made very clear, and even that doesn’t help the case. In England please…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Dechen, 40, grew up in Thimphu, the capital city of Bhutan. Her native language was Mangdip, also known as Nyenkha, as her parents are originally from central Bhutan. She went to schools in the city, where the curriculum was predominantly taught in Dzongkha, the national language, and English. In…

Italo Calvino, novelist, essayist, critic, editor, publisher, lived a life that seemed made of words. Like his Baron in the Trees, the legendary aristocrat who escaped in childhood to the upper canopy of a forest, he often seemed reluctant to be grounded on terra firma, much preferring flights of imagination.In the title essay here, the piece that gives this collection its guiding philosophy, he explains something of that habit of mind. In his youth, he suggests, he had the belief that fictional worlds could illuminate…

Can there be much material left in Italo Calvino’s desk drawers? Since the death of the puckish Italian polymath in 1985, no fewer than six collections of his nonfiction have appeared in English, gathered into the autobiographical (The Road to San Giovanni, Hermit in Paris) or the literary-critical (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Why Read the Classics?).So with this seventh collection, The Written World and the Unwritten World, covering a scattering of Calvino’s literary writings from 1952 to 1985 and translated by…

Nearly half of the world’s roughly 7,000 known languages four in ten of them exist without an accompanying written component. These unwritten languages pose a unique problem for modern machine learning translation systems, as they typically need to convert verbal speech to written words before translating to the new language and reverting the text back to speech, but one that Meta has reportedly addressed with its latest open-source language AI advancement. As part of Meta’s Universal Speech Translator (UST) program which…

This is the Sept. 29, 2022, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.For the second time in two years, I found myself staring down a herd of bison.It was a gorgeous morning at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, home to vast grasslands pockmarked by prairie dog burrows and cavernous badlands carved by the Little Missouri River and its tributaries. I was joined by friends with whom I’d also…

She decided to study physics. It was, in a way, good timing—a Black American woman had just become the first of her kind to earn a physics PhD, back in Greene-Johnson’s home state. At Stanford, Greene-Johnson was the only Black student in her major, but that didn't surprise her. What did was the presence of six Black PhD students in the department. “I had brothers and sisters galore,” she told me.Her adviser greeted her by saying, “I wanted the other one,” referring to one of the white women in her class. “But you’ll…