Watch The National perform some songs from their forthcoming album.
[Update 4/8/2013] And now a quality recording of a song from the new album, Demons.
Author: Anders Monsen (Page 21 of 83)
Fascinating story about the potential real gold ring source for J.R.R. Tolkien’s one ring from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Sounds almost too good to be true, but what’s a neat story if true. Shows how something simple and physical can inspire a tale of fantasy. A cursed ring, indeed.
Over at NPR the economics debate between libertarian John Papola and Keynesian James Livingston continues, with a rebuttal from Papola. For a recap, watch the classic rap video econ-off between Hayek and Keynes that Papola created a few years ago, “Fear the Boom and Bust.”
Book news round-up from NPR, including mention of a publishing company planning to bring back forgotten young adult novels from the 1930s onward.
Positive run-down on the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, which seems fairly well-represented by dystopian fiction this year. Glad to see Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion among the books, even a front-runner, possibly.
From reason.tv, a video interview with Peter Bagge about his new graphic novel, Reset.
This morning I read on Ken MacLeod’s Twitter that writer Iain Banks has terminal cancer and may only have a few months left to live. Unlike early Banks fans, I stumbled upon his books after first reading MacLeod’s fiction, not the other way around. In the late 1990s I picked up Feersum Endjinn and was simply blown away. His style is impeccable, his imagination visionary. Look to Windward, The Use of Weapons, Matter, Inversions, many more brilliant books. I’ve read only one of his non-sf books under Iain Banks, as they are next to impossible to find in the US. I expected he would continue to write for years to come, and the news he may be working on his last novel is distressing and depressing. Once again there is no fairness in the world.
A recent essay that Ilya Somin wrote for Prometheus about libertarianism and science fiction has been translated into French.
Contrast this io9 article with news that Flipboard just created 50 million magazine editors. Which is more exciting? Is it io9 with it nostalgia for a “world where what you read online comes to you in silos. Instead of a feed reader, you can get an app that organizes your app subscriptions on a nice digital bookshelf where they look just like a bunch of paper magazines in a bookstore” or the one about Flipboard allowing you to curate your own magazine, where “where each user tacks pieces of content into collections that other users can follow. Flipboard users with good taste and and lots of friends could suddenly become influential drivers of attention to news articles”? I’d go for the latter.
Scientists build a small-scale robotic ant society. Having recently read Daniel Suarez’ novel Kill Decision, the implications are almost scary.
