This year’s Booker Prize winner is (gasp!) a science fiction novel! How fabulous. M. John Harrison won for The End of Everything. I haven’t read it, but now I want to.
The End of Everything can be read as a thriller, a mystery, a satire, a dystopia, a road novel, a work of realism; whatever the reader is looking for can be found here, albeit told at a slant and with a twist. The book offers something for everyone!
And here’s a piece by one of the judges on reading the contenders, and the strange and wondrous experience of swimming through this uniquely human sea.
The before times have come and gone, and we seem to be moving towards something new, but do not yet know what. In the meantime, people will continue to write novels that will console and enchant, challenge and provoke. My year of reading has shown what a gift that can be.
Applications are now open for the agency’s next class of astronauts, who will join NASA as America returns to the Moon, builds the Moon Base, and lays the groundwork for the first crewed missions to Mars.
Applications are open until 11:59 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 3.
I had a little time this past weekend so I made bread. While it was baking, I had fun with this fascinating article about an Italian farmer’s rediscovery of a heritage wheat, and what came next!
When a seven-eared stem emerged from the ground, it seemed like a miracle. What Claudio Grossi had unearthed was an ancient grain that proved to be an answer to some modern problems…
Oh hey, world, two astronauts from the International Space Station are doing a spacewalk this morning, and we can watch it live! (Apologies if you’re seeing this after November 5, 2026, but I bet there’s a recording!)
On Thursday, Nov. 5, NASA astronaut Anil Menon and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Joshua Kutryk will install and deploy the eighth and final International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (IROSA), completing the space station’s power system augmentation. Together, the eight roll-out arrays will increase the station’s available power by up to 30%.
The US midterm elections are today, and I can’t think of a better day to exercise your rights as a citizen! I’ve written about votingbefore but today, I want to re-share a couple of helpful links in case you have questions about getting to the polls:
I am the sort of person who likes setting out basic rules for myself. They make decisions easier when there are a lot of options, yay, but what happens when two rules come in conflict with each other?
Take this weekend, for example. I have a standing rule to support children who come to the door. We’ve donated bottles to girls doing recycling drives for their ringette teams. We buy chocolate from school kids raising money for classroom projects. And of course we buy cookies from Girl Guides. So when two boys came by with rakes asking if we needed some help cleaning up the leaves in our yard, I had a problem.
We don’t clean up the leaves, generally. We mow them so they provide fertilizer and protection for critters over the winter. We just hadn’t gotten around to the mowing part yet, and these budding entrepreneurs had noticed.
So, what to do when my two directives came into conflict? I decided to err on the side of kindness.
The boys did a good job cleaning up the yard. And when the rest of the leaves fall from the trees, we’ll leave them for the winter. That way we support the next generation of kids, and critters too.
“The arts aren’t a leisure industry—the arts have always been an imaginative and emotional wrestle with reality—a series of inventions and creations. A capacity to think differently, a willingness to change our understanding of ourselves. To help us to be wiser, more reflective, less frightened people. Artists make something out of nothing every day.” — Jeanette Winterson
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