david

Why do small children in Japan ride the subway alone?

https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2024/12/19/why-do-small-children-in-japan-ride-the-subway-alone

from The Economist

Into this fog slipped Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare . The novel, Butler’s third, is the story of Moddie, an overeducated and underachieving thirtysomething who, following a seismic breakup, abandons Chicago for her Midwestern hometown, where she tries to get a grip on her life. It’s a sharp book, with painfully real characters and perfectly... See more

Damir Karakaš’s Celebration , translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, begins at the end of World War II. Its four sections—“House,” “Dogs,” “Celebration,” and “Father”—move from 1945 to 1935, then 1941 to 1928, and follow Mijo, a man whose yellow-brown uniform marks him as a member of the recently fallen Croatian fascist organization of the Ustaše.... See more

Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel , translated by Susan Bernofsky, set in post-lockdown Berlin, is an absurd, dark, dreamlike narrative that meditates on warfare, religion, memory, migration, and belonging through the strange consciousness of a literary researcher, Patrik. A Celan scholar who self-identifies as “the patient,”... See more

I picked up Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel thinking I might read a few chapters. But this is literary criticism that is itself literary—alive and strange and hard to put down. Frank’s selection is eclectic—of the thirty-two novels he covers, some are expected (James Joyce’s Ulysses ), some unexpected (H.... See more

A worthy Cursor competitor

Windsurf: An agentic IDE

Windsurf is an AI code editor that shares a lot of similarities with Cursor, and at first glance, it might be hard to tell the difference between the two. However, Windsurf excels with its ability to easily search your codebase and identify what’s relevant, and I prefer its approach of directly... See more