Ian Randall reviews Communications Breakdown: SF Stories about the Future of Connection edited by Jonathan Strahan Modern apocalypse Communications Breakdown is a science-fiction anthology that imagines the future of connection – and what happens when such technology goes wrong. (Courtesy: iStock/BitsAndSplits) “A sight never to be forgotten.” “Heaven became illuminated.” “Nothing could exceed the grandeur
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 and writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 and writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation
Social media platforms can be toxic environments at times, and tensions can spill over in the real world, as with the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC following the last US presidential election. Nowadays, heated polarization seems to emerge everywhere online and connects with our identities – from the music you love, to
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 and writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation
The Family Game I Never Wanted to Win Laird Barron Share article Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 and writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need
A new frequency comb setup can capture the moment-by-moment details of carbon dioxide gas escaping from a nozzle at supersonic speeds in an air-filled chamber, followed by rapid oscillations of gas due to complex aerodynamics within the chamber. The data plot shows the absorbance of light (vertical) over time (horizontal left to right) across a
Green credentials: the UN Climate Change Conference, COP28, took place between 30 November and 12 December in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (courtesy: Ministry of Environment – Rwanda) The UN’s COP28 conference in Dubai is over. Government delegations have shaken hands, packed up and flown home. Journalists, lobbyists and campaigners have filed their last report, eaten
Careful selection: removing 10% of the oranges on the surface of this display could cause an citrus avalanche. (Courtesy: Sir James/CC BY 3.0) Over the past few years I have spent more time in my native Canada, where I do enjoy a visit to the supermarket (Fortinos is my favourite). Like in many countries outside
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the memoir Pretty by KB Brookins, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf on May 28, 2024. Preorder the book here. By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race. Even as it shines light on the
The Wall Street journal has published a story that may explain many of the mysteries of the war against Hamas in Gaza. The Journal reveals something the Israelis are keeping secret. The Israeli military has built five water pumps near the coastal Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City and has been experimenting with flooding Hamas’ 310
From classics like The Godfather and Jaws to modern marvels like The Notebook, Game of Thrones, and Crazy Rich Asians, many of history’s greatest films and TV shows began as novels. A well-written book provides the ultimate Hollywood source material, with complex characters and an engrossing plot that, when read, already plays like a movie
For six minutes Wisconsin husband, farmer, and writer Philip Hasheider was dead. He met all the requirements: heart not beating, lungs no longer breathing, skin an ashen-color turning blue. He was lifeless, flat on the floor. This extraordinary story of his Near Death Experience (NDE) is about the events on an early October morning leading
Stable skyrmions: First-principles calculations of the skyrmion-stabilizing Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction in pristine (bottom) and oxidized (top) Fe3GaTe2-x enabled the team to understand why the skyrmions that form (right) are so robust. (Courtesy: H Chang) Researchers in China have produced a phenomenon known as the giant skyrmion topological Hall effect in a two-dimensional material using only a
As a Palestinian in diaspora, nothing builds my connection to the land more than literature. It is not just the scenes detailed by our great poets that makes the ground feel realer under my feet, but the gravitational pull towards each other that gives me belief in that liberated homeland. In my work as a
I am a memoirist, a writer who juices the moments and characters in my life as a way to make sense of it all. This proves challenging, however, when I consider that I have very few memories from before I turned twelve. There’s a deep blackness in that part of my hippocampus, where the brain
Researchers from MIT and Northeastern University developed a liquid crystal elastomer fibre that can change its shape in response to thermal stimuli. The fibre, which is fully compatible with existing textile manufacturing machinery, could be used to make morphing textiles, like a jacket that becomes more insulating to keep the wearer warm when temperatures drop.
As an immigrant, I initially binged Norwegian literature to learn more of the language and the culture of my new home, but it soon felt more like an escapist pastime. Racism clouded most of my off-the-page interactions until I forged relationships with BIPOC Norwegians who empathized and shared their strategies. In my novella Sita in