Clik here to view.
Turning 50
This week, Rayuela turned 50 years old. On June 28 1963, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch in the English translation) was released at bookstores in Buenos Aires. When I finished reading […]
View ArticleClik here to view.
Careless Talk
Javier Marías begins “Tu rostro mañana” (“Your Face Tomorrow”) with a warning: "One should never tell anyone anything". To fall silent s the great ambition that no one achieves not even after death.
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Not So Benevolent Knowledge
Most people I know love classifications. They need to feel that they can, like entomologists, pin the things they find into their corresponding boxes and under their proper names: the […]
View ArticleClik here to view.
Men confined to one side become misshapen
There is a scene in Ben-Hur, the novel by Lew Wallace published in 1880 and made into a famous film starring Charlton Heston in 1959, which comes once and again to […]
View ArticleClik here to view.
Philosophy is not Neosporin
The title attracted me like a colourful flower. In “There is no Theory of Everything”, Simon Critchley scratches at the distressing question of the meaning of life: Philosophy scratches at […]
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paris est une fête
Daily orders of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” (french translation: “Paris est une fête“), first published in 1964, surged after a TV interview on Monday with an old woman called […]
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Non Euclidean Geometry Of Fanfares And Tambourines
This year Madrid’s “much-loved Cabalgata de los Reyes Magos” has brought more controversy than presents, and the city mayor, Manuela Carmena, made it all the way to the Financial Times. Reading […]
View ArticleLet us data tell us the true stories behind stories
Machine learning is changing what we think of as literature, as researchers are starting to take an algorithmic approach to their field. Advances in natural language processing and digitisation of text...
View ArticleAlienímaginas
Dear Mind the Post reader, More than one year ago, I started to post (again) in my dear native language here, a sister blog to Mind the Post I am codenaming Alienímagina(*). Blogging in Spanish had...
View ArticleQfwfq, Endgame
Can literary studies survive? This is the subject matter of a collection of essays by The Chronicle of Higher Education, a major news service in United States academic affairs. The intro is deliciously...
View ArticleHomo Sapiens 2.0
If the world we live in is increasingly complex, and that seems to be the case, and our individual intelligence remains limited, we are facing a dilemma: either we increase our collective intelligence...
View ArticleHow Hansel, Gretel, and the ants inspire new concepts in computing
A team of researchers is studying an interesting parallel between the exploration problem confronted by ants and the mathematical sampling problem of acquiring information. Exploring an unfamiliar,...
View ArticlePerfect Crime
This infographics by Dorothy Gambrell for Bloomberg is delicious: Who Did What in Every Agatha Christie Murder Novel. In Agatha Christie’s novels, murder and financial fraud are often intertwined. The...
View ArticleWould I find la Maga?
Would I find la Maga? It’s a sort of irony that the very first sentence of a novel I read in my teens and have been one of my constant aesthetic references contains this word, this name. Somehow the...
View ArticleThe art of punctuation
One of the things that impressed me most when I read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, nearly one hundred years ago, was the nearly incredible length of the sentences. Starting a new sentence was...
View ArticleWhy is Speculative Fiction Inferior? Just Hypocrisy
For decades, speculative fiction—which encompasses the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror—has been subject to the dismissive presumption that it is somehow sub-literary and, therefore, not...
View Article
