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The main character of the novel, unlike me, is a scientist. She is employed by a biotech think tank, where she studies self-replicating cells that are programmed to multiply in particular patterns on command. But she does not work with the real, organic cells; she examines how they behave in a comp…

Anyway. The more I tried to get the characters in the story to enact the behavior that would lead to their relationship’s demise, the more I found myself spiraling outward to describe their entire world. How else could I show how death had infiltrated their lives and ruined their capacity to connec…

I imagined, while watching Melancholia the second time, how the people in the village outside the family’s private property might have been dealing with the news of apocalypse. Maybe they were generating wild conspiracy theories and attacking one another—or maybe they had stopped worrying, stopped …

Porete’s work is a prime example of mystical writing in the apophatic tradition. Apophasis: the rhetorical strategy of approaching a subject by denying its existence, or denying that it can be described

The Gift’s thesis is that artistic creation is fundamentally an act of generosity, which may be accounted for by commodity systems such as the market economy but which forever evades total capture by those systems. Hyde makes (some occasionally universalizing and exoticizing) sojourns into gift the…