BBC research shows the average age of best actress nominees is rising

On Saturday, the United States and Israeli governments unleashed stealth bombers, drones, and missiles on Iran, citing a rationale of preventing Iran from developing and deploying catastrophic nuclear weapons.  

“They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore,” President Donald Trump would later say in an 6-minute address to the nation.

But in their quest to prevent Iran from developing an advanced weapon, the US and Israel were also deploying one of their own: artificial intelligence. 

As the Wall Street Journal reported the day of the strikes, the US military used Anthropic’s large language model, Claude, for “intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios” to prepare its attack. 

The band's unlikely 1976 album became America's all-time bestseller

Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale star in a bold film "loaded with surprises"

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor

From Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls (Archipelago), translated from the French by Alyson Waters, an encounter in a hospital for schizophrenics:

The comment led to a silence. Everyone was trying to imagine the dark street, unknown, with weird things occurring there. The guy near the door pushed the light timer and the central globe lit up, first with a red glimmer, then a sickly glow. It was an energy-saving lamp and, for thousands of hours, it had been saving its energy and diffusing a light for the dying and sustainable development. When we were in this bedroom, Breton and I, we generally preferred the slightly brighter light from the two streetlamps in the courtyard.

“No point staying in the dark,” commented the guy, as if to excuse himself for having modified the lighting.

Twenty years ago, race drama Crash beat Brokeback Mountain to best picture

We are thrilled to announce that Renny Gong will receive this year’s George Plimpton Prize and that Bud Smith will receive the Susannah Hunnewell Prize. The awards will be presented at our annual Spring Revel on April 14 in New York, MCed by John Early and Wallace Shawn. We’ll also be honoring Edward P. Jones with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature.

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent by recognizing an emerging fiction writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, and David Szalay.

Of this year’s Plimpton Prize–winning story, the Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

“You’re not dumb, okay,” the twelve-year-old narrator of Renny Gong’s “Ping-Pong Kids” says to his Chinese-born mother by way of apology, having implied that she enjoys phone games for people with “low intelligence” and should read more instead. The mother and son are en route to an intensive table tennis training camp in Qingdao, where coaches take whipping sticks to trainees’ shins and ping-pong prodigies are manufactured by the dozen. Gong has coined a new declension of the stage mom: a beautiful, driven single immigrant, pushing her child to realize the ambition that shapes both of their lives. In fresh, vernacular prose, he conjures the cruelty and failures of children impelled to exceed their parents as deftly as he renders the technical details of the sport they play. The story limns the distinctions between “ping-pong” and “table tennis,” friendship and rivalry, finally exploring the emergence of the boy’s own values alongside the intrinsic pleasures of just plain fun.

I have begun to suspect that I am not the main character. I spend my days watching history unfold on the screen of my phone. History, of course, is a story: a narrative sequence of causes and effects. Right now it seems to be a story about intolerable violence, something from which I am, I know, profoundly remote insofar as I continue to tolerate it. This is not very protagonistic of me. Main characters, surely, do not feel the world to be distant and bewildering in its senseless horror. They do not feel the story of history to be totally disconnected from their personal, concurrent experience of being alive. Main characters, after all, drive the plot.

Conveniently, real-life main characters love to write about themselves, so there’s plenty of material from which I might learn how to achieve main character status myself. Material, for example, like George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries and 107 Days, two recently published diaristic texts. Both of these meticulous nonfictional accounts of living through history are said to be very novelistic. One is “remarkably vivid and suffused with novelistic detail” such that its author “emerges as an unforgettable, three-dimensional character.” The other, we’re told, “reads like a suspense novel” in that it has “a novelistic feel” and “the pace of a page-turning novel.” It would seem that these writers—George Templeton Strong and Kamala Harris, respectively—are main characters because their realities were, even during times of crisis and dissolution, like books. Things, in other words, make sense when you’re a protagonist because you live inside a novel. The present operates with a narrative purpose and a unifying logic by which the lives and actions of individuals are bound together and to the world at large such that it is possible, as any main character innately knows, to do something important.

It turns out, however, that George Templeton Strong did basically nothing. The Library of America, which published a selected edition of Strong’s Civil War–era diaries in January, may nonetheless be pleased to know that Strong is, I think, very relatable in his insignificance. Born in New York in 1820, Strong was a lawyer who is remembered by history only because he made himself extraordinarily easy to remember. Nearly every day for more than forty years, Strong wrote a detailed account of his thoughts and activities in what he called his “private journal.” This document of more than four million words was discovered five decades after Strong’s death in 1875, and it now provides a unique glimpse into the past when it was the present.

Evidently the present has always been kind of pointless and annoying. “Atrocious headache all day. In bed till dinner time,” Strong reports in the first entry of this new collection. The shadow of history, however, passes over Strong’s present just four days later. The diarist wanders Lower Manhattan “alone & tired,” then returns home and writes that November 6 was “A memorable day—we do not know yet for what. Perhaps for the disintegration of the Country.” Indeed Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election that day would more or less inaugurate the most significant historical “event” of Strong’s lifetime. And what, then, would our main character experience and in real time record as his country, he knew, was “turning out raw material for History very fast”?

How the devastating meaning of this watercolour is unlocked by a medieval ballad

In 1946, Britain's wartime leader warned of the Soviet threat to the West