Neil Tyson is one of the greatest scientific educators we have ever had. He is probably unmatched when writing popular science books, where he covers topics that can be very counterintuitive. But he explains astrophysics very smoothly that anybody can understand without scientific knowledge. I started and stopped this book several times when it first arrive on my doorstep over a week ago —

It really doesn't help that the ending is obviously intended to be lyrical and beautiful and symbolic and open to a variety of interpretions and is instead just pretentious and confusing. During the age of this nationalist thought-world, from the 1870s to the 1910s, many Muslim writers wrote in Bengali; like Mir Musharraf Hussein, who wrote novels, plays, and verse, in particular, the three-part Bishad-Sindhu (Ocean of Sorrows) about the Battle of Karbala, and Ismail Hossain Shiraji, who traveled to Turkey during the Balkan Wars, wrote travelogues about Turkey in Bengali as well as seditious anti-colonial literature. These writers were certainly also affected by the newly ascendant discourses of nation and community. Though not a particularly visible or remarkable part of the vernacular-educated Bengali middle-class literati, these writers also grappled with issues of sovereignty, in particular through idealized connections with the Islamic world as well as Islamic literary and ethical themes in Bengali that had been present in the language since at least the 17th century CE. Given that the Muslim portion of Siraj’s identity was crucial for the stereotype of him as a tyrant, why not include any assessment of Muslim Bengali writing during the age of nationalist thought? Chatterjee mentions how by 1940, ‘the Muslim public in Calcutta was being mobilized for entirely new political futures’ (p. 323), but without any sense of the exclusions that were discursively operating in the thought-worlds of Bengali letters at the time. Inputting an awareness of the exclusions operating at discursive levels would allow readers a sense of the texture of how hegemonic ideas generate force and power. These questions reflect on the larger issue of how hegemony is understood in this work, for the broader audience of scholars of modern politics and political thought. Is hegemony always already given and does it not have a history? What happens to the contingent moments of the construction of the hegemonic ideas in the making of ‘imperial practices’? I am awed by the mind bending theorems proposed by Hawking and Bekenstein. some concepts explained below Chatterjee’s exposure of these debates and tracing of the origins of nationalist thought are detailed and nuanced. But there are two areas in his presentation that cry out for more expansion. One, though he mentions without any notes or references that ‘Muslim critics had often complained about the unfair portrayal of Siraj in Nabinchandra’s Palasir yuddha’ (p. 242), he devotes not a single line to any Muslim Bengali writers, critics, or political figures who had a stake in this entire debate. It is not incumbent upon Chatterjee to offer an analysis of each and every text and/or community that produced responses to these sorts of discourses, but a history of discourse without any grappling with the social markers on the ground leaves readers wondering about the historicity of these moments. When discussing how such a nationalist and idealized form of India’s past came to occupy these writers through the figure of Siraj, Chatterjee does not discuss how this very form potentially excluded Muslims from taking an active role in the nationalist imagination in this particular way. As Chatterjee states, Nabin Chandra Sen provided In this bleak graphic novel, set in the seventies, Seattle area teens have to deal with all the usual angst ridden issues of their age group - peer pressure, popularity, sex, isolation - AND - a strange, uncurable STD that causes not only eruptions of repulsive festering sores, but lumps, shedding skin, gaping wounds that talk, and tails. Kind of makes herpes seem like a walk in the park.This graphic novel is so weird and twisted . . . yet, at the same time, makes so much sense. The first image below is just a taste of what you are getting into if you give this a try.

Galison’s film also follows a separate group of theoretical physicists – Sasha Haco, Malcolm Perry, Andrew Strominger and Hawking – working on a problem known as “the information paradox”. Strominger describes how he thinks about the paradox 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even when he’s brushing his teeth and when he’s dreaming. A singularity is what you end up with when a giant star is compressed to an unimaginably small point." The story is set in one summer post-high-school-graduation from a Seattle high school in the late seventies, when Burns himself would have been graduating from a Seattle high school. Four characters take center stage, Chris, Rob, Keith and Eliza, though a once bullied boy named Dave also plays a central role. In the story young people begin to develop physical abnormalities as a result of developing sexual desire for someone, or actually having sex with someone. Some critics thought Burns might have been making a commentary on the AIDS crisis (as in: Just say no to sex, kids, or it will screw you up forever!), but Burns himself said it was more generally about adolescence than just sexual awakening. This transition to adulthood as Burns depicts it is infused with lots of drug use/hallucinations, and nightmares; while friendship is important in the story, it is mainly a tale of desire, fears, confusion and what happens if you are in any sense different as you pass from childhood to adulthood. The social distortion is matched by visual images of distorted bodies, though images of the natural world—the sky, trees, ocean--and physical beauty (including bodies) are also present and at some points--not all--restorative. It is the most interesting, well-posed question in modern physics,” he says, looking like a decade-older version of Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner in the Avengers movies. “So interesting that I was ready to devote my life to trying to understand it.” governed, was at least sovereign, and therefore free, and had a state where even though the ruler was a Muslim, Hindus nonetheless enjoyed positions in the highest echelons of government (p. 242).Did not like the art style at all, and the story is really weird and messed up? And at no point was I thinking 'wow, this is good I can't stop reading' it was actually more like, 'what the actual eff is happening here I NEED ANSWERS.' A sexually transmitted disease is infecting teenagers, a disease that mutates anyone that catches it. But what happens to the people who catch the teenage plague?