Things have gotten so bad for DeSantis that a recent Fox News poll shows him at 21% - comparable with the 19% that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed debunked conspiracy theories about vaccine safety, is receiving on the Democratic side.
"What this book is about is ordinary, normal and everyday, the knowledge that we are mortal..." (David Sexton, April 26, 2023, LitHub)
Ostensibly a work of science fiction, Never Let Me Go is really nothing of the kind. Ishiguro says he's perfectly open to people reading it as a chilling warning about biotechnology but feels they've missed the inner heart of the book if they take it that way. He has certainly given readers nothing to foster such a misreading. For the book is set in the past, not the future: "England, late 1990s" it is specified before the novel begins.
The narrator, Kathy H, is thirty-one as the book opens, and has been a "carer" for nearly twelve years. She looks back to her time at a school she remains very proud to have attended, Hailsham, recalling first when she and her friends were children there, and then when they were teenagers, so locating it in the early and later Seventies, perhaps. Then in Part Two, she tells us about their lives afterwards, in "the Cottages" as young adults, perhaps in the early Eighties. But such dating is never precise and there are few contemporary references. There is almost no allusion to technology, beyond humdrum cars, Rovers and Volvos, and old-fashioned cassette tapes and Walkmans.
Almost nothing about the actual biological status of the clones is specified either--neither how they were created, nor how they can make their "donations" and continue for a while to live. Nor are we given any information about changes in society at large. Quite remarkably, there are simply no futuristic, alternative world or science-fiction components to the story. For what this book is about is ordinary, normal and everyday, the knowledge that we are mortal, that our time is limited, death inescapable.
And everything about the way in which it is written, from that absence of technology to the conversational, unremarkable language in which Kathy tells us her story, is calculated to bring it home to us that these are our own lives we are contemplating. In his invariably clear and modest way, Ishiguro describes this radical narrative thus: "The strategy here is that we're looking at a very strange world, at a very strange group of people, and gradually, I wanted people to feel they're not looking at such a strange world, that this is everybody's story."
One caveat: we are all born to die, not to be killed.
A lawyer for Fox News whistleblower Abby Grossberg--the former producer on Tucker Carlson Tonight who's suing the host and other executives at the network--has confirmed that the DOJ's Special Counsel Jack Smith has requested access to some of the recordings in her possession. [...]
While the lawyer didn't specify exactly which tapes Smith asked for--Grossberg said she has about 90 unaired recordings from inside Fox News--MSNBC aired a part of the Ted Cruz tapes where the Texas senator discusses overthrowing the election with Fox's Maria Bartiromo.
In 1925, at the age of 60, Denmark's national composer gave in to depression. "If I could live my life again," said Carl Nielsen, "I would ... take a commercial apprenticeship or do some other form of useful work that would lead to a visible final result. The creative artist's lot is not a happy one."
The ending of the sixth is a bad joke without a punchline
Nielsen was working at the time on his sixth symphony, titled "the simple symphony" though it was nothing of the sort. His marriage had broken down, and he was feeling unappreciated. His fifth symphony, in two movements, was packed with impotent rage. The sixth was pared down to semi-disjointed statements, enigmatic and forever unsettling. Nielsen delved deep into himself whilst offering limited rewards to his listeners. The ending of the sixth is a bad joke without a punchline. He is perhaps the most elusive of great composers.
Every decade or so, a conductor attempts to make sense of the six symphonies on record.
