JAMES FREY: Next To Heaven
James Frey’s Next to Heaven Is Made for White Lotus and Big Little Lies Fans — See the Cover! (Exclusive)
The ‘A Million Little Pieces’ author is back with a satirical look at the “beautiful, wealthy and unsatisfied”
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James Frey is known for pushing boundaries and his latest novel promises to be no different.
Billed as “a satirical thrill ride through the dark heart of privilege,” Next to Heaven is the perfect propulsive read for fans of shows like White Lotus and Big Little Lies, the publisher teases. The novel is set to be released on June 17, 2025 — and PEOPLE has the exclusive first look at the juicy cover!
With this new novel, Frey is ready to sink his teeth into the dark and frivolous.
“The world is so serious and dreadful these days, I wanted to write a fun, sexy, thrilling book that peels back the veneer of ‘perfect’ lives and exposes what money and desire can do to people,” Frey tells PEOPLE in an exclusive excerpt. “I hope readers laugh and generally have a great time watching it all unravel.”
Poof!
Always fun to revisit…
Always Go Balls-out
Inside a Fusion Startup’s Insane, Top-Secret Opening Ceremony
Robots! Huge capacitors! A pianist-programmer of impossible skill! One of Silicon Valley’s formative figures takes the stage at a wild event.
by JARON LANIER
ONCE IN A while, Silicon Valley is still Silicon Valley. It happened on August 8, 2024, at the opening ceremony for a nuclear fusion energy startup. The events of that day were so astonishing I wish I could blurt them out to you in an instant, like a hologram, but you will need to be patient, as the linear nature of language allows me to unveil only one piece at a time.
I had been sensing a malaise for a year or two, a feeling that tech had lost its flavor. The big AI leap was part of it. It wasn’t just the question of, “If AI could do everything, what would people be for?” (Deceptive question, since AI is made of people. Your data, remember?) More than that, the focus on AI seemed to change the way people thought about reality. A lot of my friends were talking about using language models to calculate the best future. Life was now a problem to be solved.
The way out of this trap, I think, is for people to become smaller. To get back in touch with the edge of mystery. This isn’t a conclusion I can argue for using language, but once in a while, if we’re lucky, it’s a thing that can be experienced.
So: An audience composed of venture capitalists, US military and intelligence agency officials, physicists, and San Francisco artists have been invited to a secret event. They enter through an imposing vault door to take their places in rows of seats that feel tiny in the shadows of a vast space. Behind them is a sea of refrigerator-sized capacitors. In front is a stage set that is a little hard to visually interpret. It is white and heavenly, high tech, large, glowing.
Rickey Henderson Gone
The Late Rickey Henderson Is An Exciting Look Into the Future
By John Tamny
“At 5-foot-10, Henderson was smaller than many big leaguers, but he overcame his size with a combination of horse power, a savant-like ability to exploit deficiencies in pitchers, and an extreme bravado that many players viewed as cockiness.” That’s how Michael Rosenwald described the recently passed Rickey Henderson in an obituary that Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard correctly described as a “masterpiece.”
To think about Rosenwald writing Henderson’s obituary was to imagine that he had as much fun writing about Henderson as Henderson had playing baseball. Same with George Will in his own column memorializing Henderson. Henderson loved baseball, and those who love baseball are returning his affection to him. This is a big deal not just because Henderson was so special, but because understanding a little about Henderson is a way of understanding a future in which many more people will work with joy similar to Henderson’s.
What was most appealing about how Rosenwald described Henderson was in his focus on the player’s mind. He had “a savant-like ability to exploit deficiencies in pitchers,” while Will’s column was titled “Man of Steal, mind of titanium.” Will wrote that “The cerebral Tony La Russa, who won more games than any manager not named Connie Mack, and who managed Rickey and against him, remembers him even more for ‘his baseball IQ’ than for his legs.” Yes!
Wakeman Unwoke
Six Dildos Only
Texas Prevents People From Owning More Than 6 Dildos. Now Lawmakers Want to Ban Sex Toys at Walmart
by Jody Serrano
Texas is the land where regulation is always second, or so they say. However, it’s also a state where politicians have chosen to regulate oddly specific things, from laws allowing residents to hunt feral hogs from hot air balloons to laws outlining the number of dildos a person can own.
Recently, Texas lawmakers have set their sights on something that has become ubiquitous in recent years: sex toys in retail stores. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they want them out.
A ban on sex toys in stores. Republican Rep. Hillary Hickland is behind the proposal to ban sex toys. Earlier this week, Hickland filed HB 1549, a bill that would ban retail stores such as Walmart, Target, and CVS from selling sex toys. Under the bill, only a “sexually oriented business” will be able to sell sex toys.
They’ve always been cool – it’s not a fad.
Where Beards Grow, Strong Feelings Follow
Whether on Prince William, JD Vance or Jacob Elordi, facial hair gets people talking.
As far as beards go, his is more measly than grizzly.
For the past several months, Prince William, the shiny-headed British royal, has been fostering a modest bit of scruff. The heir to the British throne debuted the beard in August, with an Instagram post congratulating Team Britain on their success at the Olympics. At that time the growth was slight, as if he had forgotten his razor over a long weekend, the strands barely connecting with his sideburns.
That version of the Prince’s patchy beard didn’t last. As he told People magazine in November, he shaved at the behest of his daughter, Princess Charlotte, who was reported to have fallen into “floods of tears” at the sight of her father’s new look.
But this past week the beard was back — fuller, if only just so — as Prince William served Christmas lunch at a charity organization in London and attended the reopening of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris over the weekend.
Something that really is happening.
Dealing corpses from a Las Vegas strip mall: A look inside the shadowy U.S. body trade
A disgraced chiropractor found a new job selling bodies. In an industry with few guardrails, he soon faced accusations of mishandling human remains.
By Mike Hixenbaugh, Susan Carroll, Liz Kreutz and Tyler Kingkade
This article is part of “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.
LAS VEGAS — Obteen Nassiri was in need of a new line of work. After losing his chiropractor’s license following allegations that he had misled patients and defrauded insurers out of millions, he dove into an industry with virtually no guardrails or barriers to entry — the shadowy U.S. body trade.
Operating out of a beige strip mall in Las Vegas between a tattoo parlor and a psychic, Nassiri’s new company, Med Ed Labs, acquired corpses from funeral homes and medical schools, then sold or leased them at a markup to groups seeking human remains for medical training, including the U.S. military.
Within just a few years, he had built a national network of suppliers and clients. He also left a trail of scandal and alleged ethical failures, including complaints that he mishandled human remains.
3:10 To AI
Always Worth Revisiting
Guerrillas Take LA
After 40 Years as the Conscience of the Art World, the Guerrilla Girls Finally Get Their First L.A. Show
The survey, “Laugh, Cry, Fight,” got its name before the election, but it serves just as well in its aftermath, says a founding member.
A giant ape has overtaken Los Angeles exhibition venue Beyond the Streets—not King Kong, but Queen Kong. The official mascot of the Guerrilla Girls, in fact. This looming inflatable crowns “Laugh, Cry, Fight,” the first-ever L.A. exhibition for the famed anonymous art collective of rebellious women.
Each member of the Guerrilla Girls assumes the name of a historic female artist. They make public appearances only wearing their iconic gorilla masks. Regarding the exhibition’s title, founding member Käthe Kollwitz told me over Zoom, “We knew the show was going to start after the election, but we didn’t know how the election was going to turn out. It just seemed like a great motto for what we do.”
The Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985 in response to the show “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—which widely omitted women. They made posters highlighting the lack of female representation in art museum collections and posted them on the streets of New York art strongholds. This was a decade before Cost and Revs popularized wheat-pasted posters as street art—but six years after Jenny Holzer papered subway stations with her Inflammatory Essays. Reactions to the stunt were swift, widespread, and spirited.
Ben Franklin Was The Balls
Electrostatic Motors Reach the Macro Scale
It turns out that Benjamin Franklin was on to something in 1747
It’s a pretty sure bet that you couldn’t get through a typical day without the direct support of dozens of electric motors. They’re in all of your appliances not powered by a hand crank, in the climate-control systems that keep you comfortable, and in the pumps, fans, and window controls of your car. And although there are many different kinds of electric motors, every single one of them, from the 200-kilowatt traction motor in your electric vehicle to the stepper motor in your quartz wristwatch, exploits the exact same physical phenomenon: electromagnetism.
For decades, however, engineers have been tantalized by the virtues of motors based on an entirely different principle: electrostatics. In some applications, these motors could offer an overall boost in efficiency ranging from 30 percent to close to 100 percent, according to experiment-based analysis. And, perhaps even better, they would use only cheap, plentiful materials, rather than the rare-earth elements, special steel alloys, and copious quantities of copper found in conventional motors.
“Electrification has its sustainability challenges,” notes Daniel Ludois, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. But “an electrostatic motor doesn’t need windings, doesn’t need magnets, and it doesn’t need any of the critical materials that a conventional machine needs.”
Mo’ Laughter Mo’ Money
The power of funny: How comedic creativity still fuels business growth
It’s time to stop taking advertising so seriously. Let’s put the laughs—and the growth—back into marketing.
In my 30 years of crafting award-winning and culture-shaping advertising, one constant has remained true: humor works.
Whether it’s to cut through the noise or to create a lasting emotional bond with consumers, funny commercials are the most memorable. Yet, in today’s landscape, comedic creativity seems to be a dwindling resource, and that’s a missed opportunity for brands. Humor isn’t just entertainment—it’s a growth multiplier.
HUMOR STICKS
There’s a reason you can still recall that absurd ad from 15 years ago with the punchline that made you laugh. Comedy doesn’t just catch attention; it stays with us.
Reincarnation Real
Secret Pentagon study hints at reincarnation being real after finding consciousness ‘never dies’
By MATTHEW PHELAN SENIOR SCIENCE REPORTER
A study conducted by US Army Intelligence has suggested that reincarnation is real because consciousness ‘never dies.’
Entitled ‘Analysis and Assessment of The Gateway Process,’ the 29-page report was drafted by US Army Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M McDonnell in 1983 and declassified by the CIA in 2003.
The research has resurfaced on social media, with Chicago-based comedian Sara Holcomb summarizing the findings, saying: ‘We’re pretty sure reincarnation is real.’
‘Consciousness is energy and it exists outside of our understanding of reality,’ Holocomb said, paraphrasing page 19 of McDonnell’s Army intel report. ‘And energy… never dies.’
The mind-bending official Pentagon study was commissioned to better understand what its Army intel colleagues were doing sending personnel to a small institute in Charlottesville, Virginia that was working on the ‘Gateway Experience.’
Spinranker
Los Angeles Times Owner Plans to Launch Tech-Driven “Bias Meter” On Articles Next Year
Patrick Soon-Shiong says that his team is building a product where “the reader can press a button and get both sides” of a story.
BY ERIK HAYDEN
Weeks after scrapping a presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris that had been prepped by his editorial board, the owner of The Los Angeles Times says his product team is working on a new tech-driven “bias meter” to add to articles on the paper’s website as soon as next year.
The idea, as Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong presented it, sounds like it’ll be a module that presents multiple viewpoints on a particular news item as well as allow some version of comments to be integrated. And it marks the latest signal from the billionaire that he plans to reshape the Times as the second Trump administration gears up and after the exits of multiple edit board members following the endorsement flap.
“Imagine if you now take — whether it be news or opinion — and you have a bias meter, whether news or opinion, more like the opinion, or the voices, you have a bias meter so somebody could understand as a reader that the source of the article has some level of bias,” Soon-Shiong elaborated in a radio segment hosted by incoming Timeseditorial board member Scott Jennings.
Juluren
The ‘large head’ people: Scientists uncover a lost human species in Asia
Reviewed by Chris Melore
HONOLULU — Could another group of ancient humans have lived alongside Homo sapiens? Scientists have identified fossils of a new species of ancient human that once roamed Eastern Asia with an extraordinarily large brain. The fossils, found at the Xujiayao site in northern China, represent a previously unknown group of humans that scientists have dubbed “Juluren” – meaning “large head people” – who lived between 200,000 and 160,000 years ago.
The story begins in the 1970s when researchers unearthed a collection of 21 fossil fragments representing 16 different individuals at the Xujiayao site. But it wasn’t until recent comprehensive analysis that scientists realized just how unique these remains were. The most striking feature? A cranial capacity of approximately 1,700 milliliters – significantly larger than both their predecessors and many modern humans.
[ click to continue reading at StudyFinds ]
Another One
NASA detects asteroid that’s due to hit Earth’s atmosphere
A newly discovered asteroid is on a collision course for Earth and will hit our atmosphere in just a matter of hours.
The asteroid, designated COWECP5, is forecasted to streak through the sky over Eastern Siberia at 11:14am ET.
Scientists say the small space rock, measuring 27 inches in diameter, is expected to burn up in the atmosphere and poses no threat to humans on the ground.
The asteroid was spotted by NASA’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, which was designed to provide scientists with up to a week’s notice of impending asteroids.
The Vera Rubin Risk
When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk
How do you know what you’re not allowed to see?
In the early months of 2023, the astronomer Željko Ivezić found himself taking part in a highly unusual negotiation. Ivezić is the 59-year-old director of the Vera Rubin Observatory, a $1 billion telescope that the United States has been developing in the Chilean high desert for more than 20 years. He was trying to reach an agreement that would keep his telescope from compromising America’s national security when it starts stargazing next year.
This task was odd enough for any scientist, and it was made more so by the fact that Ivezić had no idea with whom he was negotiating. “I didn’t even know which agency I was talking to,” he told me on a recent video call from his field office in Chile. Whoever it was would communicate with him only through intermediaries at the National Science Foundation. Ivezić didn’t even know whether one person or several people were on the other side of the exchange. All he knew was that they were very security-minded. Also, they seemed to know a great deal about astronomy.
Tootsies Rock!
Tootsie Rolls: Wartime Snack
I was emptying the remaining candy from our Halloween bowl a few days ago, intending to fill the community bowl at work with it. At the bottom of the bowl, there were quite a few Tootsie Rolls left over – more than any other candy. Perhaps the kids just don’t care for Tootsie Rolls.
In fact, I made a sour face myself. I don’t fancy them either. To me, they are too sweet, hard to chew, and just…. boring. Lord knows, I have eaten so many of them in my life. Often, during my service, I opened Meals-Ready-To Eat, or MREs, and found Tootsie Rolls as part of the contents.
Despite my dislike, I never threw them away. As a Marine, I know their value.
Although the candy may not seem exciting, its wartime history is anything but boring. During World War II, the company that produced the “Tootsie Roll” was one of the few candy companies to thrive during the war. They were a recipient of an early form of what we call “government contracting” today.
Trader Arts
Grocery Giant Trader Joe’s Hides Art in Its Aisles. This New Book Reveals Just Where to Look
Julie Averbach spent four years visiting more than 150 Trader Joe’s stores and hunting down the retailer’s art-historical sources.
by Min Chen
One day, at a Trader Joe’s grocery store, Julie Averbach picked up a box of caesar salad and was immediately struck by its label. Besides announcing the package’s contents, it contained an image of Augustus of Prima Porta, the first-ever sculpture carved of the Roman emperor. The lid of a plastic salad bowl was an unlikely (if admittedly witty) place to slap on a 1st-century C.E. statue, but Averbach soon discovered that elsewhere in Trader Joe’s—across its products, signs, and murals—were countless other nods to art. “The entire store,” she told me over email, “was a trove of art.”
That revelation sent Averbach on a mission. Over the course of nearly four years, the art history major visited more than 150 Trader Joe’s stores across the country to uncover how they deploy visual art in packaging and marketing. What she found was enough to fill a book: The Art of Trader Joe’s, which identifies and unpacks an abundance of iconic works featured in the stores—from the detail of the Birth of Venus on a tin of Italian Roast to a sign in Chicago that references Starry Night with the superb slogan “Your Gogh-To Neighborhood Store.”
[ click to continue reading at artnet ]
Deep Deep Thermal
The hunt for heat: Drilling the deepest holes on Earth
by Norman Miller
Beneath our feet is an almost limitless source of energy, but while a few lucky locations have geothermal heat close to the surface, the rest of the world will need to dig a lot deeper. The challenge is how to get deep enough.
There are some spots around the world where energy literally bubbles to the surface. In Iceland, home to more than 200 volcanoes and dozens of natural hot springs, tapping into this energy isn’t hard. Dotted around the country are steaming pools of water, heated by the geothermal fires that burn just below the crust. Boiling jets of water and steam are thrown into the air by geysers.
Iceland now heats 85% of its houses with this geothermal energy, while 25% of the country’s electricity also comes from power stations that harness this heat from underground. It’s an appealing prospect – an almost limitless supply of energy waiting to be tapped.
The Abandoned World
The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?
Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria
By Tess McClure
Abandonment, when it came, crept in from the outskirts. Homes at the edge of town were first to go, then the peripheral grocery stores. It moved inward, slow but inexorable. The petrol station closed, and creeper vines climbed the pumps, amassing on the roof until it buckled under the strain. It swallowed the outer bus shelters, the pharmacies, the cinema, the cafe. The school shut down.
Today, one of the last institutions sustaining human occupation in Tyurkmen, a village in central Bulgaria, is the post office. Dimitrinka Dimcheva, a 56-year-old post officer, still keeps it open two days a week, bringing in packages of goods that local shops no longer exist to sell. Once a thriving town of more than 1,200, Tyurkmen is now home to fewer than 200 people.
On a warm spring afternoon, Dimcheva stood in the town square. “The weddings took place here, all of the folk dances, the volleyball. There were lots of young people. A pool,” she said. She gazed around, pointing to ruins or now-empty spaces where buildings once stood, remembering. There, the building that housed a small cinema. Behind it, the space for a school that burned down, was rebuilt, then closed. “Life was bubbling.” Now, she said, “life in the villages is dying”.
“It all started with a dick joke.”
How YouTube Took Over the World
It all started with a dick joke. Twenty years later, the colossal video-sharing site rivals TV networks, Hollywood and TikTok — with no signs of slowing.
BY JESSE WILL
Some afternoon in the summer of 2010, I was standing in a dingy office building in New York’s Garment District, staring at the screen of an iMac and doing what hundreds, maybe thousands of others were also doing at that same exact moment: watching a video called “Yosemitebear Mountain Double Rainbow 1-8-10.” Despite the shaky footage, the wind noise and the pixelated video, Paul “Yosemitebear” Vasquez’s footage of a “full-on double rainbow all the way” stretching across the Sierra Nevada foothills, and his crying, cracking voice — “What does this mean?” — sucked me in.
Watching it now, the video, running over three minutes and now with 51 million views, seems almost interminable by today’s standards. (Back then, we had different attention spans.) In the office, we laughed at Yosemitebear, but I wanted to teleport off of that drab carpet and into the brush of a Mariposa County mountainside. The clip felt transcendent — something about the weirdness of being alive, seeing something extraordinary, yet overreacting to it — and sharing that with the world…it might have been peak YouTube.
900 Years and Done
London’s Smithfield Market to close after 900 years
A vote has sealed the fate of the market, but legal experts say the plan may be unlawful — as City of London Corporation plans to pay traders millions in compensation
by Andy Silvester
Smithfield, the capital’s oldest meat market, is to close — bringing to an end 900 years of trading on the historic site.
The fate of both Smithfield and Billingsgate fish market, in Canary Wharf, was sealed during a private vote by the governing body of their owner and operator, the City of London Corporation, on Tuesday afternoon.
The Corporation had previously planned to relocate both markets to a new site in Dagenham, in the capital’s eastern suburbs.
However, owing to cost overruns, the court approved a new plan to scrap the £1 billion relocation plan but close the market regardless.
The Need To Prevent Going Up
Ask Ethan: Is antigravity even possible?
Humans, when we consider space travel, recognize the need for gravity. Without our planet, is artificial or antigravity even possible?
by Ethan Siegel
Here in our Universe, under general relativity, everything that has mass or energy seems to both cause and also to respond to the curvature of spacetime, rendering gravity an always attractive force. And yet, when we think about science fiction, from Star Trek to Battlestar to 2001, artificial gravity and even antigravity are ideas that have permeated our culture in film, literature, television, and more. Is this even something that’s physically possible? Or do the rules of general relativity absolutely forbid something like this from becoming reality? Physics investigates.
For as long as we’ve been thinking about journeying to other star systems and the planets and worlds that orbit them, we’ve been compelled to consider just how to keep human beings intact during any journey that would bridge the interstellar distances. While short trips through the zero-gravity environment of space might be feasible for humans, over longer time periods, human bodies suffer from all sorts of maladies: space blindness, bone density loss, muscle atrophy, and much more. While instantaneous teleportation or faster-than-light travel, either through a wormhole or via warp drive, might be satisfactory solutions for science fiction, when it comes to reality, we need a superior plan.
No Mo’ Brit Lit
University scraps English literature degree as ‘no longer viable’
Canterbury Christ Church University blames a decline in applicants as it drops the subject for new students
Canterbury Christ Church University is scrapping English literature degrees because of a decline in applicants.
The university, based in Kent, said the course was “no longer viable in the current climate” and would not be offered from September 2025.
Canterbury has a played a significant role in the history of English literature, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and as the birthplace of Christopher Marlowe and Aphra Behn.
Students in their first or second year will be able to finish their degree and those completing a foundation year will be given the chance to switch to alternative courses.
SamGPT
AI bot ChatGPT will be smarter than any human on Earth ‘in a few thousand days’ as boss issues spooky update
But how long is “a few thousand days”? The Sun breaks it down for you below.
by Millie Turner, Senior Technology & Science Reporter
CHATGPT, a groundbreaking artificially intelligent (AI) chatbot, will be smarter than any human on Earth “in a few thousand days”, according to its creator.
It will be like the dawn of the internet – on steroids.
In a personal blog post titled “The Intelligence Age“, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote: “It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.
“How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? In three words: deep learning worked.”
Artificial superintelligence is a hypothetical machine learning system with an intellectual scope beyond the smartest, and most gifted humans on Earth.
University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom defines machine superintelligence as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest”.
Gregorian Revival
Lo-fi music conquered YouTube. Now it’s got a rising religious niche.
Who knew lo-fi mixed with snippets of Gregorian chant could be so good — and profitable?
by Sophia Smith Galer
I needed some sweet baptized beats,” one commenter wrote. “If anyone could say a prayer for the health of my children, I would appreciate it,” wrote another. “I will say a quick prayer for you both, Maggie and Neza,” replied someone called BF. “God bless you, everyone listening!”
Since it first streamed a year ago, a YouTube video of a cartoon man reading a Bible and smoking a cigar on his porch to the sound of piano-dusted beats has been viewed 1.5M times. Its popularity means YouTube’s algorithm easily surfaces it whenever somebody searches for “lo-fi,” or low-fidelity music, the DIY genre notable for its analogue warmth and looped beats — and, in this video’s unusual case, snippets of Gregorian chant.
According to Gitnux, lo-fi has seen about a 50% increase in searches over the past year, with lo-fi hip-hop increasing 200% in streams. The most prominent lo-fi account, Lofi Girl, has over 14M followers, and new accounts are constantly popping up. Like classical music, lo-fi can calm the listener and provide a soothing backdrop for studying or relaxing. But plaintive Latin hymns aren’t historically mixed with lo-fi beats, and that’s exactly why the genre has made the brains behind @catholiclofi thousands of dollars.
Pillow-smotherers
A Cancellation Trilogy
Jews take the lead in a new literary art form: The cancel-culture novel
Nothing stifles great art like censorship, whether through overt acts by government censors or through acts of pillow-smothering by conformist claques eager to display their virtue. As far as the pillow-smotherers are concerned, it’s no secret that the mainstream publishing houses only look to publish work that conforms to a few preset narratives while robustly censoring anything that tweaks their puritanical orthodoxy. Starting in 2020, when thought-policing in creative fields peaked, publishing houses were often the first to “do the work” of acquiescing to cancellation mobs and dumping writers who didn’t immediately kowtow to the party line of the day, or simply didn’t check off the right identity boxes. This is not a surprise for an industry that is overwhelmingly made up of affluent liberal arts college-educated tote bag-carriers living in coastal metropolises.
Any writer worth their salt opposes any movement that seeks to curb free artistic expression, and this includes what we now call cancel culture—a term that is now said to be “of the right” but which describes something entirely real. The old cliché offered to new writers is “write what you know,” and any writer minted in this new milieu surely knows about cancel culture. Thus, it’s not a surprise that a new wave of writers has begun to write, often in metafictional tones, about authors stifled by the specter of cancellation. And while some are indeed right wing (which didn’t seem to hurt the fiction of Saul Bellow and Mario Vargas Llosa), others are leftists and old-school liberals of a bygone time and place where free speech was held to be central to progressive intellectual life.
Magritte $121mm
Magritte painting nets auction record of $121 million
New York (AFP) – A painting by Rene Magritte shattered an auction record for the surrealist artist on Tuesday, selling for more than $121 million at Christie’s in New York.
The seminal 1954 painting had been valued at $95 million, and the previous record for a work by Magritte (1898-1967) was $79 million, set in 2022.
After a nearly 10-minute bidding war on Tuesday, “Empire of Light” (“L’Empire des lumieres”) was sold for $121,160,000, “achieving a world-record price for the artist and for a surrealist work of art at auction”, according to auction house Christie’s.
The painting — depicting a house at night, illuminated by a lamp post, while under a bright, blue sky — is one of a series by the Belgian artist showing the interplay of shadow and light.
“Empire of Light” was part of the private collection of Mica Ertegun, an interior designer who fled communist Romania to settle in the United States where she became an influential figure in the arts world.