| | | | | Passing the 'chimp test': how Neanderthals and women helped create language | | by Steven Poole Aug 28, 2021 | | How did humans learn to talk and why haven’t chimpanzees followed suit? Linguistics expert Sverker Johansson busts some chauvinist myths How and when did human language evolve? Did a “grammar module” just pop into our ancestors’ brains one day thanks to a random change in our DNA? Or did language come from grooming, or tool use, or cooking meat with fire? These and other hypotheses exist, but there seems little way to rationally choose between them. It was all so very long ago, so any theory must be essentially speculation. Or must it? This is the question presented as an elegant intellectual thriller by The Dawn of Language: Axes, Lies, Midwifery and How We Came to Talk. Its author is Sverker Johansson, a serene and amiable 60-year-old Swede who speaks to me over Zoom from his book-crammed home study in the city of Falun, where he works as a senior adviser at Dalarna University. Continue reading... | | | | | Rafia Zakaria: 'A lot of white female professors told me to quit' | | by Nesrine Malik Aug 28, 2021 | | The activist and author discusses why there is no one-size-fits-all feminism and her aim to create work that comforts women of colour who have been ‘gaslit’ Rafia Zakaria’s new book Against White Feminism starts with a sort of Sex and the City scene entitled “At a wine bar, a group of feminists ...” In it, some well-heeled white women are gathered for a drink in New York. The only brown woman in attendance, Zakaria winces and wilts under the glare of their innocent questions, as she tries to avoid the responses she tends to receive when she tells her true story – ones of pity, discomfort and avoidance. Zakaria was born in Pakistan and at the age of 17 agreed to an arranged marriage to a Pakistani man living in the US. “I had never experienced freedom, so I gladly signed it away,” she writes. The marriage was unhappy, and she left her abusive husband at the age of 25, seeking refuge in a shelter with her toddler. What followed were years of precarity in the US. Continue reading... | | | | | | | Children's books roundup – the best new picture books and novels | | by Imogen Russell Williams Aug 28, 2021 | | Wild island adventures, hungry monsters, TS Eliot’s cat – plus the best new YA novels The remote wildness of a Scottish island blended with Celtic folklore and Hindu mythology: Jasbinder Bilan’s Aarti & the Blue Gods (Chicken House) is a gem for readers of eight-plus. Aarti lives alone with her exacting, cruel aunt, cut off from the world and her own history – until a boy washes up on the beach, and she makes an extraordinary discovery. Deftly interweaving the tangible and the numinous, this richly layered adventure confirms Bilan’s striking, original talent. From Scavengers author Darren Simpson comes The Memory Thieves (Usborne), a tense sci-fi thriller. In the Elsewhere Sanctuary, young residents, including Cyan, submit to Dr Haven’s memory modifications to escape deep-rooted trauma – but when Cyan finds a cryptic message carved into a whale skeleton, and sees a new arrival resist the regime, he begins to rebel, too. Simpson combines fast-paced visual storytelling with a complex, thought-provoking message about coming to terms with the past. Continue reading... | | | | | Sally Rooney on the hell of fame: 'It doesn't seem to work in any real way for anyone' | | by Emma Brockes Aug 28, 2021 | | At 30, the Normal People author is already the most talked-about novelist of her generation. As she readies her third novel, she’s bracing for more (unwanted) attention Sally Rooney appears before a stark, white background, stripped of even the most incidental feature. It makes me laugh: in 18 months of Zoom meetings, I’ve encountered people in their bedrooms and home offices, in front of bookcases and windows – situations that, no matter how bland or contrived, still betray some minor, contextualising detail. The empty staging today is, evidently, something that Rooney, after two hit novels and the rapid onset of an unwelcome fame, clearly wishes might extend further than a video call. Later in our conversation she will tell me celebrity is a condition that, in many cases, “happens without meaningful consent – the famous person never even wanted to become famous”. Now, after exchanging greetings, I mention the singularity of the naked white walls and she laughs and says merely, “Yes.” There are some good reasons for the 30-year-old’s reticence. Her first two novels – Conversations With Friends and Normal People – were published in quick succession to the sort of acclaim that put Rooney in a category of exposure more consistent with actors than novelists. The books featured characters in late adolescence and early adulthood struggling through first relationships while starting to organise their thoughts about the world. They were erudite and self-assured, written with a dry, flat affect that was often very funny, and contained the kinds of fleeting, well-wrought descriptions that infused every scene with a casual virtuosity. (Early on in Conversations With Friends, Frances, the heroine, sleeps with Nick, a married man, and taking the bus home afterwards, sits at the back near the window, where “the sun bore down on my face like a drill and the cloth of the seat felt sensationally tactile against my bare skin”. Rooney’s ability to unpack a thought or feeling without forfeiting economy is one of the great strengths of her writing.) Continue reading... | | | | | Fran Lebowitz: 'If people disagree with me, so what?' | | by Hadley Freeman Aug 28, 2021 | | With a hit Netflix series and The Fran Lebowitz Reader now published in the UK, the American wit talks about failing to write, her dislike of Andy Warhol and her best friend Toni Morrison Fran Lebowitz is a famous writer who famously doesn’t write. “I’m really lazy and writing is really hard and I don’t like to do hard things,” she says, and it’s the rare writer who would not have some sympathy with that. Yet, as all writers also know, writer’s block, which the 70-year-old has suffered from for four decades now, is never really about laziness. Lebowitz’s editor Erroll McDonald (“the man with the easiest job in New York”) has said she suffers from “excessive reverence for the written word”. Given that Lebowitz has, at last count, more than 11,000 of them in her apartment, there is no question that she loves books. “I would never throw away a book – there are human beings I would rather throw out of the window,” she says. So is this talk of “excessive reverence” a euphemistic way of saying that she has low self-esteem and doesn’t think she can write anything good enough to commit to print? Continue reading... | | | | | Colin Farrell on making The North Water: 'It's a relief that no one died' | | by Gabriel Tate Aug 28, 2021 | | Farrell and Stephen Graham star in the gritty new thriller about an 1850s whaling ship. However, the drama wasn’t confined to the screen … Nothing shocked me about The North Water,” says Colin Farrell, stroking his straggly beard. “If I want to be shocked, I’ll go out at 3am and see someone homeless in the street. That’s shocking because it demonstrates apathy that results in abject cruelty. This has blood, seal and whale killings, murder, rape, mayhem. But however brutal that seems, it’s a film set. It’s all artifice.” Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips Continue reading... | | | | | Body Heat at 40: the sexiest and sweatiest film of the 80s | | by Scott Tobias Aug 28, 2021 | | Lawrence Kasdan’s thrilling update of Double Indemnity brought the noir template into a new decade with help from a never-better Kathleen Turner The first time we see William Hurt in Body Heat, he’s standing naked with his back to the camera, glistening in post-coital sweat and staring out at a burning building – which, in the seedy world of south Florida real estate, counts as a business transaction. His latest conquest acknowledges his lack of interest in her after sex (“You’re watching the fire,” she says. “You’re done with me.”), but she doesn’t seem put out by it. Like the audience, she’s enjoying the view. Related: An American Werewolf in London at 40: John Landis’s crafty creative peak Continue reading... | | | | | | | |
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