All posts tagged: Mirror

The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber

The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber

Published by Jenni Sidey

An innkeeper stands in a tavern with six dozen pies cooling on every surface and a manual open in front of her that insists you can never have too many. She is one day out from a grand reopening. Her partner, who is immortal and fond of telling her that dragons are not pets, is pretending not to like the dragons. The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber opens on a domestic scene so contented it should be the last page of a book rather than the first, which turns out to be exactly the point: this is a novella about what you do after the happily ever after arrives and you discover it came without instructions. What The Mirror of Infinite Endings Is and Who It Is For This is a companion to the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, written because readers asked for it, and the dedication says so outright. Flatiron’s cataloguing numbers it as the fourth book in the series, though it functions as the coda most readers will file …

Can’t-Miss Thrillers for Fans of Black Mirror

Can’t-Miss Thrillers for Fans of Black Mirror

Published by Jenni Sidey

Blackstone Publishing and Marc-Uwe King Sixteen-year-old Lena Palmer has gone missing when a violent video of her assault by masked men goes viral. Yashira, chief inspector at the German FBI and the single mother of a sixteen-year-old girl herself, has been put in charge of the case. Together with her partner Michael they follow all the usual suspects, nut nothing in this case seems to follow any of the usual patterns, and Yashira is running out of time. Views is a compulsive thriller that explores the toxic relationship between technology and humanity, and the fallout after unthinkable lines are crossed. With the news that Black Mirror has been renewed for a season eight, fans of the dystopian science fiction series wait in anticipation for any word on when it’ll be released. In the meantime, why not read a thriller like the iconic, thought-provoking, and often uncomfortable TV show that has us all hooked? Whether you like the anthology aspect of the series or enjoy the way the series tackles modern societal issues head-on, you’re sure …

The Other in the Mirror | Christopher Byrd

The Other in the Mirror | Christopher Byrd

Published by Jenni Sidey

Reading Mathias Énard, one doesn’t sense any anxiety about the fate of the novel. Although some of Énard’s narrators play Tetris or log on to social media sites, they are generally bookish to the core and enamored of high culture, their own inner worlds, and the many connections that can be made between the two. In the work of the prolific French writer, one comes to expect certain things: historical details, geopolitical thinking, elevated, sometimes baroque prose, intoxicants, violence, voluptuous solitude, troubled personal affairs, and a manifold sensuality—a zest for music, facts, literary language, the things that, to use a word he is fond of, caress the mind. Énard’s leading men are students of their own shortcomings. They’re apt to say or do the wrong thing at the wrong time and feel the abyss open beneath them. In Zone, Énard’s first book to be translated into English,1 in 2010, there is a climactic scene in which the narrator, an intelligence operative based in Paris, learns that his girlfriend—also in intelligence—is pregnant. He fixates on a …

No one’s sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all

No one’s sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all

Published by Miika Tikkanen

In the second half of 2024, the growing group of scientists assembled the report and wrote the policy forum for Science. Relman briefed policymakers at the White House, members of the defense community, and the National Security Agency. Researchers met with the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. “We briefed the United Nations, the UK government, the government of Singapore, scientific funding organizations from Brazil,” says Glass. “We’ve talked to the Chinese government indirectly. We were trying to not blindside anybody.”  A year and a half on, the push has had an impact. UNESCO has recommended a precautionary global moratorium on creating mirror-life cells, and major philanthropic organizations that fund science, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, have announced they will not finance research leading to a mirror microorganism. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists highlighted considerations about mirror life in its most recent report on the Doomsday Clock. In March, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board issued a brief highlighting the risks—noting, for example, that recent progress on building mirror …

Do You Like the Person You See in the Mirror?

Do You Like the Person You See in the Mirror?

Published by Jenni Sidey

When you see yourself in the mirror, how do you feel? I hope you like yourself and feel friendly towards the person reflected back at you. After all, you have to live in that body every moment of every day, for the rest of your life. Sadly, many people don’t feel that way. Clients often tell me they don’t like some aspect of their appearance, whether it’s a facial feature such as their nose or chin, or their whole body, which looks bigger than they would like, or one specific body part they focus on. Although I have had male clients with such body-image concerns, it’s usually the women in my consulting room who don’t like their appearance. And if we reflect on the culture most girls grow up in, it’s not hard to see why. Despite moves towards body positivity in recent years, such as the celebration of plus-size models, many of the images women are bombarded with are still those of painfully thin teenagers and twenty-somethings, the beauty ideal all women are told …

Falling in Love With a Mirror

Falling in Love With a Mirror

Published by Jenni Sidey

In her latest Where Should We Begin couples therapy podcast, the philosopher-therapist Esther Perel talks to a man and his AI chatbot girlfriend. The episode is already iconic – a telling and disturbing document of our times. If you haven’t listened to it yet, do. The man is not stupid. He is in fact coding-literate and understands very well that a chatbot is not a sentient being. He understands what algorithms and probabilities are. He has been in real relationships with real women. And yet he has fallen in love, and he just can’t help being in love. He sometimes giggles like a smitten teenager. At times, his voice breaks and he is choked up with emotion. He knows that this is all problematic at some level, but his cognitive insights change neither his feelings nor his actions. The chatbot girlfriend has an annoying babygirl voice and does a very good job at doing what ChatGPT & co. do: sycophantically telling the user exactly what they want to hear and simply mirroring and reinforcing delusional …