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Üleeile toimus meie suurima ja pikima traditsiooniga (juba 25 aastat!) Eesti Looduse fotokonkursi lõpuõhtu. Konkursile saadeti 1250 pilti 195 autorilt ning üldarvestuses pälvis auhinna 24 fotot. Mul oli rõõm saada auhinnatud kolme pildiga! :) Juuresolev pilt hinnati parimaks veelooma fotoks! Meie vetemaailma tippkiskja – haug. Reaalselt oli tegu umbes 4-5kg kaaluva haugiga, kellel pikkust peaaegu […]

Good morning everyone. I'm so pleased to direct you to BookPage, which has my cover revealed today for Winterkeep! Also for the new covers of Graceling, Fire, and Bitterblue. Not to mention a Q&A about Winterkeep, and an excerpt. Thank you, BookPage, for helping me share all this. Enjoy, everyone!

Click through for the Winterkeep cover reveal.

Hello, lovely people.

I have another craft post planned for sometime soon… I'm hoping to write about The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa, if I can just figure out how to articulate what I want to say. It's such a beautiful book! One of those rare books I got out of the library, read, then decided I needed to own.

Until then, I wanted to share a little bit of blather about Winterkeep (January 19, 2021), plus display all eight new covers — the new USA and UK covers for Graceling, Fire, Bitterblue, and Winterkeep — altogether in one place. If you don't care about the blather and just want to see pretty pictures, scroll down.

So. The first few drafts of Winterkeep were written in many, many points of view. It was early days, and I was trying to figure out how to tell the story I wanted to tell. I pretty much allowed anyone a point of view, sort of as an experiment, to see how each character felt, and figure out whose feelings were most important. Then gradually, across revisions, I whittled those POVs down. In its final form, Winterkeep is told from five points of view — and only three of them are human! 

One is Queen Bitterblue, whose POV will be familiar to those who've read my book Bitterblue. Bitterblue is a little bit older now, twenty-three. She's always working, always doing the best with the problems facing a young queen, and at the moment, she's worried about two of her advisers who died mysteriously in a shipwreck in Winterkeep. She's also worried about a friend, a Keepish man she's sort-of-maybe romantically involved with, named Katu Cavenda. Everyone says Katu is traveling… so why does it seem like he's actually disappeared? These questions, among others, bring Bitterblue to Winterkeep, to figure things out for herself.

Another point of view is Giddon, a character who'll be familiar to readers of Graceling and Bitterblue. Remember what a jerk Giddon was in Graceling? He actually told Katsa once that he was confident she'd want babies someday, because after all, she wasn't "an unnatural woman." YUCK! 

Then, when I started to write Bitterblue, I discovered that Giddon had evolved. I was touched by the friendship he began to develop with Bitterblue, which surprised me while I was writing. I realized that over the course of the last few years of his life, he'd taken responsibility for his behavior and grown up a bit. After all, he was only eighteen years old in Graceling, and he hadn't encountered much pushback against his viewpoints yet. I like to think that Giddon paid attention to the good influences around him and rethought a few things. Anyway, now he's back, and he's had a few more years to grow up even more.

Another point of view is a Keepish girl named Lovisa Cavenda, age 16, who's depicted on the USA cover (below). Lovisa's a sneak and a secret keeper; she's a manipulator and a survivor. Katu Cavenda's niece and a student of politics and government at the Winterkeep Academy, she lives in the dorms but sneaks home frequently, spying on her own parents, who are important political figures in Winterkeep. If I had to choose one character at the very heart of this book, it would be Lovisa Cavenda. Through no fault of her own, she finds herself in an impossible situation… Will she find a way out?

Another point of view is a telepathic blue fox, who has a special, exclusive mental bond with Lovisa Cavenda's mother, Ferla Cavenda. And trust me, though Ferla has a warm hearth and a warm coat with a fuzzy hood it's cozy to ride inside, Ferla's mind is not always a comfortable place! The rules of foxkind are fairly strict. What happens to a fox who can't decide whether to follow the rules?

Finally, my last point of view is a gigantic sea creature with thirteen legs and twenty-three eyes who lives at the bottom of the ocean, protecting her treasures (sunken anchors, sunken human corpses, sunken ships). All she wants is to be left alone… but the machinations of humans and the interests of her undersea world keep interrupting her peace.

Those are my five points of view! Together, they tell the story of Winterkeep, which is, above all, a story of relationships. I hope you'll enjoy watching these five characters come together.

And now for my shiny new covers. 

First up are the USA covers. In the USA and Canada, Graceling is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Fire, Bitterblue, and Winterkeep are published by Penguin Books. These covers were illustrated by Kuri Huang (@kuri_huang) and designed by Theresa Evangelista and Jessica Jenkins. Shown below in series order.

 

One of my absolute favorite things about this reboot is that both my USA and my UK publishers are updating the series, and both went with a beautiful, rich, textured look — but they're so different from each other. Below are my new UK covers. In the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, my books are published by Gollancz. The covers were illustrated by Micaela Alcaino (@micaelaalcaino) and designed by Tomás Almeida.

 

And that's my update for today. Hope you're all hanging in there. More soon. ????

I took a break from my craft series for a couple months. And then I handed in the first draft of a new book this week! Which means that this weekend I can finally turn my attention to writing about craft in The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa.

Yoko Ogawa's slender, stunning book, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, is a challenging one to use as a writing lesson, because while I can describe a hundred smart and wonderful things about it, that doesn’t mean I know how to translate its beauty into advice to other writers. It’s not helpful for me to say, “See how perfect this is? Now go do that." 

And it is that kind of book, the kind that pulls you into a narrative dream and holds you there so gently, with such soft hands, that it's hard to figure out how you got where you are. When did it happen, and how?

For me, it had already happened by the time I'd gotten to the end of page 3. And I think that the "how" has something to do with a sense of spaciousness.

What do I mean by a sense of spaciousness? Well, it's pretty hard to nail it down exactly, but I've been considering this a lot, and I think it has to do with a combination of things. One is unflowery, unfussy prose. Another is revelation of character through brief, searing lines of plot or observation. (You know those beautiful moments in books when a single sentence seems to capture the essence of a character, and just like that, you feel like you can see into their soul?) Another is a gentle, no-rush kind of pacing. Another has to do with themes that lend themselves to spaciousness. And another is the way Ogawa hooks this story into two real-world entities that have power, meaning, and spaciousness outside any book: mathematics and baseball.  

You didn't think this was going to be simple, did you? :o) The Housekeeper and the Professor is a book that seems spare and uncomplicated as you read it, but I think it's deceptively so. There's a lot packed into its 180 pages. The reader who feels suspended in a narrative dream is actually perched on top of a lot of strong, invisible foundations. Today I'll try to look at those foundations a little closer.

I'm not going to harp on the unflowery, unfussy prose, because I think you'll see that for yourself when I share examples from the text. Instead I'll talk first about the revelation of character, then get into pacing and themes, then say a little about the allusions to mathematics and baseball.

All page references are to the 2009 English-language paperback edition published by Picador.

First, a brief overview, with no spoilers: A housekeeper is assigned to work in the house of a professor of mathematics who lives in a small city on the Inland Sea. The professor, who's sixty-four, sustained a brain injury in an automobile accident seventeen years ago and lost his ability to form new memories. "He can remember a theorem he developed thirty years ago, but he has no idea what he ate for dinner last night" (5). He can only remember new things for eighty minutes. 

As a consequence, every morning, when the housekeeper arrives at the home of the professor, she's a stranger to him, as is her son who often accompanies her. And every day is predictable in some ways, yet thoroughly unpredictable in others. 

Told from the perspective of the housekeeper, the book is about the inner lives and growing relationships of four people, all of whose real names are not used: the housekeeper; her son; the Professor; and the professor's sister-in-law, who lives in the main house across from the professor's cottage. The book contains small, quiet, satisfying revelations. You learn more information about all of the characters over time. But the journey is as satisfying as the destination. This is one of those books where I wasn't reading to find out what happens; I was reading for the pleasure of spending time with the book.

Now, let's talk about character.

In the hands of a clunky writer, a character's inability to form new memories would be a gimmick. There are no gimmicks here. Almost from the first line, these are people you believe in, with thoughts and dilemmas that suspend you in a state of wanting, along with these characters, to understand what it means to be human. 

Here's how the book opens:

We called him the Professor. And he called my son Root, because, he said, the flat top of his head reminded him of the square root sign.

"There's a fine brain in there," the Professor said, mussing my son's hair. Root, who wore a cap to avoid being teased by his friends, gave a wary shrug. "With this one little sign we can come to know an infinite range of numbers, even those we can't see." He traced the symbol in the thick layer of dust on his desk.

This opening is the first of many times when the Professor embarks on an explanation of a mathematical concept. You, the reader, might immediately groan, thinking, Oh no, he's going to lecture, he's going to mansplain math… But only two pages later, on page 3, our narrator, the housekeeper, addresses that concern with this description:

But the professor didn't always insist on being the teacher. He had enormous respect for matters about which he had no knowledge, and he was as humble in such cases as the square root of negative one itself. Whenever he needed my help, he would interrupt me in the most polite way. Even the simplest request—that I help him set the timer on the toaster, for example—always began with "I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but…" Once I'd set the dial, he would sit peering in as the toast browned. He was as fascinated by the toast as he was by the mathematical proofs we did together, as if the truth of the toaster were no different from that of the Pythagorean theorem.

It's this description of the Professor peering in as the toast browns, caring about it as much as he cares about everything else, that captured my heart on page 3. With that tiny act, Ogawa shows us something essential about the Professor's character. And Ogawa repeats this method of revealing character over and over again, sharing small, isolated moments of searing revelation.

Here's another example of a small moment, one where we learn the Professor's particular, yet socially clueless, sympathy toward children:

Just then, there was a cry from the sandbox. A little girl stood sobbing, a toy shovel clutched in her hand. Instantly, the Professor was at her side, bending over to comfort her. He tenderly brushed the sand from her dress.

Suddenly, the child's mother appeared and pushed the Professor away, picking the girl up and practically running off with her. The Professor was left standing in the sandbox. I watched him from behind, unsure how to help. The cherry blossoms fluttered down, mingling with the numbers in the dirt. (46-47)

I'm not sure the professor understands what's just happened in that moment, but we do. And we can see him and feel for him (at the same time as we might feel frustrated with him).

Here's one more, shorter example: "I wondered how many times I had said those words since I'd come to work at the Professor's house. 'Don't worry. It's fine.' At the barber, outside the X-ray room at the clinic, on the bus home from the ballgame. Sometimes as I was rubbing his back, at other times stroking his hand. But I wondered whether I had ever been able to comfort him. His real pain was somewhere else, and I sensed that I was always missing the spot" (169-170).

Maybe when I use the word "spacious" to describe this kind of characterization, what I mean is that nothing is crowded, every detail is illuminated and clear, and allowed to be the star of the scene it's in. Every description is given the space it's needed. As a result, the characterizations seem clean and spare, but not because the characters are simple people with simple lives. They are complex people with difficult, tragic, sometimes frightening lives. But we can see them clearly, because Ogawa draws them with precise lines on a spacious page. 

I almost want to say that it's like each character is standing alone, visible to us in a bright, uncrowded room, but that makes the characters and the book sound sterile, which is completely wrong. In fact, they live in rooms full of things, especially books, papers, baseball cards, and food. And their lives, thoughts, and feelings are deeply entangled. But reading this book, the reader does not feel entangled. The reader has room.

This is partly because Ogawa gives every moment in this story the same weight as any other part of the story. The moment with the browning toast, for example, is just as important as other longer, more emotionally fraught scenes in the book. And this gets us into pacing. 

This book is composed of a lot of different kinds of passages. Tiny plot moments, like the Professor watching the toast brown. Longer scenes, like one where Root gets injured and the Professor and the housekeeper rush him to the hospital; one where they all go to a baseball game together; one where they have a party. Passages where the housekeeper is musing about the life of the Professor; passages where she's doing a little snooping in the Professor's house, hoping to learn about his past. Occasional passages where the housekeeper is telling us something about her own past. Also, lots and lots of passages about math.

Pacing isn't something I can demonstrate using short examples, because it depends upon how all the parts of the text sit in relation to each other. But I can try to explain what Ogawa does, and what it's like to read: She simply and straightforwardly lets every passage take as much time and space as it needs. It's okay if a math explanation fills up several pages. It's okay if some of the most beautiful and revealing character moments for the Professor — like his ability, every afternoon, to see the evening star before anyone else can (page 79) — take less than a page. There's a way in which the weight of any one part of this book has nothing to do with its length. All the different needs of the text are balanced in their significance. 

How does a short description manage to carry as much weight as a many-paged scene? I think it's partly because of what this book is telling us — its themes. Browning toast is, in fact, as important as the Pythagorean theorem. The housekeeper tells us so. A child is as important as a mathematician. A moment when a man with a brain injury is sad and confused is as important as the most fundamental mathematical discovery. Everything is connected, everything matters, and everything gets to take up space.

One thing I took away from the pacing of this book is that I want to try to worry less about the moments when my text feels uneven. I'll always listen to feedback from my readers when it comes to my pacing — but ultimately, there are other aspects of a text, particularly its style, mood, and themes, that can bind seemingly disparate parts of a book together. Maybe that's something I can talk about more sometime using one of my own books. It comes down to a book being a web, and that's a really complicated thing to try to talk about!

Here's another interesting thing Ogawa does with pacing: While it becomes pretty easy, pretty quickly, for the reader to know who the Professor is, this makes a fascinating contrast with the other characters in the book, who come into focus much more slowly. Especially the housekeeper herself, who's the narrator, but who's always talking about everyone else, hiding herself in the background (much like a housekeeper). Honestly, it took me a while to even notice the housekeeper as a character. And then I began to care about her experience deeply.

A lot of our revelations about the housekeeper's character relate to math. With a quiet, patient kind of wonder, the housekeeper absorbs every math lesson the Professor gives, and we see what that's like for her. We watch it touch her daily life—and reshape her entire outlook. 

"There was something profound in his love for math," the housekeeper says. "And it helped that he forgot what he'd taught me before, so I was free to repeat the same question until I understood. Things that most people would get the first time around might take me five, or even ten times, but I could go on asking the Professor to explain until I finally got it" (23).

Just as the Professor explains math to the housekeeper, Ogawa explains it to the reader, and explains it well; we understand it because we're sharing the housekeeper's growing understanding of it. Consequently, we can understand the way it's changing the housekeeper. One day, while cleaning the kitchen, she finds a serial number engraved on the back of the refrigerator door: 2311. Unable to help herself, she pulls out a notepad and gets to work trying to figure out whether this is a prime number. "Once I'd proved that 2,311 was prime, I put the notepad back in my pocket and went back to my cleaning, though now with a new affection for this refrigerator, which had a prime serial number. It suddenly seemed so noble, divisible by only one and itself" (113).

Later, she reflects on the relationship between math and meaning: "In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make even the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth" (124).

(It's worth mentioning that this book's sense of spaciousness is also aided by descriptions of actually spacious things. It's hard to imagine something more spacious than infinite lace!)

Slowly, we watch the housekeeper's relationship with the Professor—and with math—change her entire concept of herself. Here, the Professor has just watched her cook dinner with utter fascination and respect: "I looked at the food I had just finished preparing and then at my hands. Sautéed pork garnished with lemon, a salad, and a soft, yellow omelet. I studied the dishes, one by one. They were all perfectly ordinary, but they looked delicious—satisfying food at the end of a long day. I looked at my palms again, filled suddenly with an absurd sense of satisfaction, as though I had just solved Fermat's Last Theorem" (135).

Honestly, the mathematics in The Housekeeper and the Professor is one reason it's tricky to use this book as a craft lesson. It's clear Ogawa has enormous mathematical expertise, which breathes life and meaning into this story — but not many writers are going to have that expertise at their disposal, and not all stories can be about math. I also wonder what it's like to read this book if you're indifferent to math, or even hate it? Baseball, which is extremely math-based, plays another huge part in this book — I wonder how the book reads to people untouched by both math and baseball? I happen to adore both; I lap up baseball movies and math plays like Arcadia or Proof with the purest joy; so it's impossible for me to imagine reading this book from the perspective of a baseball-hater or a math-hater. It's hard to imagine that reader having the same experience I'm having.

Nonetheless, the point remains that Ogawa is harnessing the essence of other disciplines, math and baseball, and using them to expand her story — and it works for a lot of readers. It creates a kind of magic similar to Victor LaValle's use of fairytales in The Changeling. Things that we understand in a different context, like math or fairytales, can expand the meaning of realities that otherwise don't make sense, or hurt too much. Like a person who's lost a part of their brain that they need in order to make new, sustained relationships. Or a housekeeper who's been alone, unsupported, and unappreciated for most of her life.

And here again, Ogawa makes spacious choices. Is anything more spacious than math? Math defines space, and the infinity of space. And one of the complaints most often brandished at baseball is that there's way too much empty space in the game :o). Math and baseball serve as themes helping to create the book's spaciousness.

So. I'm not convinced that this post is the most useful entry in my craft series, especially for any of you looking for nitty-gritty writing advice. But I do hope you'll read Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor, and maybe my thoughts will combine with your own to help you come to some conclusions. I'll end this post with a spacious image:

"As we reached the top of the stairs that led to the seats above third base, all three of us let out a cry. The diamond in all its grandeur was laid out before us — the soft, dark earth of the infield, the spotless bases, the straight white lines, and the manicured grass. The evening sky seemed so close you could touch it, and at that moment, as if they had been awaiting our arrival, the lights came on. The stadium looked like a spaceship descended from the heavens" (88).

Happy writing!

 

Reading like a writer.

 Hi, everyone. In the midst of all this difficult news, Winterkeep is about to be released. So it's time to share the dates and details of my virtual tour events. If you're looking for a happy escape from all that's going on — and let's face it, probably some conversation about how books help us absorb/understand/frame current events — please join us! I'm going to be talking to a lot of super interesting people: Author and podcaster Sarah Enni. Authors Malinda Lo and Tui Sutherland. Agent Faye Bender and editor Andrew Karre.

Here's a link to my tour page: http://www.penguinteen.com/event/kristin-cashore-on-tour/

 

And I'll also spell everything out here:

First up, on Tuesday, January 19 at 7PM ET, I’ll be in conversation with Sarah Enni, hosted by the Brookline Booksmith. Sarah’s an author and journalist who’s the host of the wonderful First Draft podcast. More details and registration here: https://www.brooklinebooksmith.com/event/kristin-cashore-sarah-enni.

Next, on Sunday, January 24 at 2PM PST (5PM EST), Malinda Lo & I will talk about Winterkeep and Malinda’s beautiful new release, Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Our conversation will be moderated by Wings of Fire author Tui Sutherland. You can probably expect some craft talk! This event is hosted by Mysterious Galaxy. Details and registration here: https://www.mystgalaxy.com/cashorelo124 

Finally, on Monday, January 25 at 6PM EST, I’ll be in conversation with agent Faye Bender, hosted by editor Andrew Karre. Certainly some publishing talk! This event is hosted by Books & Books. Details and registration here:  https://booksandbooks.com/event/winterkeep-an-evening-with-kristin-cashore/ 

All events can be attended virtually for free. If you're purchasing a book as part of your registration, limited signatures and personalizations are available in some cases, so please do check the details.

And thanks.

Winterkeep is now out in the world, and can be purchased at your favorite book retailer. I am happy for you to buy the book wherever you prefer, but do keep indie retailers bookshop.org, Libro.fm, and Kobo in mind!

This week, I'm on the podcast First Draft with Sarah Enni... Sarah is so skilled at insightful conversation, and so warm, too. We had a lovely chat. Check it out!

I have two more virtual events to round off book release week, and you're invited. The first is Sunday at 5PM ET (2PM PT), with Malinda Lo, moderated by Tui Sutherland, and presented by Mysterious Galaxy Books in San Diego. The nice thing about this event is that Malinda, Tui, and I are all in the same book group. So we're used to getting together to talk about books. Just not usually our own books! Of course, our last eleven meetings have been virtual, but normally, the group meets in one of the homes of our lovely members. If I were hosting book group in January, I would have a fire roaring in the fireplace… So I'm going to light a fire for Sunday's event.

It's free to join us, but you do need to register ahead of time. Also, note that though I'm not personalizing books via my local indie during the pandemic, you can purchase books through this event and get signed or personalized bookplates. But you need to do so pretty soon, so if you're interested, follow the links! Instructions for ordering are here.

My final event, on Monday at 6PM ET, will be a conversation with my agent Faye Bender, moderated by editor Andrew Karre, who is my new editor! So this conversation will certainly involve some publishing talk. This event is hosted by Books & Books and the Miami Book Fair. This event is free, but you do need to register ahead of time.

Finally, for those of you not on Twitter, I'll share some pictures of my Winterkeep-writing process. Here's a drawing I made on November 10, 2013, while I was planning this book while on a writing trip in Akureyri, Iceland. At the time, I'm pretty sure I imagined that this picture encapsulated the entire plot of the book. (Don't worry, there are no spoilers! Especially since most of the stuff didn't make it into the final draft…)

Next up, here's a picture from the first page of my first draft, started on April 21, 2014. I wanted to share this because at the top, I've written, "I am writing a book and today I will write 2 pages." That's something I learned from Linda Sue Park, who gave a speech about writing once years ago in which she talked about the emotional weight of trying to make progress through such a long and gigantic project. You don't sit down thinking to yourself, "I need to write this entire book." You sit down thinking to yourself, "today I will write two pages." When Linda Sue said those words, it changed my writing life. So much pressure disappeared! (By the way, if you enjoy seeing pictures of my notebook, you might like the detailed post I wrote about writing Bitterblue.) (Oh! And if you read that post, then read the writing carefully below, you will notice that ONCE AGAIN, I tried to write an earthquake into a book. Like the earthquake in Bitterblue, this Winterkeep earthquake did not make it through to the final draft. Why am I obsessed with earthquakes?)

Finally, years later — almost 3 years ago, in February of 2018 — I was far along in the writing process, but I still hadn't figured out what this place was called, what this book was called, what the undersea beast was called…. At a writing retreat with friends, I kidnapped this gigantic easel notepad thingamajig and started writing down possibilities. Everyone voted. You'll note that "Winterkeep" isn't even on this list (though some pretty silly things are; I wrote down every possibility, no matter how bad), but you'll also see that I was getting pretty close to "Winterkeep!" I don't remember exactly, but I must have come up with "Winterkeep" while we were at dinner one night, and everyone agreed it was the winner. (For a while after that, I was calling the book Winter Keeper, but when it came time to decide for sure, my team at Penguin decided to go with Winterkeep, so that the title would line up nicely with the other single-word Graceling Realm titles.)

And that's my Winterkeep update for today! I hope we'll get to see you at one of my upcoming events!

Here are a few organizations that need our support right now: 

Fund Texas Choice. A nonprofit organization funding abortion travel for people in Texas. 

Frontera Fund. Making abortion accessible for people in the Rio Grande Valley. 

Clinic Access Support Network. Providing transportation, lodging, emotional support, and more to those seeking abortion care in Houston, TX. 

Bridge Collective. A full spectrum doula collective, nonprofit organization based in Austin, TX. 

The Afiya Center. An advocacy organization based in Dallas, TX, dedicated to transforming the lives of Black womxn and girls through reproductive justice. 

Texas Equal Access Fund. Providing financial and emotional support to people seeking abortion care in the north, east, and panhandle regions of Texas. 

Lilith Fund. Financial assistance, emotional support, and building community spaces for people who need abortions in Texas — unapologetically, with compassion and conviction. 

West Fund. Working to make abortions accessible and affordable to people in West Texas. 

Thank you to the folks at @FundTexasChoice who helped me compile this list.

 

 

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All solutions for the November 12 episode.

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Компания Google DeepMind опубликовала исходные тексты системы машинного обучения AlphaFold 3, предназначенной для предсказания трёхмерной структуры белков и моделирования взаимодействия белков с другими типами молекул. За создание алгоритмов машинного обучения, реализованных во второй версии AlphaFold, в этом году присуждена Нобелевская премия по химии. Связанный с AlphaFold 3 инструментарий написан на Python и C++, и распространяется под лицензией CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Натренированные модели предоставляются на основе пользовательского соглашения. Отдельно запущен сервер, позволяющий экспериментировать с AlphaFold 3 в online-режиме.

All eyes are on Michigan as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battle over undecided voters in the crucial swing state, including many of the state’s 200,000 Arab American and Muslim voters who reject both the Republican and Democratic parties’ stance on Israel and Palestine. We speak to Dearborn, Michigan’s Lebanese American Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who is the first Arab and Muslim mayor of the city, about many of his constituents’ loss of support for the Democratic Party and how the Arab American vote could impact the presidential election. Hammoud, like many Dearborn residents, has lost extended family to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, and describes the climate in the city as “a blanket of grief.” Having called for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel, he refused to meet with Trump last week, but has also declined to endorse Harris. Hammoud calls on voters to not sit out the election entirely, but to “vote their moral conscience, and says the citizens of Dearborn are “willing to put people over party, first and foremost.”

Donald Trump has been reelected president of the United States. Ahead of Kamala Harris’s expected concession speech, we speak to professors Carol Anderson and Michele Goodwin to discuss Harris’s historic campaign — and historic loss. “The Confederacy won,” says Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University. “It paints a picture of what Americans are willing to embrace,” says Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown and an expert on healthcare law, who warns of the public health dangers of a second Trump administration and discusses the election’s implications for reproductive rights.

Donald Trump’s performance in the 2024 election surpassed expectations, with the candidate winning the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia and picking up larger shares of more diverse segments of the electorate, including Black and Latino male voters. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, says the blame lies squarely on the Harris campaign, which refused to differentiate itself from unpopular incumbent President Joe Biden. “The problem here is with the leadership of the Democratic Party,” adds John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation. Nichols and Taylor discuss how Democrats “demobilized” young voters and grassroots organizers, to their electoral detriment. “Donald Trump, as a president who has very few guardrails, has the potential to take horrific actions,” says Nichols. For those seeking to oppose him, says Taylor, “There’s a lot of rebuilding that has to be done.”

We speak with historian Robin D. G. Kelley about the roots of Donald Trump’s election victory and the decline of Democratic support among many of the party’s traditional constituencies. Kelley says he agrees with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who said Democrats have “abandoned” working-class people. “There was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board,” Kelley says of the Harris campaign. He says the highly individualistic, neoliberal culture of the United States makes it difficult to organize along class lines and reject the appeal of authoritarians like Trump. “Solidarity is what’s missing — the sense that we, as a class, have to protect each other.”

Dutch Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani discusses the violence that broke out last week between visiting Israeli soccer fans and pro-Palestinian protesters in Amsterdam. The Dutch authorities made over 60 arrests, and at least five people were hospitalized as a result of the clashes, which local and international leaders were quick to brand as antisemitic, even though observers in Amsterdam have said it was Israeli hooligans who instigated much of the violence. Rabbani says that while it’s common for rival teams’ fans to get into skirmishes, what happened in Amsterdam was different. “What we’re talking about here in Amsterdam is not a clash between the hooligans of two opposing sides, but rather these Israeli thugs attacking people who, in principle, had nothing to do with the game, and then afterwards being confronted by their victims,” Rabbani says.