Flagship

Print books keep on selling

Sales of physical books are booming, despite the rise of e-books. The growth of the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers in the early 2000s was predicted to kill off print books and, perhaps, the independent bookstore. But print-book sales are up 10-14% over the last three years across English-speaking markets, an industry analyst told CBC: Nice numbers “for an industry that many people thought was dying.” Surprisingly, e-readers are more popular among older people — being able to make the text bigger is a plus for the varifocal generation — while younger readers, driven by the growth in genre fiction and young-adult novels, and by social-media trends like “BookTok,” are buying print books in ever-greater numbers.

Hopkins to play Kindertransport hero

Anthony Hopkins will play the lead in One Life, a biopic of Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved 669 mainly Jewish children before World War II. Winton, a British stockbroker, organized the “Kindertransport” trains which took children from Czechoslovakia to Britain in the 1930s ahead of the Nazi invasion. Hopkins’ co-star Johnny Flynn told the BBC that Winton, far from feeling a hero, dwelt for decades on those he hadn’t saved — the last train of 250 children was due to leave the day war broke out: “For him it is a tragedy,” and one he felt “deep shame” about. But thousands of people now owe their lives to Winton, as he found out in 1988, in one of the most moving scenes ever shown on British television.

Tiktok creators go creepy

In a recent TikTok trend, people are making themselves doll-like, creepy, and subtly wrong. The #uncannyvalleymakeup hashtag has had hundreds of millions of views, and involves makeup artists doing their faces so that they look like an almost-human robot or mannequin. The trend exploits the “uncanny valley” phenomenon, noted in 1970 by a Japanese robotics professor: When things are almost, but not quite, human-like, we have a strong, visceral reaction of disgust and fear to them, as some did to the movie version of Cats. Too-smooth or subtly distorted features, exaggerated facial expressions, and stilted movement can be part of the effect.

Commemorating le Brutalisme

A new book explores Paris’s underappreciated Brutalist architecture. The French capital is better known for its older buildings, such as the soon-to-be-reopened 13th-century Notre-Dame de Paris or the regimented, open streets created during Georges-Eugène Haussman’s 1870s renovation of the city center. But as in many European cities much had to be rebuilt after World War II, and the need to do so at scale required low-cost materials with few embellishments, so architectural form followed function. The resulting style was “brut,” or “raw.” Brutalist Paris praises the “important architectural interventions” of Brutalism, but “few of the buildings have weathered well,” wrote Madeleine Schwartz in the London Review of Books. “Many of the buildings are now dilapidated, abandoned, isolated.”

Mexico’s holiday food returns

Mexico’s holiday celebrations kicked off on December 12, the day of the country’s most venerated patron, the Virgin of Guadalupe. However the country’s most famous festive culinary tradition — the Torta de bacalao a la Vizcaína, a type of sandwich made with marinated cod — is only now arriving on menus across the country. And it comes just in time: Many Mexicans are in the middle of the Guadalupe-Reyes celebration, a bacchanalia that requires participants to have at least one drink a day for almost a month. Whether for soaking up booze or just enjoying one of Mexico’s most unique culinary treats, El Rey del Pavo in Mexico City’s historic center has been making some of the best-regarded tortas for more than four decades.

The online store of one of Croatia’s biggest publishers, Mozaik knjiga, recommends The Stillwater Girls by Minka Kent, known as Zlo mjesto — Evil Place — in Croatian. It’s a chilling psychological novel about three girls raised away from civilization in a forest in upstate New York. Kent “has always been interested in why good people do bad things,” says Vedran Bratusek, one of Mozaik knjiga’s editors. Buy it from Mozaik knjiga or your local bookstore.

The expected value at auction of a newly discovered drawing by the 17th-century Flemish artist Anthony Van Dyck. The work, Portrait of Willem Hondius, was thought lost, although reprints existed, until someone told Christie’s auction house that they had inherited the original. It seemed “too good to be true,” Stijen Alsteens, a Christie’s art expert, told Artnet, but turned out not to be. The portrait was created for reproduction as prints and engravings, and “really enabled Van Dyck to disseminate his ideas for portraiture,” Alsteen said, crucial in making him “the most consequential and influential of 17th-century portraitists.”

The arrival of the Christmas holiday brings with it mulled wine, gingerbreads cookies, and the unmistakably high-pitched voice of Mariah Carey singing All I Want For Christmas Is You. One of the leading pop artists of the past two decades, Carey is now commonly associated with the best-selling holiday song, a creation that “The Queen of Christmas” first opposed when music executives pitched the idea. However, no one in 1994, when the song was first recorded, could have foreseen its success: It has now raked in almost $100 million. “That song is just embedded in history now,” a Grammy-winning producer told the Associated Press.

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