Check out the top stories from HT WKND
1) Keeping up with Kafka
This year will mark 100 years since German-Czech writer Franz Kafka died. But Kafka is a mood that persists. Kafka is a rite of passage. Dog-eared editions of his books have shepherded millions through teen angst, mid-life crises and the general existential dread of adulthood. Kafkaesque is a term for the ages. It will continue to describe our experience of navigating an inscrutable world marked by indifferent bureaucracy, unreasonable patriarchs and powerful dictators, as much as it will deftly explain the alienation we experience when the wide chasm between ourselves and others by way of our political differences becomes known to us. Read more.
2) Old Franz and New
What does it look like when three countries join forces to celebrate a unique mind and legacy? A century after the Jewish German-Czech writer Franz Kafka died, aged 40, in Vienna, Austria, tribute events include gigs by bands named The Metamorphosis and The Process; a videogame that confronts players with the impossibility of choice; a fable-like production for children; and a futuristic experiment that seeks to explore the meaning of Kafka in the age of AI.
Perhaps the most extensive of the celebrations planned is Kafka 2024, initiated by the Adalbert Stifter Association in Munich and the Prague City Library, and supported by the governments of Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria, with a calendar of events unfolding across all three countries. Read more.
3) Modern sports medicine: It’s a flex
In August, Vinesh Phogat underwent surgery to reconstruct her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), following a knee injury. In January, she was back in competition, powering her way through to gold at the Senior National Wrestling Championships. That is a dramatically short timeline that is simply not supposed to happen. How did it? Well, that’s how far modern sports science has come. Read more.
4) THE DAILY QUIZ
In the Amazon, scientists have found the world’s biggest snake. It’s thick as a car tyre, eight meters long, weighing 200kg. It’s green, bigger than a reticulated python and could easily star in a film with Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube. The name?
a. Anaconda
b. Boa Constrictor
c. Water Boa
d. Boolean Python
5) Fever dream: In this story, ladies first, second and third
What would it look like if women ruled the world? More than a century ago, the Bengali feminist writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain followed that line of thought through rather dark alleyways. A pioneering women’s rights advocate in the early 1900s, Hossain (1880-1932) wrote of her vision in a story titled Sultana’s Dream, published in 1905. In this tale, written in English, the men thoughtlessly rush into a war and suffer great losses, while the women, who are scientists, inventors and rulers of Ladyland, devise a way to end the war non-violently. The men are then confined indoors and stripped of their freedoms. It is a world order that comes at a price, but a lower price than the alternative, the book would seem to argue. Read more.
