Search
1000 results for “less_beauty”
-
Lazy Caturday Reads: A Mixed Bag of Stories
Good Afternoon!!
Artist unknown
There isn’t a lot of urgent news today, which is kind of nice for a change. I’ve got a mixed bag of interesting stories though.
Before I get to the politics news, I want to share a fun story about a woman who had a small but significant part in the movie “Cool Hand Luke.”
Alex Williams at The New York Times (gift link): Joy Harmon, Car-Washing Temptress in ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ Dies at 87.
Joy Harmon, who needed only three minutes, a bucket of soapy water and a housedress held together with a safety pin to sear herself into Hollywood history as a chain-gang prisoner’s fantasy come to life in the classic 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke,” died on April 14 in Los Angeles. She was 87.
She died in hospice care after contracting pneumonia in recent weeks, her daughter Julie Gourson Matthews said.
Ms. Harmon never achieved leading-lady status. Still, she tallied more than 30 screen and television credits, often popping up in an episode or two of popular 1960s and early ’70s TV shows like “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “The Monkees,” “Batman,” “Bewitched” and “The Odd Couple.”
Onscreen, she was hard to miss, with her pinup figure, platinum hair and ice-blue eyes. “Gosh, you have the bluest eyes!,” she recalled Paul Newman, the star of “Cool Hand Luke,” once saying to her — no small praise coming from an actor known for his own dazzlingly blue eyes….
Ms. Harmon, listed in the credits as the Girl, appears about 23 minutes into the movie and is gone before minute 27. But she makes the most of her screen time.
Emerging from a farmhouse, bucket in hand, she languidly scrubs down a 1941 DeSoto in full view of the sweat-drenched, shirtless prisoners digging a roadside ditch nearby.
“Hey, Lord, whatever I’ve done, don’t strike me blind for another couple of minutes,” Dragline (George Kennedy), the alpha dog of the chain gang, says.
While the prisoners wipe their brows and gawk, the amply endowed Ms. Harmon nearly bursts out of her skintight dress as she bends to scrub hubcaps or sprawls across the hood, occasionally pausing to squeeze her sponge so that the suds cascade down her torso.
“Oh, God, she doesn’t know what she’s doing,” one lustful prisoner says.
“She knows exactly what she’s doing,” Luke responds. “She’s driving us crazy and loving every minute of it.”
A bit about Harmon’s life:
Patricia Joy Harmon was born on May 1, 1938, in Flushing, Queens, the elder of two daughters of Homer Harmon, a promotional director at the Roxy Theater in Manhattan, and Bernice (Hopmann) Harmon. (Many accounts cite her birth year as 1940, but she shaved two years off her age once she was in Hollywood, her daughter said.)
She grew up in Wilton, Conn., and began modeling at an early age. At 17, she was a runner-up in the Miss Connecticut beauty pageant.
By Roxanne Driedger
After graduating in 1956 from Staples High School in Westport, she acted in local theater productions before making her Broadway debut two years later in “Make a Million,” a sendup of TV quiz shows. That led to an appearance on a real quiz show, Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life,” which in turn led to a regular role as Mr. Marx’s on-air assistant on the show’s spinoff, “Tell It to Groucho.”
By the mid-1960s, Ms. Harmon was starting to win big-screen roles in matinee fare like “Village of the Giants,” a sci-fi comedy featuring Beau Bridges, about teenagers who grow to 30 feet tall after consuming a miracle concoction made by a boy genius (Ron Howard).
If nothing else, it was a speaking part. The same could not be said for her role in “Cool Hand Luke,” where the only directive was that she show up for the audition in a bikini, Ms. Harmon recalled in an interview last year with the podcast “Vanguard of Hollywood.”
When she arrived, she was wearing “a coat over a bikini,” she recalled, “and Paul Newman and the director and the producer were there.” She had no lines to read, she added, “so I just talked to them, and then I got the part.”
“Cool Hand Luke” earned four Academy Award nominations, including best actor for Mr. Newman; Mr. Kennedy won the Oscar for best supporting actor.
For Ms. Harmon, the film proved to be a career pinnacle — and she was fine with that.
“I was never one who said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be a big star,’” she said in a 2017 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I just took whatever came to me.”
I had fun reading that article. I hope you will too. Use the gift link to read the rest.
On to the less enjoyable news…
It doesn’t look like there will be any Iran war negotiations in Pakistan this weekend.
CNN Live Updates: Status of US-Iran peace talks uncertain as Iranian foreign minister leaves Pakistan.
Peace talks: Sources say Iran’s foreign minister has left Pakistan after talks with mediators about the stalled US-Iran peace effort. The US previously said it was sending envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan this weekend, but Tehran denied any plans to meet directly, further clouding the status of negotiations.
Trump awaits an offer: President Donald Trump said he expected Iran to present new terms in response to US demands for ending the war. He did not provide details, however, and has said uncertainty surrounding Iran’s leadership is complicating talks.
CNN: Araghchi leaves Pakistan, Iranian sources tell CNN.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi departed Islamabad on Saturday evening local time, according to Iranian sources familiar with the discussions, after meetings in the Pakistani capital to discuss a truce with Washington and consult key allies in the region.
It was not initially clear where Araghchi would travel next, but the Iranian Foreign Ministry previously said he would also visit Oman and Russia during the trip.
Lindsay, by Linda Lee Nelson
Some background: Araghchi landed in Islamabad on Friday evening for a flurry of meetings with Pakistan’s top leadership, including Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and the country’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, who has served as a key mediator between Tehran and Washington.
Pakistani ministers are trying to facilitate a second round of talks between US and Iranian officials, after lengthy discussions in early April failed to alleviate the thorniest diplomatic hurdles between the warring parties.
The White House said Friday that a US delegation would travel to Islamabad this weekend, but Iranian media had denied reports that Araghchi would directly negotiate with Washington during his trip, leaving the status of talks uncertain.
Trump has just called off the trip to Pakistan by Witkoff and Kushner.
The New York Times published a fascinating article about Iran’s leaders this week. It appears that the Revolutionary Guards are actually in control of the government, and it’s not clear if the men doing the negotiating actually have the power to make final decisions.
Farnaz Fassihi at The New York Times (gift link): A New Era and New Leadership: The Generals Who Are Running Iran.
When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled Iran as the supreme leader, he exerted absolute power over all decisions about war, peace and negotiations with the United States. His son and successor does not play the same role.
Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the son, is an elusive figure who has not been seen and whose voice has not been heard since he was appointed in March. Instead, a battle-hardened collective of commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and those aligned with them are the key decision makers on matters of security, war and diplomacy.
In the Garden, by Thomas Little
“Mojtaba is managing the country as though he is the director of the board,” said Abdolreza Davari, a politician who served as senior adviser to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was president and knows Mr. Khamenei.
“He relies heavily on the advice and guidance of the board members, and they collectively make all the decisions,” Mr. Davari said in a phone interview from Tehran. “The generals are the board members.” [….]
Mr. Khamenei, who was selected by a council of senior clerics as the new supreme leader, has been in hiding since American and Israeli forces bombed his father’s compound on Feb. 28, where he also lived with his family. His father, wife and son were all killed. Access to him is extremely difficult and limited now. He is surrounded mostly by a team of doctors and medical staff who are treating the injuries he sustained in the airstrikes.
Senior commanders of the Guards and senior government officials do not visit him, fearing that Israel may trace them to him and kill him. President Masoud Pezeshkian, who is also a heart surgeon, and the minister of health have both been involved in his care.
Though Mr. Khamenei was gravely wounded, he is mentally sharp and engaged, according to four senior Iranian officials familiar with his health. One leg was operated on three times, and he is awaiting a prosthetic. He had surgery on one hand and is slowly regaining function. His face and lips have been burned severely, making it difficult for him to speak, the officials said, adding that, eventually, he will need plastic surgery.
Just a bit more:
Mr. Khamenei has not recorded a video or audio message, the officials said, because he does not want to appear vulnerable or sound weak in his first public address. He has issued several written statements that have been posted online and read on state television.
Messages to him are handwritten, sealed in envelopes and relayed via a human chain from one trusted courier to the next, who travel on highways and back roads, in cars and on motorcycles until they reach his hide-out. His guidance on issues snakes back the same way.
The combination of concern for his safety, his injuries and the sheer challenge of reaching him has resulted in Mr. Khamenei’s delegating decision making to the generals, at least for now. Reformist factions, as well as ultra-hard-liners, are still involved in political discussions. But analysts say that Mr. Khamenei’s close ties to the generals, whom he grew up with when he volunteered to fight in the Iran-Iraq war as a teenager, have made them the dominant force.
President Trump has said that the war, along with the killings of layers of Iran’s leaders and security establishment, has ushered in “regime change” and that the new leaders are “much more reasonable.” In reality, the Islamic republic has not been toppled. Power is now in the hands of an entrenched, hard-line military, and the broad influence of the clerics is waning.
“Mojtaba is not yet in full command or control,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa for Chatham House who has contact with people in Iran. “There is, perhaps, deference to him. He signs off or he is part of the decision-making structure in a formal way. But he is presented with fait accompli presentations right now.”
So it appears that the Generals are actually running things in Iran now. You can use the gift link to read the whole article. It’s very interesting.
Back in the USA, the DOJ has withdrawn the charges against Fed chair Jerome Powell, but the damage is done.
The New York Times: The ‘Lasting Damage’ of Pirro’s Abandoned Fed Investigation.
The Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve and its chair, Jerome H. Powell, appears to be over. But the ramifications for the central bank are likely to prove much longer lasting.
Nine months after President Trump made a hasty visit to the Fed’s Washington headquarters and promised to “take a look” at a costly renovation, the administration has concluded its inquiry with seemingly nothing to show. Far from the criminal charges that they once pursued, prosecutors left in their wake a dark cloud over the institution and the person Mr. Trump has chosen to next lead the central bank.
The about-face has removed, for now, the immediate threat of a further escalation against the Fed. It has also potentially cleared a path for Mr. Trump’s nominee for Fed chair, Kevin M. Warsh, to succeed Mr. Powell, whose term ends on May 15.
By Richard Williams
What will be far harder to recoup is confidence in the Fed’s ability to operate independently from a White House that has shown little restraint in its efforts to bully the central bank into slashing interest rates.
Even as Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, announced that the investigation was shutting down, she warned that she would “not hesitate” to reopen the inquiry if warranted. Ms. Pirro added that she had asked the Fed’s inspector general to take over the investigation, even though the internal watchdog had been looking into the matter since July….
Kathryn Judge, a Columbia Law School professor who was a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said she feared “lasting damage” from the investigation into Mr. Powell — not only for the Fed but for policymakers across government.
Until now, she said, officials did not have to worry about repercussions from “taking a strong stance on policy issues in ways that are inconsistent with the president’s agenda.” But that was the sort of pressure that Mr. Powell faced as Mr. Trump sought to force rates down.
There’s some news about Trump’s corrupt case against the IRS.
NBC News: Judge questions legal basis for Trump’s $10 billion case against IRS.
A federal judge is asking the Justice Department and President Donald Trump’s private attorneys to explain whether his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, an agency he oversees as president, is the type of dispute federal courts can hear.
In a Friday order, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams questioned whether an actual disagreement exists, writing that a case can only stand if there is “adverseness” between the parties.“Typically, adverseness is found in a situation where one party is asserting its right and the other party is resisting,” Williams wrote. “Consequently, if there is no adverseness, there is no case or controversy.”
The Constitution’s “case or controversy” clause says federal courts may only hear actual “controversies.”
The judge ordered both parties to explain “whether a case and controversy exists” by May 20. Williams set a hearing on the matter for May 27 in Miami.
The order comes as both sides seek to resolve the dispute. Attorneys representing Trump and the IRS asked a federal court in a joint filing last week to pause proceedings for 90 days while the parties hold talks to find a resolution.
How the hell can they resolve a “dispute” when Trump is the boss?
Trump sued the IRS and the Treasury Department in January alleging that the agency was at fault for the unauthorized release of his tax documents by a government contractor who shared them with news outlets. Trump argued that the IRS did not take the necessary steps to prevent the actions of the contractor, Charles Littlejohn, who was sentenced to five years in prison in 2024 following a guilty plea.
In her order, Williams did recognize that Trump sued the IRS in “his personal capacity,” rather than as president, but wrote that “he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.”
The corruption in this administration is beyond belief.
Some good news–it looks like Trump’s “SAVE” act is dead.
Al Weaver at NOTUS: Senate Republicans Bench Trump’s Voting Bill.
Senate Republicans have sidelined the SAVE America Act, arguing that it shouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the party’s priority list, especially amid the Iran war and growing economic woes.
Quiet Day by Yuriy Sultanov
Republican leaders this week were forced to remove the proposal as pending business in the chamber as they shifted gears to pass the budget resolution. That effectively benched the bill — which has been championed by President Donald Trump and considered a top agenda item — after an extensive pressure campaign by conservative members and influencers.
The necessary move, however, was greeted with a sigh of relief by a number of Republicans who, while supportive of the measure, believe it’s time to move on to more pressing matters. They also believe the pro-SAVE America Act blitz, led by Sen. Mike Lee and like-minded conservatives, did little to help the case, and may have backfired. Members are ready to bid it adieu as they near the final six months before the midterms.
“They’ve convinced themselves that the longer it hangs around, the more popular it gets. The reality is — I’m quite certain they haven’t gained a single vote, and may have lost a few with time,” one Senate Republican told NOTUS. “There’s some things that aren’t possible, and this is one of them.”
The member noted that while key parts of the bill — which requires voter ID and proof of citizenship to register to vote — poll well with wide swaths of Americans, including Democrats, it is hardly considered a leading issue for voters.
“When put in a lineup of the top 100 things people are thinking about every day, it doesn’t get very high on the list,” the senator continued. “We’re spending a lot of the precious resource of time and energy on something that’s not top-of-mind awareness to voters.”
I already had to produce a photo ID and prove my citizenship when I registered to vote. Good riddance to this idiotic bill.
A follow-up to The Atlantic story on Kash Patel:
Joe Sommerlad at The Independent: Atlantic writer sued by Kash Patel says she’s been ‘inundated’ with new sources corroborating her reporting.
Sarah Fitzpatrick, The Atlantic investigative journalist behind last week’s bombshell story about FBI Director Kash Patel, has said she has since been “inundated” with messages from new sources corroborating her reporting.
Fitzpatrick’s story alleged that Patel drinks to excess – so much so that, in one instance, breaching equipment was ordered to break into a locked bedroom when he did not respond to inquiries about his well-being. The profile and also characterized him as deeply paranoid about being fired by President Donald Trump.
Patel claimed the stories were false and has filed a ludicrous lawsuit.
Speaking to the Radio Atlantic podcast one week after the article, Fitzpatrick was asked about the director’s retaliatory moves and said she was undaunted.
“My response is that I stand by every single word of this report,” she said. “We were very diligent. We were very careful. It went through multiple levels of editing, review, care.
“And I think one of the things that has been most gratifying, after – immediately after the story published was, I have been inundated by additional sourcing going up to the highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work, providing additional corroborating information.”
Fitzpatrick said that she used more than two dozen sources for her original report, characterizing the officials she spoke to as “people who felt that not only was this conduct embarrassing, unbecoming, but that it was a national security vulnerability, and that Americans were perhaps less safe as a result.”
Asked about some of the more shocking details in her report, she said: “I had never heard anything like this as a reporter, and I think I spent a very long time, a very diligent amount of time checking it out because it was so explosive.
“And I think the fact that this was known throughout the FBI, throughout the Justice Department, that it reached the White House is because it was so alarming. And people were really frightened.”
There’s more at the link.
Those are the stories that caught my attention today. What’s on your mind?
#AyatollahMojtabaKhamenei #CoolHandLuke #DonaldTrump #FedChair #IranRevolutionaryGuards #JeromeHPowell #JoyHarmon #KashPatel #Pakistan #PaulNewman #SarahFitzpatrick #SAVEAmericaAct #TheAtlantic #TrumpIRSLawsuit #USIranPeaceTalks -
Lazy Caturday Reads: A Mixed Bag of Stories
Good Afternoon!!
Artist unknown
There isn’t a lot of urgent news today, which is kind of nice for a change. I’ve got a mixed bag of interesting stories though.
Before I get to the politics news, I want to share a fun story about a woman who had a small but significant part in the movie “Cool Hand Luke.”
Alex Williams at The New York Times (gift link): Joy Harmon, Car-Washing Temptress in ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ Dies at 87.
Joy Harmon, who needed only three minutes, a bucket of soapy water and a housedress held together with a safety pin to sear herself into Hollywood history as a chain-gang prisoner’s fantasy come to life in the classic 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke,” died on April 14 in Los Angeles. She was 87.
She died in hospice care after contracting pneumonia in recent weeks, her daughter Julie Gourson Matthews said.
Ms. Harmon never achieved leading-lady status. Still, she tallied more than 30 screen and television credits, often popping up in an episode or two of popular 1960s and early ’70s TV shows like “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “The Monkees,” “Batman,” “Bewitched” and “The Odd Couple.”
Onscreen, she was hard to miss, with her pinup figure, platinum hair and ice-blue eyes. “Gosh, you have the bluest eyes!,” she recalled Paul Newman, the star of “Cool Hand Luke,” once saying to her — no small praise coming from an actor known for his own dazzlingly blue eyes….
Ms. Harmon, listed in the credits as the Girl, appears about 23 minutes into the movie and is gone before minute 27. But she makes the most of her screen time.
Emerging from a farmhouse, bucket in hand, she languidly scrubs down a 1941 DeSoto in full view of the sweat-drenched, shirtless prisoners digging a roadside ditch nearby.
“Hey, Lord, whatever I’ve done, don’t strike me blind for another couple of minutes,” Dragline (George Kennedy), the alpha dog of the chain gang, says.
While the prisoners wipe their brows and gawk, the amply endowed Ms. Harmon nearly bursts out of her skintight dress as she bends to scrub hubcaps or sprawls across the hood, occasionally pausing to squeeze her sponge so that the suds cascade down her torso.
“Oh, God, she doesn’t know what she’s doing,” one lustful prisoner says.
“She knows exactly what she’s doing,” Luke responds. “She’s driving us crazy and loving every minute of it.”
A bit about Harmon’s life:
Patricia Joy Harmon was born on May 1, 1938, in Flushing, Queens, the elder of two daughters of Homer Harmon, a promotional director at the Roxy Theater in Manhattan, and Bernice (Hopmann) Harmon. (Many accounts cite her birth year as 1940, but she shaved two years off her age once she was in Hollywood, her daughter said.)
She grew up in Wilton, Conn., and began modeling at an early age. At 17, she was a runner-up in the Miss Connecticut beauty pageant.
By Roxanne Driedger
After graduating in 1956 from Staples High School in Westport, she acted in local theater productions before making her Broadway debut two years later in “Make a Million,” a sendup of TV quiz shows. That led to an appearance on a real quiz show, Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life,” which in turn led to a regular role as Mr. Marx’s on-air assistant on the show’s spinoff, “Tell It to Groucho.”
By the mid-1960s, Ms. Harmon was starting to win big-screen roles in matinee fare like “Village of the Giants,” a sci-fi comedy featuring Beau Bridges, about teenagers who grow to 30 feet tall after consuming a miracle concoction made by a boy genius (Ron Howard).
If nothing else, it was a speaking part. The same could not be said for her role in “Cool Hand Luke,” where the only directive was that she show up for the audition in a bikini, Ms. Harmon recalled in an interview last year with the podcast “Vanguard of Hollywood.”
When she arrived, she was wearing “a coat over a bikini,” she recalled, “and Paul Newman and the director and the producer were there.” She had no lines to read, she added, “so I just talked to them, and then I got the part.”
“Cool Hand Luke” earned four Academy Award nominations, including best actor for Mr. Newman; Mr. Kennedy won the Oscar for best supporting actor.
For Ms. Harmon, the film proved to be a career pinnacle — and she was fine with that.
“I was never one who said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be a big star,’” she said in a 2017 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I just took whatever came to me.”
I had fun reading that article. I hope you will too. Use the gift link to read the rest.
On to the less enjoyable news…
It doesn’t look like there will be any Iran war negotiations in Pakistan this weekend.
CNN Live Updates: Status of US-Iran peace talks uncertain as Iranian foreign minister leaves Pakistan.
Peace talks: Sources say Iran’s foreign minister has left Pakistan after talks with mediators about the stalled US-Iran peace effort. The US previously said it was sending envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan this weekend, but Tehran denied any plans to meet directly, further clouding the status of negotiations.
Trump awaits an offer: President Donald Trump said he expected Iran to present new terms in response to US demands for ending the war. He did not provide details, however, and has said uncertainty surrounding Iran’s leadership is complicating talks.
CNN: Araghchi leaves Pakistan, Iranian sources tell CNN.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi departed Islamabad on Saturday evening local time, according to Iranian sources familiar with the discussions, after meetings in the Pakistani capital to discuss a truce with Washington and consult key allies in the region.
It was not initially clear where Araghchi would travel next, but the Iranian Foreign Ministry previously said he would also visit Oman and Russia during the trip.
Lindsay, by Linda Lee Nelson
Some background: Araghchi landed in Islamabad on Friday evening for a flurry of meetings with Pakistan’s top leadership, including Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and the country’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, who has served as a key mediator between Tehran and Washington.
Pakistani ministers are trying to facilitate a second round of talks between US and Iranian officials, after lengthy discussions in early April failed to alleviate the thorniest diplomatic hurdles between the warring parties.
The White House said Friday that a US delegation would travel to Islamabad this weekend, but Iranian media had denied reports that Araghchi would directly negotiate with Washington during his trip, leaving the status of talks uncertain.
Trump has just called off the trip to Pakistan by Witkoff and Kushner.
The New York Times published a fascinating article about Iran’s leaders this week. It appears that the Revolutionary Guards are actually in control of the government, and it’s not clear if the men doing the negotiating actually have the power to make final decisions.
Farnaz Fassihi at The New York Times (gift link): A New Era and New Leadership: The Generals Who Are Running Iran.
When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled Iran as the supreme leader, he exerted absolute power over all decisions about war, peace and negotiations with the United States. His son and successor does not play the same role.
Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the son, is an elusive figure who has not been seen and whose voice has not been heard since he was appointed in March. Instead, a battle-hardened collective of commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and those aligned with them are the key decision makers on matters of security, war and diplomacy.
In the Garden, by Thomas Little
“Mojtaba is managing the country as though he is the director of the board,” said Abdolreza Davari, a politician who served as senior adviser to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was president and knows Mr. Khamenei.
“He relies heavily on the advice and guidance of the board members, and they collectively make all the decisions,” Mr. Davari said in a phone interview from Tehran. “The generals are the board members.” [….]
Mr. Khamenei, who was selected by a council of senior clerics as the new supreme leader, has been in hiding since American and Israeli forces bombed his father’s compound on Feb. 28, where he also lived with his family. His father, wife and son were all killed. Access to him is extremely difficult and limited now. He is surrounded mostly by a team of doctors and medical staff who are treating the injuries he sustained in the airstrikes.
Senior commanders of the Guards and senior government officials do not visit him, fearing that Israel may trace them to him and kill him. President Masoud Pezeshkian, who is also a heart surgeon, and the minister of health have both been involved in his care.
Though Mr. Khamenei was gravely wounded, he is mentally sharp and engaged, according to four senior Iranian officials familiar with his health. One leg was operated on three times, and he is awaiting a prosthetic. He had surgery on one hand and is slowly regaining function. His face and lips have been burned severely, making it difficult for him to speak, the officials said, adding that, eventually, he will need plastic surgery.
Just a bit more:
Mr. Khamenei has not recorded a video or audio message, the officials said, because he does not want to appear vulnerable or sound weak in his first public address. He has issued several written statements that have been posted online and read on state television.
Messages to him are handwritten, sealed in envelopes and relayed via a human chain from one trusted courier to the next, who travel on highways and back roads, in cars and on motorcycles until they reach his hide-out. His guidance on issues snakes back the same way.
The combination of concern for his safety, his injuries and the sheer challenge of reaching him has resulted in Mr. Khamenei’s delegating decision making to the generals, at least for now. Reformist factions, as well as ultra-hard-liners, are still involved in political discussions. But analysts say that Mr. Khamenei’s close ties to the generals, whom he grew up with when he volunteered to fight in the Iran-Iraq war as a teenager, have made them the dominant force.
President Trump has said that the war, along with the killings of layers of Iran’s leaders and security establishment, has ushered in “regime change” and that the new leaders are “much more reasonable.” In reality, the Islamic republic has not been toppled. Power is now in the hands of an entrenched, hard-line military, and the broad influence of the clerics is waning.
“Mojtaba is not yet in full command or control,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa for Chatham House who has contact with people in Iran. “There is, perhaps, deference to him. He signs off or he is part of the decision-making structure in a formal way. But he is presented with fait accompli presentations right now.”
So it appears that the Generals are actually running things in Iran now. You can use the gift link to read the whole article. It’s very interesting.
Back in the USA, the DOJ has withdrawn the charges against Fed chair Jerome Powell, but the damage is done.
The New York Times: The ‘Lasting Damage’ of Pirro’s Abandoned Fed Investigation.
The Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve and its chair, Jerome H. Powell, appears to be over. But the ramifications for the central bank are likely to prove much longer lasting.
Nine months after President Trump made a hasty visit to the Fed’s Washington headquarters and promised to “take a look” at a costly renovation, the administration has concluded its inquiry with seemingly nothing to show. Far from the criminal charges that they once pursued, prosecutors left in their wake a dark cloud over the institution and the person Mr. Trump has chosen to next lead the central bank.
The about-face has removed, for now, the immediate threat of a further escalation against the Fed. It has also potentially cleared a path for Mr. Trump’s nominee for Fed chair, Kevin M. Warsh, to succeed Mr. Powell, whose term ends on May 15.
By Richard Williams
What will be far harder to recoup is confidence in the Fed’s ability to operate independently from a White House that has shown little restraint in its efforts to bully the central bank into slashing interest rates.
Even as Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, announced that the investigation was shutting down, she warned that she would “not hesitate” to reopen the inquiry if warranted. Ms. Pirro added that she had asked the Fed’s inspector general to take over the investigation, even though the internal watchdog had been looking into the matter since July….
Kathryn Judge, a Columbia Law School professor who was a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said she feared “lasting damage” from the investigation into Mr. Powell — not only for the Fed but for policymakers across government.
Until now, she said, officials did not have to worry about repercussions from “taking a strong stance on policy issues in ways that are inconsistent with the president’s agenda.” But that was the sort of pressure that Mr. Powell faced as Mr. Trump sought to force rates down.
There’s some news about Trump’s corrupt case against the IRS.
NBC News: Judge questions legal basis for Trump’s $10 billion case against IRS.
A federal judge is asking the Justice Department and President Donald Trump’s private attorneys to explain whether his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, an agency he oversees as president, is the type of dispute federal courts can hear.
In a Friday order, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams questioned whether an actual disagreement exists, writing that a case can only stand if there is “adverseness” between the parties.“Typically, adverseness is found in a situation where one party is asserting its right and the other party is resisting,” Williams wrote. “Consequently, if there is no adverseness, there is no case or controversy.”
The Constitution’s “case or controversy” clause says federal courts may only hear actual “controversies.”
The judge ordered both parties to explain “whether a case and controversy exists” by May 20. Williams set a hearing on the matter for May 27 in Miami.
The order comes as both sides seek to resolve the dispute. Attorneys representing Trump and the IRS asked a federal court in a joint filing last week to pause proceedings for 90 days while the parties hold talks to find a resolution.
How the hell can they resolve a “dispute” when Trump is the boss?
Trump sued the IRS and the Treasury Department in January alleging that the agency was at fault for the unauthorized release of his tax documents by a government contractor who shared them with news outlets. Trump argued that the IRS did not take the necessary steps to prevent the actions of the contractor, Charles Littlejohn, who was sentenced to five years in prison in 2024 following a guilty plea.
In her order, Williams did recognize that Trump sued the IRS in “his personal capacity,” rather than as president, but wrote that “he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.”
The corruption in this administration is beyond belief.
Some good news–it looks like Trump’s “SAVE” act is dead.
Al Weaver at NOTUS: Senate Republicans Bench Trump’s Voting Bill.
Senate Republicans have sidelined the SAVE America Act, arguing that it shouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the party’s priority list, especially amid the Iran war and growing economic woes.
Quiet Day by Yuriy Sultanov
Republican leaders this week were forced to remove the proposal as pending business in the chamber as they shifted gears to pass the budget resolution. That effectively benched the bill — which has been championed by President Donald Trump and considered a top agenda item — after an extensive pressure campaign by conservative members and influencers.
The necessary move, however, was greeted with a sigh of relief by a number of Republicans who, while supportive of the measure, believe it’s time to move on to more pressing matters. They also believe the pro-SAVE America Act blitz, led by Sen. Mike Lee and like-minded conservatives, did little to help the case, and may have backfired. Members are ready to bid it adieu as they near the final six months before the midterms.
“They’ve convinced themselves that the longer it hangs around, the more popular it gets. The reality is — I’m quite certain they haven’t gained a single vote, and may have lost a few with time,” one Senate Republican told NOTUS. “There’s some things that aren’t possible, and this is one of them.”
The member noted that while key parts of the bill — which requires voter ID and proof of citizenship to register to vote — poll well with wide swaths of Americans, including Democrats, it is hardly considered a leading issue for voters.
“When put in a lineup of the top 100 things people are thinking about every day, it doesn’t get very high on the list,” the senator continued. “We’re spending a lot of the precious resource of time and energy on something that’s not top-of-mind awareness to voters.”
I already had to produce a photo ID and prove my citizenship when I registered to vote. Good riddance to this idiotic bill.
A follow-up to The Atlantic story on Kash Patel:
Joe Sommerlad at The Independent: Atlantic writer sued by Kash Patel says she’s been ‘inundated’ with new sources corroborating her reporting.
Sarah Fitzpatrick, The Atlantic investigative journalist behind last week’s bombshell story about FBI Director Kash Patel, has said she has since been “inundated” with messages from new sources corroborating her reporting.
Fitzpatrick’s story alleged that Patel drinks to excess – so much so that, in one instance, breaching equipment was ordered to break into a locked bedroom when he did not respond to inquiries about his well-being. The profile and also characterized him as deeply paranoid about being fired by President Donald Trump.
Patel claimed the stories were false and has filed a ludicrous lawsuit.
Speaking to the Radio Atlantic podcast one week after the article, Fitzpatrick was asked about the director’s retaliatory moves and said she was undaunted.
“My response is that I stand by every single word of this report,” she said. “We were very diligent. We were very careful. It went through multiple levels of editing, review, care.
“And I think one of the things that has been most gratifying, after – immediately after the story published was, I have been inundated by additional sourcing going up to the highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work, providing additional corroborating information.”
Fitzpatrick said that she used more than two dozen sources for her original report, characterizing the officials she spoke to as “people who felt that not only was this conduct embarrassing, unbecoming, but that it was a national security vulnerability, and that Americans were perhaps less safe as a result.”
Asked about some of the more shocking details in her report, she said: “I had never heard anything like this as a reporter, and I think I spent a very long time, a very diligent amount of time checking it out because it was so explosive.
“And I think the fact that this was known throughout the FBI, throughout the Justice Department, that it reached the White House is because it was so alarming. And people were really frightened.”
There’s more at the link.
Those are the stories that caught my attention today. What’s on your mind?
#AyatollahMojtabaKhamenei #CoolHandLuke #DonaldTrump #FedChair #IranRevolutionaryGuards #JeromeHPowell #JoyHarmon #KashPatel #Pakistan #PaulNewman #SarahFitzpatrick #SAVEAmericaAct #TheAtlantic #TrumpIRSLawsuit #USIranPeaceTalks -
Faith, Fiction, & Fairytales @faithfictionandfairytales.wordpress.com@faithfictionandfairytales.wordpress.com ·Takeover + Review Blitz: The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner by Susan L. Tuttle
Welcome to the Takeover + Review Blitz for The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner by Susan L. Tuttle, hosted by JustRead Publicity Tours!
About the Book
Title: The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner
Series: Treasures of Halstead Manor #3
Author: Susan L. Tuttle
Publisher: Kregel Publications
Release Date: March 24, 2026
Genre: Mystery & Suspense / RomanceWill the key unlock more than a vault filled with treasure?
Brooke Sumner has been carefully avoiding Storm Whitlock ever since he betrayed her trust. When he joins Caspar’s mysterious treasure-hunting group, she steps away to focus on her antique shop and keep herself busy.
Then Caspar invites her back for one final assignment, and Brooke is torn. Returning to Halstead Manor to help the team find the second half of a key is intriguing. It also means she’d be working with Storm. But she doesn’t trust his motives, so she reluctantly rejoins to keep him in check.
As they dive into their expedition, Brooke finds her heart softening toward those she’d once held at arm’s length. And is it possible she misunderstood Storm’s betrayal of their friendship?“In this friends-to-more romance, we get to see the beauty of being known, being loved, and finding the people who want to walk alongside us.” —Toni Shiloh, Christy Award-winning author
PURCHASE LINKS: Goodreads | Kregel Publications | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Christianbook | BookBub | Bookshop
More Books from this Series:
About the Author
Susan L. Tuttle is a pastor’s wife, mom, and the director of women’s ministry at her church near Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her previous writing includes The Rare Jewel of Everleigh Wheaton, The Novel Adventures of Natalie Daughtry, the Along Came Love series, and the Carol Award–finalist Love You, Truly.
Connect with Susan by visiting SusanLTuttle.com to follow her on social media or subscribe to email newsletter updates.
My Review
The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner brings the Treasures of Halstead Manor series to a thrilling conclusion, once again taking Everleigh, Natalie, Brooke, and their entourage on a mind-bending adventure (which I’ll admit I struggled to keep up with at times). Tuttle capitalizes on found family, bodyguard, and friends to enemies to more tropes in this finale, and she held my attention from the opening pages.
Contentious as it was, I loved Storm and Brooke’s relationship and all their banter. The foundation of their childhood friendship shone through in every encounter, and I loved reading about all the ways they came through for each other as children. I will admit I was annoyed that Storm couldn’t reveal everything to Brooke until near the end of the book, but it was necessary to the plot, I suppose.
Tuttle is NOT easy on her characters. The stakes were high from page one, both for Brooke and for Storm in his own issue. Watching Brooke navigate her pain was hard at times, and I wish the faith content could have been a bit more consistent throughout–the end revelation felt a bit too neat and pretty. I liked the message that we can have peace through the storms of life when we put our trust in Jesus, but I don’t think it’s always quite so easy as simply making a choice. It’s a daily battle.
I liked the look at how the foster care system can adversely impact kiddos, especially if they’re passed from home to home and never adopted. As for the romance, the romantic tension between Brooke and Storm felt a bit excessive at times, and Storm really played into it, but I guess their friendship made it feel less bothersome than it otherwise might have been.
It was exciting to finally discover more of Caspar’s story, and the ending was shocking–it definitely tied up some loose threads I’ve been wondering about through the book and series. Overall a satisfactory read, and much cleaner than book 2 (I wasn’t comfortable with fade-to-black between a married couple, which might be fine for others!)
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from the author. All views expressed are my honest opinion.
Tour Giveaway
(1) winner will receive a copy of The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner and $20 Amazon gift card!
Be sure to check out each stop on the tour for more chances to win. Full tour schedule linked below. Giveaway began at midnight April 15, 2026 and lasts through 11:59 PM EST on April 22, 2026. Winner will be notified within 2 weeks of close of the giveaway and given 48 hours to respond or risk forfeiture of prize. US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.
Giveaway is subject to the policies found here.
Follow along at JustRead Tours for a full list of stops!
Go check out The Ultimate Blindside!
Leave a like if this post was helpful, and subscribe to receive future posts to your inbox!
#author #BlogTour #books #ChristianBooks #ChristianFiction #JustReadTours #mystery #ReviewTour #SusanLTuttle #TheHiddenKeyOfBrookeSumner #TreasuresOfHalsteadManor -
Faith, Fiction, & Fairytales @faithfictionandfairytales.wordpress.com@faithfictionandfairytales.wordpress.com ·Takeover + Review Blitz: The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner by Susan L. Tuttle
Welcome to the Takeover + Review Blitz for The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner by Susan L. Tuttle, hosted by JustRead Publicity Tours!
About the Book
Title: The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner
Series: Treasures of Halstead Manor #3
Author: Susan L. Tuttle
Publisher: Kregel Publications
Release Date: March 24, 2026
Genre: Mystery & Suspense / RomanceWill the key unlock more than a vault filled with treasure?
Brooke Sumner has been carefully avoiding Storm Whitlock ever since he betrayed her trust. When he joins Caspar’s mysterious treasure-hunting group, she steps away to focus on her antique shop and keep herself busy.
Then Caspar invites her back for one final assignment, and Brooke is torn. Returning to Halstead Manor to help the team find the second half of a key is intriguing. It also means she’d be working with Storm. But she doesn’t trust his motives, so she reluctantly rejoins to keep him in check.
As they dive into their expedition, Brooke finds her heart softening toward those she’d once held at arm’s length. And is it possible she misunderstood Storm’s betrayal of their friendship?“In this friends-to-more romance, we get to see the beauty of being known, being loved, and finding the people who want to walk alongside us.” —Toni Shiloh, Christy Award-winning author
PURCHASE LINKS: Goodreads | Kregel Publications | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Christianbook | BookBub | Bookshop
More Books from this Series:
About the Author
Susan L. Tuttle is a pastor’s wife, mom, and the director of women’s ministry at her church near Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her previous writing includes The Rare Jewel of Everleigh Wheaton, The Novel Adventures of Natalie Daughtry, the Along Came Love series, and the Carol Award–finalist Love You, Truly.
Connect with Susan by visiting SusanLTuttle.com to follow her on social media or subscribe to email newsletter updates.
My Review
The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner brings the Treasures of Halstead Manor series to a thrilling conclusion, once again taking Everleigh, Natalie, Brooke, and their entourage on a mind-bending adventure (which I’ll admit I struggled to keep up with at times). Tuttle capitalizes on found family, bodyguard, and friends to enemies to more tropes in this finale, and she held my attention from the opening pages.
Contentious as it was, I loved Storm and Brooke’s relationship and all their banter. The foundation of their childhood friendship shone through in every encounter, and I loved reading about all the ways they came through for each other as children. I will admit I was annoyed that Storm couldn’t reveal everything to Brooke until near the end of the book, but it was necessary to the plot, I suppose.
Tuttle is NOT easy on her characters. The stakes were high from page one, both for Brooke and for Storm in his own issue. Watching Brooke navigate her pain was hard at times, and I wish the faith content could have been a bit more consistent throughout–the end revelation felt a bit too neat and pretty. I liked the message that we can have peace through the storms of life when we put our trust in Jesus, but I don’t think it’s always quite so easy as simply making a choice. It’s a daily battle.
I liked the look at how the foster care system can adversely impact kiddos, especially if they’re passed from home to home and never adopted. As for the romance, the romantic tension between Brooke and Storm felt a bit excessive at times, and Storm really played into it, but I guess their friendship made it feel less bothersome than it otherwise might have been.
It was exciting to finally discover more of Caspar’s story, and the ending was shocking–it definitely tied up some loose threads I’ve been wondering about through the book and series. Overall a satisfactory read, and much cleaner than book 2 (I wasn’t comfortable with fade-to-black between a married couple, which might be fine for others!)
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from the author. All views expressed are my honest opinion.
Tour Giveaway
(1) winner will receive a copy of The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner and $20 Amazon gift card!
Be sure to check out each stop on the tour for more chances to win. Full tour schedule linked below. Giveaway began at midnight April 15, 2026 and lasts through 11:59 PM EST on April 22, 2026. Winner will be notified within 2 weeks of close of the giveaway and given 48 hours to respond or risk forfeiture of prize. US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.
Giveaway is subject to the policies found here.
Follow along at JustRead Tours for a full list of stops!
Go check out The Ultimate Blindside!
Leave a like if this post was helpful, and subscribe to receive future posts to your inbox!
#author #BlogTour #books #ChristianBooks #ChristianFiction #JustReadTours #mystery #ReviewTour #SusanLTuttle #TheHiddenKeyOfBrookeSumner #TreasuresOfHalsteadManor -
Faith, Fiction, & Fairytales @faithfictionandfairytales.wordpress.com@faithfictionandfairytales.wordpress.com ·Takeover + Review Blitz: The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner by Susan L. Tuttle
Welcome to the Takeover + Review Blitz for The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner by Susan L. Tuttle, hosted by JustRead Publicity Tours!
About the Book
Title: The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner
Series: Treasures of Halstead Manor #3
Author: Susan L. Tuttle
Publisher: Kregel Publications
Release Date: March 24, 2026
Genre: Mystery & Suspense / RomanceWill the key unlock more than a vault filled with treasure?
Brooke Sumner has been carefully avoiding Storm Whitlock ever since he betrayed her trust. When he joins Caspar’s mysterious treasure-hunting group, she steps away to focus on her antique shop and keep herself busy.
Then Caspar invites her back for one final assignment, and Brooke is torn. Returning to Halstead Manor to help the team find the second half of a key is intriguing. It also means she’d be working with Storm. But she doesn’t trust his motives, so she reluctantly rejoins to keep him in check.
As they dive into their expedition, Brooke finds her heart softening toward those she’d once held at arm’s length. And is it possible she misunderstood Storm’s betrayal of their friendship?“In this friends-to-more romance, we get to see the beauty of being known, being loved, and finding the people who want to walk alongside us.” —Toni Shiloh, Christy Award-winning author
PURCHASE LINKS: Goodreads | Kregel Publications | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Christianbook | BookBub | Bookshop
More Books from this Series:
About the Author
Susan L. Tuttle is a pastor’s wife, mom, and the director of women’s ministry at her church near Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her previous writing includes The Rare Jewel of Everleigh Wheaton, The Novel Adventures of Natalie Daughtry, the Along Came Love series, and the Carol Award–finalist Love You, Truly.
Connect with Susan by visiting SusanLTuttle.com to follow her on social media or subscribe to email newsletter updates.
My Review
The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner brings the Treasures of Halstead Manor series to a thrilling conclusion, once again taking Everleigh, Natalie, Brooke, and their entourage on a mind-bending adventure (which I’ll admit I struggled to keep up with at times). Tuttle capitalizes on found family, bodyguard, and friends to enemies to more tropes in this finale, and she held my attention from the opening pages.
Contentious as it was, I loved Storm and Brooke’s relationship and all their banter. The foundation of their childhood friendship shone through in every encounter, and I loved reading about all the ways they came through for each other as children. I will admit I was annoyed that Storm couldn’t reveal everything to Brooke until near the end of the book, but it was necessary to the plot, I suppose.
Tuttle is NOT easy on her characters. The stakes were high from page one, both for Brooke and for Storm in his own issue. Watching Brooke navigate her pain was hard at times, and I wish the faith content could have been a bit more consistent throughout–the end revelation felt a bit too neat and pretty. I liked the message that we can have peace through the storms of life when we put our trust in Jesus, but I don’t think it’s always quite so easy as simply making a choice. It’s a daily battle.
I liked the look at how the foster care system can adversely impact kiddos, especially if they’re passed from home to home and never adopted. As for the romance, the romantic tension between Brooke and Storm felt a bit excessive at times, and Storm really played into it, but I guess their friendship made it feel less bothersome than it otherwise might have been.
It was exciting to finally discover more of Caspar’s story, and the ending was shocking–it definitely tied up some loose threads I’ve been wondering about through the book and series. Overall a satisfactory read, and much cleaner than book 2 (I wasn’t comfortable with fade-to-black between a married couple, which might be fine for others!)
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from the author. All views expressed are my honest opinion.
Tour Giveaway
(1) winner will receive a copy of The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner and $20 Amazon gift card!
Be sure to check out each stop on the tour for more chances to win. Full tour schedule linked below. Giveaway began at midnight April 15, 2026 and lasts through 11:59 PM EST on April 22, 2026. Winner will be notified within 2 weeks of close of the giveaway and given 48 hours to respond or risk forfeiture of prize. US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.
Giveaway is subject to the policies found here.
Follow along at JustRead Tours for a full list of stops!
Go check out The Ultimate Blindside!
Leave a like if this post was helpful, and subscribe to receive future posts to your inbox!
#author #BlogTour #books #ChristianBooks #ChristianFiction #JustReadTours #mystery #ReviewTour #SusanLTuttle #TheHiddenKeyOfBrookeSumner #TreasuresOfHalsteadManor -
Faith, Fiction, & Fairytales @faithfictionandfairytales.wordpress.com@faithfictionandfairytales.wordpress.com ·Takeover + Review Blitz: The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner by Susan L. Tuttle
Welcome to the Takeover + Review Blitz for The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner by Susan L. Tuttle, hosted by JustRead Publicity Tours!
About the Book
Title: The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner
Series: Treasures of Halstead Manor #3
Author: Susan L. Tuttle
Publisher: Kregel Publications
Release Date: March 24, 2026
Genre: Mystery & Suspense / RomanceWill the key unlock more than a vault filled with treasure?
Brooke Sumner has been carefully avoiding Storm Whitlock ever since he betrayed her trust. When he joins Caspar’s mysterious treasure-hunting group, she steps away to focus on her antique shop and keep herself busy.
Then Caspar invites her back for one final assignment, and Brooke is torn. Returning to Halstead Manor to help the team find the second half of a key is intriguing. It also means she’d be working with Storm. But she doesn’t trust his motives, so she reluctantly rejoins to keep him in check.
As they dive into their expedition, Brooke finds her heart softening toward those she’d once held at arm’s length. And is it possible she misunderstood Storm’s betrayal of their friendship?“In this friends-to-more romance, we get to see the beauty of being known, being loved, and finding the people who want to walk alongside us.” —Toni Shiloh, Christy Award-winning author
PURCHASE LINKS: Goodreads | Kregel Publications | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Christianbook | BookBub | Bookshop
More Books from this Series:
About the Author
Susan L. Tuttle is a pastor’s wife, mom, and the director of women’s ministry at her church near Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her previous writing includes The Rare Jewel of Everleigh Wheaton, The Novel Adventures of Natalie Daughtry, the Along Came Love series, and the Carol Award–finalist Love You, Truly.
Connect with Susan by visiting SusanLTuttle.com to follow her on social media or subscribe to email newsletter updates.
My Review
The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner brings the Treasures of Halstead Manor series to a thrilling conclusion, once again taking Everleigh, Natalie, Brooke, and their entourage on a mind-bending adventure (which I’ll admit I struggled to keep up with at times). Tuttle capitalizes on found family, bodyguard, and friends to enemies to more tropes in this finale, and she held my attention from the opening pages.
Contentious as it was, I loved Storm and Brooke’s relationship and all their banter. The foundation of their childhood friendship shone through in every encounter, and I loved reading about all the ways they came through for each other as children. I will admit I was annoyed that Storm couldn’t reveal everything to Brooke until near the end of the book, but it was necessary to the plot, I suppose.
Tuttle is NOT easy on her characters. The stakes were high from page one, both for Brooke and for Storm in his own issue. Watching Brooke navigate her pain was hard at times, and I wish the faith content could have been a bit more consistent throughout–the end revelation felt a bit too neat and pretty. I liked the message that we can have peace through the storms of life when we put our trust in Jesus, but I don’t think it’s always quite so easy as simply making a choice. It’s a daily battle.
I liked the look at how the foster care system can adversely impact kiddos, especially if they’re passed from home to home and never adopted. As for the romance, the romantic tension between Brooke and Storm felt a bit excessive at times, and Storm really played into it, but I guess their friendship made it feel less bothersome than it otherwise might have been.
It was exciting to finally discover more of Caspar’s story, and the ending was shocking–it definitely tied up some loose threads I’ve been wondering about through the book and series. Overall a satisfactory read, and much cleaner than book 2 (I wasn’t comfortable with fade-to-black between a married couple, which might be fine for others!)
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from the author. All views expressed are my honest opinion.
Tour Giveaway
(1) winner will receive a copy of The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner and $20 Amazon gift card!
Be sure to check out each stop on the tour for more chances to win. Full tour schedule linked below. Giveaway began at midnight April 15, 2026 and lasts through 11:59 PM EST on April 22, 2026. Winner will be notified within 2 weeks of close of the giveaway and given 48 hours to respond or risk forfeiture of prize. US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.
Giveaway is subject to the policies found here.
Follow along at JustRead Tours for a full list of stops!
Go check out The Ultimate Blindside!
Leave a like if this post was helpful, and subscribe to receive future posts to your inbox!
#author #BlogTour #books #ChristianBooks #ChristianFiction #JustReadTours #mystery #ReviewTour #SusanLTuttle #TheHiddenKeyOfBrookeSumner #TreasuresOfHalsteadManor -
Faith, Fiction, & Fairytales @faithfictionandfairytales.wordpress.com@faithfictionandfairytales.wordpress.com ·Takeover + Review Blitz: The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner by Susan L. Tuttle
Welcome to the Takeover + Review Blitz for The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner by Susan L. Tuttle, hosted by JustRead Publicity Tours!
About the Book
Title: The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner
Series: Treasures of Halstead Manor #3
Author: Susan L. Tuttle
Publisher: Kregel Publications
Release Date: March 24, 2026
Genre: Mystery & Suspense / RomanceWill the key unlock more than a vault filled with treasure?
Brooke Sumner has been carefully avoiding Storm Whitlock ever since he betrayed her trust. When he joins Caspar’s mysterious treasure-hunting group, she steps away to focus on her antique shop and keep herself busy.
Then Caspar invites her back for one final assignment, and Brooke is torn. Returning to Halstead Manor to help the team find the second half of a key is intriguing. It also means she’d be working with Storm. But she doesn’t trust his motives, so she reluctantly rejoins to keep him in check.
As they dive into their expedition, Brooke finds her heart softening toward those she’d once held at arm’s length. And is it possible she misunderstood Storm’s betrayal of their friendship?“In this friends-to-more romance, we get to see the beauty of being known, being loved, and finding the people who want to walk alongside us.” —Toni Shiloh, Christy Award-winning author
PURCHASE LINKS: Goodreads | Kregel Publications | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Christianbook | BookBub | Bookshop
More Books from this Series:
About the Author
Susan L. Tuttle is a pastor’s wife, mom, and the director of women’s ministry at her church near Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her previous writing includes The Rare Jewel of Everleigh Wheaton, The Novel Adventures of Natalie Daughtry, the Along Came Love series, and the Carol Award–finalist Love You, Truly.
Connect with Susan by visiting SusanLTuttle.com to follow her on social media or subscribe to email newsletter updates.
My Review
The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner brings the Treasures of Halstead Manor series to a thrilling conclusion, once again taking Everleigh, Natalie, Brooke, and their entourage on a mind-bending adventure (which I’ll admit I struggled to keep up with at times). Tuttle capitalizes on found family, bodyguard, and friends to enemies to more tropes in this finale, and she held my attention from the opening pages.
Contentious as it was, I loved Storm and Brooke’s relationship and all their banter. The foundation of their childhood friendship shone through in every encounter, and I loved reading about all the ways they came through for each other as children. I will admit I was annoyed that Storm couldn’t reveal everything to Brooke until near the end of the book, but it was necessary to the plot, I suppose.
Tuttle is NOT easy on her characters. The stakes were high from page one, both for Brooke and for Storm in his own issue. Watching Brooke navigate her pain was hard at times, and I wish the faith content could have been a bit more consistent throughout–the end revelation felt a bit too neat and pretty. I liked the message that we can have peace through the storms of life when we put our trust in Jesus, but I don’t think it’s always quite so easy as simply making a choice. It’s a daily battle.
I liked the look at how the foster care system can adversely impact kiddos, especially if they’re passed from home to home and never adopted. As for the romance, the romantic tension between Brooke and Storm felt a bit excessive at times, and Storm really played into it, but I guess their friendship made it feel less bothersome than it otherwise might have been.
It was exciting to finally discover more of Caspar’s story, and the ending was shocking–it definitely tied up some loose threads I’ve been wondering about through the book and series. Overall a satisfactory read, and much cleaner than book 2 (I wasn’t comfortable with fade-to-black between a married couple, which might be fine for others!)
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from the author. All views expressed are my honest opinion.
Tour Giveaway
(1) winner will receive a copy of The Hidden Key of Brooke Sumner and $20 Amazon gift card!
Be sure to check out each stop on the tour for more chances to win. Full tour schedule linked below. Giveaway began at midnight April 15, 2026 and lasts through 11:59 PM EST on April 22, 2026. Winner will be notified within 2 weeks of close of the giveaway and given 48 hours to respond or risk forfeiture of prize. US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.
Giveaway is subject to the policies found here.
Follow along at JustRead Tours for a full list of stops!
Go check out The Ultimate Blindside!
Leave a like if this post was helpful, and subscribe to receive future posts to your inbox!
#author #BlogTour #books #ChristianBooks #ChristianFiction #JustReadTours #mystery #ReviewTour #SusanLTuttle #TheHiddenKeyOfBrookeSumner #TreasuresOfHalsteadManor -
The Season of the Spritz
There is something unmistakable about April light. It stretches a little longer across the table, lingers just enough on the rim of a glass to catch the sparkle, and invites us—quietly but persistently—back outdoors. It is not yet summer’s bold declaration, nor winter’s final whisper. It is a transition. A becoming.
And there is no better companion to this moment than the spritz.
To call the spritz a “cocktail” feels almost too narrow. It is, more accurately, a ritual of restraint and expression. A balance of bitterness and brightness, of bubbles and botanicals, where nothing dominates and everything contributes. It is the kind of drink that encourages conversation rather than interrupting it, the kind that turns a casual afternoon into something just a touch more intentional.
Photo by Augustin Mazaud on Pexels.comFrom Necessity to Nuance
The spritz, like many of the world’s most enduring pleasures, began not as indulgence, but as practicality. In the 19th century, when soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire occupied parts of northern Italy, they found the local wines—particularly those of the Veneto—too intense for their tastes. Their solution was simple: ask for a spritz, a splash of water to soften the wine.
There was nothing glamorous about it. No garnish. No ceremony. Just dilution.
But Italy has a way of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Over time, still water gave way to sparkling. Local bitters—bright, herbal, and often vividly colored—found their way into the glass. And eventually, Prosecco joined the composition, bringing lift, elegance, and a celebratory note that elevated the drink from functional to fashionable. What began as a soldier’s compromise became, quite beautifully, a cultural signature.
The Modern Expression
Today’s spritz is less about watering something down and more about building something up. It is a study in composition, where each ingredient plays a deliberate role. The sparkling wine provides structure and effervescence. The liqueur—whether bitter, floral, or herbal—introduces personality. Soda adds lightness. And the garnish, often overlooked, becomes the aromatic bridge between the drink and the drinker.
Photo by Anna McDonald on Pexels.comThe most recognizable expression, of course, is the Aperol Spritz. Its signature hue—somewhere between a Venetian sunset and a ripe blood orange—has become synonymous with the category itself. It is approachable, gently bitter, slightly sweet, and endlessly drinkable. It does not challenge; it invites.
And yet, just beside it sits the Hugo Spritz, quieter but no less captivating. Where Aperol leans into citrus and bitterness, Hugo drifts into florals—elderflower, mint, lime—like a garden just beginning to bloom. It is the kind of drink that doesn’t announce itself, but once noticed, becomes difficult to forget.
Together, they represent two ends of a spectrum: bold and delicate, bitter and aromatic. Between them lies an entire world waiting to be explored.
The Aperol Spritz
The most recognizable of them all—sunset in a glass. Bright orange, gently bitter, lightly sweet, and endlessly drinkable.
Classic Build:
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 2 oz Aperol
- 1 oz soda water
- Orange slice
It’s the gateway spritz—the one that invites curiosity without intimidation.
The Hugo Spritz
If Aperol is sunset, Hugo is spring morning. Elderflower liqueur, mint, lime—this is the garden in bloom.
Classic Build:
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 1.5 oz elderflower liqueur
- Soda water
- Fresh mint, lime wheel
Elegant, aromatic, and quietly enchanting.
Where Curiosity Begins
If the Aperol Spritz is the introduction, the true joy of the spritz lies in what comes next.
There is a particular delight in watching someone take their first sip of a Cynar Spritz. There is often a pause—just a moment—where expectation meets reality. Artichoke, after all, is not an ingredient most associate with cocktails. And yet, in the hands of an amaro like Cynar, it becomes something earthy, bittersweet, and unexpectedly compelling. It is a spritz that sparks conversation, not just because of its flavor, but because of its audacity.
This is where the philosophy of Sips & Stories comes to life. The classics are not endpoints; they are starting points. A foundation upon which to build, to riff, to reinterpret.
Photo by Nasim Didar on Pexels.comA splash of limoncello can turn a spritz into a sunlit stroll along the Amalfi Coast. A touch of dry vermouth can introduce structure and subtle herbal complexity. Fresh basil, thyme, or even rosemary can transform aroma into memory. The spritz, perhaps more than any other cocktail, invites personalization without pretension.
The Experience in the Glass
Part of what makes the spritz so captivating is its visual and aromatic presence. This is not a drink meant to be confined. It belongs in a generous glass—ideally a large wine bowl—where ice can settle comfortably and aromatics can rise freely. The shape matters. It allows the botanicals to bloom, the citrus oils to express, and the bubbles to carry those scents upward with each sip.
There is also a quiet elegance in how a spritz is built. No shaking. No aggressive stirring. Just a gentle layering—sparkling wine first, then liqueur, then a lift of soda. A soft stir, almost a whisper, and the drink is complete. It is a process that mirrors the drink itself: unhurried, balanced, and intentional.
Photo by Irving Joaquin Gutierrez on Pexels.comAt the Table
The spritz finds its natural home at the table, particularly in the company of foods that echo its lightness or contrast its bitterness. There is a reason it thrives in the Italian aperitivo tradition. Salty bites—prosciutto, olives, lightly dressed seafood—play beautifully against its refreshing lift. Creamy textures, like burrata or ricotta, soften its edges. Citrus and herbs create harmony, reinforcing the very notes that define the drink.
Imagine, for a moment, a simple crostini—grilled bread topped with whipped ricotta, a touch of lemon zest, a drizzle of honey, and a scattering of fresh thyme. Paired with a floral, elderflower-driven spritz, the experience becomes something more than food and drink. It becomes a conversation between them.
Lemon Ricotta Crostini with Honey & Thyme
- Fresh ricotta
- Lemon zest
- Honey
- Fresh thyme
- Grilled baguette slices
Whip ricotta with lemon zest until airy. Spread over warm crostini, drizzle with honey, and finish with thyme.
Pair with a Hugo Spritz or Limoncello Spritz—where citrus and florals echo the dish.
A Story in Every Glass
In Venice, there is an unspoken understanding that a spritz is never just a spritz. It is a reflection of the moment, the mood, and the person holding the glass. Ratios shift. Garnishes change. Preferences evolve. No two are ever exactly alike.
There is even a quiet bit of lore among locals—that the way one builds their spritz reveals something deeper. A heavier pour of bitter suggests boldness. A lighter, more floral touch hints at subtlety. Whether or not this is true is almost beside the point. What matters is the idea that the drink is expressive.
And perhaps that is why the spritz feels so perfectly suited to April. It exists in that same space of transition and possibility. Not fully one thing, not yet another. Open to interpretation.
The Invitation
As we continue to explore the world through Sips & Stories, the spritz stands as a reminder that the best experiences are rarely about strict adherence to tradition. They are about understanding the foundation—and then having the confidence to step beyond it.
So this season, let the classics guide you, but not define you. Reach for something unfamiliar. Add an herb you’ve never used. Swap a liqueur. Change the balance. Tell your own story in the glass.
Because the true beauty of the spritz is not in how it began, but in how it continues to evolve—one pour, one evening, one conversation at a time.
And in April, under that soft, lingering light, there may be no better story to tell 🥂
The April Awakening Spritz
A SOMM&SOMM original—crafted for that first evening you dine outdoors.
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 1 oz St-Germain (elderflower liqueur)
- 0.5 oz Lillet Blanc
- Soda water
- Grapefruit twist
- Fresh basil leaf
Construct in a large wine glass over ice. Garnish with intention.
Tasting Note:
Floral, gently bitter, with a citrus backbone and herbal lift—like spring itself, finding its voice.Cover Photo by ginPhotos on Pexels.com
#Cocktails #food #LearningWine #SparklingWIne #wine #WineBlog -
The Season of the Spritz
There is something unmistakable about April light. It stretches a little longer across the table, lingers just enough on the rim of a glass to catch the sparkle, and invites us—quietly but persistently—back outdoors. It is not yet summer’s bold declaration, nor winter’s final whisper. It is a transition. A becoming.
And there is no better companion to this moment than the spritz.
To call the spritz a “cocktail” feels almost too narrow. It is, more accurately, a ritual of restraint and expression. A balance of bitterness and brightness, of bubbles and botanicals, where nothing dominates and everything contributes. It is the kind of drink that encourages conversation rather than interrupting it, the kind that turns a casual afternoon into something just a touch more intentional.
Photo by Augustin Mazaud on Pexels.comFrom Necessity to Nuance
The spritz, like many of the world’s most enduring pleasures, began not as indulgence, but as practicality. In the 19th century, when soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire occupied parts of northern Italy, they found the local wines—particularly those of the Veneto—too intense for their tastes. Their solution was simple: ask for a spritz, a splash of water to soften the wine.
There was nothing glamorous about it. No garnish. No ceremony. Just dilution.
But Italy has a way of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Over time, still water gave way to sparkling. Local bitters—bright, herbal, and often vividly colored—found their way into the glass. And eventually, Prosecco joined the composition, bringing lift, elegance, and a celebratory note that elevated the drink from functional to fashionable. What began as a soldier’s compromise became, quite beautifully, a cultural signature.
The Modern Expression
Today’s spritz is less about watering something down and more about building something up. It is a study in composition, where each ingredient plays a deliberate role. The sparkling wine provides structure and effervescence. The liqueur—whether bitter, floral, or herbal—introduces personality. Soda adds lightness. And the garnish, often overlooked, becomes the aromatic bridge between the drink and the drinker.
Photo by Anna McDonald on Pexels.comThe most recognizable expression, of course, is the Aperol Spritz. Its signature hue—somewhere between a Venetian sunset and a ripe blood orange—has become synonymous with the category itself. It is approachable, gently bitter, slightly sweet, and endlessly drinkable. It does not challenge; it invites.
And yet, just beside it sits the Hugo Spritz, quieter but no less captivating. Where Aperol leans into citrus and bitterness, Hugo drifts into florals—elderflower, mint, lime—like a garden just beginning to bloom. It is the kind of drink that doesn’t announce itself, but once noticed, becomes difficult to forget.
Together, they represent two ends of a spectrum: bold and delicate, bitter and aromatic. Between them lies an entire world waiting to be explored.
The Aperol Spritz
The most recognizable of them all—sunset in a glass. Bright orange, gently bitter, lightly sweet, and endlessly drinkable.
Classic Build:
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 2 oz Aperol
- 1 oz soda water
- Orange slice
It’s the gateway spritz—the one that invites curiosity without intimidation.
The Hugo Spritz
If Aperol is sunset, Hugo is spring morning. Elderflower liqueur, mint, lime—this is the garden in bloom.
Classic Build:
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 1.5 oz elderflower liqueur
- Soda water
- Fresh mint, lime wheel
Elegant, aromatic, and quietly enchanting.
Where Curiosity Begins
If the Aperol Spritz is the introduction, the true joy of the spritz lies in what comes next.
There is a particular delight in watching someone take their first sip of a Cynar Spritz. There is often a pause—just a moment—where expectation meets reality. Artichoke, after all, is not an ingredient most associate with cocktails. And yet, in the hands of an amaro like Cynar, it becomes something earthy, bittersweet, and unexpectedly compelling. It is a spritz that sparks conversation, not just because of its flavor, but because of its audacity.
This is where the philosophy of Sips & Stories comes to life. The classics are not endpoints; they are starting points. A foundation upon which to build, to riff, to reinterpret.
Photo by Nasim Didar on Pexels.comA splash of limoncello can turn a spritz into a sunlit stroll along the Amalfi Coast. A touch of dry vermouth can introduce structure and subtle herbal complexity. Fresh basil, thyme, or even rosemary can transform aroma into memory. The spritz, perhaps more than any other cocktail, invites personalization without pretension.
The Experience in the Glass
Part of what makes the spritz so captivating is its visual and aromatic presence. This is not a drink meant to be confined. It belongs in a generous glass—ideally a large wine bowl—where ice can settle comfortably and aromatics can rise freely. The shape matters. It allows the botanicals to bloom, the citrus oils to express, and the bubbles to carry those scents upward with each sip.
There is also a quiet elegance in how a spritz is built. No shaking. No aggressive stirring. Just a gentle layering—sparkling wine first, then liqueur, then a lift of soda. A soft stir, almost a whisper, and the drink is complete. It is a process that mirrors the drink itself: unhurried, balanced, and intentional.
Photo by Irving Joaquin Gutierrez on Pexels.comAt the Table
The spritz finds its natural home at the table, particularly in the company of foods that echo its lightness or contrast its bitterness. There is a reason it thrives in the Italian aperitivo tradition. Salty bites—prosciutto, olives, lightly dressed seafood—play beautifully against its refreshing lift. Creamy textures, like burrata or ricotta, soften its edges. Citrus and herbs create harmony, reinforcing the very notes that define the drink.
Imagine, for a moment, a simple crostini—grilled bread topped with whipped ricotta, a touch of lemon zest, a drizzle of honey, and a scattering of fresh thyme. Paired with a floral, elderflower-driven spritz, the experience becomes something more than food and drink. It becomes a conversation between them.
Lemon Ricotta Crostini with Honey & Thyme
- Fresh ricotta
- Lemon zest
- Honey
- Fresh thyme
- Grilled baguette slices
Whip ricotta with lemon zest until airy. Spread over warm crostini, drizzle with honey, and finish with thyme.
Pair with a Hugo Spritz or Limoncello Spritz—where citrus and florals echo the dish.
A Story in Every Glass
In Venice, there is an unspoken understanding that a spritz is never just a spritz. It is a reflection of the moment, the mood, and the person holding the glass. Ratios shift. Garnishes change. Preferences evolve. No two are ever exactly alike.
There is even a quiet bit of lore among locals—that the way one builds their spritz reveals something deeper. A heavier pour of bitter suggests boldness. A lighter, more floral touch hints at subtlety. Whether or not this is true is almost beside the point. What matters is the idea that the drink is expressive.
And perhaps that is why the spritz feels so perfectly suited to April. It exists in that same space of transition and possibility. Not fully one thing, not yet another. Open to interpretation.
The Invitation
As we continue to explore the world through Sips & Stories, the spritz stands as a reminder that the best experiences are rarely about strict adherence to tradition. They are about understanding the foundation—and then having the confidence to step beyond it.
So this season, let the classics guide you, but not define you. Reach for something unfamiliar. Add an herb you’ve never used. Swap a liqueur. Change the balance. Tell your own story in the glass.
Because the true beauty of the spritz is not in how it began, but in how it continues to evolve—one pour, one evening, one conversation at a time.
And in April, under that soft, lingering light, there may be no better story to tell 🥂
The April Awakening Spritz
A SOMM&SOMM original—crafted for that first evening you dine outdoors.
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 1 oz St-Germain (elderflower liqueur)
- 0.5 oz Lillet Blanc
- Soda water
- Grapefruit twist
- Fresh basil leaf
Construct in a large wine glass over ice. Garnish with intention.
Tasting Note:
Floral, gently bitter, with a citrus backbone and herbal lift—like spring itself, finding its voice.Cover Photo by ginPhotos on Pexels.com
#Cocktails #food #LearningWine #SparklingWIne #wine #WineBlog -
The Season of the Spritz
There is something unmistakable about April light. It stretches a little longer across the table, lingers just enough on the rim of a glass to catch the sparkle, and invites us—quietly but persistently—back outdoors. It is not yet summer’s bold declaration, nor winter’s final whisper. It is a transition. A becoming.
And there is no better companion to this moment than the spritz.
To call the spritz a “cocktail” feels almost too narrow. It is, more accurately, a ritual of restraint and expression. A balance of bitterness and brightness, of bubbles and botanicals, where nothing dominates and everything contributes. It is the kind of drink that encourages conversation rather than interrupting it, the kind that turns a casual afternoon into something just a touch more intentional.
Photo by Augustin Mazaud on Pexels.comFrom Necessity to Nuance
The spritz, like many of the world’s most enduring pleasures, began not as indulgence, but as practicality. In the 19th century, when soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire occupied parts of northern Italy, they found the local wines—particularly those of the Veneto—too intense for their tastes. Their solution was simple: ask for a spritz, a splash of water to soften the wine.
There was nothing glamorous about it. No garnish. No ceremony. Just dilution.
But Italy has a way of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Over time, still water gave way to sparkling. Local bitters—bright, herbal, and often vividly colored—found their way into the glass. And eventually, Prosecco joined the composition, bringing lift, elegance, and a celebratory note that elevated the drink from functional to fashionable. What began as a soldier’s compromise became, quite beautifully, a cultural signature.
The Modern Expression
Today’s spritz is less about watering something down and more about building something up. It is a study in composition, where each ingredient plays a deliberate role. The sparkling wine provides structure and effervescence. The liqueur—whether bitter, floral, or herbal—introduces personality. Soda adds lightness. And the garnish, often overlooked, becomes the aromatic bridge between the drink and the drinker.
Photo by Anna McDonald on Pexels.comThe most recognizable expression, of course, is the Aperol Spritz. Its signature hue—somewhere between a Venetian sunset and a ripe blood orange—has become synonymous with the category itself. It is approachable, gently bitter, slightly sweet, and endlessly drinkable. It does not challenge; it invites.
And yet, just beside it sits the Hugo Spritz, quieter but no less captivating. Where Aperol leans into citrus and bitterness, Hugo drifts into florals—elderflower, mint, lime—like a garden just beginning to bloom. It is the kind of drink that doesn’t announce itself, but once noticed, becomes difficult to forget.
Together, they represent two ends of a spectrum: bold and delicate, bitter and aromatic. Between them lies an entire world waiting to be explored.
The Aperol Spritz
The most recognizable of them all—sunset in a glass. Bright orange, gently bitter, lightly sweet, and endlessly drinkable.
Classic Build:
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 2 oz Aperol
- 1 oz soda water
- Orange slice
It’s the gateway spritz—the one that invites curiosity without intimidation.
The Hugo Spritz
If Aperol is sunset, Hugo is spring morning. Elderflower liqueur, mint, lime—this is the garden in bloom.
Classic Build:
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 1.5 oz elderflower liqueur
- Soda water
- Fresh mint, lime wheel
Elegant, aromatic, and quietly enchanting.
Where Curiosity Begins
If the Aperol Spritz is the introduction, the true joy of the spritz lies in what comes next.
There is a particular delight in watching someone take their first sip of a Cynar Spritz. There is often a pause—just a moment—where expectation meets reality. Artichoke, after all, is not an ingredient most associate with cocktails. And yet, in the hands of an amaro like Cynar, it becomes something earthy, bittersweet, and unexpectedly compelling. It is a spritz that sparks conversation, not just because of its flavor, but because of its audacity.
This is where the philosophy of Sips & Stories comes to life. The classics are not endpoints; they are starting points. A foundation upon which to build, to riff, to reinterpret.
Photo by Nasim Didar on Pexels.comA splash of limoncello can turn a spritz into a sunlit stroll along the Amalfi Coast. A touch of dry vermouth can introduce structure and subtle herbal complexity. Fresh basil, thyme, or even rosemary can transform aroma into memory. The spritz, perhaps more than any other cocktail, invites personalization without pretension.
The Experience in the Glass
Part of what makes the spritz so captivating is its visual and aromatic presence. This is not a drink meant to be confined. It belongs in a generous glass—ideally a large wine bowl—where ice can settle comfortably and aromatics can rise freely. The shape matters. It allows the botanicals to bloom, the citrus oils to express, and the bubbles to carry those scents upward with each sip.
There is also a quiet elegance in how a spritz is built. No shaking. No aggressive stirring. Just a gentle layering—sparkling wine first, then liqueur, then a lift of soda. A soft stir, almost a whisper, and the drink is complete. It is a process that mirrors the drink itself: unhurried, balanced, and intentional.
Photo by Irving Joaquin Gutierrez on Pexels.comAt the Table
The spritz finds its natural home at the table, particularly in the company of foods that echo its lightness or contrast its bitterness. There is a reason it thrives in the Italian aperitivo tradition. Salty bites—prosciutto, olives, lightly dressed seafood—play beautifully against its refreshing lift. Creamy textures, like burrata or ricotta, soften its edges. Citrus and herbs create harmony, reinforcing the very notes that define the drink.
Imagine, for a moment, a simple crostini—grilled bread topped with whipped ricotta, a touch of lemon zest, a drizzle of honey, and a scattering of fresh thyme. Paired with a floral, elderflower-driven spritz, the experience becomes something more than food and drink. It becomes a conversation between them.
Lemon Ricotta Crostini with Honey & Thyme
- Fresh ricotta
- Lemon zest
- Honey
- Fresh thyme
- Grilled baguette slices
Whip ricotta with lemon zest until airy. Spread over warm crostini, drizzle with honey, and finish with thyme.
Pair with a Hugo Spritz or Limoncello Spritz—where citrus and florals echo the dish.
A Story in Every Glass
In Venice, there is an unspoken understanding that a spritz is never just a spritz. It is a reflection of the moment, the mood, and the person holding the glass. Ratios shift. Garnishes change. Preferences evolve. No two are ever exactly alike.
There is even a quiet bit of lore among locals—that the way one builds their spritz reveals something deeper. A heavier pour of bitter suggests boldness. A lighter, more floral touch hints at subtlety. Whether or not this is true is almost beside the point. What matters is the idea that the drink is expressive.
And perhaps that is why the spritz feels so perfectly suited to April. It exists in that same space of transition and possibility. Not fully one thing, not yet another. Open to interpretation.
The Invitation
As we continue to explore the world through Sips & Stories, the spritz stands as a reminder that the best experiences are rarely about strict adherence to tradition. They are about understanding the foundation—and then having the confidence to step beyond it.
So this season, let the classics guide you, but not define you. Reach for something unfamiliar. Add an herb you’ve never used. Swap a liqueur. Change the balance. Tell your own story in the glass.
Because the true beauty of the spritz is not in how it began, but in how it continues to evolve—one pour, one evening, one conversation at a time.
And in April, under that soft, lingering light, there may be no better story to tell 🥂
The April Awakening Spritz
A SOMM&SOMM original—crafted for that first evening you dine outdoors.
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 1 oz St-Germain (elderflower liqueur)
- 0.5 oz Lillet Blanc
- Soda water
- Grapefruit twist
- Fresh basil leaf
Construct in a large wine glass over ice. Garnish with intention.
Tasting Note:
Floral, gently bitter, with a citrus backbone and herbal lift—like spring itself, finding its voice.Cover Photo by ginPhotos on Pexels.com
#Cocktails #food #LearningWine #SparklingWIne #wine #WineBlog -
The Season of the Spritz
There is something unmistakable about April light. It stretches a little longer across the table, lingers just enough on the rim of a glass to catch the sparkle, and invites us—quietly but persistently—back outdoors. It is not yet summer’s bold declaration, nor winter’s final whisper. It is a transition. A becoming.
And there is no better companion to this moment than the spritz.
To call the spritz a “cocktail” feels almost too narrow. It is, more accurately, a ritual of restraint and expression. A balance of bitterness and brightness, of bubbles and botanicals, where nothing dominates and everything contributes. It is the kind of drink that encourages conversation rather than interrupting it, the kind that turns a casual afternoon into something just a touch more intentional.
Photo by Augustin Mazaud on Pexels.comFrom Necessity to Nuance
The spritz, like many of the world’s most enduring pleasures, began not as indulgence, but as practicality. In the 19th century, when soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire occupied parts of northern Italy, they found the local wines—particularly those of the Veneto—too intense for their tastes. Their solution was simple: ask for a spritz, a splash of water to soften the wine.
There was nothing glamorous about it. No garnish. No ceremony. Just dilution.
But Italy has a way of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Over time, still water gave way to sparkling. Local bitters—bright, herbal, and often vividly colored—found their way into the glass. And eventually, Prosecco joined the composition, bringing lift, elegance, and a celebratory note that elevated the drink from functional to fashionable. What began as a soldier’s compromise became, quite beautifully, a cultural signature.
The Modern Expression
Today’s spritz is less about watering something down and more about building something up. It is a study in composition, where each ingredient plays a deliberate role. The sparkling wine provides structure and effervescence. The liqueur—whether bitter, floral, or herbal—introduces personality. Soda adds lightness. And the garnish, often overlooked, becomes the aromatic bridge between the drink and the drinker.
Photo by Anna McDonald on Pexels.comThe most recognizable expression, of course, is the Aperol Spritz. Its signature hue—somewhere between a Venetian sunset and a ripe blood orange—has become synonymous with the category itself. It is approachable, gently bitter, slightly sweet, and endlessly drinkable. It does not challenge; it invites.
And yet, just beside it sits the Hugo Spritz, quieter but no less captivating. Where Aperol leans into citrus and bitterness, Hugo drifts into florals—elderflower, mint, lime—like a garden just beginning to bloom. It is the kind of drink that doesn’t announce itself, but once noticed, becomes difficult to forget.
Together, they represent two ends of a spectrum: bold and delicate, bitter and aromatic. Between them lies an entire world waiting to be explored.
The Aperol Spritz
The most recognizable of them all—sunset in a glass. Bright orange, gently bitter, lightly sweet, and endlessly drinkable.
Classic Build:
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 2 oz Aperol
- 1 oz soda water
- Orange slice
It’s the gateway spritz—the one that invites curiosity without intimidation.
The Hugo Spritz
If Aperol is sunset, Hugo is spring morning. Elderflower liqueur, mint, lime—this is the garden in bloom.
Classic Build:
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 1.5 oz elderflower liqueur
- Soda water
- Fresh mint, lime wheel
Elegant, aromatic, and quietly enchanting.
Where Curiosity Begins
If the Aperol Spritz is the introduction, the true joy of the spritz lies in what comes next.
There is a particular delight in watching someone take their first sip of a Cynar Spritz. There is often a pause—just a moment—where expectation meets reality. Artichoke, after all, is not an ingredient most associate with cocktails. And yet, in the hands of an amaro like Cynar, it becomes something earthy, bittersweet, and unexpectedly compelling. It is a spritz that sparks conversation, not just because of its flavor, but because of its audacity.
This is where the philosophy of Sips & Stories comes to life. The classics are not endpoints; they are starting points. A foundation upon which to build, to riff, to reinterpret.
Photo by Nasim Didar on Pexels.comA splash of limoncello can turn a spritz into a sunlit stroll along the Amalfi Coast. A touch of dry vermouth can introduce structure and subtle herbal complexity. Fresh basil, thyme, or even rosemary can transform aroma into memory. The spritz, perhaps more than any other cocktail, invites personalization without pretension.
The Experience in the Glass
Part of what makes the spritz so captivating is its visual and aromatic presence. This is not a drink meant to be confined. It belongs in a generous glass—ideally a large wine bowl—where ice can settle comfortably and aromatics can rise freely. The shape matters. It allows the botanicals to bloom, the citrus oils to express, and the bubbles to carry those scents upward with each sip.
There is also a quiet elegance in how a spritz is built. No shaking. No aggressive stirring. Just a gentle layering—sparkling wine first, then liqueur, then a lift of soda. A soft stir, almost a whisper, and the drink is complete. It is a process that mirrors the drink itself: unhurried, balanced, and intentional.
Photo by Irving Joaquin Gutierrez on Pexels.comAt the Table
The spritz finds its natural home at the table, particularly in the company of foods that echo its lightness or contrast its bitterness. There is a reason it thrives in the Italian aperitivo tradition. Salty bites—prosciutto, olives, lightly dressed seafood—play beautifully against its refreshing lift. Creamy textures, like burrata or ricotta, soften its edges. Citrus and herbs create harmony, reinforcing the very notes that define the drink.
Imagine, for a moment, a simple crostini—grilled bread topped with whipped ricotta, a touch of lemon zest, a drizzle of honey, and a scattering of fresh thyme. Paired with a floral, elderflower-driven spritz, the experience becomes something more than food and drink. It becomes a conversation between them.
Lemon Ricotta Crostini with Honey & Thyme
- Fresh ricotta
- Lemon zest
- Honey
- Fresh thyme
- Grilled baguette slices
Whip ricotta with lemon zest until airy. Spread over warm crostini, drizzle with honey, and finish with thyme.
Pair with a Hugo Spritz or Limoncello Spritz—where citrus and florals echo the dish.
A Story in Every Glass
In Venice, there is an unspoken understanding that a spritz is never just a spritz. It is a reflection of the moment, the mood, and the person holding the glass. Ratios shift. Garnishes change. Preferences evolve. No two are ever exactly alike.
There is even a quiet bit of lore among locals—that the way one builds their spritz reveals something deeper. A heavier pour of bitter suggests boldness. A lighter, more floral touch hints at subtlety. Whether or not this is true is almost beside the point. What matters is the idea that the drink is expressive.
And perhaps that is why the spritz feels so perfectly suited to April. It exists in that same space of transition and possibility. Not fully one thing, not yet another. Open to interpretation.
The Invitation
As we continue to explore the world through Sips & Stories, the spritz stands as a reminder that the best experiences are rarely about strict adherence to tradition. They are about understanding the foundation—and then having the confidence to step beyond it.
So this season, let the classics guide you, but not define you. Reach for something unfamiliar. Add an herb you’ve never used. Swap a liqueur. Change the balance. Tell your own story in the glass.
Because the true beauty of the spritz is not in how it began, but in how it continues to evolve—one pour, one evening, one conversation at a time.
And in April, under that soft, lingering light, there may be no better story to tell 🥂
The April Awakening Spritz
A SOMM&SOMM original—crafted for that first evening you dine outdoors.
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 1 oz St-Germain (elderflower liqueur)
- 0.5 oz Lillet Blanc
- Soda water
- Grapefruit twist
- Fresh basil leaf
Construct in a large wine glass over ice. Garnish with intention.
Tasting Note:
Floral, gently bitter, with a citrus backbone and herbal lift—like spring itself, finding its voice.Cover Photo by ginPhotos on Pexels.com
#Cocktails #food #LearningWine #SparklingWIne #wine #WineBlog -
The Season of the Spritz
There is something unmistakable about April light. It stretches a little longer across the table, lingers just enough on the rim of a glass to catch the sparkle, and invites us—quietly but persistently—back outdoors. It is not yet summer’s bold declaration, nor winter’s final whisper. It is a transition. A becoming.
And there is no better companion to this moment than the spritz.
To call the spritz a “cocktail” feels almost too narrow. It is, more accurately, a ritual of restraint and expression. A balance of bitterness and brightness, of bubbles and botanicals, where nothing dominates and everything contributes. It is the kind of drink that encourages conversation rather than interrupting it, the kind that turns a casual afternoon into something just a touch more intentional.
Photo by Augustin Mazaud on Pexels.comFrom Necessity to Nuance
The spritz, like many of the world’s most enduring pleasures, began not as indulgence, but as practicality. In the 19th century, when soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire occupied parts of northern Italy, they found the local wines—particularly those of the Veneto—too intense for their tastes. Their solution was simple: ask for a spritz, a splash of water to soften the wine.
There was nothing glamorous about it. No garnish. No ceremony. Just dilution.
But Italy has a way of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Over time, still water gave way to sparkling. Local bitters—bright, herbal, and often vividly colored—found their way into the glass. And eventually, Prosecco joined the composition, bringing lift, elegance, and a celebratory note that elevated the drink from functional to fashionable. What began as a soldier’s compromise became, quite beautifully, a cultural signature.
The Modern Expression
Today’s spritz is less about watering something down and more about building something up. It is a study in composition, where each ingredient plays a deliberate role. The sparkling wine provides structure and effervescence. The liqueur—whether bitter, floral, or herbal—introduces personality. Soda adds lightness. And the garnish, often overlooked, becomes the aromatic bridge between the drink and the drinker.
Photo by Anna McDonald on Pexels.comThe most recognizable expression, of course, is the Aperol Spritz. Its signature hue—somewhere between a Venetian sunset and a ripe blood orange—has become synonymous with the category itself. It is approachable, gently bitter, slightly sweet, and endlessly drinkable. It does not challenge; it invites.
And yet, just beside it sits the Hugo Spritz, quieter but no less captivating. Where Aperol leans into citrus and bitterness, Hugo drifts into florals—elderflower, mint, lime—like a garden just beginning to bloom. It is the kind of drink that doesn’t announce itself, but once noticed, becomes difficult to forget.
Together, they represent two ends of a spectrum: bold and delicate, bitter and aromatic. Between them lies an entire world waiting to be explored.
The Aperol Spritz
The most recognizable of them all—sunset in a glass. Bright orange, gently bitter, lightly sweet, and endlessly drinkable.
Classic Build:
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 2 oz Aperol
- 1 oz soda water
- Orange slice
It’s the gateway spritz—the one that invites curiosity without intimidation.
The Hugo Spritz
If Aperol is sunset, Hugo is spring morning. Elderflower liqueur, mint, lime—this is the garden in bloom.
Classic Build:
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 1.5 oz elderflower liqueur
- Soda water
- Fresh mint, lime wheel
Elegant, aromatic, and quietly enchanting.
Where Curiosity Begins
If the Aperol Spritz is the introduction, the true joy of the spritz lies in what comes next.
There is a particular delight in watching someone take their first sip of a Cynar Spritz. There is often a pause—just a moment—where expectation meets reality. Artichoke, after all, is not an ingredient most associate with cocktails. And yet, in the hands of an amaro like Cynar, it becomes something earthy, bittersweet, and unexpectedly compelling. It is a spritz that sparks conversation, not just because of its flavor, but because of its audacity.
This is where the philosophy of Sips & Stories comes to life. The classics are not endpoints; they are starting points. A foundation upon which to build, to riff, to reinterpret.
Photo by Nasim Didar on Pexels.comA splash of limoncello can turn a spritz into a sunlit stroll along the Amalfi Coast. A touch of dry vermouth can introduce structure and subtle herbal complexity. Fresh basil, thyme, or even rosemary can transform aroma into memory. The spritz, perhaps more than any other cocktail, invites personalization without pretension.
The Experience in the Glass
Part of what makes the spritz so captivating is its visual and aromatic presence. This is not a drink meant to be confined. It belongs in a generous glass—ideally a large wine bowl—where ice can settle comfortably and aromatics can rise freely. The shape matters. It allows the botanicals to bloom, the citrus oils to express, and the bubbles to carry those scents upward with each sip.
There is also a quiet elegance in how a spritz is built. No shaking. No aggressive stirring. Just a gentle layering—sparkling wine first, then liqueur, then a lift of soda. A soft stir, almost a whisper, and the drink is complete. It is a process that mirrors the drink itself: unhurried, balanced, and intentional.
Photo by Irving Joaquin Gutierrez on Pexels.comAt the Table
The spritz finds its natural home at the table, particularly in the company of foods that echo its lightness or contrast its bitterness. There is a reason it thrives in the Italian aperitivo tradition. Salty bites—prosciutto, olives, lightly dressed seafood—play beautifully against its refreshing lift. Creamy textures, like burrata or ricotta, soften its edges. Citrus and herbs create harmony, reinforcing the very notes that define the drink.
Imagine, for a moment, a simple crostini—grilled bread topped with whipped ricotta, a touch of lemon zest, a drizzle of honey, and a scattering of fresh thyme. Paired with a floral, elderflower-driven spritz, the experience becomes something more than food and drink. It becomes a conversation between them.
Lemon Ricotta Crostini with Honey & Thyme
- Fresh ricotta
- Lemon zest
- Honey
- Fresh thyme
- Grilled baguette slices
Whip ricotta with lemon zest until airy. Spread over warm crostini, drizzle with honey, and finish with thyme.
Pair with a Hugo Spritz or Limoncello Spritz—where citrus and florals echo the dish.
A Story in Every Glass
In Venice, there is an unspoken understanding that a spritz is never just a spritz. It is a reflection of the moment, the mood, and the person holding the glass. Ratios shift. Garnishes change. Preferences evolve. No two are ever exactly alike.
There is even a quiet bit of lore among locals—that the way one builds their spritz reveals something deeper. A heavier pour of bitter suggests boldness. A lighter, more floral touch hints at subtlety. Whether or not this is true is almost beside the point. What matters is the idea that the drink is expressive.
And perhaps that is why the spritz feels so perfectly suited to April. It exists in that same space of transition and possibility. Not fully one thing, not yet another. Open to interpretation.
The Invitation
As we continue to explore the world through Sips & Stories, the spritz stands as a reminder that the best experiences are rarely about strict adherence to tradition. They are about understanding the foundation—and then having the confidence to step beyond it.
So this season, let the classics guide you, but not define you. Reach for something unfamiliar. Add an herb you’ve never used. Swap a liqueur. Change the balance. Tell your own story in the glass.
Because the true beauty of the spritz is not in how it began, but in how it continues to evolve—one pour, one evening, one conversation at a time.
And in April, under that soft, lingering light, there may be no better story to tell 🥂
The April Awakening Spritz
A SOMM&SOMM original—crafted for that first evening you dine outdoors.
- 3 oz Prosecco
- 1 oz St-Germain (elderflower liqueur)
- 0.5 oz Lillet Blanc
- Soda water
- Grapefruit twist
- Fresh basil leaf
Construct in a large wine glass over ice. Garnish with intention.
Tasting Note:
Floral, gently bitter, with a citrus backbone and herbal lift—like spring itself, finding its voice.Cover Photo by ginPhotos on Pexels.com
#Cocktails #food #LearningWine #SparklingWIne #wine #WineBlog -
The Silver – Looking Glass of Hymnal Blue Review By SaundersComprising members of Horrendous and Crypt Sermon, back in ye strange times of 2021, Philadelphia’s The Silver dropped an impactful debut platter upon the unsuspecting underground masses. Ward of Roses struck a powerful and unexpected blow, welding atmospheric goth, post, black, and progressive elements into a biting and melodramatic slab of extreme metal. Time flies, and nearly five years later, The Silver make an anticipated return through sophomore album, Looking Glass of Hymnal Blue. Already boasting a unique, versatile and imposing formula, rather than dramatically reinventing their sound, Looking Glass of Hymnal Blue finds The Silver tightening the nuts and bolts of their songwriting to forge a confident continuation and subtle evolution of Ward of Roses.
Balance is the key to unlocking The Silver’s songwriting power and stirring dynamics. A wicked melting pot of gothy atmosphere, darkly sparkling melodicism, and stormy theatricality, Looking Glass of Hymnal Blue grounds these elements with anguished extremes, the harrowing howls of vocalist Nick Duchemin, and a hyperactive barrage of blast beats, frantic, blackened riffage, and steely aggression. This enticing, ying-yanging combination is expertly crafted, especially when combined with progressive arrangements that flex The Silver’s strengths and unorthodox charms with interesting, complex musicianship and memorable hooks. Shrouded in an atmosphere of icy melancholy, Looking Glass of Hymnal Blue’s wrenching emotional resonance lends further substance to the dense material. Notably, the improved clean vocal lines play a more integral role, featuring an emotive, addictive punch soaring through the album’s jagged, bleaker terrain.
The opening title track sets the tone, unleashing visceral bursts of turbulent axework and frantic rhythms, as dueling harsh and clean vocals consolidate The Silver’s mastery of contrast, including frosty beauty and beast dynamics. Some almost Opeth-esque bluesy guitar work and a beautifully delivered clean vocal passage cap off a stellar introduction. Longer form epics form the bulk of the album, as evidenced on the album’s lengthiest piece, the stunning, nearly nine-minute-long “Two Candles.” The Silver handle the weighty composition with crafty skill. Urgent, savage ebbs smoothly intermingle with soaring cleans, mellow passages, and colorful guitar work. It’s an ambitious, frequently gripping journey, encapsulating The Silver’s strengths and individuality in one momentous epic. Elsewhere, The Silver’s keen balancing act also shines on shorter, punchier songs, such as the aggressive, percussive-heavy surge and pristine melodics of “Memorias,” or violently thrashing assault and blackened intensity of “Tendrils.”
Ward of Roses possessed a distinct freshness and raw delivery complimenting its harsher realms and melodrama. Naturally, the elements of surprise are tempered second time around, Looking Glass of Hymnal Blue only marginally sacrifices the rawer edge of the debut, compensating through a stronger, more confident melodic presence and tighter songcraft. The Silver’s proggy inclinations come to the fore, deviating from conventional writing and maintaining a rich infectiousness, where hooks bore into the soul and lodge in the memory bank. Musically, Looking Glass of Hymnal Blue is another ambitious, genre-splicing beast, straddling post, black, prog, and doomy realms with aplomb, maintaining cohesion, beefing up the technicality and rippling guitar fireworks, and pushing forward Matt Knox’s confident, compelling clean vocal melodies. This may not work for all listeners, depending on tolerance for Knox’s vocal style, which generally dips less into the spoken word theatrics that were occasionally a stumbling block on Ward of Roses. Special mention also to the robust rhythm section; as plump basslines, pulsating rhythms, and intricate drum patterns demand attention.
Only the shorter, bluesy later album cut “…Twilight of Love” falls short of the hefty standards of its counterparts, though it is a solid song regardless, feeding into the colossal power, violent throes, and affecting melodies of closer “My Lone Dark Lantern.” Looking Glass of Hymnal Blue adds intriguing twists and layers to an already cool formula, largely levelling up from the sophisticated, exciting promise of their debut. Crafting another accomplished, beautifully produced album, The Silver avoid the dreaded sophomore slump, taking minor creative risks while both expanding and consolidating their unique sound. Taking their time with this second opus, the payoff is grand, and The Silver’s welcome return suggests this project is here for the long haul.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
#2026 #40 #AmericanMetal #BlackMetal #CryptSermon #GileadMedia #Goth #Horrendous #LookingGlassOfHymnalBlue #Opeth #ProgressiveMetal #Review #Reviews #TheSilver
DR: N/A | Format Reviewed: Stream
Label: Gilead Media
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: March 20th, 2026 -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Playful Math 184: Carnival of Living Math
Welcome to the 184th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — a smorgasbord of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
With all the links, a blog carnival can feel overwhelming. Bookmark this article, so you can take your time reading the posts.
“Living math” means bringing our children face-to-face with the big ideas of mathematics to help them develop their reasoning skills. When the ideas of math come to life for our children, their minds delight in seeing how numbers and shapes connect to each other and exploring these relationships.
Scattered between the playful math links below, you’ll find quotations from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math, along with several paintings of children playing and learning which I considered for the book but ran out of room.
“The lesson” by Rafael Frederico, 1895.By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 184th edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.
Puzzle: Playing with Primes
Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach, in correspondence with Swiss polymath Leonhard Euler, posed several ideas about number theory (the study of natural numbers) which he couldn’t prove. The version we know now as Goldbach’s Conjecture is:
Every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.
Goldbach’s Conjecture is one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in math. It has been shown to hold for numbers less than 4 × 10^18, but remains unsettled for larger numbers.
Our carnival number can be written as the sum of primes in eight ways:
184 = 181 + 3
= 179 + 5
= 173 + 11
= 167 + 17
= 137 + 47
= 131 + 53
= 113 + 71
= 101 + 83184 can also be written as the sum of four consecutive prime numbers:
184 = 41 + 43 + 47 + 53
Play around with Goldbach’s Conjecture and prime numbers.
- What do you notice about sums of primes?
- What do you wonder?
- What other questions can you ask?
Did you know the prime numbers come in a pattern? While it can be hard to prove for sure which large numbers are prime, there are infinitely many numbers that we can be confident are not prime.
- List some large numbers that you know are not prime. How do you know?
- Fill in this worksheet and consider the patterns.
- Now can you list more large numbers that are not prime? Can you tell some that might be?
Contents
And now, on to the main attraction: the blog posts. Some articles were submitted by their authors; others were drawn from the immense backlog in my rss reader. If you’d like to skip directly to your area of interest, click one of these links.
- Talking Math with Kids
- Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
- Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
- Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
- Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
- Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
- Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Talking Math with Kids
“From their birth, children have minds just like ours, hungry for knowledge and able to digest solid mental food. They enter life full of wonder, questioning, investigating the world, reasoning, and drawing conclusions.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel invents Trifle — a new, very small game. “I invented a small game off the cuff last night. I needed a super quick game to play with my 6.5-year-old before bedtime.”
- Christopher Danielson shares the conversations that launched his yet-unpublished book: On vehicles and the meanings of words. “These questions are simple yet deep. They can inform our current conversations in which we seek to regain our understanding of truth, meaning, and empathy.”
- Digging through Christopher Danielson’s delightful archives, I find: A circular conversation, and Doll years, and Does the Earth have an end?. “If you are new to talking math with your kids, don’t worry about getting the timing right. Just start to make a habit of asking those questions. The first few times, you may not get much. That’s OK. It can be like introducing new foods — children need multiple exposures to new things before they accept them.”
- Tom Hobson tells how to build A State-of-the-Art Preschool Playground (for under $200) that will prompt all sorts of math (and other) talk. “As educational as these kinds of spaces are for children, these wonderlands of loose parts, dirt, rocks and compost, these bastions of junkyard chic, they are often perceived as eyesores by the uninitiated. Before going too far, you might want to save up to build a fence.”
- Writing is talking on paper. Dylan Kane tries Incorporating more writing in 7th grade math. “Slowing down and writing about a topic is a great way to think deeply about it, to make connections, to consider hypotheticals, to reason about cause and effect.”
- Jenna Laib gets 4th-graders writing math: How Many Nivelsnorts: Assessing Silly Story Problems. “Perhaps this speaks to who I was as a child, but there is a playfulness and a creativity to getting to write about nivelsnorts and flying tomatoes, and I don’t see a need to deny students that.”
- Karrie E. suggests 5 Easy Ways to Add Writing into Your Math Class. “The goal isn’t to create more work for your or your students. It’s to make thinking visible.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
“That he should do sums is of comparatively small importance; but the use of those functions which ‘summing’ calls into play is a great part of education.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Patrick Vennebush explores the Mathematical Mysteries of 2026. Meanwhile, Iva Sallay collects 2026 Math Facts and Factors, including a “powerful” math joke. You may also enjoy George Sicherman’s Roman New Year puzzle.
- Sarah Dees explains one of my favorite math games: How to Play Target Number. “This is a fabulous math game that works for third grade all the way up through 6th. You can choose the complexity of the game by choosing how many dice to use.”
- Erick Lee poses A Problem Worth Solving. “I liked this problem because there are so many different ways to approach it and so many interesting patterns to see while solving it.”
- Susan Smith and Kim Montague explore Factor Puzzles: Helping Math Make Sense. “That’s the challenge we pose to students: What do you notice about the puzzle you see? What relationships pop out to you?”
- Pat Ballew plays around with The 3×3 Magic Square, More Magical than You Thought! And Greg Ross shares a magic Venn diagram: Set Piece.
- For my contribution to the carnival, I finish up my series on mental math with Advanced Multiplication, Part 1, followed by Advanced Multiplication, Part 2, and then Advanced Division to wrap things up. “The more time our children spend playing around with numbers and making sense of these relationships, the better they’ll be prepared for algebra and beyond.”
- Jenna Laib shares important information: The 8 Fast Food Chains in the US Most Likely to Get Your Drive-Thru Order Right. And some good news: Extreme Poverty Fell Sharply Worldwide – Even Excluding China. Slow Reveal Graphs “invite learners to examine trends, relationships, and possible interpretations.”
- John Golden teaches Statistics and Probability for K-8 Teachers with some fun resources: Who Wins? “Lots of great discussion about variation, mean, median and their limitations.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
“If students find our lessons boring, that is because we are not engaging their minds. Children learn by thinking, imagining, reflecting, reasoning, arguing, justifying, and communicating, putting their thoughts into words. Learning, like digestion, is active.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Iva Sallay graphs a Cat Rotating Around a Bouncing Ball. “This year, the 9th-graders I work with at school need to know how to rotate a shape around a point that is NOT the origin. This is a topic I had never thought about before. To patch up this hole in my math knowledge, I decided to play with rotations in Desmos.”
- Ramsha Waseem reports on 14-year-old Miles Wu’s origami invention. “I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu.
- Karen Latham offers suggestions for Making the Most of Probability. “I like to have students work several counting problems by hand, so they have experience simplifying expressions with factorials. Then they can move on and let the calculator do the work.”
- David Butler plays with a geometric puzzle: When perimeter is equal to area. “One answer I discovered to this question is completely surprising and delightful to me. You may want to attempt to prove it yourself before I show you my proof…”
- Andrew Staccy categorizes Catriona Agg’s Puzzles by Topic. “The various techniques are grouped into categories and ordered roughly by complexity. Puzzles may appear more than once as they can have multiple ways of being solved.”
- Pat Ballew takes a look at Heron and his Formula(s). “Heron is also remembered for his invention of a primitive steam engine and many early automatons, and a coin operated vending machine, and one of the earliest forerunners of the thermometer.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
“Never are the operations of Reason more delightful and more perfect than in mathematics. There is great joy in standing by, as it were, and watching our own thought work out an intricate problem.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Christopher Burke posts a series of Geometry Problems of the Day from the Regents Exam, with solutions. “This is a silly question because it’s obvious that both Choices (1) and (2) cannot both be true, so one of them must be the answer.”
- Oliver Johnson explores the probability that your shopping receipt ends in .00: Time’s Arrow. “This ‘everything has the same chance’ collection of probabilities is called the uniform distribution, and it’s really important. But what might be surprising is how easily we reach it, and how few items we need to pick up in a supermarket to make it appear.”
- Nicola Rennie discusses How to create a more accessible line chart. “It’s a myth that accessibility means compromising on aesthetics. Instead, accessibility means prioritising communication.”
- Sue VanHattum needs beta-readers for Althea and the Mysteries of Calculus, version 8.2. “I’m still finding places where I need to add a bit to make the math clearer. Adding a touch of color here, removing something out of place there. I feel like a sculptor or painter.”
- Erick Lee shares A Calculus Esti-Mystery. “Instead of using basic number properties for the clues, I leveled it up. To unlock the clues, my students had to evaluate derivatives.”
- And don’t miss the 249th Carnival of Mathematics.
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
“We take strong ground when we appeal to the beauty and truth of Mathematics. Mathematics are to be studied for their own sake and not as they make for general intelligence and grasp of mind. But then how profoundly worthy are these subjects of study for their own sake!”
—Charlotte Mason
- David Butler (and daughter) explore a math/art puzzle: Jenga Views. “One thing I particularly like about them is that you don’t need an answer key, because you can just look at your construction and tell if it looks right or not. There’s something empowering about being able to check it yourself.”
- John Golden shares a couple of shape puzzles: Five by Five, and his variation on the theme: Seven by Seven. “Easier to solve, but more solutions. Better for free play. If you made something cool, tangram style, I would love to see it!”
- Rick Mohr welcomes us to a world of Tiled Art. “enjoy a gallery of artworks as each emerges from an underlying grid. And try creating your own tessellation, with the tiles staying interlocked automatically.”
- I post two excerpts from my new book, Charlotte Mason’s Living Math: Discover Math in Art, and the math equation journaling prompt True-False-True. “This puzzle pushes students to consider the structure of mathematical expressions. Make it a game by letting your children challenge you, too.”
- Andrew Taylor creates things with math. I’ve been enjoying his puzzle game Celtix. “Celtic knots are a rich tradition, but for the sake of reducing them to a game mechanic you can think of them as ribbons which ‘bounce’ off ‘walls’ which you can add by clicking anywhere that the ribbons cross each other.”
- Paula Beardell Krieg demonstrates how to make a Cube with an Open Pocket. You may also enjoy her Snow Day Octahedrons. “I’ve been at my desk, working on geometric solids, doing art and math together. I find focus and comfort here.”
- Jonathan Halabi plays with a couple of Birthday Puzzles. Greg Ross finds some harder Words and Numbers. And Pat Ballew digs deeper into Some History Notes about Alphametic Puzzles (and some early versions of a Topology Gem).
- Ben Orlin seeks play-testers: Puzzle Planet. “Your collective generosity and wisdom help me to clarify confusing bits, fine-tune difficulty levels, cull inferior puzzles, spotlight superior ones, and sprinkle play-testers’ insight and wit throughout the text.”
- Laura looks at the math of bell ringing: I can hear the bells. “Each bell ringer controls a huge bell, often on the order of a tonne in weight. One by one they ring their bells, then switch to a new permutation (a change) and repeat.”
- James Propp plays around with probability: In Praise of Stupid Questions. “The way to find things out is to ask a lot of questions. Ask enough questions, and you’re likely to find a new answer: new to you, and once in a while, new to others.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
“It can be exhausting to shovel information into our child’s head. We put out a lot of effort without much return, and daily lessons become a struggle of wills. But when we treat a child as a person capable of learning for himself and meet him mind-to-mind, with a focus on understanding big ideas, lessons become a delight.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel concludes that Manipulatives in Math Class Are So Worth It. “When it came to mathematizing — linking equations and the rods — the kids who had previous experience building and free playing with the rods made the connections far more readily. Playing with the rods seems to prime the mind to make connections.”
- JoAnne Growney wonders, Can Poems Affect Students’ Math-Attitudes? “One useful viewpoint is that math need not be treated as an isolated subject . . . it is connected to our lives in VERY MANY ways.”
- Growney also links to two contests your students still have time to enter: Creative Writing — Including Mathematics. For inspiration, consider her poem Like Poetry, Mathematics is Beautiful.
- Cathy Yenca details how to prepare The April Fool’s Day Math Activity Students Never Forget. “I decided I wanted to prank my students, but not the kind of prank that derails a lesson. I wanted something that would make students lean into the math instead of checking out.“
- Jenna Laib discusses Measuring Growth in Mathematical Reasoning: What Mia’s Thinking Reveals. “I confess: sometimes I find wrong answers more interesting than right ones. There can be so many ways to get something wrong!”
- Craig Barton creates interactive tools and games for teachers. “End of lesson treat or whiteboard activity for the whole class. Project a game and play together!”
- The Math is FigureOutAble team highlights Leonhard Euler: The Blind Mathematician Who Saw Everything. “Every student can learn to think like a mathematician. They can persist through challenges, adjust their thinking, and experience the satisfaction of figuring something out. They do not need perfect conditions or special talent. They need instruction that invites sense making and builds confidence over time.”
- David Butler shares More wisdom from the Dodecahedron about the humanity of doing math. “I find that maths is full of emotion. Frustration, curiosity, surprise, satisfaction, pride, sadness, companionship, wonder, silliness, joy — they’re all there, sometimes in quick succession.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Quotations are from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math. Public domain art is primarily from Wikimedia Commons.
And that rounds up this edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival. I hope you enjoyed the ride.
The next installment of our carnival will open sometime during the 2nd quarter of 2026 at Nature Study Australia. Visit our blog carnival information page for more details.
“The Lesson” by Charles Chaplin, circa 1880. #Activities #AllAges #Games #MTaPPlayfulMathCarnival #Puzzles #Quotations -
Playful Math 184: Carnival of Living Math
Welcome to the 184th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — a smorgasbord of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
With all the links, a blog carnival can feel overwhelming. Bookmark this article, so you can take your time reading the posts.
“Living math” means bringing our children face-to-face with the big ideas of mathematics to help them develop their reasoning skills. When the ideas of math come to life for our children, their minds delight in seeing how numbers and shapes connect to each other and exploring these relationships.
Scattered between the playful math links below, you’ll find quotations from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math, along with several paintings of children playing and learning which I considered for the book but ran out of room.
“The lesson” by Rafael Frederico, 1895.By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 184th edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.
Puzzle: Playing with Primes
Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach, in correspondence with Swiss polymath Leonhard Euler, posed several ideas about number theory (the study of natural numbers) which he couldn’t prove. The version we know now as Goldbach’s Conjecture is:
Every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.
Goldbach’s Conjecture is one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in math. It has been shown to hold for numbers less than 4 × 10^18, but remains unsettled for larger numbers.
Our carnival number can be written as the sum of primes in eight ways:
184 = 181 + 3
= 179 + 5
= 173 + 11
= 167 + 17
= 137 + 47
= 131 + 53
= 113 + 71
= 101 + 83184 can also be written as the sum of four consecutive prime numbers:
184 = 41 + 43 + 47 + 53
Play around with Goldbach’s Conjecture and prime numbers.
- What do you notice about sums of primes?
- What do you wonder?
- What other questions can you ask?
Did you know the prime numbers come in a pattern? While it can be hard to prove for sure which large numbers are prime, there are infinitely many numbers that we can be confident are not prime.
- List some large numbers that you know are not prime. How do you know?
- Fill in this worksheet and consider the patterns.
- Now can you list more large numbers that are not prime? Can you tell some that might be?
Contents
And now, on to the main attraction: the blog posts. Some articles were submitted by their authors; others were drawn from the immense backlog in my rss reader. If you’d like to skip directly to your area of interest, click one of these links.
- Talking Math with Kids
- Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
- Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
- Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
- Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
- Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
- Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Talking Math with Kids
“From their birth, children have minds just like ours, hungry for knowledge and able to digest solid mental food. They enter life full of wonder, questioning, investigating the world, reasoning, and drawing conclusions.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel invents Trifle — a new, very small game. “I invented a small game off the cuff last night. I needed a super quick game to play with my 6.5-year-old before bedtime.”
- Christopher Danielson shares the conversations that launched his yet-unpublished book: On vehicles and the meanings of words. “These questions are simple yet deep. They can inform our current conversations in which we seek to regain our understanding of truth, meaning, and empathy.”
- Digging through Christopher Danielson’s delightful archives, I find: A circular conversation, and Doll years, and Does the Earth have an end?. “If you are new to talking math with your kids, don’t worry about getting the timing right. Just start to make a habit of asking those questions. The first few times, you may not get much. That’s OK. It can be like introducing new foods — children need multiple exposures to new things before they accept them.”
- Tom Hobson tells how to build A State-of-the-Art Preschool Playground (for under $200) that will prompt all sorts of math (and other) talk. “As educational as these kinds of spaces are for children, these wonderlands of loose parts, dirt, rocks and compost, these bastions of junkyard chic, they are often perceived as eyesores by the uninitiated. Before going too far, you might want to save up to build a fence.”
- Writing is talking on paper. Dylan Kane tries Incorporating more writing in 7th grade math. “Slowing down and writing about a topic is a great way to think deeply about it, to make connections, to consider hypotheticals, to reason about cause and effect.”
- Jenna Laib gets 4th-graders writing math: How Many Nivelsnorts: Assessing Silly Story Problems. “Perhaps this speaks to who I was as a child, but there is a playfulness and a creativity to getting to write about nivelsnorts and flying tomatoes, and I don’t see a need to deny students that.”
- Karrie E. suggests 5 Easy Ways to Add Writing into Your Math Class. “The goal isn’t to create more work for your or your students. It’s to make thinking visible.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
“That he should do sums is of comparatively small importance; but the use of those functions which ‘summing’ calls into play is a great part of education.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Patrick Vennebush explores the Mathematical Mysteries of 2026. Meanwhile, Iva Sallay collects 2026 Math Facts and Factors, including a “powerful” math joke. You may also enjoy George Sicherman’s Roman New Year puzzle.
- Sarah Dees explains one of my favorite math games: How to Play Target Number. “This is a fabulous math game that works for third grade all the way up through 6th. You can choose the complexity of the game by choosing how many dice to use.”
- Erick Lee poses A Problem Worth Solving. “I liked this problem because there are so many different ways to approach it and so many interesting patterns to see while solving it.”
- Susan Smith and Kim Montague explore Factor Puzzles: Helping Math Make Sense. “That’s the challenge we pose to students: What do you notice about the puzzle you see? What relationships pop out to you?”
- Pat Ballew plays around with The 3×3 Magic Square, More Magical than You Thought! And Greg Ross shares a magic Venn diagram: Set Piece.
- For my contribution to the carnival, I finish up my series on mental math with Advanced Multiplication, Part 1, followed by Advanced Multiplication, Part 2, and then Advanced Division to wrap things up. “The more time our children spend playing around with numbers and making sense of these relationships, the better they’ll be prepared for algebra and beyond.”
- Jenna Laib shares important information: The 8 Fast Food Chains in the US Most Likely to Get Your Drive-Thru Order Right. And some good news: Extreme Poverty Fell Sharply Worldwide – Even Excluding China. Slow Reveal Graphs “invite learners to examine trends, relationships, and possible interpretations.”
- John Golden teaches Statistics and Probability for K-8 Teachers with some fun resources: Who Wins? “Lots of great discussion about variation, mean, median and their limitations.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
“If students find our lessons boring, that is because we are not engaging their minds. Children learn by thinking, imagining, reflecting, reasoning, arguing, justifying, and communicating, putting their thoughts into words. Learning, like digestion, is active.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Iva Sallay graphs a Cat Rotating Around a Bouncing Ball. “This year, the 9th-graders I work with at school need to know how to rotate a shape around a point that is NOT the origin. This is a topic I had never thought about before. To patch up this hole in my math knowledge, I decided to play with rotations in Desmos.”
- Ramsha Waseem reports on 14-year-old Miles Wu’s origami invention. “I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu.
- Karen Latham offers suggestions for Making the Most of Probability. “I like to have students work several counting problems by hand, so they have experience simplifying expressions with factorials. Then they can move on and let the calculator do the work.”
- David Butler plays with a geometric puzzle: When perimeter is equal to area. “One answer I discovered to this question is completely surprising and delightful to me. You may want to attempt to prove it yourself before I show you my proof…”
- Andrew Staccy categorizes Catriona Agg’s Puzzles by Topic. “The various techniques are grouped into categories and ordered roughly by complexity. Puzzles may appear more than once as they can have multiple ways of being solved.”
- Pat Ballew takes a look at Heron and his Formula(s). “Heron is also remembered for his invention of a primitive steam engine and many early automatons, and a coin operated vending machine, and one of the earliest forerunners of the thermometer.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
“Never are the operations of Reason more delightful and more perfect than in mathematics. There is great joy in standing by, as it were, and watching our own thought work out an intricate problem.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Christopher Burke posts a series of Geometry Problems of the Day from the Regents Exam, with solutions. “This is a silly question because it’s obvious that both Choices (1) and (2) cannot both be true, so one of them must be the answer.”
- Oliver Johnson explores the probability that your shopping receipt ends in .00: Time’s Arrow. “This ‘everything has the same chance’ collection of probabilities is called the uniform distribution, and it’s really important. But what might be surprising is how easily we reach it, and how few items we need to pick up in a supermarket to make it appear.”
- Nicola Rennie discusses How to create a more accessible line chart. “It’s a myth that accessibility means compromising on aesthetics. Instead, accessibility means prioritising communication.”
- Sue VanHattum needs beta-readers for Althea and the Mysteries of Calculus, version 8.2. “I’m still finding places where I need to add a bit to make the math clearer. Adding a touch of color here, removing something out of place there. I feel like a sculptor or painter.”
- Erick Lee shares A Calculus Esti-Mystery. “Instead of using basic number properties for the clues, I leveled it up. To unlock the clues, my students had to evaluate derivatives.”
- And don’t miss the 249th Carnival of Mathematics.
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
“We take strong ground when we appeal to the beauty and truth of Mathematics. Mathematics are to be studied for their own sake and not as they make for general intelligence and grasp of mind. But then how profoundly worthy are these subjects of study for their own sake!”
—Charlotte Mason
- David Butler (and daughter) explore a math/art puzzle: Jenga Views. “One thing I particularly like about them is that you don’t need an answer key, because you can just look at your construction and tell if it looks right or not. There’s something empowering about being able to check it yourself.”
- John Golden shares a couple of shape puzzles: Five by Five, and his variation on the theme: Seven by Seven. “Easier to solve, but more solutions. Better for free play. If you made something cool, tangram style, I would love to see it!”
- Rick Mohr welcomes us to a world of Tiled Art. “enjoy a gallery of artworks as each emerges from an underlying grid. And try creating your own tessellation, with the tiles staying interlocked automatically.”
- I post two excerpts from my new book, Charlotte Mason’s Living Math: Discover Math in Art, and the math equation journaling prompt True-False-True. “This puzzle pushes students to consider the structure of mathematical expressions. Make it a game by letting your children challenge you, too.”
- Andrew Taylor creates things with math. I’ve been enjoying his puzzle game Celtix. “Celtic knots are a rich tradition, but for the sake of reducing them to a game mechanic you can think of them as ribbons which ‘bounce’ off ‘walls’ which you can add by clicking anywhere that the ribbons cross each other.”
- Paula Beardell Krieg demonstrates how to make a Cube with an Open Pocket. You may also enjoy her Snow Day Octahedrons. “I’ve been at my desk, working on geometric solids, doing art and math together. I find focus and comfort here.”
- Jonathan Halabi plays with a couple of Birthday Puzzles. Greg Ross finds some harder Words and Numbers. And Pat Ballew digs deeper into Some History Notes about Alphametic Puzzles (and some early versions of a Topology Gem).
- Ben Orlin seeks play-testers: Puzzle Planet. “Your collective generosity and wisdom help me to clarify confusing bits, fine-tune difficulty levels, cull inferior puzzles, spotlight superior ones, and sprinkle play-testers’ insight and wit throughout the text.”
- Laura looks at the math of bell ringing: I can hear the bells. “Each bell ringer controls a huge bell, often on the order of a tonne in weight. One by one they ring their bells, then switch to a new permutation (a change) and repeat.”
- James Propp plays around with probability: In Praise of Stupid Questions. “The way to find things out is to ask a lot of questions. Ask enough questions, and you’re likely to find a new answer: new to you, and once in a while, new to others.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
“It can be exhausting to shovel information into our child’s head. We put out a lot of effort without much return, and daily lessons become a struggle of wills. But when we treat a child as a person capable of learning for himself and meet him mind-to-mind, with a focus on understanding big ideas, lessons become a delight.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel concludes that Manipulatives in Math Class Are So Worth It. “When it came to mathematizing — linking equations and the rods — the kids who had previous experience building and free playing with the rods made the connections far more readily. Playing with the rods seems to prime the mind to make connections.”
- JoAnne Growney wonders, Can Poems Affect Students’ Math-Attitudes? “One useful viewpoint is that math need not be treated as an isolated subject . . . it is connected to our lives in VERY MANY ways.”
- Growney also links to two contests your students still have time to enter: Creative Writing — Including Mathematics. For inspiration, consider her poem Like Poetry, Mathematics is Beautiful.
- Cathy Yenca details how to prepare The April Fool’s Day Math Activity Students Never Forget. “I decided I wanted to prank my students, but not the kind of prank that derails a lesson. I wanted something that would make students lean into the math instead of checking out.“
- Jenna Laib discusses Measuring Growth in Mathematical Reasoning: What Mia’s Thinking Reveals. “I confess: sometimes I find wrong answers more interesting than right ones. There can be so many ways to get something wrong!”
- Craig Barton creates interactive tools and games for teachers. “End of lesson treat or whiteboard activity for the whole class. Project a game and play together!”
- The Math is FigureOutAble team highlights Leonhard Euler: The Blind Mathematician Who Saw Everything. “Every student can learn to think like a mathematician. They can persist through challenges, adjust their thinking, and experience the satisfaction of figuring something out. They do not need perfect conditions or special talent. They need instruction that invites sense making and builds confidence over time.”
- David Butler shares More wisdom from the Dodecahedron about the humanity of doing math. “I find that maths is full of emotion. Frustration, curiosity, surprise, satisfaction, pride, sadness, companionship, wonder, silliness, joy — they’re all there, sometimes in quick succession.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Quotations are from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math. Public domain art is primarily from Wikimedia Commons.
And that rounds up this edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival. I hope you enjoyed the ride.
The next installment of our carnival will open sometime during the 2nd quarter of 2026 at Nature Study Australia. Visit our blog carnival information page for more details.
“The Lesson” by Charles Chaplin, circa 1880. #Activities #AllAges #Games #MTaPPlayfulMathCarnival #Puzzles #Quotations -
Playful Math 184: Carnival of Living Math
Welcome to the 184th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — a smorgasbord of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
With all the links, a blog carnival can feel overwhelming. Bookmark this article, so you can take your time reading the posts.
“Living math” means bringing our children face-to-face with the big ideas of mathematics to help them develop their reasoning skills. When the ideas of math come to life for our children, their minds delight in seeing how numbers and shapes connect to each other and exploring these relationships.
Scattered between the playful math links below, you’ll find quotations from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math, along with several paintings of children playing and learning which I considered for the book but ran out of room.
“The lesson” by Rafael Frederico, 1895.By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 184th edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.
Puzzle: Playing with Primes
Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach, in correspondence with Swiss polymath Leonhard Euler, posed several ideas about number theory (the study of natural numbers) which he couldn’t prove. The version we know now as Goldbach’s Conjecture is:
Every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.
Goldbach’s Conjecture is one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in math. It has been shown to hold for numbers less than 4 × 10^18, but remains unsettled for larger numbers.
Our carnival number can be written as the sum of primes in eight ways:
184 = 181 + 3
= 179 + 5
= 173 + 11
= 167 + 17
= 137 + 47
= 131 + 53
= 113 + 71
= 101 + 83184 can also be written as the sum of four consecutive prime numbers:
184 = 41 + 43 + 47 + 53
Play around with Goldbach’s Conjecture and prime numbers.
- What do you notice about sums of primes?
- What do you wonder?
- What other questions can you ask?
Did you know the prime numbers come in a pattern? While it can be hard to prove for sure which large numbers are prime, there are infinitely many numbers that we can be confident are not prime.
- List some large numbers that you know are not prime. How do you know?
- Fill in this worksheet and consider the patterns.
- Now can you list more large numbers that are not prime? Can you tell some that might be?
Contents
And now, on to the main attraction: the blog posts. Some articles were submitted by their authors; others were drawn from the immense backlog in my rss reader. If you’d like to skip directly to your area of interest, click one of these links.
- Talking Math with Kids
- Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
- Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
- Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
- Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
- Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
- Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Talking Math with Kids
“From their birth, children have minds just like ours, hungry for knowledge and able to digest solid mental food. They enter life full of wonder, questioning, investigating the world, reasoning, and drawing conclusions.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel invents Trifle — a new, very small game. “I invented a small game off the cuff last night. I needed a super quick game to play with my 6.5-year-old before bedtime.”
- Christopher Danielson shares the conversations that launched his yet-unpublished book: On vehicles and the meanings of words. “These questions are simple yet deep. They can inform our current conversations in which we seek to regain our understanding of truth, meaning, and empathy.”
- Digging through Christopher Danielson’s delightful archives, I find: A circular conversation, and Doll years, and Does the Earth have an end?. “If you are new to talking math with your kids, don’t worry about getting the timing right. Just start to make a habit of asking those questions. The first few times, you may not get much. That’s OK. It can be like introducing new foods — children need multiple exposures to new things before they accept them.”
- Tom Hobson tells how to build A State-of-the-Art Preschool Playground (for under $200) that will prompt all sorts of math (and other) talk. “As educational as these kinds of spaces are for children, these wonderlands of loose parts, dirt, rocks and compost, these bastions of junkyard chic, they are often perceived as eyesores by the uninitiated. Before going too far, you might want to save up to build a fence.”
- Writing is talking on paper. Dylan Kane tries Incorporating more writing in 7th grade math. “Slowing down and writing about a topic is a great way to think deeply about it, to make connections, to consider hypotheticals, to reason about cause and effect.”
- Jenna Laib gets 4th-graders writing math: How Many Nivelsnorts: Assessing Silly Story Problems. “Perhaps this speaks to who I was as a child, but there is a playfulness and a creativity to getting to write about nivelsnorts and flying tomatoes, and I don’t see a need to deny students that.”
- Karrie E. suggests 5 Easy Ways to Add Writing into Your Math Class. “The goal isn’t to create more work for your or your students. It’s to make thinking visible.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
“That he should do sums is of comparatively small importance; but the use of those functions which ‘summing’ calls into play is a great part of education.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Patrick Vennebush explores the Mathematical Mysteries of 2026. Meanwhile, Iva Sallay collects 2026 Math Facts and Factors, including a “powerful” math joke. You may also enjoy George Sicherman’s Roman New Year puzzle.
- Sarah Dees explains one of my favorite math games: How to Play Target Number. “This is a fabulous math game that works for third grade all the way up through 6th. You can choose the complexity of the game by choosing how many dice to use.”
- Erick Lee poses A Problem Worth Solving. “I liked this problem because there are so many different ways to approach it and so many interesting patterns to see while solving it.”
- Susan Smith and Kim Montague explore Factor Puzzles: Helping Math Make Sense. “That’s the challenge we pose to students: What do you notice about the puzzle you see? What relationships pop out to you?”
- Pat Ballew plays around with The 3×3 Magic Square, More Magical than You Thought! And Greg Ross shares a magic Venn diagram: Set Piece.
- For my contribution to the carnival, I finish up my series on mental math with Advanced Multiplication, Part 1, followed by Advanced Multiplication, Part 2, and then Advanced Division to wrap things up. “The more time our children spend playing around with numbers and making sense of these relationships, the better they’ll be prepared for algebra and beyond.”
- Jenna Laib shares important information: The 8 Fast Food Chains in the US Most Likely to Get Your Drive-Thru Order Right. And some good news: Extreme Poverty Fell Sharply Worldwide – Even Excluding China. Slow Reveal Graphs “invite learners to examine trends, relationships, and possible interpretations.”
- John Golden teaches Statistics and Probability for K-8 Teachers with some fun resources: Who Wins? “Lots of great discussion about variation, mean, median and their limitations.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
“If students find our lessons boring, that is because we are not engaging their minds. Children learn by thinking, imagining, reflecting, reasoning, arguing, justifying, and communicating, putting their thoughts into words. Learning, like digestion, is active.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Iva Sallay graphs a Cat Rotating Around a Bouncing Ball. “This year, the 9th-graders I work with at school need to know how to rotate a shape around a point that is NOT the origin. This is a topic I had never thought about before. To patch up this hole in my math knowledge, I decided to play with rotations in Desmos.”
- Ramsha Waseem reports on 14-year-old Miles Wu’s origami invention. “I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu.
- Karen Latham offers suggestions for Making the Most of Probability. “I like to have students work several counting problems by hand, so they have experience simplifying expressions with factorials. Then they can move on and let the calculator do the work.”
- David Butler plays with a geometric puzzle: When perimeter is equal to area. “One answer I discovered to this question is completely surprising and delightful to me. You may want to attempt to prove it yourself before I show you my proof…”
- Andrew Staccy categorizes Catriona Agg’s Puzzles by Topic. “The various techniques are grouped into categories and ordered roughly by complexity. Puzzles may appear more than once as they can have multiple ways of being solved.”
- Pat Ballew takes a look at Heron and his Formula(s). “Heron is also remembered for his invention of a primitive steam engine and many early automatons, and a coin operated vending machine, and one of the earliest forerunners of the thermometer.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
“Never are the operations of Reason more delightful and more perfect than in mathematics. There is great joy in standing by, as it were, and watching our own thought work out an intricate problem.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Christopher Burke posts a series of Geometry Problems of the Day from the Regents Exam, with solutions. “This is a silly question because it’s obvious that both Choices (1) and (2) cannot both be true, so one of them must be the answer.”
- Oliver Johnson explores the probability that your shopping receipt ends in .00: Time’s Arrow. “This ‘everything has the same chance’ collection of probabilities is called the uniform distribution, and it’s really important. But what might be surprising is how easily we reach it, and how few items we need to pick up in a supermarket to make it appear.”
- Nicola Rennie discusses How to create a more accessible line chart. “It’s a myth that accessibility means compromising on aesthetics. Instead, accessibility means prioritising communication.”
- Sue VanHattum needs beta-readers for Althea and the Mysteries of Calculus, version 8.2. “I’m still finding places where I need to add a bit to make the math clearer. Adding a touch of color here, removing something out of place there. I feel like a sculptor or painter.”
- Erick Lee shares A Calculus Esti-Mystery. “Instead of using basic number properties for the clues, I leveled it up. To unlock the clues, my students had to evaluate derivatives.”
- And don’t miss the 249th Carnival of Mathematics.
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
“We take strong ground when we appeal to the beauty and truth of Mathematics. Mathematics are to be studied for their own sake and not as they make for general intelligence and grasp of mind. But then how profoundly worthy are these subjects of study for their own sake!”
—Charlotte Mason
- David Butler (and daughter) explore a math/art puzzle: Jenga Views. “One thing I particularly like about them is that you don’t need an answer key, because you can just look at your construction and tell if it looks right or not. There’s something empowering about being able to check it yourself.”
- John Golden shares a couple of shape puzzles: Five by Five, and his variation on the theme: Seven by Seven. “Easier to solve, but more solutions. Better for free play. If you made something cool, tangram style, I would love to see it!”
- Rick Mohr welcomes us to a world of Tiled Art. “enjoy a gallery of artworks as each emerges from an underlying grid. And try creating your own tessellation, with the tiles staying interlocked automatically.”
- I post two excerpts from my new book, Charlotte Mason’s Living Math: Discover Math in Art, and the math equation journaling prompt True-False-True. “This puzzle pushes students to consider the structure of mathematical expressions. Make it a game by letting your children challenge you, too.”
- Andrew Taylor creates things with math. I’ve been enjoying his puzzle game Celtix. “Celtic knots are a rich tradition, but for the sake of reducing them to a game mechanic you can think of them as ribbons which ‘bounce’ off ‘walls’ which you can add by clicking anywhere that the ribbons cross each other.”
- Paula Beardell Krieg demonstrates how to make a Cube with an Open Pocket. You may also enjoy her Snow Day Octahedrons. “I’ve been at my desk, working on geometric solids, doing art and math together. I find focus and comfort here.”
- Jonathan Halabi plays with a couple of Birthday Puzzles. Greg Ross finds some harder Words and Numbers. And Pat Ballew digs deeper into Some History Notes about Alphametic Puzzles (and some early versions of a Topology Gem).
- Ben Orlin seeks play-testers: Puzzle Planet. “Your collective generosity and wisdom help me to clarify confusing bits, fine-tune difficulty levels, cull inferior puzzles, spotlight superior ones, and sprinkle play-testers’ insight and wit throughout the text.”
- Laura looks at the math of bell ringing: I can hear the bells. “Each bell ringer controls a huge bell, often on the order of a tonne in weight. One by one they ring their bells, then switch to a new permutation (a change) and repeat.”
- James Propp plays around with probability: In Praise of Stupid Questions. “The way to find things out is to ask a lot of questions. Ask enough questions, and you’re likely to find a new answer: new to you, and once in a while, new to others.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
“It can be exhausting to shovel information into our child’s head. We put out a lot of effort without much return, and daily lessons become a struggle of wills. But when we treat a child as a person capable of learning for himself and meet him mind-to-mind, with a focus on understanding big ideas, lessons become a delight.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel concludes that Manipulatives in Math Class Are So Worth It. “When it came to mathematizing — linking equations and the rods — the kids who had previous experience building and free playing with the rods made the connections far more readily. Playing with the rods seems to prime the mind to make connections.”
- JoAnne Growney wonders, Can Poems Affect Students’ Math-Attitudes? “One useful viewpoint is that math need not be treated as an isolated subject . . . it is connected to our lives in VERY MANY ways.”
- Growney also links to two contests your students still have time to enter: Creative Writing — Including Mathematics. For inspiration, consider her poem Like Poetry, Mathematics is Beautiful.
- Cathy Yenca details how to prepare The April Fool’s Day Math Activity Students Never Forget. “I decided I wanted to prank my students, but not the kind of prank that derails a lesson. I wanted something that would make students lean into the math instead of checking out.“
- Jenna Laib discusses Measuring Growth in Mathematical Reasoning: What Mia’s Thinking Reveals. “I confess: sometimes I find wrong answers more interesting than right ones. There can be so many ways to get something wrong!”
- Craig Barton creates interactive tools and games for teachers. “End of lesson treat or whiteboard activity for the whole class. Project a game and play together!”
- The Math is FigureOutAble team highlights Leonhard Euler: The Blind Mathematician Who Saw Everything. “Every student can learn to think like a mathematician. They can persist through challenges, adjust their thinking, and experience the satisfaction of figuring something out. They do not need perfect conditions or special talent. They need instruction that invites sense making and builds confidence over time.”
- David Butler shares More wisdom from the Dodecahedron about the humanity of doing math. “I find that maths is full of emotion. Frustration, curiosity, surprise, satisfaction, pride, sadness, companionship, wonder, silliness, joy — they’re all there, sometimes in quick succession.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Quotations are from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math. Public domain art is primarily from Wikimedia Commons.
And that rounds up this edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival. I hope you enjoyed the ride.
The next installment of our carnival will open sometime during the 2nd quarter of 2026 at Nature Study Australia. Visit our blog carnival information page for more details.
“The Lesson” by Charles Chaplin, circa 1880. #Activities #AllAges #Games #MTaPPlayfulMathCarnival #Puzzles #Quotations -
Playful Math 184: Carnival of Living Math
Welcome to the 184th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — a smorgasbord of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
With all the links, a blog carnival can feel overwhelming. Bookmark this article, so you can take your time reading the posts.
“Living math” means bringing our children face-to-face with the big ideas of mathematics to help them develop their reasoning skills. When the ideas of math come to life for our children, their minds delight in seeing how numbers and shapes connect to each other and exploring these relationships.
Scattered between the playful math links below, you’ll find quotations from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math, along with several paintings of children playing and learning which I considered for the book but ran out of room.
“The lesson” by Rafael Frederico, 1895.By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 184th edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.
Puzzle: Playing with Primes
Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach, in correspondence with Swiss polymath Leonhard Euler, posed several ideas about number theory (the study of natural numbers) which he couldn’t prove. The version we know now as Goldbach’s Conjecture is:
Every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.
Goldbach’s Conjecture is one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in math. It has been shown to hold for numbers less than 4 × 10^18, but remains unsettled for larger numbers.
Our carnival number can be written as the sum of primes in eight ways:
184 = 181 + 3
= 179 + 5
= 173 + 11
= 167 + 17
= 137 + 47
= 131 + 53
= 113 + 71
= 101 + 83184 can also be written as the sum of four consecutive prime numbers:
184 = 41 + 43 + 47 + 53
Play around with Goldbach’s Conjecture and prime numbers.
- What do you notice about sums of primes?
- What do you wonder?
- What other questions can you ask?
Did you know the prime numbers come in a pattern? While it can be hard to prove for sure which large numbers are prime, there are infinitely many numbers that we can be confident are not prime.
- List some large numbers that you know are not prime. How do you know?
- Fill in this worksheet and consider the patterns.
- Now can you list more large numbers that are not prime? Can you tell some that might be?
Contents
And now, on to the main attraction: the blog posts. Some articles were submitted by their authors; others were drawn from the immense backlog in my rss reader. If you’d like to skip directly to your area of interest, click one of these links.
- Talking Math with Kids
- Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
- Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
- Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
- Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
- Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
- Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Talking Math with Kids
“From their birth, children have minds just like ours, hungry for knowledge and able to digest solid mental food. They enter life full of wonder, questioning, investigating the world, reasoning, and drawing conclusions.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel invents Trifle — a new, very small game. “I invented a small game off the cuff last night. I needed a super quick game to play with my 6.5-year-old before bedtime.”
- Christopher Danielson shares the conversations that launched his yet-unpublished book: On vehicles and the meanings of words. “These questions are simple yet deep. They can inform our current conversations in which we seek to regain our understanding of truth, meaning, and empathy.”
- Digging through Christopher Danielson’s delightful archives, I find: A circular conversation, and Doll years, and Does the Earth have an end?. “If you are new to talking math with your kids, don’t worry about getting the timing right. Just start to make a habit of asking those questions. The first few times, you may not get much. That’s OK. It can be like introducing new foods — children need multiple exposures to new things before they accept them.”
- Tom Hobson tells how to build A State-of-the-Art Preschool Playground (for under $200) that will prompt all sorts of math (and other) talk. “As educational as these kinds of spaces are for children, these wonderlands of loose parts, dirt, rocks and compost, these bastions of junkyard chic, they are often perceived as eyesores by the uninitiated. Before going too far, you might want to save up to build a fence.”
- Writing is talking on paper. Dylan Kane tries Incorporating more writing in 7th grade math. “Slowing down and writing about a topic is a great way to think deeply about it, to make connections, to consider hypotheticals, to reason about cause and effect.”
- Jenna Laib gets 4th-graders writing math: How Many Nivelsnorts: Assessing Silly Story Problems. “Perhaps this speaks to who I was as a child, but there is a playfulness and a creativity to getting to write about nivelsnorts and flying tomatoes, and I don’t see a need to deny students that.”
- Karrie E. suggests 5 Easy Ways to Add Writing into Your Math Class. “The goal isn’t to create more work for your or your students. It’s to make thinking visible.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
“That he should do sums is of comparatively small importance; but the use of those functions which ‘summing’ calls into play is a great part of education.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Patrick Vennebush explores the Mathematical Mysteries of 2026. Meanwhile, Iva Sallay collects 2026 Math Facts and Factors, including a “powerful” math joke. You may also enjoy George Sicherman’s Roman New Year puzzle.
- Sarah Dees explains one of my favorite math games: How to Play Target Number. “This is a fabulous math game that works for third grade all the way up through 6th. You can choose the complexity of the game by choosing how many dice to use.”
- Erick Lee poses A Problem Worth Solving. “I liked this problem because there are so many different ways to approach it and so many interesting patterns to see while solving it.”
- Susan Smith and Kim Montague explore Factor Puzzles: Helping Math Make Sense. “That’s the challenge we pose to students: What do you notice about the puzzle you see? What relationships pop out to you?”
- Pat Ballew plays around with The 3×3 Magic Square, More Magical than You Thought! And Greg Ross shares a magic Venn diagram: Set Piece.
- For my contribution to the carnival, I finish up my series on mental math with Advanced Multiplication, Part 1, followed by Advanced Multiplication, Part 2, and then Advanced Division to wrap things up. “The more time our children spend playing around with numbers and making sense of these relationships, the better they’ll be prepared for algebra and beyond.”
- Jenna Laib shares important information: The 8 Fast Food Chains in the US Most Likely to Get Your Drive-Thru Order Right. And some good news: Extreme Poverty Fell Sharply Worldwide – Even Excluding China. Slow Reveal Graphs “invite learners to examine trends, relationships, and possible interpretations.”
- John Golden teaches Statistics and Probability for K-8 Teachers with some fun resources: Who Wins? “Lots of great discussion about variation, mean, median and their limitations.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
“If students find our lessons boring, that is because we are not engaging their minds. Children learn by thinking, imagining, reflecting, reasoning, arguing, justifying, and communicating, putting their thoughts into words. Learning, like digestion, is active.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Iva Sallay graphs a Cat Rotating Around a Bouncing Ball. “This year, the 9th-graders I work with at school need to know how to rotate a shape around a point that is NOT the origin. This is a topic I had never thought about before. To patch up this hole in my math knowledge, I decided to play with rotations in Desmos.”
- Ramsha Waseem reports on 14-year-old Miles Wu’s origami invention. “I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu.
- Karen Latham offers suggestions for Making the Most of Probability. “I like to have students work several counting problems by hand, so they have experience simplifying expressions with factorials. Then they can move on and let the calculator do the work.”
- David Butler plays with a geometric puzzle: When perimeter is equal to area. “One answer I discovered to this question is completely surprising and delightful to me. You may want to attempt to prove it yourself before I show you my proof…”
- Andrew Staccy categorizes Catriona Agg’s Puzzles by Topic. “The various techniques are grouped into categories and ordered roughly by complexity. Puzzles may appear more than once as they can have multiple ways of being solved.”
- Pat Ballew takes a look at Heron and his Formula(s). “Heron is also remembered for his invention of a primitive steam engine and many early automatons, and a coin operated vending machine, and one of the earliest forerunners of the thermometer.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
“Never are the operations of Reason more delightful and more perfect than in mathematics. There is great joy in standing by, as it were, and watching our own thought work out an intricate problem.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Christopher Burke posts a series of Geometry Problems of the Day from the Regents Exam, with solutions. “This is a silly question because it’s obvious that both Choices (1) and (2) cannot both be true, so one of them must be the answer.”
- Oliver Johnson explores the probability that your shopping receipt ends in .00: Time’s Arrow. “This ‘everything has the same chance’ collection of probabilities is called the uniform distribution, and it’s really important. But what might be surprising is how easily we reach it, and how few items we need to pick up in a supermarket to make it appear.”
- Nicola Rennie discusses How to create a more accessible line chart. “It’s a myth that accessibility means compromising on aesthetics. Instead, accessibility means prioritising communication.”
- Sue VanHattum needs beta-readers for Althea and the Mysteries of Calculus, version 8.2. “I’m still finding places where I need to add a bit to make the math clearer. Adding a touch of color here, removing something out of place there. I feel like a sculptor or painter.”
- Erick Lee shares A Calculus Esti-Mystery. “Instead of using basic number properties for the clues, I leveled it up. To unlock the clues, my students had to evaluate derivatives.”
- And don’t miss the 249th Carnival of Mathematics.
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
“We take strong ground when we appeal to the beauty and truth of Mathematics. Mathematics are to be studied for their own sake and not as they make for general intelligence and grasp of mind. But then how profoundly worthy are these subjects of study for their own sake!”
—Charlotte Mason
- David Butler (and daughter) explore a math/art puzzle: Jenga Views. “One thing I particularly like about them is that you don’t need an answer key, because you can just look at your construction and tell if it looks right or not. There’s something empowering about being able to check it yourself.”
- John Golden shares a couple of shape puzzles: Five by Five, and his variation on the theme: Seven by Seven. “Easier to solve, but more solutions. Better for free play. If you made something cool, tangram style, I would love to see it!”
- Rick Mohr welcomes us to a world of Tiled Art. “enjoy a gallery of artworks as each emerges from an underlying grid. And try creating your own tessellation, with the tiles staying interlocked automatically.”
- I post two excerpts from my new book, Charlotte Mason’s Living Math: Discover Math in Art, and the math equation journaling prompt True-False-True. “This puzzle pushes students to consider the structure of mathematical expressions. Make it a game by letting your children challenge you, too.”
- Andrew Taylor creates things with math. I’ve been enjoying his puzzle game Celtix. “Celtic knots are a rich tradition, but for the sake of reducing them to a game mechanic you can think of them as ribbons which ‘bounce’ off ‘walls’ which you can add by clicking anywhere that the ribbons cross each other.”
- Paula Beardell Krieg demonstrates how to make a Cube with an Open Pocket. You may also enjoy her Snow Day Octahedrons. “I’ve been at my desk, working on geometric solids, doing art and math together. I find focus and comfort here.”
- Jonathan Halabi plays with a couple of Birthday Puzzles. Greg Ross finds some harder Words and Numbers. And Pat Ballew digs deeper into Some History Notes about Alphametic Puzzles (and some early versions of a Topology Gem).
- Ben Orlin seeks play-testers: Puzzle Planet. “Your collective generosity and wisdom help me to clarify confusing bits, fine-tune difficulty levels, cull inferior puzzles, spotlight superior ones, and sprinkle play-testers’ insight and wit throughout the text.”
- Laura looks at the math of bell ringing: I can hear the bells. “Each bell ringer controls a huge bell, often on the order of a tonne in weight. One by one they ring their bells, then switch to a new permutation (a change) and repeat.”
- James Propp plays around with probability: In Praise of Stupid Questions. “The way to find things out is to ask a lot of questions. Ask enough questions, and you’re likely to find a new answer: new to you, and once in a while, new to others.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
“It can be exhausting to shovel information into our child’s head. We put out a lot of effort without much return, and daily lessons become a struggle of wills. But when we treat a child as a person capable of learning for himself and meet him mind-to-mind, with a focus on understanding big ideas, lessons become a delight.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel concludes that Manipulatives in Math Class Are So Worth It. “When it came to mathematizing — linking equations and the rods — the kids who had previous experience building and free playing with the rods made the connections far more readily. Playing with the rods seems to prime the mind to make connections.”
- JoAnne Growney wonders, Can Poems Affect Students’ Math-Attitudes? “One useful viewpoint is that math need not be treated as an isolated subject . . . it is connected to our lives in VERY MANY ways.”
- Growney also links to two contests your students still have time to enter: Creative Writing — Including Mathematics. For inspiration, consider her poem Like Poetry, Mathematics is Beautiful.
- Cathy Yenca details how to prepare The April Fool’s Day Math Activity Students Never Forget. “I decided I wanted to prank my students, but not the kind of prank that derails a lesson. I wanted something that would make students lean into the math instead of checking out.“
- Jenna Laib discusses Measuring Growth in Mathematical Reasoning: What Mia’s Thinking Reveals. “I confess: sometimes I find wrong answers more interesting than right ones. There can be so many ways to get something wrong!”
- Craig Barton creates interactive tools and games for teachers. “End of lesson treat or whiteboard activity for the whole class. Project a game and play together!”
- The Math is FigureOutAble team highlights Leonhard Euler: The Blind Mathematician Who Saw Everything. “Every student can learn to think like a mathematician. They can persist through challenges, adjust their thinking, and experience the satisfaction of figuring something out. They do not need perfect conditions or special talent. They need instruction that invites sense making and builds confidence over time.”
- David Butler shares More wisdom from the Dodecahedron about the humanity of doing math. “I find that maths is full of emotion. Frustration, curiosity, surprise, satisfaction, pride, sadness, companionship, wonder, silliness, joy — they’re all there, sometimes in quick succession.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Quotations are from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math. Public domain art is primarily from Wikimedia Commons.
And that rounds up this edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival. I hope you enjoyed the ride.
The next installment of our carnival will open sometime during the 2nd quarter of 2026 at Nature Study Australia. Visit our blog carnival information page for more details.
“The Lesson” by Charles Chaplin, circa 1880. #Activities #AllAges #Games #MTaPPlayfulMathCarnival #Puzzles #Quotations -
Playful Math 184: Carnival of Living Math
Welcome to the 184th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — a smorgasbord of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
With all the links, a blog carnival can feel overwhelming. Bookmark this article, so you can take your time reading the posts.
“Living math” means bringing our children face-to-face with the big ideas of mathematics to help them develop their reasoning skills. When the ideas of math come to life for our children, their minds delight in seeing how numbers and shapes connect to each other and exploring these relationships.
Scattered between the playful math links below, you’ll find quotations from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math, along with several paintings of children playing and learning which I considered for the book but ran out of room.
“The lesson” by Rafael Frederico, 1895.By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 184th edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.
Puzzle: Playing with Primes
Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach, in correspondence with Swiss polymath Leonhard Euler, posed several ideas about number theory (the study of natural numbers) which he couldn’t prove. The version we know now as Goldbach’s Conjecture is:
Every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.
Goldbach’s Conjecture is one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in math. It has been shown to hold for numbers less than 4 × 10^18, but remains unsettled for larger numbers.
Our carnival number can be written as the sum of primes in eight ways:
184 = 181 + 3
= 179 + 5
= 173 + 11
= 167 + 17
= 137 + 47
= 131 + 53
= 113 + 71
= 101 + 83184 can also be written as the sum of four consecutive prime numbers:
184 = 41 + 43 + 47 + 53
Play around with Goldbach’s Conjecture and prime numbers.
- What do you notice about sums of primes?
- What do you wonder?
- What other questions can you ask?
Did you know the prime numbers come in a pattern? While it can be hard to prove for sure which large numbers are prime, there are infinitely many numbers that we can be confident are not prime.
- List some large numbers that you know are not prime. How do you know?
- Fill in this worksheet and consider the patterns.
- Now can you list more large numbers that are not prime? Can you tell some that might be?
Contents
And now, on to the main attraction: the blog posts. Some articles were submitted by their authors; others were drawn from the immense backlog in my rss reader. If you’d like to skip directly to your area of interest, click one of these links.
- Talking Math with Kids
- Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
- Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
- Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
- Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
- Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
- Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Talking Math with Kids
“From their birth, children have minds just like ours, hungry for knowledge and able to digest solid mental food. They enter life full of wonder, questioning, investigating the world, reasoning, and drawing conclusions.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel invents Trifle — a new, very small game. “I invented a small game off the cuff last night. I needed a super quick game to play with my 6.5-year-old before bedtime.”
- Christopher Danielson shares the conversations that launched his yet-unpublished book: On vehicles and the meanings of words. “These questions are simple yet deep. They can inform our current conversations in which we seek to regain our understanding of truth, meaning, and empathy.”
- Digging through Christopher Danielson’s delightful archives, I find: A circular conversation, and Doll years, and Does the Earth have an end?. “If you are new to talking math with your kids, don’t worry about getting the timing right. Just start to make a habit of asking those questions. The first few times, you may not get much. That’s OK. It can be like introducing new foods — children need multiple exposures to new things before they accept them.”
- Tom Hobson tells how to build A State-of-the-Art Preschool Playground (for under $200) that will prompt all sorts of math (and other) talk. “As educational as these kinds of spaces are for children, these wonderlands of loose parts, dirt, rocks and compost, these bastions of junkyard chic, they are often perceived as eyesores by the uninitiated. Before going too far, you might want to save up to build a fence.”
- Writing is talking on paper. Dylan Kane tries Incorporating more writing in 7th grade math. “Slowing down and writing about a topic is a great way to think deeply about it, to make connections, to consider hypotheticals, to reason about cause and effect.”
- Jenna Laib gets 4th-graders writing math: How Many Nivelsnorts: Assessing Silly Story Problems. “Perhaps this speaks to who I was as a child, but there is a playfulness and a creativity to getting to write about nivelsnorts and flying tomatoes, and I don’t see a need to deny students that.”
- Karrie E. suggests 5 Easy Ways to Add Writing into Your Math Class. “The goal isn’t to create more work for your or your students. It’s to make thinking visible.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
“That he should do sums is of comparatively small importance; but the use of those functions which ‘summing’ calls into play is a great part of education.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Patrick Vennebush explores the Mathematical Mysteries of 2026. Meanwhile, Iva Sallay collects 2026 Math Facts and Factors, including a “powerful” math joke. You may also enjoy George Sicherman’s Roman New Year puzzle.
- Sarah Dees explains one of my favorite math games: How to Play Target Number. “This is a fabulous math game that works for third grade all the way up through 6th. You can choose the complexity of the game by choosing how many dice to use.”
- Erick Lee poses A Problem Worth Solving. “I liked this problem because there are so many different ways to approach it and so many interesting patterns to see while solving it.”
- Susan Smith and Kim Montague explore Factor Puzzles: Helping Math Make Sense. “That’s the challenge we pose to students: What do you notice about the puzzle you see? What relationships pop out to you?”
- Pat Ballew plays around with The 3×3 Magic Square, More Magical than You Thought! And Greg Ross shares a magic Venn diagram: Set Piece.
- For my contribution to the carnival, I finish up my series on mental math with Advanced Multiplication, Part 1, followed by Advanced Multiplication, Part 2, and then Advanced Division to wrap things up. “The more time our children spend playing around with numbers and making sense of these relationships, the better they’ll be prepared for algebra and beyond.”
- Jenna Laib shares important information: The 8 Fast Food Chains in the US Most Likely to Get Your Drive-Thru Order Right. And some good news: Extreme Poverty Fell Sharply Worldwide – Even Excluding China. Slow Reveal Graphs “invite learners to examine trends, relationships, and possible interpretations.”
- John Golden teaches Statistics and Probability for K-8 Teachers with some fun resources: Who Wins? “Lots of great discussion about variation, mean, median and their limitations.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
“If students find our lessons boring, that is because we are not engaging their minds. Children learn by thinking, imagining, reflecting, reasoning, arguing, justifying, and communicating, putting their thoughts into words. Learning, like digestion, is active.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Iva Sallay graphs a Cat Rotating Around a Bouncing Ball. “This year, the 9th-graders I work with at school need to know how to rotate a shape around a point that is NOT the origin. This is a topic I had never thought about before. To patch up this hole in my math knowledge, I decided to play with rotations in Desmos.”
- Ramsha Waseem reports on 14-year-old Miles Wu’s origami invention. “I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu.
- Karen Latham offers suggestions for Making the Most of Probability. “I like to have students work several counting problems by hand, so they have experience simplifying expressions with factorials. Then they can move on and let the calculator do the work.”
- David Butler plays with a geometric puzzle: When perimeter is equal to area. “One answer I discovered to this question is completely surprising and delightful to me. You may want to attempt to prove it yourself before I show you my proof…”
- Andrew Staccy categorizes Catriona Agg’s Puzzles by Topic. “The various techniques are grouped into categories and ordered roughly by complexity. Puzzles may appear more than once as they can have multiple ways of being solved.”
- Pat Ballew takes a look at Heron and his Formula(s). “Heron is also remembered for his invention of a primitive steam engine and many early automatons, and a coin operated vending machine, and one of the earliest forerunners of the thermometer.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
“Never are the operations of Reason more delightful and more perfect than in mathematics. There is great joy in standing by, as it were, and watching our own thought work out an intricate problem.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Christopher Burke posts a series of Geometry Problems of the Day from the Regents Exam, with solutions. “This is a silly question because it’s obvious that both Choices (1) and (2) cannot both be true, so one of them must be the answer.”
- Oliver Johnson explores the probability that your shopping receipt ends in .00: Time’s Arrow. “This ‘everything has the same chance’ collection of probabilities is called the uniform distribution, and it’s really important. But what might be surprising is how easily we reach it, and how few items we need to pick up in a supermarket to make it appear.”
- Nicola Rennie discusses How to create a more accessible line chart. “It’s a myth that accessibility means compromising on aesthetics. Instead, accessibility means prioritising communication.”
- Sue VanHattum needs beta-readers for Althea and the Mysteries of Calculus, version 8.2. “I’m still finding places where I need to add a bit to make the math clearer. Adding a touch of color here, removing something out of place there. I feel like a sculptor or painter.”
- Erick Lee shares A Calculus Esti-Mystery. “Instead of using basic number properties for the clues, I leveled it up. To unlock the clues, my students had to evaluate derivatives.”
- And don’t miss the 249th Carnival of Mathematics.
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
“We take strong ground when we appeal to the beauty and truth of Mathematics. Mathematics are to be studied for their own sake and not as they make for general intelligence and grasp of mind. But then how profoundly worthy are these subjects of study for their own sake!”
—Charlotte Mason
- David Butler (and daughter) explore a math/art puzzle: Jenga Views. “One thing I particularly like about them is that you don’t need an answer key, because you can just look at your construction and tell if it looks right or not. There’s something empowering about being able to check it yourself.”
- John Golden shares a couple of shape puzzles: Five by Five, and his variation on the theme: Seven by Seven. “Easier to solve, but more solutions. Better for free play. If you made something cool, tangram style, I would love to see it!”
- Rick Mohr welcomes us to a world of Tiled Art. “enjoy a gallery of artworks as each emerges from an underlying grid. And try creating your own tessellation, with the tiles staying interlocked automatically.”
- I post two excerpts from my new book, Charlotte Mason’s Living Math: Discover Math in Art, and the math equation journaling prompt True-False-True. “This puzzle pushes students to consider the structure of mathematical expressions. Make it a game by letting your children challenge you, too.”
- Andrew Taylor creates things with math. I’ve been enjoying his puzzle game Celtix. “Celtic knots are a rich tradition, but for the sake of reducing them to a game mechanic you can think of them as ribbons which ‘bounce’ off ‘walls’ which you can add by clicking anywhere that the ribbons cross each other.”
- Paula Beardell Krieg demonstrates how to make a Cube with an Open Pocket. You may also enjoy her Snow Day Octahedrons. “I’ve been at my desk, working on geometric solids, doing art and math together. I find focus and comfort here.”
- Jonathan Halabi plays with a couple of Birthday Puzzles. Greg Ross finds some harder Words and Numbers. And Pat Ballew digs deeper into Some History Notes about Alphametic Puzzles (and some early versions of a Topology Gem).
- Ben Orlin seeks play-testers: Puzzle Planet. “Your collective generosity and wisdom help me to clarify confusing bits, fine-tune difficulty levels, cull inferior puzzles, spotlight superior ones, and sprinkle play-testers’ insight and wit throughout the text.”
- Laura looks at the math of bell ringing: I can hear the bells. “Each bell ringer controls a huge bell, often on the order of a tonne in weight. One by one they ring their bells, then switch to a new permutation (a change) and repeat.”
- James Propp plays around with probability: In Praise of Stupid Questions. “The way to find things out is to ask a lot of questions. Ask enough questions, and you’re likely to find a new answer: new to you, and once in a while, new to others.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
“It can be exhausting to shovel information into our child’s head. We put out a lot of effort without much return, and daily lessons become a struggle of wills. But when we treat a child as a person capable of learning for himself and meet him mind-to-mind, with a focus on understanding big ideas, lessons become a delight.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel concludes that Manipulatives in Math Class Are So Worth It. “When it came to mathematizing — linking equations and the rods — the kids who had previous experience building and free playing with the rods made the connections far more readily. Playing with the rods seems to prime the mind to make connections.”
- JoAnne Growney wonders, Can Poems Affect Students’ Math-Attitudes? “One useful viewpoint is that math need not be treated as an isolated subject . . . it is connected to our lives in VERY MANY ways.”
- Growney also links to two contests your students still have time to enter: Creative Writing — Including Mathematics. For inspiration, consider her poem Like Poetry, Mathematics is Beautiful.
- Cathy Yenca details how to prepare The April Fool’s Day Math Activity Students Never Forget. “I decided I wanted to prank my students, but not the kind of prank that derails a lesson. I wanted something that would make students lean into the math instead of checking out.“
- Jenna Laib discusses Measuring Growth in Mathematical Reasoning: What Mia’s Thinking Reveals. “I confess: sometimes I find wrong answers more interesting than right ones. There can be so many ways to get something wrong!”
- Craig Barton creates interactive tools and games for teachers. “End of lesson treat or whiteboard activity for the whole class. Project a game and play together!”
- The Math is FigureOutAble team highlights Leonhard Euler: The Blind Mathematician Who Saw Everything. “Every student can learn to think like a mathematician. They can persist through challenges, adjust their thinking, and experience the satisfaction of figuring something out. They do not need perfect conditions or special talent. They need instruction that invites sense making and builds confidence over time.”
- David Butler shares More wisdom from the Dodecahedron about the humanity of doing math. “I find that maths is full of emotion. Frustration, curiosity, surprise, satisfaction, pride, sadness, companionship, wonder, silliness, joy — they’re all there, sometimes in quick succession.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Quotations are from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math. Public domain art is primarily from Wikimedia Commons.
And that rounds up this edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival. I hope you enjoyed the ride.
The next installment of our carnival will open sometime during the 2nd quarter of 2026 at Nature Study Australia. Visit our blog carnival information page for more details.
“The Lesson” by Charles Chaplin, circa 1880. #Activities #AllAges #Games #MTaPPlayfulMathCarnival #Puzzles #Quotations -
When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?
We are living in the precise historical moment when the question “Is this real?” has become unanswerable in real time, and the fact that nobody seems particularly alarmed by this should alarm us all. The case study arrived this month with the force of a wartime broadcast, which is exactly what it was: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose physical whereabouts and physical condition have been the subject of intense speculation since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, appeared in a video address on March 12. Social media users immediately claimed he had six fingers on his right hand. The rumor spread to millions of viewers within hours. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newsweek scrambled to verify that the extra digit was, in fact, the hypothenar eminence, the fleshy pad at the base of the little finger, rendered ambiguous by video compression. Netanyahu’s office declared, flatly, that the Prime Minister was “fine.”
But here is the part that should keep you staring at the ceiling at three in the morning: even after the debunking, nobody believed it. When Netanyahu posted a follow-up video on March 15 showing himself at a Jerusalem cafe, ordering coffee, joking that he was “dying for coffee,” and holding up both hands to count his fingers for the camera, the conspiracy only deepened. Social media users analyzed the coffee cup for evidence of impossible fluid dynamics. They scrutinized his wedding ring. They compared his facial geometry frame by frame and declared that his face shape shifted from round to oval when he looked down. Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok, feeding on the volume of user suspicion, attached a community note to the cafe video labeling it as likely “deepfake” or “AI generated,” a determination it later reversed on a subsequent Nowruz greeting video. The coffee shop itself, The Sataf in the Jerusalem Hills, posted its own photographs confirming the visit. Reuters verified the location from archival interior imagery. None of it mattered. The suspicion is now self-sustaining.
This is new. We have moved past the familiar story of political misinformation, where a false claim circulates until it is corrected. What replaced it is an epistemological shift in which correction itself has become suspect. Video, photographic evidence, official statements, corroborating witnesses: the entire apparatus of verification is now presumed to be compromised. We have entered a period where the existence of deepfake technology has made all video evidence permanently conditional, regardless of whether any given video is actually fake. The capacity to fake has poisoned the capacity to trust what is not faked.
Consider the Iranian side of the same conflict. The Israeli disinformation detection firm Cyabra identified networks of tens of thousands of accounts that generated material receiving 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war, almost entirely pro-Iranian, and concentrated on TikTok. These networks circulated fabricated imagery showing missile strikes flattening Tel Aviv and American troops captured by Iranian forces, none of which occurred. The fog of war has always included propaganda, but the fog has never before been this photorealistic. The fabrications are no longer crude Photoshop composites that a trained eye can spot in seconds. They are rendered with sufficient fidelity that a reasonable person, scrolling quickly, would have no immediate basis for doubt.
The Netanyahu case is a wartime extreme, but the underlying dynamic is already operating in peacetime contexts that are far more intimate and far less examined. Live television broadcasts now routinely employ real-time processing that smooths skin, adjusts lighting, and enhances color in ways that alter the appearance of the people on screen. Forget the traditional makeup and lighting techniques of broadcast television, which have existed since the medium began. What we are watching now are computational interventions applied to the video signal itself, and they operate on a continuum that has no clear boundary between “enhancement” and “replacement.” When a news anchor’s wrinkles are softened in real time by a processing algorithm, at what point does the person on screen cease to be a representation of the actual person and become a representation of a computational ideal? The answer, of course, is that no one has defined the point, because defining the point would require acknowledging that the line has already been crossed.
The timeline for how this unfolds is not speculative. It is already underway, and its stages are visible if you are willing to look at them directly.
The first stage, which we passed through roughly between 2020 and 2024, was the period of detectable fakery. Deepfakes existed, but they carried tells: mismatched lighting, uncanny eye movement, hands with too many or too few fingers, audio that did not quite sync with lip movement. During this stage, the existence of deepfakes was alarming but containable. A sufficiently careful viewer could, with effort, distinguish real from generated. The six-finger test was, during this period, a reliable heuristic. It no longer is.
The second stage, which we entered in 2025 and now inhabit fully, is the period of plausible deniability in both directions. The technology has improved to the point where generated content is frequently indistinguishable from real content at normal viewing resolution and speed. But the critical feature of this stage has little to do with the quality of the fakes. The quality is a prerequisite. The real achievement is the weaponization of doubt itself. Because deepfakes are now plausible, all real video is also potentially fake, and all fake video is potentially real. This is the stage at which Netanyahu can hold up his hands and count to five and still not be believed. The doubt is no longer attached to any specific piece of evidence. It has become ambient. It is the atmosphere.
The third stage, which is arriving faster than anyone in a position of authority seems prepared to address, is the period of accepted substitution. This is the stage at which the question “Is this real?” is replaced by the question “Does it matter?” We are already seeing the leading edge of this transition. Virtual influencers with millions of followers sell products and cultivate parasocial relationships with audiences who know, on some level, that the person does not exist. Customer service interactions are conducted by chatbots that simulate empathy with increasing sophistication. Telehealth appointments are mediated through screens that already abstract the physical presence of the physician. Each of these represents a small concession, a minor substitution of the computational for the human, and each one makes the next substitution slightly easier to accept.
The fourth stage, which I believe will arrive within a decade if present trends continue unchallenged, is the period of preferential replacement. This is the stage at which people begin to prefer the generated version to the real one. The logic is seductive: the generated version is more consistent, more available, more accommodating, and more aesthetically optimized than any real person can be. A generated therapist never has a bad day. A generated teacher never loses patience. A generated romantic partner never gains weight, never ages, never says the wrong thing, never leaves. The appeal has nothing to do with indistinguishability. The generated version does not need to pass for real. It needs only to be better than real, or at least better than the parts of reality that cause friction, disappointment, and pain.
This is where the loss becomes catastrophic, and it is a loss that will not announce itself. It will arrive as convenience, then as optimization, then as the quiet replacement of difficult, unpredictable, mortal human beings with frictionless digital surrogates. The people who accept the replacement will not experience it as a loss at all. They will experience it as an improvement.
Information survives this exchange. Efficiency survives it. Even aesthetic pleasure survives it. The thing that does not survive is the specific quality of human presence that cannot be computed: the knowledge that another consciousness is regarding you, that another mortal being with its own fears and desires and confusions is making the choice to attend to you. Martin Buber called this the I-Thou relationship, the encounter between subjects that cannot be reduced to the encounter between a subject and an object. A generated face, no matter how perfect, is always an object. It is always an It. And the slow, imperceptible replacement of Thou with It across every domain of human interaction represents a spiritual impoverishment that no amount of technological sophistication can compensate for.
The Netanyahu case makes this concrete because it operates in the domain of political authority, where the stakes of presence are explicit. A head of state who cannot prove he is alive by appearing on camera has lost something fundamental about the nature of political legitimacy, which has always depended, at some level, on the leader’s physical embodiment. The king’s body was, for centuries, the metaphorical body of the state. When the body becomes optional, or interchangeable, or generatable, the concept of political authority itself becomes unmoored. If a sufficiently advanced system can generate a Netanyahu who gives speeches, responds to events, and projects confidence, and if that generated Netanyahu is indistinguishable from the real one, then the real Netanyahu becomes, in a functional sense, unnecessary. The office consumes the officer.
And here is the trap that no one operating inside this logic has thought through to its end: the fakery, once deployed, must eventually collide with the truth, and the collision destroys the credibility of every previous communication. If Netanyahu is alive and well, Israel will at some point have to produce him in a setting that satisfies even the most hostile skeptic, and at that moment, every algorithmically smoothed video, every carefully staged cafe visit, every broadcast conducted via video link rather than in the physical presence of journalists becomes retroactive evidence of a government that chose simulation over transparency during wartime. The question will no longer be “Was he dead?” but “Why did you make it so easy to believe he might be?” If, on the other hand, Netanyahu was in fact killed or incapacitated, then every video released after that event is a state-produced fabrication, and the Israeli government will have to explain why it fed generated imagery of a living leader to its own citizens and to the world while conducting a war in his name. Either outcome is devastating, because both outcomes reveal the same underlying choice: the decision to substitute a generated image for an accountable human presence. The lie, once constructed, offers no clean exit. You cannot quietly stop using a generated version of a leader and resume using the real one without admitting that the generated version existed. You cannot announce the leader’s death after weeks of generated appearances without admitting that the state lied about his survival. The technology that made the deception possible also makes the unwinding of the deception impossible, because every frame of every video released during the period of ambiguity is now permanently suspect. This is the structural problem with institutional fakery that no amount of technical sophistication can solve: reality always collects what it is owed, and the interest compounds.
But this dynamic does not stop at heads of state. It extends to every relationship mediated by a screen, which is to say, in 2026, nearly every relationship. If your doctor appears on a telehealth screen and you cannot be certain whether you are speaking to a human physician or a generated avatar trained on that physician’s mannerisms and medical knowledge, then the bond between patient and healer has been hollowed out. If your child’s teacher conducts class through a video feed that may or may not be running real-time enhancement or substitution, then the trust between student and mentor has been corrupted at its source. If your elderly parent’s weekly video call with you is, unbeknownst to you, mediated by a system that smooths their tremor and brightens their complexion to spare you worry, then the intimacy between parent and child has been overwritten by an act of tenderness, and the tenderness is what makes it worse.
Will we care? That is the question that matters most, and I suspect the honest answer is that most people will not, at least not in the way that caring requires. Caring, in this context, means insisting on the real even when the real is less pleasant, less convenient, and less optimized than the alternative. It means choosing the trembling hand over the steady avatar. It means tolerating the wrinkles, the bad lighting, the awkward pauses, the six-fingered ambiguity of actual human presence captured by imperfect technology. It means understanding that the imperfections are evidence of life, markers of the irreducible difference between a person and a performance.
The people who will care are the people who already understand that beauty, meaning, and truth are inseparable from vulnerability, impermanence, and risk. They are the people who prefer a live theater performance with a missed cue to a flawless film, who prefer a handwritten letter with a misspelling to a generated email with perfect grammar, who prefer the face of a friend aging in real time to a photograph retouched into permanent youth. These people will be, increasingly, a minority. They will be regarded as eccentrics, romantics, Luddites, people who refuse to accept improvement.
They will also be the last people who know what it means to be in the presence of another human being. And when they are gone, the knowledge will go with them, because it is not the kind of knowledge that can be stored or transmitted or generated. It is the kind of knowledge that can only be lived.
#ai #cyabra #fakery #israel #netanyahu #networks #politics #reality #snopes #video #virtual #war -
When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?
We are living in the precise historical moment when the question “Is this real?” has become unanswerable in real time, and the fact that nobody seems particularly alarmed by this should alarm us all. The case study arrived this month with the force of a wartime broadcast, which is exactly what it was: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose physical whereabouts and physical condition have been the subject of intense speculation since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, appeared in a video address on March 12. Social media users immediately claimed he had six fingers on his right hand. The rumor spread to millions of viewers within hours. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newsweek scrambled to verify that the extra digit was, in fact, the hypothenar eminence, the fleshy pad at the base of the little finger, rendered ambiguous by video compression. Netanyahu’s office declared, flatly, that the Prime Minister was “fine.”
But here is the part that should keep you staring at the ceiling at three in the morning: even after the debunking, nobody believed it. When Netanyahu posted a follow-up video on March 15 showing himself at a Jerusalem cafe, ordering coffee, joking that he was “dying for coffee,” and holding up both hands to count his fingers for the camera, the conspiracy only deepened. Social media users analyzed the coffee cup for evidence of impossible fluid dynamics. They scrutinized his wedding ring. They compared his facial geometry frame by frame and declared that his face shape shifted from round to oval when he looked down. Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok, feeding on the volume of user suspicion, attached a community note to the cafe video labeling it as likely “deepfake” or “AI generated,” a determination it later reversed on a subsequent Nowruz greeting video. The coffee shop itself, The Sataf in the Jerusalem Hills, posted its own photographs confirming the visit. Reuters verified the location from archival interior imagery. None of it mattered. The suspicion is now self-sustaining.
This is new. We have moved past the familiar story of political misinformation, where a false claim circulates until it is corrected. What replaced it is an epistemological shift in which correction itself has become suspect. Video, photographic evidence, official statements, corroborating witnesses: the entire apparatus of verification is now presumed to be compromised. We have entered a period where the existence of deepfake technology has made all video evidence permanently conditional, regardless of whether any given video is actually fake. The capacity to fake has poisoned the capacity to trust what is not faked.
Consider the Iranian side of the same conflict. The Israeli disinformation detection firm Cyabra identified networks of tens of thousands of accounts that generated material receiving 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war, almost entirely pro-Iranian, and concentrated on TikTok. These networks circulated fabricated imagery showing missile strikes flattening Tel Aviv and American troops captured by Iranian forces, none of which occurred. The fog of war has always included propaganda, but the fog has never before been this photorealistic. The fabrications are no longer crude Photoshop composites that a trained eye can spot in seconds. They are rendered with sufficient fidelity that a reasonable person, scrolling quickly, would have no immediate basis for doubt.
The Netanyahu case is a wartime extreme, but the underlying dynamic is already operating in peacetime contexts that are far more intimate and far less examined. Live television broadcasts now routinely employ real-time processing that smooths skin, adjusts lighting, and enhances color in ways that alter the appearance of the people on screen. Forget the traditional makeup and lighting techniques of broadcast television, which have existed since the medium began. What we are watching now are computational interventions applied to the video signal itself, and they operate on a continuum that has no clear boundary between “enhancement” and “replacement.” When a news anchor’s wrinkles are softened in real time by a processing algorithm, at what point does the person on screen cease to be a representation of the actual person and become a representation of a computational ideal? The answer, of course, is that no one has defined the point, because defining the point would require acknowledging that the line has already been crossed.
The timeline for how this unfolds is not speculative. It is already underway, and its stages are visible if you are willing to look at them directly.
The first stage, which we passed through roughly between 2020 and 2024, was the period of detectable fakery. Deepfakes existed, but they carried tells: mismatched lighting, uncanny eye movement, hands with too many or too few fingers, audio that did not quite sync with lip movement. During this stage, the existence of deepfakes was alarming but containable. A sufficiently careful viewer could, with effort, distinguish real from generated. The six-finger test was, during this period, a reliable heuristic. It no longer is.
The second stage, which we entered in 2025 and now inhabit fully, is the period of plausible deniability in both directions. The technology has improved to the point where generated content is frequently indistinguishable from real content at normal viewing resolution and speed. But the critical feature of this stage has little to do with the quality of the fakes. The quality is a prerequisite. The real achievement is the weaponization of doubt itself. Because deepfakes are now plausible, all real video is also potentially fake, and all fake video is potentially real. This is the stage at which Netanyahu can hold up his hands and count to five and still not be believed. The doubt is no longer attached to any specific piece of evidence. It has become ambient. It is the atmosphere.
The third stage, which is arriving faster than anyone in a position of authority seems prepared to address, is the period of accepted substitution. This is the stage at which the question “Is this real?” is replaced by the question “Does it matter?” We are already seeing the leading edge of this transition. Virtual influencers with millions of followers sell products and cultivate parasocial relationships with audiences who know, on some level, that the person does not exist. Customer service interactions are conducted by chatbots that simulate empathy with increasing sophistication. Telehealth appointments are mediated through screens that already abstract the physical presence of the physician. Each of these represents a small concession, a minor substitution of the computational for the human, and each one makes the next substitution slightly easier to accept.
The fourth stage, which I believe will arrive within a decade if present trends continue unchallenged, is the period of preferential replacement. This is the stage at which people begin to prefer the generated version to the real one. The logic is seductive: the generated version is more consistent, more available, more accommodating, and more aesthetically optimized than any real person can be. A generated therapist never has a bad day. A generated teacher never loses patience. A generated romantic partner never gains weight, never ages, never says the wrong thing, never leaves. The appeal has nothing to do with indistinguishability. The generated version does not need to pass for real. It needs only to be better than real, or at least better than the parts of reality that cause friction, disappointment, and pain.
This is where the loss becomes catastrophic, and it is a loss that will not announce itself. It will arrive as convenience, then as optimization, then as the quiet replacement of difficult, unpredictable, mortal human beings with frictionless digital surrogates. The people who accept the replacement will not experience it as a loss at all. They will experience it as an improvement.
Information survives this exchange. Efficiency survives it. Even aesthetic pleasure survives it. The thing that does not survive is the specific quality of human presence that cannot be computed: the knowledge that another consciousness is regarding you, that another mortal being with its own fears and desires and confusions is making the choice to attend to you. Martin Buber called this the I-Thou relationship, the encounter between subjects that cannot be reduced to the encounter between a subject and an object. A generated face, no matter how perfect, is always an object. It is always an It. And the slow, imperceptible replacement of Thou with It across every domain of human interaction represents a spiritual impoverishment that no amount of technological sophistication can compensate for.
The Netanyahu case makes this concrete because it operates in the domain of political authority, where the stakes of presence are explicit. A head of state who cannot prove he is alive by appearing on camera has lost something fundamental about the nature of political legitimacy, which has always depended, at some level, on the leader’s physical embodiment. The king’s body was, for centuries, the metaphorical body of the state. When the body becomes optional, or interchangeable, or generatable, the concept of political authority itself becomes unmoored. If a sufficiently advanced system can generate a Netanyahu who gives speeches, responds to events, and projects confidence, and if that generated Netanyahu is indistinguishable from the real one, then the real Netanyahu becomes, in a functional sense, unnecessary. The office consumes the officer.
And here is the trap that no one operating inside this logic has thought through to its end: the fakery, once deployed, must eventually collide with the truth, and the collision destroys the credibility of every previous communication. If Netanyahu is alive and well, Israel will at some point have to produce him in a setting that satisfies even the most hostile skeptic, and at that moment, every algorithmically smoothed video, every carefully staged cafe visit, every broadcast conducted via video link rather than in the physical presence of journalists becomes retroactive evidence of a government that chose simulation over transparency during wartime. The question will no longer be “Was he dead?” but “Why did you make it so easy to believe he might be?” If, on the other hand, Netanyahu was in fact killed or incapacitated, then every video released after that event is a state-produced fabrication, and the Israeli government will have to explain why it fed generated imagery of a living leader to its own citizens and to the world while conducting a war in his name. Either outcome is devastating, because both outcomes reveal the same underlying choice: the decision to substitute a generated image for an accountable human presence. The lie, once constructed, offers no clean exit. You cannot quietly stop using a generated version of a leader and resume using the real one without admitting that the generated version existed. You cannot announce the leader’s death after weeks of generated appearances without admitting that the state lied about his survival. The technology that made the deception possible also makes the unwinding of the deception impossible, because every frame of every video released during the period of ambiguity is now permanently suspect. This is the structural problem with institutional fakery that no amount of technical sophistication can solve: reality always collects what it is owed, and the interest compounds.
But this dynamic does not stop at heads of state. It extends to every relationship mediated by a screen, which is to say, in 2026, nearly every relationship. If your doctor appears on a telehealth screen and you cannot be certain whether you are speaking to a human physician or a generated avatar trained on that physician’s mannerisms and medical knowledge, then the bond between patient and healer has been hollowed out. If your child’s teacher conducts class through a video feed that may or may not be running real-time enhancement or substitution, then the trust between student and mentor has been corrupted at its source. If your elderly parent’s weekly video call with you is, unbeknownst to you, mediated by a system that smooths their tremor and brightens their complexion to spare you worry, then the intimacy between parent and child has been overwritten by an act of tenderness, and the tenderness is what makes it worse.
Will we care? That is the question that matters most, and I suspect the honest answer is that most people will not, at least not in the way that caring requires. Caring, in this context, means insisting on the real even when the real is less pleasant, less convenient, and less optimized than the alternative. It means choosing the trembling hand over the steady avatar. It means tolerating the wrinkles, the bad lighting, the awkward pauses, the six-fingered ambiguity of actual human presence captured by imperfect technology. It means understanding that the imperfections are evidence of life, markers of the irreducible difference between a person and a performance.
The people who will care are the people who already understand that beauty, meaning, and truth are inseparable from vulnerability, impermanence, and risk. They are the people who prefer a live theater performance with a missed cue to a flawless film, who prefer a handwritten letter with a misspelling to a generated email with perfect grammar, who prefer the face of a friend aging in real time to a photograph retouched into permanent youth. These people will be, increasingly, a minority. They will be regarded as eccentrics, romantics, Luddites, people who refuse to accept improvement.
They will also be the last people who know what it means to be in the presence of another human being. And when they are gone, the knowledge will go with them, because it is not the kind of knowledge that can be stored or transmitted or generated. It is the kind of knowledge that can only be lived.
#ai #cyabra #fakery #israel #netanyahu #networks #politics #reality #snopes #video #virtual #war -
When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?
We are living in the precise historical moment when the question “Is this real?” has become unanswerable in real time, and the fact that nobody seems particularly alarmed by this should alarm us all. The case study arrived this month with the force of a wartime broadcast, which is exactly what it was: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose physical whereabouts and physical condition have been the subject of intense speculation since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, appeared in a video address on March 12. Social media users immediately claimed he had six fingers on his right hand. The rumor spread to millions of viewers within hours. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newsweek scrambled to verify that the extra digit was, in fact, the hypothenar eminence, the fleshy pad at the base of the little finger, rendered ambiguous by video compression. Netanyahu’s office declared, flatly, that the Prime Minister was “fine.”
But here is the part that should keep you staring at the ceiling at three in the morning: even after the debunking, nobody believed it. When Netanyahu posted a follow-up video on March 15 showing himself at a Jerusalem cafe, ordering coffee, joking that he was “dying for coffee,” and holding up both hands to count his fingers for the camera, the conspiracy only deepened. Social media users analyzed the coffee cup for evidence of impossible fluid dynamics. They scrutinized his wedding ring. They compared his facial geometry frame by frame and declared that his face shape shifted from round to oval when he looked down. Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok, feeding on the volume of user suspicion, attached a community note to the cafe video labeling it as likely “deepfake” or “AI generated,” a determination it later reversed on a subsequent Nowruz greeting video. The coffee shop itself, The Sataf in the Jerusalem Hills, posted its own photographs confirming the visit. Reuters verified the location from archival interior imagery. None of it mattered. The suspicion is now self-sustaining.
This is new. We have moved past the familiar story of political misinformation, where a false claim circulates until it is corrected. What replaced it is an epistemological shift in which correction itself has become suspect. Video, photographic evidence, official statements, corroborating witnesses: the entire apparatus of verification is now presumed to be compromised. We have entered a period where the existence of deepfake technology has made all video evidence permanently conditional, regardless of whether any given video is actually fake. The capacity to fake has poisoned the capacity to trust what is not faked.
Consider the Iranian side of the same conflict. The Israeli disinformation detection firm Cyabra identified networks of tens of thousands of accounts that generated material receiving 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war, almost entirely pro-Iranian, and concentrated on TikTok. These networks circulated fabricated imagery showing missile strikes flattening Tel Aviv and American troops captured by Iranian forces, none of which occurred. The fog of war has always included propaganda, but the fog has never before been this photorealistic. The fabrications are no longer crude Photoshop composites that a trained eye can spot in seconds. They are rendered with sufficient fidelity that a reasonable person, scrolling quickly, would have no immediate basis for doubt.
The Netanyahu case is a wartime extreme, but the underlying dynamic is already operating in peacetime contexts that are far more intimate and far less examined. Live television broadcasts now routinely employ real-time processing that smooths skin, adjusts lighting, and enhances color in ways that alter the appearance of the people on screen. Forget the traditional makeup and lighting techniques of broadcast television, which have existed since the medium began. What we are watching now are computational interventions applied to the video signal itself, and they operate on a continuum that has no clear boundary between “enhancement” and “replacement.” When a news anchor’s wrinkles are softened in real time by a processing algorithm, at what point does the person on screen cease to be a representation of the actual person and become a representation of a computational ideal? The answer, of course, is that no one has defined the point, because defining the point would require acknowledging that the line has already been crossed.
The timeline for how this unfolds is not speculative. It is already underway, and its stages are visible if you are willing to look at them directly.
The first stage, which we passed through roughly between 2020 and 2024, was the period of detectable fakery. Deepfakes existed, but they carried tells: mismatched lighting, uncanny eye movement, hands with too many or too few fingers, audio that did not quite sync with lip movement. During this stage, the existence of deepfakes was alarming but containable. A sufficiently careful viewer could, with effort, distinguish real from generated. The six-finger test was, during this period, a reliable heuristic. It no longer is.
The second stage, which we entered in 2025 and now inhabit fully, is the period of plausible deniability in both directions. The technology has improved to the point where generated content is frequently indistinguishable from real content at normal viewing resolution and speed. But the critical feature of this stage has little to do with the quality of the fakes. The quality is a prerequisite. The real achievement is the weaponization of doubt itself. Because deepfakes are now plausible, all real video is also potentially fake, and all fake video is potentially real. This is the stage at which Netanyahu can hold up his hands and count to five and still not be believed. The doubt is no longer attached to any specific piece of evidence. It has become ambient. It is the atmosphere.
The third stage, which is arriving faster than anyone in a position of authority seems prepared to address, is the period of accepted substitution. This is the stage at which the question “Is this real?” is replaced by the question “Does it matter?” We are already seeing the leading edge of this transition. Virtual influencers with millions of followers sell products and cultivate parasocial relationships with audiences who know, on some level, that the person does not exist. Customer service interactions are conducted by chatbots that simulate empathy with increasing sophistication. Telehealth appointments are mediated through screens that already abstract the physical presence of the physician. Each of these represents a small concession, a minor substitution of the computational for the human, and each one makes the next substitution slightly easier to accept.
The fourth stage, which I believe will arrive within a decade if present trends continue unchallenged, is the period of preferential replacement. This is the stage at which people begin to prefer the generated version to the real one. The logic is seductive: the generated version is more consistent, more available, more accommodating, and more aesthetically optimized than any real person can be. A generated therapist never has a bad day. A generated teacher never loses patience. A generated romantic partner never gains weight, never ages, never says the wrong thing, never leaves. The appeal has nothing to do with indistinguishability. The generated version does not need to pass for real. It needs only to be better than real, or at least better than the parts of reality that cause friction, disappointment, and pain.
This is where the loss becomes catastrophic, and it is a loss that will not announce itself. It will arrive as convenience, then as optimization, then as the quiet replacement of difficult, unpredictable, mortal human beings with frictionless digital surrogates. The people who accept the replacement will not experience it as a loss at all. They will experience it as an improvement.
Information survives this exchange. Efficiency survives it. Even aesthetic pleasure survives it. The thing that does not survive is the specific quality of human presence that cannot be computed: the knowledge that another consciousness is regarding you, that another mortal being with its own fears and desires and confusions is making the choice to attend to you. Martin Buber called this the I-Thou relationship, the encounter between subjects that cannot be reduced to the encounter between a subject and an object. A generated face, no matter how perfect, is always an object. It is always an It. And the slow, imperceptible replacement of Thou with It across every domain of human interaction represents a spiritual impoverishment that no amount of technological sophistication can compensate for.
The Netanyahu case makes this concrete because it operates in the domain of political authority, where the stakes of presence are explicit. A head of state who cannot prove he is alive by appearing on camera has lost something fundamental about the nature of political legitimacy, which has always depended, at some level, on the leader’s physical embodiment. The king’s body was, for centuries, the metaphorical body of the state. When the body becomes optional, or interchangeable, or generatable, the concept of political authority itself becomes unmoored. If a sufficiently advanced system can generate a Netanyahu who gives speeches, responds to events, and projects confidence, and if that generated Netanyahu is indistinguishable from the real one, then the real Netanyahu becomes, in a functional sense, unnecessary. The office consumes the officer.
And here is the trap that no one operating inside this logic has thought through to its end: the fakery, once deployed, must eventually collide with the truth, and the collision destroys the credibility of every previous communication. If Netanyahu is alive and well, Israel will at some point have to produce him in a setting that satisfies even the most hostile skeptic, and at that moment, every algorithmically smoothed video, every carefully staged cafe visit, every broadcast conducted via video link rather than in the physical presence of journalists becomes retroactive evidence of a government that chose simulation over transparency during wartime. The question will no longer be “Was he dead?” but “Why did you make it so easy to believe he might be?” If, on the other hand, Netanyahu was in fact killed or incapacitated, then every video released after that event is a state-produced fabrication, and the Israeli government will have to explain why it fed generated imagery of a living leader to its own citizens and to the world while conducting a war in his name. Either outcome is devastating, because both outcomes reveal the same underlying choice: the decision to substitute a generated image for an accountable human presence. The lie, once constructed, offers no clean exit. You cannot quietly stop using a generated version of a leader and resume using the real one without admitting that the generated version existed. You cannot announce the leader’s death after weeks of generated appearances without admitting that the state lied about his survival. The technology that made the deception possible also makes the unwinding of the deception impossible, because every frame of every video released during the period of ambiguity is now permanently suspect. This is the structural problem with institutional fakery that no amount of technical sophistication can solve: reality always collects what it is owed, and the interest compounds.
But this dynamic does not stop at heads of state. It extends to every relationship mediated by a screen, which is to say, in 2026, nearly every relationship. If your doctor appears on a telehealth screen and you cannot be certain whether you are speaking to a human physician or a generated avatar trained on that physician’s mannerisms and medical knowledge, then the bond between patient and healer has been hollowed out. If your child’s teacher conducts class through a video feed that may or may not be running real-time enhancement or substitution, then the trust between student and mentor has been corrupted at its source. If your elderly parent’s weekly video call with you is, unbeknownst to you, mediated by a system that smooths their tremor and brightens their complexion to spare you worry, then the intimacy between parent and child has been overwritten by an act of tenderness, and the tenderness is what makes it worse.
Will we care? That is the question that matters most, and I suspect the honest answer is that most people will not, at least not in the way that caring requires. Caring, in this context, means insisting on the real even when the real is less pleasant, less convenient, and less optimized than the alternative. It means choosing the trembling hand over the steady avatar. It means tolerating the wrinkles, the bad lighting, the awkward pauses, the six-fingered ambiguity of actual human presence captured by imperfect technology. It means understanding that the imperfections are evidence of life, markers of the irreducible difference between a person and a performance.
The people who will care are the people who already understand that beauty, meaning, and truth are inseparable from vulnerability, impermanence, and risk. They are the people who prefer a live theater performance with a missed cue to a flawless film, who prefer a handwritten letter with a misspelling to a generated email with perfect grammar, who prefer the face of a friend aging in real time to a photograph retouched into permanent youth. These people will be, increasingly, a minority. They will be regarded as eccentrics, romantics, Luddites, people who refuse to accept improvement.
They will also be the last people who know what it means to be in the presence of another human being. And when they are gone, the knowledge will go with them, because it is not the kind of knowledge that can be stored or transmitted or generated. It is the kind of knowledge that can only be lived.
#ai #cyabra #fakery #israel #netanyahu #networks #politics #reality #snopes #video #virtual #war -
When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?
We are living in the precise historical moment when the question “Is this real?” has become unanswerable in real time, and the fact that nobody seems particularly alarmed by this should alarm us all. The case study arrived this month with the force of a wartime broadcast, which is exactly what it was: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose physical whereabouts and physical condition have been the subject of intense speculation since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, appeared in a video address on March 12. Social media users immediately claimed he had six fingers on his right hand. The rumor spread to millions of viewers within hours. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newsweek scrambled to verify that the extra digit was, in fact, the hypothenar eminence, the fleshy pad at the base of the little finger, rendered ambiguous by video compression. Netanyahu’s office declared, flatly, that the Prime Minister was “fine.”
But here is the part that should keep you staring at the ceiling at three in the morning: even after the debunking, nobody believed it. When Netanyahu posted a follow-up video on March 15 showing himself at a Jerusalem cafe, ordering coffee, joking that he was “dying for coffee,” and holding up both hands to count his fingers for the camera, the conspiracy only deepened. Social media users analyzed the coffee cup for evidence of impossible fluid dynamics. They scrutinized his wedding ring. They compared his facial geometry frame by frame and declared that his face shape shifted from round to oval when he looked down. Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok, feeding on the volume of user suspicion, attached a community note to the cafe video labeling it as likely “deepfake” or “AI generated,” a determination it later reversed on a subsequent Nowruz greeting video. The coffee shop itself, The Sataf in the Jerusalem Hills, posted its own photographs confirming the visit. Reuters verified the location from archival interior imagery. None of it mattered. The suspicion is now self-sustaining.
This is new. We have moved past the familiar story of political misinformation, where a false claim circulates until it is corrected. What replaced it is an epistemological shift in which correction itself has become suspect. Video, photographic evidence, official statements, corroborating witnesses: the entire apparatus of verification is now presumed to be compromised. We have entered a period where the existence of deepfake technology has made all video evidence permanently conditional, regardless of whether any given video is actually fake. The capacity to fake has poisoned the capacity to trust what is not faked.
Consider the Iranian side of the same conflict. The Israeli disinformation detection firm Cyabra identified networks of tens of thousands of accounts that generated material receiving 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war, almost entirely pro-Iranian, and concentrated on TikTok. These networks circulated fabricated imagery showing missile strikes flattening Tel Aviv and American troops captured by Iranian forces, none of which occurred. The fog of war has always included propaganda, but the fog has never before been this photorealistic. The fabrications are no longer crude Photoshop composites that a trained eye can spot in seconds. They are rendered with sufficient fidelity that a reasonable person, scrolling quickly, would have no immediate basis for doubt.
The Netanyahu case is a wartime extreme, but the underlying dynamic is already operating in peacetime contexts that are far more intimate and far less examined. Live television broadcasts now routinely employ real-time processing that smooths skin, adjusts lighting, and enhances color in ways that alter the appearance of the people on screen. Forget the traditional makeup and lighting techniques of broadcast television, which have existed since the medium began. What we are watching now are computational interventions applied to the video signal itself, and they operate on a continuum that has no clear boundary between “enhancement” and “replacement.” When a news anchor’s wrinkles are softened in real time by a processing algorithm, at what point does the person on screen cease to be a representation of the actual person and become a representation of a computational ideal? The answer, of course, is that no one has defined the point, because defining the point would require acknowledging that the line has already been crossed.
The timeline for how this unfolds is not speculative. It is already underway, and its stages are visible if you are willing to look at them directly.
The first stage, which we passed through roughly between 2020 and 2024, was the period of detectable fakery. Deepfakes existed, but they carried tells: mismatched lighting, uncanny eye movement, hands with too many or too few fingers, audio that did not quite sync with lip movement. During this stage, the existence of deepfakes was alarming but containable. A sufficiently careful viewer could, with effort, distinguish real from generated. The six-finger test was, during this period, a reliable heuristic. It no longer is.
The second stage, which we entered in 2025 and now inhabit fully, is the period of plausible deniability in both directions. The technology has improved to the point where generated content is frequently indistinguishable from real content at normal viewing resolution and speed. But the critical feature of this stage has little to do with the quality of the fakes. The quality is a prerequisite. The real achievement is the weaponization of doubt itself. Because deepfakes are now plausible, all real video is also potentially fake, and all fake video is potentially real. This is the stage at which Netanyahu can hold up his hands and count to five and still not be believed. The doubt is no longer attached to any specific piece of evidence. It has become ambient. It is the atmosphere.
The third stage, which is arriving faster than anyone in a position of authority seems prepared to address, is the period of accepted substitution. This is the stage at which the question “Is this real?” is replaced by the question “Does it matter?” We are already seeing the leading edge of this transition. Virtual influencers with millions of followers sell products and cultivate parasocial relationships with audiences who know, on some level, that the person does not exist. Customer service interactions are conducted by chatbots that simulate empathy with increasing sophistication. Telehealth appointments are mediated through screens that already abstract the physical presence of the physician. Each of these represents a small concession, a minor substitution of the computational for the human, and each one makes the next substitution slightly easier to accept.
The fourth stage, which I believe will arrive within a decade if present trends continue unchallenged, is the period of preferential replacement. This is the stage at which people begin to prefer the generated version to the real one. The logic is seductive: the generated version is more consistent, more available, more accommodating, and more aesthetically optimized than any real person can be. A generated therapist never has a bad day. A generated teacher never loses patience. A generated romantic partner never gains weight, never ages, never says the wrong thing, never leaves. The appeal has nothing to do with indistinguishability. The generated version does not need to pass for real. It needs only to be better than real, or at least better than the parts of reality that cause friction, disappointment, and pain.
This is where the loss becomes catastrophic, and it is a loss that will not announce itself. It will arrive as convenience, then as optimization, then as the quiet replacement of difficult, unpredictable, mortal human beings with frictionless digital surrogates. The people who accept the replacement will not experience it as a loss at all. They will experience it as an improvement.
Information survives this exchange. Efficiency survives it. Even aesthetic pleasure survives it. The thing that does not survive is the specific quality of human presence that cannot be computed: the knowledge that another consciousness is regarding you, that another mortal being with its own fears and desires and confusions is making the choice to attend to you. Martin Buber called this the I-Thou relationship, the encounter between subjects that cannot be reduced to the encounter between a subject and an object. A generated face, no matter how perfect, is always an object. It is always an It. And the slow, imperceptible replacement of Thou with It across every domain of human interaction represents a spiritual impoverishment that no amount of technological sophistication can compensate for.
The Netanyahu case makes this concrete because it operates in the domain of political authority, where the stakes of presence are explicit. A head of state who cannot prove he is alive by appearing on camera has lost something fundamental about the nature of political legitimacy, which has always depended, at some level, on the leader’s physical embodiment. The king’s body was, for centuries, the metaphorical body of the state. When the body becomes optional, or interchangeable, or generatable, the concept of political authority itself becomes unmoored. If a sufficiently advanced system can generate a Netanyahu who gives speeches, responds to events, and projects confidence, and if that generated Netanyahu is indistinguishable from the real one, then the real Netanyahu becomes, in a functional sense, unnecessary. The office consumes the officer.
And here is the trap that no one operating inside this logic has thought through to its end: the fakery, once deployed, must eventually collide with the truth, and the collision destroys the credibility of every previous communication. If Netanyahu is alive and well, Israel will at some point have to produce him in a setting that satisfies even the most hostile skeptic, and at that moment, every algorithmically smoothed video, every carefully staged cafe visit, every broadcast conducted via video link rather than in the physical presence of journalists becomes retroactive evidence of a government that chose simulation over transparency during wartime. The question will no longer be “Was he dead?” but “Why did you make it so easy to believe he might be?” If, on the other hand, Netanyahu was in fact killed or incapacitated, then every video released after that event is a state-produced fabrication, and the Israeli government will have to explain why it fed generated imagery of a living leader to its own citizens and to the world while conducting a war in his name. Either outcome is devastating, because both outcomes reveal the same underlying choice: the decision to substitute a generated image for an accountable human presence. The lie, once constructed, offers no clean exit. You cannot quietly stop using a generated version of a leader and resume using the real one without admitting that the generated version existed. You cannot announce the leader’s death after weeks of generated appearances without admitting that the state lied about his survival. The technology that made the deception possible also makes the unwinding of the deception impossible, because every frame of every video released during the period of ambiguity is now permanently suspect. This is the structural problem with institutional fakery that no amount of technical sophistication can solve: reality always collects what it is owed, and the interest compounds.
But this dynamic does not stop at heads of state. It extends to every relationship mediated by a screen, which is to say, in 2026, nearly every relationship. If your doctor appears on a telehealth screen and you cannot be certain whether you are speaking to a human physician or a generated avatar trained on that physician’s mannerisms and medical knowledge, then the bond between patient and healer has been hollowed out. If your child’s teacher conducts class through a video feed that may or may not be running real-time enhancement or substitution, then the trust between student and mentor has been corrupted at its source. If your elderly parent’s weekly video call with you is, unbeknownst to you, mediated by a system that smooths their tremor and brightens their complexion to spare you worry, then the intimacy between parent and child has been overwritten by an act of tenderness, and the tenderness is what makes it worse.
Will we care? That is the question that matters most, and I suspect the honest answer is that most people will not, at least not in the way that caring requires. Caring, in this context, means insisting on the real even when the real is less pleasant, less convenient, and less optimized than the alternative. It means choosing the trembling hand over the steady avatar. It means tolerating the wrinkles, the bad lighting, the awkward pauses, the six-fingered ambiguity of actual human presence captured by imperfect technology. It means understanding that the imperfections are evidence of life, markers of the irreducible difference between a person and a performance.
The people who will care are the people who already understand that beauty, meaning, and truth are inseparable from vulnerability, impermanence, and risk. They are the people who prefer a live theater performance with a missed cue to a flawless film, who prefer a handwritten letter with a misspelling to a generated email with perfect grammar, who prefer the face of a friend aging in real time to a photograph retouched into permanent youth. These people will be, increasingly, a minority. They will be regarded as eccentrics, romantics, Luddites, people who refuse to accept improvement.
They will also be the last people who know what it means to be in the presence of another human being. And when they are gone, the knowledge will go with them, because it is not the kind of knowledge that can be stored or transmitted or generated. It is the kind of knowledge that can only be lived.
#ai #cyabra #fakery #israel #netanyahu #networks #politics #reality #snopes #video #virtual #war -
When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?
We are living in the precise historical moment when the question “Is this real?” has become unanswerable in real time, and the fact that nobody seems particularly alarmed by this should alarm us all. The case study arrived this month with the force of a wartime broadcast, which is exactly what it was: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose physical whereabouts and physical condition have been the subject of intense speculation since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, appeared in a video address on March 12. Social media users immediately claimed he had six fingers on his right hand. The rumor spread to millions of viewers within hours. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newsweek scrambled to verify that the extra digit was, in fact, the hypothenar eminence, the fleshy pad at the base of the little finger, rendered ambiguous by video compression. Netanyahu’s office declared, flatly, that the Prime Minister was “fine.”
But here is the part that should keep you staring at the ceiling at three in the morning: even after the debunking, nobody believed it. When Netanyahu posted a follow-up video on March 15 showing himself at a Jerusalem cafe, ordering coffee, joking that he was “dying for coffee,” and holding up both hands to count his fingers for the camera, the conspiracy only deepened. Social media users analyzed the coffee cup for evidence of impossible fluid dynamics. They scrutinized his wedding ring. They compared his facial geometry frame by frame and declared that his face shape shifted from round to oval when he looked down. Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok, feeding on the volume of user suspicion, attached a community note to the cafe video labeling it as likely “deepfake” or “AI generated,” a determination it later reversed on a subsequent Nowruz greeting video. The coffee shop itself, The Sataf in the Jerusalem Hills, posted its own photographs confirming the visit. Reuters verified the location from archival interior imagery. None of it mattered. The suspicion is now self-sustaining.
This is new. We have moved past the familiar story of political misinformation, where a false claim circulates until it is corrected. What replaced it is an epistemological shift in which correction itself has become suspect. Video, photographic evidence, official statements, corroborating witnesses: the entire apparatus of verification is now presumed to be compromised. We have entered a period where the existence of deepfake technology has made all video evidence permanently conditional, regardless of whether any given video is actually fake. The capacity to fake has poisoned the capacity to trust what is not faked.
Consider the Iranian side of the same conflict. The Israeli disinformation detection firm Cyabra identified networks of tens of thousands of accounts that generated material receiving 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war, almost entirely pro-Iranian, and concentrated on TikTok. These networks circulated fabricated imagery showing missile strikes flattening Tel Aviv and American troops captured by Iranian forces, none of which occurred. The fog of war has always included propaganda, but the fog has never before been this photorealistic. The fabrications are no longer crude Photoshop composites that a trained eye can spot in seconds. They are rendered with sufficient fidelity that a reasonable person, scrolling quickly, would have no immediate basis for doubt.
The Netanyahu case is a wartime extreme, but the underlying dynamic is already operating in peacetime contexts that are far more intimate and far less examined. Live television broadcasts now routinely employ real-time processing that smooths skin, adjusts lighting, and enhances color in ways that alter the appearance of the people on screen. Forget the traditional makeup and lighting techniques of broadcast television, which have existed since the medium began. What we are watching now are computational interventions applied to the video signal itself, and they operate on a continuum that has no clear boundary between “enhancement” and “replacement.” When a news anchor’s wrinkles are softened in real time by a processing algorithm, at what point does the person on screen cease to be a representation of the actual person and become a representation of a computational ideal? The answer, of course, is that no one has defined the point, because defining the point would require acknowledging that the line has already been crossed.
The timeline for how this unfolds is not speculative. It is already underway, and its stages are visible if you are willing to look at them directly.
The first stage, which we passed through roughly between 2020 and 2024, was the period of detectable fakery. Deepfakes existed, but they carried tells: mismatched lighting, uncanny eye movement, hands with too many or too few fingers, audio that did not quite sync with lip movement. During this stage, the existence of deepfakes was alarming but containable. A sufficiently careful viewer could, with effort, distinguish real from generated. The six-finger test was, during this period, a reliable heuristic. It no longer is.
The second stage, which we entered in 2025 and now inhabit fully, is the period of plausible deniability in both directions. The technology has improved to the point where generated content is frequently indistinguishable from real content at normal viewing resolution and speed. But the critical feature of this stage has little to do with the quality of the fakes. The quality is a prerequisite. The real achievement is the weaponization of doubt itself. Because deepfakes are now plausible, all real video is also potentially fake, and all fake video is potentially real. This is the stage at which Netanyahu can hold up his hands and count to five and still not be believed. The doubt is no longer attached to any specific piece of evidence. It has become ambient. It is the atmosphere.
The third stage, which is arriving faster than anyone in a position of authority seems prepared to address, is the period of accepted substitution. This is the stage at which the question “Is this real?” is replaced by the question “Does it matter?” We are already seeing the leading edge of this transition. Virtual influencers with millions of followers sell products and cultivate parasocial relationships with audiences who know, on some level, that the person does not exist. Customer service interactions are conducted by chatbots that simulate empathy with increasing sophistication. Telehealth appointments are mediated through screens that already abstract the physical presence of the physician. Each of these represents a small concession, a minor substitution of the computational for the human, and each one makes the next substitution slightly easier to accept.
The fourth stage, which I believe will arrive within a decade if present trends continue unchallenged, is the period of preferential replacement. This is the stage at which people begin to prefer the generated version to the real one. The logic is seductive: the generated version is more consistent, more available, more accommodating, and more aesthetically optimized than any real person can be. A generated therapist never has a bad day. A generated teacher never loses patience. A generated romantic partner never gains weight, never ages, never says the wrong thing, never leaves. The appeal has nothing to do with indistinguishability. The generated version does not need to pass for real. It needs only to be better than real, or at least better than the parts of reality that cause friction, disappointment, and pain.
This is where the loss becomes catastrophic, and it is a loss that will not announce itself. It will arrive as convenience, then as optimization, then as the quiet replacement of difficult, unpredictable, mortal human beings with frictionless digital surrogates. The people who accept the replacement will not experience it as a loss at all. They will experience it as an improvement.
Information survives this exchange. Efficiency survives it. Even aesthetic pleasure survives it. The thing that does not survive is the specific quality of human presence that cannot be computed: the knowledge that another consciousness is regarding you, that another mortal being with its own fears and desires and confusions is making the choice to attend to you. Martin Buber called this the I-Thou relationship, the encounter between subjects that cannot be reduced to the encounter between a subject and an object. A generated face, no matter how perfect, is always an object. It is always an It. And the slow, imperceptible replacement of Thou with It across every domain of human interaction represents a spiritual impoverishment that no amount of technological sophistication can compensate for.
The Netanyahu case makes this concrete because it operates in the domain of political authority, where the stakes of presence are explicit. A head of state who cannot prove he is alive by appearing on camera has lost something fundamental about the nature of political legitimacy, which has always depended, at some level, on the leader’s physical embodiment. The king’s body was, for centuries, the metaphorical body of the state. When the body becomes optional, or interchangeable, or generatable, the concept of political authority itself becomes unmoored. If a sufficiently advanced system can generate a Netanyahu who gives speeches, responds to events, and projects confidence, and if that generated Netanyahu is indistinguishable from the real one, then the real Netanyahu becomes, in a functional sense, unnecessary. The office consumes the officer.
And here is the trap that no one operating inside this logic has thought through to its end: the fakery, once deployed, must eventually collide with the truth, and the collision destroys the credibility of every previous communication. If Netanyahu is alive and well, Israel will at some point have to produce him in a setting that satisfies even the most hostile skeptic, and at that moment, every algorithmically smoothed video, every carefully staged cafe visit, every broadcast conducted via video link rather than in the physical presence of journalists becomes retroactive evidence of a government that chose simulation over transparency during wartime. The question will no longer be “Was he dead?” but “Why did you make it so easy to believe he might be?” If, on the other hand, Netanyahu was in fact killed or incapacitated, then every video released after that event is a state-produced fabrication, and the Israeli government will have to explain why it fed generated imagery of a living leader to its own citizens and to the world while conducting a war in his name. Either outcome is devastating, because both outcomes reveal the same underlying choice: the decision to substitute a generated image for an accountable human presence. The lie, once constructed, offers no clean exit. You cannot quietly stop using a generated version of a leader and resume using the real one without admitting that the generated version existed. You cannot announce the leader’s death after weeks of generated appearances without admitting that the state lied about his survival. The technology that made the deception possible also makes the unwinding of the deception impossible, because every frame of every video released during the period of ambiguity is now permanently suspect. This is the structural problem with institutional fakery that no amount of technical sophistication can solve: reality always collects what it is owed, and the interest compounds.
But this dynamic does not stop at heads of state. It extends to every relationship mediated by a screen, which is to say, in 2026, nearly every relationship. If your doctor appears on a telehealth screen and you cannot be certain whether you are speaking to a human physician or a generated avatar trained on that physician’s mannerisms and medical knowledge, then the bond between patient and healer has been hollowed out. If your child’s teacher conducts class through a video feed that may or may not be running real-time enhancement or substitution, then the trust between student and mentor has been corrupted at its source. If your elderly parent’s weekly video call with you is, unbeknownst to you, mediated by a system that smooths their tremor and brightens their complexion to spare you worry, then the intimacy between parent and child has been overwritten by an act of tenderness, and the tenderness is what makes it worse.
Will we care? That is the question that matters most, and I suspect the honest answer is that most people will not, at least not in the way that caring requires. Caring, in this context, means insisting on the real even when the real is less pleasant, less convenient, and less optimized than the alternative. It means choosing the trembling hand over the steady avatar. It means tolerating the wrinkles, the bad lighting, the awkward pauses, the six-fingered ambiguity of actual human presence captured by imperfect technology. It means understanding that the imperfections are evidence of life, markers of the irreducible difference between a person and a performance.
The people who will care are the people who already understand that beauty, meaning, and truth are inseparable from vulnerability, impermanence, and risk. They are the people who prefer a live theater performance with a missed cue to a flawless film, who prefer a handwritten letter with a misspelling to a generated email with perfect grammar, who prefer the face of a friend aging in real time to a photograph retouched into permanent youth. These people will be, increasingly, a minority. They will be regarded as eccentrics, romantics, Luddites, people who refuse to accept improvement.
They will also be the last people who know what it means to be in the presence of another human being. And when they are gone, the knowledge will go with them, because it is not the kind of knowledge that can be stored or transmitted or generated. It is the kind of knowledge that can only be lived.
#ai #cyabra #fakery #israel #netanyahu #networks #politics #reality #snopes #video #virtual #war -
Happy 100th birthday, György Kurtág!
On 19 February, György Kurtág hopes to celebrate his 100th birthday. That very day the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ will organise the concert Happy 100 György!, featuring music by Kurtág himself and kindred spirits, as well as three new pieces by Dutch composers. The day after, Die Stechardin, his second opera, will premiere in Budapest.
György Kurtág, the Hungarian grandmaster of incisive aphorisms (Budapest, 1926), is no stranger in the Netherlands. As early as the 1970s, pianist Geoffrey Madge and the Residentie Orkest championed his existentialist music. Yet he rose to true fame in the 1990s, when Reinbert de Leeuw started advocating his music, dedicating many memorable concerts to the amiable composer, with whom he forged a close bond.
In 2016, the Muziekgebouw honoured Kurtág on the occasion of his 90th birthday. During a festive portrait concert, De Leeuw conducted the Asko|Schönberg through works by Webern (a great inspiration for Kurtág), György Ligeti, his namesake and compatriot, and works by Kurtág himself. In the birthday concert on 19 February 2026 again a work by Ligeti will be played: his groundbreaking Poème Symphonique, whose music consists of the ticking of 100 metronomes wound to different tempos.
Kurtág and Reinbert de Leeuw
In 2016, Kurtág and his inseparable wife Márta were too frail to travel from Budapest to Amsterdam for the concert. However, they did appear in a preview of the documentary The Three Kurtágs, made by their niece Judit. This was unique: György and Márta Kurtág often performed as a piano duo, but they never became public figures like Ligeti; they lived a secluded life.
Sitting comfortably together on their sofa, the two discuss the progress of the CD recordings of a large part of Kurtág’s work, which Reinbert de Leeuw has been working on since 2013. They charmingly bounce off each other in a lively conversation, in which a sentence started by one is naturally finished by the other – as if they were literally speaking with one voice. Their love for each other and for De Leeuw is palpable.
They regret not being able to be physically present during the recordings, but because Reinbert plays these back over the phone after each session and also visits them regularly in person, they are still able to comment on them. The notoriously critical Kurtág, who sometimes calls out ‘Nein, nicht so!’ when Reinbert merely raises his arms to begin a piece, is now full of praise. ‘It’s as if they recorded the music in their mother tongue,’ he says with shining eyes.
Musical mother tongue
The three-disc CD box containing all of Kurtág’s conducted choral and ensemble works was released a year later. In the accompanying booklet Kurtág gratefully refers to it as “a royal gift”. That is no exaggeration, because on this release from the German label ECM, Reinbert de Leeuw once again surpassed himself. With his relentless determination to get to the heart of the matter, he leads Asko|Schönberg, Groot Omroepkoor, Cappella Amsterdam and a selection of soloists to intense performances, that allow Kurtág’s soul-piercing sounds to penetrate to the very core.
This unique historical document is still available for purchase for less than forty euros – a bargain. Kurtág’s suggestion that the musicians and singers perform his music as if it were their own mother tongue is no idle chatter. Language is extremely important to the sensitive Hungarian composer – in more ways than one.
He often refers to Béla Bartók as “my musical mother tongue”. But he has created his own unique grammar from poignant, aphoristic bursts of sound that spring from a deep inner necessity. He is a great lover of poetry and literature: of the eleven pieces on the compilation, seven are vocal. Kurtág even learned Russian so that he could read Dostoevsky; three cycles on the CD box set are in this language.
The best known of these is Messages from the Late Miss R.V. Trussova, with which he made his breakthrough in Western Europe in the 1980s. In 21 miniatures, a soprano sings of bitter experiences of love. The longest song lasts 3 minutes, the shortest 22 seconds. In that short span of time, Kurtág sketches an entire novel. Unfortunately none of the three vocal cycles will be performed in the concert Happy 100 György! on 19 February. Het Muziek, successor to Asko|Schönberg, will however perform Akrostichon – Wortspiel for soprano and ensemble by Unsuk Chin.
Kurtág’s first opera causes a sensation
In 2016 the 90-year-old Kurtág was still working on his first and so far only opera, Fin de Partie (Endgame), based on Samuel Beckett’s play of the same name. He had seen it in Paris in 1957 on Ligeti’s recommendation and called it “one of the most powerful experiences of my life”. The opera was commissioned by Teatro alla Scala Milan in 2010, and he had been working on it ever since. Together with Mártá, he significantly condensed the story; only sixty percent of the original text remained. On the other hand, they added Beckett’s poem Roundelay as a prologue.
This prologue premiered during a festival in honour of his 90th birthday at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he himself once studied. The world premiere of the complete opera took place in November 2018 at the Teatro alla Scala, directed by Pierre Audi, who died last year, with Markus Stenz conducting. Kurtág and his wife Mártá were again unable to attend; she died a year later.
This first work by the then 92-year-old composer caused a real sensation. The absurd libretto, which barely has any plot and revolves around four people waiting for an indeterminate ending, was immediately hailed as a classic by the international press. In March 2019, the opera was also performed at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and again Markus Stenz. Theaterkrant called it “a true musical masterpiece”, while de Volkskrant saw how “supreme aimlessness can lead to supreme beauty”. Unfortunately, I had to miss the performance due to illness.
Fin de Partie (c) Ruth WaltzEver-expanding piano series Jatékok (Games)
For Kurtág’s 95th birthday in 2021, the Muziekgebouw organised an ambitious three-day festival, which was unfortunately cancelled due to the Covid pandemic. Instead, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard played excerpts from Jatékok (Games) via a live stream. In this ever-expanding series of miniatures for one and/or two pianos – which he himself calls “pedagogical performance pieces” – Kurtág explores a musical idea or portrays a friend.
He frequently played these with Mártá, and they recorded a number of them on CD. In 2021, Aimard presented several brand-new miniatures, because even at the age of 95, Kurtág was still composing every day. During the concert Happy 100 György! on 19 February, Het Muziek will play a selection from Jatékok in an arrangement by Olivier Cuendet. This organist and composer previously made an orchestral version of Zwiegespräch for string quartet and electronics, which Kurtág composed together with his son of the same name.
The icing on the cake is the rarely performed Lebenslauf for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart and two basset horns. Kurtág’s works are placed in context with Ligeti’s Poème symphonique mentioned above and works by Unsuk Chin and Thomas Adès. There are also three world premieres, inspired by the number one hundred. Mayke Nas wrote 100 seconds, Huba de Graaff composed 100 notes, and Jasper de Bock made 100 years (I, II, III, IV).
Kurtág finishes second opera at the age of 99
Kurtág completed his first opera when he was 92 years old, but he did not rest on his laurels afterwards. Commissioned by the Budapest Music Centre, he composed a new opera, Die Stechardin, which will premiere on 20 February 2026 during a birthday festival in Budapest.
The libretto is based on letters and writings by the German scientist Georg Christoph Lindberg, who had a relationship with his student Maria Dorothea Stechard, twenty years his junior. Although she died at the age of seventeen and he later remarried, she always remained his great love. ‘She reconciled me with all of humanity,’ Lindberg wrote to a friend.
The libretto poses recognisable questions about life. Is there an afterlife? Does our soul live on after our death? Is there love that transcends the grave? The action is set in another world – heaven, an alternative reality? – where Maria waits for her beloved to rejoin her.
Kurtág completed this three-part monologue for soprano and orchestra in June 2025 and orchestrated it together with Zsolt Serei. Maria Husmann, who has been working with Kurtág for decades, sings the title role, accompanied by the Concerto Budapest Orchestra under András Keller.
Farewell
It is not surprising that Kurtág was drawn to this theme: in 2019, he lost Mártá, who had been his partner for 72 years and remained his inspiration throughout his life. While his opera Fin de partie can be viewed as an artistic testament, Die Stechardin may be considered a farewell, celebrating the beauty of life and love. It expresses reconciliation with death and Kurtág’s hope for a speedy reunion with his beloved.
May he be able to attend the world premiere on 20 February 2026 in Budapest, and then join Márta, wherever she may be.
On 19 February, I will moderate the introduction to the birthday concert Happy 100 György in the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ. Starting at 7.15 p.m., admission free. I will speak with Fedor Teunisse, artistic director of Het Muziek, and the composers De Bock, De Graaff and Nas.
#DieStechardin #GyörgyKurtág #GyörgyLigeti #HubaDeGraaff #MaykeNas #UnsukChin -
Happy 100th birthday, György Kurtág!
On 19 February, György Kurtág hopes to celebrate his 100th birthday. That very day the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ will organise the concert Happy 100 György!, featuring music by Kurtág himself and kindred spirits, as well as three new pieces by Dutch composers. The day after, Die Stechardin, his second opera, will premiere in Budapest.
György Kurtág, the Hungarian grandmaster of incisive aphorisms (Budapest, 1926), is no stranger in the Netherlands. As early as the 1970s, pianist Geoffrey Madge and the Residentie Orkest championed his existentialist music. Yet he rose to true fame in the 1990s, when Reinbert de Leeuw started advocating his music, dedicating many memorable concerts to the amiable composer, with whom he forged a close bond.
In 2016, the Muziekgebouw honoured Kurtág on the occasion of his 90th birthday. During a festive portrait concert, De Leeuw conducted the Asko|Schönberg through works by Webern (a great inspiration for Kurtág), György Ligeti, his namesake and compatriot, and works by Kurtág himself. In the birthday concert on 19 February 2026 again a work by Ligeti will be played: his groundbreaking Poème Symphonique, whose music consists of the ticking of 100 metronomes wound to different tempos.
Kurtág and Reinbert de Leeuw
In 2016, Kurtág and his inseparable wife Márta were too frail to travel from Budapest to Amsterdam for the concert. However, they did appear in a preview of the documentary The Three Kurtágs, made by their niece Judit. This was unique: György and Márta Kurtág often performed as a piano duo, but they never became public figures like Ligeti; they lived a secluded life.
Sitting comfortably together on their sofa, the two discuss the progress of the CD recordings of a large part of Kurtág’s work, which Reinbert de Leeuw has been working on since 2013. They charmingly bounce off each other in a lively conversation, in which a sentence started by one is naturally finished by the other – as if they were literally speaking with one voice. Their love for each other and for De Leeuw is palpable.
They regret not being able to be physically present during the recordings, but because Reinbert plays these back over the phone after each session and also visits them regularly in person, they are still able to comment on them. The notoriously critical Kurtág, who sometimes calls out ‘Nein, nicht so!’ when Reinbert merely raises his arms to begin a piece, is now full of praise. ‘It’s as if they recorded the music in their mother tongue,’ he says with shining eyes.
Musical mother tongue
The three-disc CD box containing all of Kurtág’s conducted choral and ensemble works was released a year later. In the accompanying booklet Kurtág gratefully refers to it as “a royal gift”. That is no exaggeration, because on this release from the German label ECM, Reinbert de Leeuw once again surpassed himself. With his relentless determination to get to the heart of the matter, he leads Asko|Schönberg, Groot Omroepkoor, Cappella Amsterdam and a selection of soloists to intense performances, that allow Kurtág’s soul-piercing sounds to penetrate to the very core.
This unique historical document is still available for purchase for less than forty euros – a bargain. Kurtág’s suggestion that the musicians and singers perform his music as if it were their own mother tongue is no idle chatter. Language is extremely important to the sensitive Hungarian composer – in more ways than one.
He often refers to Béla Bartók as “my musical mother tongue”. But he has created his own unique grammar from poignant, aphoristic bursts of sound that spring from a deep inner necessity. He is a great lover of poetry and literature: of the eleven pieces on the compilation, seven are vocal. Kurtág even learned Russian so that he could read Dostoevsky; three cycles on the CD box set are in this language.
The best known of these is Messages from the Late Miss R.V. Trussova, with which he made his breakthrough in Western Europe in the 1980s. In 21 miniatures, a soprano sings of bitter experiences of love. The longest song lasts 3 minutes, the shortest 22 seconds. In that short span of time, Kurtág sketches an entire novel. Unfortunately none of the three vocal cycles will be performed in the concert Happy 100 György! on 19 February. Het Muziek, successor to Asko|Schönberg, will however perform Akrostichon – Wortspiel for soprano and ensemble by Unsuk Chin.
Kurtág’s first opera causes a sensation
In 2016 the 90-year-old Kurtág was still working on his first and so far only opera, Fin de Partie (Endgame), based on Samuel Beckett’s play of the same name. He had seen it in Paris in 1957 on Ligeti’s recommendation and called it “one of the most powerful experiences of my life”. The opera was commissioned by Teatro alla Scala Milan in 2010, and he had been working on it ever since. Together with Mártá, he significantly condensed the story; only sixty percent of the original text remained. On the other hand, they added Beckett’s poem Roundelay as a prologue.
This prologue premiered during a festival in honour of his 90th birthday at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he himself once studied. The world premiere of the complete opera took place in November 2018 at the Teatro alla Scala, directed by Pierre Audi, who died last year, with Markus Stenz conducting. Kurtág and his wife Mártá were again unable to attend; she died a year later.
This first work by the then 92-year-old composer caused a real sensation. The absurd libretto, which barely has any plot and revolves around four people waiting for an indeterminate ending, was immediately hailed as a classic by the international press. In March 2019, the opera was also performed at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and again Markus Stenz. Theaterkrant called it “a true musical masterpiece”, while de Volkskrant saw how “supreme aimlessness can lead to supreme beauty”. Unfortunately, I had to miss the performance due to illness.
Fin de Partie (c) Ruth WaltzEver-expanding piano series Jatékok (Games)
For Kurtág’s 95th birthday in 2021, the Muziekgebouw organised an ambitious three-day festival, which was unfortunately cancelled due to the Covid pandemic. Instead, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard played excerpts from Jatékok (Games) via a live stream. In this ever-expanding series of miniatures for one and/or two pianos – which he himself calls “pedagogical performance pieces” – Kurtág explores a musical idea or portrays a friend.
He frequently played these with Mártá, and they recorded a number of them on CD. In 2021, Aimard presented several brand-new miniatures, because even at the age of 95, Kurtág was still composing every day. During the concert Happy 100 György! on 19 February, Het Muziek will play a selection from Jatékok in an arrangement by Olivier Cuendet. This organist and composer previously made an orchestral version of Zwiegespräch for string quartet and electronics, which Kurtág composed together with his son of the same name.
The icing on the cake is the rarely performed Lebenslauf for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart and two basset horns. Kurtág’s works are placed in context with Ligeti’s Poème symphonique mentioned above and works by Unsuk Chin and Thomas Adès. There are also three world premieres, inspired by the number one hundred. Mayke Nas wrote 100 seconds, Huba de Graaff composed 100 notes, and Jasper de Bock made 100 years (I, II, III, IV).
Kurtág finishes second opera at the age of 99
Kurtág completed his first opera when he was 92 years old, but he did not rest on his laurels afterwards. Commissioned by the Budapest Music Centre, he composed a new opera, Die Stechardin, which will premiere on 20 February 2026 during a birthday festival in Budapest.
The libretto is based on letters and writings by the German scientist Georg Christoph Lindberg, who had a relationship with his student Maria Dorothea Stechard, twenty years his junior. Although she died at the age of seventeen and he later remarried, she always remained his great love. ‘She reconciled me with all of humanity,’ Lindberg wrote to a friend.
The libretto poses recognisable questions about life. Is there an afterlife? Does our soul live on after our death? Is there love that transcends the grave? The action is set in another world – heaven, an alternative reality? – where Maria waits for her beloved to rejoin her.
Kurtág completed this three-part monologue for soprano and orchestra in June 2025 and orchestrated it together with Zsolt Serei. Maria Husmann, who has been working with Kurtág for decades, sings the title role, accompanied by the Concerto Budapest Orchestra under András Keller.
Farewell
It is not surprising that Kurtág was drawn to this theme: in 2019, he lost Mártá, who had been his partner for 72 years and remained his inspiration throughout his life. While his opera Fin de partie can be viewed as an artistic testament, Die Stechardin may be considered a farewell, celebrating the beauty of life and love. It expresses reconciliation with death and Kurtág’s hope for a speedy reunion with his beloved.
May he be able to attend the world premiere on 20 February 2026 in Budapest, and then join Márta, wherever she may be.
On 19 February, I will moderate the introduction to the birthday concert Happy 100 György in the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ. Starting at 7.15 p.m., admission free. I will speak with Fedor Teunisse, artistic director of Het Muziek, and the composers De Bock, De Graaff and Nas.
#DieStechardin #GyörgyKurtág #GyörgyLigeti #HubaDeGraaff #MaykeNas #UnsukChin