What We Are Reading Today: Flashes of Creation

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Updated 29 August 2021
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What We Are Reading Today: Flashes of Creation

Author: Paul Halpern

Paul Halpern, a respected physics professor and author, breaks down the great debate over the Big Bang and the continuing quest to understand the fate of the universe.
The universe is changing. But scientists did not realize that a century ago, when astronomers like Edwin Hubble and Henrietta Leavitt discerned that other galaxies exist and that they’re hurtling away from the Milky Way at incredible speeds. That monumental discovery sparked decades of epic debates about the vastness and origins of the universe, and they involved a clash of titans, the Russian-American nuclear physicist George Gamow and the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle.
In his new book, Flashes of Creation, Halpern chronicles the rise of Gamow and Hoyle into leaders of mostly opposing views of cosmology, as they disputed whether everything began with a Big Bang billions of years ago, said Ramin Skibba in a review for The New York Times.
Halpern is the author of 14 popular science books, exploring the subjects of space, time, higher dimensions, dark energy, dark matter, exoplanets, particle physics, and cosmology.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Novel Relations’ by Alicia Mireles Christoff

Updated 11 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Novel Relations’ by Alicia Mireles Christoff

“Novel Relations” engages 20th-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory.

Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read.

These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too.