What We Are Reading Today: The Life of Violet by Virginia Woolf

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Updated 11 October 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Life of Violet by Virginia Woolf

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a 25-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet — a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson.

But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories.

The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Magnetic Reconnection’ by Masaaki Yamada

Updated 11 December 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Magnetic Reconnection’ by Masaaki Yamada

Plasmas comprise more than 99 percent of the visible universe; and, wherever plasmas are, magnetic reconnection occurs. In this common yet incompletely understood physical process, oppositely directed magnetic fields in a plasma meet, break, and then reconnect, converting the huge amounts of energy stored in magnetic fields into kinetic and thermal energy. In “Magnetic Reconnection,” Masaaki Yamada offers an illuminating synthesis of modern research and advances on this important topic.