What We Are Reading Today: Southern Imagining

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Updated 04 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: Southern Imagining

  • In “Southern Imagining,” Elleke Boehmer offers an alternative perspective, using literary, scientific and cultural material to explore how we look at the world from the south

Author: Elleke Boehmer

A northern viewpoint is most often the default, while the south — the far southern latitudes occupied by Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and southern Africa, among others — seems far away and ignorable.

In “Southern Imagining,” Elleke Boehmer offers an alternative perspective, using literary, scientific and cultural material to explore how we look at the world from the south.

Reading, she argues, is a transformative means of reversing our usual planetary orientation and rearranging our perceptual geography. Boehmer examines writing from across southern continents and islands.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree’ by Nabil Ali

Updated 08 February 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree’ by Nabil Ali

Flowering currant, ivy, Portuguese laurel, and woad might all have grown in a medieval garden, but it would have taken special expertise to extract and create rich blue and purple pigments from them. 

Humans have been extracting dyes and inks from natural materials for millennia, and the practice was firmly established during the medieval era, recorded in manuscripts that survive today.

“Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree” brings together recipes for making natural colors according to season, method, and ingredients.