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There are so many Alan Arkin performances I love. He’s one of the rare actors who deserves the effusive tributes inspired by his death on June 30. Arkin was eighty-nine, and we’d gotten so used to him showing up in all kinds of films and television projects that it seemed a harsh blow to lose him. Such a range of roles in The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (1966), Wait Until Dark (1967), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), Catch-22 (1970), The In-Laws (1979), Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Rocketeer (1991), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Gattaca (1997), Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Argo (2012), BoJack Horseman (2014–20), The Kominsky Method (2018–21), and lots more — even recurring sketches on the second season of Sesame Street.

The continuing fame enjoyed by H. G. Wells owes itself largely to his two most famous novels, The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Imaginative and daring, these books infuse the reader with a combination of hope and realism: hope for the possibility of a vibrant future that benefits all, and realism about the difficulty of realizing such an aim. Ignored in retellings of Wells’s life and works is that his vision of progress was a distinctly socialist one.

It was more than eight decades back, when on June 22, 1941, Hitler launched his fascist attack on Soviet Union. The onslaught was called Operation Barbarossa.

The woman who climbed trees opens with a wedding. Meena 14, stands on a terrace in Dharbhanga eating roasted peanuts when she is told about 21-year-old Manmohan, her future husband. He is first in his family from Nepal to study in India. Her mother, Keveri, claims he is a “prize” and a “project Manju”.

The first Everest climbers families took their person bond and love for the mountains to a new high on May 29, 1953, seventy years after that great achievement by tensing Norgay and Edmund Hillary who became global icons during that period.

Tina Turner, a trailblazer of rock and roll, has died at the age of 83. Throughout her decades-long career in the public eye, Turner showcased a raw and unfiltered musical energy whenever she took the stage. As a Black woman in the music industry, she often broke out of the boxes society intended for her to fit neatly into. Not only that, she pushed back on the notion of how “women of a certain age” were supposed to act and behave when her career had a second surge in the 1980s. The self-made rocker pushed through adversity both within the industry and in her personal life to solidify herself forever in music history.

Most people, including even trained economists, fail to appreciate the fact that an exchange rate depreciation, if it is to work in reducing the trade deficit in a capitalist economy, must necessarily hurt the working class by lowering the real wage rate. A capitalist economy, looking at it differently, improves its trade balance, for which it must improve its competitiveness, by lowering the real wage rate; and an exchange rate depreciation is one way of doing so.

Everybody over 50-60-even 70 will have a picture of Tina Turner in the head shaking things up inside there, leaving the grey cells in an almighty disarray with songs that rock all the way to wherever. Yeah, wherever, ‘cause Tina Turner took off for ’Wherever’ May 24, at 83, which is 17 short of a century. She should have stayed; especially after making such an impact. Somebody in the media called Tina the “earthshaking singer” with “rasping vocals, sexual magnetism and explosive energy”.

Only about a month ago, on Monday, April 4 this year, a South African pilot named Rudolf Erasmus gathered applause from aviation experts for safely making an emergency landing after an extremely venomous Cape Cobra reared its head in the cockpit midflight, news agency PTI had reported. Erasmus kept his nerve even as he spotted for a brief second the cobra slithering back under his seat. He was piloting a small aircraft from Worcester to Nelspruit carrying only four passengers.

A traditional family in Lahore, Pakistan, is ripped apart when the youngest son becomes infatuated with an ambitious trans starlet in Saim Sadiq’s impressive debut feature which explores sexual fluidity, love, desire, and rebellion within a repressed patriarchal society.