For children to flourish, they need to grow up reading and being read to. The following is a list of essential books for any beloved children in your life. And they’re brilliant enough that they can be enjoyed equally well by adults. THE ARABIAN NIGHTS, preferably in a kid-friendly version. These shockingly strange stories of magic and adventure fired the minds of authors like Lovecraft, Dickens, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters. FIVE CHILDREN AND IT and THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET, by Edith Nesbit. A series of books about four children who have misadventures with a Psammead and a phoenix. The way Edith portrays kids was a major influence on Narnia and Harry Potter. A WRINKLE IN TIME, by Madeleine L’Engle. Awkward, brainy Meg Murry must travel to the ends of the universe to rescue her father, in a visionary fusion of science, mysticism and cosmic horror leavened by L’Engle’s gentle Episcopalianism. LITTLE WOMEN, by Louisa May Alcott. Not just for girls. Alcott is second to none as a writer of characters, and in telling the story of the March sisters and Laurie, she becomes the closest thing we have to an American Dickens. ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. Harold Bloom called them the greatest children’s fantasies ever written, and they are my personal favorites. Every child needs to know the Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN, by George MacDonald. A girl named Irene must battle a race of sinister goblins with soft feet who are threatening to abduct her and force her into marriage. The influence of MacDonald’s Goblins can be seen in The Hobbit. THE WESTING GAME, by Ellen Raskin. A child’s first introduction to the mystery genre. Turtle Wexler is one of the all-time great children’s book heroines, and reading the end of this book as an adult still brings me to tears. A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH and TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, by Jules Verne. Some of the most thrilling adventure stories ever written, satisfying a child’s fascination with things that live in the sea or beneath the earth. A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, by Lemony Snicket. A masterpiece of contemporary fantasy, Snicket’s unique blend of whimsy, Gothic horror and clever wordplay birthed a generation of darkly funny, verbally precocious readers. Read to your kids. Teach them that reading is for pleasure, not to pass a test. Let them read what they love. Let them see you reading books with joy and enthusiasm. That’s how you get a child to fall in love with reading. That’s how you make a lifelong reader.

Audi has officially unveiled its first hybrid supercar called the Audi Nuvolari. • Starting price: $697,000 • 0-60mph: 2.5s • 978 hp • 499 units will be built • Fastest production vehicle in Audi history • Top speed: Over 217 mph (350 km/h) • New Audi signature paint color: Titanium • Three electric motors each produce 110 kW • Two oil-cooled electric motors mounted on the front axle • 7.3 kWh lithium-ion battery • Fully electric driving capability in E-Hybrid mode • Hybrid powertrain combines a 4-liter twin-turbo V8 with three axial-flux electric motors • Formula 1-derived prepreg autoclave carbon manufacturing process • Brake-by-wire braking system • Braking system capable of absorbing up to 2.8 megawatts of energy Deliveries begin in the first half of 2027. More photos in the thread below:

La magie de la Targa Florio.

I love it when I get to tweet this again.

In a workshop on the outskirts of Bletchley (it had to be there, didn't it), on the 26th of March this year, a small British company called Pulsar Fusion did something that has not been done by any other company or government on Earth. It ignited a controlled plasma inside the test chamber of a working nuclear fusion rocket engine. The plasma held, along with the chamber. The fusion reaction was the kind of reaction that, contained inside a sufficiently engineered magnetic bottle, will one day take a crewed British vehicle to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months, and that will, within the working lifetime of the engineers presently building it, make the outer planets of the solar system accessible to anyone with a British passport. The geography of the achievement deserves a longer moment of pause. Bletchley, in 1942, was where Alan Turing and his colleagues broke the Enigma cipher and almost certainly shortened the war in Europe by two years. Pulsar Fusion's headquarters sits roughly 600 yards from the Hut where they did it. The country that did the maths inside that hut has just, less than a mile down the road, ignited the plasma that could power the next century of human space travel. There is a continuity of British scientific lineage here that is, on the face of it, almost embarrassingly providential, and it is almost completely unreported in the British press. It's not quite Kitty-Hawk-to-the-moon in 61 years, but it's close. Like so many great companies of profound importance, Pulsar Fusion is pretty small. It was founded in 2013, and employs around 50 staff. Its chief executive, Richard Dinan, is a working British physicist who has spent the last decade quietly assembling the team and the capital to do what the world's national space agencies have been promising for 60 years and consistently failing to deliver. The competing American programmes, principally at NASA's Glenn Research Center and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, are years behind on the propulsion side. The competing Chinese programmes are obscure but, on what is known publicly, also behind. The European Space Agency is, as ever, organising a workshop. Pulsar fired its plasma in March and has been preparing the next-stage tests in the months since. What this kind of capability means, when commercialised, is genuinely vast. The economic argument for getting a payload to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months is not principally about the human passengers, though there is one. It is about cargo. Given a 30-day transit, Mars becomes a logistically tractable destination for the kind of infrastructure-build that turns it from a flag-planting science mission into a working industrial site. The argument for the outer planets is even larger. The asteroid belt alone, on conservative mineralogical estimates, contains more economically viable platinum-group metals than the entire crust of the Earth has been mined for in industrial history. The first country with reliable fusion propulsion is the first country with reliable access to that supply. The country that holds that capacity, fifty years from now, will be holding the most consequential industrial advantage of the 21st century, and there is no obvious second prize. The standard British response to this kind of thing is to either ignore it entirely, sell the company to an American buyer at series B (the DeepMind path) for fire-sale prices, or fund it at the level of a Whitehall departmental tea and coffee budget (the Skycutter and Orbex paths). The standard British response will not be sufficient. Pulsar Fusion needs the kind of patient capital that turns a working demonstration into an operational engine, and that, in turn, into a manufacturing capability. The British state, on present form, is structurally incapable of providing it, British pension funds are structurally incapable of investing in it, and the British political class will, on present form, only notice if it somehow manages to swing a leadership election. I wantt= Pulsar Fusion treated as a national-strategic asset, and beyond that as a potential subject of national destiny. The Sovereign AI Fund that backed Ineffable Intelligence has a clear template. The Prosperity Zone programme we designed at Progress that anchors heavy industry at SaxaVord and Teesside has the geographic flexibility to include a fusion-propulsion cluster in Buckinghamshire, six miles from the most evocative site in modern British scientific history. The procurement architecture of every major British defence and space agency should, from this autumn, be writing offtake contracts contingent on Pulsar's milestones. There's nothing extreme about these ideas. We could have been doing it decades ago. I always conceived of Britain as being as much among the stars as it is on Earth. To buy into the idea of Britain as a culture and polity is necessarily to buy into the concept of the human being as an illimitable force. Our history is littered with happy instances of people of great fortitude hitting upon obstacles and, with a cry of "This will not stop us", clearing the way for our brothers and sisters to follow through. A small British company in Bletchley has, while nobody was looking, extended that arm of our tradition, by accomplishing one of the most important pieces of scientific engineering of the decade. The country that produced them is, in a measurable sense, the same country that produced the Bombe, the Colossus, the jet engine, the structure of DNA, and the World Wide Web. The capacity is intact. The political class capable of recognising it must catch up, and will.

The wait is over! Jaguar just named its new 1000bhp electric GT: The Type 01 ⚡️ buff.ly/wY8493I

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