The Dutch-Israeli author on a demonic club hit, her fish fixation, and her love of furniture restoration videos Born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1987, Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher who lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her work has appeared in publications including LitHub, Electric Literature and Elle.com, and she has a David Attenborough-themed advice column, Dear David, in the online literary journal Longleaf Review. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank, received a notable mention in the 2018 Best American Essays collection. The Safekeep, published by Viking earlier this year, is Van der Wouden’s debut novel and is shortlisted for the Booker prize. Continue reading...

Creatures can converse and share their stories by voice or text through visitors’ mobile phones at Museum of Zoology If the pickled bodies, partial skeletons and stuffed carcasses that fill museums seem a little, well, quiet, fear not. In the latest coup for artificial intelligence, dead animals are to receive a new lease of life to share their stories – and even their experiences of the afterlife. More than a dozen exhibits, ranging from an American cockroach and the remnants of a dodo, to a stuffed red panda and a fin whale skeleton, will be granted the gift of conversation on Tuesday for a month-long project at Cambridge University’s Museum of Zoology. Continue reading...

Museum features consoles from 1983’s Famicom to 2017’s Switch, as well as honouring Nintendo’s pre-video-game era Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come for momijigari, the turning of the autumn leaves in the city’s picturesque parks. This autumn, however, there is a new draw: a Nintendo museum. The new attraction, which opens on Wednesday, is best described as a chapel of video game nostalgia. Upstairs, Nintendo’s many video game consoles, from 1983’s Famicom through 1996’s Nintendo 64 to 2017’s Switch, are displayed reverently alongside their most famous games. On the back wall, visitors can also peer at toys, playing cards and other artefacts from the Japanese company’s pre-video-game history, stretching back to its founding as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in 1889. Downstairs, there are interactive exhibits with comically gigantic controllers and floor-projected playing cards. Continue reading...

From playing Super Mario on a giant control to spotting Pikmin hiding in corners, my visit to this delightful museum in Kyoto offered up experience over education • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto, 100 years before the release of the Game Boy. Long before it was a video game company, it made toys and hanafuda cards adorned with scenes from nature, used to play several different games popular in Japan. By 1969, Nintendo had expanded its business to include western-style playing cards, and the company built a plant to manufacture them in southern Kyoto. Until 2016, the Uji Ogura Plant was a card factory and as a repairs centre for the company’s consoles. It has been turned into a Nintendo Museum, opening on 2 October, where the gaming giant’s entire history will be on display. Nintendo flew me to Kyoto to see the museum. Along with the Super Nintendo World theme park, at Universal Studios in Osaka, it will be a major draw for video game tourists in Japan. It’s laid out across two floors: upstairs, there is a gallery of Nintendo products, from playing cards through to the Nintendo Switch. Downstairs are the interactive exhibits, where you can play snatches of Nintendo games on comically gigantic controllers that require two people to operate and immerse yourself for a not-entirely-generous seven minutes in a NES, SNES or N64 game in the retro area. Or you can step into a re-creation of a 1960s Japanese home and whack ping-pong balls with a bat (the Ultra Machine batting toy was developed by Gunpei Yokoi, the inventor of the Game Boy, and released in 1967). Continue reading...