All summer, The Lemur’s editors-in-chief handpicked a few things worth holding on to. For our last issue of the season, we decided to ask what delighted and bemused other Lemurs this summer. There’s no through-line here, no ranking, no real theme. We simply endeavor to record for the annals of Lemur history everything we’ve been consuming.

In Other Worlds — exhibition, Barbican Centre

Australian auteur Liam Young’s exhibition spreads six survivable futures across three parts of the Barbican, including a genuine London underground car park (not, I assume, the primary draw). I was struck by Young’s vision of a future wilderness mostly unmarred by human hands. To make the rewilding work, ten billion of us are stacked into one hyperdense metropolis—“Planet City.” It’s quite the utopian vision if you don’t stop to consider the logistics of who would agree to it, and, qualms aside, I’ve been turning it over for weeks. 

I made the mistake of watching Coppola’s uncanny CGI disaster, Megalopolis, the night before attending, and my instrument was badly out of calibration. I was consequently a bit pessimistic about the weightless, human-less, AI-esque sheen of much of the exhibit. Not all of it lands. But it’s worth the £20.50 (about $26) for some of Young’s genuinely pioneering ideas, and to share in the experience with fellow citygoers amid the Barbican’s lovely brutalist bulk. Through September 6. — CE

Pulse Topology — exhibition, Superblue Miami

From your heartbeat resonating through thousands of lightbulbs to cascades of water reflecting light as a collage of shapes using space as a canvas, I was immersed in a surreal experience watching 3D artwork transform commonly known elements into unconventional pieces of art. I was entranced by the way light created a melange of flowers you could walk through, and by how a labyrinth of mirrors reflected how life magnified one’s self-consciousness, creating a crucible where one’s introspective experience brought one to reconcile discomfort into acceptance. What really stood out was the installation called Pulse Topology by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose arrangement of 3,000 lightbulbs reflected a wave-like topology, with the incandescent bulbs flickering in varying patterns. Bad-oom, bad-oom went the lights until I put my hand under one, and the lightbulbs started to match the cadence of my heartbeat. I learned that the lightbulbs replay the previous person’s heartbeat, repeating that process for the last 300 people. I left thinking: “No matter who was behind me, the sound of another person’s heartbeat sounded so beautiful.” — AND

Everything Is Tuberculosis and The Anthropocene Reviewed — nonfiction, John Green

I saw John Green speak at the start of the summer and have gotten really into his nonfiction writing since then. I enjoy the wonder and curiosity that he embodies, as well as the humility and self-awareness with which he approaches really big topics. I think he embodies what it is to be a Lemur. — Lauren Blake ’28

Leaving Las Vegas, the three Critiques, and Body Heat — film and philosophy, Mike Figgis, Immanuel Kant, Lawrence Kasdan

These slivers of the vast media landscape have shaped my summer experience. I was inclined to watch Figgis’ film, aptly described as a tender relationship with a prostitute; it further highlighted Nicolas Cage’s unwavering charisma, and his spiral towards self-annihilation makes it a promising case study of film madness done right. Kant’s Critiques are a humbling foray into why some things can’t be reasoned through cognitively; I’ve only been getting through 10 pages of each Critique (pray for my soul). Whenever reading Kant gets nauseating, the neo-noir erotic film Body Heat relaxes my brain. It reminds me of how a 113-minute running time can flesh out indescribable motifs such as temperature. Overall, these pieces of media have brought me to a place of oneness with the lightness of summer. — Adonis Borges ’24, staff writer emeritus

The Odyssey — film, Christopher Nolan

I learned that even Nolan eventually sucked up to Hollywood narratives (in the sense that there is some strange notion that a man has to be ashamed of his masculinity to be a sympathetic hero, when, really, I just felt bad for the guy). I agree that Odysseus being a serial cheater and full of hubris isn’t great, but that makes him a more real, flawed character in an authentic way rather than a flawed one in an artificial way. I am with Emily Wilson, famed for her translation of The Odyssey, who said that, sadly, Nolan’s rendition of Odysseus “isn’t complicated or wily or artful.” There is a cringeworthy one-dimensionality in Nolan’s adaptation that strips away the sentimentality and tension that mirror the era’s uncomfortable reality. I learned that a character becomes more sympathetic when they end up being who you don’t want them to be, rather than the other way around. — Anonymous Lemur 

Schitt’s Creek, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Space Trilogy — television and fiction, Dan and Eugene Levy, Jonathan Swift, C.S. Lewis

Schitt’s Creek goes triple platinum in my brain. It’s not often you root for posh, out-of-touch characters, but the Roses are the perfect functional dysfunctional family. A random number generator told me to read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Lewis’s Space Trilogy in succession, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the similarities between them. Two flavors of British man on a journey meet a new, enlightened species and realize that Western society could use a lot of work. — Lauren Vandivier ’28

Attention-Seeking Behavior — novel, Aea Varfis-van Warmelo

A novel whose unreliable narrator wears many hats: a lover who can’t commit, a peruser of parks and corpses, and a historian who has some cool background info about lie detection. The many themes, and lack of a theme, make this a super cool book concept because you can’t trust anything the narrator says, and it really dives into why we deceive people, language, vulnerability, and performance. If you’re looking to get out of a reading slump, which I have unfortunately fallen victim to, it’s a great book to start your escape. — Emily McDermott ’28

Lost Weekend — album, Phoebe Bridgers

Phoebe hits us with an annoyingly repetitive sound yet heart-wrenching lyrics. Listen if you’re looking for a good cry or a love song about Bo Burnham (trust me, it’s worth the listen). — Lauren Vandivier ’28

That’s the summer. As always, keep an open mind, and we welcome feedback on any of these picks or the newsletter itself—we’d love to revive a weekly format once we’re finished hauling mattress toppers and coffee makers down to Durham. We’ll see you back on campus.