‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (1843 magazine August 7, 2023): A special edition of Editor’s Picks from The Economist’s summer double issue. This week, we take a deep dive into how Ukraine’s virtually non-existent navy sank the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea.
The Moskva was the most advanced vessel in the Black Sea. But the Ukrainians had a secret weapon, reports Wendell Steavenson with Marta Rodionova
Oliver Wainwright – The Guardian (August 7, 2023): A handful of little green blocks flashes up on the screen, filling a building site with a neat grid of uniform cubes. One second they form rows of towers, next they morph into low-rise courtyards, then they flip back into long slender slabs, before cycling through hundreds of other iterations, in a hypnotic high-speed ballet of bristling buildings.
I watch this while on a Zoom call with Wanyu He, an architect based in Shenzhen, China, and the founder of XKool, an artificial intelligence company determined to revolutionise the architecture industry. She freezes the dancing blocks and zooms in, revealing a layout of hotel rooms that fidget and reorder themselves as the building swells and contracts. Corridors switch sides, furniture dances to and fro. Another click and an invisible world of pipes and wires appears, a matrix of services bending and splicing in mesmerising unison, the location of lighting, plug sockets and switches automatically optimised. One further click and the construction drawings pop up, along with a cost breakdown and components list. The entire plan is ready to be sent to the factory to be built.
Literary Review of Canada – September 2023: The September issue features Michael Taube on Jason Kenney, the life of Jack Austin, the legacy of a horse racing dynasty, our tenacious statistics bureau, memories of melmac, and Vincent Lam’s latest—with a cover from Alexander MacAskill.
Jason Guriel’s very specific type of fun
The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles By Jason Guriel
Forgotten Work By Jason Guriel
The question is asked all the time, usually in unpoetic moments; it’s an occupational hazard of teaching literature. There I’ll be at the clinic, sinuses on fire, when sure enough the doctor asks, “What’s your favourite book?” My practised answer, no hemming and hawing, is Moby-Dick. Everyone’s heard of it, and it sounds reassuringly substantial. (No one wants to hear a professor say Twilight.) “Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience,” I’ll mumble to myself as I walk out with my prescription.
On those important rituals by Kyle Wyatt
The quick end to Jason Kenney’s long career by Michael Taube
Paying tribute to John English by Daniel Woolf
When Jack Austin went to Ottawa by Jeff Costen
From the start, women were at the center of the demonstrations that swept Iran last year. Schoolgirls emerged as an unexpected source of defiant energy.
One morning this past winter, the students at a girls’ high school in Tehran were told that education officials would arrive that week to inspect their classrooms and check compliance with the school’s dress code: specifically, the wearing of the maghnaeh, a hooded veil that became a requirement for schoolgirls in the years after the Iranian Revolution. During lunch, a group of students gathered in the schoolyard. A thirteen-year-old in the seventh grade, whom I’ll call Nina, pressed in to hear what was being said. At the time, mass protests against the government were raging across the country; refusing to wear the veil had become a symbol of the movement. An older girl told the others that it was time for them to join together and make a stand.
The twenty-nine-year-old musician pursues technical, rather than emotional, manipulation with her instrument. She can coax from it the sounds of an accordion, a drum, or a string orchestra.
“Do you listen to Sudan Archives?” Most of the time, but not every time, the response to this question is one of confusion. How can one listen to the archives of a country? Sudan Archives is, in fact, a twenty-nine-year-old musician—a singer, rapper, producer, arranger, lyricist, and violinist. She creates a “fiddle-punk sound,” as she describes it, that blends folk, ambient, soul, house, and whatever other tradition she feels is available for the taking. Sudan (the name that her colleagues, her fans, and, increasingly, her intimates call her) begins composing by striking a riff on one of her five violins, which she uses differently from most other American producers.
The Hunt family owns one of the largest private oil companies in the country. Leah Hunt-Hendrix funds social movements that want to end the use of fossil fuels.
Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures.
Kikuchi Keikoku (Kikuchi Gorge) is a 4km long gorge located in Aso Kuju National Park. The water runs from the outer rim of the Aso Crater. It is also known as Kikuchi Suigen (water source), and was selected as one of the 100 best waters in Japan
Vladimir Putin wants to lead Russians into a civilizational conflict with the West far larger than Ukraine. Will they follow him?
The presidential bid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has tested the bonds of an iconic Democratic clan that does not want him to run and does not know what to do about it.
The city ended a partnership with the Texas Department of Public Safety this month after troubling incidents. In response, Gov. Greg Abbott sent in more troopers.
A lawsuit that Gov. Philip Murphy of New Jersey has filed against New York’s congestion pricing plan has reignited a border war and led to charges of hypocrisy.
Boomers Daily 