The planet’s apparent backward motion occurs for a few weeks about every four months. Here’s what’s really happening—and how astrology became a modern phenomenon.
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (September 18, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the The Economist. This week, an analysis of how AI can revolutionize science and how a fresh wave of hard-right populism is stalking Europe.
Where’s the support for Democratic insurgents?
For decades, New Hampshire has generated brisk and gratifying drama with its first-in-the-nation presidential primary. The Granite State momentously destroyed a presidency in 1968, when the Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy ran against President Lyndon Johnson on an antiwar platform.
On seeing without being seen
by Rachel Cusk
Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did—the rest of her remained obstinately alive. She took a considerable time to die and outlasted the nurses’ predictions by many days, so that those of us who had been summoned to her bedside had to depart and return to our lives.
● First, a little history. See that modest cathedral by the Hôtel de Ville? It’s where Eleanor of Aquitaine married King Louis VII of France. Later, in 1152, this feisty daughter of the southwest married again, in Poitiers, to the man who became King Henry II. In doing so she began a Bordelais involvement with England that didn’t end until 1453, when the French captured the city. Sure, a lot of water has flowed under the city’s bridges since then, but to be reminded of the connection is like discovering an unexpected cousin.
● Bordeaux profited handsomely from this attachment thanks to the English thirst for its wines. So continue this 650-year tradition with a riveting, self-guided audio tour of La Cité du Vin. The decanter-shaped landmark explores every aspect of global winemaking and wine culture, with one amusing omission: intoxication. The best bit is a display that wafts key wine flavours up your nose (£19; laciteduvin.com).
The northern district of Chartrons starts with palatial mansions and merchant warehouses, but shrinks to more modest proportions the further you wander from the city centre. Along the Rue Notre Dame it finds its mojo. Here, half a mile of browsable tiny shops sell must-have crockery, hand-made brushes and £2.50 fruit-crumble tartlets. Clambering vines deepen the sense that you’ve found the perfect French provincial street.
The bohemian English circle that included Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell revolted against Victorian formality—and their casually ornamental style is inspiring designers today.
By Rebecca Mead
In July, 1918, Virginia Woolf spent a weekend at Garsington—a country home, outside Oxford, owned by Lady Ottoline Morrell, a celebrated hostess of the era, and her husband, Philip Morrell, a Member of Parliament. The house, a ramshackle Jacobean mansion that the Morrells had acquired five years earlier, had been vividly redecorated by Ottoline into what one guest called a “fluttering parrot-house of greens, reds and yellows.” One sitting room was painted with a translucent seafoam wash; another was covered in deep Venetian red, and early visitors were invited to apply thin lines of gold paint to the edges of wooden panels. The entrance hall was laid with Persian carpets and, as Morrell’s biographer Miranda Seymour has written, the pearly gray paint on the walls was streaked with pink, “to create the effect of a winter sunset.” Woolf, in her diary, noted that the Italianate garden fashioned by Morrell—with paved terraces, brilliantly colored flower beds, and a pond surrounded by yew-tree hedges clipped with niches for statuary—was “almost melodramatically perfect.”
Pavels Hedström believes that most architecture separates us from nature. He wants to make nonhuman life inescapable.
By Sam Knight
At the end of his first year at the architecture school of the Royal Danish Academy, Pavels Hedström went on a class trip to Japan. Hedström, a twenty-five-year-old undergraduate, revered Japanese culture and aesthetics, even though he had never visited the country. As a teen-ager growing up in rural Sweden, Hedström had been introduced to Zen meditation by his mother, Daina, and devoured manga and anime. In architecture school, Hedström was drawn to Japanese principles of design and how they applied to a world—and a profession—increasingly troubled by the climate crisis. Hedström was particularly influenced by Metabolism, a postwar Japanese architectural movement that imagined cities of the future as natural organisms: ephemeral, self-regulating, and subject to biological rhythms of growth, death, and decay. In 1977, Kisho Kurokawa, one of Metabolism’s founders, wrote, “Human society must be regarded as one part of a continuous natural entity that includes all animals and plants.”
If the president wins re-election, his climate team is likely to try to cut greenhouse gases from steel, cement and other hard-to-clean-up manufacturing.
Ahead of U.N. meetings this week, thousands gathered in Midtown to demand that President Biden and other world leaders stop new oil and gas drilling.
Border closures and a freeze on financial transactions imposed after soldiers seized power are hurting millions, while Western nations remain divided over what to do.
Every year, thousands of followers of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov descend on the town of Uman to worship, dance and pay homage at the tomb of their spiritual leader.
Boomers Daily 