Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Previews: The American Scholar – Autumn 2022

Autumn 2022

The Root Problem

Harvesting wild ginseng has sustained Appalachian communities for generations—so what will happen when there are no more plants to be found?

The Degradation Drug

A medication prescribed for Parkinson’s and other diseases can transform a patient’s personality, unleashing heroic bouts of creativity or a torrent of shocking, even criminal behavior

Why We Are Failing to Make the Grade

Covid-19 has contributed to a crisis in America’s classrooms, but the problems predate the pandemic and are likely to outlast it

Covers: New York Review Of Books – Oct 20, 2022

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The Two Elizabeths

The queen presided over the death of a British world and yet was enormously successful in keeping alive the monarchy that symbolized it.


Last Poem

A poem by Emily Berry


‘She Captured All Before Her’

Darryl Pinckney

It used to be that people complained how little they knew of Queen Elizabeth. Toward the end, her remoteness was treasured.


Silences and Scars

Jenny Uglow

Two new books on Berlin track the city through decades of growth, economic desperation, artistic innovation, Nazi terror, political division, and reunification.

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by Sinclair McKay

The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin by Kirsty Bell


Lucky Guy

Joshua Cohen

Jared Kushner’s anti-ideological ideology is to get the best deal for whomever he represents—the business he was born into, the business he married into, and, most of all, himself.

Breaking History: A White House Memoir by Jared Kushner

Arts & History: ‘Winslow Homer – Force Of Nature’

Why is Winslow Homer a household name in the USA? And what makes his art so important? Follow Homer’s journey, at a time of great upheaval in American history, from magazine illustrator to sought-after artist in oil and watercolour.

Winslow Homer: Force of Nature Ground Floor Galleries Until 8 January 2023

Previews: London Review Of Books – October 6, 2022

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Our new issue is finally online, ft Mahmood Mandani on leaving Uganda, Tony Wood on Russia’s energy crisis, @MJCarter10 at Westminster Abbey, @danielsoar on Ian McEwan, @amiasrinivasan on Andrea Dworkin, T.J. Clark on painting & poetry & a @Jon_McN cover.

On Leaving Uganda

Uganda’s constitution of 1995 entrenched the barrier against citizenship for non-indigenous applicants, who now had to belong to an indigenous group.

At Westminster Abbey

The bald lesson of the abbey’s memorials is that money, power and connections repeatedly trump virtue and talent.

2022 Museum Tours: Musée d’Orsay In Paris, France

Musée d’Orsay, (French: “Orsay Museum”) national museum of fine and applied arts in Paris that features work mainly from France between 1848 and 1914. Its collection includes painting, sculpture, photography, and decorative arts and boasts such iconic works as Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio (1854–55), Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863; Luncheon on the Grass), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (1876; Bal du moulin de la Galette).

The Musée d’Orsay is housed in the former Gare d’Orsay, a railway station and hotel that was designed by Victor Laloux and located on the Left Bank of the Seine River opposite the Tuileries Gardens. At the time of its completion in 1900, the building featured an ornate Beaux Arts façade, while its interior boasted metal construction, passenger elevators, and electric rails.

Because of changes in railway technology, however, the station soon became outdated and was largely vacant by the 1970s. Talks to transform the builing into an art museum began early in the decade and were finalized in 1977 through the initiative of Pres. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. With government funds, the building was restored and remodeled in the early 1980s by ACT architecture group.

The interior was designed by Gaetana Aulenti, who created a complex layout of galleries that occupied three main levels surrounding the atrium beneath the building’s iconic iron-and-glass barrel vault. On the ground floor, formerly the building’s train platforms, extensive stone structures broke up the cavernous space and created a central nave for the sculpture collection and gallery spaces for painting and decorative arts.

Previews: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 30, 2022

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This week’s @TheTLS , featuring @RichardEvans36 on German militarism; Laura Thompson on Raine Spencer; A. N. Wilson on Turgenev; @colincraiggrant on Eureka Day; Claire Lowdon on Kamila Shamsie; @rauchway on interest rates – and more.

Exhibits: Peter Alexander ‘Echoes Of Perception’ At Museum Of California Art

Langson IMCA in Irvine, CA – September 24, 2022 – January 14, 2023

In 2019, artist Peter Alexander was invited by Langson IMCA Museum Director Kim Kanatani to curate an exhibition of California Impressionism from the Museum’s collections.

Prior to his untimely death in 2020, Alexander had begun identifying works that he felt exemplified the California Impressionists’ profound connection to the light, space, and natural phenomena of California and the similar influence they had on his own work.

In honor of Alexander’s commitment to the project, a team of curators consisting of Kevin Appel, Julianne Gavino, Kim Kanatani, Curt Klebaum, Claudia Parducci, and Bruce Richards expanded the exhibition into a dialogue between the early modernist painters and Alexander’s own work, forming a fluid exchange between generations equally influenced by the atmospheric light of the Golden State.

The passages in this exhibition follow phenomena experienced over the course of a day from dawn, to dusk, to the depths of night. From mountain peaks to the ocean floor, Alexander and these California Impressionist painters echo one another in their pursuit of capturing the ineffable sensibility of place and space.

With works spanning from 1896 to 2020, Echoes of Perception: Peter Alexander and California Impressionism includes 14 Impressionist works from Langson IMCA’s collection along with 11 of Alexander’s resin sculptures, canvases, works on paper, and a painting on velvet that offer an alternative way to engage with California Impressionism through the eyes of this pioneering contemporary artist.

International Art: Apollo Magazine – October 2022

Apollo Magazine – October 2022 Issue:

  • Bernice Bing’s West Coast cool

• Antwerp’s greatest museum reopens at last

• Who is UNESCO really for?

• Introducing the Apollo 40 Under 40 Asia Pacific

Plus: the remarkable career of Marianne Werefkin; the making of John Singer Sargent’s notorious Madame X; the occult modernism of Rudolf Steiner; and reviews of the artists who saw in stereo, a history of tomb raiding in Egypt and the memoir of Ibrahim El-Salahi

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – October 3, 2022

Aaron Judge towers over the catcher and hits a baseball at a stadium.
By Françoise Mouly, Art by Mark Ulriksen


The New Yorker Magazine – October 3, 2022

The Shock and Aftershocks of “The Waste Land”

T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece is a hundred years old, but it has never stopped sounding new. By Anthony Lane

Did a Nobel Peace Laureate Stoke a Civil War?

After Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, ended a decades-long border conflict, he was heralded as a unifier. Now critics accuse him of tearing the country apart.