Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and a popular writer on linguistics and evolutionary psychology. Angela Tan interviews him about politics, language, death, and reasons to be optimistic.
Apollo Magazine(January 29, 2024): The new February 2024 issue features ‘Giants of Indian Miniature Painting’; The Crisis in Italian Paintings and more…
• Holidaying with the Habsburgs
• An interview with Julie Mehretu
• The crisis in Italian museums
• Howard Hodgkin’s Indian miniatures
Plus: Slim pickings for foodies on Valentine’s Day, Parma’s monumental museum complex, and – and reviews of Impressionists on paper, experimental art in the Eastern bloc, and Africa and Byzantium at the Met
The New Yorker (January 29, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresSarula Bao’s “Lunar New Year” – The artist depicts the joys of gathering with loved ones, around a table of good food
As the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, Bill Stenger rose most days around 6 a.m. and arrived at the slopes before seven. He’d check in with his head snowmaker and the ski-patrol staff, visit the two hotels on the property, and chat with the maintenance workers, the lift operators, the food-and-beverage manager, and the ski-school instructors—a kind of management through constant motion. Stenger is seventy-five, with white hair, wire-rimmed reading glasses, and a sturdy physique that makes him look built for fuzzy sweaters.
The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires
We thought we could master nature, but we were playing with fire.
With elections postponed and no end to the war with Russia in sight, Volodymyr Zelensky and his political allies are becoming like the officials they once promised to root out: entrenched.
MGM (January 28, 2024) – Highlights from the Top Ten Best Historical films including:
A Bridge Too Far (1977) Directed By: Richard Attenborough Cast: Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Hardy Kruger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell, Liv
The Alamo (1960) Produced and Directed by John Wayne Cast: John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Frankie Avalon, Patrick Wayne, Linda Cristal, Joan O’Brien, Chill Wills, Ken Curtis, Carlos Arruza, Jester Hairston, Joseph Calleia, and guest star Richard Boone
The Battle of Britain (1969) Directed by Guy Hamilton Cast: Harry Andrews, Michael Caine, Trevor Howard, Curt Jurgens, Ian McShane, Kenneth More, Laurence Olivier, Nigel Patrick, Christopher Plummer, Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Robert Shaw, Patrick Wymark, Susannah York
De-Lovely (2004) Directed By: Irwin Winkler Cast: Kevin Kline, Ashley Judd, Jonathan Pryce
The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) Written for the screen and Directed by Randall Wallace Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Gerard Depardieu, Gabriel Byrne, Anne Parillaud, Judith Godreche
Alexander the Great (1956) Written, Produced and Directed By: Robert Rossen Cast: Richard Burton, Fredric March, Claire Bloom, Barry Jones, Harry Andrews, Stanley Baker, Niall MacGinnis, Danielle Darrieux
The Great Escape (1963) Produced and Directed by: John Sturges Cast: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Donald, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn
Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) Directed By: John Frankenheimer Cast: Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, Thelma Ritter, Neville Brand, with Edmond O’Brien as “Tom Gaddis,” also starring Betty Field, Telly Savalas
The Bridge at Remagen (1969) Directed By: John Guillermin Cast: George Segal, Robert Vaughn, Ben Gazzara, Bradford Dillman, E. G. Marshall
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) Produced and Directed By: Stanley Kramer Cast: Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland as “”Irene Hoffman,”” Maximilian Schell, and Montgomery Clift
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 26, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Ukraine’s Leading Man’ – In “The Showman”, Simon Shuster makes the case that Volodymyr Zelensky’s past as an entertainer helps him on the world stage…
In “The Showman,” the journalist Simon Shuster trails the entertainer-turned-wartime president as he rallies the world for support.
By David Kortava
THE SHOWMAN: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky, by Simon Shuster
Nine months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, the Time magazine correspondent Simon Shuster caught a ride on a presidential train that few, if any, journalists had seen from the inside. In a private carriage, with the blinds drawn, Volodymyr Zelensky was fueling up on coffee during a trip to the frontline. He’d been reading about Winston Churchill, but with Shuster he’d sooner discuss another key World War II figure: Charlie Chaplin.
“He used the weapon of information during the Second World War to fight against fascism,” Zelensky said. “There were these people, these artists, who helped society. And their influence was often stronger than artillery.”
Mightier — and Meaner — Than the Sword
Emily Cockayne’s “Penning Poison,” a history of anonymous letters, reveals the ways we’ve been torturing one another, verbally, for centuries.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of San Francisco
Two books — “The Longest Minute,” by Matthew J. Davenport, and “Portal,” by John King — examine the City by the Bay’s resiliency from very different angles.
Times Literary Supplement (January 24, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Rich Are Always With Us’ – Ferdinand Mount on taming the plutocrats; Empire’s balance sheet; Who is Charles III?; Silvia Townsend Warner’s revival and ChatGPT goes to college…
The New Yorker (January 22, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresRoz Chast’s “Bird Bath” – The artist depicts her favorite antidote for dreary winter weather: a nice, hot bath.
As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”
There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 19, 2024): The latest issue features the excitement over advance copy reviews of a January novel, Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!” …“You’ve got to read this,” one editor said. “One of the most electric novels I’ve read in a long while,” another said. This kind of thing — everyone thrilled by the same book — is unusual at the TBR, and explains why “Martyr!,” about a grieving young man’s search for meaning, graces our cover this week.
In “Martyr!,” the poet Kaveh Akbar turns a grieving young man’s search for meaning into a piercing family saga.
Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar
Reviewed by By Junot Díaz
Cyrus Shams, the aching protagonist at the heart of Kaveh Akbar’s incandescent first novel, is a veritable Rushdiean multitude: an Iranian-born American, a “bad” immigrant, a recovering addict, a straight-passing queer, an almost-30 poet who rarely writes, an orphan, a runner of open mics, an indefatigable logophile, a fiery wit, a self-pitying malcontent. But above all else Cyrus is sad; profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally sad.
Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:
“Knife,” by Salman Rushdie
“James,” by Percival Everett
“The Book of Love,” by Kelly Link
“Martyr,” by Kaveh Akbar
“The Demon of Unrest,” by Erik Larson
“The Hunter,” by Tana French
“Wandering Stars,” by Tommy Orange
“Anita de Monte Laughs Last,” by Xochitl Gonzalez
“Splinters,” by Leslie Jamison
“Neighbors and Other Stories,” by Diane Oliver
“Funny Story,” by Emily Henry
“Table for Two,” by Amor Towles
“Grief Is for People,” by Sloane Crosley
“One Way Back: A Memoir,” by Christine Blasey Ford
“The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir,” by RuPaul
The importance of Homer by Joshua T. Katz Galaxy brains by Gary Saul Morson The Thames: river of destinies by Jeremy Black “Breakfast Special”: a new story by Woody Allen
New poems by Nicholas Friedman, Jessica Hornik & Michael Spence
The Met (January 19, 2024): Join curators Stephan Wolohojian, Adam Eaker, David Pullins, and Anna-Claire Stinebring along with their special guests as they guide you through the newly reopened galleries dedicated to European Paintings from 1300 to 1800.
The reconfigured galleries highlight fresh narratives and dialogues among more than 700 works of art from the Museum’s world-famous holdings, which include recently acquired paintings and prestigious loans, as well as select sculptures and decorative art, showcase the interconnectedness of cultures, materials, and moments across The Met collection.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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