Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – December 31, 2023

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 31, 2023): The latest issue features Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready For His Close-Up – Sam Wasson’s supremely entertaining new book, “The Path to Paradise”, tracks the ups and downs, ins and outs, of a remarkable career.

The Problem of Misinformation in an Era Without Trust

This image shows the face of a wooden Pinocchio figure reflected in the screen of an iPhone on a bright red background. Pinocchio’s long nose protrudes a couple inches from the screen.

Elon Musk thinks a free market of ideas will self-correct. Liberals want to regulate it. Both are missing a deeper predicament.

By Jennifer Szalai

When the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk sat down for his profanity-laced interview at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit in late November, his petulant dropping of F-bombs received a lot of attention. Less noticed but far more revealing was his evident disdain for a humble word beginning with the letter T. “You could not trust me,” Musk said, affecting an air of tough-guy indifference in his shearling-collared flight jacket and shiny black boots. “It is irrelevant. The rocket track record speaks for itself.”

Arts & Literature, Culture, Homes, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Previews: Country Life Magazine – Dec 27, 2023

Leave a comment
Image

Country Life Magazine – December 27, 2023: The latest issue features ‘This Splendid Land’ – Landscapes, Landmarks, Houses and Gardens; The Art of Knot Tying; Winston Churchill’s interior-design tips; A unicorn in the garden – fantastic beasts tamed…

Figs, wisteria, and the roses that ‘are ridiculously easy to grow’

Country Life’s 10 best gardens stories of 2023

By Toby Keel

The rose variety that’s ridiculously easy to grow: ‘Stuff some cuttings into the soil and two years later, they’ll be flourishing’

Long-standing Country Life contributor Charles Quest-Ritson is literally the man who wrote the book on roses — specifically The RHS encyclopedia of Roses — and back in June, he shared some tips on sharing and planting cuttings which proved enormously popular.

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Jan 1 & 8, 2024

Leave a comment
A person pauses from working at their desk and looks out the window at fireworks over a city skyline.

The New Yorker – January 1 & 8, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover features Bianca Bagnarelli’s “Deadline” – The artist evokes a moment suspended between the old and the new.

How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence

A painting of a young girl with flowers by Camille Pissarro

He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.

By Adam Gopnik

It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises—has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his hero-painter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in.

A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza

A photograph of the writer Mosab Abu Toha and his family

Following Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s invasion, Mosab Abu Toha fled his home with his wife and three children. Then I.D.F. soldiers took him into custody.

By Mosab Abu Toha

Arts & Literature, Boats, Books, Historical, Profiles, Reviews, Videos

Historical: Saving John Steinbeck’s ‘Western Flyer’

Video Leave a comment

CBS Mornings (December 23, 2023) – After writing “The Grapes of Wrath,” author John Steinbeck explored the Gulf of Mexico in a famous boat called the Western Flyer.

Since then, the boat has inspired adventurers and scientists for generations, but the original ship was nearly lost. CBS News’ Jeff Glor reports on the person determined to give it new life.

Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Magazines, Museums, Reviews

International Art: Apollo Magazine – January 2024

Leave a comment
Image

Apollo Magazine (December 23, 2023): The new January 2024 issue features ‘The Last Days of Vincent Van Gogh’; What’s in store for the art market?; Paris pays tribute to Agnès Varda, and more…

Breath of fresh air – Gerhard Richter in the Alps

Three exhibitions in the Engadin Valley explore how the Swiss mountains have inspired some of the painter’s most playful work

Remembering the festive geese of Christmas past

The festive bird has often been served up by artists and writers including J.M.W. Turner and Charles Dickens

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – December 24, 2023

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 22, 2023): The latest issue features MAGIC: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson, by Roland Lazenby; My Jewish Charlie Brown Christmas – The Peanuts special is the most overtly Christian TV holiday classic. So why does it speak to me so deeply?; Seven Fishes (Not Seven Dishes) for Christmas Eve – A modern Italian American take on the Feast of the Seven Fishes offers a streamlined menu any family can pull off….

Magic Man: The Story of the Greatest Point Guard in N.B.A. History

A color photograph of a tall man in midair holding a basketball. His uniform is purple and gold.

Roland Lazenby’s big biography of Magic Johnson gives us a wealth of detail, a huge cast of characters and, in a way, the tapestry of our time.

By Thomas Beller

MAGIC: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson, by Roland Lazenby

I once asked a portrait photographer why no one ever smiled in her pictures, and she replied, “A smile is a mask.”

I thought of this aphorism as I read Roland Lazenby’s 800-page biography of Magic Johnson. Sports Illustrated declared his smile to be one of the two greatest smiles of the 20th century. (The other was Louis Armstrong’s.) As Missy Fox, the daughter of his high school coach, says in the book, “That is the one thing he’s always had, that smile.”

My Jewish Charlie Brown Christmas

Two animated Peanuts characters, Charlie Brown and Linus, stand beside a very anemic Christmas tree in the snow.

The Peanuts special is the most overtly Christian TV holiday classic. So why does it speak to me so deeply?


By James Poniewozik

“A Charlie Brown Christmas” was a one-of-a-kind wonder when it premiered in 1965 and remains so almost 60 years later. Unlike the other jingle-belled baubles that TV throws down the chimney each year, it is melancholy and meditative. The animation is minimalist and subdued, full of grays and wafting snowflakes. I could wrap myself in the Vince Guaraldi jazz score like a quilt.

And then there’s the speech.

Arts & Literature, Culture, History, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Culture: Humanities Magazine – Winter 2024

Leave a comment
Gold_Articles_First_Kings

Humanities Magazine – Winter 2024 Issue:

Royalty Reconsidered: The King’s Beer and the Commoner’s Shirt

Silver helmet with gold detailing

A new exhibition looks at Europe’s earliest societies

Ada Palmer

As visitors exit “First Kings of Europe,” the gift shop offers a kind of test. Two craft beers were created for the exhibition, a collaboration between the museum and Off Color Brewing: Beer for Kings, made from top-quality rich and ancient grains, and Beer for Commoners, made from the more modest ingredients of the poor. Beneath the racks of beer hang T-shirts with the art for each. Which identity does the visitor want to take home: commoner or king? The answer for most exhibitions celebrating the awe-inspiring treasures of royalty would be easy, but “First Kings of Europe” is a different kind of show, with an ambitious new approach to how we display and envision power, kingship, and history.

Nazi Spies in America!

Illustration of police officer looking through handcuffs like binoculars

During World War II, Axis espionage inspired a media panic, but amateurish German agents turned out to be “underwhelming”

Sam Lebovic

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

London Review Of Books – January 4, 2024 Preview

Leave a comment
Image

London Review of Books (LRB) – December 20, 2023: The latest issue features Stevenson in Edinburgh; Katherine Mansfield’s Lies; James Meek changes the channel, and Israel and Germany…

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust, and Lies that Broke Television by Peter Biskind

Short Cuts: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation

Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany by Esra Özyürek

Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust by Andrew Port

America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life by Claire Rydell Arcenas

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Dec 22, 2023

Leave a comment
Image

Times Literary Supplement (December 20, 2023): The latest issue features ‘A nice little earner’ – On Dicken’s Christmas Carol; Jane Austen’s Truth Universally Acknowledged; Between God and Jingle Bells; and ‘Revoltingly Cute’…

Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Museums, Reviews, Videos

Exhibits: ‘Medieval Money, Merchants, And Morality’ At The Morgan Library NYC

Leave a comment

The Morgan Library & Museum (December 18, 2023) – Diane Wolfthal, David and Caroline Minter Chair Emerita in the Humanities and Professor Emerita of Art History, Rice University, and Dei Jackson, Assistant Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts here at the Morgan, discuss their current exhibition “Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality,” which charts the economic revolution that took place at the end of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.

“Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality” is open to the public November 10, 2023 through March 10, 2024.

Trade was conducted on an unprecedented scale, banks were established, and coinage proliferated like never before. The widespread use of money in everyday life transformed every aspect of European society, including its values and culture. Bringing together some of the most acclaimed manuscripts in the Morgan’s collection and other exceptional objects including a renaissance purse, a brass alms box, and a hoard of coins, this exhibition will explore the fate of the avaricious, attitudes towards the poor, contentious lending practices, and money management.

The famous Hours of Catherine of Cleves, the Hours of Henry VIII, and the Prayer Book of Queen Claude de France will be presented from a decidedly new angle, combining economic and art history to consider the early history of capitalism and the crisis in values that it sparked. These will feature alongside lesser known treasures, including an Italian account book in its original binding and a stunning leaf from a register of creditors made in Bologna, Italy, in 1394–95. As people today reflect on fluctuating markets, disparities in wealth, personal values, and morality, the themes addressed in this exhibition are as relevant as ever.