Where Do Republicans and Democrats Stand After the R.N.C.?
Biden imperilled his candidacy at the debate because of his inability to speak coherently. At the convention, Trump was doing something similar, and couldn’t stop. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Will Hezbollah and Israel Go to War?
Months of fighting at the border threaten to ignite an all-out conflict that could devastate the region.
Should We Abolish Prisons?
Our carceral system is characterized by frequent brutality and ingrained indifference. Finding a better way requires that we freely imagine alternatives. By Adam Gopnik
The Drift Magazine (July 19, 2024): The latest issue features Maybe fortresses come to violence like an addiction. Maybe the water is just water. The tide abandons what it leaves. We have absolutely no way of controlling the cane toad. “I love anyone who hears my screams.” You ever cry with that knowledge? Do they kiss on the mouth? What will the bears say? I am not yet a trampoline. No doors exist and nobody’s home. Simply because they are eternally young, beautiful, and dead.
The image of Donald Trump, his face smeared with blood after a bullet grazed his ear, marked a watershed moment in the already high-stakes 2024 US presidential election campaign. Opening our special report on the Pennsylvania rally shooting, Washington bureau chief David Smith examines how it could fuel Trump’s base and stoke further division in American politics.
Five essential reads in this week’s edition
1 Spotlight | On paw patrol in Sumatra National Geographic explorer and photographer Danielle Khan Da Silva joins an all-female group of Indigenous rangers who protect a rare Indonesian rainforest ecosystem.
2 Spotlight | Evasive action The doctors who treat cancer share their expert advice on what simple things we can all do to lessen the risk of getting the disease with Sarah Phillips.
3 Feature | Too hot to handle As heatwaves become a common occurrence, outdoor workers are particularly vulnerable, explains Samira Shackle, as she documents the death from heat of one French labourer.
4 Opinion | Simon Tisdall on the Nato summit The 75-year-old alliance was created to counteract Moscow’s power and needs to keep its focus on containing Russian ambition.
Country Life Magazine (July 16, 2024): The latest issue features ‘500 Shades of Green’ – Why is it the eye’s favorite hue; Rex Whistler’s triumph and tragedy; Big hearts and funny faces – the bull terrier and Alan Titchmarsh’s favorite flower show…
Our green and pleasant land
Our eyes can detect more of its shades than any other colour and its many hues are bound up with everything from jealousy to British racing cars—it’s all gone green for Lucien de Guise
It’s a bullseye
‘Life is merrier when you live with a bull terrier’ owners tell Katy Birchall as she delves into the kindly and comic character beneath the muscular frame
Showing the way
Goodwill and gardening go hand in hand at the ‘beautifully formed’ Royal Windsor Flower Show—and Alan Titchmarsh wouldn’t miss it for the world
First to fall
Rex Whistler refused to leave fighting the Second World War to ‘young boys’, but his courage and leadership was to cost him his life, as Allan Mallinson reveals
Lyndon Farnham’s favourite painting
The Jersey chief minister picks a work that encapsulates the island’s spirit and determination
‘Most costly and church-wise’
In the second of two articles, John Goodall investigates the 17th-century expansion that provided Lincoln College, Oxford, with a quite outstanding chapel
The legacy
Music will ring around the Royal Albert Hall again this summer thanks to Henry Wood and his Proms, reveals Octavia Pollock
All The King’s Whales and all The Queen’s dolphins
With more species around our shores than anywhere else in northern Europe, Ben Lerwill keeps his eyes peeled for porpoises, whales and dolphins
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell shells out on fine jewellery that is sure to impress
A stitch in time
Debo Devonshire’s love of chic, chickens and Chatsworth in Derbyshire is celebrated in a new exhibition, discovers Kim Parker
Interiors
Giles Kime explores large-scale wallpaper capable of transport-ing you to a whole new world
Country Life International
Jersey earns royal approval
Antonia Windsor marks 150 years of La Corbière lighthouse
Paul Henderson spices up his life with Jersey’s East Asian cuisine
Nick Hammond brews his own island tea
Holly Kirkwood picks the best properties for sale
Over the hills and far away
Tiffany Daneff marvels at the spectacular views that have been restored at the Old Rectory at Preston Capes, Northamptonshire
Kitchen garden cook
Crunchy fennel is a summer highlight for Melanie Johnson
Time for some merriment
Michael Billington is royally entertained as Shakespeare receives a modern, mirth-filled twist in Stratford and London
HARPER’S MAGAZINE – July 15, 2024: The latest issue features ‘The New Satanic Panic’ – Exorcism in the Age of TikTok; Has Psychology ruined Poetry; America’s Last Granite Carvers; William T. Vollmann reports from Korea’s DMZ, Matthew Karp on the decline of the American left, Jonathan Lethem on museums, Hisham Matar on the dangers of not knowing, Christian Wiman on Seamus Heaney, and more.
The pastor is pacing back and forth, a cordless microphone in one hand, the other extended before him. He says, “This is the awakening the American church has been waiting on,” and keeps pacing. He has readied himself before taking the elevated stage, donning a paisley shirt, top button undone, and speaks now from the wood pulpit of his revival tent.
The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45.
This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.
From the time of the Revolutionary War to the fires of the nineteen-seventies, the history of the borough has always been shaped by its in-between-ness.
Country Life Magazine (July 9, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Experts’ Experts – 185 heroes the top designers rely on; Top dogs – politics of the village show; Boar wars – what to do with wild pigs; Tea and cakes – the rise and rise of the sponge…
The experts’ experts
Giles Kime and Amelia Thorpe ask Britain’s leading lights in design to name the talented professionals who inspire and transform their own projects
The dog with the waggiest tail
Move over Crufts, the village pooch parade is the one they all want to win with local bragging rights hanging in the balance, as Madeleine Silver discovers
Rooting for the truth
Pilfering pest or beneficial ecosystem engineer? Vicky Liddell examines the often-controversial return of wild boar to Britain’s woodland
Oh, crumbs! Secrets of the sponge
How did the Victoria sponge rise to be fêted as the queen of all cakes? Flora Watkins indulges in the history of the nation’s favourite teatime treat
Philippa Thorp’s favourite painting
The interior designer chooses a powerful work that unlocks a whole range of emotions
The devil is in the detail
Minette Batters insists that the incoming Government must be held to account over the many lavish pre-election promises on food security and farming
Salvaging the vine
In the first of two articles, John Goodall charts the long, hard struggle to bring to fruition one Bishop of Lincoln’s dreams of establishing a college at Oxford
The legacy
Amie Elizabeth White brews up a tale of 18th-century success as she celebrates Thomas Twining’s role as a tea pioneer
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell earns her summer stripes with elegant blue-and-white pieces for home and away
Ancient and modern
George Plumptre is heartened to witness a clever modern renovation of Nash’s Picturesque vision at Sandridge Park, Devon
If you’re lookin’, you ain’t cookin’
Tom Parker Bowles harnesses the flame’s fickle power as he shares a chef’s secrets of the perfect barbecue technique
In the dock
John Wright grasps the nettle in a hands-on investigation into the powers of the dock leaf—and, he says, it is your turn next
Word on the street
Smart Duke Street in London’s St James’s is the epicentre of British art. Carla Passino meets the larger-than-life characters who put the area on the map
Go tell the congregation
Matthew Dennison can’t help but sing the praises of Isaac Watts, that most prolific of hymn writers born 350 years ago
Goodbye, James Anderson
James Fisher pays tribute to English cricket’s legendary fast bowler ahead of his farewell Test match against the West Indies
The actor talks about the origins of “Adaptation,” his potential leap to television, and the art of “keeping it enigmatic.”
By Susan Orlean
The wobbly distinction between reality and artifice fascinates Nicolas Cage. The first time we encountered each other was in 2001, during the making of “Adaptation”—a film based on Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt my book “The Orchid Thief” for the screen—in which Cage played Kaufman and his twin, Donald. He was in the middle of a scene, and I tiptoed onto the set as quietly as possible, convinced that any distraction would trigger one of the eruptions for which Cage had become famous. Between takes, he glanced at the handful of people watching, and exclaimed cheerily, “Oh, guys, look!” He pointed at me and a small, fuzzy-haired man I hadn’t noticed beside me. “It’s the real Charlie and the real Susan!” He seemed tickled by this collision between the characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts, and insisted that the crew take note. (Kaufman and I, who had never met before that moment, slunk away sheepishly.)
It can be easy to take the greatness of “This American Life,” the weekly public-radio show and podcast hosted by Ira Glass, for granted. The show, which Glass co-founded in 1995 at WBEZ, in Chicago, has had the same essential format for twenty-eight years and more than eight hundred episodes. It was instrumental in creating a genre of audio journalism that has flourished in recent decades, especially since the podcast boom—which was initiated by the show’s first spinoff, “Serial,” in 2014. Like “The Daily Show” or Second City, “This American Life” has trained a generation of talented people, and Glass’s three-act structures, chatty cadences, and mixture of analysis and whimsy are now so familiar as to seem unremarkable.
Eddie Murphy has been so famous for so long, occupying such a lofty place in the cultural landscape, that it can be easy to overlook just how game-changing a figure he actually is.
Let’s start, as Murphy’s career did, with standup. There had been star comics before — Steve Martin, Richard Pryor — but none exploded with anything like Murphy’s speed or intensity.
Country Life Magazine (July 2, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Call of the Coast’; Seaside treasure – the museum on the cliff; What a scoop – secrets of the ice-cream makers; A boatbuilder’s life, Barbie’s lore and best beach clubs…
Water, water, everywhere
Ben Lerwill drops anchor in the Thames to meet master boat-builder Mark Edwards, whose eclectic roll call of clients includes Elizabeth II and George Clooney
What’s your flavour?
Artisan ice cream makers have got it licked, says Madeleine Silver, as she checks out cones lovingly created using local milk and natural flavourings
You can be anything
Barbie is still in the pink at the age of 65. Susan Jenkins charts the ups and downs of Mattel’s often-controversial, yet still much-loved figurehead
Travel
Rosie Paterson reveals that Italy is still the place to go for unbeatable beach clubs, Richard MacKichan discovers the untouched isle of Formentera and Pamela Goodman carves out her own niche on a transatlantic cruise
Greg Mosse’s favourite painting
The writer chooses a ‘gorgeous panorama’ bursting with fellowship and rustic merry-making
Wrestling alligators in a mud hole
The country is all of a flutter in the build up to the General Election, but all bets are off for an exasperated Carla Carlisle
The legacy
Kate Green marvels at the Minack, Rowena Cade’s breathtaking cliffside amphitheatre
If I only had a brain
Increasing numbers of jellyfish are wobbling their way into British waters, but there’s no need to be alarmed, says Helen Scales
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell’s bold sunglasses leave everyone else in the shade
Interiors
Well-thought-out garden buildings are an ideal way to get closer to Nature, suggests Amelia Thorpe
London Life
Rosie Paterson goes up, up and away for the capital’s Balloon Regatta, Levison Wood is in the hotseat, Holly Black takes the wraps off the new-look Royal Academy Schools and Jemima Sissons is on the comeback trail
Coasting ahead
The D-Day landings were planned from its shores, but today George Plumptre finds a haven of peace at Lepe House in Hampshire
Strawberry dreams
Tom Parker Bowles is seduced by the charms of the strawberry, that most flirtatious of fruits
Kitchen garden cook
Melanie Johnson savours the joy of sweet and floral apricots
The dog days aren’t done
All eyes are on St Swithin’s Day as Lia Leendertz examines what weather lore has in store
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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