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One of the rare 24-cent misprints sold at auction this week for a record-breaking $2 million
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A new Hollywood epic traces Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise and fall through his checkered relationship with his first wife
The market was established in the late 19th century by King Rama IV, who ordered the construction of a canal to connect two rivers. It consists of a network of canals where vendors sell various goods from their boats, such as fruits, vegetables, souvenirs, and street food.
Visitors can experience the colorful and lively atmosphere of the market by taking a boat ride along the canals or walking along the banks. Damnoen Saduak Floating Market is a unique and memorable way to experience the traditional Thai culture and lifestyle.
Wikipedia and the problem of historical memory
by Ben Lerner
At twenty-six, in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched, I found myself driving a red Subaru Outback—the color was technically “claret metallic,” the friend who’d lent me the car had told me, in case I ever wanted to touch up the paint—on Highway 12 in Utah. I was heading to the East Bay after a painful breakup in New York. I remember, wrongly, that I was listening to a book on tape, a work by a prominent linguist, as I moved through the alien landscape, jagged formations of red rock towering against a cloudless sky.
Letting go of Philip Roth
by Hannah Gold
It is difficult to predict when one will spend the night at a hotel in Newark, let alone three, and uncommon to agree to such a scenario willingly. If you live there already, you stay home. If you’re there for a professional engagement, your boss made you go. If your flight has been canceled, you go there as a last resort. Whereas, though I felt compelled to be there, I couldn’t point to an authority outside of myself that had forced my hand. The room had been booked a week in advance.
In more than a hundred works of fiction, Oates has investigated the question of personality—while doubting that she actually has one.
By Rachel Aviv
hen Joyce Carol Oates was thirty-four, she started a journal. “Query,” she wrote on the first page. “Does the individual exist?” She felt that she knew little about herself—for instance, whether she was honest or a hypocrite. “I don’t know the answer to the simplest of questions,” she wrote. “What is my personal nature?”
In “My Name Is Barbra,” the icon takes a maximalist approach to her own life, studying every trial, triumph, and snack food of a six-decade career.
By Rachel Syme
Seventy years ago, before she was galactically famous, before she dropped an “a” from her first name, before she was a Broadway ingénue, before her nose bump was aspirational, before she changed the way people hear the word “butter,” before she was a macher or a mogul or a decorated matron of the arts, Barbra Streisand was, by her own admission, “very annoying to be around.” She was born impatient and convinced of her potential—the basic ingredients of celebrity, and of an exquisitely obnoxious child. When Streisand was growing up in Brooklyn, in the nineteen-forties, she used to crawl onto the fire escape of her shabby apartment building and conduct philosophical debates with her best friend, Rosyln Arenstein, who was a staunch atheist.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (November 17, 2023): The latest issue features How David Zaslav blew up Hollywood – The inside story of a novice movie mogul in an age of disruption, discontent and disaster ; Russell Brand’s Alternate Reality – The British entertainer built an army of fans with his conspiracy-minded podcast. Now, amid sex-assault claims against him, they’ve become his whole world; Sofia Coppola’s Subversive Search for Truth in ‘Priscilla’ – Hollywood is addicted to mythologizing biopics. ‘‘Priscilla’’ offers something different…
A merger put him in the driver’s seat at Warner Brothers, one of the industry’s biggest studios. It has been a wild ride.
By Jonathan Mahler, James B. Stewart and Benjamin Mullin
It was April 2022, and David Zaslav had just closed the deal of a lifetime. From the helm of his relatively small and unglamorous cable company, Discovery, he had taken control of a sprawling entertainment conglomerate that included perhaps the most storied movie studio on the planet, Warner Brothers. The longtime New Yorker had always loved movies, and against the advice of several media peers, he had moved to Hollywood and taken over Jack Warner’s historic office, hauling the old mogul’s desk out of storage and topping it off with an old-time handset telephone. So far things were going great. He had met all the stars and players, was widely feted as the next in line to save the eternally struggling industry and was well into the process of renovating a landmark house in Beverly Hills.
Hollywood is addicted to mythologizing biopics. ‘‘Priscilla’’ offers something different.
By Rafaela Bassili
As with much of her other work, the opening of Sofia Coppola’s latest film, “Priscilla,” is all about textures. A pair of manicured feet sink into a shag carpet; a fingernail is carefully polished in red; we see the back of a prodigious black bouffant, then the dexterous painting of a dramatic cat eye with black liner. Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) paces around Graceland relentlessly. There’s nothing for her to do, and too much for her to process.
NEW HUMANIST MAGAZINE – WINTER 2023 ISSUE: The new issue features Pavan Amara on the new technologies revolutionising reproduction, Gabriele Di Donfrancesco on Europe’s battle over “family values” and Rachael Lennon on a decade of same-sex marriage, and a new column from Shaparak Khorsandi…
A play of past and present
The Atlantic revisits Reconstruction
.By JEFFREY GOLDBERG
No one should fear a history that asks a country to live up to its highest ideals.
The federal government abandoned Reconstruction in 1877, but Black people didn’t give up on the moment’s promise.
In this video, beekeepers Ray Sciberras and Jorge Spiteri take us back to the time of the Romans and tell us all about the Apis Mellifera Ruttneri – the Maltese honeybee. We also see how the honey they produce plays a key role at the Camilleri & Sons Bakery, where among the many delicacies, you’ll find delicate Zeppoli Ta’ San Guzepp pastries drizzled with honey.
But it doesn’t stop at pastry, as chef Robert Cassar of the MICHELIN-recommended restaurant Root 81 makes clear. “Honey, in my eyes, is like butter – you can use it with everything,” he says.
Country Life Magazine – November 15, 2023: The latest issue features the annual Georgian Group Architecture Awards; Horns of plenty – The Bull, monarch of the meadow has been a key mythological figure since ancient times; the sensitive restoration of Somerton Castle in Lincolnshire, a once-neglected medieval stronghold; the great thatching renaissance, and more…
Imaginative restoration, from Stowe House to Stroud canal, is lauded in the annual Georgian Group Architectural Awards
Jane Wheatley investigates the development pitfalls of finding a pipistrelle on your property
The art of thatching is enjoying a renaissance as architects are drawn to its eco credentials, as Sarah Langford discovers
The monarch of the meadow has been a key mythological figure since ancient times. Ian Morton takes the bull by the horns
Jonathan Self finds comfort in every crunchy, buttery mouthful and asks: how do you like yours?
Christopher Stocks goes under-ground to examine the centuries-long allure of glittering grottos
Director-general Ben Cowell celebrates Historic Houses and half a century of achievement
The explorer chooses a work that demonstrates the beauty and colour of the natural world
Jamie Blackett runs the gauntlet of the ‘Grand National’ in pursuit of ever-elusive South Uist snipe
Nicholas Cooper marvels at the sensitive restoration of Somerton Castle in Lincolnshire, a once-neglected medieval stronghold
Kate Green meets the docile and floppy-eared British Lop
Need a sparkling conversation starter? Hetty Lintell picks out a fistful of fabulous cocktail rings
The sartorial centre of Savile Row provided the perfect setting for our Gentleman’s Life party
Painting a floor is a fun way to add colour and pattern to a room, finds Amelia Thorpe
Victorian glasshouses are feats of engineering that deserve a new lease of life, says Lucy Denton
Charles Quest-Ritson is wowed by the display of trained apples in the 18th-century walled garden at The Newt in Somerset
Melanie Johnson savours the sweet earthiness of a chestnut
Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Lear may be off beam, but Michael Billington is buoyed by a stirring portrayal of the Bard’s wife
And much more
Out on the lake, fishermen catch féra, a delicate fish that Michelin-starred chef Jean Sulpice is particularly fond of working with. The forests that surround the lake are also a source of inspiration for the chef, who never misses an opportunity to stroll through them in search of new flavours.
Boomers Daily 