Harper’s Magazine – OCTOBER 2023: This issue features ‘Craving A Choice’ – Insurgency and its Threat to the Democratic Party; The Spy – An Essay On seeing without being seen, and more…
For decades, New Hampshire has generated brisk and gratifying drama with its first-in-the-nation presidential primary. The Granite State momentously destroyed a presidency in 1968, when the Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy ran against President Lyndon Johnson on an antiwar platform.
Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did—the rest of her remained obstinately alive. She took a considerable time to die and outlasted the nurses’ predictions by many days, so that those of us who had been summoned to her bedside had to depart and return to our lives.
For generations, the Chinese Communist Party has held on to power partly through an implicit bargain with its citizenry: Sacrifice your freedoms, and in exchange, we’ll guarantee ever-rising living standards.
That deal has not held up for today’s youths.
Until quite recently, China’s young people seemed poised to take on the world — and many of them appeared to believe they would. They’ve shown a streak of hyper-nationalism, stoked by the country’s leadership and reinforced by China’s growing economic and geopolitical strength.
China’s Gen Z came of age, after all, in the wake of the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization and amid a rapid rise in incomes.
President Xi Jinping has said young people must learn to “eat bitterness” (an idiom that roughly means to toughen up by enduring hardship). Today’s youths, leaders say, are not too good for manual labor or moving to the countryside — experiences Xi and his generation once had to endure.
China’s resilience after the financial crisis, particularly relative to the sluggish recovery across most of the West, suggested China and its citizens had nowhere to go but up. Political dysfunction in many of those same Western democracies, expertly exploited by Chinese propaganda, reinforced this perception.
The bleeding edge … LookX uses a piece of crumpled paper as a prompt to create buildings in the style of Frank Gehry (left) and Zaha Hadid (right). Composite: Tim Fu
It’s revolutionizing building – but could AI kill off an entire profession? Perhaps not, finds our writer, as he enters a world where Corbusier-style marvels and 500-room hotels are just a click away
Oliver Wainwright – The Guardian (August 7, 2023):A handful of little green blocks flashes up on the screen, filling a building site with a neat grid of uniform cubes. One second they form rows of towers, next they morph into low-rise courtyards, then they flip back into long slender slabs, before cycling through hundreds of other iterations, in a hypnotic high-speed ballet of bristling buildings.
“You don’t even have to do much” … Patrik Schumacher-generated designs for ZHA using Midjourney. Photograph: Zaha Hadid Architects
I watch this while on a Zoom call with Wanyu He, an architect based in Shenzhen, China, and the founder of XKool, an artificial intelligence company determined to revolutionise the architecture industry. She freezes the dancing blocks and zooms in, revealing a layout of hotel rooms that fidget and reorder themselves as the building swells and contracts. Corridors switch sides, furniture dances to and fro. Another click and an invisible world of pipes and wires appears, a matrix of services bending and splicing in mesmerising unison, the location of lighting, plug sockets and switches automatically optimised. One further click and the construction drawings pop up, along with a cost breakdown and components list. The entire plan is ready to be sent to the factory to be built.
‘A novelist is condemned to produce a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery,’ reflects the beleaguered hero of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s portrait of the artist as a middle-aged car crash.
London Review of Books (LRB – August 5, 2023) – But really, as Pinfold goes on to say, ‘most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters – Dickens and Balzac even – were flagrantly guilty.’ Pinfold is by admission a self-portrait, so Waugh must have expected readers to speculate on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself.
In 1958, a Cambridge don called Frederick J. Stopp produced a study of Waugh – uniquely, Waugh himself gave ‘generous assistance’ – which warmly endorsed the idea that he had basically ‘two books in his armoury’, the first featuring the ‘contrast between sanity and insanity’ and the second ‘sanity venturing out into the surrounding sphere of insanity, and defeating it at its own game’.
Whether this particular dualism had Waugh’s approval is unclear, but either way it doesn’t seem entirely satisfactory since the two alternatives look like variants of the same thing. Less well-disposed readers have thought that Waugh’s books divided on much more rudimentary lines: the good ones, which are funny, and the bad ones, which are pious.
There is the string of brilliant, brittle social comedies in the 1930s, and then there is whatever started happening with the publication in 1945 of Brideshead Revisited. Stopp reported, presumably with his master’s sanction, that ‘Mr Waugh’s reputation among the critics has hardly yet recovered from the blow.’ Brigid Brophy had the best joke: ‘In literary calendars, 1945 is marked as the year Waugh ended.’
Foreign Affairs (August 2, 2023) – As 2022 came to an end, hopes were rising that China’s economy—and, consequently, the global economy—was poised for a surge. After three years of stringent restrictions on movement, mandatory mass testing, and interminable lockdowns, the Chinese government had suddenly decided to abandon its “zero COVID” policy, which had suppressed demand, hampered manufacturing, roiled supply lines, and produced the most significant slowdown that the country’s economy had seen since pro-market reforms began in the late 1970s.
Economic long COVID will likely plague the Chinese economy for years.
In the weeks following the policy change, global prices of oil, copper, and other commodities rose on expectations that Chinese demand would surge. In March, then Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced a target for real GDP growth of around five percent, and many external analysts predicted it would go far higher.
LA Review of Books (Summer 2023) – In this elemental issue of LARB Quarterly, no. 38: Earth, we found new ways of looking at the planet. Writers were free to take up the theme casually or catastrophically, studying the earth beneath their fingernails or the planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away. We imagined being sealed outside, dreaming of coming home.
ON AN UNUSUALLY rainy evening in Los Angeles this March, at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, two investigative reporters from Germany gave a talk about a financial scandal known as “cum-ex.” Against the backdrop of a mid-century modern terrace, its polished cement looking dull and gray in the storm, the pair flashed through a series of slides about international tax embezzlement.
A relatively small drip of funds from the German cultural ministry sometimes supports talks like these in the name of Mann’s legacy. When the capital of German literary life was exiled to Los Angeles around the Second World War, the author built a home that now still hosts salons in the name of democratic cultural exchange.
THE YEAR WAS 1971, the place Łódź. Journalist Hanna Krall was interviewing a pioneering heart surgeon named Jan Moll. The good doctor, apparently unhappy with the outcome of previous interviews, told Krall that everything journalists ever wrote about medicine was nonsense. So, if she wanted to avoid doing the same, he strongly suggested she have her article vetted by a certain cardiologist, a Dr. Edelman, who, said Moll, would correct her mistakes. Krall agreed and arranged a meeting. She sat down with Marek Edelman in the Grand Hotel café, where it took 15 minutes for him to read through her article.
My husband doesn’t enjoy peeling oranges. He doesn’t like the little white webs of pith or the way the juice trickles between his fingers and soaks and stains the skin. He’s not a fan of pips. The citrus-sweet taste he could take or leave. If I had to choose between him and my favourite fruit, I like to think I’d stick with him.
On this episode of The London Magazine Podcast, we speak with Max Wilkinson.Max is a playwright and screenwriter whose award-winning play, Rainer, about a voyeuristic delivery rider riding around London, played at the Arcola Theatre last summer and is being produced for BBC Radio Four’s Afternoon play slot.
When Clare wakes, the car is moving along a wide valley between fields of grazing cattle. She shifts in her seat, her side sweaty where her brother Robbie has been leaning against her. The last thing she remembers is crossing into Austria at a high pass, a young border guard peering in at them through the drizzle. Now the sun is out, and the tarmac is steaming in the heat. At a junction, her father slows down. ‘This is it,’ he says, turning the car. They pass through a village, all whitewashed houses with large overhanging roofs. In the deserted square is a small inn, Der Jäger painted across one wall in beautiful gothic script. Next to the lettering is a twenty-foot-high figure of a hunter in Tyrolean leather trousers and green hat, striding across a mountain side. Clare notices that he has the same jaw as John Travolta in Grease.
Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty accomplished something many writers aspire to but few ever pull off: he predicted the future. Toward the end of his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, Rorty considered the possibility that “the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments.”
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