@TheTLS – July 1, 2022. Featuring Kenneth Rogoff on inflation; @KuperSimon on the Tour de France; @natsegnit on the ultrawealthy; Terry Eagleton on Geoff Dyer; @amyhawk_ on Hong Kong; @scheffer_pablo on climate change in medieval literature – and more.
The artist discusses America’s fractured present and his fears for the future.
By Françoise Mouly, Art by Chris Ware
“Am I laughably naïve to think we might all somehow grow up and continue this relatively youngish two-hundred-and-forty-six-year-old experiment? I’m starting to think I am,” the artist Chris Ware said. His cover for the July 4, 2022, issue of the magazine captures the divides underlying this year’s Independence Day celebrations. As suburban real-estate agents prepare to carpet the nation’s lawns with miniature flags, millions of Americans are riveted to the proceedings of the House select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Down the street, the Supreme Court struck down, on June 23rd, a New York state law restricting the ability to carry a gun in public, even as the Senate voted to pass gun-control legislation in the aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting.
Nearly 50 years ago, the Supreme Court legalized abortion. The decision has since divided the country. Now that the court has overturned Roe v. Wade, here are 10 books that outline the history and the terms of the debate.
Monocle’s Tyler Brûlé and Georgina Godwin cover the weekend’s biggest discussion topics in this special Gstaad edition of the programme.
Is there a novel more revered—and more famously unread—than James Joyce’s Ulysses? Despite its complexities, this love letter to Dublin, published a century ago, is a very readable chronicle of everyday life and everyday struggles. It’s a book about marriage, sex, religion, food, art, loneliness, companionship, and so much else. It’s a book, that is, about life. We hope that the following essays will send you on a quest to discover, or rediscover, this most staggering of epics.
The divine, stark photographs of Robert Adams
Times Literary Supplement for June 24, 2022: @TheTLS, featuring our annual Summer Books feature; Michele Pridmore-Brown on transhumanism; @zoesqwilliams on the Oxford chumocracy; a newly discovered response to the Wilde trials by George Egerton; Claire Lowdon on the new Ottessa Moshfegh – and more.
The artist discusses urban spaces and classic Russian children’s books.
New York may be a city where a person can, for the amount one might reasonably expect to pay for a month’s rent in many parts of this country, partake in an hours-long omakase experience featuring toro topped with osetra caviar and uni served with white truffle. Its temples of art may house some of the most renowned—and well-insured—art in the world. But it is also a city that embraces the epicure of the hot dog and the patron of the sidewalk artist. I recently spoke to this week’s cover artist, Victoria Tentler-Krylov, about city planning and sketching people on the subway.
Thomas Hardy’s depictions of a fictional Wessex and his own dear Dorset are more accurate than they may at first appear, says Susan Owens.
We feel a frisson when a real place plays a key part in a novel. The Cobb at Lyme Regis will always be associated with silly Louisa Musgrove and her tumble in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Knole in Kent with Virginia Woolf’s hero-heroine Orlando. Thomas Hardy, however, took the use of known locations to another level. He may have invented the characters in his novels, but he made them walk along actual roads, look across valleys at real views and live in recognisable villages and towns — sometimes, even in identifiable buildings.
For all its operatic symbolism, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is a novel in which practical footwear matters. Among its heart-breaking moments is when Tess’s walking boots are discovered stuffed in a hedge where she had hidden them, mistaken for a tramp’s pair and taken away, forcing her to walk many miles back home along a rough road in pretty, but thin-soled, patent-leather ones.
A map depicting Hardy’s Wessex by Emery Walker, drawn for Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Credit: BBC / Album
Those who live in the country come to know land by ear as much as by eye. Hardy’s characters are expert in this — even in the dark and when drunk, as in Desperate Remedies (1871): ‘Sometimes a soaking hiss proclaimed that they were passing by a pasture, then a patter would show that the rain fell on some large-leafed root crop, then a paddling plash announced the naked arable.’
This week’s Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS, featuring @muldoonpoetry on Ulysses at 100; John Fuller on Auden; @MatthewReiszTHE on science reporting; @MalikShushma on elite women in Rome; @majorjonnyd on Yorkshire – and more.
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