Country Life Magazine – January 17, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Floral Fireworks’ – The National Collection of Dahlias; The Bridges of Britain; and the Arts-and-Crafts masterpieces of Madresfield Court, Worcestershire…
Floral fireworks
Kirsty Fergusson visits the new home of the 1,700-strong National Collection of Dahlias and reveals which blooms to order now for late-summer colour
The Bridges of Britain
Our greatest bridges span the ages and have the power to inspire both awe and admiration, as Jack Watkins discovers
Cold cures
The beautiful and practical cast-iron Victorian cloche is making a comeback. Tiffany Daneff investigates the revival of the miniature glass house
Twist and shout
Tiffany Daneff visits Morton Hall Gardens in Worcestershire to discover the secret of its owner’s intriguing new clematis-training technique
Why, why, why weigela?
New forms of this easy-to-grow garden shrub have repeating flowers in wonderful colours — no wonder they are hot sellers, suggests Charles Quest-Ritson
HARPER’S MAGAZINE – FEBRUARY 2024:This issue features ‘Israel’s War Within’ – The battle for a country’s soul; The Trials of Trucking School; Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis…
In August 1975, I stood outside the Knesset, in Jerusalem, witnessing a fevered demonstration against Henry Kissinger, then the American secretary of state. Thousands of young men in knitted kippahs chanted and danced in circles, their arms wrapped around one another, their voices echoing off the stone building. They were mainly West Bank settlers, I was informed, part of a fledgling movement called Gush Emunim—in effect, the Young Guard of the National Religious Party (NRP).
“If you have to change friends, that’s what you gotta do,” our instructor, Johnny, told the twelve of us sitting in a makeshift classroom in a strip mall outside Austin. “They’re gonna be so jealous, because you’re gonna be bringing home so much money. Encourage them to get their CDL, too.”
A CDL is a commercial driver’s license, and if you pay attention, you’ll find variations on the phrase cdl drivers wanted everywhere: across interstate billboards, in small-town newspapers, on diner bulletin boards, on TV, and, most often, on the backs of semitrucks. Each of us had come to the Changing Lanes CDL School to answer that call.
Scientific American (January 16, 2024): The February 2024 issue features ‘The Milky Way’s Secret History’ – New star maps reveal our galaxy’s turbulent past; Why Aren’t We Made of Antimatter? – To understand why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, physicists are looking for a tiny signal in the electron…
The New Yorker – January 22, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover featuresPascal Campion’s “Winter Sun” – The artist depicts the beams of sunlight that flicker during the coldest months of the year.
Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.
To be vigilant—to live without illusions about the ever-present threat of annihilation—was a primary value at No. 4 Haportzim Street, once the Jerusalem address of the Netanyahu family. This wariness had ancient roots. In the Passover Haggadah, the passage beginning “Vehi Sheamda” reminds everyone at the Seder table that in each generation an enemy “rises up to destroy” the Jewish people. “But the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands,” the Haggadah continues. Benzion Netanyahu, the family patriarch and a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, was a secular man. For deliverance, he looked not to faith but to the renunciation of naïveté and the strength of arms. This creed became his middle son’s inheritance, the core of his self-conception as the uniquely unillusioned defender of the State of Israel.
In the early months of the pandemic, joggers on the Bear Creek Greenway, in southern Oregon, began to notice tents cropping up by the path. The Greenway, which connects towns and parks along a tributary of the Rogue River, was beloved for its wetlands and for stands of oaks that attracted migrating birds. Now, as jobs disappeared and services for the poor shut down, it was increasingly a last-ditch place to live. Tents accumulated in messy clusters, where people sometimes smoked fentanyl, and “the Greenway” became a byword for homelessness and drug use. On a popular local Facebook page, one typical comment read, “Though I feel sorry for some of the people in that situation, most of them are just pigs.” In Medford, the largest city along the trail, police demolished encampments and ticketed people for sleeping rough.
The Economist Magazine (January 12, 2024): The latest issue features ‘China’s EV Onslaught’ – An influx of Chinese cars is terrifying the West; Europe’s Silicon Valley; ‘America Fights Back’ – The new contest for sea power; Why Olaf Scholz is no Angela Merkel – Germany is unable and unwilling to lead Europe; What science says about old leaders…
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 12, 2024): The new issue features ‘Why Are American Drivers So Deadly’ –After decades of declining fatality, dangerous driving has surged again….
After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.
By Matthew Shaer
In the summer of 1999, a few years after graduating from medical school, Deborah Kuhls moved from New York to Maryland, where she had been accepted as a surgical fellow at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. Founded by a pioneer in emergency medicine, Shock Trauma is one of the busiest critical-care facilities in the country — in an average year, doctors there see approximately 8,000 patients, many of them close to death.
Andy Reid’s diligence and sense of mischief have made him one of the game’s best-ever coaches. Can he get his struggling Chiefs back to the Super Bowl?
By Michael Sokolove
Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, has won more than 250 games in his career, fourth all-time, which puts him high on any list of the N.F.L.’s greatest coaches. Most of the others in that pantheon are men who personify the sport’s militaristic soul — Vince Lombardi, for example, the fabled coach of the 1960s-era Green Bay Packers, or Reid’s contemporary, the grim Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots. But Reid is no Lombardi or Belichick; he’s Steve Jobs. He’s a designer, a tinkerer, a product engineer who imbues his football with creativity and even an occasional touch of whimsy.
Science Magazine – January 11, 2024: The new issue features‘Lost City’ – Ancient development in the Upper Amazon; What SARS-CoV-2’s mild cousins reveal about Covid-19; Specifying laws of friction and a Continued decline in sharks despite regulation…
The assassination of a Hamas chief in Lebanon. A terror attack on mourners of an Iranian former general. Commercial shipping in the Red Sea targeted by Yemeni rebels, and a US airstrike in Iraq.All were separate events in the Middle East last week but all were linked, in one way or another, to the presence of autonomous but Iranian-backed militia forces in the region.
When asked to visualise the threat of war engulfing the Middle East, for this week’s cover, illustrator Carl Godfrey took a literal approach. “I wanted to convey the tense and unpredictable situation,” says Carl, “and there’s nothing more tense than looking down the barrel of a gun. Especially when those barrels are pointing in all directions, and the risk of war is expanding in all directions.”
Studies of the microbes living on and in our bodies are conducted mainly in a few rich countries, squandering opportunities to improve the health of people globally.
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