THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR(June 4, 2024): The latest issue features ‘An Olympian for the Ages’ – Why George Eyser’s feats at the 1904 Games deserve to be celebrated today; Joshua Prager on a forgotten Olympian, Mickalene Thomas and the art of remixing, new poetry from Ange Mlinko, and more…
Is the convergence of human and machine really upon us?
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI by Ray Kurzweil
In the fall of 2014, an MIT cognitive scientist named Tomaso Poggio predicted that humankind was at least 20 years away from building computers that could interpret images on their own. Doing so, declared Poggio, “would be one of the most intellectually challenging things … for a machine to do.” One month later, Google released an AI program that did exactly what he’d deemed impossible.
Country Life Magazine (June 4, 2024): The latest issue features Britain’s Wildlife Safaris; Tulips, tanks and teddies – The great passions….
Stuff and nonsense
Collectors explain their peculiar passions, from tanks to taxidermy, tulips to teddy bears, to Kate Green, Agnes Stamp, Tiffany Daneff and Octavia Pollock
A walk on the wild side
Ben Lerwill embarks on a great British safari, seeking out the best places to witness the full colour of Nature, from red deer to golden eagles and brown argus butterflies to grey seals
Standing on ceremony
The spectacle of The King’s Birthday Parade will summon up a vision from a bygone age, suggests Simon Doughty, as he chronicles the evolution of the ceremonial uniform
Beccy Speight’s favourite painting
The CEO of the RSPB chooses a dramatic and evocative work
Crossing the channel
Carla Carlisle reflects on the 80th anniversary of D-Day and wonders ‘what comes next?’
A Georgian vision
John Martin Robinson visits Gatewick in West Sussex and finds a modern country house harbouring an 18th-century spirit
The legacy
Kate Green hails F. M. Halford’s contribution to dry-fly fishing
The longest day and the shortest night
Harvest hopes and the magic of midsummer, with Lia Leendertz
Her green and pleasant land
Mary Miers paints a picture of Peggy Guggenheim’s rural idyll
Fresh as a summer breeze
Natasha Goodfellow picks out botanicals to add complexity and character to both food and drink
Interiors
A lambing shed turned home office wows Arabella Youens
London Life
Russell Higham on London Zoo memories)
Garden squares and gasholders
Gilly Hopper tucks into canal-side dining
Nick Foulkes indulges in The Emory experience
Floreat Etona
Education and horticulture still go hand in hand at Eton in Berkshire, as George Plumptre discovers
Kitchen garden cook
Savour tart gooseberries this summer, says Melanie Johnson
Native herbs
John Wright extols the virtues of the underused wild marjoram
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell’s deck-shoe shuffle
Travel
Emma Love sets sail on luxury yachts
Lauren Ho puts her best foot forward in Zambia
Pamela Goodman aces it
A little to the left
Being left-handed is no barrier to greatness, finds Bernard Bale
Apollo Magazine (June 2, 2024): The new June 2024 issue features ‘The awesome art of Caspar David Friedrich’; Should museums charge entry fees? and Picnicking with the Impressionists…
Smithsonian Magazine (June 1 , 2024) –The latest issue features ‘Inside Earth’s Newest Caves’ – Clues about early life emerge from Iceland’s active volcanoes…
Journey Into the Fiery Depths of Earth’s Youngest Caves
What Iceland’s volcanoes are revealing about early life on our planetand’s volcanoes are revealing about early life on our planet
This Doctor Pioneered Counting Calories a Century Ago, and We’re Still Dealing With the Consequences
When Lulu Hunt Peters brought Americans a new method for weighing their dinner options, she launched a century of diet fads that left us hungry for a better way to keep our bodies strong and healthy
The New Yorker (May 30, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features John Cuneo’s “A Man of Conviction” – The former President is found guilty on all thirty-four counts.
The jury has convicted the former President of thirty-four felony counts in his New York hush-money trial. Now the American people will decide to what extent they care.
When the Verdict Came In, Donald Trump’s Eyes Were Wide Open
In the courtroom with the former President at the moment he became a convicted felon.
London Review of Books (LRB) – May 29 , 2024: The latest issue features Daniel Trilling – Trouble with the Troubles Act; Primordial Black Holes; The Village Voice….
In 1968, Fidel Castro invited an American anthropologist called Oscar Lewis to interview Cubans about their lives. Lewis was famous for an oral history project, conducted in a Mexico City slum, which he had turned into a book called The Children of Sánchez (1961). By recounting a poor family’s struggles and hustles, legal and otherwise, Lewis angered the country’s ruling party, which still described itself as ‘revolutionary’. The Mexican Revolution, like the Cuban Revolution after it, wasn’t supposed to have an end date. But after major gains, including redistributing land to landless farmers, it had been ‘interrupted’, as the historian Adolfo Gilly later put it. Lewis exposed the revolution’s unfinished business, and didn’t shy away from discussing the sexual peccadilloes of the poor. The Spanish-language edition of Children of Sánchez was published in 1964, but thanks to a lawsuit claiming the material was ‘obscene and denigrating’, the book wasn’t freely available in Mexico for several years.
The Freaks Came out to Write: The Definitive History of the ‘Village Voice’, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano.
In the mid-1960s, the Village Vanguard jazz club in Greenwich Village held Monday night speak-outs. At one of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the Vanguard expecting to make common cause with the speakers, but Jones did not look kindly on us. In fact, he quickly told us we weren’t wanted in the civil rights movement, that we were just an interference, only there to make ourselves feel good. Then he pointed his finger and roared: ‘Blood is going to run in the seats of the theatre of revolution, and guess who’s sitting in those seats!’
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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