Category Archives: Opinion

Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – August 2024

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HARPER’S MAGAZINE – July 15, 2024: The latest issue features ‘The New Satanic Panic’ – Exorcism in the Age of TikTok; Has Psychology ruined Poetry; America’s Last Granite Carvers; William T. Vollmann reports from Korea’s DMZ, Matthew Karp on the decline of the American left, Jonathan Lethem on museums, Hisham Matar on the dangers of not knowing, Christian Wiman on Seamus Heaney, and more.

The Demon Slayers

The new age of American exorcisms by Sam Kestenbaum

The pastor is pacing back and forth, a cordless microphone in one hand, the other extended before him. He says, “This is the awakening the American church has been waiting on,” and keeps pacing. He has readied himself before taking the elevated stage, donning a paisley shirt, top button undone, and speaks now from the wood pulpit of his revival tent. 

Music and Mystery  

Seamus Heaney and the end of the poetic career

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45.

This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.

Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – July 22, 2024

In a Supreme Court portrait Trumps head replaces the heads of the Conservative Justices.

The New Yorker (July 15, 2024): The latest issue features Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” – The remaking of the Supreme Court in Donald Trump’s image.

F.D.R.’s Election Lessons for Joe Biden and the Democrats

Less than six weeks before Democrats formally choose their nominee, the President is marching down a path of constant peril.

Inside the Trump Plan for 2025

A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President’s return to the White House. By Jonathan Blitzer

Paradise Bronx

Paradise Bronx

From the time of the Revolutionary War to the fires of the nineteen-seventies, the history of the borough has always been shaped by its in-between-ness.

By Ian Frazier

Current Affairs: Prospect Magazine – Aug/Sept 2024

Prospect (@prospect_uk) / X

Prospect Magazine (July 11, 2024) – The latest issue features ‘Fixing The Mess’ – How Britain can recover, and find its place in the world; Gaza’s Future; Asylum King – Meet the man cashing in on the system; Giorgia Meloni – How the extreme became mainstream….

How Britain can rejoin the world

The UK isn’t the global power that it was in 1997. But if the new government makes smart choices, we might still avoid drifting into irrelevance

Agnès Poirier’s diary: Parisians flee the Olympics

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Agnès Poirier

For months we had been complaining about the damage the Games would inevitably bring to our city

Labour must rethink the machinery of state

Sam Freedman

Are there any humans left on the internet?

The Economist Magazine – July 13, 2024 Preview

How to raise the world’s IQ

The Economist Magazine (July 11, 2024): The latest issue features How to raise the world’s IQ

Labour’s first week

What does Labour’s win mean for British foreign policy?

Will Biden’s dam break?

Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside

Ungovernable France

France is desperately searching for a government

Inside AI’s black box

Researchers are figuring out how large language models work

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Education: “Schooling’s Stagnation” – July 13, 2024

Special reports: Must try harder

The Economist SPECIAL REPORTS (July 8, 2024): The latest special report features “Schooling’s Stagnation” – Must try harder…

Must try harder

Schools in rich countries are making poor progress. They need to get back to basics, argues Mark Johnson

Schools in rich countries are making poor progress

Hanging on to the best of them is getting harder

The rich world’s teachers are increasingly morose

Will artificial intelligence transform school?

Efforts to teach character bring promise and perils

England’s school reforms are earning fans abroad

The New Yorker Magazine ‘Interview Issue’ July 2024

gif cover of 2024 Interviews Issue

The New Yorker (July 8, 2024): The new digital issue features The Interviews Issue – A week of conversations with figures of note.

Nicolas Cage Is Still Evolving

The actor talks about the origins of “Adaptation,” his potential leap to television, and the art of “keeping it enigmatic.”

By Susan Orlean

Square black and white portrait of Nicolas Cage. Cage is wearing a suit and is photographed from the side looking at the camera.
Triptych of three blackandwhite portraits of Nicolas Cage in a black suit and white collared shirt. In the middle image...

The wobbly distinction between reality and artifice fascinates Nicolas Cage. The first time we encountered each other was in 2001, during the making of “Adaptation”—a film based on Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt my book “The Orchid Thief” for the screen—in which Cage played Kaufman and his twin, Donald. He was in the middle of a scene, and I tiptoed onto the set as quietly as possible, convinced that any distraction would trigger one of the eruptions for which Cage had become famous. Between takes, he glanced at the handful of people watching, and exclaimed cheerily, “Oh, guys, look!” He pointed at me and a small, fuzzy-haired man I hadn’t noticed beside me. “It’s the real Charlie and the real Susan!” He seemed tickled by this collision between the characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts, and insisted that the crew take note. (Kaufman and I, who had never met before that moment, slunk away sheepishly.)

Ira Glass Hears It All

Ira Glass cycling on the street in New York.

Three decades into “This American Life,” the host thinks the show is doing some of its best work yet—even if he’s still jealous of “The Daily.”

By Sarah Larson

It can be easy to take the greatness of “This American Life,” the weekly public-radio show and podcast hosted by Ira Glass, for granted. The show, which Glass co-founded in 1995 at WBEZ, in Chicago, has had the same essential format for twenty-eight years and more than eight hundred episodes. It was instrumental in creating a genre of audio journalism that has flourished in recent decades, especially since the podcast boom—which was initiated by the show’s first spinoff, “Serial,” in 2014. Like “The Daily Show” or Second City, “This American Life” has trained a generation of talented people, and Glass’s three-act structures, chatty cadences, and mixture of analysis and whimsy are now so familiar as to seem unremarkable.

The New York Times Magazine – July 7, 2024

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 6, 2024): The latest issue features

Eddie Murphy Is Ready to Look Back

By David Marchese

Eddie Murphy has been so famous for so long, occupying such a lofty place in the cultural landscape, that it can be easy to overlook just how game-changing a figure he actually is.

Let’s start, as Murphy’s career did, with standup. There had been star comics before — Steve Martin, Richard Pryor — but none exploded with anything like Murphy’s speed or intensity.

Ti West Is Turning Hollywood Into a Horror Show

Ti West.

His “X” trilogy — which culminates with “MaXXXine” — obsesses over cinema, stardom and the industry itself.

By RYAN BRADLEY

The Real Problem With Legal Weed

New York is trying to treat an addictive substance just like any other product.

By CHARLES FAIN LEHMAN

Technology Report: “Spycraft” – July 6, 2024

Technology Quarterly: Watching the watchers

The Economist SPECIAL REPORTS (July 2, 2024): The ‘Watching The Watchers’ issue features Tools of the spy trade have changed and so has the world in which they are used, says Shashank Joshi

The tools of global spycraft have changed

Illustration of two magnifying glasses with eyes inside on a background of digital files and pointing cursors.
illustration: claire merchlinsky

And so has the world in which they are used, says Shashank Joshi

Afew years ago intelligence analysts observed that internet-connected cctv cameras in Taiwan and South Korea were inexplicably talking to vital parts of the Indian power grid. The strange connection turned out to be a deliberately circuitous route by which Chinese spies were communicating with malware they had previously buried deep inside crucial parts of the Indian grid (presumably to enable future sabotage). The analysts spotted it because they were scanning the internet to look for “command and control” (c2) nodes—such as cameras—that hackers use as stepping stones to their victims.

Ubiquitous technical surveillance has made spying more difficult

Signals intelligence has become a cyber-activity

Sometimes the old ways of espionage are the best

Artificial intelligence can speed-sort satellite photos

Private firms and open sources are giving spies a run for their money

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – July 8 & 15, 2024

A woman holds an ice cream cone at Coney Island.

The New Yorker (July 1, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Kadir Nelson’s “Soft-Serve” – Keeping it cool while keeping cool…

Finally, a Leap Forward on Immigration Policy

President Biden has offered help to undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, in the most consequential act of immigration relief in more than a decade. By Jonathan Blitzer

High-Roller Presidential Donor Perks

Give now to get your name on the wing of a fighter jet!

Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Scabrous Satire of the Super-Rich

In “Long Island Compromise,” wealth is a curse. Or is that just what we’d like to think?

The Economist Magazine – June 29, 2024 Preview

France’s centre cannot hold

The Economist Magazine (June 27, 2024): The latest issue features

France’s centre cannot hold

After the election, populists of the right and left could hobble a centrist president

What to expect from a second Biden term

He has a domestic agenda, but no easy way to bring it about

Can countries get rich from services?

American fried chicken can now be served from the Philippines

Making heavy weather of hot weather

Deadly heat is increasingly the norm, not an exception to it

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