Category Archives: Opinion

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 23, 2023

Daniel Clowess “Quiet Luxury”

The New Yorker – October 23, 2023 issue: The new issues cover features Daniel Clowes’s “Quiet Luxury” – The artist discusses patronage, in-home pillars, and what he’d do with a billion dollars.

Beyond the Myth of Rural America

Grant Woods sister Nan Wood Graham and his dentist Byron McKeeby stand by the painting for which they had posed...

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

By Daniel Immerwahr

Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us can’t help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood, it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who “would fit into such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, “American Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most famous art work ever produced in the United States.

When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby

In many states, lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.

American ChroniclesBeyond the Myth of Rural America

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

What Happened to San Francisco, Really?

It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask.By Nathan Heller

The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle

Offsetting has been hailed as a fix for runaway emissions and climate change—but the market’s largest firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that weren’t real.

The New York Times Magazine – Oct 15, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 15, 2023):

My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom

All the photographs in this article are black-and-white. Taylor Swift onstage facing away from the camera.

Taylor Swift’s greatest gift is for telling her own story — better than any journalist could. But Taffy Brodesser-Akner gives it a shot anyway.

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Section 301, in the second-to-highest tier of Levi’s Stadium, floats 105 feet above Santa Clara, Calif. It comprises 251 seats — a mere hamlet in the vast 64,000-seat general kingdom of the place, but it was our hamlet, and on the last Saturday in July, we took up each one of those seats and watched, our collective breath held, as Taylor Swift emerged from a bevy of billowing pastel parachutes and rose up on a platform to perform the 47th show of her Eras Tour. A few songs in, she announced, laughing, that her father told her that Santa Clara had named her its honorary mayor during her two-night stay there and that the entire town had been renamed Swiftie Clara. 

How Jesmyn Ward Is Reimagining Southern Literature

Jesmyn Ward

The novelist is competing with giants like William Faulkner, while mapping territory all her own.

By Imani Perry

Jesmyn Ward gestured with her eyes and a tilt of her face, hands on the wheel. “This crazy colored house right here? That’s my grandmother’s house. That’s the house I grew up in. And her sister lives there” — she pointed — “and then that little blue house? That’s my great-grandparents’ house.” She was driving me around DeLisle, Miss., her hometown and the inspiration for Bois Sauvage, the fictional setting of her first three novels. It is Deep South-in-August hot outside, and the air-conditioning was a relief. “My mom’s side of the family was all clustered around this road.”

Previews: The Economist Magazine – Oct 14, 2023

Israel’s agony and its retribution

The Economist Magazine (October 14, 2023): The latest issue features Israel’s Agony and its Retribution; America’s health-care rip-off; Technocrats vs Populists; The backlash against greenery; Rwanda wants to be Africa’s new cop on the beat; A corner of Italy that is forever China

Will Israel’s agony and retribution end in chaos or stability?

Much depends on its offensive in Gaza—and its politicians and neighbours

Briefing

Hamas’s atrocities and Israel’s retaliation will change both sides for ever

The miscalculations of Israel’s and Gaza’s leaders are being laid bare


Opinion: Free Markets Are Fading, Democracy Dims In Africa, Bitcoin Origins

‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (October 9, 2023) A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, are free markets history? Also, why Africans are losing faith in democracy (10:25) and we investigate whether bitcoin originally leaked from an American spy lab? (17:25)

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 16, 2023

Five people on a gondola drifting through New York's subway.

The New Yorker – October 16, 2023 issue: The new issues cover features Yonatan Popper’s “Service Changes” – the delightful and dreadful parts of riding the subway.

Jake Sullivan’s Trial by Combat

A photoillustration of Jake Sullivan with a map of Ukraine.

Inside the White House’s battle to keep Ukraine in the fight.

By Susan B. Glasser

On a Monday afternoon in August, when President Joe Biden was on vacation and the West Wing felt like a ghost town, his national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, sat down to discuss America’s involvement in the war in Ukraine. Sullivan had agreed to an interview “with trepidation,” as he had told me, but now, in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, steps from the Oval Office, he seemed surprisingly relaxed for a congenital worrier. (“It’s my job to worry,” he once told an interviewer. “So I worry about literally everything.”)

The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

Video of a squid ship from above

China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost.

By Ian Urbina

In the past few decades, partly in an effort to project its influence abroad, China has dramatically expanded its distant-water fishing fleet. Chinese firms now own or operate terminals in ninety-five foreign ports. China estimates that it has twenty-seven hundred distant-water fishing ships, though this figure does not include vessels in contested waters; public records and satellite imaging suggest that the fleet may be closer to sixty-five hundred ships.

Views: The New York Times Magazine – October 8, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 8, 2023):

Who Hired the Hitmen to Silence Zitácuaro?

An illustration of a broken camera and blood splatter.

In one small Mexican city, journalists who tried to expose cartel violence and government corruption became swept up in the murders devouring the country.

By Nicholas Casey

The Genius Behind Hollywood’s Most Indelible Sets

Jack Fisk looks up.

How Jack Fisk, the master production designer behind ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ and many other films, brings the past to life.

By Noah Gallagher Shannon

Previews: The Economist Magazine – October 7, 2023

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The Economist Magazine (October 7, 2023): The latest issue features Governments jettisoning the principles of free markets; Africans losing faith in democracy and how the ousting of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is bad for America and worse for Ukraine….

Are free markets history?

Governments are jettisoning the principles that made the world rich

Why Africans are losing faith in democracy

The alternatives will undoubtedly be worse

The ousting of Kevin McCarthy: bad for America, worse for Ukraine

His successor should seek cross-party support to keep funding the war

Special Report: ‘Homeland Economics’ (October 2023)

Special reports: Homeland Economics

The Economist SPECIAL REPORTS (OCTOBER 7TH 2023):

Homeland Economics

Governments across the world are rediscovering industrial policy. They are making a big mistake, argues Callum Williams

Current Affairs: Prospect Magazine – November 2023

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Prospect Magazine (November 2023) – Grading the governor – From a global pandemic to a cost-of-living crisis, Andrew Bailey couldn’t have become Bank of England chief at a more challenging time; The government that stopped governing, and more…

Grading the governor

From a global pandemic to a cost-of-living crisis, Andrew Bailey couldn’t have become Bank of England chief at a more challenging time. In an exclusive interview, Lionel Barber assesses his performance—and asks whether the worst is finally over

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – October 9, 2023

A woman sits on a subway car as it passes the Williamsburg Bridge.

The New Yorker – October 9, 2023 issue: The new issue features David Kirkpatrick on the right’s legal juggernaut, Gideon Lewis-Kraus on a behavioral-economics scandal, Hannah Goldfield on Kwame Onwuachi, and more.

Kwame Onwuachi’s Cuisine of the Self

Kwame Onwuachi reviews an order with another man in the kitchen at Tatiana.

How the chef at Tatiana brought Afro-Caribbean cooking—and his life story—to the center of New York City’s fine-dining scene.

By Hannah Goldfield

Among the Cabin Fanatics of Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty

A crowd of people sit in a stadium.

For more than a hundred years, the Neshoba County Fair has drawn revellers from all over the country. Why do they keep coming back?

By Paige Williams