“A Field Guide to the Bear-Men of Leningrad” : a rare non-speculative thing from me, about boyhood & masculinity & human monstrosity in 1930s Russi… https://instagr.am/p/CqDkW1jsCI5/
Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Spring 2023
Category Archives: Previews
Preview: Foreign Policy Magazine – Spring 2023
The World Will Regret Its Retreat From Globalization
Trade and financial flows have fallen well below their peaks, and poorer countries will bear the brunt.
It’s High Time to Prepare for Russia’s Collapse
Not planning for the possibility of disintegration betrays a dangerous lack of imagination.
America’s Zero-Sum Economics Doesn’t Add Up
Industrial policy and subsidies are nothing new and can be useful. But shutting off from the world will have consequences.
Finance Preview: Barron’s Magazine – March 27, 2023
Barron’s Magazine – March 27, 2023:
The 10 Years Before Retirement Are Critical. How to Be Ready.
While retirement planning is a decadeslong endeavor, the way you handle your final decade before leaving the workforce will have a critical impact on how ready you’ll be when that day finally arrives.
“It hits about 10 years out—this train is coming to me,” says Danielle Byrd Thompson, a financial professional at Equitable Advisors in Washington, D.C. “It’s like a time clock is starting.”
Analysis: At Dollar General, a Record of Overcharging
A Barron’s analysis finds that four states fined the retailer a total of more than $1 million for price inaccuracies in 2021 and 2022.
Preferred Shares Offer a Better Way to Bet On Banks
With fat yields and more safety than common stock, preferred shares can be lifeboats for investors navigating banking’s stormy seas. Why bigger is better for small investors.
Schwab and the Bank Mess: Sizing Up the Firm’s Risks
The brokerage’s stock has plunged by more than a third this year as customers yank cash from low-yielding “sweep” accounts. What’s ahead.
The New York Times Book Review – March 26, 2023
The New York Times Book Review – March 26, 2023:
Margaret Atwood Is Still Sending Us Notes From the Future
Her new story collection, “Old Babes in the Wood,” offers elegiac scenes from a marriage plus a grab bag of curious fables.
There are authors we turn to because they can uncannily predict our future; there are authors we need for their skillful diagnosis of our present; and there are authors we love because they can explain our past. And then there are the outliers: those who gift us with timelines other than the one we’re stuck in, realities far from home. If anyone has proved, over the course of a long and wildly diverse career, that she can be all four, it’s Margaret Atwood.
50 Years On, ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’ Still Haunts and Inspires
Michael Lesy’s book of historical photographs and found text offers a singular portrait of American life.
Michael Lesy’s 1973 book “Wisconsin Death Trip” is an American oddity, a cult classic for a reason. In a way that few documentary texts do, it makes us leave the baggage of modernity at the trailhead. It forces us back into the inconceivably long nights in rural and small-town America before the widespread use of electricity, before radio, before antibiotics for dying children and antidepressants for anxiety bordering on mania, when events could make a family feel that some nocturnal beast had chalked its door.
The Prophetic
The first installment of an essay series on American literature and faith.
I am a child of the church. In an early memory, I am 6 years old, half-asleep in the back of my grandparents’ station wagon on the way home from a revival…
Reports: Tufts Health & Nutrition – April 2023
Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter (April 2023)
- The Truth about “Brain-Boosting” Supplements
- News Bites
- Personalized Nutrition
- Special Report: Cooking with Kids
- Eight Cups of Water a Day?
- Featured Recipe: April Fools’ Day Tofu Scramble
- Ask Tufts Experts: Cardiovascular Disease; Melatonin
Exhibition Views: Shirley Jaffe – Form As Experiment
The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel presents 113 works, from Shirley Jaffe’s early abstract expressionist works to the geometric paintings that are characteristic of her late oeuvre.
Shirley Jaffe – Form as Experiment
March 25 to July 30, 2023
Born in New Jersey in 1923 as Shirley Sternstein, in 1949, the artist, now Mrs Jaffe, moved to Paris. Following her short-lived her marriage to the journalist Irving Jaffe, the painter decided to remain in France. Having soon established herself in the city, she held regular contact with the American “art expats” Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, and Joan Mitchell, who had relocated to Paris somewhat later.
Her work dating from this period may be attributed to Abstract Expressionism, a form that sought to draw exclusively from its own resources and which consisted primarily of wildly applied fields of colour and gestures. Although, for the art market at the time, this amounted to a success formula Jaffe nevertheless decided to strike out in a different direction.
Culture: New York Times Magazine – March 26, 2023
The New York Times Magazine – March 26, 2023:
The Age-Old Food Fight That Beats an Italian Town to a Pulp
Every winter, Ivrea erupts into a ferocious three-day festival where its citizens pelt one another with 900 tons of oranges. (Yes, oranges.)
The orange throwers are organized into nine teams, each with a different flag, logo, captain and uniform.
I Went on a Package Trip for Lonely Millennials. It Was Exhausting.
On traveling to Morocco with a group-travel company that promised to build “meaningful friendships” among its youngish clientele.
Sections
I’m Lost All the Time. So I Went on a Labyrinth Vacation.
The dizzying joys of maze tourism, in Barcelona, Paris and Chenonceaux.
The Parc del Laberint d’Horta, in Barcelona.Credit…Joakim Eskildsen for The New York Times
Seeking the Spirited, Mystical Jamaica Tourists Don’t See
A photographer’s journey through her native spiritual landscape of Jamaica, where Christian and Afro-centric traditions blend.
Preview: History Today Magazine – April 2023
HISTORY TODAY MAGAZINE – APRIL 2023 ISSUE
The First Folio
The stage has a short memory, print a long one: 400 years since its first publication, Shakespeare’s First Folio is the reason we remember him.
American Moppets
Americanised globalisation and the new world of Russian business in the 1990s.
In the 1990s, a version of the satirical puppet show Spitting Image arrived on Russian television. A Muscovite once told the story of his father, who took great care to record every episode on VHS.
Research Preview: Science Magazine – March 24, 2023
A new pandemic origin report is stirring controversy. Here are key takeaways
Virology database cuts off—and then reinstates—scientists who found and analyzed data collected 3 years ago by team in China
Earth at higher risk of big asteroid strike, satellite data suggest
“It would be in the range of serious crap happening.”
At a basic level, humanity’s survival odds come down to one thing: the chances of a giant space rock slamming into the planet and sending us the way of the dinosaurs. One way to calibrate that hazard is to look at the size of Earth’s recent large impact craters.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – March 25, 2023
The world according to Xi
Even if China’s transactional diplomacy brings some gains, it contains real perils
A lesser man than Xi Jinping might have found it uncomfortable. Meeting Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week, China’s leader spoke of “peaceful co-existence and win-win co-operation”, while supping with somebody facing an international arrest warrant for war crimes. But Mr Xi is untroubled by trivial inconsistencies. He believes in the inexorable decline of the American-led world order, with its professed concern for rules and human rights. He aims to twist it into a more transactional system of deals between great powers. Do not underestimate the perils of this vision—or its appeal around the world.
Central banks face an excruciating trade-off
They have to choose between financial instability and high inflation. It wasn’t meant to be that way
The job of central bankers is to keep banks stable and inflation low. Today they face an enormous battle on both fronts. The inflation monster is still untamed, and the financial system looks precarious.
The trouble with Emmanuel Macron’s pension victory
The way a wise policy was forced through will have political costs
Any French president who asks his fellow citizens to retire later does so at his peril. When Jacques Chirac tried in 1995, crippling strikes made him shelve the project; 18 months later voters sacked his government. Piles of rubbish were left to rot on the streets, as they are today on the boulevards of Paris. Bin collectors have joined strikes against the decision by the current president, Emmanuel Macron, to raise the minimum pension age from 62 to 64. So it was with some relief that on March 20th his minority government narrowly survived two no-confidence votes, opening the way for his reform to enter the statute books.
Boomers Daily 