The New Criterion – February 2024 Preview
Category Archives: Previews
The New York Times Magazine- January 21, 2024
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 19, 2024): The new issue features ‘The Whale Who Went AWOL’ – How do you solve a problem like Hvaldmir?; How Group Chats Rule the World – They quietly became the de facto spaces to share dumb jokes, grief or even plans for an insurrection…
The Whale Who Went AWOL
Hvaldimir escaped captivity and became a global celebrity. Now, no one can agree about what to do with him.
By Ferris Jabr
On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope.
How Group Chats Rule the World
They quietly became the de facto spaces to share dumb jokes, grief or even plans for an insurrection.
By Sophie Haigney
I am texting all the time. I am, at the very least, receiving texts all the time, a party to conversations in which I am alternately an eavesdropper and an active participant. This is because I am in a lot of group chats — constant, interlinked, text-message-based conversations among multiple friends that happen all day long. I dip into and out of these conversations, on my phone and on my computer. Sometimes I will put both away for two hours and return to find 279 new messages waiting.
The New York Review Of Books – February 8, 2024
Ethical Espionage
What moral principles should guide our intelligence-gathering agencies?
Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West by Calder Walton
Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence by Cécile Fabre
On October 7, as Hamas fighters roared into southern Israel from Gaza, bringing terror and death to anyone they encountered—Israeli soldiers, Bedouins, young people dancing and getting high together, kibbutzniks scooping up small children into desperate arms—I was sleeping in a comfortable hotel room in Georgia. All around me in the sultry darkness of a beautiful resort, many of the US intelligence community’s finest minds were also slumbering. We awoke with the expectation that we would be addressed by CIA director William Burns at the opening of the Cipher Brief’s annual Threat Conference, a yearly gathering of national security professionals from the private and public sectors, plus a few academics and journalists.
Research Preview: Science Magazine -January 19, 2024
Immune damage in Long Covid
Links between the complement and coagulation systems could lead to Long Covid therapies
Second image of ‘shadow’ confirms giant black hole is real
To zoom in farther, Event Horizon Telescope wants to add more radio dishes to its network—and go to space
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – January 19, 2024
The Guardian Weekly (January 18, 2024) – The new issue features ‘State Of Emergency’ – How drug cartels upended Ecuador; Why Houthi anger could spread war; Are aliens already among us?…
Not long ago, Ecuador was chiefly known for its volcanoes, wildlife and eco-tourism. It’s an image that may now need some rehabilitation after chaos and bloodshed sparked by the prison escape last week of Adolfo Macías, the country’s most notorious gang leader and drug lord.
With cartels from Peru and Colombia routinely funnelling narcotics through Ecuador’s ports en route to Europe, Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips reports on a rising problem that threatens to tear apart the once-peaceful Andean state.
In the Middle East, Yemen’s Houthi rebels could stymie the increasingly slim chances of preventing a regional war. With the US and UK bombing Houthi bases in response to attacks on commercial shipping, diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour recounts the Houthis’ rise and why military strikes against them may not lead to the desired outcome.
London Review Of Books – January 25, 2024 Preview
Hooted from the Stage
Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
by Lucasta Miller.
Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse
by Anahid Nersessian.
Looking back to September 1820, when things had gone badly wrong but not yet so grotesquely as to be visibly beyond repair, we can see how few and how poor Keats’s options were. Surely it was better that (in the absence of other volunteers) the young artist Joseph Severn agreed to travel with the dying poet to Rome that autumn than that he had refused.
Bertie Wooster in Murmansk
A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution
by Anna Reid.
Research Preview: Nature Magazine- January 18, 2024
Why the immune response to a vaccine varies from person to person
A dormant immune system before receiving the BCG vaccine is tied to a greater innate immune response afterwards.
The Higgs boson is caught in a singular transformation
Detectors at the Large Hadron Collider spot the famed particle decaying into a photon and a ‘Z boson’.
Commentary Magazine – February 2024 Preview
They’re Coming After Us
‘IHAVE NEVER FELT LIKE THIS BEFORE’
I have lost count of the number of times the phrase “I have never felt like this before” has been spoken in my ear, texted to me, or sent to me in an email, in the three months since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
When I talked with Israelis on a trip in November, the phrase described a gut emotion few under the age of 50 said they had ever experienced—the sense that they were personally vulnerable to outside attack in a manner more like an extended military invasion than a terrorist blow. They had lived through years of ineffectual rocket fire that was all but magically extinguished by the Iron Dome and Arrow anti-missile systems.
The Likely Lab Leak and the Covid Cassandra
Enola Gay, or, How the Media Imploded When It Came to Harvard’s President
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Jan 19, 2024
Times Literary Supplement (January 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Power Failure’ – The retreat from net zero; Canon wars; The end of literary criticism; Empires imprint on the Middle East; Harvard and plagarism….
Previews: Country Life Magazine-January 17, 2024
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
Boomers Daily 