New Scientist Magazine (November 4, 2023): This issue features How healthy are you really? – New tests to give you the answer; The origins of Life; Machine Unlearning – Can we ever teach an AI to forget?; Moths that mimic spiders; Did wind help sculpt the Sphinx; and more…
nature Magazine – November 2, 2023: The latest issue cover features an artist’s impression of the collision between the protoplanet Theia and proto-Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. It has been suggested that it was this ‘Giant Impact’ that formed the Moon, but direct evidence for the existence of Theia remains elusive.
Times Literary Supplement (November 3, 2023): The new issue features Rock Hudson and the art of docudrama; Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm continued; Wife to Mr. Orwell; Whitman’s war diaries; Britain passes the chaos test and more…
The Guardian Weekly (November 3, 2023) – The new issue features Bletchley Park, the main center of allied second world war codebreakers,and it’s no coincidence that the English country house was chosen as the venue for this week’s landmark summit on safety in artificial intelligence. The age of AI brings opportunities but also significant risks, as a number of experts in the field outlined in an open letter last week.
Global technology editor Dan Milmo discusses the pros and cons with one of the technology’s leading thinkers, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, who says the rise of AI must be thought of as seriously as the climate crisis. Then, Observer columnist Sonia Sodha argues that calling for AI to be reined in is not simply a sign of luddism.
Country Life Magazine – November 1, 2023: The new issue features the rural delights of Durslade Farm to the heart of Mayfair; The secret garden in Regent’s Park in London; Norman Foster, the architect who helped shape the capital; the historic American bars that offer a taste of the US on this side of the pond, and more…
London Life
Emma Love welcomes the rural delights of Durslade Farm to the heart of Mayfair
The secret garden in Regent’s Park, seasonal suggestions and Matthew Williamson’s London
Carla Passino meets Norman Foster, the architect who helped shape the capital
Robert Crossan visits the historic American bars that offer a taste of the US on this side of the pond
Nick Trend’s favourite painting
The art historian picks a steely-eyed painting that signalled the invention of the self-portrait
At Canaan’s Edge
Carla Carlisle ponders the story of the Promised Land and hopes that common sense prevails
A local revival
The future is bright for Lytham Hall after locals stepped in to save the house at the heart of the Lancashire estate, as John Martin Robinson discovers
A nightingale sang…
Tiffany Daneff visits a garden in Kent planted for wildlife and surrounded by new woodland
Native breeds
Kate Green admires the hardy Lincoln Red, a low-input rare breed that produces quality beef
Stranger things
From horn dancing to burning barrels and cheese rolling, Harry Pearson delves into weird and wonderful British folk festivals
You’re a dark horse
The black horse is a symbol of strength and courage. Celia Brayfield gallops through the history of the fabled steed
Kitchen garden cook
Melanie Johnson savours the turnip’s sweet and nutty flavour, perfect with scallops
Travel
Jo Rodgers follows in the foot-steps of the Durrells in Corfu
Welcoming, home-from-home villas
Pamela Goodman pedals off the beaten cycle path
Speak like a Georgian
Know your ‘fubbs’ from your ‘fizzle’ — Matthew Dennison investigates 18th-century slang
Literary Review – November 2023: The new issue features Sex, Satire & Revolution; The Race to the Future: The Adventure that Accelerated the Twentieth Century; Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago – The Britannias: An Island Quest; and more…
The Race to the Future: The Adventure that Accelerated the Twentieth Century
By Kassia St Clair
Cost, not a lack of courage, ensured that the entry field for the 1907 Peking to Paris car race was small. A massive two-thousand-franc deposit (equivalent to a professor’s annual salary) kept all but five of the aspiring contestants out of the race. That exclusion, as Kassia St Clair demonstrates in her captivating history of one of the most challenging endurance trials in the history of motoring, was precisely what the organisers intended.
In July 2023 Orkney Islands Council voted to explore alternative governmental arrangements for the archipelago. One option proposed by the council leader was for it to become a self-governing territory of Norway, the kingdom which lost control of Orkney to Scotland in 1468. The episode – in reality, a smart political stunt in a row over the Scottish government’s transport policy – attracted extraordinary international attention. In the UK press, it was treated with an uneven mixture of constitutional soul-searching and patronising amusement at the Passport to Pimlico-styleantics of the Orcadians.
The Architectural Review (November 2023) – The November issue of The Architectural Review showcases the shortlisted architects of the 2023 AR Emerging awards, who are leading the way in careful adaptive reuse and ecological ways of building around the world. But emerging into an industry that is overly reliant on unpaid labour and race-to-the-bottom fee structures has always been difficult.
Since these conditions are rarely discussed, this issue is also dedicated to ‘beginnings’ and their paradoxes: ‘you are supposed to begin knowing something but also doing something completely new,’ writes Renee Gladman in the Keynote. Taking in napkin sketches, competitions, references and photographs, AR November 2023 serves a useful reminder that others came before, and that the beginning is behind us.
Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (detail; c. 1520–24), Andrea Solario. Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna
Apollo Magazine (October 27, 2023) – This exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt places work by Hans Holbein the Younger and the Elder, Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgkmair in dialogue with that of their contemporaries working in the city of Augsburg and elsewhere in Germany, and in Italy and the Netherlands (2 November–18 February 2024).
“The Städel Museum is prized far and wide for its major Old Masters exhibitions. After Rubens, Rembrandt and Reni, it now holds yet another exceptional show in store for the public. The Städel Museum is presenting the Renaissance in the North—a new and entirely unique style of painting that originated more than 500 years ago in the North of Europe at the threshold from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period.“
Philipp Demandt, Director, Städel Museum
It brings together some 130 painting, drawings and prints by leading artists of the Northern Renaissance dating from the period of the 1480s through to the 1530s. These include two masterpieces by Holbein the Younger – the Solothurn Madonna (1522), on loan from the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, and The Madonna of Jacob Meyer zum Hasen (1526–28) from the Würth Collection.
Ursula (FALL 2023): The new issue feature Takesada Matsutani, 86, who has lived and worked in Paris since the late 1960s, but he came of age as an artist in Osaka, Japan, as a member of the avant-garde Gutai movement. He has long worked in highly experimental ways with printmaking and artist’s books.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 29, 2023): This week’s issue features “A Haunting on the Hill,” by Shirley Jackson; ‘I Feel a Human Deterioration’ – making sense of the violence and loss in Israel; Is It Time to Pull Up Stakes and Head for Mars? – Probably not, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith argue in “A City on Mars”….
Apparitions, black hares and time warps festoon the pages of Elizabeth Hand’s “A Haunting on the Hill,” set in the same moldering mansion as Shirley Jackson’s classic horror novel.
Probably not, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith argue in “A City on Mars.”
By W. M. Akers
A CITY ON MARS: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Face it, folks. Earth is finished. It’s overheated, overcrowded, overregulated. It’s the ultimate fixer-upper, a dump we inherited from our parents that we’d be cruel to pass on to our children. It’s time to pull up stakes. It’s time for Mars.
Or maybe not.
Lighting out for the solar system is an appealing fantasy, but “A City on Mars,” an exceptional new piece of popular science by the “Soonish” authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, suggests we shouldn’t be so quick to give up on Earth. Forceful, engaging and funny, it is an essential reality check for anyone who has ever looked for home in the night sky.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
Boomers Daily 