Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — Nov 2023
Category Archives: Previews
The burden of the humanities by Wilfred M. McClay
The New York Times Book Review – October 15, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 15, 2023): This week’s issue features a fabulous historical novel, the Janet Malcolm-like account of an Australian murder trial, a sprightly history of the Oxford English Dictionary, a homage to “The Haunting of Hill House”, historical fiction, thrillers, crime novels, romance, horror & Gothic fiction, science fiction & fantasy.)
A Fitting — and Frightening — Homage to ‘The Haunting of Hill House’
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.
The Wife Has Committed Murder but It’s the Husband Who Scares Her Lawyer
In Marie NDiaye’s new novel, “Vengeance Is Mine,” a woman is haunted by a decades-old trauma she feels, but cannot quite remember.
VENGEANCE IS MINE, by Marie NDiaye. Translated by Jordan Stump.
The characters in Marie NDiaye’s novels are an unsettling brood. They fret and pace around their homes, tormented by their pasts. Their minds trap and trick them. A daughter can’t shake memories of her mother’s murder; a man gropes for the truth about his imprisonment in a deserted vacation town; a chef pursues culinary perfection at any cost; a woman — reminded of a friend, a schoolteacher or was it her mother? — fatally chases an apparition in green.
Finance Preview: Barron’s Magazine – Oct 16, 2023
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – October 16, 2023 ISSUE:
Why Apple Wants Its Chips Made in a Desert
Oil Prices Could Spike Above $100 if the Israel-Hamas War Widens
So far, the fighting has affected oil prices only modestly, in contrast to past wars in the Middle East. That could change, depending on Iran’s role.
Insurance Stocks Have Been Hammered. 6 Picks for the Rebound.
Insurers have been hit by a one-two punch of natural disasters and lackluster financial markets. But there’s a silver lining: the profits and surpluses that come with rising premiums.
Don’t Make This Common Medicare Open Enrollment Mistake
Enrolling in the wrong plan can cost you hundreds of dollars a year.
Where We Would Invest $100,000 Right Now
Walmart, Moderna, Tesla, and IBM are among our favorite ideas for the current market.
The New York Times Magazine – Oct 15, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 15, 2023):
My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom
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.
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
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.”
Research Preview: Science Magazine – Oct 13, 2023
A family portrait of human brain cells
A cell census provides information on the source of human brain specialization
The brain is composed of multiple regions associated with distinct functions, which have become further specialized in the human lineage. To define how this specialization is implemented, how it arises during development, and how it has emerged over the course of human evolution, a detailed understanding of the cells that make up the human brain is required.
The ecology of whales in a changing climate
Some whale populations are exhibiting unexpected cycles of boom and bust
Previews: The Economist Magazine – Oct 14, 2023
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
The New York Review Of Books – November 2, 2023
When the Barbarians Take Over
Uwe Wittstock’s new account of writers considering whether to flee or to remain in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power sheds light on the choices faced by many writers in India and Russia today.
February 1933: The Winter of Literature
by Uwe Wittstock, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles
“It will have become clear to you now,” Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig in mid-February 1933, “that we are heading for a great catastrophe.” Two weeks previously, on January 30, Germany’s eighty-five-year-old president, Paul von Hindenburg, had appointed as chancellor a man who for more than a decade had spoken and written frankly about his resolve to extirpate democracy and Jews from the country. Roth, who left Berlin the same morning Adolf Hitler came to power and never returned to Germany, was desperate to make his complacent friend recognize the perils before them.
Mozart the Modernist
In his new biography, Peter Mackie conjures a vertiginous version of Mozart as the quintessential artist of the modern world.
By Simon Callow
Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces
by Patrick Mackie
Biographies of composers are a relatively recent genre; those of Mozart were among the first examples.Though his life was not as sensational as that of Gesualdo, for example, who murdered his wife, Mozart was, from his early years, an international celebrity whose very personality posed questions beyond the eternal riddle of creativity. How could a mere child—he started performing publicly on the clavichord at the age of six—be so astoundingly versatile? As he toured Europe, going from court to court and salon to salon with his father, Leopold, and his older sister, Maria Anna—a talented musician as well—the delightful little boy in his nattily embroidered outfits enchanted his listeners, readily obliging them with requests, however crass: now playing with the keys covered, now with only one finger, to delighted applause.
Preview: London Review Of Books – Oct 19, 2023
Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Ryan Bloom
Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder and the Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint
On Nagorno-Karabakh
Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census by Dan Bouk
Research Preview: Nature Magazine – Oct 12, 2023
AI’s potential to accelerate drug discovery needs a reality check
Companies say the technology will contribute to faster drug development. Independent verification and clinical trials will determine whether this claim holds up.
Summer storms launch water high into the stratosphere
Thunderstorms can increase the levels of water vapour in the atmosphere, at altitudes as high as 19 km.
How ChatGPT and other AI tools could disrupt scientific publishing
A world of AI-assisted writing and reviewing might transform the nature of the scientific paper.
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – October 13, 2023
The Guardian Weekly (October 13, 2023) – The new issue features Hamas militants’ devastating incursion into Israel from Gaza resulting in thousands of deaths, provoking a declaration of war and upending the fragile diplomacy of the Middle East.
The swirling composite of images on the magazine’s cover this week tries to encapsulate the human chaos and grief of civilians, both in Israel and Gaza, caught in the chaos of war. The central image shows a vast explosion filling the sky above Gaza City, an ominous portent of many violent acts still to come.
As the region faces its worst conflict for 50 years, Bethan McKernan reports from a kibbutz ransacked by militants and finds shocked residents still struggling to process events. Guardian correspondents Harriet Sherwood, Patrick Wintour and Peter Beaumont provide context and analysis, while international affairs commentator Simon Tisdall argues that the ultimate blame lies with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s controversial prime minister.
Ahead of this weekend’s elections in Poland that could give the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party an unprecedented third term in office, Shaun Walker goes on the campaign trail with Donald Tusk whose centre-right Civic Coalition is hoping to reverse the country’s slide away from democratic norms. And Brussels correspondent Lisa O’Carroll reports on the EU’s Granada summit where Hungary’s Viktor Orbán accused fellow leaders of attempting to impose a “diktat” with a proposal on a bloc-wide agreement on migration.
With global temperatures for September described as “gobsmackingly bananas” by leading climatologist Zeke Hausfather, our interview with the president of Cop28 could not be more timely. Sultan Al Jaber explains to environment editor Fiona Harvey how he believes he can square his job as the chief of the United Arab Emirates’ national oil company with leading a global conference focused on net zero carbon emissions.
Boomers Daily 