Times Literary Supplement (October13, 2023): The new issue features Deeper Truths – The spiritual quest of the Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse; ‘Woke Wars’ and identity politics; fashion and the Bloomsbury group; Jewish boxers in London; Elsa Morante’s princes and demons and ‘Free Will?’
4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets illuminate the personal lives of Mesopotamian businesswomen
By DURRIE BOUSCAREN
Excavations at the ancient Anatolian city of Kanesh in Turkey have revealed a district where merchants from the distant Mesopotamian city of Assur in Iraq lived and worked. Some 23,000 cuneiform tablets, mostly dating from about 1900 to 1840 B.C., have been found in the merchants’ personal archives in Kanesh.
The parents of an Assyrian woman named Zizizi were furious. Like many of their neighbors’ children, their daughter had dutifully wed an Assyrian merchant. Sometime around the year 1860 B.C., she had traveled with him to the faraway Anatolian city of Kanesh in modern-day Turkey, where he traded textiles. But her husband passed away and, instead of returning to her family, Zizizi chose to marry a local.
Simon Lester swings into the win-at-all-costs world of that old playground chestnut: conkers
Last call for the corncrake
This small and secretive bird is becoming ever-more rare, but there is hope, finds Vicky Liddell
Doing it by the book
Independent bookshops are thriving against the high-street odds. Catriona Gray selects a few of her favourites from the shelf
Interiors
Giles Kime picks 10 blasts from the past that are back in fashion, Eleanor Doughty marvels at Nels Crosthwaite Eyre’s light touch, Bee Osborn hails the rise of the super cottage and Amelia Thorpe visits a resurgent Pimlico Road
Nine centuries of service
In the second of two articles, John Goodall focuses on London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital
Native breeds
The ‘picturesque’ New Forest pony is central to centuries-old grazing rights, finds Kate Green
Colour supplements
Fiery autumn tints catch the eye of Jane Powers in the secluded Cliff House Garden in Co Dublin
We reap what he sowed
Katherine Cole hails campaigner Miles Hadfield, who fought to save a host of historic gardens
Having a gourd time
Pumpkins and squashes have long been an inspiration to chefs and artists, reveals Lia Leendertz
The good stuff
Brown is the colour this season, so it’s chocs away for Hetty Lintell
The travel website has high margins, low overhead, and lots of free cash flow. The current business has deep strengths in Europe and its rolling out new products.4 min read
With the tariff, climate policy is now being written directly into trade rules, forcing major industrial companies to expedite efforts to reduce emissions, shift trade patterns, or pay up.Long read
National Geographic Traveller Magazine (November 2023): The latest issue features features 49 unique experiences in New York City, reveals the winners of our annual Hotel Awards, explores Turkeys ancient Lycian Way and helps plan a campervanning adventure in Australia.
Also inside this issue:
Kenya: meet a new generation of Maasai taking safari tourism into their own hands. Camargue: join the annual pilgrimage of Romani people to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Turkey: ancient tombs, lemon groves and mountainside villages await on the sun-drenched Lycian Way. Australia: pack the campervan for adventures in coastal cities and national parks. Stockholm: how the Swedish capital is shaped by the ebb and flow of the water around it. Brighton: right here, right now, visit the original party town and fountain of counterculture.
Plus,long-distance bikepacking in North Wales; reimagining heritage tours in the US; savouring the flavours of Vietnam; unearthing the history beneath Belgrade’s streets; discovering the hotels near the new Ghibli Park in Nagoya; blasting off into space-inspired family experiences; Guadalajara’s hidden quarters; escaping to the country in the North York Moors; ushering in the Day of the Dead with season reads; and packing the essentials for cold-weather camping
Literary Review – October 2023: The new issue features How Bond Was Born; Impressions of Monet; Inequality through the Ages; Adam Smith the Socialist, and more…
Anthony Powell, two and a half years older than Ian Fleming, remembered him as ‘one of the few persons I have met to announce that he was going to make a lot of money out of writing novels, and actually contrive to do so’.
You long for sublime artists to be sublime people. Or, if they’re bad, to be magnificently so. Possessing ‘a vanity born of supreme egoism’, Claude Monet ‘believed his art conferred a right to good living’ and that ‘his welfare must be … the immediate concern of others’, writes Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times. With great honesty, Wullschläger records her subject’s wearisome scrounging letters and his propensity for petty and often pointless mendacity.
In one small Mexican city, journalists who tried to expose cartel violence and government corruption became swept up in the murders devouring the country.
Philosophy Now Magazine (October/November 2023) – The new issue features Hannah Arendt – the Complexities of Loving and the Banality of Evil; What Happened to Philosophy?; The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry Into Human Freedom and more…
Science Magazine – October 6, 2023: The new issue features Ancient DNA; The risks of radioactive waste water release; Dating the arrival of humans in the Americas; and more…
The wastewater releas e from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is expected to have negligible effects on people and the ocean
In 2011, the east coast of Japan suffered an earthquake and tsunami that resulted in the meltdown of three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. This led to an uncontrolled release of large amounts of radioactive material to the surrounding land and to the Pacific Ocean.
A debate about the age of ancient footprints continues
Dating the oldest evidence for the presence of Homo sapiens in the Americas is a matter of ongoing debate. One view is that the earliest such evidence is from 16,000 to 14,000 years ago, after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when people would have crossed the Beringian strait from Siberia over a dry land bridge.
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….