London Review of Books (LRB) – May 18, 2023 issue: The War in Khartoum, Vermeer’s Waywardness, Palestinians in Paraguay and Claire Hall on Anaximander.
In London, I had taken A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal for a dependable rest point on strolls around the National Gallery. In Amsterdam, relocated to join 27 other Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum exhibition, its strangeness re-emerged. This canvas, executed towards the end of Vermeer’s relatively brief career (some four years, perhaps, before he died aged 43 in 1675), commits to a tactic he had earlier only toyed with: to set an internal picture as a wholly self-contained block within his own composition, uninterrupted by foreground forms.
ArtReview (May 2023 Issue) – Featuring Frida Orupabo, Isaac Julien, Sarah Pierce, Kahlil Robert Irving and Christina Quarles; columns on faltering art markets and questions of what art should do for a society; and much more
Art has long looked to the recent past for inspiration, but might the return of post-Internet art just be too much, too soon?
Frida Orupabo, on the cover of ArtReview May 2023, mines images sourced from colonial archives, film, fashion and family albums to create collages that carve representation and empowerment from stereotype. Her visual references, ranging from clips of singers like Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, to the art of Carrie Mae Weems and Kara Walker, are incorporated into multilayered works, some pinned with metal tacks to look like the kind of vintage paper doll whose appendages are manipulable. The sense of ‘reclaiming the power to choose how a woman’s body, and more specifically Black female sexuality, is presented and received’, writes Fi Churchman, ‘is a central theme of Orupabo’s work’.
VernissageTV (May 8, 2023) – The opening reception of the Swiss artist Stephan Hostettler. Stephan Hostettler was born in 1988 in Unterseen, Switzerland.
After training as a metalworker, he attended the preliminary design course in Bern and graduated from the specialist class for graphics in Biel. He presented his works for the first time in 2019 at the Jungkunst exhibition in Winterthur. Hostettler lives and works in Bern.
“At its core, my work is about how we humans live or could live in this world. It offers a humorous but critical perspective on our actions as a society and aims to trigger discussions that contribute to a positive development. I wish for a world in which we treat each other with respect, we live with nature, take care of it and in which no one has to live in fear.”
Stephan Hostettler Solo Exhibition in Bern (Switzerland). Vernissage, May 6, 2023.
Claire Dederer’s deft and searching book surfaces a “fan’s dilemma” over such figures as Vladimir Nabokov, Woody Allen, Willa Cather and Roman Polanski.
Expanding on a popular essay published in The Paris Review a month after the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation, “Monsters” sustains an essayistic, sometimes aphoristic tone throughout 250-odd pages.
Welcome to three novels set in locales where life is exceedingly difficult.
By Alida Becker
AT THE HOUR BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF by Tara Ison
The title comesfrom a French expression for twilight. Sure enough, her novel sends us to the dusk that borders the familiar and the wild, the known and the unknown. It’s where our beliefs and suspicions can cast dark shadows over our lives. And, of course, the lives of others.
Alarmed by the country’s political divisions, Jeff Sharlet embarked on an anguished quest to understand the rise of antidemocratic extremism. In “The Undertow,” he documents his findings.
By Joseph O’Neill
THE UNDERTOW: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, by Jeff Sharlet
The premise of “The Undertow,” Jeff Sharlet’s anguished new book of reportage, is that the United States is “coming apart.” The disintegration is political. It involves the rise of the autocratically inclined Donald Trump; the attempt by members of the Republican Party to overthrow the election of Joe Biden in January 2021; and, during the Biden presidency, the overturning by the Supreme Court of Roe v Wade.
Bud Light is the latest casualty in a battle over whether companies are embracing too many progressive goals on everything from gender identity to climate change. What’s at stake as companies fight back.
Everyone is talking about Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic. Now, the drugs are poised to go from conversation starters to profit makers.
An industry reckoning over carbon credits could refresh the market for renewables derived from things such as cooking oil and cow manure. These beaten-down stocks that could get a lift once headwinds subside.
National Geographic Traveller Magazine (June 2023). The latest issue features Canada’s greatest outdoor adventures, summer guides to Oslo and Lisbon, the quetzals and rivers of Costa Rica, and explores the Silk Road route of Central Asia.
Óli and Brim the dog, on the coast close to Velbastaður.
On their farm in the Faroe Islands, where the sheep roam the hillsides and the chickens put themselves to bed, Óli and Anna Rubeksen dish up a feast of local ingredients ranging from rhubarb to lamb hearts.
Also inside this issue:
Oman: A rich history and striking landscapes, from the Arabian coast to the Hajar Mountains. Costa Rica: Explore Central America’s wildest corners, where quetzals hide and rivers lead to jungle lodges. Laos: In a corner of this Southeast Asian country, life is shaped by the flow of the Mekong River. Lisbon: Tram rides, street art and al fresco meals: Portugal’s lively capital is best explored outdoors. Oslo: Summer is the perfect time to discover Norway’s flourishing premier city. Bosnia & Herzegovina: Discover this Balkan country’s turbulent history, wild nature and surprising food scene. Barbados: Inventive food and drinks projects are redefining the Caribbean island’s culinary landscape. Paris: The French capital beckons with accommodation options to suit every pocket.
Plus, it’s the anniversary of Vienna’s World Fair; new exhibitions in London; a taste of Corfu; archaeology and Indiana Jones in Syracuse; Manila’s design-led hotels; family trips to the UK seaside; sand, sherry and Spanish history in Cádiz; a Cornish escape to Falmouth; great reads on British nature; and packing essentials.
Science Magazine – May 5, 2023 issue: The immune system protects us from cancer and infection using a powerful armamentarium that is kept in check by an array of regulatory processes. When they fail, the immune system can start attacking the host in a process known as autoimmunity. This special issue highlights recent advances in our understanding of autoimmune diseases and the regulation of immune tolerance. See the special section beginning on page 468.
Antibodies that target self-antigens are an important component of certain autoimmune diseases and are sometimes used as a clinical marker for these syndromes. ILLUSTRATION: STEPHAN SCHMITZ/FOLIOART
A cardinal feature of the immune system is its ability to distinguish self from nonself. Although many early immunologists thought that its powerful defenses could rarely, if ever, be turned against the host, pioneering research on autoimmune diseases beginning in the early 1900s has documented a different reality. More than 80 different autoimmune disorders have now been described that may affect up to 5% of the population.
The New York Review of Books – May 25, 2023 issue: Michael Hofmann on Goethe’s last years, Jerome Groopman on the business of biotech, Joan Acocella on Balanchine, Jed S. Rakoff on William O. Douglas’s environmentalism, Adam Hochschild on 1619 and 1776, Willa Glickman on grassroots labor unions, Brenda Wineapple on Susanna Moore, Ian Johnson on art looters, Jenny Uglow on Samuel Pepys and the wreck of the HMS Gloucester, Nicholas Guyatt on financing the Civil War, Elaine Blair on how we talk about sexual assault, poems by Eugene Ostashevsky, D. Nurske, and Ama Codjoe, and much more.
In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.
Conversations with Goethe: In the Last Years of His Life by Johann Peter Eckermann, translated from the German by Allan Blunden, with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson
A strange time to publish—strange time to publish anything—a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (or should that be Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann?), in six hundred static, major-key pages that can easily feel like twice as many. The big man, himself by now somewhat fallen on hard times, recorded by the little acolyte.
A new book reveals the split personality of the biotech industry: an altruistic enterprise that creates breakthrough treatments for patients in need, and a bare-knuckle business that seeks to generate astronomic profits and stop competitors from developing better treatments.
A research scientist for Pharmacyclics, Sunnyvale, California, 2013. In For Blood and Money, Nathan Vardi writes that when Pharmacyclics—which developed ibrutinib, a treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia—was bought by the pharmaceutical giant AbbVie in 2015 for $21 billion, ‘the deal…set the new high-water mark for success in the biotechnology industry.’
nature Magazine – May 4, 2023 issue:As stars evolve, they expand and so will engulf planets in close orbit around them. This planetary catastrophe is expected to generate powerful luminous ejections of mass from the star, although this has not been observed directly.
The current landscape of mobile mental-health apps is the result of a 70-year search to automate therapy. Now, advanced AIs pose fresh ethical questions.
Illustration by Fabio Buonocore
Since 2015, Koko, a mobile mental-health app, has tried to provide crowdsourced support for people in need. Text the app to say that you’re feeling guilty about a work issue, and an empathetic response will come through in a few minutes — clumsy perhaps, but unmistakably human — to suggest some positive coping strategies.
ArtReview (May 2023 Issue) – Featuring Frida Orupabo, Isaac Julien, Sarah Pierce, Kahlil Robert Irving and Christina Quarles; columns on faltering art markets and questions of what art should do for a society; and much more
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