Category Archives: Reviews

The Spectator World Magazine – April 13, 2026

Arming the dragon | The Spectator

THE SPECTATOR WORLD: The latest issue features Arming the dragon‘ – How the West is empowering China’s war machine…

Operation Epic Fury is costing Trump his coalition

As US troops flock to danger, Donald Trump seeks ways to disentangle himself from the war on Iran. “We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” he said in a 19-minute address at the start of the month. “It’s very important that we keep this conflict in perspective.”

How the West is empowering China’s war machine

The West’s technology brains and universities are arming China. A few of them are potentially breaking the law to do it, but most of them don’t need to. The front door has been open for years, and nobody in London or Washington has thought to close it.

The US currency is under attack like never before

It was, on the surface, a fairly routine proposal. Officials from the BRICS nations, made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, have decided to discuss, at a summit in New Delhi later this year, how to deepen trade and collaboration. No one was paying very much attention when the decision was made. And yet, according to a report in the well-informed newspaper Berliner Zeitung, a resolution was quietly suggested that might turn the global monetary system upside down. It was the start of what might be termed the “plot against the dollar.” America’s currency is likely to face its most serious challenge of the post-World War Two era.

Preview: Archaeology Magazine – MAY/JUNE 2026

Archaeology Magazine: The latest issue features ‘Exploring the World of the Odyssey.

The Unexpected World of the Odyssey

Discovering the surprising inspirations behind Homer’s great tales of the Trojan War. By The Editors

Pioneers of Lakefront  Living

Why Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers in the Alps built their villages on stilts

The Last Maya Kingdom

On the shores of a lake in Guatemala, the Itzá people defied the Spanish for nearly 200 years

Art for the Ages

A surreal style of painting endured for 4,000 years in the canyonlands of West Texas

Bridge to the Past

The Yellow River brought both prosperity and calamity to China’s dazzling medieval capital By Ling Xin

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – APRIL 13, 2026 PREVIEW

The cover of the April 13 2026 Future Issue of The New Yorker in which a man smiles as he types on a screen attached to...

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features ‘Christoph Niemann’s “New Horizons” – Technology and the future.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s Warped Vision of the Iran War

The two men might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. But the war has shown that this isn’t true. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Why Are People Injecting Themselves with Peptides?

Health and wellness influencers are hawking unapproved treatments on the gray market. The future of the F.D.A.—and the health of consumers—is at stake. By Dhruv Khullar

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?

New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.

By Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz

THE OBSERVER MAGAZINE – SUNDAY, APRIL 5, 2026

The Observer Magazine: The latest issue features – Coverage centers on the ongoing Middle East crisis, featuring a dramatic account of a mission to rescue the crew of a downed U.S. F-15 fighter jet. Reports also detail Israeli airstrikes in Beirut and Iranian drone attacks on energy facilities in Kuwait. Also, the Economic Impact: Analysts warn that soaring energy costs triggered by the conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz could threaten the global AI boom and lead to higher taxes and mortgage rates in the UK.

A picture of home

Nasa’s moon mission has captured a view immortalised by Apollo astronauts in 1968, but its quest to beat China to the lunar surface is now under threat from Trump By Giles Whittell

White House chaos intensifies after Iran downs two US warplanes

Desperate search for missing US pilot caps a week of confusion for the president as he loses his grip on the conflict

‘Forty-eight hours before all hell will rain down’: Trump warns Iran over Hormuz

As the US president ups the ante, allies discuss using minesweepers to clear the strait and Tehran imposes new transit fees on shipping

THE WEEK MAGAZINE —– APRIL 10, 2026 PREVIEW

The Week Magazine - Malta Libraries - OverDrive

THE WEEK MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘IRAN’S ADVANTAGE’ – Controlling the Strait of Hormuz with drones and mines.

Has Trump’s unpredictability broken the oil market?

How could rising gas prices affect the EV market?

Just because gas is up doesn’t mean EVs will take over

Trump’s White House Makeover Halted: A federal judge ordered a work stoppage on a $400 million ballroom project intended to replace the demolished East Wing, ruling the project lacked Congressional approval.
The Reinvention of War: The editor’s letter and lead features examine how cheap, deadly drones in Ukraine and Iran have transformed combat, turning sophisticated hardware into “knights in shining armor” vulnerable to modern technology.
Supreme Court Blocks Conversion Therapy Ban: The Court overturned a Colorado law prohibiting conversion therapy for minors, focusing on freedom of speech for mental health professionals.
Social Media Liability Inflection Point: Coverage of landmark jury awards in Los Angeles and New Mexico against Meta and Google for failing to protect children from psychological harm and online predators.
The Cicada Covid Variant: A new variant of Covid-19, dubbed “Cicada,” is reported to be spreading across the United States.
The German Deepfake Scandal: An investigative look into a scandal in Germany that has brought the issue of “virtual rape” and deepfake technology into the international spotlight. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE- APRIL 5, 2026

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘How the generation raised on smartphones is imagining life without them” by Matthew Shaer

The Novel Will Never Die. Ben Lerner’s Latest Book Shows Us Why.

With “Transcription,” the writer makes a case for the vitality of the form.

The Unlikely TV Show Restoring Everyone’s Faith in Dating

Without exploitation, “Love on the Spectrum” captures the triumphs and travails of dating. It has become one of Netflix’s most popular shows. By Anna Peele

Worried About A.I. Taking Your Job? That’s Not Very ‘Agentic’ of You.

Today’s spin on the idea of personal agency is convenient for tech C.E.O.s, who boast that their models work just fine without us. By Nitsuh Abebe

What Is YouTube’s Dominance Doing to Us? We Asked Its C.E.O.

    THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE – APRIL 4, 2026 PREVIEW

    THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE: The latest issue features How China hopes to win from the war

    How China hopes to win from the war

    Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake

    The perils of a ground war in Iran

    Donald Trump may send in troops. Does he know what to do with them?

    Lessons for the world from tiny Hungary

    A regime loved by MAGA may soon lose power. That matters

    How worried should you be about private credit?

    Its humbling could raise borrowing costs

    Index providers should not bend the rules for Elon Musk

    They will only expose ordinary investors to unnecessary risks

    THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – APRIL 23, 2026

    THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features a dispatch from Tehran, Jed Perl on Morgan Meis’s funky kind of art criticism, Francine Prose on MAGA fiction, Caroline Fraser on the dump, Michael Gorra on Civil War diaries, David Cole on the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, Hermione Lee on Virginia Woolf’s letters, Trevor Jackson on American “retirement,” Kathryn Hughes on Tennyson’s cosmos, Colm Tóibín on Irish reunification, a collage by Lucy Sante, poems by Andrea Cohen and Timmy Straw, and much more.


    From the Rooftops of Tehran

    We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.

    Living Through the Civil War

    George Templeton Strong’s diaries provide the North’s best record of daily passions and woes during its struggle against the South.

    George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries edited by Geoff Wisner

    ‘A Vast Symphony of Stone’

    In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.

    Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York City, January 28–May 24, 2026

    The Aging Class

    Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.

    Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age by James Chappel

    Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy by Teresa Ghilarducci, with a foreword by E. J. Dionne Jr.

    TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – APRIL 3, 2026 PREVIEW

    TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features Claude Rawson on the British Imagination; ‘Trump’s Whisperers; Hardy’s breakthrough novel; Thomas Mann today…

    Cultural superpower?

    An argument for ‘British is best’

    The argument of Peter Watson’s hugely ambitious The British Imagination: A history of ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II is that “The essential arc of British history – intellectual and creative history, just as much as political, economic and military history – is of a small, indeed tiny, country sequestered on the north-west coast of Europe that over the centuries would forge the largest and most unlikely empire the world has seen”. It may seem odd to be reading this in the present depressed state of the nation, although Watson stresses from the outset that the concept of “the British imagination” embraces its hospitality to foreign influences and eventually to the power of a wider “Anglosphere”.

    English virtue battles the pagan

    The genesis of Far from the Madding Crowd

    The texture of etcetera

    What smartphones can’t record

    Freeing Thomas Mann

    Modern English translations that do justice to the work

    THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY – APRIL 3, 2026 PREVIEW

    THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘The Tipping Point’ – A watershed moment for big tech’…

    In a landmark case, a California jury last week found social media companies Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately designing addictive products. The ruling came the day after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was ordered to pay $375m after a jury in a separate trial in New Mexico found it misled consumers about the safety of its platforms.

    Meta, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok are facing thousands of similar lawsuits in US courts, while governments around the world are starting to introduce measures to curb social media’s grip on children’s attention.

    Guardian technology editors Dan Milmo and Robert Booth assess whether what has been called a “big tobacco” moment for the industry will lead to significant change. And in our opinion section, Jonathan Freedland argues that the court verdicts must be just the start of a global fightback.

    The big story | A war of regression
    Weeks into a war that was going to take days and has cost billions, Donald Trump has bombed the US into a worse position with Iran, writes Patrick Wintour

    Science | ‘On the shoulders of giants’
    Plant specimens and teaching materials that inspired Charles Darwin have been unearthed and will be used for the first time to teach contemporary students about botany, Donna Ferguson reports

    Feature | Circuit training
    After touring 11 Chinese companies making humanoid robots, Chang Che asks: just how close are we to a robotic future?

    Opinion | Labour needs a thinker
    Ed Miliband’s stock is rising in a party in need of an old-style intellectual heavyweight, argues Gaby Hinsliff

    Culture | Gimme shelter
    Catherine Slessor visits Henry Moore’s former countryside home Hoglands, now home to studios and a vast sculpture garden, to learn about a new exhibition of the drawings he made as a war artist, capturing people as they took sanctuary from the blitz