Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — Dec 2023
Category Archives: Reviews
Reviews: Best Books On Aging And Retirement
HBR Guide to Designing Your Retirement
By Harvard Business Review | Harvard Business Review Press (256 pages)
What sets this retirement guide apart from others is the perspectives brought by the contributing writers. In addition to presenting case histories and addressing the best ways to assess your life goals and financial needs, the authors discuss specific steps to help you think about encore careers in coaching, consulting or teaching; practical tips for coping with different stresses; and how to view the career you’re leaving as a period of “preretirement” to help you evaluate what comes next.
Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing
By Abigail Thomas | Golden Notebook Press (196 pages)
Veteran book editor, agent and author Abigail Thomas begins her third memoir with the observation that at 80, her thoughts can sometimes be “interrupted by a memory so vivid that I am in two places at once.” Perhaps a jarring thought to some, but to Thomas, such moments can be “an inexpensive, unpatented, readily available form of time travel,” and readers who choose to accompany her will be rewarded.
Funny gripes, wistful reflections, rueful memories and realizations about aging fill these pages. Some of the best entries are about her days as a single mother of three living in Greenwich Village and protesting the Vietnam War. “The times that were a-changing have changed,” Thomas writes, “but for a little while I’m going to ignore what went off the rails, and let myself remember what innocence and hope felt like.”
Somebody’s Fool
By Richard Russo | Knopf (464 pages)
The closing piece of the “North Bath” trilogy by Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo is a wondrous novel that captures the changing pace of small-town life in the 21st century. The setting once again is a fictional, blue-collar community in upstate New York whose senior residents must grapple not only with the daily indignities of financial troubles and aging bodies, but with intrusions from the inhabitants of a more-prosperous neighboring town.
No worries if you are new to these books. You can jump right in to enjoy the fun even if you haven’t read the previous two (“Nobody’s Fool” and “Everyone’s Fool”). You can also expand your immersion in Russo’s world by streaming the 1994 movie of “Nobody’s Fool,” starring Paul Newman in an Oscar-nominated role.
The Measure of Our Age
By M.T. Connolly | PublicAffairs (384 pages)
In this compassionate book, M.T. Connolly, founding head of the Justice Department’s Elder Justice Initiative, lays out many of the problems associated with giving and finding care for seniors in our aging society. And as its subtitle, “Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life,” suggests, she also has ideas for solutions to help avert a worse crisis.
Connolly draws on research, interviews and her own experience to explore these issues. “Our norms and systems have not kept up with our longevity, sometimes with terrible, and usually preventable, consequences,” she writes. She is optimistic, however, that “change is possible—and some is even under way” on community, federal and individual levels.
One thing that needs to continue, she writes, is “increasing our capacity to make meaning of aging, and of our fleeting time on Earth, by paying more attention to the power of purpose, curiosity, stories, awe, and love.”
The Well-Lived Life
By Dr. Gladys McGarey | Atria Books (256 pages)
To remain healthy in mind and body, consider the wisdom of Dr. Gladys McGarey, still a consulting physician at the age of 102, and co-founder of the American Holistic Medical Association. McGarey sums up her approach to life in six lessons, hence the book’s subtitle: “A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age.” We won’t list them, and they are probably not what you would expect.
Based on her own experience—some of it difficult and emotionally draining—she places huge importance on the ability to regain perspective and purpose after a physical illness or crisis. This is essential for healing, medically and emotionally, says McGarey, whose own life story reveals she has had to practice what she preaches. At 69, she had to find a new path when her husband and medical partner of 46 years left her for a younger woman.
Architecture: Tour Of 4 Iconic New York Museums
Today Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects returns to AD for an in-depth look at how the iconic museums and art galleries of NYC developed their unique designs and became some of the city’s best landmarks.
Director: Hiatt Woods; Director of Photography: Charlie Jordan; Editor: Alex Mechanik; Host: Michael Wyetzner
Special Report: ‘China’s Armed Forces’ (NOV 2023)
The People’s Liberation Army is not yet as formidable as the West fears
Overestimating China’s armed forces would be dangerous, argues Jeremy Page
In 1957 america was gripped by fears of a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. The Kremlin had stunned the world with a test flight of an intercontinental ballistic missile (icbm) and the launch of Sputnik. An American intelligence report predicted that by 1962, the Soviets could have 500 icbms, outstripping America’s arsenal. When word of that leaked, a political furore erupted. Eyeing the presidency from his Senate seat, John F. Kennedy demanded action to prevent a Soviet “shortcut to world domination”.
China is struggling to recruit enough highly skilled troops
The PLA needs them to operate all its new weapons
From hypersonic missiles to undersea drones, the PLA is making leaps
But China’s military tech still lags behind the West’s
Covers: Science Magazine November 10, 2023 Preview
AI’s challenge of understanding the world
In thinking about the challenge of getting artificial intelligence (AI) to understand our complex world, I recalled a Twitter post from a user of Tesla’s self-driving system. The user tweeted that his car kept stopping abruptly at a particular location for no apparent reason. Then he noticed a billboard advertisement on the side of the road, featuring a sheriff holding up a stop sign. The car’s vision system had interpreted this as an actual stop sign, and slammed on the brakes.
The Scottish wildcat has been wiped out by breeding with domestic cats
After 2000 years of isolation, a few decades of interbreeding have rendered the animal “genomically extinct”
BY DAVID GRIMM
Though it lies in ruins on the northeast coast of England, Kilton Castle was once an imposing stone fortress, home to several noble families, and—it appears—at least eight cats. Archaeological excavations in the 1960s uncovered a well, at the bottom of which lay the bones of several felines dating back to the 14th century. The animals were an odd mix: Some were domestic cats, but other, larger specimens appeared to be European wildcats, a fierce, burly species that has inhabited the continent for hundreds of thousands of years.
Technology: Liv Boeree On The ‘Dark Side Of Game Theory’ Competition In AI
Poker champion and science communicator Liv Boeree introduces us to the dark force of game theory driving many of humanity’s biggest social problems — a force that’s now threatening to derail the AI industry.
Olivia “Liv” Boeree is a British science communicator, television presenter and former professional poker player. She is a World Series of Poker and European Poker Tour champion, and is the only female player in history to win both a WSOP bracelet and an EPT event.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – Nov 11, 2023
How artificial intelligence will transform fame
The omnistar is born – Those complaining the loudest about the new technology stand to benefit the most
How scary is China?
Superpower politics – America must understand China’s weaknesses as well as its strengths
Giorgia Meloni’s “mother of all reforms” is a power grab
Constitutional chicanery – Italians should reject their prime minister’s demagogic proposal
The New York Times Style Magazine – Nov 12, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE (November 12, 2023) – T’S TRAVEL ISSUE features the writer Aatish Taseer embarked on an epic 40,000-mile journey through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq. What he learned was less a life-altering revelation and more a lesson in curiosity itself.
The Enduring, Transformational Power of Pilgrimage
The writer Aatish Taseer embarked on a journey through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq. What he learned was less a life-altering revelation and more a lesson in curiosity itself.
Travel, the movement of people from one place to another, has always existed. But long before we thought to travel for pleasure, we traveled for purpose: for commerce, and for faith.
Even the most casual student of the Silk Road, that fearsome, wondrous network of routes that people began plying in the second century B.C. (and did so for approximately the next 1,600 years) knows that the two — business and God, whoever or whatever your god was — often intermingled. Merchants and adventurers returned with new kinds of goods, but also with new kinds of ideas: of art, of architecture, of ideology, of faith. The Silk Road brought Islam to India, and Buddhism to Japan. It’s why travel has always been both thrilling and dangerous. You never know how a new land is going to change you; it never knows how you’re going to change it.
Behind the Story: How a Writer Prepared for a 40,000-Mile Trip
The dozens of books that T writer Aatish Taseer read before his journey through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq, and what he learned from each pilgrimage.
Eighteen months ago, when the New York-based T writer at large Aatish Taseer began planning his reporting trips for this month’s three-part feature story — an exploration of religious travel in Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq — he was already well acquainted with the idea of pilgrimage. His first book, the 2009 memoir “Stranger to History,” opens with what is arguably the world’s best-known faith-motivated journey, the hajj to Mecca, and ends with what he describes as a personal pilgrimage to meet his estranged father in Pakistan. In Delhi, India, where Taseer grew up, quick trips for the purpose of worship were commonplace. “People would do a pilgrimage on an ordinary Sunday,” he says, “instead of going to an amusement park.”
Preview: London Review Of Books – Nov 16, 2023
Bad Blood – ‘We’ve messed up, boys’
‘In the UK between 1970 and 1991, about 1250 people with bleeding disorders were infected with HIV (and many of them with Hepatitis C, too); by the time the Infected Blood Inquiry began, about three-quarters had died, the majority of them from HIV-related causes.
By Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood
by Cara McGoogan.
Death in the Blood: The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal
by Caroline Wheeler.
Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic
‘Nearly eighty years after she first starred in a film, Taylor is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men.’
By Bee Wilson
Research Preview: Nature Magazine – Nov 9, 2023
Brain and body are more intertwined than we knew
A host of disorders once thought to be nothing to do with the brain are, in fact, tightly coupled to nervous-system activity.
A robot performs heart surgery with a strong but delicate touch
Device can wield tools inside one of the heart’s chambers while bracing itself against a stabilizer fitted into a major cardiac vein.
The Solar System’s biggest moon is spattered with salt
Dried brine from a subsurface ocean speckles the surface of Ganymede, which orbits Jupiter.
Boomers Daily 