Category Archives: Reviews

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – NOVEMBER 20, 2025 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Will We Still Google It?’; Syntax of Slavery and Habsburg Legacies…

Will we still google it?

I’m starting to feel some pre-emptive nostalgia when I do a Google search. Yes, it’s true, search can sometimes take you to places you don’t want to go. But at least a ‘classical’ search engine like Google in the 2000s and 2010s took you outside itself, and perhaps implicitly prompted you to evaluate critically what you found there. by Donald MacKenzie

Syntax of Slavery

Slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was taken for granted until the growth of abolitionism in the later 18th century. Liverpool could hardly be an exception when the slave trade was so embedded in its economy.  By John Kerrigan

Habsburg Legacies

We still live in the long shadow of Habsburg disintegration. In addition to the lingering legacy of 19th-century state formations, European and global politics are shaken by continuing reverberations in states that have disappeared from Europe since 1990: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the GDR and, above all, the Soviet Union. By Holly Case

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – NOVEMBER 14, 2025

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Roy Foster on Seamus Heaney’s miraculous poems.

Blazing graft

Charting Seamus Heaney’s Wordsworthian journey By Roy Foster

What the public wants?

Writing novels by AI – and committee By Gordon Fraser

Books of the Year 2025

Our contributors choose their favourites

Touching the void

Simone Weil’s ethical life class By A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 2025 PREVIEW

THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE: The latest issue featuresVOTE’

Senate Democrats Just Made a Huge Mistake

The shutdown was hurting Trump. Ending it helps him.Jonathan Chait

Pay Attention to the First 10 Minutes of SNL

James Austin Johnson’s catchall monologues have become an ideal format for the recent onslaught of political news.Erik Adams

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE – NOV. 9, 2025

Current cover

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The 11.9.25 Issue features Parul Sehgal on Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of ‘Frankenstein’; Emily Baumgaertner Nunn on the trafficked girls of Los Angeles; Jesse Barron on the suicide of a teen who fell in love with an A.I. chatbot; J Wortham on the art exhibition using decommissioned Confederate monuments; and more.

They Fell in Love With A.I. Chatbots — and Found Something Real

Three people on the joys and anxieties of A.I. romances. By Coralie Kraft

A Harrowing Escape From the Drone-Infested Hellscape of Ukraine’s Front Lines

In Ukraine, unmanned weapons hunt the wounded and medics alike. Moving injured soldiers to safety has never been more difficult. By C.J. Chivers

Why Does So Much New Technology Feel Inspired by Dystopian Sci-Fi Movies?

The industry keeps echoing ideas from bleak satires and cyberpunk stories as if they were exciting possibilities, not grim warnings.By Casey Michael HenryCreditPhoto illustration by Michael Houtz

She Was Ready to Have Her 15th Child. Then Came the Felony Charges.

MaryBeth Lewis’s desire to be a new mom again, at 65 years old, led to a custody battle like no other. By David Gauvey Herbert

THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 8, 2025 PREVIEW

THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE: The latest issue featuresThe relationship recession‘.

The rise of singlehood is reshaping the world

In good ways and bad

China’s clean-energy revolution will reshape markets and politics

The world’s biggest manufacturer now has an interest in the world decarbonising

Democrats risk drawing the wrong lessons from one good day

Moderate governors offer a better model than a charming socialist in New York

America should not push other countries to adopt the dollar

More dollarisation would be a double-edged sword

NATURE MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 6, 2025

Volume 647 Issue 8088

NATURE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Brain Development’ – Mapping the distribution and diversity of cells in the growing brain.’

Artificial brains with less drain

Biologically inspired electronic neurons could boost the efficiency of artificial-intelligence systems.

Longer walks beat shorter strolls for heart health

People who rack up most of their daily steps in walks lasting less than five minutes have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease than do those who amass their steps in big blocks.

Secret route to warm cosmic ‘inflation’: the nuclear force

Modelling shows how the infant Universe might have stayed warm and dense during its primoridal expansion.

Forests’ misty breath sustains crops in distant lands

The moisture emitted by forests travels across national borders to provide precipitation to far-away fields.

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 17, 2025

Edel Rodriguez's “Mayor Mamdani” | The New Yorker

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest cover features Edel Rodriguez’s “Mayor Mamdani”

The Mamdani Era Begins

His opponents tried to smear him for his youth, inexperience, and leftist politics. But New Yorkers didn’t want a hardened political insider to be mayor—they wanted Zohran Mamdani.

Dick Cheney’s Brand of Conservatism

For years before taking office, the former Vice-President appeared less dogmatic than he was.

The Dishy Operatics of Lily Allen’s Breakup Album

On “West End Girl,” all the gritty bits are there: messages with a husband’s mistress, the discovery of a cache of sex toys.

THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY – NOVEMBER 7, 2025 PREVIEW

THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘A Massacre Foretold’ – The Tragedy of El Fasher’

For some time now, El Fasher in Sudan has been a city beyond the reach of journalists. But the haunting satellite image on our cover this week, of smoke billowing from fires near El Fasher’s airport, told its own story as starkly as anything that could be reported from the ground.

Other satellite images showed clusters of burned-out vehicles, and what appeared to be pools of blood beside piles of bodies on the ground. A massacre was under way that could be seen from space.

The last major city in Darfur to fall to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was already the scene of catastrophic levels of human suffering, but has “descended into an even darker hell”, senior UN officials warned last week. This key moment in the two-and-a-half-year-long civil war has unfolded in plain sight with minimal intervention from the international community, unless you count the United Arab Emirates, which has been arming the RSF paramilitaries.

Spotlight | The Andrew formerly known as a prince
Stupidity and self-entitlement sank King Charles III’s disgraced younger brother – and the royal reckoning may not be over yet, writes Stephen Bates

Technology | What if the internet just … stopped working?
Could everything suddenly go offline and if so, how? Aisha Down goes inside the fragile system holding the modern world together

Interview | Margaret Atwood puts the world to rights
At 85, she’s a literary seer and saint – and queen of the Canadian resistance. So what does the writer make of our dystopian society? Lisa Allardice finds out

Opinion | World leaders: Cop30 could be your great legacy
With the US backing away from the climate crisis, now is the moment when other nations must step up, says former British prime minister Gordon Brown

Culture | Back to black with Lynne Ramsay
The Scottish film director burst on to the scene with Ratcatcher and terrified audiences with We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her latest film stars Hollywood darling Jennifer Lawrence, but it doesn’t flinch from the dark side of family life, finds Amy Raphael

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 10, 2025

New Yorkers walk by a tree on a rainy day.

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest cover features ‘Sudden Shower’ by Sergio-Garcia Sanchez.

The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

ChatGPT does not have an inner life. Yet it seems to know what it’s talking about. By James Somers

Voting Rights and Immigration Under Attack

The President’s goals were clear on the first day of his term, when he issued an executive order overruling the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship clause. By Jelani Cobb

Mobsters We Have Seen on High

The jewel heist at the Louvre reminded Brooklynites of the time, in 1952, when two bejewelled crowns were swiped from a beloved local church—the one with a Mob boss on the ceiling. By Susan Mulcahy

LITERARY REVIEW – NOVEMBER 2025

LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Jeremy Noel-Tod on Seamus Heaney * Kathryn Murphy on Vermeer * Kirsten Tambling on two 18th-century artists * Sophie Oliver on Katherine Mansfield * Lucy Lethbridge on reading * Tom Shippey on the first king of England * Daniel Rey on Christopher Columbus * Nigel Jones on U-boats * Richard Vinen on the Second World War * John Phipps on John le Carré * Julian Baggini on effective altruism 

The Pen & the Spade

The Poems of Seamus Heaney By Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis (edd.)

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found By Andrew Graham-Dixon

A woman stands, oblivious to our gaze, absorbed entirely in her activity – reading, pouring, weighing, holding out her pearls. A window to the left admits a radiance, which falls variously on the common stuff the room contains. The light enters as an absolute blank, but infuses colour as it illuminates the scene. 

Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life By Gerri Kimber

The rush to tell the story of Katherine Mansfield’s short, fascinating life began as soon as she died. Her husband, John Middleton Murry, a gifted editor, notoriously turned the publication of her writing into an industry.