The Israeli government is taking a leaf out of Ariel Sharon’s playbook to try to undo what it regards as Sharon’s biggest mistake. This essay is on the ‘regime change’ planned for Gaza, and the carnage it entails.
Party officials are vanishing, young workers are “lying flat,” and entrepreneurs are fleeing the country. What does China’s inner turmoil mean for the world?
By Evan Osnos
Twenty-five years ago, China’s writer of the moment was a man named Wang Xiaobo. Wang had endured the Cultural Revolution, but unlike most of his peers, who turned the experience into earnest tales of trauma, he was an ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life. In his novella “Golden Age,” two young lovers confess to the bourgeois crime of extramarital sex—“We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breath.” They are summoned to account for their failure of revolutionary propriety, but the local apparatchiks prove to be less interested in Marx than in the prurient details of their “epic friendship.”
Our accelerating rates of extraction come with immense ecological and social consequences.
The town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, doesn’t have a lot to say for itself. Its Web site, which features a photo of a flowering tree next to a rusty bridge, notes that the town is “conveniently located between Asheville and Boone.” According to the latest census data, it has 2,332 residents and a population density of 498.1 per square mile. A recent story in the local newspaper concerned the closing of the Hardee’s on Highway 19E; this followed an incident, back in May, when a fourteen-year-old boy who’d eaten a biscuit at the restaurant began to hallucinate and had to be taken to the hospital. Without Spruce Pine, though, the global economy might well unravel.
0:15 AI can predict your risk of Parkinson’s – RETFound was trained using 1.6 million retinal images which gave it a picture of a healthy retina. Then its creators added images of eyes from people with certain conditions. Our eyes are a window to our health. They’re the only place where doctors can directly observe capillaries, our smallest blood vessels, enabling detection of cardiovascular illnesses such as hypertension. Eyes are also linked to the central nervous system, giving an insight into neural tissue, too. The RETFound tool was best at picking up eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy. On Parkinson’s, stroke and heart disease, it performed not quite as well but still beat other AI models.
2:08 These are the most detailed heat maps of our planet – They use imagery from a satellite called HotSat-1 which can detect heat and cold at a resolution of 3.5 metres. The satellite can precisely map the fronts of forest fires, detect and monitor heat islands in cities and measure the thermal efficiency of buildings. This information can drive more effective decision-making.
3:51 AI designed this robot in 26 seconds – Researchers from Northwestern University gave an AI a simple prompt. ‘Design a robot that can walk across a flat surface’. By the 9th iteration, the AI had successfully met its brief. The robot could walk half its own body length per second. The entire iteration process took just 26 seconds and it ran on a laptop.
6:26 Norway completed it’s largest rewilding project – It’s centred around Sveagruva, a 100-year-old mining town on the Arctic island of Svalbard. Norway decided to close the town and its mining operations in 2017 and return the area to its natural state, restoring biodiversity and the local ecosystem.
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BARRON’S MAGAZINE – October 23, 2023 ISSUE:
For some advisors, the move to Charles Schwab from TD Ameritrade didn’t go smoothly. Chances are, they’ll stick around anyway.
Asset managers’ shares are cheap, and the companies could benefit from an upturn in investment flows. Sizing up BlackRock, T. Rowe Price, and more.Long read
The Change Company was touted as a community-development leader. It became the country’s largest provider of exotic mortgages.Long read
The crypto industry wants laws passed that clarify how it will be regulated.Long read
Home equity accounts for almost half of the median net worth of homeowners 60 and older.4 min read
Apparel that straddles athleticwear and loungewear has become Americans’ de facto uniform. Here are the companies best positioned to profit from it.Long read
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 22, 2023): This week’s issue features “Hunting the Falcon,” on this week’s cover, Tina Brown, who reviewed it, calls it “a fierce, scholarly tour de force,” adding: “The authors, a husband-and-wife historian team, are a dream pairing.”
In “Hunting the Falcon,” the historians John Guy and Julia Fox take a fresh look at an infamous Tudor marriage — and find there is indeed more to know.
By Tina Brown
HUNTING THE FALCON: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe, by John Guy and Julia Fox
Anne Boleyn glanced over her shoulder repeatedly as she waited at the Tower of London for her executioner, a specialist swordsman who had been summoned from France. Would Henry VIII, who could spare lives as casually as he snuffed them out, spare her life on the scaffold as he’d been known to do before?
In “The Halt During the Chase,” by Rosemary Tonks — first published in 1972, and newly reissued — a young woman goes in search of herself.
By Mary Marge Locker
THE HALT DURING THE CHASE, by Rosemary Tonks
From the first page of this clever, fishy little novel, our narrator, Sophie, is the kind of woman whose laughter is a weapon. She could scare off an assailant with one well-timed whack of her tongue. Originally published in 1972, “The Halt During the Chase” is the second Rosemary Tonks novel to be reissued by New Directions in as many years, bringing a new audience to her charming and imperfect heroines, who are all voice, half poetry and half snarl.
The Week In Art Podcast (October 20, 2023): This week: it’s the second year of Paris +, the event that has taken over from Fiac as the leading French art fair. How is Art Basel’s French flagship faring amid geopolitical turmoil and economic uncertainty, and is Paris still on the rise as a cultural hub?
We speak to Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, and Kabir Jhala, our deputy art market editor, who are in Paris, to find out. The largest ever exhibition of the work of the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto opened last week at the Hayward Gallery in London, before travelling to Beijing and Sydney next year. We talk to its co-curator Thomas Sutton.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is La femme-cheval or the Horse-Woman, a painting made in 1918 by the French artist Marie Laurencin. She is the subject of a major survey, called Sapphic Paris, opening this week at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in the US. Cindy Kang, who co-curated the exhibition, tells us more about this landmark work in Laurencin’s life.
Paris +, 20-22 October.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, Hayward Gallery, London, until 7 January 2023; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 23 March-23 June 2024; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, 2 August-27 October 2024.
Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, US, 22 October-21 January.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 22, 2023): The latest issue features In Search of Kamala Harris; Longer Commutes, Shorter Lives: The Costs of Not Investing in America and The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer….
After nearly three years, the vice president is still struggling to make the case for herself — and feels she shouldn’t have to.
All the conditions seemed right for a chance to reset the narrative.
At the Munich Security Conference in February, amid rising international angst about Russia’s war in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris led a delegation of Americans, including around 50 lawmakers from both parties. She spent her first day in Germany in seclusion, preparing for the next 48 hours: meetings with European leaders the first day and a keynote speech the next in the ornate ballroom of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. When she emerged, head high and shoulders back, Harris exuded what her staff members have argued is a particular comfort with her role on the international stage. There, they say, she is respected.
For decades, spending on the future put the nation ahead of all others. What would it take to revive that spirit?
Every morning in 21st-century America, thousands of people wake up and prepare to take a cross-country trip. Some are traveling for business. Others are visiting family or going on vacations. Whether they are leaving from New York or Los Angeles, Atlanta or Seattle, their trips have a lot in common.
REASON MAGAZINE (DECEMBER 2023) – The latest issue features The Endangered Species Act at 50 – Why have so few species been taken off the endangered species list?; Dobbs and the abortion debate is reshaping American Politics; Will Russia ever be free?, and more…
Why have so few species been taken off the endangered species list?
Some progressives want to remove bureaucratic obstacles to growth—in the service of Democrats and big government.
A wave of ballot measures reminds us most Americans are moderate on abortion.
Promise and peril in post-Putin Russia
Past the halfway point, Extremely Large Telescope prepares to receive first mirrors
A web of steel girders is rising from the flattened summit of Cerro Armazones, 3000 meters above sea level in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The dome it will support will be vast—with a footprint as big as a soccer field and almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty— and unexpectedly nimble: It will smoothly rotate on rails as a giant telescope inside tracks stars through the night.
Co-developer of biotech’s drug couldn’t supply original data
Gas could replace fossil fuels and fight climate change—if it is made cleanly
Boomers Daily 