Insurers have been hit by a one-two punch of natural disasters and lackluster financial markets. But there’s a silver lining: the profits and surpluses that come with rising premiums.
The Economist (October 13, 2023) – On October 7th Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel and slaughtered more than 1,300 people, mostly civilians. What is Hamas and how powerful is it?
Video timeline: 00:00 – What is Hamas? 00:55 – Hamas’s control of Gaza 01:18 – Growth of Hamas military capacity 01:32 – The latest attack on Israel
Wall Street Journal (October 13, 2023) – NASA launched a spacecraft on Friday to study the Psyche asteroid, which is believed to be made out of metal.
Video timeline: 0:00 NASA’s mission 0:46 The psyche asteroid 1:45 Why metal matters 3:04 What we can learn from the mission
The rocky inner planets of our solar system are thought to have mostly metallic cores. WSJ breaks down why this mission matters and what it could tell us about Earth’s origins.
The Week In Art Podcast (October 13, 2023): The Frieze art fair has turned 20 this week, and is only growing in its ambitions, having acquired the Armory Show fair in New York and Expo Chicago.
So what should we make of Frieze’s continuing expansion and what’s the mood at Frieze London and Frieze Masters this year? We talk to Tim Schneider, The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, who is over from New York for the fairs. In Reykjavik in Iceland, the artist-run Sequences Biennial opens on Friday. A former curator of the event is Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, who will represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Tom Seymour went to the Icelandic capital to talk to her about Venice, Sequences and the Icelandic scene.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Open Window, Collioure (1905) by Henri Matisse. The painting is a highlight of the exhibition Vertigo of Colour: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. We speak to Dita Amory, co-curator of the show, about this landmark painting in Matisse’s career.
Frieze London and Frieze Masters, Regent’s Park, London, until 15 October.
The Sequences Biennial, entitled Can’t See, begins on 13 October and continues until 22 October 2023.
Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 13 October-21 January 2024; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 25 February-27 May 2024.
Section 301, in the second-to-highest tier of Levi’s Stadium, floats 105 feet above Santa Clara, Calif. It comprises 251 seats — a mere hamlet in the vast 64,000-seat general kingdom of the place, but it was our hamlet, and on the last Saturday in July, we took up each one of those seats and watched, our collective breath held, as Taylor Swift emerged from a bevy of billowing pastel parachutes and rose up on a platform to perform the 47th show of her Eras Tour. A few songs in, she announced, laughing, that her father told her that Santa Clara had named her its honorary mayor during her two-night stay there and that the entire town had been renamed Swiftie Clara.
The novelist is competing with giants like William Faulkner, while mapping territory all her own.
By Imani Perry
Jesmyn Ward gestured with her eyes and a tilt of her face, hands on the wheel. “This crazy colored house right here? That’s my grandmother’s house. That’s the house I grew up in. And her sister lives there” — she pointed — “and then that little blue house? That’s my great-grandparents’ house.” She was driving me around DeLisle, Miss., her hometown and the inspiration for Bois Sauvage, the fictional setting of her first three novels. It is Deep South-in-August hot outside, and the air-conditioning was a relief. “My mom’s side of the family was all clustered around this road.”
A cell census provides information on the source of human brain specialization
The brain is composed of multiple regions associated with distinct functions, which have become further specialized in the human lineage. To define how this specialization is implemented, how it arises during development, and how it has emerged over the course of human evolution, a detailed understanding of the cells that make up the human brain is required.
The ecology of whales in a changing climate
Some whale populations are exhibiting unexpected cycles of boom and bust
The New York Review of Books (November 2, 2023) – The latest features the 60th Anniversary Issue— with Pankaj Mishra on writing in the face of fascism, Lucy Sante on the kaleidoscopic Blaise Cendrars, Fintan O’Toole on the battles over wokeness, Deborah Eisenberg on the enchantments of Elsa Morante, Timothy Garton Ash on the dream of a free Europe, Simon Callow on vertiginous Mozart, Jed Perl on the Warholization of Picasso, Marilynne Robinson on Iowa’s tattered ideals, Catherine Nicholson on Shakespeare’s First Folio, Susan Faludi on abortion in the nineteenth century, Martha Nussbaum on the rights of whales, poems by Anne Carson and Ishion Hutchinson, and much more.
Uwe Wittstock’s new account of writers considering whether to flee or to remain in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power sheds light on the choices faced by many writers in India and Russia today.
by Uwe Wittstock, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles
“It will have become clear to you now,” Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig in mid-February 1933, “that we are heading for a great catastrophe.” Two weeks previously, on January 30, Germany’s eighty-five-year-old president, Paul von Hindenburg, had appointed as chancellor a man who for more than a decade had spoken and written frankly about his resolve to extirpate democracy and Jews from the country. Roth, who left Berlin the same morning Adolf Hitler came to power and never returned to Germany, was desperate to make his complacent friend recognize the perils before them.
Biographies of composers are a relatively recent genre; those of Mozart were among the first examples.Though his life was not as sensational as that of Gesualdo, for example, who murdered his wife, Mozart was, from his early years, an international celebrity whose very personality posed questions beyond the eternal riddle of creativity. How could a mere child—he started performing publicly on the clavichord at the age of six—be so astoundingly versatile? As he toured Europe, going from court to court and salon to salon with his father, Leopold, and his older sister, Maria Anna—a talented musician as well—the delightful little boy in his nattily embroidered outfits enchanted his listeners, readily obliging them with requests, however crass: now playing with the keys covered, now with only one finger, to delighted applause.
London Review of Books (LRB) – October 19, 2023: The new issue features Camus in the New World; Charles Lamb’s Lives; The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary and At the Met: On Cecily Brown….
Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Ryan Bloom
Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder and the Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint
On Nagorno-Karabakh
Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census by Dan Bouk
nature Magazine – October 12, 2023: The latest issue features the results of a comprehensive re-evaluation of the conservation status of amphibians since 2004.
Companies say the technology will contribute to faster drug development. Independent verification and clinical trials will determine whether this claim holds up.
The Economist
Boomers Daily 