‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (September 25, 2023) – A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, how to win a long war in Ukraine, what Asia’s economic revolution means for the world (11:05) and why a disgraced comedian is the symbol of a cruel, misogynistic and politically vacant era in Britain (18:52).
Category Archives: Reviews
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – October 2, 2023
Is an All-Meat Diet What Nature Intended?
The hyper-carnivory movement conjures a time when men hunted and lunch was literally on the hoof. What does the research say?
The Emotionally Haunted Electronic Music of Oneohtrix Point Never
Daniel Lopatin talks with Amanda Petrusich about his collaborations with the Weeknd and the Safdie brothers.
Amsterdam Exhibitions: ‘Van Gogh Along The Seine’
Van Gogh Museum (September 22, 2023) – In the 19th century, bridges and trains made it easier to visit places outside of Paris. And yet smoking factory chimneys increasingly dominated the horizon. This exhibition reveals how artists captured these changes in their artworks.
‘And when I painted landscape in Asnières this summer I saw more colour in it than before.’
Vincent van Gogh to his sister Willemien van Gogh, late October 1887
‘Van Gogh along the Seine’
13 October 2023 until 14 January 2024
Five ambitious artists – Van Gogh, Seurat, Signac, Bernard and Angrand – travelled to the banks of the Seine to paint. Surrounded by green, they captured the changes ushered in by the burgeoning industry. Here they found new, contemporary motifs and developed their use of colour and painting techniques. Asnières had a particular impact on the artistic development of these artists.
Views: The New York Times Magazine – Sept 24, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (September 22, 2023): The 9.24.23 Issue features Hannah Dreier on migrant children working in dangerous conditions; McKenzie Funk on Hank Asher, a drug smuggler who became a pioneer in data mining; Sonia Shah on new research that suggests animals are saying more than we think; and more.
The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?
Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research suggests that isn’t so.
Can a mouse learn a new song?
Such a question might seem whimsical. Though humans have lived alongside mice for at least 15,000 years, few of us have ever heard mice sing, because they do so in frequencies beyond the range detectable by human hearing. As pups, their high-pitched songs alert their mothers to their whereabouts; as adults, they sing in ultrasound to woo one another. For decades, researchers considered mouse songs instinctual, the fixed tunes of a windup music box, rather than the mutable expressions of individual minds.
A Chile Paste So Good, It’s Protected by the U.N.
Real-deal Tunisian harissa is an anchor to the motherland and a bright, specific accent to countless dishes.
By Eric Kim
Last year, UNESCO officially deemed harissa, the brick red, aromatic chile paste, “an integral part of domestic provisions and the daily culinary and food traditions of Tunisian society.” Keyword: Tunisian.
Finance Preview: Barron’s Magazine – Sept 25, 2023
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – SEPTEMBER 22, 2023: The latest issue features the $50 Billion question – How Ozempic and Wegovy could break the healthcare system.
How Ozempic and Wegovy Could Break the Healthcare System
Between cost and demand, the latest breed of weight-loss drugs could transform healthcare in the U.S.—for good and ill.
How a Government Shutdown Could Hurt Retirees
Social Security checks will keep coming, but expect other complications.
China Is in Trouble, but It’s Not as Bad as Some Think
Those ready to write off the country underestimate the resources of policy makers and the power of an $18 trillion economy that is home to 1.4 billion people.Long read
This Busted Bank Merger Is Fixing Itself. Its Stock Is Worth Buying.
Four years after it was created, Truist Financial is finally dealing with the issues that have damaged it. The case for investing now.Long read
The New York Times Book Review – Sept 24, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 24, 2023): The latest issue features Walter Isaacson’s buzzy Elon Musk biography, which has already rocketed to No. 1 on the best-seller list. Also, gorgeous historical novels from Lauren Groff and Daniel Mason; a remarkable new book about road ecology; the translation of a beloved, best-selling Japanese novel; “Doppelganger,” Naomi Klein’s investigation into the online underworld of conspiracies and misinformation; and Stephen King’s latest, “Holly,” to name just a few.
Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur depicts a mercurial “man-child” with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match.
At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person, the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.” As the people closest to him will attest, he lacks empathy — something that Isaacson describes as a “gene” that’s “hard-wired.”
Lauren Groff’s Latest Is a Lonely Novel of Hunger and Survival
“The Vaster Wilds” follows a girl’s escape from a nameless colonial settlement into the unforgiving terrain of America.
By Fiona Mozley
Jamestown, Va., the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, very nearly didn’t survive. A few years into its existence, in the early 1600s, the majority of the population had succumbed to famine and disease. The period known as the Starving Time has taken on allegorical status. Jamestown is the colony that tried too much too soon; that underestimated the harsh climate, the foreign land, its existing, Indigenous population. Pilgrims went in search of heaven and found hell.
Books: The Booker Prize 2023 Shortlist Revealed
The Shortlist
The Bee Sting
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life?
By Paul Murray
Western Lane
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Chetna Maroo’s tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself – and squash
By Chetna Maroo
Prophet Song
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink
By Paul Lynch
This Other Eden
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding’s spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference
By Paul Harding
If I Survive You
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. An exhilarating novel-in-stories that pulses with style, heart and barbed humour, while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques
Study for Obedience
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
The Week In Art Podcast (September 21, 2023): This week: the latest controversies prompted by the Unesco World Heritage Committee. As we mentioned last week, the 45th session of the committee is taking place in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, and continues until 25 September.
The founder of The Art Newspaper, Anna Somers Cocks, joins host Ben Luke to look at the latest sites granted World Heritage status and at the Committee’s decision not to add Venice to the organisation’s endangered list. We ask: is Unesco so mired in politics that it cannot adequately perform its role? The Colombian artist Fernando Botero died last week, aged 91, and we talk to the gallerist Stéphane Custot, of Waddington Custot galleries in London, about this painter and sculptor who drew ire from many critics but achieved widespread public acclaim.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is October’s Gone . . . Goodnight (1973) by Barkley L. Hendricks. As a group of paintings by Hendricks goes on display among the masters at Frick Madison in New York, Aimee Ng, co-curator of the exhibition, tells us about the painting.
Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick, Frick Madison, New York, until 7 January 2024.
Research Preview: Science Magazine – Sept 22, 2023
Peak solar activity is arriving sooner than expected, reaching levels not seen in 20 years
The Sun’s flare-ups can threaten satellites and electric grids, highlighting need for better forecasts
Quantum algorithm offers faster way to hack internet encryption
Scheme to factor giant numbers could be more efficient than 30-year-old Shor’s algorithm
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 22, 2023
Times Literary Supplement (September 22, 2023): The new issue features Playing with Fire – The limitless ambition of Elon Musk; Peter Brown in an antique land; The new New Journalism; A literary critic and murderer; John Gray’s Hobbes for liberals, and more…
The X files
ELON MUSK by Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson’s intimate account of a tech titan
When Elon Musk was a child, his parents warned him against playing with fire. His response was to take a box of matches behind a tree and start lighting them. Scenes like this are frequent in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk, who has become the world’s richest person thanks to his disdain for authority, instinct for the dramatic and “reality-bending wilfulness” (and because he has applied these traits to good ideas). Isaacson reports that the family’s motto is “Live dangerously – carefully”, but a more apt one might be the maxim quoted by Musk’s cousin Peter: “Risk is a type of fuel”.
Travels with his aunts
The intellectual life of a pioneering historian of Late Antiquity
By Mary Beard
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND – A Life in History by Peter Brown
In the late 1970s, the historian Peter Brown dumped his old dinner jacket on a park bench in Berkeley, California. It was not just a minor act of charity to the local homeless, who may or may not have welcomed a cast-off “tuxedo”. Brown had recently moved from an academic career in Oxford and London to a post in the United States, and he was signalling to himself a new start in what seemed to be a more democratic, less hidebound educational system: more jeans and trainers than black tie. He has been based in America ever since.
Boomers Daily 