Category Archives: Reviews

World Economic Forum: Top Stories- April 29, 2023

World Economic Forum (April 29, 2023) – This week’s top stories of the week include:

0:15 Germany tackles skill gap with on-job training – Jakob Kasperidus joined wind power firm SL Naturenergie 2 years ago despite having no experience in the field. Previously, he managed an organic food shop. Now, he’s training to become a senior project developer as he works. “The first months were not that easy. It has to be said that we actually had quite a nice concept. That is, we had former or senior project developers who have been in the profession for some time now, who were always assigned a tandem junior project developer. That means I’ve had a mentor, if you will, for 2 or 2.5 years now, who then trained me bit by bit, so to speak.”

2:24 New documentary explores endometriosis – This director has endometriosis, along with millions of women. She made a movie about it. Endometriosis is a condition where cells similar to the uterus lining grow outside of the uterus. It causes severe, life-limiting pelvic pain and affects 190 million women of reproductive age globally. That’s 1 in 9 women. Yet many struggle to get their condition recognized and treated.

5:08 Scientists test honey for antibiotic potential – Honey is a traditional remedy for wound-healing due to its antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties. Now, scientists at Cardiff University are going back to this ancient cure to search for the next wave of bacteria-fighting medicine. The honey works as a ‘drug discovery tool’. Researchers test samples of honey for antibacterial compounds, then follow them back, using technology, to the plant species the bees visited. Many of these plants would otherwise be dismissed as weeds.

6: 32 Student designs plastic windows for Ukraine – The plastic windows can be built in just 15 minutes at a cost of €13.60 per square metre. The windows combine 4 layers of polythene sheeting with PVC piping and an ‘insulating noodle’ to create an immediate triple-glazed window which lets in enough light to live by. Millions of Ukrainians are living in bomb-damaged homes in a country where temperatures can drop to -20°C. The plastic windows were designed by Cambridge student Harry Blakiston Houston who took a break from his biotechnology PhD to start an NGO, Insulate Ukraine.

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The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change.

Preview: New York Times Magazine – April 30, 2023

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The New York Times Magazine – April 29, 2023:

Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong’

In his most extensive interview yet, Anthony Fauci wrestles with the hard lessons of the pandemic — and the decisions that will define his legacy.

The Most Dangerous Person in the World Is Randi Weingarten’

Randi Weingarten, wearing a bright blue shirt and staring directly into the camera.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.Credit…Michal Chelbin for The New York Times

School closures and culture wars turned classrooms into battlegrounds — and made the head of one of the country’s largest teachers’ unions a lightning rod for criticism.

Finance Preview: Barron’s Magazine – May 1, 2023

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Barron’s Magazine – May 1, 2023:

The Cautionary History of Debt-Limit Gimmicks

Illustration by Alvaro Bernis

The U.S. Congress began imposing debt limits in 1776. When the Continental Congress authorized its very first loan from France, it instructed U.S. commissioners to borrow a “sum not exceeding two million sterling.” Congress continued to permit the Treasury to borrow only up to bond-by-bond specific limits until 1917. Prior to then, U.S. Treasury secretaries actually operated under multiple debt limits, authorized bond by authorized bond. The single, aggregate debt limit we’re more familiar with today was first adopted by the U.S. in 1939.

The Fed Has Few Good Options. The Risk of a Misstep Is Growing.

The Fed Has Few Good Options. The Risk of a Misstep Is Growing.

The Federal Reserve is struggling to cool inflation further without damaging the economy. The easy part is over.

J&J’s Kenvue Spinoff: A Rare IPO Winner in a Moribund Market

J&J’s Kenvue Spinoff: A Rare IPO Winner in a Moribund Market

The consumer health company features a range of leading brands, a relatively cheap valuation, a solid balance sheet, consistent earnings, and a healthy dividend yield. It’s no tech unicorn, a good thing in 2023.

Pressure on First Republic Mounts as Advisors Jump Ship

Pressure on First Republic Mounts as Advisors Jump Ship

The bank’s elite wealth management unit is suffering a major talent drain. It may only get worse.

Art: ‘Must-See Museum Exhibitions’ – May 2023

Sotheby’s (April 28, 2023) – Looking for some inspiration for your next museum visit? This month, we’re taking a tour of six of the world’s most exciting and innovative museum exhibitions with Tim Marlow, Director of the Design Museum, London.

Doris Salcedo – Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, 21 May–17 September 2023 – Salcedo is a Colombian-born artist, whose central subject is human trauma and tragedy. Though much of her work emanates from the violent conflict over the last three decades in her native land, its resonance is universal. Doris Salcedo presents eight major series of works from across her career – from untitled pieces of wooden furniture filled with concrete to the remarkable Palimpsest in which the names of over 300 refugees and migrants who died at sea quite literally weep before our eyes.

Vincent van Gogh 2023 marks the 170th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh. Three exhibitions opening this month look set to enhance our understanding of the great Dutch painter:

Van Gogh and the Avant Garde The Art Institute of Chicago 14 May–4 September 2023 – Van Gogh and the Avant Garde takes the modern landscape as its central subject and looks at how the artist – along with Seurat, Signac and others – turned his attention from urban Parisian life to wrestling with the surrounding countryside with a formal inventiveness that set the tone for the development of Modernism.

Van Gogh’s Cypresses The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 22 May–27 August 2023 – From the religious connotation of trees in graveyards to their role as the backdrop of his incarceration at the asylum in Saint-Remy, the artist’s flame-like evergreens will be presented with all their evocative resonance in Van Gogh’s Cypresses,

Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 12 May–3 September 2023 – The unsurpassable Van Gogh Museum will celebrate its own 50th anniversary with Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months – an exhibition delving into the tremendously productive final period of his life, in which he made several of his most renowned masterpieces.

The New York Times Book Review – April 30, 2023

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The New York Times Book Review (April 30, 2023): On the cover this week – Ned Blackhawk’s “The Rediscovery of America,” a sweeping, important, revisionist work of American history that places Native Americans front and center. Illustrating it is “Les Castors du Roi,” a 2011 painting by Kent Monkman, a Cree artist in Canada’s Dish With One Spoon Territory.

Read Your Way Through Boston

An illustration depicting a snowy street in Boston; a man in the foreground is engrossed in reading his book.
Credit…Raphaelle Macaron

Paul Theroux, the quintessential travel writer, has also enshrined his Massachusetts roots in his writing. Here are his recommendations for those who come to visit.


My father, like many passionate readers, was a literary pilgrim in his native Massachusetts, a state rich in destinations, hallowed by many of the greatest writers in the language. “Look, Paulie, this is the House of the Seven Gables — go on, count them!”

Everything, Everywhere, in One Big Book

This color photo shows a woman flipping pages of a book posed on top of a long low bookcase filled with volumes. Behind the woman, stretching to the top of the photograph are more bookshelves filled with books.
A woman consults a book at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan.Credit…Ángel Franco/The New York Times

In “All the Knowledge in the World,” Simon Garfield recounts the history of the encyclopedia — a tale of ambitious effort, numerous errors and lots of paper.

In ‘Ordinary Notes,’ a Radical Reading of Black Life

The book cover for “Ordinary Notes,” by Christina Sharpe, is lilac with bold black type. A blurry photo of houses at twilight sits along the bottom edge.

The scholar Christina Sharpe’s new book comprises memories, observations, artifacts and artworks — fragments attesting to the persistence of prejudice while allowing glimpses of something like hope.

Travel & History: The Sindh Region Of Pakistan (DW)

DW Documentary (April 28, 2023) – Pakistan’s Sindh region is one of the cradles of human civilization. It’s seen as the homeland of the Indus Valley Civilization, an advanced Bronze Age civilization. But the events of 1947 brought drastic change to the cultural landscape of the Sindh.

The 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan was devastating for those living in the Sindh region. Most were Hindus and fled to India, as the area was completely assigned to Pakistan. Many Muslims from India then resettled in Sindh and changed the face of this region, whose cultural heritage had been formed over centuries.

Suddenly, the Hindus who remained found themselves in the minority. Many members of the Sindhi community are now scattered across the globe. They’re making every effort to preserve the old stories and traditions and are proud of their legacy as descendants of one of the oldest human civilizations.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Art Newspaper April 27, 2023: This week: AI and art. We explore some of the key aspects relating to artificial intelligence and its use in the art world: the works being made using AI technologies and exploring their impact; anxieties about machines replacing humans; the idea of AIs being able to think and create independently; and whether we can truly grasp the significance and possible effects of the technologies and those who control it, and more.

Host Ben Luke talks to Noam Segal—an associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, whose focus is on technology-based art—about AI, its history in art, its social and environmental effects, and how artists are using it today. The Art Newspaper’s live editor, Aimee Dawson, talks to the artist and writer Gretchen Andrew about making art with AI and together they explore its wider application across the art world.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, an image made using AI by the photographer Boris Eldagsen. The piece caused controversy earlier this month when it was awarded a prize at the Sony World Photography Awards, which Eldagsen refused to accept. The researcher and photographer Lewis Bush discusses the work, the controversy and wider questions around AI and photography.

Research Preview: Science Magazine – April 28, 2023

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Science Magazine – April 28, 2023 issue: Mammals come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, here represented by some of the least well known and most unusual—clockwise from top left: a fossa, a Hoffmann’s two-toed sloth, a lesser hedgehog tenrec, two tree (or white-bellied) pangolins, and an aye-aye. 

Zoonomia

Mammals are one of the most diverse classes of animals, ranging both in size, across many orders of magnitude, and in shape—nearly to the limit of one’s imagination. Understanding when, how, and under what selective pressures this variation has developed has been of interest since the dawn of science.

The 240 mammals sequenced through the Zoonomia project include the famous sled dog Balto, who was reported to have led a team of sled dogs in the final leg of the race to carry a life-saving serum to Nome, Alaska, in 1925. His genome, in conjunction with others, was used to reveal his ancestry and adaptations, as well as predict aspects of his morphology, including his coat color.

A two-stage earthquake in the Aleutians

Researchers deploy a wave glider to measure seafloor displacement associated with earthquakes.PHOTO: TODD ERICKSEN

The destructive behavior of great earthquakes in subduction zones, such as in Japan in 2011, depends on details of the earthquake slip. A slip at shallow depth is the dominant driver of tsunami. Using recently developed seafloor geodetic instrumentation, Brooks et al. found that the deeper slip of the July 2021 magnitude 8.2 Chignik, Alaska earthquake was followed 2.5 months later by a second stage of (aseismic) slip. This approximately 2 to 3 meters of “silent” slip allowed the shallow fault to catch up with its deeper portion, reducing its future earthquake potential.

Books: The Top Twelve Best Reviews – April 2023

12 Books to Read: The Best Reviews of April

Pegasus

Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare

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By Chris Laoutaris Pegasus

After William Shakespeare’s death, his colleagues collected his plays in a single, history-making volume. Review by Malcolm Forbes.

Read the review

The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

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By Jonathan Rosen Penguin Press

A young man’s ife of brilliant promise was overtaken when his struggle with mental illness took a turn into delusion and nightmare. Review by Richard J. McNally.

Read the review

A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South

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By Peter Cozzens Knopf

The most consequential Indian war in U.S. history didn’t take place on the prairie but among the forsts and marshes of the Deep South. Atrocities were committed by both sides. Review by Fergus M. Bordewich.

Read the review

Knopf

The Earth Transformed: An Untold History

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By Peter Frankopan Knopf

The names and dates of battles that changed history are well-remembered. But what about storms or volcanic eruptions? For eons, human civilizations have shaped—and been shaped by—the natural world. Review by Tunku Varadarajan.

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Previews: The Economist Magazine – April 29, 2023

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The Economist – April 29, 2023 issue:

As Israel turns 75, its biggest threats now come from within

The country needs a new political settlement that diminishes the power of extremists

As israel marks its 75th anniversary, take a moment to admire how it has triumphed against the odds. Before it declared independence in 1948 its own generals warned that it had only a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Today Israel is hugely rich, safer than it has been for most of its history, and democratic—if, that is, you are prepared to exclude the territories it occupies. It has overcome wars, droughts and poverty with few natural endowments other than human grit. It is an outlier in the Middle East, a hub of innovation and a winner from globalisation.

The West should supply Ukraine with F-16s

Or Russian fighter jets may win control of Ukrainian skies

A F-16 jet fighter of Royal Dutch Air Force lands on the runway of Volkel air base, southern Netherlands, on January 2, 2019. - The Dutch Air Force took part in the Air Task Force Middle East mission to fight against ISIS in Iraq and Eastern Syria. (Photo by Remko de Waal / ANP / AFP) / Netherlands OUT (Photo credit should read REMKO DE WAAL/AFP via Getty Images)

As Ukraine prepares its forces for a crucial counter-offensive, the argument among its Western allies about what equipment to provide chunters on. Having finally received the tanks it had been pleading for since last year, Ukraine has increased the intensity of its demands for fighter jets. Yet its pleas are falling on largely deaf ears.