Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

February 17, 2023: Turkey and Syria. As the countries reel from the devastation of the 6 February earthquake, how can communities and agencies protect damaged heritage?

We talk to Aparna Tandon from Iccrom, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property about culture’s significance in the humanitarian response to the crisis. As Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle arrives at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, we take a tour of the show’s key moments with its curator, Eleanor Nairne.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is a Germantown “eye-dazzler” blanket, made between 1895 and 1905 by a Diné weaver from the Navajo Nation. It’s part of a new show at the Bard Graduate Center in New York,

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest. Hadley Jensen, the curator of the exhibition, tells us more.Disasters Emergency Committee’s Turkey-Syria Earthquake: dec.org.uk; a PDF of Aparna Tandon’s handbook First Aid To Cultural Heritage In Times Of Crisis is available for free at iccrom.org.Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle, Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 21 May.

The book accompanying the exhibition is published by Prestel, priced £24.99 or $29.95.Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest, Bard Graduate Center, New York, until 9 July. An online exhibition featuring an interactive catalogue has approximately 250 items from the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of Navajo textiles will be available later this month at bgc.bard.edu.

Culture: New York Times Magazine – Feb 19, 2023

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The New York Times Magazine – February 19, 2023:

Spirited Away to Miyazaki Land

What happens when the surreal imagination of the world’s greatest living animator, Hayao Miyazaki, is turned into a theme park?

Remaking Country’s Gender Politics, One Barroom Weeper at a Time

The Nashville songwriter Shane McAnally is behind many of country music’s No. 1 hits, which aren’t as straight as they seem.

Why Is Affirmative Action in Peril? One Man’s Decision.

How the landmark 1978 Supreme Court decision that upheld the practice may ultimately have set it on a path to being outlawed.

Previews: The Economist Magazine- Feb 18, 2023

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The Economist Magazine- February 18, 2023:

Inflation will be harder to bring down than markets think

Investors are betting on good times. The likelier prospect is turbulence

Israel’s proposed legal reforms are a dreadful answer to a real problem

They will damage the country at home and abroad

The World Bank’s embattled chief steps down

David Malpass’s record is better than his many critics will credit

Previews: History Today Magazine – March 2023

Volume 73 Issue 3 March 2023 | History Today

History Today Magazine – March 2023 Issue:


Treason of the Clerics

For 600 years Muslims held sway over the Indian subcontinent. Then democracy and a desultory leadership did them in.

Getting Away with Murder

Sarah Malcolm by William Hogarth, 1733.

Found guilty of the Temple Murders in 1733, Sarah Malcolm became the most notorious woman in Britain. Did she commit the crime alone? Did she commit it at all?

Save Your Ass

CIA

The US government was happy to support the assassination of foreign officials – but not to be seen doing so.

The New York Review Of Books – March 9, 2023

Download The New York Review of Books - March 9, 2023 - SoftArchive

The New York Review of Books – March 9, 2023:

Peddling Darkness

True crime stories, like Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel, make for suspenseful reading. But do they exploit the criminal, and deepen a thirst for punishment?

Commanders and Courtiers

The Howe family achieved an influential position of power in late-eighteenth-century Britain, propelled by the shrewd social intelligence of the Howe women.

Books: TLS/Times Literary Supplement – Feb 17, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (February 17, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS , featuring @jamesamarcus on Mailer at 100; Tom Seymour Evans on James Ellroy; @SPlokhy on Putin’s war in Ukraine; @nclarke14 on Blake Morrison; @CamilleRalphs_on Sylvia Plath; @natsegnit on Salman Rushdie; @rinireg on balloons – and more.

Science Review: Scientific American – March 2023

March 2023

Scientific American – March 2023 Issue:

Long COVID Now Looks like a Neurological Disease, Helping Doctors to Focus Treatments

The causes of long COVID, which disables millions, may come together in the brain and nervous system

Tiny Bubbles of Quark-Gluon Plasma Re-create the Early Universe

New experiments can re-create the young cosmos, when it was a mash of fundamental particles, more precisely than ever before

Babies Are Born with an Innate Number Sense

Plato was right: newborns do math

Opinion: Searching With Chatbots, Adani & India’s Capitalism, Lazy In France

A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, how chatbots will influence the lucrative business of internet search, the parable of Adani (11:25) and why France is arguing about work, and the right to be lazy (19:50).