Category Archives: Stories

Culinary Arts: Michelin-Starred Chef Stefano Secchi Of Rezdôra NYC

Follow chef/owner Stefano Secchi through an entire day at his rustic Italian restaurant Rezdôra, from organizing a kitchen of line cooks and rolling fresh pasta through serving dinner each night in the heart of Manhattan. Take a first hand look behind the scenes to see what really goes into serving high-quality cuisine day in, day out.

Previews: Times Literary Supplement – April 29, 2022

This week’s Times Literary Supplement for April 29, 2022 @TheTLS, featuring Carol Tavris on Darwinian feminism; @TomFStevenson on geopolitics; @TobyLichtig on Compartment No. 6; Edmund Gordon on the new Jennifer Egan; @hjccochrane on Primo Levi; @rinireg on borders – and more.

Previews: Archaeology Magazine – May/June 2022

Table of Contents  May/June 2022

Secrets of Scotland’s Viking Age Hoard

A massive cache of Viking silver and Anglo-Saxon heirlooms reveals the complex political landscape of ninth-century Britain

The World of Egyptian Demons

Thousands of supernatural beings, including protective cobra spirits and knife-wielding turtles, guarded ancient Egyptians in life and death

Fit for Fighting

The discovery of Mesopotamian-style armor in northwest China offers new insights into a battle- tested ancient technology

To Live and Die in Pompeii

Unearthing the unusual burial of a freedman who gained entrée into the city’s top social ranks

Morning News: U.N. Chief In Moscow, U.S. Diplomats Return, Musk Buys Twitter

As UN chief António Guterres heads to Moscow, we give you the latest on his meeting with Vladimir Putin. Plus: US diplomats begin to return to Ukraine, Elon Musk strikes a deal to buy Twitter and a round-up of the latest news from the Nordic region.

Previews: The Atlantic Magazine – May 2022

MAY 2022

From This Issue

Preparing for the end of Roe, Europe’s ex-royals, tour guides to a tragedy, and how social media shattered society. Plus Winslow Homer, the myth of the liberal world order, a new history of WWII, ending mom guilt, the price of privacy, and more.

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International Art: Apollo Magazine – May 2022 Issue

• The method in Jackson Pollock’s madness

• The problem with Russian money in the art world

• What war photography looks like today

• Philip Guston’s uneasy quest for freedom

Plus: The women artists gazing at men, the portraits of Glyn Philpot, and Elizabeth David’s taste in Old Masters; and reviews of Donatello in Florence, Boilly in Paris, Kafka’s drawings and Stephen Shore’s memoir.

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Morning News: U.S. Meets With Zelensky In Ukraine, Macron Wins Re-Election

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, promising to gradually re-establish a diplomatic presence in Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron won a second term, beating far right candidate Marine Le Pen with 58 percent of the vote. And, workers at an Amazon sorting facility in Staten Island begin voting on unionization today.

Science Books: Top New Picks – Nature Magazine

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks.

Spark

Timothy J. Jorgensen Princeton Univ. Press (2022)

The use of electricity in medicine has long been controversial, notes health physicist Timothy Jorgensen. Eighteenth-century polymath Benjamin Franklin applied shocks to paralysed muscles with temporary success. In the 1930s, neurologist Ugo Cerletti pioneered painful but effective electroconvulsive therapy for schizophrenia and depression. Yet even today, “no one is sure exactly how ECT works”, says Jorgensen in his brilliant book. Now, business magnate Elon Musk plans to implant computer chips to treat brain disorders.

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The New Fire

Ben Buchanan & Andrew Imbrie MIT Press (2022)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not like electricity, but like fire, say Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie — academic specialists in emerging technology — in their authoritative, coruscating analysis of its current and future significance. Its potential impact ranges from illuminating to catastrophic, according to three rival and sometimes overlapping views from observers whom they label “evangelists, warriors and Cassandras”. “Three sparks ignite the new fire,” say the authors: data, algorithms and computing power.

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Tomorrow’s People

Paul Morland Picador (2022)

“To most of us, the influence of demography on our future is far from obvious,” writes demographer Paul Morland. City dwellers tend to have low fertility, thereby creating an older population and eventually population decline, which could prompt migration and ethnic change, as in today’s United Kingdom — or might not, as in Japan. Morland’s careful book discusses ten indicators, one per chapter: infant mortality, population growth, urbanization, fertility, ageing, old age, population decline, ethnic change, education and food.

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Restarting the Future

Jonathan Haskel & Stian Westlake Princeton Univ. Press (2022)

In the past few decades, growth has stagnated in advanced economies. This is odd, given low interest rates, high business profits and a wide belief that we live with “dizzying technological progress”, write economists Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake. They argue that the old economic model based on material production fails when it comes to intangible assets — such as software, data, design and business processes — that hinge on ideas, knowledge and relationships. Financial and state institutions must update to cope.

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Inequality

Carles Lalueza-Fox MIT Press (2022)

Inequality and its origins will always preoccupy humans. In 2014, biologist Carles Lalueza-Fox led the retrieval of a genome from a European forager’s skeleton more than 7,000 years old; his later studies revealed genetic evidence of “inequality and discrimination in different times and periods”, as he describes in this significant book, written during the pandemic. He concludes by observing that COVID‑19 has had an enhanced impact on poor people, which he anticipates will feature in future genetic studies.

New Books: ‘San Francisco – Portrait Of A City’ (2022)

Starting with an early picture of a gang of badass gold prospectors who put this beautiful Northern California city on the map, this ambitious and immersive photographic history of San Francisco takes a winding tour through the city from the mid–nineteenth century to the present day.

The Streets of San Francisco

An epic pictorial history of the City by the Bay

Enjoy eye-catching views of the city’s most enduring landmarks and symbols: the Golden Gate BridgeChinatown, the picturesque trams that wind up and down the famously steep hills, the popular waterfront, its beautiful bay, and its spectacular cityscapes and vistas. San Francisco’s counterculture movements that shaped our collective consciousness are also featured prominently: the beats of North Beach, the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, the gay communities of Castro, and the Black Panthers of neighboring Oakland. Some of the city’s most famous residents also make appearances: Robin Williams, The Grateful Dead, Angela Davis, Janis Joplin, Sylvester, and Allen Ginsberg, among others.

This book features hundreds of newly found images from dozens of archives including museums, universities, libraries, galleries, private collections, and historical societies, from 19th-century daguerreotypes to mid-century Kodachromes to 21st-century digital pictures. Master photographers include, among others: Stephen Shore, Imogen Cunningham, Fred Lyon, Steve Schapiro, Minor White, Dorothea Lange, Albert Watson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, William Claxton, Fred Herzog, Ansel Adams, Jim Marshall, and many local shooters. Also includes introductory essays and captions by Bay Area–based author Richie Unterberger and a “Best of San Francisco” books, music, and movies section and biographies of the photographers. Tony Bennett famously sang, “I left my heart in San Francisco,” and this meticulously researched and conceived portrait will equally inspire and make you fall in love with the spirit of the City by the Bay.

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Preview: New York Times Magazine – April 24, 2022