Nature Magazine – March 13, 2024: The latest issue cover features ‘Burning Question’ – How drought conditions are driving overnight fires in North America…
The de-extinction company Colossal is the first to convert elephant cells to an embryonic state, but using them to make mammoths won’t be easy, say researchers.
The New Yorker (March 11, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Peter de Sève’s “Downhill” – The artist depicts carving up the slopes, straight into spring.
Katja Grace’s apartment, in West Berkeley, is in an old machinist’s factory, with pitched roofs and windows at odd angles. It has terra-cotta floors and no central heating, which can create the impression that you’ve stepped out of the California sunshine and into a duskier place, somewhere long ago or far away. Yet there are also some quietly futuristic touches. High-capacity air purifiers thrumming in the corners. Nonperishables stacked in the pantry. A sleek white machine that does lab-quality RNA tests. The sorts of objects that could portend a future of tech-enabled ease, or one of constant vigilance.
The classical-education movement seeks to fundamentally reorient schooling in America. Its emphasis on morality and civics has also primed it for partisan takeover.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March ,8 2024): The latest issue featuresRenaissance scholar Ramie Targoff’s new book, “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” which sets out to show modern readers that the Elizabethan era did indeed produce its share of great women writers, and she details four of them across a range of disciplines.
In “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” the Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff presents an astounding group of Elizabethan women of letters.
By Tina Brown
SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, by Ramie Targoff
Judith Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf’s imaginary sister of the Bard, was for years the accepted portrait of the nonexistent writer of Renaissance England. In “A Room of One’s Own,” her seminal feminist essay, Woolf concluded that any glimmer of female creativity in Shakespeare’s time would have been expunged by a pinched life as a breeding machine of children who so often died, disallowed opinions of her own. Had any woman survived these conditions, wrote Woolf, “whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issued from a strained and morbid imagination.”
Using clever camera methods, a new photo book illuminates how honeybees see plants and flowers.
By William Atkins
In WHAT THE BEES SEE: The Honeybee and Its Importance to You and Me, Craig P. Burrows’s ultraviolet-lit photographs mimic the fluorescence his botanical subjects emit when exposed to sunlight, revealing colors and textures usually obscured by the dazzle of visible light. Because bees see in the ultraviolet spectrum, Burrows’s method can afford us a glimpse of the world as they perceive it: His portraits of plants are, in part, prompts for interspecies empathy at a time when bees are under attack on multiple fronts, from air pollution to pesticides.
The Economist Magazine (March 7, 2024): The latest issue features Three big risks that might tip America’s presidential election – Third parties, the Trump trials and the candidates’ age introduce a high degree of uncertainty; Xi Jinping’s hunger for power is hurting China’s economy; How to fix the Ivy League – Its supremacy is being undermined by bad leadership…
It was August 2017 when the world really started to take note of Myanmar’s Rohingya people. Descendants of Arab Muslims who speak a different language to most other people in Myanmar, the Rohingya had up to that point lived mainly in the northern Rakhine state, coexisting uneasily alongside the majority Buddhist population.
But the Rohingya were reviled by many as illegal immigrants and treated by the then government as stateless people. In 2017, when violence broke out in the north of the state, security forces supported by Buddhist militia launched a “clearance operation”that forced more than 1 million Rohingya people to flee their homes and the country, actions that many onlookers saw as ethnic cleansing. Most Rohingya were driven into vast refugee camps in the Cox’s Bazar region of Bangladesh, where they have remained ever since.
The Guardian global development reporter Kaamil Ahmed has been covering the Rohingya crisis for almost a decade, making multiple trips to the region. For this week’s Big Story, Kaamil returned to Cox’s Bazar where, in two moving reports, he details how disease and illness are widespread in the ramshackle camps, and how the desperation to escape has resulted in rich business for people traffickers.
And, with Myanmar now controlled by a military junta and introducing a deeply unpopular conscription drive (as Rebecca Ratcliffe and Aung Naing Soe report), the prospect of any Rohingya people being able to return home to Rakhine state remains as distant as it did in 2017.
Nature Magazine – March 6, 2024: The latest issue cover features ‘Flood Warning’ – Sinking land and rising sea pose increased threat to US coastal cities.…
Times Literary Supplement (March 6, 2024): The latest issue features‘Talking about their generation’ – James Campbell and Douglas Field on the Beats including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; Alexandra Reza on Frantz Fanon; Miranda France on Montserrat Roig….
Country Life Magazine – March 5, 2024: The latest issue features The Country Life Top 100 – Britain’s leading exponents of country-house architecture, interior design, gardens and specialist services…
Welcome to the eighth edition of our guide to Britain’s leading exponents of country-house architecture, interior design, gardens and specialist services
New series: The legacy
In the first of this new series, Kate Green celebrates Dame Miriam Rothschild’s remarkable contribution to the nation as a pioneer of wildflower gardening
Reach for the Skye
Following in the slipstream of swimming cattle, Joe Gibbs enjoys safe passage to the Isle of Skye courtesy of the world’s last manual turntable ferry
Hail the conquering heroes
Jack Watkins is in the saddle for a canter through 100 years of the Cheltenham National Hunt Festival’s Blue Riband event, the Gold Cup
Arts & antiques
Works by a whole host of great artists are more accessible than you might imagine. Carla Passino talks to leading art dealers about the Old Masters you could collect
Sir Alistair Spalding’s favourite painting
The artistic director admires a religious fresco that encourages contemplation and reflection
Out of Africa
Carla Carlisle reflects on the life of Karen Blixen after visiting the author’s former home in Kenya
Renewal and recovery
The restoration of Boston Manor House in Greater London offers a fascinating insight into changing tastes, reveals Charles O’Brien
The Devil wears parsley
March can be the month of all weathers, warns Lia Leendertz
The masked singer
Jack Watkins goes in search of the elusive, enchanting woodlark
London Life
Cashing in with Russell Higham
Celebrating Claridge’s
Revisiting James Burton’s beat with Carla Passino
Jack Watkins finds change in the air at the Natural History Museum
Stancombe revisited
Marion Mako visits Stancombe Park, Gloucestershire — Waugh’s garden inspiration for Brideshead
Kitchen garden cook
Melanie Johnson harnesses the subtle depth of flavour of leeks
And so to sleep…
Hemlock is a pretty addition to riverbanks, but its charm ends there, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee
The claws are out
Simon Lester shares the thrill of an encounter with the secretive native white-clawed crayfish
The good stuff
Patterned or pastel? Hetty Lintell showcases the finest waistcoats
The New Yorker (March 4, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Barry Blitt’s “Slappenheimer” – The artist revisits the infamous Oscars slap to riff on the tensions of this year’s ceremony.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 1, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Yakety-Yak’ – In “Language City”, Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in New York, the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis…
The feisty title character of her new book, “Ferris,” has a sharp eye for detail, and so, its author hopes, does she. Meanwhile, she is on an Alice McDermott reading jag.
In “Language City,” the linguist Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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