The Economist Magazine (February 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Right Goes GAGA’ – Meet the Global Anti-Globalist Alliance’; Goodbye to the racial jobs gap; San Francisco’s comeback; China’s chipmaking plan; The looming hell in Rafah….
Nature Magazine – February 14, 2024: The latest issue cover climate and land-use stresses could push the rainforest past a tipping point as early as 2050. The researchers probed five causes of water stress — global warming, annual rainfall, seasonal intensity of rainfall, length of the dry season and deforestation — using palaeorecords, climate models and observational data.
Times Literary Supplement (February 14, 2024): The latest issue features Thinking AI; London literary consequences, A new play in the great tradition, and Household terrors…
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 9, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Armed And Dangerous’ – Two new books – “One Nation Under Guns”, by Dominic Erdozain, and “What We’ve Become”, by Jonathan M. Metzl – examine America’s gun culture and its costs…
Two new books consider how the country’s obsession with firearms has become an existential threat.
By Rachel Louise Snyder
ONE NATION UNDER GUNS: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, by Dominic Erdozain
WHAT WE’VE BECOME: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, by Jonathan M. Metzl
Last year, a friend from Brunei visited me in the United States. She is American but was raised in Sudan and has lived in Cambodia and Scotland, among other places. We were talking about the rise in anxiety among teenagers in America when another friend texted me; her daughter had just arrived home from school, where she’d spent the afternoon in lockdown. “Of course your kids have anxiety,” my Brunei friend said. “They’re being raised in a war zone.”
In Margot Livesey’s new novel, “The Road From Belhaven,” a 19th-century farm girl’s life and maturity are complicated by her uncontrollable visions of accident and disaster.
By Daisy Lafarge
Lizzie Craig has a gift: She sees “pictures” of events before they take place. It happens first when she’s 10, with a vision in which her grandfather’s scythe slips from a whetstone and injures his leg. It’s the tail end of the 19th century in Fife, rural Scotland, where Lizzie is brought up by her grandparents on Belhaven Farm. Her pictures, more often than not, are premonitions of accidents and disasters: a hurt leg, a wheel coming off a cart, a tree hit by lightning. They tend to arrive “a few weeks before the accident,” giving Lizzie time to prepare, and sometimes, intervene accordingly.
The Guardian Weekly (February 8, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Final Straw’ – What’s eating Europe’s Farmers?; Joe Biden’s Middle East masterplan; Can anything stop the AI deepfakes? and The Pet Shop Boys are back in town…
If you live in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland or Greece, you may well have already run into one of the numerous roadblocks or protests formed in recent weeks by furious farmers. If you’re in Spain and Italy, take cover – because they are coming to you soon, if not already.
In this week’s cover story, we explore what has proved to be the final straw for Europe’s farmers. A combination of rising costs, environmental rules and grievances over EU policies, coupled with more localised complaints, seem to be the factors driving the convoys of tractors. But far-right and anti-establishment parties, who could make major gains in forthcoming European parliament elections, have also picked up on the protests as part of their agenda against EU influence.
Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis and Europe correspondent Jon Henley delve into the protests (if not the piles of steaming dung being dumped on the continent’s roads, as illustrated wonderfully by Neil Jamieson on this week’s cover), and ask what can be done to placate them.
The blockbuster medications that reduce body weight also reduce inflammation in organs such as the brain, raising hopes that they can treat Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.
Times Literary Supplement (February 7, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Cancel Culture’ – The limits of academic free speech; An Auschwitz memoir; Wittgenstein’s bombshell; Horrible legions and Dutch artobiography…
The New Yorker (February 5, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresNicholas Konrad’s “Online Profile” – The magazine celebrates its ninety-ninth anniversary..
When Golden was a young curator in the nineties, her shows, centering Black artists, were unprecedented. Today, those artists are the stars of the art market.
Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times
The philosopher was a champion of political and intellectual freedom, but he had no interest in being a martyr. Instead, he shows us how prudence and boldness can go hand in hand.