The Israeli government is taking a leaf out of Ariel Sharon’s playbook to try to undo what it regards as Sharon’s biggest mistake. This essay is on the ‘regime change’ planned for Gaza, and the carnage it entails.
Party officials are vanishing, young workers are “lying flat,” and entrepreneurs are fleeing the country. What does China’s inner turmoil mean for the world?
By Evan Osnos
Twenty-five years ago, China’s writer of the moment was a man named Wang Xiaobo. Wang had endured the Cultural Revolution, but unlike most of his peers, who turned the experience into earnest tales of trauma, he was an ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life. In his novella “Golden Age,” two young lovers confess to the bourgeois crime of extramarital sex—“We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breath.” They are summoned to account for their failure of revolutionary propriety, but the local apparatchiks prove to be less interested in Marx than in the prurient details of their “epic friendship.”
Our accelerating rates of extraction come with immense ecological and social consequences.
The town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, doesn’t have a lot to say for itself. Its Web site, which features a photo of a flowering tree next to a rusty bridge, notes that the town is “conveniently located between Asheville and Boone.” According to the latest census data, it has 2,332 residents and a population density of 498.1 per square mile. A recent story in the local newspaper concerned the closing of the Hardee’s on Highway 19E; this followed an incident, back in May, when a fourteen-year-old boy who’d eaten a biscuit at the restaurant began to hallucinate and had to be taken to the hospital. Without Spruce Pine, though, the global economy might well unravel.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 22, 2023): This week’s issue features “Hunting the Falcon,” on this week’s cover, Tina Brown, who reviewed it, calls it “a fierce, scholarly tour de force,” adding: “The authors, a husband-and-wife historian team, are a dream pairing.”
In “Hunting the Falcon,” the historians John Guy and Julia Fox take a fresh look at an infamous Tudor marriage — and find there is indeed more to know.
By Tina Brown
HUNTING THE FALCON: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe, by John Guy and Julia Fox
Anne Boleyn glanced over her shoulder repeatedly as she waited at the Tower of London for her executioner, a specialist swordsman who had been summoned from France. Would Henry VIII, who could spare lives as casually as he snuffed them out, spare her life on the scaffold as he’d been known to do before?
In “The Halt During the Chase,” by Rosemary Tonks — first published in 1972, and newly reissued — a young woman goes in search of herself.
By Mary Marge Locker
THE HALT DURING THE CHASE, by Rosemary Tonks
From the first page of this clever, fishy little novel, our narrator, Sophie, is the kind of woman whose laughter is a weapon. She could scare off an assailant with one well-timed whack of her tongue. Originally published in 1972, “The Halt During the Chase” is the second Rosemary Tonks novel to be reissued by New Directions in as many years, bringing a new audience to her charming and imperfect heroines, who are all voice, half poetry and half snarl.
The Week In Art Podcast (October 20, 2023): This week: it’s the second year of Paris +, the event that has taken over from Fiac as the leading French art fair. How is Art Basel’s French flagship faring amid geopolitical turmoil and economic uncertainty, and is Paris still on the rise as a cultural hub?
We speak to Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, and Kabir Jhala, our deputy art market editor, who are in Paris, to find out. The largest ever exhibition of the work of the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto opened last week at the Hayward Gallery in London, before travelling to Beijing and Sydney next year. We talk to its co-curator Thomas Sutton.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is La femme-cheval or the Horse-Woman, a painting made in 1918 by the French artist Marie Laurencin. She is the subject of a major survey, called Sapphic Paris, opening this week at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in the US. Cindy Kang, who co-curated the exhibition, tells us more about this landmark work in Laurencin’s life.
Paris +, 20-22 October.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, Hayward Gallery, London, until 7 January 2023; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 23 March-23 June 2024; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, 2 August-27 October 2024.
Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, US, 22 October-21 January.
A strong line-up of galleries from France was joined by exhibitors from across Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America, and the Middle East for a global showcase of the highest quality. Reaching beyond the Grand Palais Éphémère, the fair presented an active cultural program from morning to night, all week, and throughout the city, through a robust program of collaborations with Paris’s cultural institutions and its city-wide sector Sites.
October 13, 2023–January 21, 2024
Their daring, energetic experiments with color, form, structure, and perspective changed the course of French painting; it marked an introduction to early modernism and introduced Matisse’s first important body of work in his long career.
This exhibition, which is co-organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, emphasizes as never before the legacy of that summer and examines the paintings, drawings, and watercolors of Matisse and Derain through sixty-five works on loan from national and international museums, including Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou; National Galleries of Scotland; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; as well as private collections.
As he inks, hand wipes, and rolls his final print through the press, he reflects on his philosophy. “My goal is to leave no fingerprints,” he says. All you see is the artist’s work. I’m just another pencil. I’m just another brush. But I want the pencil to be sharpened really well. I want the brush to be sable. And to do that and be completely spontaneous, I trust the materials.”
Country Life Magazine – October18, 2023: The latest issue features Norfolks – Little pockets of fun; The real Macnab – great adventures in the field; Britain’s loneliest trees; Beethoven’s Austria and Amsterdam’s canal life, and more…
In memory of the Sycamore Gap tree, so callously cut down, we salute its fellow arboreal sentinels of Britain
The Editor and The Judge set off across the Tulchan estate in pursuit of a stag, a brace of grouse and a salmon, in the spirit of John Buchan’s hero
The author picks a scene full of the thrill of the racecourse
The rural people of Scotland are reeling under a prejudiced new law on hunting. Jamie Blackett despairs for the fox
What makes a building English? Steven Brindle considers the answer, from soaring cathedral vaults to austere Palladian villas and rambling country piles
Kate Green luxuriates in the luscious locks of the Leicestershire Longwool
Few creatures face as difficult a journey as the salmon does to and from its spawning grounds. Simon Lester follows in its wake
A dramatic kitchen and why it’s time to cuddle up in British wool
Charles Quest-Ritson takes the well-worn path to the famed nursery of Larch Cottage in Cumbria
Behind hounds or on the marsh, casting for a salmon or stalking a stag, nothing stirs Adrian Dangar’s heart as fieldsports do
Melanie Johnson finds the perfect pairing for hazelnuts
Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.
Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us can’t help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood, it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who “would fit into such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, “American Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most famous art work ever produced in the United States.
In many states, lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.
Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.
It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask.By Nathan Heller
Offsetting has been hailed as a fix for runaway emissions and climate change—but the market’s largest firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that weren’t real.
Boomers Daily 