The New Criterion – February 2024 Preview
Tag Archives: Book Reviews
The New York Review Of Books – February 8, 2024
Ethical Espionage
What moral principles should guide our intelligence-gathering agencies?
Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West by Calder Walton
Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence by Cécile Fabre
On October 7, as Hamas fighters roared into southern Israel from Gaza, bringing terror and death to anyone they encountered—Israeli soldiers, Bedouins, young people dancing and getting high together, kibbutzniks scooping up small children into desperate arms—I was sleeping in a comfortable hotel room in Georgia. All around me in the sultry darkness of a beautiful resort, many of the US intelligence community’s finest minds were also slumbering. We awoke with the expectation that we would be addressed by CIA director William Burns at the opening of the Cipher Brief’s annual Threat Conference, a yearly gathering of national security professionals from the private and public sectors, plus a few academics and journalists.
London Review Of Books – January 25, 2024 Preview
Hooted from the Stage
Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
by Lucasta Miller.
Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse
by Anahid Nersessian.
Looking back to September 1820, when things had gone badly wrong but not yet so grotesquely as to be visibly beyond repair, we can see how few and how poor Keats’s options were. Surely it was better that (in the absence of other volunteers) the young artist Joseph Severn agreed to travel with the dying poet to Rome that autumn than that he had refused.
Bertie Wooster in Murmansk
A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution
by Anna Reid.
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Jan 19, 2024
Times Literary Supplement (January 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Power Failure’ – The retreat from net zero; Canon wars; The end of literary criticism; Empires imprint on the Middle East; Harvard and plagarism….
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Jan 12, 2024
Times Literary Supplement (January 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Have a good trip’ – On the uses of psychedelic drugs; Hisham Matar’s novel of London exile; A West Bank tragedy; Puzzled by crosswords; French Band Aid, and more…
Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Winter 2024
Lowest of the Low on a High Red Hill
By Carrie Cogan
I rode west with a childhood friend who was driving to a job in California. We passed through Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and still there was no sign of the Commander. My friend placed a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans on the console between us, jumble of rich dark gems, glittering like they were wet. I crunched them in my teeth without thinking. Sometimes I drove and let her sleep. When clouds clotted the sun her hair still glowed, some mix of orange and yellow and pink. Toast, or the honey for it, or the cinnamon.
After we spent a day and a night in a certain desert town, I told my friend to go on without me. I’d stay. The town was bordered by empty hills and endless sky: room to disappear. I found an unopened pack of Juicy Fruit gum on the sidewalk, which I took for a sign.
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Jan 5, 2024
Times Literary Supplement (January 3, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Lady Vanishes’ – Muireann Maguire on a revival of classic crime fiction; What next for Julian Assange; David Hockney’s drawings; Dreaming up 007; The science of belonging and more…
The New York Review Of Books – January 18, 2024
The Fate of Free Will
By James Gleick
In Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell makes a scientific case for the existence of human agency.
Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell
Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control over our actions, of continual decision-making—is part of the experience of being human, moment by moment and day by day. True, we sometimes just drift, like robots or zombies, but at other times we gird our loins and exert our will. David Hume defined will nearly three centuries ago as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” The feeling was universal then and it’s universal now.
Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic
Why have Americans not fought to sustain the unprecedented Covid-era expansion of aid to children, renters, and gig workers?
The Pandemic Paradox: How the Covid Crisis Made Americans More Financially Secure by Scott Fulford
The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher
Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from Covid-19 by Zachary Parolin
Arts/Culture: Humanities Magazine – Winter 2024
Humanities Magazine – Winter 2024 Issue:
Royalty Reconsidered: The King’s Beer and the Commoner’s Shirt
A new exhibition looks at Europe’s earliest societies
As visitors exit “First Kings of Europe,” the gift shop offers a kind of test. Two craft beers were created for the exhibition, a collaboration between the museum and Off Color Brewing: Beer for Kings, made from top-quality rich and ancient grains, and Beer for Commoners, made from the more modest ingredients of the poor. Beneath the racks of beer hang T-shirts with the art for each. Which identity does the visitor want to take home: commoner or king? The answer for most exhibitions celebrating the awe-inspiring treasures of royalty would be easy, but “First Kings of Europe” is a different kind of show, with an ambitious new approach to how we display and envision power, kingship, and history.
Nazi Spies in America!
During World War II, Axis espionage inspired a media panic, but amateurish German agents turned out to be “underwhelming”
London Review Of Books – January 4, 2024 Preview
Boomers Daily 