THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 18, 2025): The The 1.19.25 Issue features Jennifer Kahn on chronic pain; Moises Velasquez-Manoff on raw milk; Alia Malek on Syrians in Turkey; and more.
After developing chronic pain, I started looking into what scientists do — and still don’t — understand about the disease. Here is what I learned.By Jennifer Kahn
Despite the serious risks of drinking it, a growing movement — including the potential health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — claims it has benefits. Should we take them more seriously?By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (January 15, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Bloomsbury treasures’ – Newly discovered poems and photographs…
This week’s @TheTLS featuring Jonathan Rée on a new translation of Kapital; @knott_sarah on motherhood; @sophieolive on two newly discovered Woolf poems; Estelle Shirbon on Baalu Girma; Emma Greensmith on hybrid creatures; @bjkingape on cats – and more pic.twitter.com/4EfVcWxJQR
To understand the body, “we might picture the heart as a pump, the brain as a kind of computer, the lungs as bellows, the kidney as filters”. But what about the immune system — asks immunologist John Trowsdale in his engaging analysis. It has no straightforward analogy, operating simultaneously as an antiviral software, a surveillance camera, a weapons system and a way to share resources. The system is “unobtrusive yet extensive, nowhere and everywhere, redundant yet essential, powerful yet remote”.
Wild Chocolate
Rowan Jacobsen Bloomsbury (2024)
When residue inside decorative pots from ancient Mexico was analysed, it yielded traces of cacao — early evidence of cocoa consumption. The Spanish word chocolate might have been influenced by the Nahuatl (Aztec) cacahuatl, or cacao water. Journalist Rowan Jacobsen’s appealing book explores wild chocolate’s history as he travels through Central and South America, meeting chocolate makers, activists and Indigenous leaders who revive the bean’s variety in taste and prestige, lost during its modern industrial manufacture.
Talking Images
Eds Silvia Ferrara et al. Routledge (2024)
The logo of the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games was a figure with a red dot ‘head’, blue ‘body’ and single, straight green ‘leg’ — adapted from the Chinese character zhi, meaning ‘birth, life’, ‘arrival’ and ‘achievement’. It is one of a huge variety of “talking images” in a collection edited by three scholars interested in writing. Images range from Palaeolithic symbols and ancient Mesopotamian pictograms to modern Chinese calligraphy and Indian comics. The book traces links between images, marks, language and writing.
Do Plants Know Math?
Stéphane Douady et al. Princeton Univ. Press (2024)
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 12, 2025): The latest issue features ‘A Deal With The Devil’ – A.N. Wilson’s new biography of Goethe approaches its subject through his masterpiece and life’s work, the verse drama “Faust”.
Anticipation for the promise a new year brings is, in 2025, heavily tempered by trepidation about what Donald Trump’s second term will look like. For the big story of our first edition of the new year, diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour surveys how the world from Moscow to London, Tehran to Beijing and Brussels to Kyiv is gearing up for 20 January. Whether they be populists or hard-headed foreign-policy realists, it is clear that leaders are prepared to talk back to Trump in his language of power. Equally true is that despite the incoming White House administration’s preference to concentrate on America first domestic issues, the war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East and tensions with China force themselves to the forefront of Trump’s agenda and are unlikely to be solved in either his first day, week or month in office. As the year unfolds, Guardian Weekly will continue to help you make sense of Trump’s return and the biggest global issues of 2025.
1 Spotlight | Air disaster compounds South Korea’s troubles A major fatal air accident is a tragedy for any nation but as Justin McCurry and Raphael Rashid report, the Jeju Air crash has come against a continued background of political division and instability.
2 Science | Time’s paradox A timely exploration by Miriam Frankel of recent research has found out about the factors that make life drag or fly by. And, importantly, what you can do to help reset your inner clock to a more satisfactory tempo.
3 Features | The millennium bug that didn’t bite us A quarter of a century ago, doomsayers thought the world would end as we clicked over to a new century due to malfunctioning computer systems. But, Tom Faber reports, the much-feared bug was always going to be a damp squib.
4 Opinion | Uneasy parallels between the McCarthy era and Trump 2.0 Richard Sennett reflects on how postwar paranoia about the ‘enemy within’ changed his family and what it can teach Americans when a similarly anti-liberal administration is in power.
5 Culture | Another side of Bob Dylan Bob Dylan shuns discussion of his early years, so how did James Mangold, the director of a new biopic, and his creative team approach their script – and what happened when Dylan asked for a meeting? Alexis Petridis finds out.
Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States anoints him as “Disruptor in Chief”, a vital role with world-historical significance. Trump’s ascension to this position was presaged in Ayn Rand’s stupendous novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), whose central character, John Galt, confronts a similarly sclerotic America, which he sets out systematically to disrupt in a radical, transformative manner. This highly controversial novel is important in illuminating what is at stake at the cultural level in the struggle to come, and in emphasising the scale and direction of the challenges facing Trump, his administration and his supporters. Atlas Shrugged is also valuable because, together with Rand’s earlier novel The Fountainhead (1943), it offers in compelling fictional form a powerful, necessarily hyperbolic, statement of the philosophical values that must be reasserted to make America great again.
If Hillbilly Elegy was compulsory reading for observers of American politics wanting to understand Trump’s first presidency, Walter Isaacson’s biographical portrait of Elon Musk is mandatory holiday reading for those wanting to understand how Donald J. Trump turned so many critics into passionate supporters and won a resounding presidential vote in 2024, and to gauge how his nation-reshaping policies might play out over the next four years.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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