Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — June 2023
Tag Archives: Books
The New York Review Of Books — June 8, 2023
The Price of Crypto
Despite its boosters’ frequent references to democracy and freedom, cryptocurrency reflects a radical marketization of politics in which major players can rewrite the rules as needed.
The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin
Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains by Vitalik Buterin, edited by Nathan Schneider
None of this had to happen. In the fall of 2008, amid the great shipwreck of the international financial order, an anonymous person or group of persons writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a new electronic cash system called Bitcoin. In the “white paper” proposing the system, initially circulated to a cryptography mailing list, Nakamoto claimed that it would “allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
Ideal Detachments
Tracing the memories of an employee at Andy Warhol’s Factory, Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special dramatizes a young woman’s self-scrutiny in an era defined by male looking and listening.
Nothing Special by by Nicole Flattery
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 19, 2023
Times Literary Supplement (May 19, 2023) – Portrait of a Marriage: The Mandelas; The Return of Inflation; Doing Justice to John Rawls; The Greatest Italian Novel and Heaney’s translations.
Nature Reviews: Top New Science Books – May 2023
More Than a Glitch
Meredith Broussard – MIT Press (2023)
An artificial-intelligence (AI) ‘glitch’ is a problem neither expected nor consequential. Bias, by contrast, is baked in and disastrous, argues data scientist Meredith Broussard, one of very few Black women in this field, who focuses on AI and journalism. “Tech is racist and sexist and ableist because the world is so,” she says. Vivid examples in her disturbing book include that of a man arrested by US police using facial-recognition technology — purely because both he and the suspect in a blurry surveillance photo were Black.
Assyria
Eckart Frahm – Basic (2023)
The world’s first empire flourished in Assyria in the eighth and seventh centuries bc, and has long been seen as the epitome of barbarism. But, as Assyriologist Eckart Frahm reveals in his deeply informed, challenging history, Assyria produced many features of the modern world. Its innovations included long-distance trade, sophisticated communications networks, mass deportations and widespread political surveillance. Unlike most later empires, he writes, it was at least honest in its “open celebration of plunder, torture, and murder”.
Hands of Time
Rebecca Struthers – Hodder & Stoughton (2023)
‘Time’ is “the most commonly used noun” in English, according to Rebecca Struthers, the first professional watchmaker in the United Kingdom to earn a PhD in horology. Each chapter of her exquisitely crafted history explores a pivotal moment in watchmaking from the past 500 years. Mechanical timekeepers, she argues, have influenced human culture as much as the printing press. Imagine trying to catch a train by depending on the Sun’s position, or to perform an organ transplant without measuring the patient’s heart rate precisely.
The Deep Ocean
Michael Vecchione et al. Princeton Univ. Press (2023)
“For most people, the deep ocean is out of sight and out of mind,” write three zoologists and an oceanographer. The zone starts where penetration of sunlight can no longer support photosynthesis, about 200 metres down. This guidebook dissipates ignorance with superb colour photographs of astonishing organisms, accompanied by detailed captions and brief essays. For example, the vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) is neither vampire nor squid, but was so named because its black ‘cloak’ reminded scientists of Dracula.
Tenacious Beasts
Christopher J. Preston – MIT Press (2023)
Humans and domestic animals make up 96% of the mass of the world’s mammals. The outlook for wildlife “remains dire”, writes philosopher Christopher Preston. But he describes signs of hope in his well-travelled, thoughtful study of recoveries. Populations of humpback whales in the western Indian Ocean have surged since the mid-twentieth century; those of Californian black bears have quadrupled in a few decades. He visits farmland, prairie, river, forest and ocean, exploring why only certain species are recovering.
The New York Times Book Review-Sunday May 14, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – MAY 14, 2023
Abraham Verghese’s Sweeping New Fable of Family and Medicine
“The Covenant of Water” follows three generations of a close-knit and haunted family in southwestern India.
Pablo Picasso, the Pariah of Paris
As Annie Cohen-Solal shows in “Picasso the Foreigner,” the Spanish master was always under suspicion in France, simply for being not-French.
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 12, 2023
Times Literary Supplement (May 12, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS, features Peter Thonemann on The Triumph of the West; @joemoransblog on imagination; @michaelscaines on The Motive and the Cue; @DrAliceKelly on graphic novelizations of Gatsby; @helenlpgordon on stones; @rinireg on surveillance – and more.
Preview: London Review Of Books — May 18, 2023
Julian Bell at the Rijksmuseum
In London, I had taken A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal for a dependable rest point on strolls around the National Gallery. In Amsterdam, relocated to join 27 other Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum exhibition, its strangeness re-emerged. This canvas, executed towards the end of Vermeer’s relatively brief career (some four years, perhaps, before he died aged 43 in 1675), commits to a tactic he had earlier only toyed with: to set an internal picture as a wholly self-contained block within his own composition, uninterrupted by foreground forms.
The New York Times Book Review- Sunday May 7, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – MAY 7, 2023
Face to Face With Culture’s ‘Monsters’
Claire Dederer’s deft and searching book surfaces a “fan’s dilemma” over such figures as Vladimir Nabokov, Woody Allen, Willa Cather and Roman Polanski.
Expanding on a popular essay published in The Paris Review a month after the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation, “Monsters” sustains an essayistic, sometimes aphoristic tone throughout 250-odd pages.
Dark Shadows, Dark Times
Welcome to three novels set in locales where life is exceedingly difficult.
By Alida Becker
AT THE HOUR BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF by Tara Ison
The title comes from a French expression for twilight. Sure enough, her novel sends us to the dusk that borders the familiar and the wild, the known and the unknown. It’s where our beliefs and suspicions can cast dark shadows over our lives. And, of course, the lives of others.
One Man’s Foray Into the Heartland of the Far Right
Alarmed by the country’s political divisions, Jeff Sharlet embarked on an anguished quest to understand the rise of antidemocratic extremism. In “The Undertow,” he documents his findings.
By Joseph O’Neill
THE UNDERTOW: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, by Jeff Sharlet
The premise of “The Undertow,” Jeff Sharlet’s anguished new book of reportage, is that the United States is “coming apart.” The disintegration is political. It involves the rise of the autocratically inclined Donald Trump; the attempt by members of the Republican Party to overthrow the election of Joe Biden in January 2021; and, during the Biden presidency, the overturning by the Supreme Court of Roe v Wade.
The New York Review Of Books – May 25, 2023
Bewitched by Goethe
In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.
Conversations with Goethe: In the Last Years of His Life by Johann Peter Eckermann, translated from the German by Allan Blunden, with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson
A strange time to publish—strange time to publish anything—a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (or should that be Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann?), in six hundred static, major-key pages that can easily feel like twice as many. The big man, himself by now somewhat fallen on hard times, recorded by the little acolyte.
Saving Lives and Making a Killing
A new book reveals the split personality of the biotech industry: an altruistic enterprise that creates breakthrough treatments for patients in need, and a bare-knuckle business that seeks to generate astronomic profits and stop competitors from developing better treatments.
For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug by Nathan Vardi
A research scientist for Pharmacyclics, Sunnyvale, California, 2013. In For Blood and Money, Nathan Vardi writes that when Pharmacyclics—which developed ibrutinib, a treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia—was bought by the pharmaceutical giant AbbVie in 2015 for $21 billion, ‘the deal…set the new high-water mark for success in the biotechnology industry.’
Art History Book Profiles: ‘The Story of Art Without Men’ Author Katy Hessel
That resulted in her new book, “The Story of Art Without Men.” Jeffrey Brown discussed the book with Hessel for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Boomers Daily 