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.
Aesthetica Magazine (February 2, 2024) – The February/March 2024 issue features ‘Perception is Everything’. This issue recognises agents of change. Throughout history, art has influenced societies, challenged norms, questioned the status quo, raised awareness and prompted new perspectives.
The artists in this issue embody this notion. We speak with Tania Franco Klein about her distinct style, which is realised through cinematic photographs. She surveys present-day anxieties and effects of media overstimulation. Meanwhile, Cristóbal Ascencio’s work and research focuses on the relationship between images and memory. He looks at how experience can be appropriated between generations. Kaya & Blank is a photographic duo that explores the way that humans inhabit the world, pushing the boundaries of how reality is presented. Tara Donovan, featured in When Forms Come Alive, opening at the Hayward Gallery, London, this winter, is one of 21 artists in an exhibition that reclaims space in an increasingly digitised world. It spans 60 years of contemporary sculpture and shows works that trigger a physical response.
In photography we traverse continents with an extraordinary range of practitioners, including Derrick O. Boateng, Ibai Acevedo, Jonathan Knowles, Tom Hegen and Neil Burnell. Our cover duo, Tropico Photo, offers pop colours and urban cool. Finally, the Last Words go to Yannis Davy Guibinga.
The Guardian Weekly (February 1, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Party Crasher’ – Is Trump more vulnerable than he seems?; Israel, the ICJ ruling and The West; Europe’s Big Bad Wolves and more….
It had all seemed like business as usual for Donald Trump in the aftermath of last week’s New Hampshire Republican primaries, where he scored a comfortable victory over his only remaining challenger, Nikki Haley. And yet … was there something in his subsequent outburst towards Haley that suggested all was not well in Trumpworld?
Barring the mother of all reversals, Trump will soon be confirmed as the Republican presidential nominee. But, as David Smith and Jonathan Freedland outline in this week’s big story, Trump remains a deeply polarising figure in American politics, not least within his own party.
And his petulant irritation at Haley over her refusal to concede the race was a visible reminder to American floating voters of the unhinged personality that lurks beneath the orange veneer, something his campaign team will be desperate to avoid more of.
“The shadow of Trump is long, and his return seems closer than ever,” explains illustrator Alberto Miranda on his cover art for this week’s Guardian Weekly. “He is a controversial figure with a dangerous side and, at the same time, has an utterly comical aspect. That’s why we wanted to portray his influence in the Republican party in an almost grotesque manner.”
The New Yorker (January 29, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresSarula Bao’s “Lunar New Year” – The artist depicts the joys of gathering with loved ones, around a table of good food
As the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, Bill Stenger rose most days around 6 a.m. and arrived at the slopes before seven. He’d check in with his head snowmaker and the ski-patrol staff, visit the two hotels on the property, and chat with the maintenance workers, the lift operators, the food-and-beverage manager, and the ski-school instructors—a kind of management through constant motion. Stenger is seventy-five, with white hair, wire-rimmed reading glasses, and a sturdy physique that makes him look built for fuzzy sweaters.
The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires
We thought we could master nature, but we were playing with fire.
With elections postponed and no end to the war with Russia in sight, Volodymyr Zelensky and his political allies are becoming like the officials they once promised to root out: entrenched.
The Guardian Weekly (January 25, 2024) – The new issue features ‘True Colours’ – What the AFD really wants for Germany; The fading hopes for Middle East Peace; Trump’s victory and DeSantis’s doomed campaign…
Events in the Middle East continue to unfold at a bewildering pace, with pockets of conflict opening up across the region. Diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour rounds up a week of flashpoints and assesses increasingly slim hopes for controlling the situation. And Oliver Holmes provides a revealing profile of Yemen, one of the most unchanging and least visited countries in the Middle East.
The Weekly went to press before news of Donald Trump’s victory in the New Hampshire Republican primary on Tuesday night, but you can catch up with all the latest Guardian coverage and reaction here. In the magazine, David Smith delivers a postmortem on Ron DeSantis’s doomed campaign, while Jonathan Freedland argues that Trump’s march to the White House can still be stopped.
Our long-read features take somewhat divergent paths this week. First, Charlotte Edwardes meets Gary Lineker, the former England footballer turned TV presenter whose penchant for regularly airing his liberal worldviews has made him public enemy No 1 for Britain’s anti-woke brigade.
Then, Chananya Groner unearths a remarkable story of factionalism and messianic fervour within New York’s Hasidic Jewish community, stretching back 30 years, which led to secret tunnels recently being discovered beneath a Brooklyn synagogue.
And in Culture, Charlotte Higgins meets the classical musicians Dalia Stasevska and Joshua Bell, who are resurrecting a long-forgotten Ukrainian concerto as a gesture of defiance to Russia.
Finally, we’re on the lookout for your best photographs of the world around us. For a chance for your picture to feature in the magazine, send us your best shot, telling us where you were in the world when you took it and why the scene resonated with you at that particular time.
The New Yorker (January 22, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresRoz Chast’s “Bird Bath” – The artist depicts her favorite antidote for dreary winter weather: a nice, hot bath.
As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”
There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.
The Guardian Weekly (January 18, 2024) – The new issue features ‘State Of Emergency’ – How drug cartels upended Ecuador; Why Houthi anger could spread war; Are aliens already among us?…
Not long ago, Ecuador was chiefly known for its volcanoes, wildlife and eco-tourism. It’s an image that may now need some rehabilitation after chaos and bloodshed sparked by the prison escape last week of Adolfo Macías, the country’s most notorious gang leader and drug lord.
With cartels from Peru and Colombia routinely funnelling narcotics through Ecuador’s ports en route to Europe, Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips reports on a rising problem that threatens to tear apart the once-peaceful Andean state.
In the Middle East, Yemen’s Houthi rebels could stymie the increasingly slim chances of preventing a regional war. With the US and UK bombing Houthi bases in response to attacks on commercial shipping, diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour recounts the Houthis’ rise and why military strikes against them may not lead to the desired outcome.
The New Yorker – January 22, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover featuresPascal Campion’s “Winter Sun” – The artist depicts the beams of sunlight that flicker during the coldest months of the year.
Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.
To be vigilant—to live without illusions about the ever-present threat of annihilation—was a primary value at No. 4 Haportzim Street, once the Jerusalem address of the Netanyahu family. This wariness had ancient roots. In the Passover Haggadah, the passage beginning “Vehi Sheamda” reminds everyone at the Seder table that in each generation an enemy “rises up to destroy” the Jewish people. “But the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands,” the Haggadah continues. Benzion Netanyahu, the family patriarch and a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, was a secular man. For deliverance, he looked not to faith but to the renunciation of naïveté and the strength of arms. This creed became his middle son’s inheritance, the core of his self-conception as the uniquely unillusioned defender of the State of Israel.
In the early months of the pandemic, joggers on the Bear Creek Greenway, in southern Oregon, began to notice tents cropping up by the path. The Greenway, which connects towns and parks along a tributary of the Rogue River, was beloved for its wetlands and for stands of oaks that attracted migrating birds. Now, as jobs disappeared and services for the poor shut down, it was increasingly a last-ditch place to live. Tents accumulated in messy clusters, where people sometimes smoked fentanyl, and “the Greenway” became a byword for homelessness and drug use. On a popular local Facebook page, one typical comment read, “Though I feel sorry for some of the people in that situation, most of them are just pigs.” In Medford, the largest city along the trail, police demolished encampments and ticketed people for sleeping rough.
The assassination of a Hamas chief in Lebanon. A terror attack on mourners of an Iranian former general. Commercial shipping in the Red Sea targeted by Yemeni rebels, and a US airstrike in Iraq.All were separate events in the Middle East last week but all were linked, in one way or another, to the presence of autonomous but Iranian-backed militia forces in the region.
When asked to visualise the threat of war engulfing the Middle East, for this week’s cover, illustrator Carl Godfrey took a literal approach. “I wanted to convey the tense and unpredictable situation,” says Carl, “and there’s nothing more tense than looking down the barrel of a gun. Especially when those barrels are pointing in all directions, and the risk of war is expanding in all directions.”
The New Yorker – January 15, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover featuresBarry Blitt’s “Back to the Future” – The artist depicts a goose-stepping Donald Trump, determined to march back into political relevance.
Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health, and elevated youth violence.
What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On
From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.
More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.
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