ICELAND REVIEW MAGAZINE (OCT/NOV 2023): The latest issue features ‘Island In The Making’ – A Scientific Expedition of Surtsey Island; Mycological Magic – Foraging with Iceland’s Mushroom Queen, and more…
The hyper-carnivory movement conjures a time when men hunted and lunch was literally on the hoof. What does the research say?
Daniel Lopatin talks with Amanda Petrusich about his collaborations with the Weeknd and the Safdie brothers.
The Guardian Weekly (September 22, 2023) – The new issue features How disaster struck Libya. Plus: Populism in Europe, and the unifying power of cheese.
Two separate natural disasters in north Africa have dominated the news recently. But Moroccan emergency responses to an earthquake that killed about 3,000 people seemed rapid and efficient in contrast to the chaos at the deluged Libyan port of Derna, where many thousands more lost their lives after the town was deluged following a double dam burst caused by Storm Daniel.
While logistical and administrative challenges have made access to Derna incredibly difficult, Observer reporter Kaamil Ahmed has gathered the testimonies of several local Libyan journalists who witnessed scenes they are still struggling to process. Diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour explains why the disaster can be seen as a culmination of the climate crisis descending upon a failed state, while Rupert Neate and Peter Beaumont discuss the differing responses to the two situations.
From Europe, Jon Henley previews three upcoming elections that could have profound consequences for the region’s political future. Indeed, as the Guardian launches a new Europe-focused digital edition, editor-in-chief Katharine Viner outlines why now is the right time for us to expand our reporting across the continent.
The bohemian English circle that included Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell revolted against Victorian formality—and their casually ornamental style is inspiring designers today.
By Rebecca Mead
In July, 1918, Virginia Woolf spent a weekend at Garsington—a country home, outside Oxford, owned by Lady Ottoline Morrell, a celebrated hostess of the era, and her husband, Philip Morrell, a Member of Parliament. The house, a ramshackle Jacobean mansion that the Morrells had acquired five years earlier, had been vividly redecorated by Ottoline into what one guest called a “fluttering parrot-house of greens, reds and yellows.” One sitting room was painted with a translucent seafoam wash; another was covered in deep Venetian red, and early visitors were invited to apply thin lines of gold paint to the edges of wooden panels. The entrance hall was laid with Persian carpets and, as Morrell’s biographer Miranda Seymour has written, the pearly gray paint on the walls was streaked with pink, “to create the effect of a winter sunset.” Woolf, in her diary, noted that the Italianate garden fashioned by Morrell—with paved terraces, brilliantly colored flower beds, and a pond surrounded by yew-tree hedges clipped with niches for statuary—was “almost melodramatically perfect.”
Pavels Hedström believes that most architecture separates us from nature. He wants to make nonhuman life inescapable.
By Sam Knight
At the end of his first year at the architecture school of the Royal Danish Academy, Pavels Hedström went on a class trip to Japan. Hedström, a twenty-five-year-old undergraduate, revered Japanese culture and aesthetics, even though he had never visited the country. As a teen-ager growing up in rural Sweden, Hedström had been introduced to Zen meditation by his mother, Daina, and devoured manga and anime. In architecture school, Hedström was drawn to Japanese principles of design and how they applied to a world—and a profession—increasingly troubled by the climate crisis. Hedström was particularly influenced by Metabolism, a postwar Japanese architectural movement that imagined cities of the future as natural organisms: ephemeral, self-regulating, and subject to biological rhythms of growth, death, and decay. In 1977, Kisho Kurokawa, one of Metabolism’s founders, wrote, “Human society must be regarded as one part of a continuous natural entity that includes all animals and plants.”
The Good Life France Magazine – Autumn 2023: The latest issue features A real-life sleeping beauty castle at Chateau de Gudanes, the historic city of Rouen, and highlights of Saint Malo, Brittany, Breton and Provence…
They live on these plains in semi-freedom and are reared by enthusiasts: the manadiers. These bulls are reared for one purpose: to become champions of the bullring in the Courses camarguaises. But the animals aren’t put to death and suffer no injuries. The raseteurs, wearing white, must collect the rosettes tied to the bull’s horns. We take a closer look.
Read more about this story in our article: https://f24.my/9mds.y
The Guardian Weekly (September15, 2023) – The issue features Amy Hawkins looking under the lid of China’s economy and asks if it has peaked?
Desperate searches for survivors continued in Morocco’s Atlas mountains after last Friday’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake, which killed thousands of people. Peter Beaumont reports from remote villages devastated by the country’s deadliest quake in six decades.
A worse disaster still appeared to be unfolding further along the north African coast in Libya, where up to 10,000 people were feared missing after flooding caused by the collapse of two dams. Details were only just emerging at the time of the Weekly going to press on Tuesday, but you can find the latest updates here.
First there were the bewildering DNA test results, then the long-forgotten fertility blog. Jenny Kleeman tells the remarkable tale of a discovery that would change the lives of two American families for ever.
Also in Features is American author Elif Batuman’s entertaining account of what happened when she asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT for assistance with a quote from Proust, leading her down a digital rabbit hole she never could have foreseen.
At a time of distrust and polarization, the conservative Times columnist seeks to bridge the worlds of the Christian right and the secular left.
This summer, Ross Douthat, liberal America’s favorite conservative commentator, wrote a piece about liberal America’s least favorite Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Douthat argued in his New York Times column that an unwillingness to debate Kennedy—who has claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, that 5G networks are part of a mass-surveillance system, and that covid was designed to spare Jewish and Chinese people—was an insufficient response to voters who are increasingly distrustful of the establishment.
Her books for young readers have sold more than forty-four million copies. They are full of yearning, loneliness, ambivalence, and worry.
By Casey Cep
Three winters in a row, Kate DiCamillo went into the hospital, never sure if she would come home and always a little scared to do so. One of those winters, when she was four years old and the air outside was even colder than the metal frames of the oxygen tents she’d grown accustomed to having above her bed, her father came to see her. He was wearing a long black overcoat, which made him look like a magician. “I brought you a gift,” he said, pulling something from his pocket as if from a top hat.
But its chief influences today come from South Korea and the West. Director Robert H. Lieberman and filmmaker Deborah C. Hoard introduce novelists, journalists, politicians, activists, poets, painters and a comedian, all of whom shed light on the young republic – and its young population. Historians, archaeologists and local residents tell the story of the vast empire.
The eastern European and Asian territory captured by a fighting force of united Mongol tribes was the largest contiguous land empire in the history of the world. The film looks the beyond the figure of Genghis Khan, the notorious founder of the Mongol empire, and explores the multi-faceted legacy of the realm. It’s a legacy that still makes itself felt in the present day.
The story of the “Atlantis of the North Sea” is one about our impermanence and ultimate futility against the elements. But within it also lies a warning of our potential future in an age of climate change.
Fungi can take on the mess and the junk, the waste and the abandoned, break it all down and transform toxin into life.
Taehyoung Jeon
Jesse Stone for Noema Magazine
Boomers Daily 