@nplusonemag (April 23, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Passage’ – Fast fashion nation. Six months of genocide in Gaza. Human_Fallback_2: 2 Human 2 Fallback. Martin Amis, re-reassessed. Border stories by Nicholas Hamburger and Paul Soto.
Who Sees Gaza?
A genocide in images
OCTOBER 7 MARKED the beginning of a new economy of war imagery. At first there was a video of a bulldozer plowing through the border fence between Israel and Gaza—an astonishing image, captured in a familiar way. Then things turned horribly surreal. The events of that day were beamed to the world in real time via body-cam, dashcam, cell phone, drone. A Hamas fighter wearing a GoPro stalked the highway with his automatic rifle jutting up from the bottom of the frame, first-person-shooter style. A dashboard camera showed a car zooming forward as a bullet pierced its windshield and the car began to drift, veering left, until it crashed into the rear end of a parked Toyota; you knew exactly when the person behind the wheel could no longer drive, was probably dead.
Times Literary Supplement (April 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘A Heavy Reckoning’ – Shakespeare and War’; Judgment at Tokyo; Iranian women in revolt; Memoirs of a sociopath and A Chilean masterpiece…
The New Yorker (April 15, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresAna Juan’s “Clickbait” – The artist captures the mesmerizing—and distracting—glow of modern entertainment.
Can the World Be Simulated?
Video-game engines were designed to closely mimic the mechanics of the real world. They’re now used for movies, TV shows, architecture, military trainings, virtual reality, and the metaverse.
Times Literary Supplement (April 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Man Into Marble’ – Corin Throsby and Kathryn Sutherland on the real Byron; Anthony Burgess on music; Left in charge at the palazzo; Revolutionary Russia; A shorter Long Day’s Journey and What is lyric verse?…
This week’s @TheTLS marks the bicentenary of Byron’s death, including two newly published letters. Also: Stephen Lovell on revolutionary Russia; me on Long Day’s Journey into Night; @Tiny_Camels on Jennifer Croft; @akennedysmith on 1950s Venice; @rinireg on eclipses – and more pic.twitter.com/nx02ouQKFO
Times Literary Supplement (April 3, 2024): The ‘The Art Issue’ features ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ – Tom Seymour Evans: Carson McCullers’s unruly life; Violence and Climate Change; Posing for John Singer Sargent and Huckleberry Jim – Mark Twain’s escaped slave wrests control of his story…
The New Yorker (April 1, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Pascal Campion’s “Into the Light” – The artist depicts stepping out of the subway into the overwhelming glow of the city.
When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”
It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.
Black holes are, of course, awesome. But, for scientists, they are more awesome. If a rainbow is marvellous, then understanding how all the colors of the rainbow are present, unified, in ordinary white light—that’s more marvellous. (Though, famously, in his poem “Lamia,” John Keats disagreed, blaming “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow.) In recent years, the amount of data that scientists have discovered about black holes has grown exponentially. In January, astronomers announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had observed the oldest black hole yet—one present when the universe was a mere four hundred million years old. (It’s estimated that it’s now 13.8 billion years old.) Recently, two supermassive black holes, with a combined mass of twenty-eight billion suns, were measured and shown to have been rotating tightly around each other, but not colliding, for the past three billion years. And those are just the examples that are easiest for the public to make some sense of. To me, a supermassive black hole sounds sublime; to a scientist, it can also be a test of wild hypotheses. “Astrophysics is an exercise in incredible experiments not runnable on Earth,” Avery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and at the Perimeter Institute, told me. “And black holes are an ideal laboratory.”
London Review of Books (LRB) – March 27, 2024: The latest issue features Brandon Taylor – Two Years With Zola,,,
Mary Wellesley – Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words by Jenni Nuttall
Moshé Machover, James McAuley, Avital Balwit, Brian Vickers, Pat Butcher, Joe Oldaker, Arthur M. Shapiro, Penny Collier, John Potts
Mike Jay – Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep by Kenneth Miller
T.J. Clark – Poem: ‘Clapham in March’
Michael Ledger-Lomas: Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect by John SloanTroubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum by Owen Davies
Michael Hofmann – The Islander: A Biography of Halldór Laxness by Halldór Guðmundsson, translated by Philip Roughton
Times Literary Supplement (March 27, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Illustrating Ray Bradbury’ – Michael Caines on a writer who transcended genre; Fifteen French Kings; Spy stories; Neel Mukherjee’s art and artifice; Space colonization and Andrew O’Hagan on the Cally Road….
The New Yorker (March 25, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresMark Ulriksen’s “Standing Guard” – The artist depicts the tail-wagging occasion of the first signs of spring.
“The Caring Hand,” by Eva Oertli and Beat Huber, is one of more than fifty sculptures at the new Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.Photographs by Kris Graves for The New Yorker
The civil-rights attorney has created a museum, a memorial, and, now, a sculpture park, indicting the city of Montgomery—a former capital of the domestic slave trade and the cradle of the Confederacy.
The National Monument to Freedom, in Montgomery, Alabama, is a giant book, standing forty-three feet high and a hundred and fifty feet wide. The book is propped wide open, and engraved on its surface are the names of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Black people, documented in the 1870 census, who were emancipated after the Civil War. On the spine of the book is a credo written for the dead:
Your children love you. The country you built must honor you. We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement. We commit to advancing freedom in your name.
What if building on the water could be safer and sturdier than building on flood-prone land?
In a corner of the Rijksmuseum hangs a seventeenth-century cityscape by the Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Berckheyde, “View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht,” which depicts the construction of Baroque mansions along one of Amsterdam’s main canals. Handsome double-wide brick buildings line the Herengracht’s banks, their corniced façades reflected on the water’s surface. Interspersed among the new homes are spaces, like gaps in a young child’s smile, where vacant lots have yet to be developed.
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