Times Literary Supplement (November 22, 2023): The new issue features Edward Thomas’s journey – The radical turn in English poetry; An AI emergency; Great American history; Magical thinking; Carry On Napoleon, and more…
Jacqueline Rose on violence and its origins
In response to the destruction of Gaza, it seems to be becoming almost impossible to lament more than one people at a time. When I signed Artists for Palestine’s statement last month, I looked for mention of the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli Jews on 7 October, and then decided to settle for the unambiguous condemnation of ‘every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law whoever perpetrates them’.
‘Little Boy’ exploded over Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, wiping most of the city off the face of the earth and killing eighty thousand people instantly. But the ‘shock’ to the leadership in Tokyo envisaged by the former US secretary of war Henry Stimson failed to materialise.
In more than a hundred works of fiction, Oates has investigated the question of personality—while doubting that she actually has one.
By Rachel Aviv
hen Joyce Carol Oates was thirty-four, she started a journal. “Query,” she wrote on the first page. “Does the individual exist?” She felt that she knew little about herself—for instance, whether she was honest or a hypocrite. “I don’t know the answer to the simplest of questions,” she wrote. “What is my personal nature?”
In “My Name Is Barbra,” the icon takes a maximalist approach to her own life, studying every trial, triumph, and snack food of a six-decade career.
By Rachel Syme
Seventy years ago, before she was galactically famous, before she dropped an “a” from her first name, before she was a Broadway ingénue, before her nose bump was aspirational, before she changed the way people hear the word “butter,” before she was a macher or a mogul or a decorated matron of the arts, Barbra Streisand was, by her own admission, “very annoying to be around.” She was born impatient and convinced of her potential—the basic ingredients of celebrity, and of an exquisitely obnoxious child. When Streisand was growing up in Brooklyn, in the nineteen-forties, she used to crawl onto the fire escape of her shabby apartment building and conduct philosophical debates with her best friend, Rosyln Arenstein, who was a staunch atheist.
Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow, a fictionalized account of the life of the actress Sun Weishi, depicts the hypocrisy of the Communist elites and the fate of those who embraced new ideals after the revolution.
The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty by Ha Jin
This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow of the Stanislavski acting method brought her to the pinnacle of China’s theatrical world during the Mao years. Her beauty and effervescent personality attracted powerful men—not only Zhou, who doted on her, but also Lin Biao, the Chinese Communist Party’s leading general, who divorced his wife in order to propose marriage to her (unsuccessfully), and Mao, who apparently raped her during a long rail trip. She had several other suitors and eventually married the film star Jin Shan.
Recent books about the importance of the microbiome have driven many patients to fixate on the idea of “gut health.” Are they right to do so?
Reviewed:
A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet, and Disease by Shilpa Ravella
Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure by Bryn Nelson
The Anti-Viral Gut: Tackling Pathogens from the Inside Out by Robynne Chutkan
Right before their colonoscopies, with the stress of a bowel prep still rumbling in their bellies and a mental image of the procedure beginning to sharpen, some patients will ask me why I chose a career in gastroenterology: “What made you interested in this?” The reason I usually give is that you could go all your life without a heart problem, or a lung problem, or a kidney problem, but not without a bit of nausea, constipation, or abdominal pain. The work of digestion is part of the rhythm of our daily lives, I tell them, which helps my work feel similarly immediate.
Times Literary Supplement (November 17, 2023): The new issue #TheTLS features Revenge of the grown-ups – The downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried; 2023 Books of the Year; the elusive Shakespeare; Simone Weil; Philosophers and public affairs – and more…
Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours.
In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade. This process goes on all the time—it’s happening now, as you read these words—and its scale is beyond imagining. You have some eighty billion neurons sharing a hundred trillion connections or more. Your skull contains a galaxy’s worth of constellations, always shifting.
Too often, a facial-recognition search represents virtually the entirety of a police investigation.
By Eyal Press
On March 26, 2022, at around 8:20 a.m., a man in light-blue Nike sweatpants boarded a bus near a shopping plaza in Timonium, outside Baltimore. After the bus driver ordered him to observe a rule requiring passengers to wear face masks, he approached the fare box and began arguing with her. “I hit bitches,” he said, leaning over a plastic shield that the driver was sitting behind. When she pulled out her iPhone to call the police, he reached around the shield, snatched the device, and raced off. The bus driver followed the man outside, where he punched her in the face repeatedly. He then stood by the curb, laughing, as his victim wiped blood from her nose.
Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.
By James Somers
‘In the UK between 1970 and 1991, about 1250 people with bleeding disorders were infected with HIV (and many of them with Hepatitis C, too); by the time the Infected Blood Inquiry began, about three-quarters had died, the majority of them from HIV-related causes.
By Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood
by Cara McGoogan.
Death in the Blood: The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal
by Caroline Wheeler.
‘Nearly eighty years after she first starred in a film, Taylor is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men.’
By Bee Wilson
Times Literary Supplement (November 10, 2023): The new issue features The day everything changed – The war in Israel and Gaza; Russia at war; Animal liberation revisited; Publisher to the world; Maison Gainsbourg in Paris; and more…
Does the director of “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” and “Gladiator” see himself in the hero of his epic new film?
On the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte was full of catastrophic confidence. His seventy-three thousand troops were camped on a ridge near a tavern called La Belle Alliance. His nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, occupied a slope across the fields, with a mere sixty-seven thousand troops. Over breakfast, Napoleon predicted, “If my orders are well executed, we will sleep in Brussels this evening.” When his chief of staff offered a word of caution, Napoleon snapped, “Wellington is a bad general and the English are bad troops. The whole affair will not be more serious than swallowing one’s breakfast.”
Some people think that we can’t be held responsible for what we do, given that our actions are the inevitable consequence of the laws of nature. They’re only half right.
The civil-rights mastermind was sidelined by his own movement. Now he’s back in the spotlight. What can we learn from his strategies of resistance?
By Adam Gopnik
Life on Our Planet,” a new Netflix nature documentary, renews our fascination with our most feared and loved precursors.
Israel’s current war seems to be as much a brutal insistence on the collective punishment of the Palestinian people as an offensive against Hamas.
The scenes of devastation in Israel’s south on October 7 were almost beyond description. Children killed in their beds, babies taken from their mothers’ arms, the elderly slaughtered in their kitchens. Kfar Aza, a kibbutz close to the separation barrier with Gaza, was burned nearly to the ground: a charnel house. Between a quarter and a third of nearby Kibbutz Nir Oz’s residents were killed or kidnapped. Roughly 10 percent of Kibbutz Be’eri’s population was murdered. At least a dozen of tiny Kibbutz Holit’s two hundred members are dead. The streets of the city of Sderot were littered with bodies. At an outdoor rave near Kibbutz Reim, more than 260 young men and women were gunned down as they tried to flee.
Most of Albert Camus’s evaluations from his promotional trips across the Atlantic are superficial or laughably snotty. What’s intriguing is how quickly he demands that things make sense.
Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World by Albert Camus, edited and with an introduction by Alice Kaplan, translated from the French by Ryan Bloom
Nothing in a professional writer’s life more resembles the life of a traveling salesman than the literary book tour. The superficial difference between writers on tour and salesmen on the road is that writers are encouraged to imagine themselves prized personae whose pitch is eagerly awaited by the anonymous crowd, whereas salesmen know themselves to be an intrusion, albeit one with an edge. While both are beggars at the gate, each one singing for a bit of supper, salesmen are independent entrepreneurs, pretty much calling their own shots; writers, on the other hand, are performers in someone else’s show—a talk at ten, a class at twelve, a panel at three, a reading at seven, and oh, did I forget the ten or twelve interviews tucked in at every break in the day?—all the while being dragged around by people otherwise known as “handlers” who every half-hour tell them how much they are loved, how much their work is prized, how many lives it has changed, and yes, they know how tired you must be by now, but would you mind giving just one more very small interview, this guy’s been waiting all day to talk to you.
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