Tag Archives: Literary Magazines

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 16, 2023

Five people on a gondola drifting through New York's subway.

The New Yorker – October 16, 2023 issue: The new issues cover features Yonatan Popper’s “Service Changes” – the delightful and dreadful parts of riding the subway.

Jake Sullivan’s Trial by Combat

A photoillustration of Jake Sullivan with a map of Ukraine.

Inside the White House’s battle to keep Ukraine in the fight.

By Susan B. Glasser

On a Monday afternoon in August, when President Joe Biden was on vacation and the West Wing felt like a ghost town, his national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, sat down to discuss America’s involvement in the war in Ukraine. Sullivan had agreed to an interview “with trepidation,” as he had told me, but now, in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, steps from the Oval Office, he seemed surprisingly relaxed for a congenital worrier. (“It’s my job to worry,” he once told an interviewer. “So I worry about literally everything.”)

The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

Video of a squid ship from above

China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost.

By Ian Urbina

In the past few decades, partly in an effort to project its influence abroad, China has dramatically expanded its distant-water fishing fleet. Chinese firms now own or operate terminals in ninety-five foreign ports. China estimates that it has twenty-seven hundred distant-water fishing ships, though this figure does not include vessels in contested waters; public records and satellite imaging suggest that the fleet may be closer to sixty-five hundred ships.

Books: Literary Review Magazine – October 2023

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Literary Review – October 2023: The new issue features How Bond Was Born; Impressions of Monet; Inequality through the Ages; Adam Smith the Socialist, and more…

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man eBook : Shakespeare, Nicholas: Kindle Store -  Amazon.com

Becoming James Bond By Nicholas Shakespeare

Anthony Powell, two and a half years older than Ian Fleming, remembered him as ‘one of the few persons I have met to announce that he was going to make a lot of money out of writing novels, and actually contrive to do so’. 

The Road to Giverny

Monet The Restless Vision /anglais: WULLSCHLAGER JACKIE: 9780241188309:  Amazon.com: Books

Monet: The Restless Vision By Jackie Wullschläger

You long for sublime artists to be sublime people. Or, if they’re bad, to be magnificently so. Possessing ‘a vanity born of supreme egoism’, Claude Monet ‘believed his art conferred a right to good living’ and that ‘his welfare must be … the immediate concern of others’, writes Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times. With great honesty, Wullschläger records her subject’s wearisome scrounging letters and his propensity for petty and often pointless mendacity. 

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Oct 6, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (October 6, 2023): The new issue features War Stories – A review of the Iliad; Frances Sputford’s ‘Other America’; In Chaucer’s Shadow; The devil and ChatGPTand Martin Buber’s ‘I and Thou’…

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – October 9, 2023

A woman sits on a subway car as it passes the Williamsburg Bridge.

The New Yorker – October 9, 2023 issue: The new issue features David Kirkpatrick on the right’s legal juggernaut, Gideon Lewis-Kraus on a behavioral-economics scandal, Hannah Goldfield on Kwame Onwuachi, and more.

Kwame Onwuachi’s Cuisine of the Self

Kwame Onwuachi reviews an order with another man in the kitchen at Tatiana.

How the chef at Tatiana brought Afro-Caribbean cooking—and his life story—to the center of New York City’s fine-dining scene.

By Hannah Goldfield

Among the Cabin Fanatics of Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty

A crowd of people sit in a stadium.

For more than a hundred years, the Neshoba County Fair has drawn revellers from all over the country. Why do they keep coming back?

By Paige Williams

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 29, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (September 29, 2023): The new issue features The First Folio at 400; how disease shaped global history; novels of queer experience; what Britain laughs at; literary thefts and coincidences – and much more…

Germ of an idea

How disease has shaped global history

By Adam Rutherford

Scientists often make poor historians. Their shortcomings in describing and analysing the past include a failure to shed the whiggish stories that academic history moved away from decades ago. Straight lines are still drawn between Great Men and the impact of their brilliant insights on our view of reality. They also sometimes fail to treat the material of history with the seriousness they bring to their own discipline. Simple questions that are drummed into schoolchildren are frequently ignored in analysing documentary evidence: who wrote this, why, and for whom? The result is context-lite narrative that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Our Shakespeare, rise

A copy of the First Folio at Christie's, London, 2016

Works to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the First Folio

Next year, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will reopen after a three-year closure for a large-scale renovation of its building, which dates from 1932. The centrepiece of the new Shakespeare Exhibition Hall, will be, as the press release puts it, something “that only the Folger could produce: all 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare that were collected by Henry and Emily Folger”. The Folger holds slightly more than a third of all extant copies of the book and now eighty of them will be on permanent show in a “20-foot long visible vault”, while two more will be open in cases as part of an “interactive” visitor experience. Peering into the vault says much about the Folgers’ appetite for cornering the market in Folios but, since nearly all copies differ in some respects, it did make some kind of sense to buy many of them.

The New York Review Of Books – October 19, 2023

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The New York Review of Books (October19, 2023) – The latest issue features with Gary Younge on the Black soldiers who fought for freedom at home and abroad, David Shulman on the road to a second Nakba, Jenny Uglow on the exuberant Gwen John, Suzy Hansen on America’s endless and remote wars, Kim Phillips-Fein on plundering private equity, Natalie Angier on milk, Megan O’Grady on Lucy Lippard, Adam Kirsch on the prophetic Kieślowski, Philip Clark on the lines Chuck Berry crossed, Susan Neiman on Germany’s historical memory, poems by Arthur Sze, Jessica Laser, and Jules Laforgue, and much more.

‘We Return Fighting’

By Gary Younge

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont

The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the United States during World War II was matched only by the ambivalence the United States demonstrated toward the principles on which the war was fought.

The Voyage Out

Cathleen Schine

Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel After Sappho is populated by the notable lesbians who helped modernism blossom.

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

One of my favorite novels is by Compton Mackenzie, a Scottish writer known today, if he is known at all, for his whimsically comic Whisky Galore (1947) and his ambitious early novel Sinister Street (1913). The one I love, however, is Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations (1928), a satirical roman à clef about the sapphic adventures of the unorthodox and eccentric inhabitants of an island modeled after Capri during World War I. After Sappho, a novel by Selby Wynn Schwartz that was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, is many things, none of them satirical, but I kept thinking of the title of Mackenzie’s book as I read it.

Los Angeles Review Of Books – Autumn 2023

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LA Review of Books (Autumn 2023) – The latest issue features The Funny Thing About Misogyny; The New Scarcity Studies: On Two New Socioeconomic Histories and Endgame Emotions: The Melting of Time, the Mourning of the World…

The Funny Thing About Misogyny

By Katie Kadue

THE FUNNY THING about misogyny is it’s structured like a joke. Not a very good joke—a groaner, a dad joke. Why are they called “women”? Because they’re a woe to men. Get it? Woman is a container for man; language engenders gender subordination. As Mike Myers recites on stage in his role as a moody slam poet in the thrillingly zany 1993 Hitchcockian send-up So I Married an Axe Murderer, “Woman! Whoa, man. Whoaaaaaa. Man!”

The New Scarcity Studies: On Two New Socioeconomic Histories

By Scott R. MacKenzie

Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis by CARL WENNERLIND

WATER FALLS FROM the sky, literally. It is the most abundant chemical compound on Earth, and yet many people buy it in plastic bottles. Nestlé and other corporations source water cheaply and add labels that depict something other than heavy-industry and fossil-fuel derivatives, as though you’re drinking straight from a pristine spring. By bottling this natural resource and selling it as a commodity, Nestlé creates a form of scarcity. 

Preview: London Review Of Books – October 5, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – October 5, 2023: The new issue features Animal Ethics; Orca Life – We may understand less about orcas than they do about us, and Why Weber? – Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science. 

Let them eat oysters

By Lorna Finlayson

We may be tempted to throw up our hands and say: fuck it, I’m having a burger. Peter Singer would think this illogical: we should endeavour to do the least harm we can. But we might wonder whether something is wrong with the ethical approach that has led us to this point.

Animal Liberation Now 
by Peter Singer.

Justice for Animals 
by Martha Nussbaum.

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – October 2, 2023

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The New Yorker – October 2, 2023 issue: The new issue features Barry Blitt’s “The Race for Office”.

Is an All-Meat Diet What Nature Intended?

The hyper-carnivory movement conjures a time when men hunted and lunch was literally on the hoof. What does the research say?

The Emotionally Haunted Electronic Music of Oneohtrix Point Never

Daniel Lopatin talks with Amanda Petrusich about his collaborations with the Weeknd and the Safdie brothers.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 22, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (September 22, 2023): The new issue features Playing with Fire – The limitless ambition of Elon Musk; Peter Brown in an antique land; The new New Journalism; A literary critic and murderer; John Gray’s Hobbes for liberals, and more…

The X files

Elon Musk, 2020

ELON MUSK by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson’s intimate account of a tech titan

When Elon Musk was a child, his parents warned him against playing with fire. His response was to take a box of matches behind a tree and start lighting them. Scenes like this are frequent in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk, who has become the world’s richest person thanks to his disdain for authority, instinct for the dramatic and “reality-bending wilfulness” (and because he has applied these traits to good ideas). Isaacson reports that the family’s motto is “Live dangerously – carefully”, but a more apt one might be the maxim quoted by Musk’s cousin Peter: “Risk is a type of fuel”.

Travels with his aunts

Peter Brown

The intellectual life of a pioneering historian of Late Antiquity

By Mary Beard

JOURNEYS OF THE MIND – A Life in History by Peter Brown

In the late 1970s, the historian Peter Brown dumped his old dinner jacket on a park bench in Berkeley, California. It was not just a minor act of charity to the local homeless, who may or may not have welcomed a cast-off “tuxedo”. Brown had recently moved from an academic career in Oxford and London to a post in the United States, and he was signalling to himself a new start in what seemed to be a more democratic, less hidebound educational system: more jeans and trainers than black tie. He has been based in America ever since.