London Review of Books (LRB) – September 21, 2023: The new issue features John Lanchester on statistics, William Davies on Weber, nihilism and universities @dlbirch1 on hate mail, Ferdinand Mount on Henry III Clair Wills on Shirley Hazzard and a cover by Alexander Gorlizki.
Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Histories of Economic Life, 10) by Arunabh Ghosh
At a dinner with the American ambassador in 2007, Li Keqiang, future premier of China, said that when he wanted to know what was happening to the country’s economy, he looked at the numbers for electricity use, rail cargo and bank lending. There was no point using the official GDP statistics, Li said, because they are ‘man-made’. That remark, which we know about thanks to WikiLeaks, is fascinating for two reasons. First, because it shows a sly, subtle, worldly humour – a rare glimpse of the sort of thing Chinese Communist Party leaders say in private. Second, because it’s true. A whole strand in contemporary thinking about the production of knowledge is summed up there: data and statistics, all of them, are man-made.
Guernica is a digital magazine with a global outlook, exploring connections between ideas, ideals, communities, and individual lives. It rejects binary thinking and conventional wisdom, investing instead in the power of counter-narratives, especially those driven by lived experience. Across fiction, poetry, essays, reportage, criticism, and art, Guernica is a home for established and emerging writers, in conversation with each other. Guernica is committed to global literature — highlighting work from independent presses across the Global South and translating work from every continent into English, and from English into global languages. Going into its twentieth year, Guernica remains a trusted home for incisive, urgent writing and singular perspectives on critical issues of the day.
Perennially curious, eager to reckon with the world head-on, Guernica draws readers into uncharted conversations and traces the complex ligaments connecting culture, politics, art, and ecology. Over twenty years, Guernica has built an impressive record as a place of first publication for important writers and thinkers. Guernica’s ability to deepen our sense of wonder, of responsibility, and of connection is rooted in a core conviction that we must hear from diverse voices and diverse places.
Los Angeles Review of Books
Drawing on literary tradition—and discarding it when necessary—Los Angeles Review of Books dwells in contradiction: the tension between depth and breadth, filth and glamor, destruction and creation, dream and nightmare, that L.A. lives and breathes. LARB launched in 2011 in part as a response to the disappearance of the newspaper book review supplement, and with it, the art of lively, intelligent, long-form writing on recent publications in every genre. LARB has since become a polyvocal cultural force reinventing book criticism for the internet age. It publishes new reviews, essays, and interviews online daily, as well as a print journal, LARB Quarterly, and offers events and programs that connect writers and artists to readers both in Los Angeles and across the globe.
A pillar of West Coast literary culture with national impact, Los Angeles Review of Books astounds with its scope. Its essays, reviews, and interviews are imbued with the irresistible appeal of fresh ideas and the rigor of academic inquiry. As an organization it creates and renews vital space for connection, especially through its innovative publishing workshop. New and accomplished international authors and translators cascade out of LARB, and its coverage of contemporary literature is steeped in style and substance. The commitment to history, critical thought, imagination, and to its eponymous city runs deep.
Mizna
Mizna reflects the literatures of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) communities and fosters the exchange and examination of ideas, allowing readers and audiences to engage with SWANA writers and artists on their own terms. It has been a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production since 1999, publishing a biannual print journal of poetry, fiction, essays, comix, and visual art in addition to producing the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, the largest and longest running Arab film fest in the Midwest. Recognizing that open cultural spaces are not a luxury but a necessity, Mizna also hosts classes, readings, and community events that offer points of connection between emerging and established SWANA artists and their local Twin Cities community and beyond.
Mizna is an absolute gem of a journal: tightly edited, gorgeously curated, and visually striking. Care and craft float off its pages of beautifully laid-out poetry and lovingly printed images. Mizna is both a grassroots community organization and an esteemed international artistic platform, furthering important intergenerational dialogue within the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) diaspora and showcasing thrilling new literature.
n+1
n+1 encourages writers, new and established, to take themselves as seriously as possible, to write with as much energy and daring as possible, and to connect their own deepest concerns with the broader social and political environment—that is, to write, while it happens, a history of the present day. n+1 was founded in New York City, in 2004, by six young writers and editors who wanted to make a magazine that didn’t shy away from difficult and ambitious writing and would take literature, culture, and politics as aspects of the same project. In addition to the triannual print and digital magazine, n+1 also publishes books that expand on the interests of the magazine and programs readings, panels, and events in New York City and across the US.
A distinctive, erudite editorial project overflowing with rigor and generosity, n+1 is both magnet and catapult for intellectually fearless writers. Its uniquely attentive and structural approach to editing has helped cement a reputation as a major site of discovery for new talent, and it indisputably lives on the cutting edge of literary and political discourse. n+1’s ethos is deep investment in writers and their growth. A must-read for critical engagement with pressing issues of the day.
Orion
Orion invites readers into a community of caring for the planet. Through writing and art that explore the connection between nature and culture, it inspires new thinking about how humanity might live on Earth justly, sustainably, and joyously. Founded in 1982, Orion has grown into a quarterly print magazine with in-depth features, poetry, photo essays, science reporting, profiles, book reviews, and interviews. Orion also publishes full-length books as well as original work on its website that probe humanity’s ethical obligation towards and connection to our planet and hosts workshops designed to help writers deepen their relationship with nature and place.
Orion sounds out the depth and breadth of the natural world and our human experiences in it, proving over and again how necessary a publication it is in this age of climate crisis. The magazine is the nucleus of something much larger: a network of readers and contributors bound by a desire to protect and marvel at natural beauty. Each themed issue, replete with illustrations that complement and elevate the text, is a printed object to cherish. To read Orion is to feel the planet as a living organism of which we are a part.
Oxford American
Dedicated to the complexity and vitality of the American South, Oxford American is a national magazine with a regional point of view. It began publishing in 1992 out of Oxford, Mississippi, and strives to reflect the multicultural tapestry of the region as it truly exists–to explore many Souths and trouble familiar, singular stereotypes. Oxford American publishes a wide array of literature written in diverse registers, including investigative reportage, memoir, cultural criticism, fiction, poetry, and book reviews, in addition to an iconic annual Southern music issue. Oxford American celebrates the South’s immense cultural impact on the nation–its foodways, literary innovation, fashion history, visual art, and music–and recognizes that as much as the South can be found in the world, one can find the world in the South.
Oxford American is our most adventurous and authoritative window on the South, pushing beyond headlines to deliver a textured, ever-evolving portrait of its cultural wealth. Drawn in by eye-catching art direction and dazzling editorial letters, readers stay to savor the unique weave of the journalistic with habit-forming fiction and vivid travel writing. A generous intellectual hospitality serves the magazine’s Southern neighbors and a broad national readership all at once. Oxford American is a spring of innovation, honoring tradition while forging something new.
The Paris Review
The Paris Review showcases a lively mix of exceptional poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and delights in celebrating writers at all career stages. Its “Writers at Work” series, hailed by the New York Times as “the most remarkable interviewing project we possess,” offers rich psychological portraits and a trove of practical advice for aspiring writers, and has been a hallmark of the magazine since its inception in 1953. With a quarterly print journal, a website that publishes daily, a digital archive, and a podcast featuring a blend of classic stories and poems, vintage interview recordings, and new work, The Paris Review favors daring, original writing and seeks to be the best kind of party: open, inclusive, and excitingly vibrant.
For seventy years and counting, The Paris Review has remained wonderfully distinctive and sophisticated, never short on chic art direction, impeccable curation, or international flair. The interviews make you ache to have been in the room for the conversation. Readers will find exceptional work by feted writers in every issue, but The Paris Review does not rest on its legacy: it deftly employs its footing as the standard bearer for American literary magazines to uplift talent that hasn’t yet gotten its due.
The New Yorker – September 18, 2023 issue: The new issue features R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Bodega Cat”, where the the artist discusses pivotal moments and his relationship to pets.
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.
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.
Times Literary Supplement (September 8, 2023): The new issue features Modern conspiracy theories, China’s Platonic republic, Jonathan Raban’s last days, Sebastian Faulks’s Neanderthal, the English country house, and more….
Crispr, which may be the single most transformative biological technology of the twenty-first century, is a natural phenomenon, evolved over billions of years. It was first observed in the nineteen-eighties, when researchers noticed unexplained sequences of viral DNA in E. coli. Eventually, they realized that these sequences played a role in the bacteria’s immune system: they could find and destroy other pieces of viral DNA.
Literature bores me, especially great literature,” the narrator of one of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” says. George Eliot sometimes bores me, especially the George Eliot draped in greatness. Think of the extremities of nineteenth-century fiction: labile Lermontov; crazy, visionary Melville; nasty, world-hating Flaubert; mystic moor-bound Brontës; fanatical, trembling Dostoyevsky; explosive Hamsun. There’s enough wildness to destroy the myth of that stable Victorian portal “classic realism.” It was not classic—certainly not then—and not always particularly “real.”
Literary Review – September 2023: The new issue features Yoga Goes To Hollywood by Dominic Green; How England Lost France; Who’s Afraid of AI?; Don’t Mention Tiananmen; Anne Boleyn’s Ascent and Tastes of China….
Turning Points: Crisis and Change in Modern Britain, from 1945 to Truss By Steve Richards
In the good old days, dates were for foreigners. France, to take the obvious example, had repeatedly been turned upside down by war, revolution and changes of regime. But the English tourist in Paris rarely bothered to find out which of these distasteful events might be commemorated by, say, the rue du Quatre Septembre. The history of England (this was less true of Scotland and not at all true of Ireland) was a smooth and mostly benign progression. Educated people could tell you what the Glorious Revolution was but might be hazy about when exactly it had happened.
The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs By David Runciman
Artificial intelligence, it is commonly acknowledged, will pose one of the gravest challenges to humanity in the coming years. In the minds of some, it is already the most urgent problem we face. While there are a number of possible dangers that might bring about the extinction of our species, AI confronts us with a particularly dire situation, because it may well be that we have only a brief amount of time – perhaps a generation – in which to set up norms and constraints on the development of autonomous, non-human intelligences that may otherwise escape our control.
The New York Review of Books (September 21, 2023) – The Fall Books issue features Michael Gorra on Zadie Smith, Anahid Nersessian on Joyce Mansour’s Surrealist poetry, Osita Nwanevu on the Democrats, Colin Grant on Margo Jefferson, Fintan O’Toole on fascists in the family tree, Karan Mahajan on Williamsburg rock, Ben Tarnoff on the depredations of Silicon Valley, and more…
The Fraud, Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, asks if we might all be frauds of some sort, wearing masks and performing as people who are not quite ourselves.
A groundbreaking show at the Metropolitan Museum displays, among other treasures from India, works of Buddhist art that bear the mark of ancient animist cults that long preceded the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama.
Catalog of the exhibition by John Guy; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 343 pp.
In 2003 Indian archaeologists working on a remote hilltop in the southern state of Telangana uncovered a remarkable early Buddhist monastic complex. Phanigiri, “the snake-hooded hill,” had clearly been one of the most important Buddhist monasteries in India. All around were found spectacular fragments of sculpture, including substantial sections of elaborately carved ceremonial gateways and a torso now judged to be one of the masterworks of Buddhist art. Many of the statues had been dismantled and carefully buried in soft earth for their protection after the monastery was abandoned in the fifth century CE, and they were found in almost mint condition.
Times Literary Supplement (September 1, 2023): The extraordinary story of the OED; Shakespeare quotations for everyday life; Benjamín Labatut’s infernal vision; histories of learning and forgetting; rules for reviewers– and much more
London Review of Books (LRB) – September 7, 2023: The new issue features Colm Tóibín review of ‘Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’; Desperate Midwives; French Short Stories; Catastrophic Thinking and Plant Detectives…
Ulysses is haunted by the story of its own composition. As Joyce famously put it, ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’ The annotators point out, however, that it is ‘very likely that Joyce never said this’.
The New Yorker – September 4, 2023 issue: The issue’s cover features James Thurber’s “New Tricks”, discussed by the artist’s granddaughter and his legacy and his love for his canine companions.
With smuggled cell phones and a handful of accomplices, Arthur Lee Cofield, Jr., took money from large bank accounts and bought houses, cars, clothes, and gold.
Early in 2020, the architect Scott West got a call at his office, in Atlanta, from a prospective client who said that his name was Archie Lee. West designs luxurious houses in a spare, angular style one might call millionaire modern. Lee wanted one. That June, West found an appealing property in Buckhead—an upscale part of North Atlanta that attracts both old money and new—and told Lee it might be a good spot for them to build. Lee arranged for his wife to meet West there.
Last weekend, at a tournament in the Cincinnati suburb of Mason, Coco Gauff beat Iga Świątek for the first time. It was one of those moments in tennis when the ground seemed to shift: Gauff had never taken a set from Świątek, the current world No. 1, in the seven previous times they’d met. It was the biggest win of Gauff’s young career—but it was in keeping with a high-summer revving of her already formidable game. In the hard-court tournaments held across North America which are essentially warmups for the U.S. Open, Gauff has been the imposing presence that the tennis world has been waiting for her to become—waiting avidly, for sure, but a little anxiously, too. As recently as early July, when she lost in the first round at Wimbledon, there was fretting that she wasn’t making quick enough progress.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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