THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (November 3, 2023): The latest issue features Bariatric Surgery at 16 – If childhood obesity is an ‘epidemic,’ how far should doctors go to treat it?; Some Ukrainians Helped the Russians. Their Neighbors Sought Revenge; The Eternal Life of the ’90s Supermodel -How did a small group of models manage to stay on top for so long?, and more…
If childhood obesity is an ‘epidemic,’ how far should doctors go to treat it?
By Helen Ouyang
Last fall, Alexandra Duarte, who isnow 16, went to see her endocrinologist at Texas Children’s Hospital, outside Houston. From age 10, she had been living with polycystic ovary syndrome and, more recently, prediabetes. After Alexandra described her recent quinceañera, the doctor brought up an operation that might benefit her, one that might help her lose weight and, as a result, improve these obesity-related problems.
For people in Bilozerka, the invasion began a cat-and-mouse game of collaboration and resistance.
By James Verini
Andriy Koshelev steered his car into the driveway of his home on Pushkin Street in Bilozerka, a lakeside town in Ukraine’s Kherson region. Leaving the car on, Koshelev got out and walked to the entrance gate. He reached down to loosen the latch. When he pulled it, the gate exploded. Koshelev’s parents, who lived on the same property, rushed outside as acrid smoke filled their driveway and the street. The explosion resounded across town.
Prospect Magazine (December 2023)– The latest issue features Oh, the humanities! – History, literature, film studies; I still dream of peace – How Israel might emerge from the Gaza horror, and more…
The following words were written amid the storm of battle. Planes constantly circling in the sky, the bedroom turned into a shelter, the radio telling of new atrocities, the heart torn with fear as to the fate of missing persons. The days are now devoted to funerals and condolences, and the evenings to guarding our small community. I have participated in many demonstrations against the terrible folly of Benjamin Netanyahu, which found its outcome in the revenge and rage in Gaza on 7th October. Today, I try to be available for acts of support and solidarity with the victims on all sides. This beautiful land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea weeps bitterly, its two communities refusing to be comforted.
The Drift Magazine – Fall 2023 Issue – Essays on dissidents, ecoterrorists, and mermaids; an interview with Veronica Gago, Dispatches on the future of the Supreme Court; also fiction, poetry, reviews and more…
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 29, 2023): The latest issue features The Scientists Watching Their Life’s Work Disappear; Can We Save the #Redwoods by Helping Them Move?; ‘It’s Like Our Country Exploded’: #Canada’s Year of #Fire and #ClimateChange Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night….
Amid the chaos of climate change, humans tend to focus on humans. But Earth is home to countless other species, including animals, plants and fungi. For centuries, we have been making it harder for them to exist by cutting down forests, plowing grasslands, building roads, damming rivers, draining wetlands and polluting. Now that wildlife is depleted and hemmed in, climate change has come crashing down. In 2016, scientists in Australia announced the loss of a rodent called the Bramble Cay melomys, one of the first known species driven to global extinction by climate change. Others are all but certain to follow. How many depends on how much we let the planet heat.
The largest trees on the planet can’t easily ‘migrate’ — but in a warming world, some humans are helping them try to find new homes.
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
When Philip Stielstra retired from Boeing in 2012, he needed something purposeful to do. He and his wife, Gay, were casual golfers, but Stielstra, an antiwar activist in college who refused to fight in Vietnam — he worked in a post office instead — wanted a pastime with bigger stakes. Before leaving his job, he received an email from the city of Seattle: The Parks and Recreation Department needed “tree ambassadors.” Tree canopy cover had receded in the city, and the department was responding by promoting an appreciation for its remaining trees. The volunteer ambassadors would learn about these trees and lead residents on walking tours to marvel at them. Stielstra, despite being a self-described introvert, signed up.
Fiction “Thinking Ahead” by Joan Silber: “How does a person behave when he knows he’s dying? There’s a myth that people go off and do what they’ve always wanted to do—sail to Spain, buy a horse, eat at the world’s most famous restaurant. ‘They never do that,’ my mother said, ‘that I’ve seen. They don’t even remember why they wanted to do it.”
“Seabreeze” by Korey Lewis: Jojo and Jaz wait for The Defendant to pick them up from their mother’s place and take them to Seabreeze. “If Disney is where dreams come true, then Seabreeze is where they give up.”
“Eau de Nil” by Chloe Wilson: “It was a website called Geriatrix. On it were women my age, in various states of undress. I saw breasts droopier and flatter than mine, necks that were crêpier, bellies that bulged and hung. But what really struck me was how happy they looked.”
“Country Furnishings” by Earle McCartney: The equilibrium in a tetchy blue-collar workshop gets jostled with the arrival of Frank Wonderwood—future son-in-law of the business’s new co-owner and future woodworking graduate from Del Tech.
Poetry Karen Leona Anderson, Stuart Dybek, Johanna Carissa Fernandez, Mike Good, Cleo Qian, Sarah Lynn Rogers, Joel M. Toledo
Nonfiction Laura M. Furlan her birth parents, identity, and butterflies. Adam Foulds on the home-turned-museum of one of England’s greatest architects, Sir John Soane. Sam McPhee on the singular fascination hands have on his attention. Jessica Francis Kane on her lifelong affinity with the fascinating James Boswell. And Devon Brody’s “Beth”: “I’m glad to be with only Beth and her long hair that meets the hair on my arms, and the hair on her arms that meets the hair on my arms.”
In Conversation: Ricardo Frasso Jaramillo delves with Justin Torres into Torres’s career and his new novel, Blackouts, a finalist for the National Book Award.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 22, 2023): The latest issue features In Search of Kamala Harris; Longer Commutes, Shorter Lives: The Costs of Not Investing in America and The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer….
All the conditions seemed right for a chance to reset the narrative.
At the Munich Security Conference in February, amid rising international angst about Russia’s war in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris led a delegation of Americans, including around 50 lawmakers from both parties. She spent her first day in Germany in seclusion, preparing for the next 48 hours: meetings with European leaders the first day and a keynote speech the next in the ornate ballroom of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. When she emerged, head high and shoulders back, Harris exuded what her staff members have argued is a particular comfort with her role on the international stage. There, they say, she is respected.
Every morning in21st-century America, thousands of people wake up and prepare to take a cross-country trip. Some are traveling for business. Others are visiting family or going on vacations. Whether they are leaving from New York or Los Angeles, Atlanta or Seattle, their trips have a lot in common.
Section 301, in the second-to-highest tier of Levi’s Stadium, floats 105 feet above Santa Clara, Calif. It comprises 251 seats — a mere hamlet in the vast 64,000-seat general kingdom of the place, but it was our hamlet, and on the last Saturday in July, we took up each one of those seats and watched, our collective breath held, as Taylor Swift emerged from a bevy of billowing pastel parachutes and rose up on a platform to perform the 47th show of her Eras Tour. A few songs in, she announced, laughing, that her father told her that Santa Clara had named her its honorary mayor during her two-night stay there and that the entire town had been renamed Swiftie Clara.
The novelist is competing with giants like William Faulkner, while mapping territory all her own.
By Imani Perry
Jesmyn Ward gestured with her eyes and a tilt of her face, hands on the wheel. “This crazy colored house right here? That’s my grandmother’s house. That’s the house I grew up in. And her sister lives there” — she pointed — “and then that little blue house? That’s my great-grandparents’ house.” She was driving me around DeLisle, Miss., her hometown and the inspiration for Bois Sauvage, the fictional setting of her first three novels. It is Deep South-in-August hot outside, and the air-conditioning was a relief. “My mom’s side of the family was all clustered around this road.”
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 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!”
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.
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.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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Boomers Daily 