Tag Archives: Magazines

Politics: The Guardian Weekly – October 20, 2023

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The Guardian Weekly (October 20, 2023) The new issue features escalating events in Israel and Gaza that continue to cause deep distress and alarm, with several thousand people known to be dead or wounded on either side of the border. US president Joe Biden was expected to visit Israel this week, amid growing expectations of a ground invasion of Gaza and fears of a wider regional escalation.

Also, a primer on the historical background to events by Chris McGreal, while on the opinion pages the Israeli author and historian Yuval Noah Harari and Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein provide thoughtful and grounded perspectives.

There was sadness for many Aboriginal Australians after a move to recognise Indigenous people in the country’s constitution was rejected in a referendum, as Sarah Collard and Elias Visontay report. Also from Oceania, Henry Cooke examines what aspects of Jacinda Ardern’s political legacy might survive after New Zealand elected a new conservative government.

From Egypt to Hong Kong, the 2010s were a decade when mass protest movements looked set to change the world. But in most cases, the hope embodied by many massive street demonstrations was soon crushed by authoritarian regimes. Vincent Bevins asks organisers and others who were there where it all went wrong.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Oct 20, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (October20, 2023): The new issue features ‘Rocket Man’ – North Korea’s dictator is no joke; A snapshot of Teju Cole; Daniel Dennett’s evolution; Monet’s muses; John le Carré undercover, and more…

Science Review: Scientific American – November 2023

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Scientific American – November 2023: The issue features Woman The Hunter – New science debunks the myth that men evolved to hunt and women to gather; Interspecies Organ Transplants; Materials Made in Space; The Legacy of the Endangered Species Act, and more…

The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses

The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses

Scary play lets people—and other animals—rehearse coping skills for disturbing challenges in the real world

By Coltan Scrivner and Athena Aktipis

Can We Save Every Species from Extinction?

Can We Save Every Species from Extinction?

The Endangered Species Act requires that every U.S. plant and animal be saved from extinction, but after 50 years, we have to do much more to prevent a biodiversity crisis

By Robert Kunzig

Surgeons Aim to Transplant Organs from Pigs to Humans to Help Solve the Donor Shortage

Surgeons Aim to Transplant Organs from Pigs to Humans to Help Solve the Donor Shortage

Advances are increasing the supply of organs. But this isn’t enough. Enter the genetically modified donor pig

By Tanya Lewis

Harvard Business Review – November/December 2023

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Harvard Business Review (November/December 2023) –

The Resale Revolution

Increasingly, companies are reselling their own products. Should you get into the game? 

by Thomas S. Robertson 

Summary: The average U.S. household contains a trove of potentially reusable goods worth roughly $4,500. That’s a lot of trapped value, and companies are at last getting serious about accessing it—by developing new resale capabilities. Resale has been with us for a very long time, of course—at yard sales, on used-car lots, in classified ads. 

A Step-by-Step Guide to Real-Time Pricing

An advanced AI model considers much more than what competitors are charging. 

Summary: In today’s fast-paced world of digital retailing, the ability to revise prices swiftly and on a large scale has emerged as a decisive differentiator for companies. Many retailers now track competitors’ prices via systems that scrape rivals’ websites and use this information as an input to set their own prices manually or automatically. A common strategy is to charge X dollars or X percent less than a target competitor. However, retailers that use such simple heuristics miss significant opportunities to fine-tune pricing.

Health: Harvard Magazine November/December 2023

November-December 2023 | Harvard Magazine

HARVARD MAGAZINE November-December 2023 :

You Are What (Your Microbes) Eat

Illustration of an apple being pushed from a platform into a sea of colorful microbes

Diet, cooking, and the human microbiome

IN THE LATE 2000s, Rachel Carmody was spending a lot of time counting calories. An anthropology graduate student at Harvard, she was studying whether cooking changed the number of calories the gut can extract from food. When humans invented cooking thousands of years ago, she and her advisor Richard Wrangham wondered, had they opened the door to a new source of energy?

The Brain-Cancer Link

Photograph of Humsa Venkatesh in her lab

DURING THE past two decades, the number of annual cancer deaths in the United States has fallen by 27 percent, a remarkable improvement driven by new precision diagnoses and treatments tailored to individual patients. Today, oncologists can detect cancer in its earliest stages and deliver drugs that enlist the patient’s own immune system to improve their odds of survival. Yet cancer remains the second deadliest disease in the United States, claiming more than 600,000 lives every year. Its persistence underscores the urgent need for a deeper understanding of how cancer interacts with the body. Assistant professor of neurology Humsa Venkatesh believes she may have found a promising new pathway for highly effective cancer treatments in the most unexpected of places: the human brain.

Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – November 2023

Harper’s Magazine – NOVEMBER 2023: This issue features The Machine Breaker – Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist”; Forbidden Fruit – The anti-avocado militias of Michoacán; Principia Mathemagica; From Magus – The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa, and more…

The Machine Breaker – Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist” 

by Christopher Ketcham

In the summer of 2016, a fifty-seven-year-old Texan named Stephen McRae drove east out of the rainforests of Oregon and into the vast expanse of the Great Basin. His plan was to commit sabotage. First up was a coal-burning power plant near Carlin, Nevada, a 242-megawatt facility owned by the Newmont Corporation that existed to service two nearby gold mines, also owned by Newmont.

Forbidden Fruit

by Alexander Sammon

The anti-avocado militias of Michoacán

Phone service was down—a fuse had blown in the cell tower during a recent storm—and even though my arrival had been cleared with the government of Cherán in advance, the armed guard manning the highway checkpoint, decked out in full fatigues, the wrong shade to pass for Mexican military, refused to wave me through. My guide, Uli Escamilla, assured him that we had an appointment, and that we could prove it if only we could call or text our envoy. The officer gripped his rifle with both hands and peered into the windows of our rental car.

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 23, 2023

Daniel Clowess “Quiet Luxury”

The New Yorker – October 23, 2023 issue: The new issues cover features Daniel Clowes’s “Quiet Luxury” – The artist discusses patronage, in-home pillars, and what he’d do with a billion dollars.

Beyond the Myth of Rural America

Grant Woods sister Nan Wood Graham and his dentist Byron McKeeby stand by the painting for which they had posed...

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

By Daniel Immerwahr

Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us can’t help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood, it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who “would fit into such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, “American Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most famous art work ever produced in the United States.

When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby

In many states, lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.

American ChroniclesBeyond the Myth of Rural America

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

What Happened to San Francisco, Really?

It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask.By Nathan Heller

The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle

Offsetting has been hailed as a fix for runaway emissions and climate change—but the market’s largest firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that weren’t real.

Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — Nov 2023

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The New Criterion – November 2023 issue:

The burden of the humanities  by Wilfred M. McClay
A lyrical populist revolt  by Victor Davis Hanson
Blanquette de Bard  by Anthony Daniels
Polymorphous Peretz  by Myron Magnet


New poems  by David Mason & Ian Pople

The New York Times Magazine – Oct 15, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 15, 2023):

My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom

All the photographs in this article are black-and-white. Taylor Swift onstage facing away from the camera.

Taylor Swift’s greatest gift is for telling her own story — better than any journalist could. But Taffy Brodesser-Akner gives it a shot anyway.

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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. 

How Jesmyn Ward Is Reimagining Southern Literature

Jesmyn Ward

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.”

Research Preview: Science Magazine – Oct 13, 2023

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Science Magazine – October 13, 2023: The new issue features the genetic organization of the human brain; Diversity of primate brain cells unraveled; A single-cell genomic atlas for maturation of the human cerebellum during early childhood, and more…

A family portrait of human brain cells

A cell census provides information on the source of human brain specialization

The brain is composed of multiple regions associated with distinct functions, which have become further specialized in the human lineage. To define how this specialization is implemented, how it arises during development, and how it has emerged over the course of human evolution, a detailed understanding of the cells that make up the human brain is required. 

The ecology of whales in a changing climate

Some whale populations are exhibiting unexpected cycles of boom and bust