Tag Archives: Magazines

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – June 9, 2023

June 7, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Times Literary Supplement (June 9, 2023): Requiem for a dream – Aung San Suu Kyi’s fall from grace; Vindicating Mary Wollstonecraft; France on Trial; In search of Yeats, and more…

Aung San Suu Kyi by Wendy Law-Yone review — how a saint became a pariah

Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon, Myanmar, in 2011

This short biography explains why the West misunderstood the Myanmar leader. Review by Richard Lloyd Parry

In humanity’s long history of toppled heroes, shattered reputations and honour besmirched, it is difficult to think of a more extreme case than that of Aung San Suu Kyi. A decade ago, the Myanmar leader was among the most adored and respected figures in the world — winner of the Nobel peace prize, long-term political prisoner, an emblem of peaceful, uncompromising democratic struggle. Her ascension to the national leadership felt like the vindication of precious hopes and principles; today, “the Lady”, as she used to be known, is face down in the mud.

Arts & Literature, Culture, History, Magazines, Science, Society

Culture: The American Scholar – Summer 2023

June 6, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR – SUMMER 2023 issue: What does Antoni van Leeuwenhoek have to do with Covid? Can a digital restoration of a supposed da Vinci be just as good as the real thing? What was it like to be a young journalist on one of François Truffaut’s sets?

A Kingdom of Little Animals

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, in a circa 1680 painting by the Dutch artist Jan Verkolje, famous for his portraits of prominent members of Delft society (Wikimedia Commons) — Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, in a circa 1680 painting by the Dutch artist Jan Verkolje, famous for his portraits of prominent members of Delft society

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microorganisms made possible the revolutionary advances in biology and medicine that continue to inform our Covid age

By Laura J. Snyder

One night in 1677, a grizzled man in a wrinkled linen nightshirt rushed from his bemused wife’s bed with a candle in hand to examine the “remains of conjugal coitus, immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse.” Using the candle to cast a pool of light in his dark study, he put a drop of the liquid into a tiny glass vial he had blown himself, attaching it to the back of a strange-looking device he had also constructed.

The Whole World in His Hands

The Salvator Mundi in its damaged state—cleaned but not yet restored (Wikimedia Commons)

What a digital restoration of the most expensive painting ever sold tells us about beauty, authenticity, and the fragility of existence

I got the call late on a summer afternoon. Yanai Segal, an artist I’ve known for years, asked me whether I’d heard of the Salvator Mundi—the painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that was lost for more than two centuries before resurfacing in New Orleans in 2005. I told him that I’d heard something of the story but that I didn’t remember the details. He had recently undertaken a project related to the painting, he said, and wanted to tell me about it. I was eager to hear more, but first I needed to remind myself of the basic facts. We agreed to speak again soon.

Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Previews, Reviews, Society

Front Cover: The Atlantic Magazine – July/Aug 2023

June 6, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The Atlantic Magazine – July/August 2023 issue: Mark Leibovich goes inside the MLB’s desperate effort to rescue America’s pastime from irrelevance

‘HELL WELCOMES ALL’

A graphic illustration of black, pixelated video-game characters on a red background.

Can hard-core gamers learn to play well with others? By Spencer Kornhaber

Playing a prerelease version of Diablo IV, the latest installment in a 26-year-old adventure series about battling the forces of hell, I faced swarms of demons that yowled and belched. My character, a sorcerer, shot them with lightning bolts, producing a jet-engine roar.

HOW BASEBALL SAVED ITSELF

Inside the desperate effort to rescue America’s pastime from irrelevance By Mark Leibovich

A photograph of a baseball outfielder on green field with fans silhouetted in the foreground.

Where in the name of human rain delays is Juan Soto?

The stud outfielder is late. Everyone keeps checking their phones—the antsy Major League Baseball officials, the San Diego Padres PR guy, the handful of reporters, and the assorted hangers-on you encounter around baseball clubhouses. Everyone is wondering when the Padres superstar will show up. He was supposed to be here half an hour ago, just after this baseball players’ sanctum opened and we were allowed to join them in their most elemental of baseball activities: waiting around.

Arts & Literature, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – June 12, 2023

June 5, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Sasha Velours “The Look of Pride” — Art by Sasha Velour

The New Yorker – June 12, 2023 issue: The artist behind the cover for the June 12, 2023, issue, Sasha Velour, is a gender-fluid drag queen, author, television and theatre performer, and visual artist. In 2017, she was named the winner of the ninth season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood

Many superheroes breaking through the word Hollywood

Robert Redford, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Rudd, and Angela Bassett now disappear into movies whose plots can come down to “Keep glowy thing away from bad guy.”

By Michael Schulman

The Writer Who Insists He Knew Tennessee Williams

An illustrated portrait of James Grissom writing on a notepad. From his pen emanates a cloud in which we see a scene...

James Grissom says that he met the playwright and his famous muses, and quoted them extensively in his work. Not everyone believes him.

By Helen Shaw

How a Fringe Legal Theory Became a Threat to Democracy

A seesaw with a collection of colorful US States on one side and the shape of the entire United States on the other. The...

Lawyers tried to use the independent-state-legislature theory to sway the outcomes of the 2000 and 2020 elections. What if it were to become the law of the land?

By Andrew Marantz

An extreme version of the theory could give state legislatures the power to award Electoral College votes however they see fit. Illustrations by Golden Cosmos

Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Previews, Reviews, Society

Preview: New York Times Magazine – June 4, 2023

June 2, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (June 4, 2023) – California is the place where the future happens, for good and ill. That’s part of its magic. Read our first-ever California Issue to find out what roads the state will take us down next.

Inside: A fight over a parking lot that explains the housing crisis; the future of California’s power to shape national policy; how the state is adapting to a warming world — and more.

California Builds the Future, for Good and Bad. What’s Next?

An illustration of a California-inspired scene: wildfires, cars on a highway, the writer’s strike in Hollywood, a tent city, drones in the sky, flooding and a marijuana dispensary.

From reparations to tax revolts, the Golden State tries out new ideas all the time. What roads will its latest experiments send us down?

By Laila Lalami

I remember my first glimpse into the future. In August 1992, when I arrived in California as a student, I discovered during orientation that the university required all incoming students to have something called an email account. To access it, I had to call up a text-based mail client on Unix, using a series of line commands. If I needed a file that sat on a university computer in New York, I could use file transfer protocol to download it in Los Angeles, the whole process taking no more than a few minutes. That’s brilliant, I remember thinking.

Can the ‘California Effect’ Survive in a Hyperpartisan America?

A collage illustration showing the California capitol, the Golden Gate Bridge and a surfer hitting the waves, among other California motifs.

For decades the state has been setting policy for the whole nation. Now red states are pushing back.

By Conor Dougherty

For a while this winter, seemingly every text message that Buffy Wicks received asked if she was running for Congress. Representative Barbara Lee, of California’s 12th District, which includes Oakland, had announced that she would enter the race for Dianne Feinstein’s soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat. This decision by Lee, who is 76, created a rare opportunity for the next generation of California Democrats to vie for federal office. And Wicks — a 45-year-old State Assembly member who lives in Lee’s district and was last re-elected with 85 percent of the vote — seemed like a natural candidate.

Economics, Financial, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Previews, Reviews

Previews: The Economist Magazine – June 3, 2023

June 2, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The Economist Magazine– June 3, 2023 issue: The baby-bust economy: How declining birth rates will change the world.

Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

What might change the world’s dire demographic trajectory?

In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy.

How to make the re-election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan less bad news

Turkish President and People's Alliance's presidential candidate Recep Tayyip Erdogan gestures to supporters at the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday, May 28, 2023. Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won reelection Sunday, extending his increasingly authoritarian rule into a third decade as the country reels from high inflation and the aftermath of an earthquake that leveled entire cities. (AP Photo/Ali Unal)

There is a chance for a partial reset

It certainly wasn’t fair. Nor was it entirely free. But, like it or not, the victory on May 28th of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey’s presidential election is a fact. For the next five years Turkey, Europe and the wider world will have to deal with a prickly and authoritarian populist. That is bad news on many fronts: economically, democratically and regionally. And yet pragmatists have a duty to search for chinks of light in the gloom.

It’s not just a fiscal fiasco: greying economies also innovate less

That compounds the problems of shrinking workforces and rising bills for health care and pensions

“Adam is a special child,” says the voice-over, as the camera pans across abandoned classrooms and deserted maternity wards. “He’s the last child born in Italy.” The short film made for Plasmon, an Italian brand of baby food owned by Kraft-Heinz, a giant American firm, is set in 2050. It imagines an Italy where babies are a thing of the past. It is exaggerating for effect, of course, but not by as much as you might imagine. The number of births in Italy peaked at 1m in 1964; by 2050, the un projects, it will have shrunk by almost two-thirds, to 346,000.

Magazines, Podcasts, Previews, Research, Reviews, Science

Research Preview: Science Magazine – June 2, 2023

June 1, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Science Magazine – June 2, 2023 issue: The snub-nosed monkey genus Rhinopithecus comprises five allopatric and morphologically differentiated species, the black-white snub-nosed monkey, the black snub-nosed monkey , the golden snub-nosed monkey, the gray snub-nosed monkey, and the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey.

Understanding our own order

Humans are primates. If we weren’t able to do things like write poetry and drive cars, we would likely be classified as another species of great ape, along with our closest cousins—chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. Thus, understanding the genomes, evolutionary history, sociality, and, some might argue, even ecology of modern primates greatly informs our understanding of ourselves.

A cool path for making glass

Brent Grocholski

Printing glass with additive manufacturing techniques could provide access to new materials and structures for many applications. However, one key limitation to this is the high temperature usually required to cure glass. Bauer et al. used a hybrid organic-inorganic polymer resin as a feedstock material that requires a much lower temperature for curing (see the Perspective by Colombo and Franchin).

A super Sonic circadian synchronizer

Sonic Hedgehog signaling and primary cilia control the core mammalian circadian clock

Virtually all mammalian physiological functions fall under the control of an internal circadian rhythm, or body clock. This circadian rhythm is governed by master neural networks in the hypothalamus that synchronize the activity of peripheral clocks in cells throughout the body.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

The New York Review Of Books – June 22, 2023

June 1, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The New York Review of Books – June 22, 2023 issue: Fara Dabhoiwala on the ingenious index, Ingrid D. Rowland on Guido Reni’s questing soul, Rachel Donadio on Nathalie Sarraute’s sensual eviscerations, Steve Coll on the Taliban’s second emirate, Jessica Riskin on the poisoning of Jane Stanford, Ruth Franklin on Ken Burns’s The US and the Holocaust, Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy’s conversion, Ed Vulliamy on the Native Americans of California, Linda Greenhouse on judging the Rosenbergs, Gregory Hays on our feline friends, poems by Shane McCrae and Fernando Pessoa, and much more.

Life Is Short. Indexes Are Necessary.

By Fara Dabhoiwala

Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan

In his new history of the index, Dennis Duncan traces its evolution through the constantly changing character of reading itself.

In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics. For the next half-century the compilation of successive editions of this large volume advanced his career, consumed his weekends, and encroached heavily on his domestic life.

Who Are the Taliban Now?

By Steve Coll

Taliban members walking past a mural on the former US embassy, Kabul

The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left by Hassan Abbas

Hassan Abbas’s book surveys the second Islamic Emirate’s ideology and leading personalities and probes its internal tensions.

Nearly two years after the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, the UN refers to the regime only as “the de facto authorities,” to avoid any hint of formal recognition of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban call their government. By any name, the Taliban today control Afghanistan’s territory, as well as federal ministries and local administrations. They also preside over a nation in severe crisis. Food insecurity haunts at least half of the population; a country shattered by more than four decades of war again faces the shadow of famine.

Magazines, Previews, Research, Reviews, Science

Research: The Scientist Magazine – Summer 2023

June 1, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The Scientist Magazine (June 1, 2023) – The Summer Issue features bacteria cooperating to benefit the collective, but cheaters can rig the system and biofilms are home to millions of microbes, but disrupting their interactions could produce more effective antibiotics.

Cooperation and Cheating

Bacteria cooperate to benefit the collective, but cheaters can rig the system. How is the balance maintained?

People often recognize social behaviors in complex organisms such as insects, nonhuman primates, and humans. But Megan Frederickson, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto, is interested in a different, microscopic social community: bacteria. “Cooperation is everywhere,” she said. “Cells cooperate in multicellular organisms; individuals cooperate in societies; and different species cooperate… Why would it not be the case that microbes cooperate with each other?”

New Insight into Brain Inflammation Inspires New Hope for Epilepsy Treatment

Clinicians and researchers teamed up to investigate how inappropriate proinflammatory mechanisms contribute to the pathogenesis of drug-refractory epilepsy.

3D image of a neuron cell network with a red glow representing inflammation.

Doctors treat epilepsy with anticonvulsants to control seizures, but some patients do not respond to these first-line therapies. For patients with drug-refractory epilepsy (DRE) whose seizures persist after treatment with two or more anticonvulsants, clinicians must surgically remove part of the brain tissue to cure the disease.

Arts & Literature, Ethics, Magazines, Philosophy, Previews, Reviews

Philosophy Now Magazine June / July 2023 Preview

May 31, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Philosophy Now Magazine (June/July 2023) – The ‘Meta Ethics Issue’ featuring Back to the Sophists: Nana Ariel corrects the record and the modern application of Sophistry and Will the Real John Locke Please Step Forward? Hilarius Bogbinder shows how Locke’s intellectual identity changed over time.