A show of paintings belonging to his most important patron reflects the artist’s quietly spirited side
“A Field Guide to the Bear-Men of Leningrad” : a rare non-speculative thing from me, about boyhood & masculinity & human monstrosity in 1930s Russi… https://instagr.am/p/CqDkW1jsCI5/
Trade and financial flows have fallen well below their peaks, and poorer countries will bear the brunt.
Not planning for the possibility of disintegration betrays a dangerous lack of imagination.
Industrial policy and subsidies are nothing new and can be useful. But shutting off from the world will have consequences.
The New York Times Magazine – March 26, 2023:
Every winter, Ivrea erupts into a ferocious three-day festival where its citizens pelt one another with 900 tons of oranges. (Yes, oranges.)
The orange throwers are organized into nine teams, each with a different flag, logo, captain and uniform.
On traveling to Morocco with a group-travel company that promised to build “meaningful friendships” among its youngish clientele.
Sections
The dizzying joys of maze tourism, in Barcelona, Paris and Chenonceaux.
The Parc del Laberint d’Horta, in Barcelona.Credit…Joakim Eskildsen for The New York Times
A photographer’s journey through her native spiritual landscape of Jamaica, where Christian and Afro-centric traditions blend.
HISTORY TODAY MAGAZINE – APRIL 2023 ISSUE
The stage has a short memory, print a long one: 400 years since its first publication, Shakespeare’s First Folio is the reason we remember him.
Americanised globalisation and the new world of Russian business in the 1990s.
In the 1990s, a version of the satirical puppet show Spitting Image arrived on Russian television. A Muscovite once told the story of his father, who took great care to record every episode on VHS.
Virology database cuts off—and then reinstates—scientists who found and analyzed data collected 3 years ago by team in China
“It would be in the range of serious crap happening.”
At a basic level, humanity’s survival odds come down to one thing: the chances of a giant space rock slamming into the planet and sending us the way of the dinosaurs. One way to calibrate that hazard is to look at the size of Earth’s recent large impact craters.
Even if China’s transactional diplomacy brings some gains, it contains real perils
A lesser man than Xi Jinping might have found it uncomfortable. Meeting Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week, China’s leader spoke of “peaceful co-existence and win-win co-operation”, while supping with somebody facing an international arrest warrant for war crimes. But Mr Xi is untroubled by trivial inconsistencies. He believes in the inexorable decline of the American-led world order, with its professed concern for rules and human rights. He aims to twist it into a more transactional system of deals between great powers. Do not underestimate the perils of this vision—or its appeal around the world.
They have to choose between financial instability and high inflation. It wasn’t meant to be that way
The job of central bankers is to keep banks stable and inflation low. Today they face an enormous battle on both fronts. The inflation monster is still untamed, and the financial system looks precarious.
The way a wise policy was forced through will have political costs
Any French president who asks his fellow citizens to retire later does so at his peril. When Jacques Chirac tried in 1995, crippling strikes made him shelve the project; 18 months later voters sacked his government. Piles of rubbish were left to rot on the streets, as they are today on the boulevards of Paris. Bin collectors have joined strikes against the decision by the current president, Emmanuel Macron, to raise the minimum pension age from 62 to 64. So it was with some relief that on March 20th his minority government narrowly survived two no-confidence votes, opening the way for his reform to enter the statute books.
The biggest phytoplankton bloom ever recorded in the South Pacific Ocean was triggered by a small but lingering storm.
A body classified as an exoplanet has been shown to nurture thermonuclear fusion of heavy hydrogen — a trait of objects called brown dwarfs.
Fruit fly ‘connectome’ will help researchers to study how the brain works, and could further understanding of neurological diseases.
Once derelict, Gurney Manor Mill was rescued in the early 1990s and transformed into a lovely family home.
Any property that is surrounded by water is guaranteed to be impressive. It’s sort of an unwritten rule. Naturally, as a former watermill, Gurney Manor Mill falls into this category: the mill and its 1.2 acres of gardens are surrounded by the historicwater system, creating a bucolic setting.
Amelia Thorpe selects watering cans for the home and garden
Don’t know your potassium from your phosphorus? Fear not, as Steven Desmond explains what to feed your plants and when
There’s more to ornamental apple trees than merely fruit, reveals Charles Quest-Ritson
Meet the ‘gentleman in velvet’—Harry Pearson unearths the underground world of the mole
The Guardian Weekly (March 24, 2023) – You’d be forgiven for having allowed the collapse of the tech industry lender Silicon Valley Bank, earlier this month, to pass you by. Even the news that SVB’s UK operation had been salvaged in a deal brokered by the British government might not have registered too much. But the rescue this week of Switzerland’s second-largest lender Credit Suisse had a more ominous feel to it, a sense of fiscal dominoes cascading slowly into one another.
For our big story this week, Anna Isaac and Kalyeena Makortoff report on a week that brought back anxious memories of the 2008 financial crash, while economics editor Larry Elliott argues that only the era of ultra-low interest rates that followed the previous crash has prevented a further correction happening sooner.
Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia this week had the feel of a pivotal moment for global diplomacy. Russian affairs reporter Pjotr Sauer and senior China correspondent Amy Hawkins look at what the strengthening of the Sino-Russian alliance signifies for Moscow, Beijing and the rest of the world.
This week also saw the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour reflects on a botched intervention that still haunts global politics to this day, while on the Opinion pages Randeep Ramesh argues that the US foreign policy debacle still serves to underline what he describes as “the capricious and self-centred nature of American global power”.
Boomers Daily 