What does Labour’s win mean for British foreign policy?
Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside
France is desperately searching for a government
Researchers are figuring out how large language models work
The New Atlantis Magazine (July 10, 2024) : The latest issue features…
Tech ethics needs a breakthrough. The Amish have it.
Fact-checking used to be how journalists policed themselves. Now it’s how they police everyone else.
Strange things in the skies of a clockwork universe
Times Literary Supplement (July 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Ven ice Preserved – La Serenissima down the centuries; Why revolutions fail; Eating ourselves to death and Ozempic nation…
The actor talks about the origins of “Adaptation,” his potential leap to television, and the art of “keeping it enigmatic.”
By Susan Orlean
The wobbly distinction between reality and artifice fascinates Nicolas Cage. The first time we encountered each other was in 2001, during the making of “Adaptation”—a film based on Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt my book “The Orchid Thief” for the screen—in which Cage played Kaufman and his twin, Donald. He was in the middle of a scene, and I tiptoed onto the set as quietly as possible, convinced that any distraction would trigger one of the eruptions for which Cage had become famous. Between takes, he glanced at the handful of people watching, and exclaimed cheerily, “Oh, guys, look!” He pointed at me and a small, fuzzy-haired man I hadn’t noticed beside me. “It’s the real Charlie and the real Susan!” He seemed tickled by this collision between the characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts, and insisted that the crew take note. (Kaufman and I, who had never met before that moment, slunk away sheepishly.)
Three decades into “This American Life,” the host thinks the show is doing some of its best work yet—even if he’s still jealous of “The Daily.”
By Sarah Larson
It can be easy to take the greatness of “This American Life,” the weekly public-radio show and podcast hosted by Ira Glass, for granted. The show, which Glass co-founded in 1995 at WBEZ, in Chicago, has had the same essential format for twenty-eight years and more than eight hundred episodes. It was instrumental in creating a genre of audio journalism that has flourished in recent decades, especially since the podcast boom—which was initiated by the show’s first spinoff, “Serial,” in 2014. Like “The Daily Show” or Second City, “This American Life” has trained a generation of talented people, and Glass’s three-act structures, chatty cadences, and mixture of analysis and whimsy are now so familiar as to seem unremarkable.
Plus: Hildegard Bechtler on the art of stage design, very fancy Victorian ice creams, the art market braces for stormy weather, a Madonna pregnant with meaning and a preview of Parcours des Mondes; reviews of Kafka in Oxford, the gardeners of the Bloomsbury Group, and the silversmith who struck gold for Tiffany & Co.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 6, 2024): The latest issue features…
Eddie Murphy has been so famous for so long, occupying such a lofty place in the cultural landscape, that it can be easy to overlook just how game-changing a figure he actually is.
Let’s start, as Murphy’s career did, with standup. There had been star comics before — Steve Martin, Richard Pryor — but none exploded with anything like Murphy’s speed or intensity.
His “X” trilogy — which culminates with “MaXXXine” — obsesses over cinema, stardom and the industry itself.
By RYAN BRADLEY
New York is trying to treat an addictive substance just like any other product.
By CHARLES FAIN LEHMAN
Literary Review – July 2, 2024: The latest issue features ‘A Tale of Two Fabulists’, North America Ablaze, Pascal Decoded, League of Dictators and Roffey’s Rage…
American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873 By Alan Taylor
A mountain of historical studies testifies to enduring interest in the American Civil War, a conflict still politically relevant in a nation riven over how to remember it. Those doubting that there is anything fresh to say about the bloodiest event in the republic’s history should read Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Taylor’s brilliant, panoramic account of the conflict.
Travellers in the Golden Realm: How Mughal India Connected England to the World By Lubaaba Al-Azami
One contender for the title of centre of the civilised world in the early 17th century is the Mughal Empire. Lubaaba Al-Azami describes it as ‘a global capital and commercial hub’. The Mughal Empire reached its zenith between the reigns of Babur, the first emperor, who established the ‘golden realm’ in 1526, and his great-great-great-grandson the sixth emperor, Aurangzeb, who died in 1707. This was a time when the artists of the fabulously wealthy Mughal dynasty were building the Taj Mahal and writing and illuminating the Padshahnama.
Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany 1918–1933 By Harald Jähner (Translated from German by Shaun Whiteside)
Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power By Timothy W Ryback
The Weimar Republic (so called as the parliament which drafted its constitution in 1919 sat in Weimar owing to unrest in Berlin) lasted for fourteen years and four months, two years longer than the Third Reich that succeeded it. Its history is beset with ironies. Its first president, Friedrich Ebert, a social democrat (and a former innkeeper), turned out to be the embodiment of petit-bourgeois conservatism. Having ditched the monarchy, he made a bargain with the army: they would defend the nascent republic in return for maintaining the old officer corps. This enabled the regime to survive five chaotic years marked by numerous violent attempts to overthrow it from both the Left and the Right.
Nine thinkers on the continent’s future without America’s embrace.
By Mark Leonard, Constanze Stelzenmüller, Nathalie Tocci, Carl Bildt, Robin Niblett, Radoslaw Sikorski, Guntram Wolff, Bilahari Kausikan, Ivan Krastev, and Stefan Theil
No bloc of countries has, for the past 75 years, been as umbilically tied to the United States as Europe. First, its western half and, since the end of the Cold War, much of its eastern half have prospered under the world’s most extensive bonds in trade, finance, and investment. Europe could also depend on the U.S. military’s iron commitment—enshrined in the 75-year-old NATO alliance—to come to its defense. Together with a few other nations, the United States and Europe defined many of the institutions that comprise what we call the Western-led order. The U.S.-European alliance has arguably been the bedrock of the global system as we know it today.
Without Washington’s embrace, the continent could revert to an anarchic and illiberal past. By HAL BRANDS
Which is the real Europe? The mostly peaceful, democratic, and united continent of the past few decades? Or the fragmented, volatile, and conflict-ridden Europe that existed for centuries before that? If Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November, we may soon find out.
President Biden has offered help to undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, in the most consequential act of immigration relief in more than a decade. By Jonathan Blitzer
Give now to get your name on the wing of a fighter jet!
In “Long Island Compromise,” wealth is a curse. Or is that just what we’d like to think?
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Discover Magazine (June 30, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Next-Gen Medicine’ – Recreating human organs on microchips; Inside the new Opioid Crisis; History’s strangest sleep study and Prehistoric Family Secrets…
From rendering animal testing obsolete to reducing HIV and preterm birth, Donald Ingber is making the future a reality.
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