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.

The New Yorker – June 5, 2023 issue: Masha Titova’s “The Music of Art”. The magazine publishes its first synesthetic, collaborative, and interactive cover. By Françoise Mouly.

The Case For and Against Ed Sheeran

The pop singer’s trial for copyright infringement of Marvin Gaye and Ed Townsend’s “Let’s Get It On” highlights how hard it is to draw the property lines of pop.

By John Seabrook

The Trials and Triumphs of Writing While Woman

An illustration of two women's heads facing one another with a pen between them.

From Mary Wollstonecraft to Toni Morrison, getting a start meant starting over.

By Lauren Michele Jackson

When the critic Joanna Biggs was thirty-two, her mother, still in her fifties, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Everything wobbled,” she recalls. Biggs was married but not sure she wanted to be, suddenly distrustful of the neat, conventional course—marriage, kids, burbs—plotted out since she met her husband, at nineteen. It was as though the disease’s rending of a maternal bond had severed her contract with the prescribed feminine itinerary. Soon enough, she and her husband were seeing other people; then he moved out, and she began making pilgrimages to visit Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave.