Tag Archives: Politics & Opinion

The Economist Magazine – April 27, 2024 Preview

How strong is India’s economy?

The Economist Magazine (April 25, 2024): The latest issue features ‘How Strong is India’s Economy?’; Campus Clashes and the Democrats; Where next in the Tech Wars; Ukraine – What $61bn will buy and Has Taylor Swift peaked?….

How strong is India’s economy?

Brechrit: another bad Tory idea

Why leaving the ECHR would be a bad idea for Britain

Where next in the tech wars?

America, China and the battle for supremacy

San Marino, Russia and spies

Intelligence sources are concerned about the country, which is surrounded by Italy

Has Taylor Swift peaked?

The musician is at the height of her commercial, but not her creative, power

Read full edition

The New York Times Magazine – April 21, 2024

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (April 19, 2024):The Modern Love issue features…

Online Dating After 50 Can Be Miserable. But It’s Also Liberating.

You know so much more about yourself and your desires when you’re older that dating apps — even with all their frustrations — can bring unanticipated pleasure.

Can a Sexless Marriage Be a Happy One?

A photograph of a miniature model with two beds separated by a door.

Experts and couples are challenging the conventional wisdom that sex is essential to relationships.

The Poems That Taught Me How to Love

Lessons from Pablo Neruda’s mind-bending verse.

By NICHOLAS CASEY

The Economist Magazine – April 20, 2024 Preview

The Economist Magazine (April 18, 2024): The latest issue features Reasons to be cheerful about Generation Z – They are not doomed to be poor and anxious…

Reasons to be cheerful about Generation Z

They are not doomed to be poor and anxious

India’s democracy needs a stronger opposition

The Congress party is set for a drubbing in the world’s biggest election

Israel should not rush to strike back at Iran

Instead it should try a novel response to Iran’s missile attack: restraint

Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – May 2024

HARPER’S MAGAZINE – April 15, 2024: The latest issue features The Life and Death of Hollywood – Film and television writers face an existential threat; The Race for Second Place – The Republican primaries as farce

The Life and Death of Hollywood

Photo illustration by Nicolás Ortega

Film and television writers face an existential threat

by Daniel Bessner

In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film.

Smith was looking for a job in television. She had an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and had lived and worked as a playwright in New York City for years—two of her productions garnered positive reviews in the Times. But playwriting had begun to feel like a vanity project: to pay rent, she’d worked as a nanny, a transcriptionist, an administrative assistant, and more. There seemed to be no viable financial future in theater, nor in academia, the other world where she supposed she could make inroads.

The Race for Second Place

Illustration by Nate Sweitzer

The Republican primaries as farce

by Kyle Paoletta

On the Saturday before the Iowa caucuses, the super PAC supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis staged a “drop by” for the candidate at its headquarters in West Des Moines. Outside the modernist office park, much of the Upper Midwest was under a deep freeze brought on by a low-pressure system that had deposited more than a foot of snow in advance of a surge of arctic air that brought the wind chill into the negative thirties. Despite the atrocious road conditions, DeSantis was keeping his schedule as a “special guest” of the Never Back Down PAC, beginning the day at the far western end of Iowa, in Council Bluffs, and concluding it three hundred miles east, in Davenport.

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 22, 2024

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The New Yorker (April 15, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Ana Juan’s “Clickbait” – The artist captures the mesmerizing—and distracting—glow of modern entertainment.

Can the World Be Simulated?

Video-game engines were designed to closely mimic the mechanics of the real world. They’re now used for movies, TV shows, architecture, military trainings, virtual reality, and the metaverse.

Are Flying Cars Finally Here?

They have long been a symbol of a future that never came. Now a variety of companies are building them—or something close.

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

The New York Times Magazine – April 14, 2024

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (April 14, 2024):The latest issue features…

How a ‘Nerdy’ Prosecutor Became the First to Try Trump

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan D.A., campaigned as the best candidate to go after the former president. Now he finds himself leading Trump’s first prosecution — and perhaps the only one before the November election.

The Playwright Who Fearlessly Reimagines America

In her new play, ‘Sally & Tom,’ Suzan-Lori Parks brings exuberant provocation to the gravest historical questions.

The New York Times Magazine – April 7, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (April 6, 2024):The latest issue features…

What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise

A collage of National Enquirer photos and headlines.

Inside the notorious “catch and kill” campaign that now stands at the heart of the former president’s legal trial.

Larry David’s Rule Book for How (Not) to Live in Society

He’s a wild, monomaniacal jerk. He’s also our greatest interpreter of American manners since Emily Post.

The Economist Magazine – April 6, 2024 Preview

China’s risky reboot

The Economist Magazine (April 4, 2024): The latest issue features China’s risky reboot; Trump and nuclear deterrence; Latin America’s right-wingers; Why India’s elite love Modi and more…

Xi Jinping’s misguided plan to escape economic stagnation

It will disappoint China’s people and anger the rest of the world

Central banks have spent down their credibility

That will make inflation trickier to handle in future

Beware a world without American power

Donald Trump’s threat to dump allies would risk a nuclear free-for-all

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 8, 2024

A person's silhouette walks up stairs toward a busy city street.

The New Yorker (April 1, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Pascal Campion’s “Into the Light” – The artist depicts stepping out of the subway into the overwhelming glow of the city.

So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit

An anthropomorphic lantern being lit by a man.

What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis.

By Leslie Jamison

When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”

Black Holes Are Even Weirder Than You Imagined

An artistic rendering of two supermassive black holes.

It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.

By Rivka Galchen

Black holes are, of course, awesome. But, for scientists, they are more awesome. If a rainbow is marvellous, then understanding how all the colors of the rainbow are present, unified, in ordinary white light—that’s more marvellous. (Though, famously, in his poem “Lamia,” John Keats disagreed, blaming “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow.) In recent years, the amount of data that scientists have discovered about black holes has grown exponentially. In January, astronomers announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had observed the oldest black hole yet—one present when the universe was a mere four hundred million years old. (It’s estimated that it’s now 13.8 billion years old.) Recently, two supermassive black holes, with a combined mass of twenty-eight billion suns, were measured and shown to have been rotating tightly around each other, but not colliding, for the past three billion years. And those are just the examples that are easiest for the public to make some sense of. To me, a supermassive black hole sounds sublime; to a scientist, it can also be a test of wild hypotheses. “Astrophysics is an exercise in incredible experiments not runnable on Earth,” Avery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and at the Perimeter Institute, told me. “And black holes are an ideal laboratory.”

The New York Times Magazine – March 31, 2024

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (March 30, 2024):

The Race to Reinvent CPR

A new, high-tech approach called ECPR can restart more hearts and save more lives. Why aren’t more hospitals embracing it?

By Helen Ouyang

Greg Hayes, an emergency first responder in Chanhassen, Minn., was picking up takeout sushi when a 911 call came in: A 61-year-old had stopped breathing at home. Hayes and his team jumped in their ambulance and were soon pulling up in front of a suburban two-story house, where paramedics and other first responders were also arriving. All of them grabbed their equipment and raced through the open garage to find a man, gray and still, on the living-room floor with his wife and stepdaughter nearby.

How Has Retirement Changed Your Relationship?

Maybe something like: A couple, photographed from behind, hold hands as they look out at a body of water with some buildings and trees around it.

We want to hear from you for a New York Times Magazine feature about how this transition can affect marriages and long-term relationships.

By Susan Dominus

When people think about stages of life that can strain relationships, they often reflect on the first sleepless years of child rearing or the phase of parenting that involves rebellious teens. Retirement, typically anticipated as a time of relaxation, might not come to mind, but this transition away from work can also be stressful, coinciding with reinventions and re-evaluations that can cause couples to suddenly experience new tensions. It can also be a time of renewed connection and relationship growth. Often, it’s both at once.