Tag Archives: Politics & Opinion

Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – August 2024

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HARPER’S MAGAZINE – July 15, 2024: The latest issue features ‘The New Satanic Panic’ – Exorcism in the Age of TikTok; Has Psychology ruined Poetry; America’s Last Granite Carvers; William T. Vollmann reports from Korea’s DMZ, Matthew Karp on the decline of the American left, Jonathan Lethem on museums, Hisham Matar on the dangers of not knowing, Christian Wiman on Seamus Heaney, and more.

The Demon Slayers

The new age of American exorcisms by Sam Kestenbaum

The pastor is pacing back and forth, a cordless microphone in one hand, the other extended before him. He says, “This is the awakening the American church has been waiting on,” and keeps pacing. He has readied himself before taking the elevated stage, donning a paisley shirt, top button undone, and speaks now from the wood pulpit of his revival tent. 

Music and Mystery  

Seamus Heaney and the end of the poetic career

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45.

This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.

Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – July 22, 2024

In a Supreme Court portrait Trumps head replaces the heads of the Conservative Justices.

The New Yorker (July 15, 2024): The latest issue features Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” – The remaking of the Supreme Court in Donald Trump’s image.

F.D.R.’s Election Lessons for Joe Biden and the Democrats

Less than six weeks before Democrats formally choose their nominee, the President is marching down a path of constant peril.

Inside the Trump Plan for 2025

A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President’s return to the White House. By Jonathan Blitzer

Paradise Bronx

Paradise Bronx

From the time of the Revolutionary War to the fires of the nineteen-seventies, the history of the borough has always been shaped by its in-between-ness.

By Ian Frazier

The Economist Magazine – July 13, 2024 Preview

How to raise the world’s IQ

The Economist Magazine (July 11, 2024): The latest issue features How to raise the world’s IQ

Labour’s first week

What does Labour’s win mean for British foreign policy?

Will Biden’s dam break?

Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside

Ungovernable France

France is desperately searching for a government

Inside AI’s black box

Researchers are figuring out how large language models work

Read full edition

The New Yorker Magazine ‘Interview Issue’ July 2024

gif cover of 2024 Interviews Issue

The New Yorker (July 8, 2024): The new digital issue features The Interviews Issue – A week of conversations with figures of note.

Nicolas Cage Is Still Evolving

The actor talks about the origins of “Adaptation,” his potential leap to television, and the art of “keeping it enigmatic.”

By Susan Orlean

Square black and white portrait of Nicolas Cage. Cage is wearing a suit and is photographed from the side looking at the camera.
Triptych of three blackandwhite portraits of Nicolas Cage in a black suit and white collared shirt. In the middle image...

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.)

Ira Glass Hears It All

Ira Glass cycling on the street in New York.

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.

The New York Times Magazine – July 7, 2024

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

Eddie Murphy Is Ready to Look Back

By David Marchese

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.

Ti West Is Turning Hollywood Into a Horror Show

Ti West.

His “X” trilogy — which culminates with “MaXXXine” — obsesses over cinema, stardom and the industry itself.

By RYAN BRADLEY

The Real Problem With Legal Weed

New York is trying to treat an addictive substance just like any other product.

By CHARLES FAIN LEHMAN

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – July 8 & 15, 2024

A woman holds an ice cream cone at Coney Island.

The New Yorker (July 1, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Kadir Nelson’s “Soft-Serve” – Keeping it cool while keeping cool…

Finally, a Leap Forward on Immigration Policy

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

High-Roller Presidential Donor Perks

Give now to get your name on the wing of a fighter jet!

Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Scabrous Satire of the Super-Rich

In “Long Island Compromise,” wealth is a curse. Or is that just what we’d like to think?

The Economist Magazine – June 29, 2024 Preview

France’s centre cannot hold

The Economist Magazine (June 27, 2024): The latest issue features

France’s centre cannot hold

After the election, populists of the right and left could hobble a centrist president

What to expect from a second Biden term

He has a domestic agenda, but no easy way to bring it about

Can countries get rich from services?

American fried chicken can now be served from the Philippines

Making heavy weather of hot weather

Deadly heat is increasingly the norm, not an exception to it

Read full edition

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – July 1, 2024

Image may contain Book Publication Furniture Person Chair Accessories Glasses Sink and Indoors

The New Yorker (June 24, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Klaas Verplancke’s “Chilling” – Coming up with creative ways to stay coo;…

What Can We Expect from the Biden-Trump Debate?

Until recently, it wasn’t clear that the two men would ever share a stage again. Now there’s a potential for even greater stakes and strangeness than four years ago. By Evan Osnos

The Doctor Tom Brady and Leonardo DiCaprio Call When They Get Hurt

Neal ElAttrache, the surgeon to the stars of sport and screen, can fix anything. By Zach Helfand

John Fetterman’s War

Is the Pennsylvania senator trolling the left or offering a way forward for Democrats? By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

The Economist Magazine – June 22, 2024 Preview

Dawn of the solar age

The Economist Magazine (June 15, 2024): The latest issue features Dawn of the solar age….

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world

An energy-rich future is within reach

The future of combat

AI will transform the character of warfare

Technology will make war faster and more opaque. It could 

AI and war

The character of warfare is about to be profoundly changed by artificial intelligence

What taxes would Labour raise

Growth alone will not fix Britain’s public finances

Macron’s deepening mess

A snap election in France reveals the flimsiness of his legacy

The champagne boom

Wine collectors are at last taking champagne seriously

Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – July 2024

HARPER’S MAGAZINE – June 17, 2024: The latest issue features Resisting Artificial Intelligence; A visual history of the Olympics and What remains of Syria…

The Gods of Logic

AI images generated by Phillip Toledano for Harper’s Magazine © The artist/Institute. Toledano’s book Another America was published in May by L’Artiere Edizioni.

Before and after artificial intelligence

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in its path, a chaos that engulfed generations in an orgy of destruction lasting almost a hundred years. A war with a death toll so high that it left a permanent scar on humanity’s soul. But we will never know the names of those who fought and died in it, or the immense suffering and destruction it caused, because the Butlerian Jihad, abominable and devastating as it was,…

Metal Machine Music

Can AI think creatively? Can we?

“Far as the east from even, / Dim as the border star, / Life is the little creature / That carries the great cigar.” So wrote Emily Dickinson, with some unfortunate help from a computer. As I read that stanza in February 2022, I was more than six months into a scientific experiment I was conducting with my friend and colleague Morten Christiansen, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell, where he and I are professors. In 2021, two years before ChatGPT would become a household name, Christiansen had been impressed by the initial technical descriptions of GPT-3, the recently released version of the generative large language…