
London Review of Books (LRB) – March 27, 2024: The latest issue features Brandon Taylor – Two Years With Zola,,,

London Review of Books (LRB) – March 27, 2024: The latest issue features Brandon Taylor – Two Years With Zola,,,

The Economist Magazine (March 21, 2024): The latest issue features

Artificial intelligence holds huge promise in health care. But it also faces massive barriers
Better diagnoses. Personalised support for patients. Faster drug discovery. Greater efficiency. Artificial intelligence (ai) is generating excitement and hyperbole everywhere, but in the field of health care it has the potential to be transformational. In Europe analysts predict that deploying ai could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year; in America, they say, it could also save money, shaving $200bn-360bn from overall annual medical spending, now $4.5trn a year (or 17% of gdp). From smart stethoscopes and robot surgeons to the analysis of large data sets or the ability to chat to a medical ai with a human face, opportunities abound.

After the energy crisis, Europe faces surging Chinese imports and the threat of Trump tariffs

Ukraine must prepare

Melting ice sheets do more than raise sea levels
Nature Magazine – March 27, 2024: The latest issue cover features ‘Qubit Quota’ – Code cuts overhead for quantum error correction by 90%…
Scientists identify a molecule that halts cholesterol production in the liver when dietary consumption is high. Research Highlight
House prices drop by 1% if wind turbines are close and visible, but they rebound quickly. Research Highlight
Data from billions of proton collisions reveal that subatomic particles called W+ and W− bosons keep company with a photon .Research Highlight
Scientists turn waste wood into an ‘ink’ that can be printed into a variety of structures.

Country Life Magazine – March 27, 2024: The latest issue features:
Marianne Taylor examines how we can help to halt the worrying decline of the humble hedgehog, Britain’s favourite mammal

Charles Quest-Ritson is wowed by the woodland garden created during the past two decades at Broughton Grange, Oxfordshire
Iron-man Sir Antony Gormley is taking over Houghton Hall in Norfolk with 100 life-size figures, as Charlotte Mullins discovers

The Dean of Westminster picks a striking work that is all about looking — and then looking again
In the first of two articles, John Goodall visits Lancing College Chapel, West Sussex, a masterpiece 154 years in the making

Kate Green tunes in for Roy Plomley’s Desert Island Discs
John Lewis-Stempel marvels at one of the smallest, yet mightiest miracles in the natural world
Your seat in church once told a lot about your status in the parish, reveals Andrew Green

It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it: John Lewis-Stempel hauls an errant heifer from a ditch
Spring has sprung — how many native wildflowers can you name?
Hetty Lintell explores exquisite gilets, bespoke tailoring and sparkling aquamarine jewellery
Giles Kime is armed with a crystal ball for his latest building project
Melanie Johnson on spinach
Plant a Philadelphus, says John Hoyland, and enjoy an explosion of blooms and scent this summer
And much more

Times Literary Supplement (March 27, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Illustrating Ray Bradbury’ – Michael Caines on a writer who transcended genre; Fifteen French Kings; Spy stories; Neel Mukherjee’s art and artifice; Space colonization and Andrew O’Hagan on the Cally Road….


Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter (APRIL 2024): The new issue features 5 Ways to ID Ultraprocessed Foods; Should You Eat Gluten Free?; Q&A: Daily Food Choices and Myth: Carbs and Weight…

The New Yorker (March 25, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Mark Ulriksen’s “Standing Guard” – The artist depicts the tail-wagging occasion of the first signs of spring.

The civil-rights attorney has created a museum, a memorial, and, now, a sculpture park, indicting the city of Montgomery—a former capital of the domestic slave trade and the cradle of the Confederacy.
The National Monument to Freedom, in Montgomery, Alabama, is a giant book, standing forty-three feet high and a hundred and fifty feet wide. The book is propped wide open, and engraved on its surface are the names of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Black people, documented in the 1870 census, who were emancipated after the Civil War. On the spine of the book is a credo written for the dead:

Your children love you.
The country you built must honor you.
We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement.
We commit to advancing freedom in your name.
What if building on the water could be safer and sturdier than building on flood-prone land?
By Kyle Chayka
In a corner of the Rijksmuseum hangs a seventeenth-century cityscape by the Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Berckheyde, “View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht,” which depicts the construction of Baroque mansions along one of Amsterdam’s main canals. Handsome double-wide brick buildings line the Herengracht’s banks, their corniced façades reflected on the water’s surface. Interspersed among the new homes are spaces, like gaps in a young child’s smile, where vacant lots have yet to be developed.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 23, 2024):

“The Morningside” reckons with climate change and its fallout while finding hope in the stories we preserve.
By Jessamine Chan
THE MORNINGSIDE, by Téa Obreht
The elegant, effortless world-building in Téa Obreht’s haunting new novel, “The Morningside,” begins with a map. Island City resembles Manhattan, but alarmingly smaller, the borders of the city redrawn by the rising water. There’s the River to the east, the Bay to the west. Here, hurricanes and tides have made building collapse a constant danger, the freeway is visible only on low-tide days, food is government rations, the wealthy have fled “upriver to scattered little freshwater townships,” and gigantic birds called rook cranes are everywhere.
In Natalie Dykstra’s hands, the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner is a tribute to the power of art.

CHASING BEAUTY: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Natalie Dykstra
Bright, impetuous and obsessed with beautiful things, Isabella Stewart Gardner led a life out of a Gilded Age novel. Born into a wealthy New York family, she married into an even wealthier Boston one when she wed John Lowell Gardner in 1860, only to be ostracized by her adopted city’s more conservative denizens, who found her self-assurance and penchant for “jollification” a bit much.

Téa Obreht’s stunning debut novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” is a hugely ambitious, audaciously written work that provides an indelible picture of life in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from the fallout of civil war. At the same time it explores the very essence of storytelling and the role it plays in people’s lives, especially when they are “confounded by the extremes” of war and social upheaval and need to somehow “stitch together unconnected events in order to understand” what is happening around them.
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – MARCH 25, 2024 ISSUE:
Insurers may cut back on benefits as their profits get squeezed. Why a Medicare/Medigap plan could be a better deal for consumers.
The London-based mining company produces copper ore, diamonds, and platinum, but its shares are treated more like lead. It offers shareholders two ways to win.
The prospectus for former President Trump’s new media company details its potential risks to investors.
Randall W. Forsyth
Jack Hough

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (March 22, 2024):

When it’s a quick trip from the schlocky pleasures of Cancún to the remote cities of the Maya, is something lost along the way?
El Tren Maya, which links five states in southern Mexico, is one of the country’s most-debated infrastructure projects. Carved through the Yucatán Peninsula at great expense, the 966-mile loop pits the megaproject ambitions of Mexico’s departing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, against the will of environmentalists and Indigenous leaders seeking to preserve a pristine environment of jaguars, ancient ruins and sacred underwater caves.

Why had immigrants, seekers and pilgrims been drawn for centuries to the treacherous shores of Mona Island? I set off to find out.
By Carina del Valle Schorske
Every year, I spend a month or two in Puerto Rico, where my mother’s family is from. Often I go in winter, with the other snowbirds, finding solace among palm trees. But I’m not a tourist, not really. I track the developers that privatize the shoreline; I follow the environmental reports that give our beaches a failing grade. I’m disenchanted with the Island of Enchantment, suspicious of an image that obscures the unglamorous conditions of daily life: frequent blackouts, meager public services, a rental market ravaged by Airbnb. Maybe that’s why I turned away from the sunshine and started to explore caves with my friends Ramón and Javier, seeking out wonders not yet packaged for the visitor economy. I’ve been learning to love stalactites and squeaking bats, black snakes and cloistered waterfalls — even, slowly, the darkness itself.