THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 15, 2023): The latest issue features ‘Glorious Memoirs by the Very Rich’ – A look back at a time when the super-wealthy felt they had nothing to lose by letting readers inside their gilded corridors; For Kate Christensen, Bad Prose Can Never Yield a Great Book – “A book is made of language,” says the author, whose new novel is “Welcome Home, Stranger.” “How can a house be great if it’s made of shoddy materials? How can a dinner be great if it’s made with terrible ingredients?”
“Class consciousness takes a vacation while we’re in the thrall of this book,” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote in the Book Review in 1985, in her evaluation of the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt’s memoir “Once Upon a Time.” To be clear, Harrison was referring to the class consciousness of the reader, not the author. Vanderbilt demonstrates perfect awareness throughout her book that most young children don’t play with emerald tiaras and alligator jewel boxes lined in chestnut satin, or rely on the services of multiple butlers, or lose count of their own houses. Harrison’s point was that Vanderbilt’s talent with a pen — and perspective on her own economic altitude — allowed consumers of her tale to suspend their envy and engage with the reality of growing up in opulent neglect.
“A book is made of language,” says the author, whose new novel is “Welcome Home, Stranger.” “How can a house be great if it’s made of shoddy materials? How can a dinner be great if it’s made with terrible ingredients?”
What books are on your night stand?
I’m living temporarily in a rented house in Iowa City, teaching at the Writers’ Workshop. When I arrived there was not one book in the entire place, so I made an emergency trip to the local used-book store, collecting whatever leaped out at me from the shelves, mostly based on the wonderful titles: “Overhead in a Balloon,” by Mavis Gallant; “Watson’s Apology,” by Beryl Bainbridge; “Anthills of the Savannah,” by Chinua Achebe; “The Brandon Papers,” by Quentin Bell; “The Marquis of Bolibar,” by Leo Perutz; “The Seven Sisters,” by Margaret Drabble; “Bruised Hibiscus,” by Elizabeth Nunez; “A Journal of the Plague Year,” by Daniel Defoe.
Science Magazine – December 14, 2023: The new issue cover features The 2023 Breakthrough of the Year: Obesity meets its match – Blockbuster weight loss drugs show promise for a wider range of health benefits; Runners-Up: At last, modest headway against Alzheimer’s; and Breakdowns of the Year – What went wrong in the world of Science….
Blockbuster weight loss drugs show promise for a wider range of health benefits
Obesity plays out as a private struggle and a public health crisis. In the United States, about 70% of adults are affected by excess weight, and in Europe that number is more than half. The stigma against fat can be crushing; its risks, life-threatening. Defined as a body mass index of at least 30, obesity is thought to power type 2 diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, fatty liver disease, and certain cancers.
Medicine has had little to offer the tens of millions of people worldwide with Alzheimer’s disease, and the few approved treatments have only targeted symptoms. But in January, U.S. regulators greenlit the first drug that clearly, if modestly, slows cognitive decline by tackling the disease’s underlying biology; a second, related treatment is close behind. Neither comes close to a cure, and both have serious risks, but they offer new hope to patients and families.
Israel is resolved to remove Hamas and its terrorist infrastructure from the Gaza Strip permanently, and for much of the world, its determination raises one question more than any other: What comes next in Gaza? For those who disapprove of Israel’s actions in the war or those who either passively or actively support the role of Hamas as the Strip’s governing authority, the lack of answers provides a pretext not only to demand a permanent cease-fire but to suggest (often quietly and with a furrowed brow indicating supposed realpolitik wisdom) that the path Israel seems to be making for itself is a dead end from which it needs to be saved.
In his new book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised,American Enterprise Institute scholar James Pethokoukis writes about the go-go years of the 1960s: Saturn V rockets were blasting to the moon, atomic power promised to make electricity “too cheap to meter,” and sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek depicted new marvels right around the corner.
“Joseph,” my friend Edward Shils said to me, “we have spoken about many things, among them about various writers, but we are both too civilized ever to talk about Shakespeare. After all, what could one say?” Yes, what can one say? Over a long writing career, I have never written about Shakespeare, and, best I can recall, among the many millions of words I have produced, have never even quoted him. Truth is, I have long admired Shakespeare without being especially nuts about him.
A compact album presentation of Hockney’s newest explorations in portraiture
Artbook D.A.P.:
This concise volume illustrates around 40 acrylic on canvas works painted by David Hockney (born 1937) at his Normandy studio—depicting his friends and visitors, as well as the artist himself. David Hockney: Normandy Portraits showcases a series of some previously unseen portraits, across 48 pages, uninterrupted by text, to allow readers to engage directly with the artworks.
These new works highlight the ongoing importance of portraiture within the artist’s practice and demonstrate his sentiment that “drawings and paintings … are a lot better than photographs to give you a sense of the person.”
Hockney returned to painting after an intensive period spent depicting the Normandy landscape using an iPad. The portraits were painted quickly and directly onto the canvas without underdrawing. As Hockney has said, “to do a portrait slowly is a bit of a contradiction.”
The Economist Magazine (December 14, 2023): The latest issue features ‘The media and the message’ – Journalism and the 2024 presidential election; ‘Can you have a healthy democracy without a common set of facts?; Iran’s regime is weaker than it looks, and therefore more pliable, and more…
America’s presidential election is a test of that proposition
Journalists should not spend much of their time writing about journalism. The world is more interesting than the inky habits of the people who report on it. But this week we are making an exception, because the discovery and dissemination of information matters a lot to politics. Don’t take our word for it: “A popular government,” wrote James Madison in 1822, “without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.” Were Thomas Jefferson offered a choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he said that he would choose the press (though that is probably going a bit far).
America should deter it from escalating the Gaza war, but also engage with it
Twelve months ago Iran was reeling from protests sparked by the death in custody of a young woman who had been arrested for showing too much hair. Its theocratic regime was increasingly isolated, as Arab states forged closer ties with its enemy, Israel. The economy was a mess, adding to popular anger at Iran’s ageing supreme leader and inept president. The Islamic Republic had not seemed so vulnerable in decades.
Foreign Affairs (December 13, 2023): The new January/February 2024 issue features ‘The Self-Doubting Superpower’ – America shouldn’t give up on the World It Made; The Middle East Remade; Why Israel Slept; Hamas’s Advantage, and more….
Most Americans think their country is in decline. In 2018, when the Pew Research Center asked Americans how they felt their country would perform in 2050, 54 percent of respondents agreed that the U.S. economy would be weaker. An even larger number, 60 percent, agreed that the United States would be less important in the world. This should not be surprising; the political atmosphere has been pervaded for some time by a sense that the country is headed in the wrong direction. According to a long-running Gallup poll, the share of Americans who are “satisfied” with the way things are going has not crossed 50 percent in 20 years. It currently stands at 20 percent.
In a barbaric surprise attack launched by Hamas on October 7, more Jews were slaughtered than on any day since the Holocaust. Thousands of elite Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip infiltrated small communities and cities in southern Israel, where they proceeded to commit sadistic, repulsive crimes against humanity, filming their vile deeds and boasting about them to friends and family back home.
Nature Magazine – December 13, 2023:The latest issue cover features the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN), which presented nine papers that map the entire mouse brain in unprecedented detail.
The extravagantly feathered Seychelles paradise flycatcher lacks genetic diversity, which might hamper its resilience to climate change and other threats.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
Artbook D.A.P.:
Boomers Daily 