An underground nuclear arsenal in Israel dwarfs the tunnels alleged at a Gaza hospital.
It’s one thing to burrow beneath the ground, digging to construct a tunnel for refuge, a passage of goods, or to store weapons during a time of war. It’s quite another for a small child to use one hand to dig their way out of the rubble that has collapsed on them.
The New Yorker – December 4, 2023 issue: The new issue‘s cover features Sergio García Sánchez’s “Ready to Soar” – The artist discusses rhythm, rigor, and the linguistic capabilities of art.
The revelation that ChatGPT, the astonishing artificial-intelligence chatbot, had been trained on an Nvidia supercomputer spurred one of the largest single-day gains in stock-market history. When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars. A few months earlier, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., had informed investors that Nvidia had sold similar supercomputers to fifty of America’s hundred largest companies. By the close of trading, Nvidia was the sixth most valuable corporation on earth, worth more than Walmart and ExxonMobil combined. Huang’s business position can be compared to that of Samuel Brannan, the celebrated vender of prospecting supplies in San Francisco in the late eighteen-forties. “There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer,” one Wall Street analyst said.
On November 6th, Donald Trump emerged from a New York City courtroom, where he had testified in a civil trial alleging that he and others in the Trump Organization had committed fraud, and gave himself a great review. “I think it went very well,” he told reporters. “If you were there, and you listened, you’d see what a scam this is.” He meant that the case was a scam and not that his company was. “Everybody saw what happened today,” he went on. “And it was very conclusive.”
The German actress Sandra Hüller probes characters with unusual depth. But to portray a Fascist wife, in “The Zone of Interest,” she reversed her usual approach—and withheld her empathy.
In “Anatomy of a Fall,” Hüller stars as a successful novelist accused of murdering her husband. The camera often lingers on her face as it shifts like quicksilver between playfulness, defiance, and evasion.Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (November 17, 2023): The latest issue features Was Peace Ever Possible in the Israel-Palestine Conflict?; Finding a Moral Center in This Era of War; The Beatles Are Still Charting the Future of Pop. It Looks Bleak – Their latest song points toward a future where no golden goose need ever stop laying, and more…
Thirty years ago, a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed achievable. The story of how it fell apart reveals why the fight remains so intractable today.
Phil Klay, as both a participant and a writer, has been thinking deeply about war for a long time. In his two acclaimed works of fiction, the book of short stories “Redeployment,” which won a 2014 National Book Award, and the novel “Missionaries” (2020), and in the nonfiction collection “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War” (2022), Klay has interrogated, to profound effect and with a deeply humane and moral sensibility, what war does to our hearts and minds, individually and collectively, here and abroad. “I’m interested in the kinds of stories that we tell ourselves about war,” says Klay, who is a 40-year-old veteran of the Iraq war.
Smithsonian Magazine (December 2023) –The latest issue features ‘Can A Robot Replace the World’s Greatest Artists?; A tiny reindeer enjoys its day in the sun; In Ukraine, war reshapes a Holocaust Memorial; the Rebirth of a Lost American Wine Region, and more…
Michael Cunningham’s “Day” peeks into the lives of a family on one specific April date across three years as life changes because of Covid and other challenges.
By Caleb Crain
DAY, by Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham’s new novel, “Day,” visits a family on April 5 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 — before, during and after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which shadows the book although the words “Covid” and “pandemic” never appear.
In Chetna Maroo’s debut novel, an adolescent girl mourns the death of her mother in the empty reverberations between points.
By Ivy Pochoda
WESTERN LANE, by Chetna Maroo
At the start of Chetna Maroo’s polished and disciplined debut, Gopi, an 11-year-old Jain girl who has just lost her mother, stands on a squash court outside London. She isn’t playing. Instead, she’s listening to the sound of the ball hitting the wall on the adjacent court, “a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo.” It is not so much the shot itself that Gopi is hearing, but that echo, the empty reverb, the lonely response as the ball’s impact gives the striker a split second to retreat to the T, the center of the court, and prepare to counteract her opponent’s responding shot.
The agreement at the conference of the parties (cop) to the un Framework Convention on Climate Change, which took place in Paris in 2015, was somewhat impotent. As many pointed out at the time, it could not tell countries what to do; it could not end the fossil-fuel age by fiat; it could not draw back the seas, placate the winds or dim the noonday sun. But it could at least lay down the law for subsequent cops, decreeing that this year’s should see the first “global stocktake” of what had and had not been done to bring the agreement’s overarching goals closer.
Science Magazine – November 17, 2023: The new issue features Dolomite, a key mineral in stunning geological formations, such as Drei Zinnen (shown here), Niagara Falls, and Hoodoos. Despite its natural abundance, laboratory growth of dolomite has proven impossible—a contradiction known as the “dolomite problem.”
HISTORY TODAY MAGAZINE (DECEMBER 2023) – This issue features The 50 years that made America from Revolution to the Monroe Doctrine, the forgotten role of Archbishop Wulfstan, the home front of the First World War, the role of sokol in Czech nationalism, Volcanos on tour, and the best history books of 2023.
Fifty years separate the Boston Tea Party and the Monroe Doctrine. How did a group of British colonies become a self-proclaimed protector of continents within half a century?
It was the evening of 16 December 1773. At Boston’s Old South Meeting House, more than 5,000 people awaited word from the governor of Massachusetts Bay, Thomas Hutchinson. Had the governor finally given in to their demand to send back to England the three ships laden with East India Company tea that were moored in Boston harbour? When learning of the governor’s refusal, tradition holds that the firebrand orator Samuel Adams loudly declared that ‘this meeting’ could do no more to defend the rights of the people. The words were a pre-arranged signal.
Books of the Year 2023
Revolutions and rubles, godlings and fascist symbols, Shakespeare and silk: ten historians choose their favourite new history books of 2023.
Nature Magazine – November 23, 2023: The latest issue cover features how cryo-electron microscopy can reveal the structure of motor protein myosin filaments, which power the heart via muscle contraction.
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