National Geographic Traveller – October 2023
Tag Archives: Previews
Finance Preview: Barron’s Magazine – August 28, 2023
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – AUGUST 28, 2023 ISSUE:
Weather Is Wreaking Havoc With Insurance. These Companies Can Handle the Storm.
Backed by nearly $1 trillion in capital and rising premiums, insurers might actually profit off the coming wave of catastrophic weather.
Floods, Wildfires, and Droughts: People Still Moving to Hotspots
Why millions of Americans continue to move to areas exposed to high climate risks.
How to Get Extra Yield on Your Cash
Bonds are close to becoming more attractive than stocks.
This Invesco Pro Is High on China, ETFs, Today’s Markets—and the Future
Marty Flanagan spent 18 years as Invesco’s CEO. During that time, he transformed the assets manager by expanding operations in Asia and acquiring the PowerShares ETF brand.Long read
SharkNinja Reinvented the Ice Cream Maker. Its Stock Is a Buy.
The company has been a consistent and successful innovator in small appliances, an industry that has been marked by slow growth and few exciting new products.4 min
The New York Times Book Review – August 27, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (August 27, 2023) The new issue features: James McBride’s Latest Is a Murder Mystery Inside a Great American Novel; The First Chinese American Movie Star and the Cost of Glittering Fame, and more…
James McBride’s Latest Is a Murder Mystery Inside a Great American Novel
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” opens with the discovery of a skeleton in a well, and then flashes back to explore its connection to a town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.
By Danez Smith
A few weeks ago, around the same time I was working on this review, I visited the Guggenheim with my fiancé. The exhibition on display as we trekked up the museum’s famous spiral was “Measuring Infinity,” a marvelous retrospective on the work of the great Venezuelan artist Gego. A German Jew who fled Nazi persecution in Europe, Gego arrived in Venezuela in 1939 and went on to become one of the most important artists to emerge from Latin America in the 20th century. Her work speaks to a deep curiosity about the interrelation of shapes, things and the dimensions created by those relationships.
The First Chinese American Movie Star and the Cost of Glittering Fame
A new biography of Anna May Wong, “Daughter of the Dragon,” is intended as a form of reclamation and subversion.
It was, according to the film historian Kevin Brownlow, “one of the most racist films ever made in America.” “Old San Francisco” (1927) featured a white actor playing a Chinese villain passing as a white man (got that?) who plans to sell an innocent white girl into white slavery until he is conveniently crushed by an earthquake. Before his grisly end he is aided in his nefarious scheme by an Asian character identified only as “a flower of the Orient,” played by an ingénue named Anna May Wong.
Views: The New York Times Magazine – August 27, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (August 27, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, Jen Percy reports on what people misunderstand about rape. Plus, the case that could unravel an art dynasty and a Harvard professor who is also an alien hunter.
What People Misunderstand About Rape
Sexual assault often goes unpunished when victims fail to fight back. But investigators, psychologists and biologists all describe freezing as an involuntary response to trauma.
By Jen Percy
There’s a lingua franca that women use, a repeated vocabulary to describe what they experience and think during a sexual assault. Variations of “freezing” are often part of that vocabulary. But the word has so many referents in its colloquial usage that it’s hard to know precisely what it means to each person saying it.
“I just absolutely froze,” Brooke Shields said in the documentary “Pretty Baby,” describing how she felt when being raped. “And I just thought, Stay alive and get out.”
The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty
How a widow’s legal fight against the Wildenstein family of France has threatened their storied collection — and revealed the underbelly of the global art market.
By Rachel Corbett
Twenty years ago, a glamorous platinum-blond widow arrived at the Paris law office of Claude Dumont Beghi in tears. Someone was trying to take her horses — her “babies” — away, and she needed a lawyer to stop them.
Research Preview: Science Magazine – August 25, 2023
If AI becomes conscious, how will we know?
Scientists and philosophers are proposing a checklist based on theories of human consciousness
In 2021, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines—and got himself fired—when he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he’d been testing, was sentient. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially so-called large language models such as LaMDA and ChatGPT, can certainly seem conscious. But they’re trained on vast amounts of text to imitate human responses. So how can we really know?
Previews: History Today Magazine-September 2023
HISTORY TODAY MAGAZINE (SEPTEMBER 2023) – This issue features Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore story, conquistador Hernán Cortés’ on trial, the fascist plot to kill the king, the fascinating fusion of Old English names, and sharpshooter Marjorie Foster’s battle with the War Office. Plus: reviews, opinion, crossword and much more!
‘Homer and His Iliad’ by Robin Lane Fox review
Homer and His Iliad by Robin Lane Fox is a masterly survey of the Iliad, its majesty, its pathos and its unparalleled progression from wrath to pity.
Faced with a jumble of bewildering ruins, modern visitors to Hisarlik in northwest Turkey, the site of ancient Troy, may find themselves perplexed and sometimes disappointed. The wide bay where the Greeks so famously beached 1,000 ships is gone, buried in silt from a local river, while beyond the fine sloping walls, a palimpsest of settlements spanning 4,000 years lies scarred and disfigured by the deep trench gouged by Heinrich Schliemann, its first archaeologist, during two decades of digging in the 19th century. Schliemann had been drawn to Hisarlik, and also to mainland Greece, by his passion for the Homeric poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, and his conviction that they described or reflected real societies and events, not least the decade-long Trojan War.
Nationalism in Nepal: On the Right Side of History
Adipurush, a controversial Bollywood film, has sparked anger in Nepal. For small states with big neighbours, details matter.
Balen Shah, the 33-year-old rapper and mayor of Kathmandu, is a man on various missions. Since his unlikely victory in 2022, he has waged war on government ministries, landlords, Nepal’s civil aviation authority, roadside hawkers and landless slum dwellers. Now he is taking on Bollywood because of a supposed historical slight.
Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore Story
One man more than any other is associated with Singapore’s remarkable success. On his centenary: who was Lee Kuan Yew and how did he do it?
Previews: The Economist Magazine – August 26, 2023
Why China’s economy won’t be fixed
An increasingly autocratic government is making bad decisions
Whatever has gone wrong? After China rejoined the world economy in 1978, it became the most spectacular growth story in history. Farm reform, industrialisation and rising incomes lifted nearly 800m people out of extreme poverty. Having produced just a tenth as much as America in 1980, China’s economy is now about three-quarters the size. Yet instead of roaring back after the government abandoned its “zero-covid” policy at the end of 2022, it is lurching from one ditch to the next.
Prigozhin’s death shows that Russia is a mafia state
A healthy country uses justice to restore order. Mr Putin uses violence instead
As we published this editorial, it was not certain that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private jet was shot down by Russian air-defences, or that the mutineer and mercenary boss was on board. But everyone believes that it was and that his death was a punishment of spectacular ruthlessness ordered by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. And that is the way Mr Putin likes it.
Research Preview: Nature Magazine – August 24, 2023
Want a sustainable future? Then look to the world’s cities
In a rapidly urbanizing world, what happens in cities matters — and sustainability success stories show what can be achieved when researchers and policymakers work together.
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and that proportion is set to grow. By 2050, another two billion people will be urban dwellers, the United Nations estimates. Cities lie at the nexus of all aspects of human development, from building thriving economies to coping with climate change.
Earth’s hottest month: these charts show what happened in July and what comes next
The planet has warmed 1.2 ºC on average, but that’s enough to produce big extremes.
From wilting saguaros in Arizona and hot-tub-like temperatures off the coast of Florida to increased heat-related hospitalizations in Europe and agricultural losses in China, last month felt unusually hot. It was: several teams have now confirmed that July 2023 was the hottest month in recorded history. And there’s more to come.
July is typically the hottest month of the year, and this July shattered records going back as far as 1850 by around 0.25 °C. Overall, the average global temperature was 1.54 °C above the preindustrial average for July, according to Berkeley Earth, a non-profit group in California that is one of several organizations tracking global warming. It’s a seemingly small increase, but what many people across the world actually experienced was a bout of long and often brutal heat waves.
Research: New Scientist Magazine – August 26, 2023
Environment – How we broke the water cycle and can no longer rely on rain to fall
Health – Unravelling the secrets of the vagus nerve will revolutionize medicine
Technology – Nowhere to hide: Data harvesters came for your privacy – and found it
Space – Aliens on low-oxygen worlds may never discover fireRead the latest issue
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – August 25, 2023
The Guardian Weekly (August 25, 2023) – The issue features ‘Fever Pitch’ – The unstoppable rise of women’s football; ‘Trust me, I’m a nurse’ – How a British child serial killer went undetected, and Art, where you least expect it…
The conviction and sentencing of Lucy Letby, who murdered seven babies while working as a hospital nurse, shocked Britain this week. As she becomes only the country’s fourth woman to receive a whole-life imprisonment term, Josh Halliday recounts her dreadful crimes and why she was not investigated for so long, despite several colleagues’ suspicions.
Sports writer Paul MacInnes reports from Jeddah on Saudi Arabia’s bid to buy up chunks of world sport using its $600bn public investment fund, a makeover project that is particularly pertinent in the light of allegations in a Human Rights Watch report this week.
Culture catches up with Devo, the new wave band from Akron, Ohio, who are hanging up their curious “energy dome” hats after 50 years. And there’s a lovely feature by Claire Armitstead about hidden art, from underwater sculpture parks to pinhole dioramas concealed inside traffic bollards.
Boomers Daily 