Climate change is making water stress worse for billions worldwide. Scaling up both new and traditional solutions must be a priority.
An immune response triggered by cardiac disease affects the function of a gland with a key role in the sleep–wake cycle.
The Guardian Weekly (August 4, 2023) – Israel in turmoil: Netanyahu’s judicial coup; Stormzy’s scholarship graduates; International fiction found in translation, and more…
Conflict over Netanyahu’s plans to overhaul judiciary is leading to new levels of civil disobedience – and potential security risks
Recent strikes targeting the southern Ukrainian city, including its orthodox cathedral, have left residents questioning its historical links to Russia
In the weeks following the policy change, global prices of oil, copper, and other commodities rose on expectations that Chinese demand would surge. In March, then Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced a target for real GDP growth of around five percent, and many external analysts predicted it would go far higher.
Times Literary Supplement (August 4, 2023): The twilight zone – Joyce Carol Oates on the novellas of Rachel Ingalls; J.L Austin, philosopher-spy; Adam Thirlwell’s historical fantasy; Hollywood blockbusters; Poverty in the U.S. and more…
Literary Review – August 2023 Issue: How Sugar Became King; Oil, Resin, Vinegar & Paint – “Albrecht Dürer: Art and Autobiography” By David Ekserdjian; Shopping & Plucking – “How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity” By Jill Burke and more…
Albrecht Dürer: Art and Autobiography By David Ekserdjian
Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World By Ulinka Rublack
The German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was fortunate in his initials. The stylised ‘AD’ that he routinely inserted into his paintings and engravings, and even the preparatory drawings, seemed to imbue his productions with an almost divine stamp of approval. Most German painters of the era did not sign their work, but Dürer was eager to assert creative ownership of his productions, obtaining legal protection of his sole right to the trademark monogram.
The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years By Ulbe Bosma
There was a time when commodity histories were everywhere. They tended to focus on consumption and trade over very long distances. Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar is much more than this sort of book. It is one of the most accomplished longue durée case studies in the history of capitalism that we have, concerned not just with trade and consumption but with production also. At every turn it subverts both critiques and celebrations of capitalism, and our understanding of much else besides. It is an extraordinary achievement.
How Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private military company went from fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine to staging a mutiny at home.
By Joshua Yaffa
Babylon was everything forbidden, and looming all around us—and my father tried to protect us from it at all costs.
As the founder of Adventures with Purpose, Jared Leisek carved a lucrative niche in the YouTube sleuthing community. Then the sleuths came for him, Rachel Monroe writes.
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – JULY 31, 2023 ISSUE –
A renewed focus on lower costs and doing what it does best could help the media titan’s shares recover from a long slump.
The Liberty Media cluster of companies is dauntingly complicated for investors. Now may be the right time to get in.
The industry has launched a legal war against a new law that would let Medicare negotiate prices. The odds are in Big Pharma’s favor.Long read
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JULY 30, 2023:
On this week’s cover, we feature biographies of composers Arnold Schoenberg and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that emphasize the extent to which each was a singular genius attuned to his culture and times; our reviews are by Anthony Tommasini (formerly The Times’s chief classical music critic) and the composer John Adams.
In Patrick Mackie’s “Mozart in Motion,” the socially observant composer embraces modernity.
Musicians tend to be wary of ascribing specific meanings to music or making too much of a piece’s extra-musical associations. In one of his Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1973, turning to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, Leonard Bernstein asked the audience to forget all about “birds and brooks and rustic pleasures” and instead concentrate on “pure” music. He then demonstrated how every phrase of the entire first movement is derived from little motifs of notes and rhythms in the first four bars of the score.
John Adams reviews “Schoenberg: Why He Matters,” in which Harvey Sachs explores the artistic, academic and spiritual life of a 20th-century cultural giant.
In 1955 Henry Pleasants, a critic of both popular and classical music, issued a cranky screed of a book, “The Agony of Modern Music,” which opened with the implacable verdict that “serious music is a dead art.” Pleasants’s thesis was that the traditional forms of classical music — opera, oratorio, orchestral and chamber music, all constructions of a bygone era — no longer related to the experience of our modern lives. Composers had lost touch with the currents of popular taste, and popular music,
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 30, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, David Quammen reports on the ongoing mystery of Covid’s origin, what we do know — and why it matters. Plus, a profile of a poet who was kidnapped from his Black father by his white grandparents and a look at a group of English activists’ fight for the right to access public lands.
We still don’t know how the pandemic started. Here’s what we do know — and why it matters.
By David Quammen
Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic and untold millions of people dead, that question about the Covid-19 coronavirus remains controversial and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought holds that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spilled into humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a messy emporium in Wuhan, China, brimming with fish, meats and wildlife on sale as food. Another school argues that the virus was laboratory-engineered to infect humans and cause them harm — a bioweapon — and was possibly devised in a “shadow project” sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army of China.
A group of English activists want to legally enshrine the “right to roam” — and spread the idea that nature is a common good.
By Brooke Jarvis
The signs on the gate at the entrance to the path and along the edge of the reservoir were clear. “No swimming,” they warned, white letters on a red background.
On a chill mid-April day in northwest England, with low, gray clouds and rain in the forecast, the signs hardly seemed necessary. But then people began arriving, by the dozens and then the hundreds. Some walked only from nearby Hayfield, while others came by train or bus or foot from many hours away. In a long, trailing line, they tramped up the hill beside the dam and around the shore of the reservoir, slipping in mud and jumping over puddles. Above them rose a long, curving hill of open moorland, its heather still winter brown. When they came to a gap between a stone wall and a metal fence, they squeezed through it, one by one, slipping under strings of barbed wire toward the water below.
1843 MAGAZINE – SUMMER STORIES 2023:
As rival candidates are lined up, the Tibetan spiritual leader tells Brook Larmer what he really thinks of China
Young soldiers have buoyed the country’s fight for freedom, but at great cost. Irena Long meets them in their jungle hideout
Criminals stole $2.5bn from Iraq’s largest state bank in broad daylight. Nicolas Pelham follows their trail
Boomers Daily 