Medical, financial and ethical hurdles stand in the way of the dream to settle in space
By Sarah Scoles
Global warming is so rampant that some scientists say we should begin altering the stratosphere to block incoming sunlight, even if it jeopardizes rain and crops
By Douglas Fox
Where’s the support for Democratic insurgents?
For decades, New Hampshire has generated brisk and gratifying drama with its first-in-the-nation presidential primary. The Granite State momentously destroyed a presidency in 1968, when the Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy ran against President Lyndon Johnson on an antiwar platform.
On seeing without being seen
by Rachel Cusk
Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did—the rest of her remained obstinately alive. She took a considerable time to die and outlasted the nurses’ predictions by many days, so that those of us who had been summoned to her bedside had to depart and return to our lives.
● First, a little history. See that modest cathedral by the Hôtel de Ville? It’s where Eleanor of Aquitaine married King Louis VII of France. Later, in 1152, this feisty daughter of the southwest married again, in Poitiers, to the man who became King Henry II. In doing so she began a Bordelais involvement with England that didn’t end until 1453, when the French captured the city. Sure, a lot of water has flowed under the city’s bridges since then, but to be reminded of the connection is like discovering an unexpected cousin.
● Bordeaux profited handsomely from this attachment thanks to the English thirst for its wines. So continue this 650-year tradition with a riveting, self-guided audio tour of La Cité du Vin. The decanter-shaped landmark explores every aspect of global winemaking and wine culture, with one amusing omission: intoxication. The best bit is a display that wafts key wine flavours up your nose (£19; laciteduvin.com).
The northern district of Chartrons starts with palatial mansions and merchant warehouses, but shrinks to more modest proportions the further you wander from the city centre. Along the Rue Notre Dame it finds its mojo. Here, half a mile of browsable tiny shops sell must-have crockery, hand-made brushes and £2.50 fruit-crumble tartlets. Clambering vines deepen the sense that you’ve found the perfect French provincial street.
The bohemian English circle that included Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell revolted against Victorian formality—and their casually ornamental style is inspiring designers today.
By Rebecca Mead
In July, 1918, Virginia Woolf spent a weekend at Garsington—a country home, outside Oxford, owned by Lady Ottoline Morrell, a celebrated hostess of the era, and her husband, Philip Morrell, a Member of Parliament. The house, a ramshackle Jacobean mansion that the Morrells had acquired five years earlier, had been vividly redecorated by Ottoline into what one guest called a “fluttering parrot-house of greens, reds and yellows.” One sitting room was painted with a translucent seafoam wash; another was covered in deep Venetian red, and early visitors were invited to apply thin lines of gold paint to the edges of wooden panels. The entrance hall was laid with Persian carpets and, as Morrell’s biographer Miranda Seymour has written, the pearly gray paint on the walls was streaked with pink, “to create the effect of a winter sunset.” Woolf, in her diary, noted that the Italianate garden fashioned by Morrell—with paved terraces, brilliantly colored flower beds, and a pond surrounded by yew-tree hedges clipped with niches for statuary—was “almost melodramatically perfect.”
Pavels Hedström believes that most architecture separates us from nature. He wants to make nonhuman life inescapable.
By Sam Knight
At the end of his first year at the architecture school of the Royal Danish Academy, Pavels Hedström went on a class trip to Japan. Hedström, a twenty-five-year-old undergraduate, revered Japanese culture and aesthetics, even though he had never visited the country. As a teen-ager growing up in rural Sweden, Hedström had been introduced to Zen meditation by his mother, Daina, and devoured manga and anime. In architecture school, Hedström was drawn to Japanese principles of design and how they applied to a world—and a profession—increasingly troubled by the climate crisis. Hedström was particularly influenced by Metabolism, a postwar Japanese architectural movement that imagined cities of the future as natural organisms: ephemeral, self-regulating, and subject to biological rhythms of growth, death, and decay. In 1977, Kisho Kurokawa, one of Metabolism’s founders, wrote, “Human society must be regarded as one part of a continuous natural entity that includes all animals and plants.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (September 17, 2023): The 9.17.23 Issue features Emily Bazelon on abortion rights being won through state ballots after the Dobbs decision; Audra D.S. Burch on the death of Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado and the city’s deep divide over policing; Teju Cole on Greek tragedies; Dan Brooks on the Italian rock band Måneskin; and more.
After Dobbs, the political ground seems to be shifting in some unpredictable ways.
By EMILY BAZELON
After Elijah McClain died in 2019, the case seemed to be closed. The George Floyd protests — and the backlash to them — would change everything.
One by one, the five men — three police officers and two paramedics — walked up before the judge one afternoon this January. Their lawyers stood beside them, and the wooden benches of the Colorado courtroom were filled with family, friends and fellow police officers and paramedics.
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – SEPTEMBER 18, 2023:
The labor action highlights the biggest issue: Can the auto makers afford to spend what it takes to thrive in the new world of EVs?
The defense contractor spent heavily on acquisitions, then struggled during the pandemic. Now with new senior leadership working to fix its operational problems, its shares could fly.
Arm Holdings closed its first day as a public company priced at more than 25 times sales and 100 times profit. It’s a pricey bet on AI.4 min
With a full range of investment and planning services at their fingertips, independent financial advisors are managing more of America’s wealth. Here’s how they do it.
The United Auto Workers strike is unlikely hurt the economy much. But it could encourage other unions to bargain more aggressively.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 17, 2023): The new issue features An Illustrated Guide to Toppling the Patriarchy, New Thrillers, Appalachian Literature, The Good Virus, and more…
In its first half-century, Ms. magazine upended norms, disrupted the print world and made trouble. It was a start.
By Anna Holmes
50 YEARS OF MS.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution, edited by Katherine Spillar and the editors of Ms.
I had my first conscious interaction with Ms. magazine as a small child when I read — or rather, had read to me — a story-poem called “Black Is Brown Is Tan.”
Part of the magazine’s delightful kids’ section, “Black Is Brown Is Tan” is about a mixed-race family not unlike my own who go about their daily routines like any other Americans. Though I was young, I remember the illustrations, by Emily Arnold McCully, with acute clarity: the rosy cheeks of the white dad, the short Afro and hoop earrings of the Black mom, and, perhaps most important, the sense of safety and warmth that permeated every page. In our house, where my mother was careful about the messaging of the media and toys we consumed, the “Stories for Free Children” section was always welcome. As for the magazine they appeared in? Well, it was canon.
In Diana Evans’s new novel, “A House for Alice,” a woman who immigrated to Britain for marriage must decide whether or not to return to her country of origin after her husband dies.
By Tiphanie Yanique
A HOUSE FOR ALICE, by Diana Evans
Houses in Diana Evans’s new novel, “A House for Alice,” are a metaphor for family. They’re filled with rooms for sleeping, lovemaking, fighting; contain corridors that lead to areas of welcome and comfort; shelter spaces that hold secrets. And like a house, a family can be burned to nothing and rebuilt anew.
The Week In Art Podcast (September 15, 2023): A Unesco conference and archeological summit in Saudi Arabia are the latest examples of the country’s increasing focus on culture as part of the so-called Vision 2030 programme.
We look at Saudi Arabia’s unprecedented and lavishly funded focus on contemporary and ancient culture and how that relates to ongoing concerns about artistic freedom and human rights abuses in the kingdom. Alia Al-Senussi, a cultural strategist, and senior advisor at Art Basel and to the Saudi Ministry of Culture, joins host Ben Luke to discuss the contemporary art scene, and Melissa Gronlund, a reporter on the Middle East for The Art Newspaper, tells us about the push to reveal hitherto underexplored Saudi heritage.
The Sierra Leone-born, London-based artist and poet Julianknxx this week unveiled a new project at London’s Barbican Centre, Chorus in Rememory of Flight. The multi-screen installation features performers and choirs from the African diaspora who Julianknxx met on a 4,000-mile trip around European cities with colonial histories, from Lisbon via Marseille, Rotterdam and Berlin to London. We talk to him about this epic endeavour. And this episode’s Work of the Week is among the greatest works on paper ever made: Michelangelo’s studies in red chalk for the Libyan Sibyl, one of the most distinctive figures on his Sistine Chapel ceiling. The drawing features in Michelangelo and Beyond at the Albertina in Vienna and one of its curators, Constanze Malissa, tells us more about it.
Art in Saudi Arabia: A New Creative Economy? by Rebecca Anne Proctor, with Alia Al-Senussi, published 30 November, Lund Humphries, £19.99.
Julianknxx: Chorus in Rememory of Flight, The Curve, Barbican Centre, London, and online on WePresent, until 11 February 2024; Julianknxx is in A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, Tate Modern, until 14 January 2024.
Michelangelo and Beyond, Albertina, Vienna, 15 September-14 January 2024.
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