Tag Archives: Reviews

Previews: The Economist Magazine – Sept 16, 2023

All weekly editions | The Economist

The Economist Magazine (September 16, 2023): The latest issue reviews How AI can revolutionize science; Donald Trump will “never” support Putin, says Volodymyr Zelensky; The hard right is getting closer to power all over Europe, and more…

How artificial intelligence can revolutionise science

Consider the historical precedents

Debate about artificial intelligence (ai) tends to focus on its potential dangers: algorithmic bias and discrimination, the mass destruction of jobs and even, some say, the extinction of humanity. As some observers fret about these dystopian scenarios, however, others are focusing on the potential rewards. ai could, they claim, help humanity solve some of its biggest and thorniest problems. And, they say, ai will do this in a very specific way: by radically accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, especially in areas such as medicine, climate science and green technology.

Modi’s “one India” goal is good for the economy, but not for politics

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, presides over the closing session of the G20 Summit

In the next decade regional tensions will build in India

The world has been seeing the bright side of India. In August it landed a spacecraft on the Moon. In the latest quarter gdp grew at an annual rate of 7.8%, making it the world’s perkiest big economy. Narendra Modi, the prime minister, has just hosted a g20 summit where other leaders, including Joe Biden, courted Asia’s rising behemoth. Yet inside India the talk has turned to whether Mr Modi’s hunger for power and dreams of national renewal could lead him to bend the constitution. 

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 15, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (September 15, 2023): The new issue features what connects the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, the Tichborne Trial and life on a sugar plantation in Jamaica? In a New Yorker essay Zadie Smith spelt out the preoccupations of The Fraud, her novel set in the Victorian era, as “fake identities, fake news, fake relationships, fake histories”. Ainsworth, in Smith’s view, was a fraud as a historical novelist.

A worldlier class of flapper

The Divorcee (1930); Ursula Parrott; The Palm Beach Story (1942)

Ursula Parrott scandalized and titillated Hollywood in the 1930s

By Lillian Crawford

Democrat or revolutionary?

A demonstration in support of Allende, Santiago, 1971

Salvador Allende reconsidered, fifty years after the military coup

By David Gallagher

Research Preview: Science Magazine – Sept 15, 2023

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Science Magazine – September 15, 2023: Blue jays, similar to other corvid songbirds, are known for their impressive cognitive abilities, presumably due to their relatively large brains. 

Mars Sample Return risks consuming NASA science

Forthcoming cost estimate for budget-busting mission could lead to strict caps from Congress

Iran prepares to erect a digital wall

Researchers feel increasingly isolated as government moves to restrict internet access

Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Autumn 2023

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Kenyon Review – Autumn 2023: The new issue includes the winner and runners-up for the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, selected by Ruth Awad, and a Food-themed folio, with poetry by sam saxInga Lea Schmidt, and Holly Zhou; fiction by Rebecca AckermannElvis Bego, and Douglas Silver; nonfiction by Katie Culligan and Erica N. Cardwell; and much more. Luminous Gender Vessel, a folio guest-edited by Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Melissa Faliveno, features work by Krys Malcolm BelcKB BrookinsAlexis Pauline GumbsCatherine Kim, and many others. The cover art is by Joanna Anos.

The New York Review Of Books – October 5, 2023

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The New York Review of Books (October 5, 2023) – The new issue features Jennifer Wilson on Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s unsettlingly funny tales of domestic un-bliss, Tim Judah on the new normal in Ukraine, Daniel M. Lavery on Jacques Pépin, E. Tammy Kim on the 1941 Disney animators’ strike, Christopher Benfey on John Constable, Bill McKibben on a planet smothered in asphalt, Lynn Hunt on the revolutions of 1848, Noah Feldman on the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc, A.E. Stallings on Simonides, poems by Devin Johnston and Claire DeVoogd, and much more.

Mother Russia

In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s latest novel, Kidnapped, Soviet bureaucracy is made all the messier by maternal desperation.

Jennifer Wilson

Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

Some months ago I was having dinner with a writer from Moscow. I told him I was thinking of reviewing a new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped, a Bollywood-inspired novella that pays homage to the Soviets’ love of Indian cinema. “Don’t do it,” he—a friend of hers—warned me. “If she doesn’t like what you write, she will turn you into a character in one of her stories—the stupid girl in New York who doesn’t know anything.” Being a longtime admirer of Petrushevskaya, I wasn’t too worried: realism is not her thing.

Ukraine’s New Normal

Market Square, Lviv, Ukraine

Away from the front, life appears to be the same, but the country has undergone profound changes.

Tim Judah

On August 8 I went to the Jellyfish Museum in Kyiv. During my previous visits to the city, it had been closed because of the war. Now it has reopened. In the gloom the fantastical creatures drifted about in their tanks while couples, friends, and families drifted about happily looking at them. In Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine close to the Russian border, the Half an Hour café, where I wrote for a couple of days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, has also just reopened.

Research Preview: Nature Magazine – Sept 14, 2023

Volume 621 Issue 7978

nature Magazine – September 14, 2023:  In this week’s issue, 193 countries agreed to work towards 17 goals aimed at improving the lives of people around the world. From eliminating poverty and reducing hunger to tackling global warming and taking care of biodiversity, the Sustainable Development Goals have since taken their place in corporate plans and government policy.

An ‘alien meteorite’ probably didn’t slam into Earth — how will we know if one does?

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured comet 2I/Borisov as a blue glow in dark space.

Nature looks at the detective work required to confirm a controversial claim of finding interstellar debris.

A research team made headlines last week when it claimed to have scooped up from the sea floor fragments of a meteorite that came from beyond our Solar System1. Finding such an interstellar sample on Earth would be exciting because it might shed light on how planets and stars beyond our own form. But a number of scientists say that the evidence that the material came from another planetary system is not convincing so far.

AI detects eye disease and risk of Parkinson’s from retinal images
Researchers have developed a model trained similarly to ChatGPT that can be adapted to evaluate multiple health conditions.
Mariana Lenharo
Ancient-human fossils sent to space: scientists slam ‘publicity stunt’
The decision to send hominin bones on a commercial spaceflight has raised eyebrows among human-evolution researchers.
Ewen Callaway

The Good Life France Magazine – Autumn 2023

The Good Life France Magazine Autumn 2023 - The Good Life France

The Good Life France Magazine – Autumn 2023: The latest issue features A real-life sleeping beauty castle at Chateau de Gudanes, the historic city of Rouen, and highlights of Saint Malo, Brittany, Breton and Provence…

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Preview: London Review Of Books – Sept 21, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – September 21, 2023: The new issue features John Lanchester on statistics, William Davies on Weber, nihilism and universities @dlbirch1 on hate mail, Ferdinand Mount on Henry III Clair Wills on Shirley Hazzard and a cover by Alexander Gorlizki.

Get a rabbit

Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic  of China (Histories of Economic Life, 10): Ghosh, Arunabh: 9780691179476:  Amazon.com: Books

By John Lanchester

Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Histories of Economic Life, 10) by Arunabh Ghosh

At a dinner​ with the American ambassador in 2007, Li Keqiang, future premier of China, said that when he wanted to know what was happening to the country’s economy, he looked at the numbers for electricity use, rail cargo and bank lending. There was no point using the official GDP statistics, Li said, because they are ‘man-made’. That remark, which we know about thanks to WikiLeaks, is fascinating for two reasons. First, because it shows a sly, subtle, worldly humour – a rare glimpse of the sort of thing Chinese Communist Party leaders say in private. Second, because it’s true. A whole strand in contemporary thinking about the production of knowledge is summed up there: data and statistics, all of them, are man-made.

Stay away from politics

By William Davies

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber 
by Wendy Brown.

Politics: The Guardian Weekly – Sept 15, 2023

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The Guardian Weekly (September15, 2023) The issue features  Amy Hawkins looking under the lid of China’s economy and asks if it has peaked?

Desperate searches for survivors continued in Morocco’s Atlas mountains after last Friday’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake, which killed thousands of people. Peter Beaumont reports from remote villages devastated by the country’s deadliest quake in six decades.

A worse disaster still appeared to be unfolding further along the north African coast in Libya, where up to 10,000 people were feared missing after flooding caused by the collapse of two dams. Details were only just emerging at the time of the Weekly going to press on Tuesday, but you can find the latest updates here.

First there were the bewildering DNA test results, then the long-forgotten fertility blog. Jenny Kleeman tells the remarkable tale of a discovery that would change the lives of two American families for ever.

Also in Features is American author Elif Batuman’s entertaining account of what happened when she asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT for assistance with a quote from Proust, leading her down a digital rabbit hole she never could have foreseen.

Previews: Country Life Magazine – Sept 13, 2023

Country Life Magazine – September 13, 2023: The new issue features the more outlandish and risqué techniques plants have developed to spread their seed, a magical garden restoration at Aldourie Castle in Inverness-shire, the origins of Spetchley Park, Worcestershire, and more…

Fifty shades of green

John Wright investigates some of the more outlandish and risqué techniques plants have developed to spread their seed

A Scottish fairy tale

George Plumptre is spellbound by a magical garden restoration at Aldourie Castle in Inverness-shire

An architectural accident

In the first of two articles, John Goodall explores the origins of Spetchley Park, Worcestershire