Inside this issue:
International Art: Apollo Magazine – November 2023
Tag Archives: Reviews
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 30, 2023
China’s Age of Malaise
Party officials are vanishing, young workers are “lying flat,” and entrepreneurs are fleeing the country. What does China’s inner turmoil mean for the world?
By Evan Osnos
Twenty-five years ago, China’s writer of the moment was a man named Wang Xiaobo. Wang had endured the Cultural Revolution, but unlike most of his peers, who turned the experience into earnest tales of trauma, he was an ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life. In his novella “Golden Age,” two young lovers confess to the bourgeois crime of extramarital sex—“We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breath.” They are summoned to account for their failure of revolutionary propriety, but the local apparatchiks prove to be less interested in Marx than in the prurient details of their “epic friendship.”
Plundering the Planet’s Resources
Our accelerating rates of extraction come with immense ecological and social consequences.
The town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, doesn’t have a lot to say for itself. Its Web site, which features a photo of a flowering tree next to a rusty bridge, notes that the town is “conveniently located between Asheville and Boone.” According to the latest census data, it has 2,332 residents and a population density of 498.1 per square mile. A recent story in the local newspaper concerned the closing of the Hardee’s on Highway 19E; this followed an incident, back in May, when a fourteen-year-old boy who’d eaten a biscuit at the restaurant began to hallucinate and had to be taken to the hospital. Without Spruce Pine, though, the global economy might well unravel.
Finance Preview: Barron’s Magazine – Oct 23, 2023
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – October 23, 2023 ISSUE:
Brokerage King Charles Schwab Won’t Be Dethroned. Here’s Why.
For some advisors, the move to Charles Schwab from TD Ameritrade didn’t go smoothly. Chances are, they’ll stick around anyway.
How to Play Investors’ Growing Interest in Bonds
Asset managers’ shares are cheap, and the companies could benefit from an upturn in investment flows. Sizing up BlackRock, T. Rowe Price, and more.Long read
Making of a Mortgage Giant: Loopholes and Nonprofits
The Change Company was touted as a community-development leader. It became the country’s largest provider of exotic mortgages.Long read
Crypto Is Lobbying Congress Hard. It Wants More Than a Bitcoin ETF.
The crypto industry wants laws passed that clarify how it will be regulated.Long read
Why Rising Home Prices Aren’t Always Good for Retirees
Home equity accounts for almost half of the median net worth of homeowners 60 and older.4 min read
Athleisure Is Bigger Than Ever. Here’s How to Play It.
Apparel that straddles athleticwear and loungewear has become Americans’ de facto uniform. Here are the companies best positioned to profit from it.Long read
The New York Times Book Review – October 22, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 22, 2023): This week’s issue features “Hunting the Falcon,” on this week’s cover, Tina Brown, who reviewed it, calls it “a fierce, scholarly tour de force,” adding: “The authors, a husband-and-wife historian team, are a dream pairing.”
When Courtly Love Goes Wrong, It’s Deadly
In “Hunting the Falcon,” the historians John Guy and Julia Fox take a fresh look at an infamous Tudor marriage — and find there is indeed more to know.
By Tina Brown
HUNTING THE FALCON: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe, by John Guy and Julia Fox
Anne Boleyn glanced over her shoulder repeatedly as she waited at the Tower of London for her executioner, a specialist swordsman who had been summoned from France. Would Henry VIII, who could spare lives as casually as he snuffed them out, spare her life on the scaffold as he’d been known to do before?
1960s London Comes Alive in a Fierce, Funny Coming-of-Age Novel
In “The Halt During the Chase,” by Rosemary Tonks — first published in 1972, and newly reissued — a young woman goes in search of herself.
By Mary Marge Locker
THE HALT DURING THE CHASE, by Rosemary Tonks
From the first page of this clever, fishy little novel, our narrator, Sophie, is the kind of woman whose laughter is a weapon. She could scare off an assailant with one well-timed whack of her tongue. Originally published in 1972, “The Halt During the Chase” is the second Rosemary Tonks novel to be reissued by New Directions in as many years, bringing a new audience to her charming and imperfect heroines, who are all voice, half poetry and half snarl.
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
The Week In Art Podcast (October 20, 2023): This week: it’s the second year of Paris +, the event that has taken over from Fiac as the leading French art fair. How is Art Basel’s French flagship faring amid geopolitical turmoil and economic uncertainty, and is Paris still on the rise as a cultural hub?
We speak to Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, and Kabir Jhala, our deputy art market editor, who are in Paris, to find out. The largest ever exhibition of the work of the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto opened last week at the Hayward Gallery in London, before travelling to Beijing and Sydney next year. We talk to its co-curator Thomas Sutton.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is La femme-cheval or the Horse-Woman, a painting made in 1918 by the French artist Marie Laurencin. She is the subject of a major survey, called Sapphic Paris, opening this week at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in the US. Cindy Kang, who co-curated the exhibition, tells us more about this landmark work in Laurencin’s life.
Paris +, 20-22 October.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, Hayward Gallery, London, until 7 January 2023; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 23 March-23 June 2024; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, 2 August-27 October 2024.
Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, US, 22 October-21 January.
The New York Times Magazine – Oct 22, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 22, 2023): The latest issue features In Search of Kamala Harris; Longer Commutes, Shorter Lives: The Costs of Not Investing in America and The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer….
In Search of Kamala Harris
After nearly three years, the vice president is still struggling to make the case for herself — and feels she shouldn’t have to.
All the conditions seemed right for a chance to reset the narrative.
At the Munich Security Conference in February, amid rising international angst about Russia’s war in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris led a delegation of Americans, including around 50 lawmakers from both parties. She spent her first day in Germany in seclusion, preparing for the next 48 hours: meetings with European leaders the first day and a keynote speech the next in the ornate ballroom of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. When she emerged, head high and shoulders back, Harris exuded what her staff members have argued is a particular comfort with her role on the international stage. There, they say, she is respected.
Longer Commutes, Shorter Lives: The Costs of Not Investing in America
For decades, spending on the future put the nation ahead of all others. What would it take to revive that spirit?
Every morning in 21st-century America, thousands of people wake up and prepare to take a cross-country trip. Some are traveling for business. Others are visiting family or going on vacations. Whether they are leaving from New York or Los Angeles, Atlanta or Seattle, their trips have a lot in common.
Opinion & Politics: Reason Magazine – December 2023
REASON MAGAZINE (DECEMBER 2023) – The latest issue features The Endangered Species Act at 50 – Why have so few species been taken off the endangered species list?; Dobbs and the abortion debate is reshaping American Politics; Will Russia ever be free?, and more…
The Endangered Species Act at 50
Why have so few species been taken off the endangered species list?
The Abundance Agenda Promises Everything to Everyone All at Once
Some progressives want to remove bureaucratic obstacles to growth—in the service of Democrats and big government.
Dobbs Is Reshaping American Politics
A wave of ballot measures reminds us most Americans are moderate on abortion.
Will Russia Ever Be Free?
Promise and peril in post-Putin Russia
Research Preview: Science Magazine – Oct 20, 2023
A giant European telescope rises as U.S. rivals await rescue
Past the halfway point, Extremely Large Telescope prepares to receive first mirrors
A web of steel girders is rising from the flattened summit of Cerro Armazones, 3000 meters above sea level in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The dome it will support will be vast—with a footprint as big as a soccer field and almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty— and unexpectedly nimble: It will smoothly rotate on rails as a giant telescope inside tracks stars through the night.
Probe of Alzheimer’s studies finds ‘egregious misconduct’
Co-developer of biotech’s drug couldn’t supply original data
U.S. hands out $7 billion for hydrogen hubs
Gas could replace fossil fuels and fight climate change—if it is made cleanly
Reviews: The 2024 Pebble Flow Electric RV Trailer
Video timeline: 00:00 Pebble Flow RV 00:10 Development of the Pebble Flow 00:48 Dual Electric Motors 01:36 App-controlled Remote Parking 02:02 45 Kilowatt-hour Battery 02:31 Magic Hitch 03:10 Instant Camp Feature
Previews: History Today Magazine – November 2023
HISTORY TODAY MAGAZINE (NOVEMBER 2023) – This issue features The murder John F. Kennedy 60 years on, the dirty secrets of medieval monks, what the Nazis learnt from the Beer Hall Putsch, Christianity’s bloody history in Japan, and deaf expression in Renaissance art.
What Killed Kennedy?
Was it the mob? A coup? Cuban dissidents? War hawks? 60 years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the theories are still debated. Do any of them hold up?
The Beer Hall Putsch: What Hitler Learnt
In the aftermath of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, Hitler was in prison and the Nazi Party banned. But its failure taught him valuable lessons.
The Flies, Fleas and Rotting Flesh of Medieval Monks
Repulsive revelations of bodily infestations were viewed by some in medieval Europe as proof of sanctity. But for most, parasites were just plain disgusting.
‘Confinement’ by Jessica Cox review
Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jessica Cox looks at the engine of the Victorian population boom: motherhood.
Boomers Daily 