London Review of Books (LRB) – September 7, 2023: The new issue features Colm Tóibín review of ‘Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’; Desperate Midwives; French Short Stories; Catastrophic Thinking and Plant Detectives…
Ulysses is haunted by the story of its own composition. As Joyce famously put it, ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’ The annotators point out, however, that it is ‘very likely that Joyce never said this’.
The New Yorker – September 4, 2023 issue: The issue’s cover features James Thurber’s “New Tricks”, discussed by the artist’s granddaughter and his legacy and his love for his canine companions.
With smuggled cell phones and a handful of accomplices, Arthur Lee Cofield, Jr., took money from large bank accounts and bought houses, cars, clothes, and gold.
Early in 2020, the architect Scott West got a call at his office, in Atlanta, from a prospective client who said that his name was Archie Lee. West designs luxurious houses in a spare, angular style one might call millionaire modern. Lee wanted one. That June, West found an appealing property in Buckhead—an upscale part of North Atlanta that attracts both old money and new—and told Lee it might be a good spot for them to build. Lee arranged for his wife to meet West there.
Last weekend, at a tournament in the Cincinnati suburb of Mason, Coco Gauff beat Iga Świątek for the first time. It was one of those moments in tennis when the ground seemed to shift: Gauff had never taken a set from Świątek, the current world No. 1, in the seven previous times they’d met. It was the biggest win of Gauff’s young career—but it was in keeping with a high-summer revving of her already formidable game. In the hard-court tournaments held across North America which are essentially warmups for the U.S. Open, Gauff has been the imposing presence that the tennis world has been waiting for her to become—waiting avidly, for sure, but a little anxiously, too. As recently as early July, when she lost in the first round at Wimbledon, there was fretting that she wasn’t making quick enough progress.
BALBEK BUREAU ARCHITECTS (AUGUST 2023) – Relogged is a private residential house located in Ukraine, in the green zone on the riverbank. Constructed using log cabin technique, it was redesigned by our studio to better align with the client’s style and way of living.
Near the fireplace area, there are vertical metal shelves for a substantial library and a cozy reading chair. For convenience, the shelves are equipped with movable metal stairs.
To the left of the entrance is a home theater. There is a step at the entrance since there used to be a garage with a different floor level, making the theater area recessed.
National Geographic Traveller Magazine (October 2023): This issue features Thailand – Idyllic Tropical Islands, a Bangkok Food Tour, and a visit with Northern Hill Tribes; A road trip along the Dalmatian Coast; Morocco – Hiking in the High Atlas Mountains and more…
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
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 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…
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Science Magazine – August 25, 2023: This image depicts whole chromosomes, some with structural abnormalities that might be found in cancer. The idea that cancer cells have aneuploidy—abnormal numbers of chromosomes and chromosome portions—has been known for decades.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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