Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — June 2023
Tag Archives: Reviews
Finance Preview: Barron’s Magazine – May 22, 2023
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – MAY 22, 2023 ISSUE
10 Stocks to Play a Resurgent Energy Sector, From Our Roundtable Experts
Our energy roundtable predicts higher crude prices as global demand grows faster than supply. What’s ahead for U.S. shale, the majors, and the energy transition.
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL HOUTZ
Goldman Sachs Is Evolving. David Solomon on the Next Chapter.
The CEO sat down with Barron’s to discuss his critics’ complaints, the challenging climate for banking, his growth ambitions, and DJing side gig.Long read
Forget the Bud Light Mess. BUD Stock Is a Buy.
The controversy over Bud Light’s transgender promotion obscures Anheuser-Busch InBev’s push to boost global sales and revenue growth
The 5 Stocks That Rule This Market—and Make Investors Nervous
Al Root
UP AND DOWN WALL STREET
The Market Shrugs off Doomsday Scenarios. It Just Might Be Right.
Ben Levisohn
THE ECONOMY
Why a Fed Hike Is Still on the Table for June
Megan Cassella
Preview: New York Times Magazine – May 21, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (May 21, 2023) – Sometimes it seems as if everyone is in therapy. And the language of therapy is certainly everywhere these days. So we dedicated this year’s Health Issue to a topic on all our minds.
THE THERAPY ISSUE
Does Therapy Really Work? Let’s Unpack That.
Research shows that counseling delivers great benefits to many people. But it’s hard to say exactly what that means for you.
In my late 20s, living alone in New York, I found myself in the grip of a dark confusion, unclear of how to proceed — and so I started seeing a therapist. During most visits, I sat in a chair with a box of tissues on the small table beside it, but the office also held a couch, on which I occasionally reclined, staring at the ceiling as I wrestled with what I was doing with my life, and even what I was doing in that office.
Want to Fix Your Mind? Let Your Body Talk.
By Daniel Bergner
Somatic therapy is surging, with the promise that true healing may reside in focusing on the physical rather than the mental.
I had been describing a looming fear about my writing, about encroaching failure. Price sat in front of a dangling plant in her home office in Austin, Texas. With her red-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her delicate features communicated a mix of candor and vulnerability that created a sense of shared space, of intimacy, even by Zoom. She listened, took notes and, with a gesture of her hand, suggested that we leave my account of the situation off to the side.
Research Preview: Science Magazine – May 19, 2023
First up this week, building resilience into crops. Staff Writer Erik Stokstad joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss all the tricks farmers use now to make resilient hybrid crops of rice or wheat and how genetically engineering hybrid crop plants to clone themselves may be the next step.
After that we ask: When did we start kissing? Troels Pank Arbøll is an assistant professor of Assyriology in the department of cross-cultural and regional studies at the University of Copenhagen. He and Sarah chat about the earliest evidence for kissing—romantic style—and why it is unlikely that such kisses had a single place or time of origin.
Global loss of lake water storage
Drying trends are prevalent worldwide
The ancient history of kissing
Sources from Mesopotamia contextualize the emergence of kissing and its role in disease transmission
The disappearing boundary between organism and machine
Artificial skin mimics the sensory feedback of biological skin
The New York Review Of Books — June 8, 2023
The Price of Crypto
Despite its boosters’ frequent references to democracy and freedom, cryptocurrency reflects a radical marketization of politics in which major players can rewrite the rules as needed.
The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin
Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains by Vitalik Buterin, edited by Nathan Schneider
None of this had to happen. In the fall of 2008, amid the great shipwreck of the international financial order, an anonymous person or group of persons writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a new electronic cash system called Bitcoin. In the “white paper” proposing the system, initially circulated to a cryptography mailing list, Nakamoto claimed that it would “allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
Ideal Detachments
Tracing the memories of an employee at Andy Warhol’s Factory, Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special dramatizes a young woman’s self-scrutiny in an era defined by male looking and listening.
Nothing Special by by Nicole Flattery
Previews: The Economist Magazine – May 20, 2023
Joe Biden’s global vision is too timid and pessimistic
The president underestimates America’s strengths and misunderstands how it acquired them
In the 1940s and early 1950s America built a new world order out of the chaos of war. For all its shortcomings, it kept the peace between superpowers and underpinned decades of growth that lifted billions out of poverty. Today that order, based on global rules, free markets and an American promise to uphold both, is fraying. Toxic partisanship at home has corroded confidence in America’s government.
China and the West take a step to ease Africa’s debt crisis
A deal for Ghana is the first test case for a new approach
Ghana made history when it led the wave of sub-Saharan African countries that won independence more than six decades ago. It may now be making history again, as the first test case for a new approach to debt relief. China and Western governments may have overcome one barrier to restructuring the billions of dollars owed by countries with unsustainable debts.
Research Preview: Nature Magazine – May 18, 2023
The ocean is hotter than ever: what happens next?
Record temperature combined with an anticipated El Niño could devastate marine life and increase the chances of extreme weather.
The global ocean hit a new record temperature of 21.1 ºC in early April, 0.1 ºC higher than the last record in March 2016. Although striking, the figure (see ‘How the ocean is warming’) is in line with the ocean warming anticipated from climate change. What is remarkable is its occurrence ahead of — rather than during — the El Niño climate event that is expected to bring warmer, wetter weather to the eastern Pacific region later this year.
For chemists, the AI revolution has yet to happen
Machine-learning systems in chemistry need accurate and accessible training data. Until they get it, they won’t achieve their potential.
Many people are expressing fears that artificial intelligence (AI) has gone too far — or risks doing so. Take Geoffrey Hinton, a prominent figure in AI, who recently resigned from his position at Google, citing the desire to speak out about the technology’s potential risks to society and human well-being.
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 19, 2023
Times Literary Supplement (May 19, 2023) – Portrait of a Marriage: The Mandelas; The Return of Inflation; Doing Justice to John Rawls; The Greatest Italian Novel and Heaney’s translations.
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – May 19, 2023
The Guardian Weekly (May 19, 2023) – This week’s issue considered the end of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s long political career. But it soon became clear that predictions of the Turkish president’s demise had been greatly misjudged. A first-round victory over his secular opponent, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, did not come by a wide enough margin to prevent a runoff vote on 28 May. But, barring a remarkable swing back to Kılıçdaroğlu, the indications are that Erdoğan will further extend his 20-year authoritarian brand of rule over Turkey.
As Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, toured European capitals to drum up support this week, speculation continued over when and where Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive against Russian forces would begin – or if indeed it had already done so. From Kherson, Luke Harding hears from a frontline commander why Kyiv is happy to bide its time, while defence editor Dan Sabbagh outlines four possible scenarios in which a Ukrainian counterattack might develop.
Two environmentally slanted features bring fascinating insights into very different parts of the world. From Kenya there’s the uplifting story of the waste picker who is lobbying for his colleagues’ working rights to be enshrined in a UN treaty. Then, John Bartlett reports from Antarctica on how the climate crisis, geopolitical tensions and booming tourism are straining relations at a remote scientific research station.
Science Review: Scientific American – June 2023 Issue
What Is the Future of Fusion Energy?
Nuclear fusion won’t arrive in time to fix climate change, but it could be essential for our future energy needs
- By Philip Ball
Last December physicists working on fusion claimed a breakthrough. A team at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California announced it had extracted more energy from a controlled nuclear fusion reaction than had been used to trigger it. It was a global first and a significant step for physics—but very far from enabling practical exploitation of fusion as an energy source.
Physicists Make Matter out of Light to Find Quantum Singularities
Experiments that imitate solid materials with light waves reveal the quantum basis of exotic physical effects
A Traumatized Woman with Multiple Personalities Gets Better as Her ‘Parts’ Work as a Team
Therapy for dissociative identity disorder has aimed to meld many personalities into one. But that’s not the only solution, a caring therapist shows
Boomers Daily 