Now aged 96, Hélène is regarded as France’s most important and passionate dealer of sub-Saharan and Oceanic art, an adventurer and explorer, ground-breaking gallerist and collector, and eminent specialist in Mbembe and Dogon art, ever since her first foray to Dakar in 1952.
Video timeline: 0:00 A sound wave and its inverse 0:32 Destructive interference 1:30 Noise-canceling headphones’ origins 3:17 What background noise to remove 4:46 Transparency modes or aware modes
What kind of audio processing is necessary to eliminate background noise when listening to music or watching a movie? WSJ dives into how noise canceling works, how the technology has changed and where things are headed.
Every year in India, many thousands are killed in marriage-payment disputes. Why does this war on women persist?
By Manvir Singh
In September 21, 2021, my mother sent a message to my extended family’s WhatsApp group: “Neeti had a heart attack and suddenly passed away—too tragic!” Neeti was a daughter of her sister, and someone I’d known all my life. But my cousin and I inhabited different worlds. I was born and raised in suburban New Jersey; she was a lifelong Delhiite. To me, Neeti and her identical twin, Preeti, exuded an urban glamour. At weddings, they sported chic, oversized sunglasses and matching, pastel-colored Punjabi-style outfits. Their faces looked a lot like my mom’s: long, with prominent cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes.
America’s broken immigration system has spawned a national fight, but Congress lacks the political will to fix it.
Earlier this year, in a helicopter above the Mexican border, a team of Texas state troopers searched for people crossing into the United States. As they flew over a neighborhood west of El Paso, the radio crackled with the voices of Border Patrol agents on the ground below, calling out migrants who were evading them.
With their unnerving stare and eerie ways, it is small wonder that owls provoke superstition—and flights of fancy, as in the owl who sails with the pussycat in Edward Lear’s poem. In myths, stories and art, “owls speak of wisdom and luck, of misfortune and malevolence”, the author writes. They were associated with Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom.
Ms Ackerman is a natural-history writer who specialises in the avian world. In “What an Owl Knows” she offers an absorbing ear-tuft-to-tail appreciation of the raptor that Mary Oliver, a poet, called a “god of plunge and blood”. Owls, it seems, know a lot. Ms Ackerman draws on recent research to explain what and how.
To begin with, she stresses, there is no generic owl, but rather a diversity of some 260 species found on every continent bar Antarctica. They stretch from the fire-hydrant-sized Blakiston’s Fish Owl to the Elf Owl, which could fit in your palm. Most, but not all, are nocturnal.
Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science and nature for almost three decades. Her most recent book, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds, explores recent findings on the biology, behavior, and conservation of owls. Her previous book, The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think, was a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her New York Times bestselling book, The Genius of Birds, has been translated into twenty-five languages and was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2016 by The Wall Street Journal, a Best Science Book by NPR’s Science Friday, and a Nature Book of the Year by The Sunday Times.
The American Scholar (June 9, 2023): The idea of “Western civilization” looms large in the popular imagination, but it’s no longer taken seriously in academia.
In her new book, The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney examines why the West won’t die and, in the process, dismantles ahistorical concepts like the “clash of civilizations” and the notion of a linear progression from Greek and Roman ideals to those of our present day—“from Plato to NATO.”
Through biographical portraits of figures both well-known and forgotten—Herodotus and Francis Bacon, Livilla and Phyllis Wheatley, Tullia d’Aragona and Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi—Mac Sweeney assembles a history that resembles less of a grand narrative than a spiderweb of influence. Successive empires (whether Ottoman, Holy Roman, British, or American) built up self-mythologies in the service of their expansionist, patriarchal, or, later, racist ideologies.
Mac Sweeney joins the podcast to talk about why the West has been such a dominant idea and on what values we might base a new vision of contemporary “western” identity.Go beyond the episode:Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s The West: A New History in Fourteen LivesWe have covered Greece and Rome in previous episodes, as well as Njinga of AngolaIn our Summer 2023 issue, Sarah Ruden considers how modern biographers distort VergilTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books.
Chapters: 00:00 — Introduction 02:40 — EV conversions 04:12 — Conversion shops 06:45 — DIY community 11:16 — Challenges
Both the shops and aftermarket community are growing substantially to meet the new demand. CNBC explores what it takes to convert a gas-powered car to an electric vehicle and whether it could go mainstream.
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – JUNE 12, 2023 ISSUE – Don’t fear the bull market. Why stocks are headed higher.
The case for optimism as a resilient market continues to disappoint the bears.
Inflation has taken a bite out of budgets, and that’s particularly true at the grocery store, as everyday essentials from cereal to sugar have shot up in price. That sticker shock provides motivation for strapped consumers to eschew their favorite brands for less-expensive generics—often made by TreeHouse Foods
Nicholas Jasinski
Randall W. Forsyth
Jack Hough
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JUNE 11, 2023: This week’s issue brims with even more books to add to your teetering nightstand pile: talky new novels by Brandon Taylor, R.F. Kuang and Luis Alberto Urrea; a wistful ode to a beloved neighborhood bar; the latest crime fiction; even some Martin Amis titles you’ve always meant to pick up, plucked from A.O. Scott’s beautiful appraisal of the late British writer.
Our critic assesses the achievement of Martin Amis, Britain’s most famous literary son.
By A.O. Scott
On May 6, at the age of 74, Charles III was crowned king of England. A few weeks later, at 73, Martin Amis died at his home in Florida. One event seemed almost comically belated, the other tragically premature. Charles took over the family business well past normal retirement age, while Amis was denied the illustrious dotage that great writers deserve.
Brandon Taylor’s novel circulates among Iowa City residents, some privileged, some not, but all aware that their possibilities are contracting.
Reading Brandon Taylor’s new novel, “The Late Americans,” I thought more than once of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award that the English magazine Literary Review gave to decades of authors, many esteemed, before showing mercy in pandemic-chilled 2020. Not because the sex in Taylor’s novel is described badly, but because — described well! — so much of it is bad.
In the issue, Lydia Davis shares selections from her 1996 journal, and they often read like warm-up scales for her exquisitely off-kilter stories. (“For lunch—a huge potato and a glass of milk.”) You’ll also find masterful uses of the diary as a fictional device. The Brazilian writer Juliana Leite’s “My Good Friend,” translated by Zoë Perry, is an elderly widow’s apparently unremarkable Sunday-evening entry—“About the roof repair, I have nothing new to report”—that turns into a story of mostly unspoken decadeslong love. And James Lasdun’s “Helen” features excerpts from the journal of a woman who lives in what the narrator describes as a “state of incandescent, almost spiritual horror,” and whose crippling self-consciousness doesn’t protect her from humiliations the reader can see coming.
Also in issue no. 244, John Keene, in an Art of Fiction interview with Aaron Robertson, describes how blogging heralded his recovery as a writer after losing drafts of several of the stories that eventually became Counternarratives. And Sharon Olds, in an Art of Poetry interview, tells Jessica Laser about the need to keep one’s art and biography separate, especially when they are clearly not. Keeping a diary might be therapeutic, Olds explains, but “writing a poem to understand yourself better would be like making a cup with no clay, or maybe like having the clay but not making the cup.” She concludes, “If I had to choose between a poem being therapeutic and it being a better poem, I’d want it to be a better poem.”
The New Yorker
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