They are not doomed to be poor and anxious
The Congress party is set for a drubbing in the world’s biggest election
Instead it should try a novel response to Iran’s missile attack: restraint
Ancient prophecies of worlds destroyed by fire are becoming realities. How will we respond?
New discoveries demystify the bizarre force that binds atomic nuclei together
Times Literary Supplement (April 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘A Heavy Reckoning’ – Shakespeare and War’; Judgment at Tokyo; Iranian women in revolt; Memoirs of a sociopath and A Chilean masterpiece…
Country Life Magazine – April 16, 2024: The latest issue features:
Archibald Thorburn’s talent for capturing the essence and atmosphere of Nature set him apart from his contemporaries, as Charles Harris discovers
The mainstay of jam and jelly may have been the fruit that tempted Adam and Eve, suggests Ian Morton
From theorbo to the viola da gamba, ancient musical instruments hold a fascination for a growing number of today’s players, finds Henrietta Bredin
James Alexander-Sinclair visits a home near Godalming, Surrey, where a blank canvas has been transformed into a beautiful, functional garden
Sir John Soane’s acrimonious fall out with his favourite sons was their loss and the nation’s gain, declares Agnes Stamp
Holly Black examines the stellar career of Wassily Kandinsky, who pioneered two major artistic movements in turbulent times
Carla Passino meets ‘ice queen’ Polly Townsend, who spent five fascinating weeks as an artist-in-residence in Antarctica
The Rare Breeds Survival Trust CEO selects a magical work that celebrates food production as well as the wonder of nature
John Goodall charts the rise of Stansted Park, West Sussex, from medieval hunting lodge to spectacular country house
A quartet of actresses take the plaudits from Michael Billington in leading roles ranging from Charlotte Brontë to Sarah Siddons
HARVARD MAGAZINE May/June2024 :
How long will the world’s forests impound carbon below ground?
by Jonathan Shaw
MARYVILLE, Tennessee, lies near the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, a range home to more tree species than exist in all of Europe. Benton Taylor grew up amidst this abundance, but as a boy, he barely noticed the plants. In the nearby national park, a family friend was raising—together with a menagerie of other mammals—a pair of bears orphaned as cubs. Taylor dreamed of studying these apex denizens of the forest, who forage at the top of the food chain. But as his education and understanding grew, his curiosity shifted to seed-dispersing animals, plants, and the soil and nutrients that sustain them: a trip down the trophic pyramid, driven by an appreciation of forests as ecological systems in which plants are primary producers. “Now I’ve half moved into the basement,” jokes the assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, whose research encompasses the strategies plants use to obtain essential nutrients such as nitrogen, and how that, in turn, affects their ability to store another vital element with a global climate impact: carbon.
by Nina Pasquini
DIVERSIFYING one’s assets is useful not only in finance but also in diet, according to an October study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). Though not many people have heard of the “portfolio diet”—consisting of plant-based foods proven to lower unhealthy cholesterol, such as nuts, oats, berries, and avocados—it is one of the easiest ways to improve long-term cardiovascular health. “The idea was that each of these foods lowers cholesterol quite minimally, but if you make a whole diet based on these different foods, you will see large reductions in [unhealthy] cholesterol,” said Andrea Glenn, an HSPH postdoctoral research fellow in nutrition and the lead author of the study. The more of these foods one eats, the higher the protection—but one need not include them all to reap the diet’s benefits, she said. “Like a business portfolio, you can choose the ones you want.”
Mina Cikara explores how political tribalism feeds the American bipartisan divide.
by Max J. Krupnick
Film and television writers face an existential threat
In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film.
Smith was looking for a job in television. She had an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and had lived and worked as a playwright in New York City for years—two of her productions garnered positive reviews in the Times. But playwriting had begun to feel like a vanity project: to pay rent, she’d worked as a nanny, a transcriptionist, an administrative assistant, and more. There seemed to be no viable financial future in theater, nor in academia, the other world where she supposed she could make inroads.
The Republican primaries as farce
On the Saturday before the Iowa caucuses, the super PAC supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis staged a “drop by” for the candidate at its headquarters in West Des Moines. Outside the modernist office park, much of the Upper Midwest was under a deep freeze brought on by a low-pressure system that had deposited more than a foot of snow in advance of a surge of arctic air that brought the wind chill into the negative thirties. Despite the atrocious road conditions, DeSantis was keeping his schedule as a “special guest” of the Never Back Down PAC, beginning the day at the far western end of Iowa, in Council Bluffs, and concluding it three hundred miles east, in Davenport.
Video-game engines were designed to closely mimic the mechanics of the real world. They’re now used for movies, TV shows, architecture, military trainings, virtual reality, and the metaverse.
They have long been a symbol of a future that never came. Now a variety of companies are building them—or something close.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (April 14, 2024):The latest issue features…
Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan D.A., campaigned as the best candidate to go after the former president. Now he finds himself leading Trump’s first prosecution — and perhaps the only one before the November election.
In her new play, ‘Sally & Tom,’ Suzan-Lori Parks brings exuberant provocation to the gravest historical questions.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (April 12, 2024): The latest issue features the cold-sweat-inducing premise of the two books on our cover this week, Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War” and Sarah Scoles’s “Countdown.”
In “Nuclear War” and “Countdown,” Annie Jacobsen and Sarah Scoles talk to the people whose job it is to prepare for atomic conflict.
In Lionel Shriver’s new novel, judging intelligence and competence is a form of bigotry.
Richard Goodwin, an adviser to presidents, “was more interested in shaping history,” she says, “and I in figuring out how history was shaped.” Their bond is at the heart of her new book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.”
Times Literary Supplement (April 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Man Into Marble’ – Corin Throsby and Kathryn Sutherland on the real Byron; Anthony Burgess on music; Left in charge at the palazzo; Revolutionary Russia; A shorter Long Day’s Journey and What is lyric verse?…
Boomers Daily 