Tag Archives: Reviews

SCIENCE MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 16, 2025

Science issue cover

SCIENCE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Advanced Nanoscopy’ – 3D rendering of photochemically sectioned brain tissue.

DNA from rum-soaked fishes chronicles century of change

Museum specimens reveal loss of genetic diversity in marine fishes of the Philippines

Did lead poisoning help drive human evolution?

“Bold” hypothesis suggests tolerance for lead allowed Homo sapiens to outlive Neanderthals

Architects of molecular cages win Chemistry Nobel

Spongelike materials called metal-organic frameworks can separate and store gases

Chaos and confusion as U.S. shutdown drags on

Mass layoffs, and subsequent reversals, have added to research spending woes

THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 18, 2025 PREVIEW

THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE: The latest issue featuresThe coming debt emergency

The rich world faces a painful bout of inflation

Governments are living far beyond their means. Sadly, inflation is the most likely escape

Brute force is no match for today’s high-tech drug-runners

They are more inventive and adaptable than ever

The America v China spat reveals a dangerous dynamic

A balance of economic terror is no basis for stability

First Brands is a painful but necessary warning for Wall Street

Lessons from a $10bn panic on the prairie

Why Trump is looking the wrong way in the Arctic

Forget Greenland; worry about Alaska

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – NOVEMBER 6, 2025

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Jed Perl on critical thinking, Mark Lilla on the MAGA nation, Ben Lerner on his heart, Clare Bucknell on female critics in early modern England, Cora Currier on twenty-five years of the “war on terror,” Peter E. Gordon on the religion of sociology, Wyatt Mason on Guy Davenport, Josephine Quinn on St. Augustine of Africa, Geoffrey O’Brien on Kavalier and Clay at the Met, Nitin K. Ahuja on the science of death, Darryl Pinckney on James Baldwin, a painting by Maira Kalman, poems by April Bernard and Amit Majmudar, and much more.


Impassioned Ferocity

A critic’s power lies in the testing of deeply held beliefs about the nature of art and art’s place in the world against the experience of specific artworks.

Authority by Andrea Long Chu

All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld

Those Passions: On Art and Politics by T.J. Clark

Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies by Jonathan Kramnick

No Judgment by Lauren Oyler

Storm Warnings

The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field

A Brief Literary Emancipation

Early modern female writers, who were denied the sort of authority usually needed to write literary criticism, were also freed from its constraints.

Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

The New Republic ———- November 2025 Preview

THE NEW REPUBLIC MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘How I Became A Populist’ – My time at the Federal Trade Commission – before Donald Trump fired me – totally changed the way I see our political divide.

Not All Old Candidates Are Joe Biden, and Not All Young Ones Are Great

All things being equal, sure, Democrats ought to lean toward younger candidates. But there are many times when all things aren’t equal.

How the Trump Oligarchy Works: The Case of Stephen Schwarzman

Timothy Noah

Trump’s Big DOJ Scam Accidentally Exposed by MAGA Dimwit Jim Jordan

The Daily Blast With Greg Sargent

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – OCTOBER 17, 2025 PREVIEW

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Artist in the making: Joyce Carol Oates on Sally Mann’s photographic craft’

Peer group

The British upper classes today By Michael Hall

Uniquely hers

A how-to book by ‘one of the greatest’ American photographers’ By Joyce Carol Oates

Master of the apocalypse

László Krasznahorkai, Nobel laureate in literature By George Szirtes

Thoroughly modern maenads

Religion, immigration, gender politics and severed heads By Mary Beard

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 2025

Scientific American

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Life’s Big Bangs’ – Did complex life emerge more than once?

Mysterious Rocks Could Rewrite Evolution of Complex Life

Controversial evidence hints that complex life might have emerged hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought—and possibly more than once

The Slippery Slope of Ethical Collapse—And How Courage Can Reverse It

Your brain gets used to wrongdoing. It can also get used to doing good

Which Anti-Inflammatory Supplements Actually Work?

Experts say the strongest scientific studies identify three compounds that fight disease and inflammation

The Sordid Mystery of a Somalian Meteorite Smuggled into China

How a space rock vanished from Africa and showed up for sale across an ocean

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 20, 2025 PREVIEW

The cover of the October 20 2025 issue of The New Yorker in which a dog cannonballs into a pile of leaves.

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest cover features Harry Bliss’s “Cannonball” – The delights of fall.

The Real Problem Is How Trump Can Legally Use the Military

Congress wrote statutes with the apparent assumption that whoever held the office of the Presidency would use the powers they granted in good faith. By Jeannie Suk Gersen

How Long Will You Live?

Smoking a cig takes twenty minutes off your life. But thinking about Rudy Giuliani’s downfall might add some time back. By Greg Clarke

Inside the Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education

How conservatives learned to stop worrying and love federal power. By Emma Green

What Zohran Mamdani Knows About Power

The thirty-three-year-old socialist is rewriting the rules of New York politics. Can he transform the city as mayor? By Eric Lach

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE – OCT. 12, 2025

Current cover

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The 10.12.25 Issue features Amy X. Wang on “buy now, pay later”; Giles Harvey on the filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer; Bruce Schoenfeld on the L.A. Dodgers and its Latino fan base; and more.

If an Energy Drink Drank an Energy Drink, You’d Get a Celsius

How a turbocharged upstart brand came to threaten Red Bull and Monster’s dominance.

Thomas Pynchon Saw Where America Was Headed. What Does He See Now?

The novelist anticipated our bizarre present. How does his latest book hold up in an age of eroding reality? By Parul Sehgal

They Got to Live a Life of Luxury. Then Came the Fine Print.

‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ has built a delirious new culture of consumption — and trapped users in a vortex of debt.

THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 11, 2025 PREVIEW

THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE: The latest issue featuresA new beginning

A new beginning for the Middle East

The breakthrough in Gaza could open up a new approach to peace

Donald Trump’s fortress economy is starting to hurt America

The pain from trade and immigration restrictions cannot be postponed forever

Japanese politics enters its heavy-metal phase

Takaichi Sanae is a refreshing change—but problems loo

Cybercrime is afflicting big business. How to lessen the pain

Banning the payment of ransoms would be a start

Africa’s leaders-for-life offer a warning to the world

The longer autocrats stay in power, the worse they become

SCIENCE MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 9, 2025

SCIENCE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Eclipsing the Sun’ – A unique cosmic event shows an influence of light on bird behavior.

Research on immune system’s ‘police’ garners Nobel

Three scientists honored for revealing how regulatory T cells prevent autoimmune disease

Quantum effects in circuits honored with Physics Nobel

Breakthrough paved the way to many of today’s budding quantum computers

Steadying the output of fiber lasers

High-power fiber lasers are used in a range of scientific fields in addition to their standard use for technology. However, increases in laser output power are limited by nonlinear effects that can damage the optical components and reduce the beam quality. Rothe et al. used a spatial wavefront-shaping technique for multimode fiber lasers that mitigates their detrimental processes, thus enabling output power to be increased appreciably while maintaining beam quality.