Times Literary Supplement (December 13, 2023): The latest issue features ‘Innocent bystanders? – Collaboration with the Third Reich; The contaminated blood scandal; Gertrude Stein and Picasso, Hamlet’s play; AI Journalism and Clarice Lispector calls…
Deeply entwined with its cultural heritage, the mountainous territory carries a historic tradition of craft metalwork – as a center for the production of hand-crafted ornaments, teapots and spiritual artefacts, destined for temples, and held in high regard by India’s king dynasties.
But the craft has entered a point of decline, continued by just a handful of artisanal metalworkers who fight for its preservation.…
We routinely test for chemicals that cause mutations. What about the dark matter of carcinogens—substances that don’t create cancer cells but rouse them from their slumber?
In the nineteen-seventies, Bruce Ames, a biochemist at Berkeley, devised a way to test whether a chemical might cause cancer. Various tenets of cancer biology were already well established. Cancer resulted from genetic mutations—changes in a cell’s DNA sequence that typically cause the cell to divide uncontrollably. These mutations could be inherited, induced by viruses, or generated by random copying errors in dividing cells. They could also be produced by physical or chemical agents: radiation, ultraviolet light, benzene. One day, Ames had found himself reading the list of ingredients on a package of potato chips, and wondering how safe the chemicals used as preservatives really were.
The law, passed in a frenzy after the First World War, is a disaster. Why is it still on the books?
In March, 1940, Edmund Carl Heine, a forty-nine-year-old American automobile executive, reached an understanding with a company then known as Volkswagenwerk GmbH. Heine, who immigrated to the United States from Germany as a young man, had spent years at Ford, first in Michigan and then in its international operations in South America and Europe, landing finally in Germany. In 1935, two years after the Nazi regime came to power, Ford fired him, for reasons that are unclear. Heine next signed on with Chrysler, in Spain, but the Spanish Civil War was tough on the car business. And so he was out of a job again.
This northeasterly nook of Catalonia’s Costa Brava, between the Pyrenees to the north and the Mediterranean to the south, was the landscape that Dalí called his “ongoing inspiration” and is a recurring motif throughout his work.
While the Casa Natal Dalí took me on a tour of Dalí’s life, its near neighbour, the gigantic Dalí Theatre-Museum (£15; salvador-dali.org), just five minutes’ walk away, was designed by the maestro himself. It opened in 1974 and showcases his style at its most eccentric, not to say egocentric.
With its pink façade and giant white eggs on its roof, like decorations on a cake, this is where you’ll find not only the Mae West “lips” sofa, but also numerous grandiose paintings and drawings, trompe l’oeils and painted ceilings — as well as Dalí’s tomb in the crypt.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 10, 2023):
The Book Review’s daily critics — Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai — reflect on the books that stuck with them in 2023.
By Jennifer Szalai, Alexandra Jacobs and Dwight Garner
Films, TV shows, albums, books, art and A.I.-generated SpongeBob performances that reporters, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.
Ian McEwan is considered one of the most important British novelists alive today. When he writes, characters and plot are difficult to separate because “often characters arise out of plots, often plots drive characters into existence”, he says. What is crucial to McEwan when writing is that “circumstances make the character and the characters generate possibilities. That sense of possibility is always so important. So characters can create their own waves.” The novel Lessons (2022) is McEwan’s most personal novel. It was written in lockdown when he was entering his 70s and beginning to take a look back at his existence. People who know him well can always connect what he is writing with things in his own life, he says.
In Lessons, McEwan wanted to create “the emotional truth of certain rather sad, tragic, disturbing things that happened in my family”, he says. “And the reflective element was also the movement towards trying to understand the circumstances, not only of my life but my generation’s life.” Ian McEwan enjoys reading biographies, but “if you want to know everything it’s possible to know about a great poet, you’ll need to read three or four biographies written over maybe a century or two centuries”, he says. He admits that fiction does not influence him like it did when he was younger.
“We have very little sense of how to generate on the page an open-ended character until the writing of Jane Austen” and he adds that it was the great Russian writers who taught us how to write characters as if they were real people. By the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, there was a great artistic revolution; McEwan points out and emphasizes that it was especially James Joyce who taught us “to understand characters from the flow of consciousness, right from the very inside”.
The Week In Art Podcast (December 8, 2023): This week: the final big art market event of the year, Art Basel in Miami Beach. The Art Newspaper’s associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, talks to our acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, in Miami about the fair, as tensions rise ahead of the pivotal 2024 US election.
In Athens, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, or EMST, is next week opening a months-long programme which will end up with the entire museum filled with women artists. We talk to EMST’s director, Katerina Gregos, about the programme, called What if Women Ruled the World? And this episode’s Work of the Week is two objects: the 15th-century Florentine artist Francesco Pesellino’s panels telling the story of David and Goliath, made for a luxurious cassone or chest for the Medici family.
The panels belong to the National Gallery in London and have just been restored for a new exhibition there, Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed. We talk to Jill Dunkerton, who did the restoration, about these extraordinary paintings.
Art Basel in Miami Beach, Miami Beach Convention Center, until Sunday, 10 December.
What if Women Ruled the World? begins at EMST, Athens, on 14 December.Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed, National Gallery, London, until 10 March 2024.
Myint Zan compares different ways of denying free will.
Grant Bartley wants to know what the problem with freedom is all about.
Nurana Rajabova is wary of an attempt to dismiss determinism to keep free will.
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.
Basil Gala on what it takes to free ourselves from our formative factors.
Literary Review – December 6, 2023: The latest issue, December 2023/January 2024, features the Christmas Double Issue; Architecture & Us; To Catch a Book Thief; Could We Move to Mars?; Milosz goes West; Ballard unplugged; To Brideshead Born and Maharajahs behaving badly…
By John Zubrzycki
‘Unruly schoolboys,’ Lord Curzon called them, but then again, he had a penchant for understatement. John Zubrzycki’s new book on India’s last princely rulers is, in fact, Lord of the Flies meets The 120 Days of Sodom. Had Zubrzycki repurposed his material for a novel, he would no doubt have had some stern reviewer scribbling ‘too on the nose’ or ‘uninspired orientalist caricature’ in the margins. Yet the rulers of India’s 562 princely states were for real, and the Raj, resolute on ruling with a light touch, much preferred coexisting with them to conquering them outright.
By Eva Hoffman
In a late poem about a friend’s death, Czesław Miłosz writes of the long passage between youth and age as one of learning ‘how to bear what is borne by others’. It could be a summary of his own poetic witness. Eva Hoffman’s moving and eloquent essay traces the ways in which that simultaneously guilty, compassionate and fastidious response characterises Miłosz’s work from its earliest days. Bearing what is borne by others is, for Miłosz, close to the heart of the poetic task, but it is also fraught with risk.
