The New Criterion – February 2024 Preview
Category Archives: Culture
The New York Times Magazine- January 21, 2024
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 19, 2024): The new issue features ‘The Whale Who Went AWOL’ – How do you solve a problem like Hvaldmir?; How Group Chats Rule the World – They quietly became the de facto spaces to share dumb jokes, grief or even plans for an insurrection…
The Whale Who Went AWOL
Hvaldimir escaped captivity and became a global celebrity. Now, no one can agree about what to do with him.
By Ferris Jabr
On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope.
How Group Chats Rule the World
They quietly became the de facto spaces to share dumb jokes, grief or even plans for an insurrection.
By Sophie Haigney
I am texting all the time. I am, at the very least, receiving texts all the time, a party to conversations in which I am alternately an eavesdropper and an active participant. This is because I am in a lot of group chats — constant, interlinked, text-message-based conversations among multiple friends that happen all day long. I dip into and out of these conversations, on my phone and on my computer. Sometimes I will put both away for two hours and return to find 279 new messages waiting.
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – January 19, 2024
The Guardian Weekly (January 18, 2024) – The new issue features ‘State Of Emergency’ – How drug cartels upended Ecuador; Why Houthi anger could spread war; Are aliens already among us?…
Not long ago, Ecuador was chiefly known for its volcanoes, wildlife and eco-tourism. It’s an image that may now need some rehabilitation after chaos and bloodshed sparked by the prison escape last week of Adolfo Macías, the country’s most notorious gang leader and drug lord.
With cartels from Peru and Colombia routinely funnelling narcotics through Ecuador’s ports en route to Europe, Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips reports on a rising problem that threatens to tear apart the once-peaceful Andean state.
In the Middle East, Yemen’s Houthi rebels could stymie the increasingly slim chances of preventing a regional war. With the US and UK bombing Houthi bases in response to attacks on commercial shipping, diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour recounts the Houthis’ rise and why military strikes against them may not lead to the desired outcome.
Previews: Country Life Magazine-January 17, 2024
Country Life Magazine – January 17, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Floral Fireworks’ – The National Collection of Dahlias; The Bridges of Britain; and the Arts-and-Crafts masterpieces of Madresfield Court, Worcestershire…
Floral fireworks
Kirsty Fergusson visits the new home of the 1,700-strong National Collection of Dahlias and reveals which blooms to order now for late-summer colour
The Bridges of Britain
Our greatest bridges span the ages and have the power to inspire both awe and admiration, as Jack Watkins discovers
Cold cures
The beautiful and practical cast-iron Victorian cloche is making a comeback. Tiffany Daneff investigates the revival of the miniature glass house
Twist and shout
Tiffany Daneff visits Morton Hall Gardens in Worcestershire to discover the secret of its owner’s intriguing new clematis-training technique
Why, why, why weigela?
New forms of this easy-to-grow garden shrub have repeating flowers in wonderful colours — no wonder they are hot sellers, suggests Charles Quest-Ritson
Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – February 2024
Israel’s War Within
On the ruinous history of Religious Zionism
In August 1975, I stood outside the Knesset, in Jerusalem, witnessing a fevered demonstration against Henry Kissinger, then the American secretary of state. Thousands of young men in knitted kippahs chanted and danced in circles, their arms wrapped around one another, their voices echoing off the stone building. They were mainly West Bank settlers, I was informed, part of a fledgling movement called Gush Emunim—in effect, the Young Guard of the National Religious Party (NRP).
Lost Highway
The trials of trucking school
“If you have to change friends, that’s what you gotta do,” our instructor, Johnny, told the twelve of us sitting in a makeshift classroom in a strip mall outside Austin. “They’re gonna be so jealous, because you’re gonna be bringing home so much money. Encourage them to get their CDL, too.”
A CDL is a commercial driver’s license, and if you pay attention, you’ll find variations on the phrase cdl drivers wanted everywhere: across interstate billboards, in small-town newspapers, on diner bulletin boards, on TV, and, most often, on the backs of semitrucks. Each of us had come to the Changing Lanes CDL School to answer that call.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine- January 22, 2024
The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition
Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.
To be vigilant—to live without illusions about the ever-present threat of annihilation—was a primary value at No. 4 Haportzim Street, once the Jerusalem address of the Netanyahu family. This wariness had ancient roots. In the Passover Haggadah, the passage beginning “Vehi Sheamda” reminds everyone at the Seder table that in each generation an enemy “rises up to destroy” the Jewish people. “But the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands,” the Haggadah continues. Benzion Netanyahu, the family patriarch and a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, was a secular man. For deliverance, he looked not to faith but to the renunciation of naïveté and the strength of arms. This creed became his middle son’s inheritance, the core of his self-conception as the uniquely unillusioned defender of the State of Israel.
A Drug-Decriminalization Fight Erupts in Oregon
An ambitious law set forth a more humane way to address addiction. Then came the backlash.
By E. Tammy Kim
In the early months of the pandemic, joggers on the Bear Creek Greenway, in southern Oregon, began to notice tents cropping up by the path. The Greenway, which connects towns and parks along a tributary of the Rogue River, was beloved for its wetlands and for stands of oaks that attracted migrating birds. Now, as jobs disappeared and services for the poor shut down, it was increasingly a last-ditch place to live. Tents accumulated in messy clusters, where people sometimes smoked fentanyl, and “the Greenway” became a byword for homelessness and drug use. On a popular local Facebook page, one typical comment read, “Though I feel sorry for some of the people in that situation, most of them are just pigs.” In Medford, the largest city along the trail, police demolished encampments and ticketed people for sleeping rough.
The New York Times Magazine- January 14, 2024
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 12, 2024): The new issue features ‘Why Are American Drivers So Deadly’ – After decades of declining fatality, dangerous driving has surged again….
Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?
After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.
By Matthew Shaer
In the summer of 1999, a few years after graduating from medical school, Deborah Kuhls moved from New York to Maryland, where she had been accepted as a surgical fellow at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. Founded by a pioneer in emergency medicine, Shock Trauma is one of the busiest critical-care facilities in the country — in an average year, doctors there see approximately 8,000 patients, many of them close to death.
The All-Time-Great Coach Who Makes Football Fun
Andy Reid’s diligence and sense of mischief have made him one of the game’s best-ever coaches. Can he get his struggling Chiefs back to the Super Bowl?
By Michael Sokolove
Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, has won more than 250 games in his career, fourth all-time, which puts him high on any list of the N.F.L.’s greatest coaches. Most of the others in that pantheon are men who personify the sport’s militaristic soul — Vince Lombardi, for example, the fabled coach of the 1960s-era Green Bay Packers, or Reid’s contemporary, the grim Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots. But Reid is no Lombardi or Belichick; he’s Steve Jobs. He’s a designer, a tinkerer, a product engineer who imbues his football with creativity and even an occasional touch of whimsy.
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – January 11, 2024
The Guardian Weekly (January 10, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Middle East on the brink’ – The threat of a regional war. Also, Inside the Post Office Horizon IT scandal…
The assassination of a Hamas chief in Lebanon. A terror attack on mourners of an Iranian former general. Commercial shipping in the Red Sea targeted by Yemeni rebels, and a US airstrike in Iraq. All were separate events in the Middle East last week but all were linked, in one way or another, to the presence of autonomous but Iranian-backed militia forces in the region.
When asked to visualise the threat of war engulfing the Middle East, for this week’s cover, illustrator Carl Godfrey took a literal approach. “I wanted to convey the tense and unpredictable situation,” says Carl, “and there’s nothing more tense than looking down the barrel of a gun. Especially when those barrels are pointing in all directions, and the risk of war is expanding in all directions.”
Previews: Country Life Magazine-January 10, 2024
Country Life Magazine – January 9, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Walk This Way’ – England’s secret sunken roads; Return of the curly-coated retriever; Tom Parker Bowles on the comfort of pie; Britain’s most poisonous plants, and more…
Curls, curls, curls
The intelligent, powerful curly-coated retriever was favoured by the Victorians and is still winning plaudits as a working breed, discovers Katy Birchall
Rolling in the deep
Ben Lerwill follows in the foot-steps of our ancestors to explore the history of holloways, those sunken and often secret routes criss-crossing the countryside
Little crop of horrors
From hemlock and henbane to giant hogweed, Britain is home to a host of poisonous plants. John Wright reveals how to spot the dangerous and the deadly
Why we all cry for pie
Tom Parker Bowles earns his crust with an ode to the enduring appeal of this humble, yet oh so heavenly savoury creation
Lady Violet Manners’s favourite painting
The broadcaster chooses a poignant work that speaks of absolute parental devotion
A distant horizon conquered
Fiona Reynolds explores the ancient Wiltshire Downs, with her sights set firmly on the far-off landmark of Cherhill Monument
The future as a footstool
The landmark 1980s restoration of London’s Liverpool Street Station is under threat from new proposals, argues Ptolemy Dean
The Midas touch
In the first of two articles, John Goodall investigates the early history of Madresfield Court, Worcestershire, which has been in the same family for 900 years
I can’t believe it’s British butter
Butter is making a comeback in a welcome celebration of our dairy heritage—Jenny Linford meets the artisan makers who are helping to spread the word
The good stuff
Tackle the snow in style this winter with Hetty Lintell’s pick of the best skiing accessories
Sweet dreams are made of these
The gardens at Villa Durazzo-Pallacini in Italy are Heaven on Earth for Charles Quest-Ritson
‘I have seen a very pretty thing…’
Lucien de Guise reveals how you can add a true touch of Ottoman opulence to your home
Interiors
Amelia Thorpe selects the hottest new stoves, fires and range cookers, and Giles Kime examines the growing range of options fuelled by bioethanol
Money for old rope
Deborah Nicholls-Lee looks at how hemp can help in the battle against climate change
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Jan 15, 2024
Has School Become Optional?
In the past few years, chronic absenteeism has nearly doubled. The fight to get students back in classrooms has only just begun.
Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health, and elevated youth violence.
What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On
From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.
More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.
