We’ve become increasingly alienated from one another. It’s time we get back in touch with each other, get out of our heads, and reconnect with our common humanity, writes Ruth Conniff.
The New Yorker (February 5, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresNicholas Konrad’s “Online Profile” – The magazine celebrates its ninety-ninth anniversary..
When Golden was a young curator in the nineties, her shows, centering Black artists, were unprecedented. Today, those artists are the stars of the art market.
Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times
The philosopher was a champion of political and intellectual freedom, but he had no interest in being a martyr. Instead, he shows us how prudence and boldness can go hand in hand.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (February 2, 2024): The new issue features ‘The Long Shadow of 1948’ – How the decisions that led to the founding of Israel left the region in a state of eternal conflict…
How the decisions that led to the founding of Israel left the region in a state of eternal conflict.
A discussion moderated by Emily Bazelon
One year matters more than any other for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 1948, Jews realized their wildly improbable dream of a state, and Palestinians experienced the mass flight and expulsion called the Nakba, or catastrophe. The events are burned into the collective memories of these two peoples — often in diametrically opposed ways — and continue to shape their trajectories.
There’s a scene in that modern classic of screwball existentialism, “Being John Malkovich,” from 1999, in which John Malkovich, playing a version of himself, enters a portal that others have been using to climb inside his mind. Suddenly, Malkovich is in a world populated solely by variations on himself: Malkovich as a flirtatious sexpot, a genteel waiter, a jazz chanteuse, a bemused child, everyone speaking only the word “Malkovich.” In a way, that scene is a microcosm of the actor’s decades-long, always-interesting career.
Users of the internet can ignore its physical underpinnings. But for technologies like artificial intelligence and the metaverse to work, others need to pay attention, argues Abby Bertics
The New Yorker (January 29, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresSarula Bao’s “Lunar New Year” – The artist depicts the joys of gathering with loved ones, around a table of good food
As the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, Bill Stenger rose most days around 6 a.m. and arrived at the slopes before seven. He’d check in with his head snowmaker and the ski-patrol staff, visit the two hotels on the property, and chat with the maintenance workers, the lift operators, the food-and-beverage manager, and the ski-school instructors—a kind of management through constant motion. Stenger is seventy-five, with white hair, wire-rimmed reading glasses, and a sturdy physique that makes him look built for fuzzy sweaters.
The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires
We thought we could master nature, but we were playing with fire.
With elections postponed and no end to the war with Russia in sight, Volodymyr Zelensky and his political allies are becoming like the officials they once promised to root out: entrenched.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 26, 2024): The new issue features ‘America’s 21st-Century E-Commerce Economy Has Stoked A 19th-Century Form of Crime: The Train Robbery’….
Prospect Magazine (March 2024) – The latest issue features ‘How The Government Captured The BBC’ – A faceless fixer – and a broadcaster in a state of ‘permanent cringe’…
We do not choose where we are born. That creates rights—and obligations—that we should all seek to honour
Conflict, human rights abuses and climate change have led to a doubling of the global refugee population in the last seven years, and yet the response of many wealthy countries has become increasingly insular and myopic. Constant demands to slash international aid, along with punitive immigration policies and hateful rhetoric, mark a shift away from humanitarian values. The UK’s Rwanda scheme epitomises this trend: it would normalise the mass deportation of asylum seekers and undermine prohibitions on returning refugees to dangerous countries. At the same time, citizens of wealthy countries appear increasingly indifferent to the plight of those who perish in the Mediterranean or along other perilous routes.
How the government captured the BBC
Ukraine’s fate, Europe’s choice
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