Arts & Culture: The New Criterion -October 2024
Category Archives: Reviews
Commentary Magazine – October 2024 Preview
Why Won’t We Let Ukraine Win?
…the U.S. has been too slow in arming its ally, too restrictive in setting conditions on the use of weapons, and generally too fearful of Vladimir Putin’s threats. The result is that Ukraine, for all its unfathomable courage and boundless ingenuity, has been permitted to fight, but not win, the war. If this keeps up, Ukraine could actually lose.
Mark Zuckerberg Is Just So Very Sorry, You Guys
When I step back a bit, I can see that Zuckerberg isn’t just haplessly begging our forgiveness. He’s trying to save his business. Meta Platforms, the company he controls, contains some of the world’s most widely used and profitable digital brands, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta appears to be thriving, with its stock price more than quadrupling since a rocky 2022. But Zuckerberg knows that his company’s brands are built on foundations of sand. Just as a sandbar will move with tides, the user base of any social platform can drift away in a surprisingly short time.
The Harris Shuffle
This is Harris’s challenge: She’s the incumbent vice president running for higher office in a change election. She’s an undefined candidate whose positions and job performance are vulnerable to attack. She wants to be seen as a disruptor while remaining loyal to President Biden. And she wants to move away from the far-left views she held as a senator while she continues to proclaim that her values have stayed the same.
The New York Times Magazine – Sept. 15, 2024
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (September 13, 2024): The latest issue features Sasha Weiss on the Prince we never knew; Ben Hubbard on a U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees; Giles Harvey on the writer Tony Tulathimutte; and more.
The Prince We Never Knew
A revealing new documentary could redefine our understanding of the pop icon. But you will probably never get to see it.
How a U.N. Agency Became a Flashpoint in the Gaza War
UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, has survived 75 years of Israeli-Palestinian strife. Can it survive the latest conflict?
An Acerbic Young Writer Takes Aim at the Identity Era
Tony Tulathimutte is a master comedian whose original and highly disturbing new book skewers liberal pieties. By Giles Harvey
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – Sept. 13, 2024
The Guardian Weekly (September 12, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Two Faces’ – Why the historical divide between Germany’s east and west could halt the rise of the AFD (Alternative for Germany)…
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Spotlight | After the Grenfell Tower inquiry
Seven years after 72 people died in a tower block fire in west London, Robert Booth and Emine Sinmaz report on the damning public investigation into a wholly preventable tragedy.
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Environment | The deep secrets of a Greenland glacier
Damian Carrington reports from Kangerlussuup glacier, where scientists are discovering new things about sediment banks that could slow the rate of rising seas.
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Feature | The big click-off: how to win at Fantasy Premier League
With 10 million players, the virtual football game has become a global phenomenon. Tom Lamont gets the lowdown from the world’s best armchair managers.
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Opinion | Why I’d pay to see Ticketmaster getting rinsed
After the Oasis ticket debacle, this much is clear, writes Marina Hyde: the “fan experience” is an excuse to be exploited while having to look grateful.
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Culture | James McAvoy on class, comfort and carnage
The Scottish actor talks to Zoe Williams about marriage, therapy – and why Ken Loach would never cast him.
Art Reviews: Gagosian Quarterly – Fall 2023
In Conversation – Christopher Makos and Jessica Beck
Andy Warhol’s Insiders at the Gagosian Shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade is a group exhibition and shop takeover that feature works by Warhol and portraits of the artist by friends and collaborators including photographers Ronnie Cutrone, Michael Halsband, Christopher Makos, and Billy Name. To celebrate the occasion, Makos met with Gagosian director Jessica Beck to speak about his friendship with Warhol and the joy of the unexpected.
The Art History of Presidential Campaign Posters
Against the backdrop of the 2020 US presidential election, historian Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present. In an interview with Quarterly editor Gillian Jakab, Wert highlights an array of landmark posters and the artists who made them.
The New York Review Of Books – October 3, 2024
Savvy in the Grass
Some botanists maintain that peas are capable of associative learning, others that tropical vines have a sort of vision. If plants possess sentience, what is the morally appropriate response?
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger
The Nation of Plants by Stefano Mancuso, translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti
Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence by Paco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence
An Entry of One’s Own
A collection of excerpts from women’s diaries written over the past four centuries offers a vast range of human experience and a subtle counterhistory.
Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries edited by Sarah Gristwood
The Bliss and the Risks
The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s ascension to greater visibility raises questions about how we assess artistic talent, how reputations are made, and how we reevaluate once-neglected artists, particularly women.
Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich/I Am Me an exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York City, June 6–September 9, 2024, and the Art Institute of Chicago, October 12, 2024–January 12, 2025
Preview: Military History Magazine – Oct/Nov 2024
MILITARY HISTORY MAGAZINE (September 12, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Napoleon At War’ – The Rise of a Military Colossus…
Napoleon: Rise of a military colossus
In our special two-part feature in this issue, Graham Goodlad explores, first, the part played by Napoleon’s generalship in his progress from unknown artillery officer to ruler of France. Then we analyses in depth two battles he fought in his…
Napoleon by numbers
Infographics: Calum Henderson
Lodi and Arcola: making the myth
Graham Goodlad analyses the clashes that made Napoleon’s name as a soldier of genius.
Hidden figures
The use of ‘native levies’ has long been a feature of foreign wars – but their employment and their sacrifice reached a peak during the British colonial era. Stephen Roberts…
Thunder in the East: Armoured warfare in South-East Asia and the Pacific, 1937-1945
From Burma to Iwo Jima, armoured fighting vehicles played a key role in some of World War II’s most challenging environments. Our military technology expert David Porter takes notes.
The Economist Magazine – September 14, 2024 Preview
America’s election is mired in conflict
Donald Trump’s conspiracy machine is already gearing up for election night
Is Labour in thrall to the unions?
They agree on the labour market above all
Danger in the South China Sea
A new stage in the conflict is beginning
Getting Europe to grow
Mario Draghi, the continent’s unofficial chief technocrat, has a plan
Breast milk: the motherlode
Some of its myriad components are being tested as treatments for cancer and other diseases
Research Preview: Nature Magazine – Sept. 12, 2024
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Ancient fish dined on bats — or died trying
Fossils hint that bats’ wings sometimes lodged in fish’s throats, leading the bat-eater to die of hunger.
Lassa fever to have a fearsome toll without vaccination
Modelling suggests that the Lassa virus could infect millions in a decade, but vaccines under development could sharply reduce deaths.
Simple steps could shrink US beef industry’s carbon hoofprint
Beef production accounts for 3% of country’s carbon emissions, but measures such as tree-planting offer help.
Literary Previews: The Paris Review – Fall 2024
Not Enough about Frank: A Visit with James Schuyler
James Schuyler on Frank O’Hara: “I still can see Frank, standing on that street corner outside a pastry shop, holding a neatly tied-up box of God knows what—éclairs, perhaps.”
James Schuyler was born in Chicago in 1923, grew up in Washington, D.C., and East Aurora, New York, and spent most of his adult years in New York City and Southampton, Long Island. Although he is perhaps less widely known than the fellow New York School poets with whom he is associated, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch, he published six full-length books of poetry during his lifetime—beginning with Freely Espousing, published by Doubleday and Paris Review Editions in 1969—as well as two novels, and a third written in collaboration with Ashbery. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Morning of the Poem (1980). Mental illness plagued him intermittently, and there were times when his life threatened to veer out of control, but friends repeatedly rallied around him, and the years before his death in 1991 were happy and productive.
