The New Criterion – March 2024 Preview
Category Archives: Reviews
The New York Times Book Review – February 18, 2024
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 16, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Philip Gefter’s sizzling, “unapologetically obsessive” new book, “Cocktails With George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” Our critic Alexandra Jacobs calls it “a shot glass filled with one work that, alongside contemporaneous books like Richard Yates’s novel ‘Revolutionary Road’ and Betty Friedan’s polemic ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ showed how the ‘cartoon versions of marriage’ long served up by American popular culture always came with a secret side of bitters.”
Filming ‘Virginia Woolf,’ the Battles Weren’t Just Onscreen
With Burton and Taylor as stars and a writer and director feuding, adapting the scabrous play wasn’t easy. “Cocktails With George and Martha” pours out the details.
‘Neighbors’ Opens the Door to a Literary Career Cut Short
A story collection from Diane Oliver, who died at 22, locates the strength in Black families surviving their separate but equal surroundings.
Writer, Mother, Ex-Wife: Leslie Jamison Is a Self in ‘Splinters’
In her powerful new memoir, the author examines a life composed of conflicting identities — and fierce, contradictory desires.
Research Preview: Science Magazine – Feb 16, 2024
Giant solar farms could provoke rainclouds in the desert
Updrafts from dark solar panels could fuel storms
X-ray survey bolsters theory of universe’s expansion
eROSITA telescope shows galaxies’ “clumpiness” matches predicted effect of dark energy, dark matter
The Economist Magazine – February 17, 2024 Preview
The growing peril of national conservatism
It’s dangerous and it’s spreading. Liberals need to find a way to stop it
Europe must hurry to defend itself against Russia—and Donald Trump
The ex-president’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to attack American allies is an assault on NATO. Ultimately, that is bad for America
American Scientist Magazine – March 2024
Deconstructing DNA Beyond the Helix
An artist’s experimental approach to Rosalind Franklin’s Photo 51 reveals the molecule’s intricate biochemistry.
When Sharks Eat an Angler’s Haul
Tensions are rising as the ocean’s great predators nab fish on the line, inciting a major new challenge in human–wildlife conflict.
Research Preview: Nature Magazine – Feb 15, 2024
First passages of rolled-up Herculaneum scroll revealed
Researchers used artificial intelligence to decipher the text of 2,000-year-old charred papyrus scripts, unveiling musings on music and capers.
Deepfakes, trolls and cybertroopers: how social media could sway elections in 2024
Faced with data restrictions and harassment, researchers are mapping out fresh approaches to studying social media’s political reach.
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Feb 16, 2024
Times Literary Supplement (February 14, 2024): The latest issue features Thinking AI; London literary consequences, A new play in the great tradition, and Household terrors…
Arts/Politics: The Atlantic Magazine – March 2024
TO STOP A SHOOTER
Why would an armed officer stand by as a school shooting unfolds? By Jamie Thompson
It was the early afternoon of Valentine’s Day 2018, and the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was full of kids exchanging stuffed animals and heart-shaped chocolates. Scot Peterson, a Broward County sheriff’s deputy, was in his office at the school, waiting to talk with a parent about a student’s fake ID. At 2:21 p.m., a report came over the school radio about a strange sound—firecrackers, possibly—coming from Building 12. Peterson stepped outside, moving briskly, talking into the radio on his shoulder. Then the fire alarm rang. Peterson, wearing a sheriff’s uniform with a Glock on his belt, started running.
A Trove of ‘Lost Basquiats’ Led to a Splashy Exhibition. Then the FBI Showed Up.
Why is it so hard to root out fakes and forgeries?
Previews: Country Life Magazine – Feb 14, 2024
Country Life Magazine – February 13, 2024: The latest ‘How Do I Love Thee?’ – Let me count the ways; Rough collies, red roses and royal caviar; Glass acts – the coolest conservatories; Head start – why real gentlemen wear hats….
The romance of the rose
With its velvety, softly scented depths, the red rose has long beguiled lovers. Charles Quest-Ritson falls under its spell
Thoroughly good eggs
Tom Parker Bowles savours the unctuous delights of caviar from the mother-daughter team at King’s Fine Foods, ethically farmed and utterly delicious
Taking the rough with the smooth
Famed for their loyalty, rough collies are happy finding hidden sheep, bounding up Munros or simply curling up with children. Katy Birchall meets Lassie
In the hat of the moment
Time was when every gentleman of every background wore a hat. It’s time to fall back in love with bowler, beret and bonnet, recommends John F. Mueller
Interiors
Amelia Thorpe admires the most stylish conservatories
Sir Karl Jenkins’s favourite painting
The composer chooses an ethereal Italian scene that literally reflects his own music
Behind the scenes at the cathedral
Fiona Reynolds explores the environs of St Albans in Hertfordshire, from the longest nave in Europe to the River Ver
A Georgian reinvention
With imagination and style, late-18th-century Marlwood Grange in Gloucestershire has been transformed into a family home fit for the 21st century, discovers Jeremy Musson
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell gets a handle on the most colourful handbags
Music to our ears
As the famous opera house at Glyndebourne, East Sussex, turns 90, the gardens are more glorious than ever. Tiffany Daneff admires a symphony of planting
More pudding, pease
Tom Parker Bowles tucks into the succulent, comforting suet pudding, an old favourite that deserves to return to our plates
More than a pretty face
Admired for his portrayal of dewy eyes and diaphanous fabrics, John Singer Sargent rose to the top of the portrait-painting world. Mary Miers follows his career from peripatetic childhood to Society favourite
Arts/History: Smithsonian Magazine – March 2024
The Remarkable Untold Story of Sojourner Truth
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Feminist. Preacher. Abolitionist. Civil rights pioneer. Now the full story of the American icon’s life and faith is finally coming to light
On May 29, 1851, a woman asked to address the attendees of the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron. She cut a striking figure, close to six feet tall even without her crisp bonnet. She was more than likely the only Black person in the room.
A procession of participants had already sounded off about the plight and potential of the “fairer sex” during the two-day gathering. “We are told that woman has never excelled in philosophy or any of the branches of mathematics,” said abolitionist Emily Rakestraw Robinson before noting that women were largely barred from higher education. Lura Maria Giddings lamented: “The degraded, vicious man, who scarcely knows his right hand from his left, is permitted to vote, while females of the most elevated intelligence are entirely excluded.” A dispatch about women’s labor from Paulina W. Davis, who would later create the women’s rights periodical The Una, painted a verbal picture of “mother and sister toiling like Southern slaves, early and late, for a son who sleeps on the downiest couch, wears the finest linen and spends his hundreds of dollars in a wild college life.”
