‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (July 17, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week: how populist Republicans plan to make Donald Trump’s second term count, NATO’s promises to Ukraine mark real progress, but there is still much more to do (10:12) and what matters about the human-dominated Anthropocene geological phase is not when it began, but how it might end (14:41).
Category Archives: Reviews
Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — August 2023
Doctor’s Orders
COVID-19 and the new science wars
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not unusual to enter common spaces across the United States—grocery stores, malls, office buildings—and experience a kind of perceptual whiplash. People wearing N-95 masks and latex gloves stood beside others wearing no mask at all—or else letting their mandatory face coverings slouch flaccidly beneath their chins.
Who Walks Always Beside You?
A disappearance in Arkansas
Twenty-two years ago, a six-year-old girl—my cousin—got lost in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance would eventually connect my family to another story, a dark and bizarre one involving kidnapping, brainwashing, murder, and a cult that believed in the imminent end of the world, laced with the kind of eerie coincidences or near-coincidences that cause perfectly rational people to question what they think they know about reality.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – July 24, 2023
Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville
Tennessee’s government has turned hard red, but a new set of outlaw songwriters is challenging Music City’s conservative ways—and ruling bro-country sound.
On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.
How Gretchen Whitmer Made Michigan a Democratic Stronghold
The Governor’s strategy for revitalizing her state has two parts: to grow, Michigan needs young people; to draw young people, it needs to have the social policies they want.
Arts & Culture: A Profile Of Native American Artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Now the 83-year-old is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City – the museum’s first retrospective ever of an Indigenous artist. Correspondent Serena Altschul reports on a moment that’s been described as long overdue.
“Landscape is Always Full of Movement”
For the Survival of Future Generations
A Post-Colonial World
World Economic Forum: Top Stories- July 15, 2023
0:15 UK universities have a plan for AI – The guidelines aim to incorporate AI ethically into education and treat it as ‘an opportunity rather than a threat’. The UK’s 24 Russell Group universities are signing the principles.
2:07 This trolley can spot if you’re at risk of stroke – It has electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors embedded in its handles which screen you for heart irregularities as you shop. Researchers at Liverpool John Moores University fitted the sensors into 10 trolleys and rolled them out at 4 supermarkets in Liverpool, UK. Shoppers were invited to hold the handlebar for at least 60 seconds. If the sensor didn’t detect an irregular heartbeat, it lit up green. Over 2 months, the trolleys screened 2,155 people. They detected atrial fibrillation in 39 people who were swiftly able to book a cardiologist appointment.
3:50 Paris generates clean energy from Métro passagers – Energy firm IBERDROLA converted 6 turnstiles into mini-turbines at Miromesnil Métro station for 2 days last year. As each passenger passed through the turnstiles the turbines converted their movement into green energy. 27,000 passengers used the turnstiles. Each passenger generated 0.2 watts of energy. If scaled across the entire Métro system, which serves 1.5 billion passengers annually this technology could generate 136MW per year.
5:09 These sensors can spot stressed tomatoes – Their inventors say they can make agriculture more sustainable while increasing crop yields at the same time.
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The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change.
Finance Preview: Barron’s Magazine – July 17, 2023
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – JULY 17, 2023 ISSUE –
40 Investment Ideas From Our Roundtable Pros
Our 10 Midyear Roundtable panelists see value in a variety of healthcare, industrial, media, and other stocks that the market has overlooked.
High-Speed Internet Will Boost Frontier Stock
Three years after a bankruptcy filing, Frontier Communications plans to connect 10 million locations to its fiberoptic network.
The Treasury Hoped to Aid Low-Income Home Buyers. The Help Went to Johnny Depp, Too.
A mortgage firm was tasked with lending to minority and low-income home buyers. So why have many of its loans gone to celebrities and the ultrawealthy? A Barron’s investigation.
The New York Times Book Review — July 16, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JULY 16, 2023: This week, Jeff Goodell’s “The Heat Will Kill You First,” feels particularly apt. “This is a propulsive book, one to be raced through; the planet is burning,” writes our critic Jennifer Szalai. But maybe you don’t want to think more than you already do about impending doom. We’ve got you covered: The issue brims with diversions — a charming novel about a reality TV show set on Mars, fiction about complicated families and a slew of good memoirs, including ones from a senior intelligence official, the war reporter Jane Ferguson and the actor Elliot Page.
Extreme Heat Is Here to Stay. Why Are We Not More Afraid?
In “The Heat Will Kill You First,” Jeff Goodell documents the lethal effects of rising temperatures and argues that we need to take hot weather a lot more seriously.
What Does It Even Mean to Be Real?
In Deborah Willis’s novel “Girlfriend on Mars,” a young woman enters a reality-TV contest to leave the planet, and her marijuana-farming boyfriend, behind.
GIRLFRIEND ON MARS, by Deborah Willis
Sometimes, a girlfriend needs space. Sometimes, she goes to space. That’s the — OK, obvious — premise of “Girlfriend on Mars,” a novel by the Canadian writer Deborah Willis, who knows what we’ve wished for from books all along, which is that they were TV instead.
Preview: New York Times Magazine – July 16, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 16, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, Greta Gerwig takes us deep inside her vision for the “Barbie” movie. Plus, the former World Cup-winner with the hardest job in soccer, the war for semiconductor chips and Robert Downey Jr. on his post-Marvel career.
Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job
Mattel wanted a summer blockbuster to kick off its new wave of brand-extension movies. She wanted it to be a work of art.
The moment Greta Gerwig knew for certain that she could make a movie about Barbie, the most famous and controversial doll in history, she was thinking about death. She had been reading about Ruth Handler, the brash Jewish businesswoman who created the doll — and who, decades later, had two mastectomies. Handler birthed this toy with its infamous breasts, the figurine who became an enduring avatar of plastic perfection, while being stuck, like all of us, in a fragile and failing human body.
‘An Act of War’: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China
The Biden administration thinks it can preserve America’s technological primacy by cutting China off from advanced computer chips. Could the plan backfire?
Last October, the United States Bureau of Industry and Security issued a document that — underneath its 139 pages of dense bureaucratic jargon and minute technical detail — amounted to a declaration of economic war on China. The magnitude of the act was made all the more remarkable by the relative obscurity of its source. One of 13 bureaus within the Department of Commerce, the smallest federal department by funding, B.I.S. is tiny: Its budget for 2022 was just over $140 million, about one-eighth the cost of a single Patriot air-defense missile battery.
Interviews: ‘Under The Eye Of Power’ Author Colin Dickey – ‘Panic & Paranoia’
The American Scholar (July 14, 2023): In his new book, ‘Under the Eye of Power’, Colin Dickey asks, “What if paranoia, particularly a paranoia of secret, subversive societies, is not just peripheral to the functioning of democracy, but at its very heart?”
The litany of contemporary conspiracy theories runs long: Pizzagate, QAnon, chemtrails, “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” “birds aren’t real.”
Some of these are funny—the rumor that Avril Lavigne and/or Paul McCartney have been replaced by doppelgängers—and some have deadly consequences, like the mass murders motivated by replacement theory or the Chronicles of the Elders of Zion.
We might like to think this is a recent phenomenon, but the first American president to espouse a conspiracy theory was actually George Washington, a freemason who believed that the Illuminati caused the French Revolution.
Research Preview: Science Magazine – July 14, 2023
A machine-intelligent world
Huge strides have been made in the development of machine-learning algorithms to generate what is commonly called artifi cial intelligence (AI). Looking to the forefront of how AI is being used in science and society reveals many benefi ts, as well as grand challenges, that must be addressed.
Leveraging artificial intelligence in the fight against infectious diseases
Despite advances in molecular biology, genetics, computation, and medicinal chemistry, infectious disease remains an ominous threat to public health. Addressing the challenges posed by pathogen outbreaks, pandemics, and antimicrobial resistance will require concerted interdisciplinary efforts.
