Video timeline: 00:00 – Why is Qatar hosting the World Cup? 00:57 – World Cups are expensive competitions 01:56 – Qatar’s human rights violations 02:36 – Qatar’s place in the Gulf 04:43 – Qatar distinguishes itself from its neighbours 05:50 – Qatar bids to host the World Cup 07:18 – Qatar’s neighbours issue a blockade 10:12 – What might happen after the World Cup?
Read our defence of Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup: https://econ.st/3XcOC5A
Ben Luke talks to Hannah McGivern, a correspondent for The Art Newspaper who has just been to Qatar, about the vast number of public art projects that will accompany the FIFA Men’s World Cup that begins there on Sunday 20 November.
She also discusses the museums that Qatar plans to open by 2030. How does this explosion of cultural initiatives sit with Qatar’s record on human rights and treatment of low-paid migrant workers in the building of its cultural venues and World Cup stadia? It has been a heady fortnight of auctions in New York.
Ben speaks to Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, about the highs and lows, and whether we can expect even more sales of blockbuster collections in the coming years.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is an untitled painting by Luis Meque, an artist born in Mozambique who came to fame in the 1980s and early-1990s in Zimbabwe. Tandazani Dhlakama, the curator of the exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, tells us about Meque’s painting and his brief and brilliant life.When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa, 20 November-3 September 2023 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
High-performance electronics will focus on increasing the rate of computation
New study suggests microbiomes can promote cancer by suppressing immune response and seeding metastase
Paleontologists are urged to take a stand against a market that may provide cover for continued poaching
Twelve sites are considered for defining the Anthropocene geological epoch
Interventions designed to improve agricultural practices often lack a solid evidence base. A new initiative could change that.
‘Most complicated therapy ever’ tailors bespoke, genome-edited immune cells to attack tumours.
Hydrogen is touted as a wonder fuel for everything from transport to home heating — but greener and more efficient options are often available.
US consumers could generate more than one billion pieces of e-waste a year by 2033.
Immune players called B cells are partly to blame for the decline in vaccine efficacy for people over 65.
Like most hauntings, Fleur Jaeggy’s books are often quite baroque, but they cast a strange spell that causes everyone to remember them as nothing but austere.
Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff
I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff
The Philosophy of Modern Song can be read as a tour journal, refracted through one lonely song after another.
The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan
We must find new ways to act toward animals in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity.
Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”
The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz
Inside December 2022 issue:
The medieval period was a golden age of saints and miracles, but they were met with a healthy dose of scepticism.
Fighting for the Union in the US Civil War, Welsh soldiers discovered that the cost of assimilation was the loss of their native language.
To Renaissance audiences, the mythical Amazons were exotic, mysterious and revealed hidden truths about their own society.
Yansong is the first participant in Concrete Icons, a new video series profiling the most iconic contemporary concrete buildings by the world’s leading architects. The video focusses on MAD’s Cloudscape of Haikou, a library with a flowing form cast in white concrete located in a waterside park in Haikou on the island of Hainan.
Completed in 2021, the 1,000-square-metre structure houses a library, cafe, restrooms, showers, a nursery room, and bike storage, and acts as a waystation for visitors to the park. Speaking to Dezeen in an exclusive video interview filmed at MAD’s offices in Beining, Yansong explained how the building is designed to put visitors in a contemplative or imaginative state of mind.
Read more on Dezeen: https://www.dezeen.com/?p=1866618
The Cloudscape of Haikou
MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, has announced the opening of the Cloudscape of Haikou is located on the southern tip of China. A unique urban public and cultural space for citizens and visitors to Haikou, this flowing, sculptural concrete form was named as one of the “most anticipated architecture projects of 2021” by The Times of London.
A prominent port city on the southern tip of China, Haikou was once an important stop on the Maritime Silk Road. With the establishment of the Hainan International Tourism Island and Hainan Free Trade Zone, Haikou’s influence has seen a gradual resurgence in modern times. Meanwhile, Haikou’s government is also enriching the city’s cultural importance, through enhancing the social attributes of the city’s public spaces, and strengthening the connection between the city, humanities, and architecture. The Cloudscape of Haikou is one such culmination of this effort.
The Cloudscape of Haikou is the first of sixteen coastal pavilions commissioned by the Haikou Tourism and Culture Investment Holding Group to rejuvenate the historic port city, with the aim of improving public space along the coastline. Known as “Haikou, Pavilions by the Seaside,” the initiative invited teams of internationally recognized architects, artists, and interdisciplinary professionals to create sixteen landmark public stations.
With a growing number of people living with pain, we desperately need to understand it – but we are still unravelling the mysterious mechanisms behind the phenomenon
Times Literary Supplement – November 18, 2022 issue of the @TheTLS, featuring Books of the Year; Ferdinand Mount on a second Trump term; @guydammann on opera funding in England; @KieranSetiya on beauty; and Javier Marías’s last column on translation (tr., Margaret Jull Costa) – and more.
