Swiss Views: A Walk Along Lake Geneva To Château de Chillon In Montreaux

Walk It (Uploaded April 18, 2023): Montreux is a traditional resort town on Lake Geneva. Nestled between steep hills and the lakeside, it’s known for its mild microclimate and the Montreux Jazz Festival, held in July.

Video timeline: 00:00 Lake Geneva 01:00 Riverside Montreux 45:08 Castle of Chillon

The town’s promenade is lined with flowers, sculptures, Mediterranean trees and grand Belle Époque buildings. Offshore is a medieval island castle, Château de Chillon, with ramparts, formal halls and a chapel with 14th-century murals. 

Preview: Foreign Affairs Magazine- May/June 2023

May/June 2023

Foreign Affairs – May/June 2023 issue:

In Defense of the Fence Sitters

What the West Gets Wrong About Hedging

Kumé Pather

As countries in the global South refuse to take a side in the war in Ukraine, many in the West are struggling to understand why. Some speculate that these countries have opted for neutrality out of economic interest. Others see ideological alignments with Moscow and Beijing behind their unwillingness to take a stand—or even a lack of morals. But the behavior of large developing countries can be explained by something much simpler: the desire to avoid being trampled in a brawl among China, Russia, and the United States.   

The Upside of Rivalry

India’s Great-Power Opportunity

Kumé Pather

For China, Russia, and the West, the last year has been one of fear and conflict. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has killed tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of people. It has prompted the United States and Europe to rearm and has pushed Moscow and Washington back into Cold War–style competition. 

Views: A Tour Of Monk’s House, Sussex In Virginia Woolf’s Literary Words

National Trust (April 18, 2023) – To this day, Virginia Woolf is still known for her novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and for her early involvement in the Bloomsbury Group, which was established in the early 1900s in London.

Monk’s House in Sussex was once the place she and her husband Leopold called home, and it’s now being cared for by the National Trust. In this video from the National Trust, you can experience what life was like at Monk’s House first hand. For more than 20 years, Virginia Woolf transformed Monk’s House into a place of beauty, art, creativity and contentment.

Virginia Woolf - IMDb
Virginia Woolf

From reciting lines in her bathtub to writing books in the tool shed, let this literary pioneer tell you in her own words how she finally found ‘a room of one’s own’. Throughout much of her life, Virginia Woolf experienced bouts of mental illness, and Monk’s House was used as a writing retreat by Virginia and Leopold.

The Sussex landscape captured her imagination, and this came through in much of her writing. She was also engaged in the conservation of the land – a legacy that lives on through the work that National Trust staff and volunteers do to care for this place of history.

News: Fox News-Dominion Defamation Trial, Russian Mercenaries In Sudan War

The Globalist, April 18, 2023: The Fox News-Dominion defamation trial begins. Plus: the effect of Russian mercenaries on the conflict in Sudan, a flick through the day’s papers and a dispatch from the Salone del Mobile.

Front Page: The New York Times — April 18, 2023

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As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings

When Antonio Diaz Mendez arrived in the U.S. from Guatemala at age 14, he was already deep in debt and largely on his own.
CREDITKIRSTEN LUCE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The White House and federal agencies were repeatedly alerted to signs of children at risk. The warnings were ignored or missed.

Hospitals and Aid Groups Become Targets as Sudan Fighting Intensifies

A satellite image of a damaged hospital in Khartoum, Sudan, on Monday.
CREDITMAXAR TECHNOLOGIES, VIA REUTERS

Civilians are caught in the cross-fire, and two rival generals vying for power made it clear their forces had no intention of standing down.

Russian Invasion of Ukraine Revolutionizes NATO Military Strategy

Shocked by Russian atrocities, NATO is becoming the war-fighting alliance it was during the Cold War, committed to defending “every inch” of its territory from Day 1.

After American’s Killing in Syria, F.B.I. Builds War Crimes Case Against Top Officials

The inquiry aims to hold to account Syrian officials considered key architects of a brutal system of detention and torture that has flourished under President Bashar al-Assad.

Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — May 2023 Issue

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Harper’s Magazine – May 2023 issue: @laurenoyler goes on the @goop cruise; @harikunzru and @erikmbaker on the real “crisis of work; A person history of panic; Losing a father and finding Stoicism; New fiction by Cynthia Ozick and more..

The Age of the Crisis of Work

The Age of the Crisis of Work thumbnail

What is the sound of quiet quitting?

Something has gone wrong with work. On this, everyone seems to agree. Less clear is the precise nature of the problem, let alone who or what is to blame. For some time we’ve been told that we’re in the midst of a Great Resignation. Workers are quitting their jobs en masse, repudiating not just their bosses but ambition itself—even the very idea of work.

The Anatomy of Panic

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A personal history of anxiety

I had my first panic attack when I was fifteen, in the middle of January, while I was sitting in geometry class. Winter in Illinois, flesh comes off the bones—what did we need geometry for? We could look at the naked angles of the trees, the circles in the sky at night. 

Island Views: Mamoudzou – Capital Of Mayotte (5K)

Uploaded April 17, 2023: Mamoudzou is the coastal capital city of the French overseas region of Mayotte, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Boats dot its harbor, and the nearby Marché Couvert sells fresh produce and handicrafts.

Local landmarks include Mtsapéré Mosque, with its white minaret, and the 1957 Notre-Dame de Fatima church. Nearby beaches include Trévani, to the north, and the small Plage du Phare, to the south.

Filmed and edited by: One Man Wolf Pack

Art Exhibition: ‘Grace Wright – Deep Symmetry’ Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

Grace Wright, Night In The Old World, 2023, 

YUVUZ GALLERY, Singapore – Deep Symmetry is New Zealand-artist Grace Wright’s first solo exhibition in Asia.

Grace Wright – Deep Symmetry

15 April – 28 May 2023

Grace Wright’s atmospheric paintings are all-consuming, inviting the viewer into a baroque world of tangled gestures. Markings on the canvas twist and convulse about themselves to build an anarchic structure before unravelling to moments of repose. While Wright’s gestures may be abstract, she views her paintings as representational narratives, evoking the tempestuous rhythm of the natural world, while alluding to 17th-century religious paintings.

Grace Wright, World Receivers, 2023

Deep Symmetry explores a recent evolution of Wright’s practice as a result of her time in Europe in the latter half of 2022. Its title was inspired by the architectural geometries of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, France, and a quote by writer Karl Ove Knausgaard: “Life is irregularity, death is geometry”.

Wright has been long fascinated with the deeper, universal connections that exist beyond our normal comprehension. Marrying alluring, harmonious colour with visceral imagery to monumental standing, Wright’s paintings are a reflection of this deep connectedness; her coiling energetic brush marks echoing the universal ‘rhythmic, cyclical nature’ forms in our world, to emotion and the force of life itself.

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 24, 2023

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The New Yorker – April 24 & May 1, 2023 issue:

JooHee Yoon’s “Drawing Hands with A.I. (After M. C. Escher)”

A hand drawn on a piece of paper rises off the page and draws another hand on the piece of paper which in turn draws the...

The artist discusses artistry, artificial intelligence, and the human experience.

Chatbots and image generators, newly on the rise, have sparked our imaginations—and our fears. As artificial-intelligence machines sharpen their ability to translate written prompts into images that accurately capture both style and substance, some visual artists worry that their specialized skills might be rendered irrelevant.

“Drawing Hands,” M. C. Escher, 1948.

The Future of Fertility

A futuristic scene of metallic DNA strands which wrap around a central petri dish containing a human ovum.

A new crop of biotech startups want to revolutionize human reproduction.

In 2016, two Japanese reproductive biologists, Katsuhiko Hayashi and Mitinori Saitou, made an announcement in the journal Nature that read like a science-fiction novel. The researchers had taken skin cells from the tip of a mouse’s tail, reprogrammed them into stem cells, and then turned those stem cells into egg cells. 

Crooks’ Mistaken Bet on Encrypted Phones

A group of four men sit around a table piled with cocaine. They are illuminated by the light of a cell phone hovering...

Drug syndicates and other criminal groups bought into the idea that a new kind of phone network couldn’t be infiltrated by cops. They were wrong—big time.

Many criminals have been convicted as a result of encrypted-phone stings—more than four hundred in the U.K. alone.Illustration by Max Löffler

News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious