A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, what happened to the Ukrainians who fled to Russia, how the sun is both our creator and destroyer (27:56), and how magicians won the attention economy (34:32).
Previews: Architectural Record – August 2022
MAD Architects Creates a Volcano-Inspired Stadium in China
For the past three decades, China has been furiously turning farmland into instant cities, transforming a heavily agrarian society into one with nearly 64 percent of its population now urbanized. In recent years, though, affluent Chinese have started to rediscover their culture’s deep roots in the countryside and the lure of the nation’s often dramatic landscapes. Architects like Ma Yansong, who founded MAD Architects in Beijing in 2004, are now busy exploring new ways of connecting the constructed environment to the natural one. Ma often talks of his notions of shanshui culture, referring to the Chinese words for “mountain” and “water” and to design inspired by a reverence for earth and sky. Yet his approach is anything but traditional. Instead, it aims to reinvent nature—for example, crafting an opera house in Harbin to look as if it were sculpted by wind and water and calling a 5 million-square-foot residential complex in Beihai with rolling roofs Fake Hills.
Tributes: Odessa, Ukraine In Tilt-Shift Timelapse
A tilt-shift timelapse short film in Odessa, Ukraine filmed in Summer of 2021 by Little Big World.
Odessa is a port city on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine. It’s known for its beaches and 19th-century architecture, including the Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater. The monumental Potemkin Stairs, immortalized in “The Battleship Potemkin,” lead down to the waterfront with its Vorontsov Lighthouse. Running parallel to the water, the grand Primorsky Boulevard is a popular promenade lined with mansions and monuments.
Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – August 8, 2022
R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Double-Parked”
The artist on learning to love New York City beaches and balancing passion projects with his career as an illustrator.
By Françoise Mouly, Art by R. Kikuo Johnson
Morning News: Russian War Attrocities, Finland Visas & Senegal Election
Finland debates whether to put a stop to Russian tourist visas. Plus: Senegal goes to the polls amid a crackdown on the opposition, a flick through the day’s papers, and a round-up of climate news.
Front Page View: The New York Times – August 1, 2022
Using Nuclear Reactors for Cover, Russians Lob Rockets at Ukrainians
Russia has turned Europe’s largest nuclear power plant into a fortress, stymying Ukraine’s forces and unnerving locals who fear both shelling and a radiation leak.
Sweden Views: A Hike To Ristafallet Waterfall (4K)
50 meters wide with a height of 14 meters. Ristafallet is one of Sweden’s most beautiful waterfalls, and famous from the movie “Ronia the Robber’s Daughter”.
In Hålland between Undersåker and Järpen lies the easily accessible Ristafallet. Turn off the E14 from Hålland into Ristafallet’s Camping. Park by the restaurant, then walk through the camping area until you find the waterfall.
Architectural Design: ‘Yacht House’ By ARNO MATIS ARCHITECTURE (2022)
This concrete waterfront residence explores the lines between landscape and architecture; blurring nature and building. In a postmodern world of dislocation, the use of landscape and topography as form-generator is a particularly cogent means to establish a sense of “poetic belonging”.
This rocky, steeply sloping waterfront site was an ideal source of inspiration to create a residence which explores this dialectical tension. The residence is massed in two forms that cascade to the waterfront.
The spaces between the forms, expressed as slip-planes, undulate like the rock formations on the Burrard Inlet shoreline. The juxtaposition of forms are loose and geometries are non-orthogonal and sympathetic to the site contours.
Cover: New York Review Of Books – August 18, 2022
The New York Review of Books – August 18, 2022
Mark Danner: We’re in an Emergency—Act Like It!
At a time when the threat of authoritarianism is rising, Democrats have a duty to make crystal clear to voters what is at stake in the November elections.
Alan Hollinghurst: In the Shadow of Young Men in Flower
In Andrew Holleran’s novels, the inescapable narrowness of his world is transcended and given poetic resonance by his close and steady attention to pain and loneliness.
The Kingdom of Sand by by Andrew Holleran
Jennifer Wilson: The First Russian
An unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather provides the best sense of how Pushkin considered his own Blackness.
Peter the Great’s African: Experiments in Prose
by Alexander Pushkin, translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, edited by Robert Chandler
Village Tours: Todenham In The Cotswolds, England
Nestled near Shipston on Stour and just north of Moreton in Marsh, Todenham is a lovely hidden gem, worth visiting in the Cotswolds.
Todenham is a village and civil parish in the Cotswold district of Gloucestershire, England. The village is significant for its Grade I listed 14th-century parish church.
