Times Literary Supplement (June 19, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Booking A Holiday’ – TLS critics choose their summer reading; Artistic license – The relationship between ‘loveliness and lucre’; Christopher Isherwood in full; How to be a Liberal; Story of a ghost painter and Fine-art fraud…
Country Life Magazine (June 18, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Why we adore Venus’, Move over Buckingham Palace – Our grandest houses, Jeremy Clarkson’s favorite painting and Old Masters – Chippendale and Coward revisited…
The television presenter and farmer immerses himself in the age of steam by selecting a 19th-century masterpiece that really stokes the imagination
Michael Hall lays bare the story of the art world’s enduring love affair with the alluring goddess Venus, from the 4th century BC right up to the modern era
Iridescence is one of the natural world’s greatest special effects. Laura Parker showcases the shimmering, jewel-like hues that can take your breath away
It’s the final straw for Hetty Lintell as she picks perfect summer accessories crafted from raffia
Giles Kime is whisked through a Sicilian palazzo, a Gothic castle and a Baroque bedroom thanks to the wonders of WOW!house
The London homes of the British aristocracy were often grander than their country counterparts and perfect for entertaining, says Lucien de Guise
Mugwort is connected with child-birth as ‘the mother of herbs’, but John Wright prefers to focus on its many uses in the kitchen
Why are beaming faces such a rarity in our portrait galleries? Claudia Pritchard seeks out the grins among the grimaces
Puck has been causing mayhem and misery for a millennium and more. Ian Morton traces the story of the mischievous sprite
Scotland’s only furniture school is keeping alive the old crafts of upholstery and marquetry, doing justice to its Chippendale name, as Mary Miers discovers
Michael Billington finds a depth of emotion behind the laughs in a rare revival of Noël Coward’s last work — a welcome antidote to mind-boggling technology
In the second of two articles, John Goodall applauds the remarkable revival of Wolterton Hall in Norfolk as a modern home equipped for the 21st century
Victoria Marston hails Douglas Bunn, whose desire to test top British riders to the max led to the drama of the Hickstead Derby
Kathryn Bradley-Hole finds no end of reasons to stop and stare as she explores the dramatic garden created from a flat water-side site at Emmetts Mill, Surrey
Melanie Johnson conjures up a trio of dishes to demonstrate the versatility of the courgette
Before and after artificial intelligence
We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in its path, a chaos that engulfed generations in an orgy of destruction lasting almost a hundred years. A war with a death toll so high that it left a permanent scar on humanity’s soul. But we will never know the names of those who fought and died in it, or the immense suffering and destruction it caused, because the Butlerian Jihad, abominable and devastating as it was,…
Can AI think creatively? Can we?
“Far as the east from even, / Dim as the border star, / Life is the little creature / That carries the great cigar.” So wrote Emily Dickinson, with some unfortunate help from a computer. As I read that stanza in February 2022, I was more than six months into a scientific experiment I was conducting with my friend and colleague Morten Christiansen, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell, where he and I are professors. In 2021, two years before ChatGPT would become a household name, Christiansen had been impressed by the initial technical descriptions of GPT-3, the recently released version of the generative large language…
Nanotechnology can already puncture cancer cells and drug-resistant bacteria. What will it do next?
By Dhruv Khullar
The rise of the far right in Europe might help Americans deprovincialize their own crisis. The single wave has struck many coastlines.
By Adam Gopnik
The eminent editor’s wife and daughter sift through a lifetime’s worth of collectibles: quirky plastic purses, a porcelain Miss Piggy, and many, many books.
By Zach Helfand
Models and forecasts can be seductive, but it’s time for executives to reclaim their economic judgment.
Forget disruption and incrementalism. Here’s how to develop high-growth products in slow-growth companies.
0:15 Mini-factories in space – Space Forge says its technology could revolutionize manufacturing. The satellites contain miniature manufacturing systems. They take advantage of the conditions in low-Earth orbit such as microgravity, extreme temperatures and a contaminant-free environment to forge materials that would be impossible to manufacture here on Earth.
1:53 Biodiversity credits explained – Nature is under unprecedented threat. Around 2 million plant and animal species could go extinct in the next few decades as climate change and habitat loss push ecosystems towards irreversible tipping points. To fight this crisis, experts are coming up with new ways to protect life on Earth by assigning value to the ecosystems around us. These innovations include biodiversity credits.
6:58 Nairobi switches to electric buses – Private minibuses called matatus are the main mode of public transport in Nairobi. Most matatus are old, diesel-powered and inefficient and 60% of the city’s population rely on them to get around. Electric mobility start-up BasiGo has built an all-electric alternative. The first bus rolled off its Nairobi production line in early 2024. Nairobi bus operators have already ordered 500 more. More than 90% of Kenya’s electricity is generated renewably, which means BasiGo’s buses are virtually emission-free.
8:40 How to build healthier cities – This architect designs buildings that bring communities together – Sumayya Vally grew up in post-Apartheid Pretoria, South Africa in what had been an Indian-only township and saw how division kept communities apart. Vally founded the Johannesburg-based architecture practice Counterspace to fight the built legacies of colonization and highlight the peaceful coexistence between communities.
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Despite failing hardware, NASA has no plans to pursue a servicing mission to the aging, iconic instrument
New studies include health data collected from space tourists on first privately funded orbital mission
Ancient DNA shows continuity between living and ancient Maya communities
The Guardian Weekly (June 13, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Blood Lines’ – The human cost of Europe’s cocaine habit’; The Far Rights surges across EU; A doughnut theory of the universe; The muscular rise of steroids…
In a week when much of the attention in Europe was on far-right political gains in the parliamentary elections, the Guardian Weekly’s cover shines a light on another of the continent’s disturbing undercurrents.
A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of unaccompanied child migrants across Europe are being forced to work for increasingly powerful drug cartels to meet the continent’s soaring appetite for cocaine.
In cities including Paris and Brussels, gangs are exploiting the “unlimited” supply of vulnerable African children at their disposal, using brutal means to control their victims, including torture and rape if they fail to sell enough drugs, as they seek to expand Europe’s $13bn cocaine market.
Mark Townsend reveals the plight of the illegal trade’s child foot soldiers, while Annie Kelly explains the growing problem of cocaine use in Europe. And from Ecuador, Tom Phillips reports on how death and destruction follow the drug on its complex journey across the Atlantic.
If America wants to maintain its lead, it should focus less on keeping China down
Elsewhere, political dysfunction and fiscal frailties are taking a toll
Times Literary Supplement (June 13, 2024): The latest issue features Freud’s Discontents – George Prochnik on the father of psychology; A great novel on the American Frontier; Death becomes them – The mourning rituals of the Victorians; Cover-up – An atrocity committed by US troops in the Philippines….
Intellicurious 