Tag Archives: Culture

Country Life Magazine – January 15, 2025 Preview

COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE (January 14, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Totally Tropical’ – The gardens of Tresco, where anything grows…

Totally tropical taste

Tiffany Daneff savours the exotic surroundings of Tresco Abbey Garden, where the temperate climate of the Isles of Scilly has created a colourful paradise

Box of tricks

The devastation of box blight is well documented, but what can we do to save our hedges?  Charles Quest-Ritson investigates

Now that’s what I call pulling power

The ox may have disappeared from the fields of Britain, but that mighty beast of burden still plays a huge role in agriculture across the globe, finds Laura Parker

 ‘Make way for Her Majesty’s gloves!’

You’ve got to hand it to Cornelia James, suggests Katy Birchall, as she recounts the incredible rise to prominence of our late Queen’s favourite glove-maker

Amie Atkinson’s favourite painting

The actress selects a heavenly landscape that has fired her imagination since childhood

The legacy

Tiffany Daneff pays tribute to Beth Chatto, whose ‘right plant, right place’ philosophy inspired her Essex dry garden

Top seats

The best chairs and benches for the garden, with Amelia Thorpe

Cool schools

Non Morris taps into the expert knowledge of Troy Scott-Smith, Charles Dowding and Tom Stuart-Smith as she digs into some of Britain’s best garden courses

Town versus Earl

John Goodall charts the history of The Lord Leycester and its outstanding medieval buildings in Warwickshire that have been given a whole new lease of life

See you on the top deck

To celebrate the centenary of London’s covered double-decker bus, Rob Crossan hops aboard for a whistle-stop tour of our capital’s public transport

The good stuff

Hetty Lintell keeps her cool with a sparkling selection of jewellery inspired by ice

Interiors

Arabella Youens admires a sitting room in London and Amelia Thorpe answers the call of the wild with animal accessories

Kitchen garden cook

Earthy leeks take centre stage in winter for Melanie Johnson

Be still, my beating art

An obsession with Emma, Lady Hamilton led painter George Romney to produce his finest pieces, reveals Carla Passino

Culture: The New Atlantis Journal – Winter 2025

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THE NEW ATLANTIS JOURNAL (January 14, 2025): The latest issue features…

The New Control Society

The gatekeepers are dying. Why is everything so mid?

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It

Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life

The Tyranny of Now

There’s no time like the present to revisit the warning of forgotten media theorist Harold Innis: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.”

The New York Times Magazine – Jan. 12, 2025

Current cover

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 10, 2025): The 1.12.25 Issue features Camille Bromley on the “talking buttons” craze for dogs on social media; Pamela Colloff on the controversial medical diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome; Yudhijit Bhattacharjee on the spy in New York’s Chinese dissident community; and more.

Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?

Many owners think so, thanks to the “talking buttons” craze on TikTok and Instagram. Scientists are less convinced. By Camille Bromley

The Republican Superstars Eager to Wish You Happy Birthday

Matt Gaetz, George Santos, Roger Stone — the celebrity-video app Cameo has become a key stop for embattled or notorious political figures. By Sophie Haigney

The Interview: Antony Blinken Insists He and Biden Made the Right Calls

Read this issue

Smithsonian Magazine – January 2025 Preview

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SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE (December 30, 2024): The latest issue features ‘In Search of the World’s Smallest Monkey’ – A journey into Ecuador’s remote forests to spy on adorable, and suprisingly chatty, pygmy marmosets.

Seventy-Seven Fascinating Finds Revealed in 2024, From a Mysterious ‘Anomaly’ Near the Great Pyramid of Giza to a Missing Portrait of Henry VIII

How an Experiment to Amplify Light in Hospital Operating Rooms Led to the Accidental Invention of the Snow Globe

The origins of the decoration lie in Vienna’s 17th district, where the inventor’s descendants are still making them for collectors around the world

Quadrant Magazine – January/February 2025

QUADRANT MAGAZINE (December 28, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Trump Takes Charge’…

Donald Trump and John Galt: Disruptors-in-Chief

Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States anoints him as “Disruptor in Chief”, a vital role with world-historical significance. Trump’s ascension to this position was presaged in Ayn Rand’s stupendous novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), whose central character, John Galt, confronts a similarly sclerotic America, which he sets out systematically to disrupt in a radical, transformative manner. This highly controversial novel is important in illuminating what is at stake at the cultural level in the struggle to come, and in emphasising the scale and direction of the challenges facing Trump, his administration and his supporters. Atlas Shrugged is also valuable because, together with Rand’s earlier novel The Fountainhead (1943), it offers in compelling fictional form a powerful, necessarily hyperbolic, statement of the philosophical values that must be reasserted to make America great again.

Musk Lifts Off

If Hillbilly Elegy was compulsory reading for observers of American politics wanting to understand Trump’s first presidency, Walter Isaacson’s biographical portrait of Elon Musk is mandatory holiday reading for those wanting to understand how Donald J. Trump turned so many critics into passionate supporters and won a resounding presidential vote in 2024, and to gauge how his nation-reshaping policies might play out over the next four years.

The New York Times Magazine – Dec. 29, 2024

Current cover

The New York Times Magazine – The 12.29.24 Issue features The Lives They Lived: remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.

In Search of Loved Ones, Syrian Women Face Horror of Assad’s Regime

In Syria, women begin picking up the pieces of a broken nation.

The Lives They Lived

Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.

The Best Friends They Left Behind

The beloved pets of some of the notable people we lost this year.

Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – January 2025

Harper’s Magazine (December 18, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Ghost Music’ – Inside Spotify’s Fake-Artist Scheme; Among the Ruins of Lebanon and Cynthia Ozick on the Pleasures of Letter Writing…

The Ghosts in the Machine

Spotify’s plot against musicians by Liz Pelly

The Forever Cure

Is civil commitment rehabilitating sex offenders—or punishing them? by Jordan Michael Smith

Voices from the Dead Letter Office

On the epistolary life by Cynthia Ozick

Politics: The Guardian Weekly – December 20, 2024

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The Guardian Weekly (December 18, 2024): The latest issue features Did democracy survive? Reflections on a year of elections. Plus The best film, music and TV of 2024…

This was a year in which billions of people living in more than 80 countries had the right to cast their democratic votes in elections. But with democracy around the world under ever-greater threats – from attacks on freedom of speech, equality of participation and plurality of media to name a few – how did the election process bear up? Jonathan Yerushalmy and Oliver Holmes find reasons for hope amid the pressure.

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The big story | France and the shadow of the Pelicot trial
The mass rape case, in which verdicts and sentencing are expected this week, has horrified the world. But this is not French society’s first attempt to confront a sexually abusive culture, writes Kim Willsher, who has witnessed the harrowing proceedings in Avignon

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Spotlight | How Ukrainian power plant workers keep the country running
As winter closes in, Shaun Walker visits a Soviet-era coal-fired thermal installation to explore how it has held up to Russian attacks

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Opinion | After the fall of Assad, the least Syrians deserve is our optimism
With the tyrannical dynasty gone, it’s important not to impose a negative script on what comes next. Syrians deserve support and hope, argues Nesrine Malik

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The shamelessness of Fifa’s process in awarding the 2034 tournament to Riyadh was a display of contempt for governance, democracy and good sense, writes Barney Ronay


What else we’ve been reading

Former French prime minister Michel Barnier, left, and the newly appointed François Bayrou.

With France on its fourth prime minister in a year and Germany facing a snap election in February, Paris and Berlin correspondents Jon Henley and Deborah Cole explain why the driving forces of the European Union are in the doldrums. An excellent primer to understand what will be a shaky start to next year for European politics. Isobel Montgomery, deputy editor