The Top Ten Ocean Stories of 2023
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Major discoveries, an undersea tragedy and international cooperation were some of the biggest saltwater moments of the year
Arts/History: Smithsonian Magazine – January 2024
Tag Archives: Magazines
CULTURE: FRANCE-AMÉRIQUE MAGAZINE – JANUARY 2024
France-Amérique Magazine – December 30, 2023 – The new issue features ‘The Peak of French Chic’; A Century Ago – Inventing the Winter Olympics in Chamonix…
The Foundations of French-American Friendship
From Washington D.C. to New York City and from New Orleans to Paris, many philanthropic organizations continue to nurture the bonds connecting France and the United States through history, politics, economics, language, and culture.
The New York Times Magazine – Dec 31, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (December 30, 2023):
Rosalynn Carter Was a Political Genius
She fell in love with a future president at 17. Marriage never waylaid her dreams.
By MICHAEL PATERNITI
Three miles lie between this life and another, between their two houses, hers in downtown Plains, Ga., and his family farm in the country surrounded by peanuts planted in red clay. Three miles between the ordinary and extraordinary.
When Sinead O’Connor Unleashed Her Ghosts
Uncovering the unlikely story behind the singer’s first album.
By JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
To say that Sinead O’Connor never quite regained the musical heights of her 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” is not to slight the rest of her output, which contained jewels. There is no getting back to a record like that first one. It was in some sense literally scary: The label had to change the original cover art, which showed a bald O’Connor hissing like a banshee cat, for the American release. In the version we saw, she looks down, arms crossed, mouth closed, vulnerable. The music had both sides of her in it.
Preview: Foreign Policy Magazine – Winter 2024
The Promise and Peril of Geopolitics
The world’s most dismal science could make Eurasia safe for illiberalism and predation—or protect it from those forces.
By Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Alexander Dugin is a bit of a madman. The Russian intellectual made headlines in the West in 2022, when his daughter was killed, apparently by Ukrainian operatives, in a Moscow car bombing likely meant for Dugin himself. Dugin would have been targeted because of his unapologetic, yearslong advocacy for a genocidal war of conquest in Ukraine. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” he screeched after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of that country in 2014, adding: “This is my opinion as a professor.” Even at his daughter’s funeral, Dugin stayed on message. Among her first words as an infant, he claimed, were “our empire.”
The New York Review Of Books – January 18, 2024
The Fate of Free Will
By James Gleick
In Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell makes a scientific case for the existence of human agency.
Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell
Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control over our actions, of continual decision-making—is part of the experience of being human, moment by moment and day by day. True, we sometimes just drift, like robots or zombies, but at other times we gird our loins and exert our will. David Hume defined will nearly three centuries ago as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” The feeling was universal then and it’s universal now.
Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic
Why have Americans not fought to sustain the unprecedented Covid-era expansion of aid to children, renters, and gig workers?
The Pandemic Paradox: How the Covid Crisis Made Americans More Financially Secure by Scott Fulford
The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher
Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from Covid-19 by Zachary Parolin
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Jan 1 & 8, 2024
How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence
He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.
By Adam Gopnik
It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises—has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his hero-painter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in.
A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza
Following Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s invasion, Mosab Abu Toha fled his home with his wife and three children. Then I.D.F. soldiers took him into custody.
International Art: Apollo Magazine – January 2024
Breath of fresh air – Gerhard Richter in the Alps
Three exhibitions in the Engadin Valley explore how the Swiss mountains have inspired some of the painter’s most playful work
Remembering the festive geese of Christmas past
The festive bird has often been served up by artists and writers including J.M.W. Turner and Charles Dickens
The New York Times Magazine – Dec 24, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (December 22, 2023):
He Was My Role Model. My Mentor. My Supplier.
Decades after I left hustling to become a writer, why did I seek out the man who drew me into that world?
By Mitchell S. Jackson
O.G. rings me in the a.m. to say he’s just touched down in Phoenix. It’s the day before he said he’d arrive, and while there was a time when I’d treat the seeming opacity of his plans as par, the call’s a minor surprise. He asks for my address and tells me he can drop by as soon as he grabs his rental car. “Cool,” I say, as if the call ain’t ramped my pulse, as if my crib is presentable for guests. It isn’t. So I shoot out of bed and get to cleaning and straightening the first floor, going so far as to light a candle. It’s been umpteen years since I’ve seen O.G. — Lonnie’s his name — and God forbid he judge me anything less than hella fastidious.
In Jordan, a Sprawling Palestinian Diaspora Looks Towards Gaza
The story of 2.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan has been shaped by generations of war and exile.Photographs
by MOISES SAMAN
How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust?
With “The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer is just the latest director to confront the problem.
Poetry makes nothing happen, W.H. Auden said in 1939, when words must have seemed especially impotent; but cinema is another matter. For several decades after the end of the Second World War, what’s come to be seen as its central catastrophe — the near-total destruction of the European Jews — was consigned to the status of a footnote. The neglect was rooted in guilt: Many nations eagerly collaborated in the killing, while others did nothing to prevent it. Consumed by their own suffering, most people simply didn’t want to know, and a conspiracy of silence was established.
Arts/Culture: Humanities Magazine – Winter 2024
Humanities Magazine – Winter 2024 Issue:
Royalty Reconsidered: The King’s Beer and the Commoner’s Shirt
A new exhibition looks at Europe’s earliest societies
As visitors exit “First Kings of Europe,” the gift shop offers a kind of test. Two craft beers were created for the exhibition, a collaboration between the museum and Off Color Brewing: Beer for Kings, made from top-quality rich and ancient grains, and Beer for Commoners, made from the more modest ingredients of the poor. Beneath the racks of beer hang T-shirts with the art for each. Which identity does the visitor want to take home: commoner or king? The answer for most exhibitions celebrating the awe-inspiring treasures of royalty would be easy, but “First Kings of Europe” is a different kind of show, with an ambitious new approach to how we display and envision power, kingship, and history.
Nazi Spies in America!
During World War II, Axis espionage inspired a media panic, but amateurish German agents turned out to be “underwhelming”
Research Preview: Science Magazine – Dec 22, 2023
The quantum phantom
A ghostly quasiparticle rooted in a century-old Italian mystery could unlock quantum computing’s potential—if only it could be pinned down
Are cryptocurrencies currencies? Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador
Preference for cash and privacy fears deterred bitcoin adoption in El Salvador.
Mimicking polar bear hairs in aerogel fibers
Encapsulated aerogel fibers offer thermal insulation, breathability, and strength
