Times Literary Supplement (October 6, 2023): The new issue features War Stories – A review of the Iliad; Frances Sputford’s ‘Other America’; In Chaucer’s Shadow; The devil and ChatGPTand Martin Buber’s ‘I and Thou’…
How the chef at Tatiana brought Afro-Caribbean cooking—and his life story—to the center of New York City’s fine-dining scene.
For more than a hundred years, the Neshoba County Fair has drawn revellers from all over the country. Why do they keep coming back?
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 1, 2023):
Josh Koskoff’s legal victory against Remington has raised the possibility of a new form of gun control: lawsuits against the companies that make assault rifles.
Our broken immigration system is still the best option for many migrants — and U.S. employers.
France-Amérique Magazine – October 2023 – The new issue features a walk through France’s vineyards and observe the changing cultural landscape. An estate near Epernay is working to produce the world’s greenest Champagne, while other producers are turning to no- and low-alcohol wines to cater to to sober-curious generation. Welcome to the Age of Raisin. Also in this issue, read about “Wemby-mania” and the success of French NBA players; meet French-American composer Betsy Jolas who, at the age of 97, still creates with the same intensity; and discover a new art space near Paris – a former blimp hangar, masterpiece of Belle Epoque industrial architecture.
Sales of no- and low-alcohol wines soar in France amid deep-seated cultural change. Your correspondent keeps his true feelings bottled up.
By Anthony Bulger
The contagiously enthusiastic “climate optimist,” a former executive for Dom Pérignon in the United States, is working to produce the world’s most environmentally friendly Champagne. In pursuit of this objective, he is working with an American investor renowned for his environmental activism, Leonardo DiCaprio.
By Clément Thiery
On the banks of a lake in the Meudon forest southwest of the French capital, a masterpiece of Belle Epoque industrial architecture is looking to become a hub of contemporary creation.
By Jean-Gabriel Fredet
The problem, however, is that at the very moment that events demand a strong and coherent response from the United States, the country cannot provide one. Its fractured political leadership—Republican and Democratic, in the White House and in Congress—has failed to convince enough Americans that developments in China and Russia matter. Political leaders have failed to explain how the threats posed by these countries are interconnected. They have failed to articulate a long-term strategy to ensure that the United States, and democratic values more broadly, will prevail.
Times Literary Supplement (September 29, 2023): The new issue features The First Folio at 400; how disease shaped global history; novels of queer experience; what Britain laughs at; literary thefts and coincidences – and much more…
How disease has shaped global history
Scientists often make poor historians. Their shortcomings in describing and analysing the past include a failure to shed the whiggish stories that academic history moved away from decades ago. Straight lines are still drawn between Great Men and the impact of their brilliant insights on our view of reality. They also sometimes fail to treat the material of history with the seriousness they bring to their own discipline. Simple questions that are drummed into schoolchildren are frequently ignored in analysing documentary evidence: who wrote this, why, and for whom? The result is context-lite narrative that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Works to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the First Folio
Next year, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will reopen after a three-year closure for a large-scale renovation of its building, which dates from 1932. The centrepiece of the new Shakespeare Exhibition Hall, will be, as the press release puts it, something “that only the Folger could produce: all 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare that were collected by Henry and Emily Folger”. The Folger holds slightly more than a third of all extant copies of the book and now eighty of them will be on permanent show in a “20-foot long visible vault”, while two more will be open in cases as part of an “interactive” visitor experience. Peering into the vault says much about the Folgers’ appetite for cornering the market in Folios but, since nearly all copies differ in some respects, it did make some kind of sense to buy many of them.
Introducing a special issue of Science
Earth scientists often call climate change a “great global experiment,” which humanity is heedlessly performing as we pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The dire consequences are already becoming clear—not just for the workings of the planet, but for our own health. Over the next few days, the stories in this special package will explore the threats, and how we can minimize them.
From cold viruses to influenza to respiratory syncytial virus, viruses that spread through the air cause billions of infections each year. That makes it important to understand how they will respond to climate change. But little is known so far, except that different viruses will react differently. Measles, for instance, spreads efficiently in all climates, suggesting global warming will make little difference to its transmission.
By Gary Younge
Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont
The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the United States during World War II was matched only by the ambivalence the United States demonstrated toward the principles on which the war was fought.
Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel After Sappho is populated by the notable lesbians who helped modernism blossom.
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
One of my favorite novels is by Compton Mackenzie, a Scottish writer known today, if he is known at all, for his whimsically comic Whisky Galore (1947) and his ambitious early novel Sinister Street (1913). The one I love, however, is Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations (1928), a satirical roman à clef about the sapphic adventures of the unorthodox and eccentric inhabitants of an island modeled after Capri during World War I. After Sappho, a novel by Selby Wynn Schwartz that was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, is many things, none of them satirical, but I kept thinking of the title of Mackenzie’s book as I read it.
Nine new countries, including Ukraine, are vying to join
Investors have begun to confront the long-haul reality of high interest rates
And Russia may also be destabilising its old ally, Armenia
