National Geographic Traveller – October 2023
Tag Archives: Magazines
Views: The New York Times Magazine – August 27, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (August 27, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, Jen Percy reports on what people misunderstand about rape. Plus, the case that could unravel an art dynasty and a Harvard professor who is also an alien hunter.
What People Misunderstand About Rape
Sexual assault often goes unpunished when victims fail to fight back. But investigators, psychologists and biologists all describe freezing as an involuntary response to trauma.
By Jen Percy
There’s a lingua franca that women use, a repeated vocabulary to describe what they experience and think during a sexual assault. Variations of “freezing” are often part of that vocabulary. But the word has so many referents in its colloquial usage that it’s hard to know precisely what it means to each person saying it.
“I just absolutely froze,” Brooke Shields said in the documentary “Pretty Baby,” describing how she felt when being raped. “And I just thought, Stay alive and get out.”
The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty
How a widow’s legal fight against the Wildenstein family of France has threatened their storied collection — and revealed the underbelly of the global art market.
By Rachel Corbett
Twenty years ago, a glamorous platinum-blond widow arrived at the Paris law office of Claude Dumont Beghi in tears. Someone was trying to take her horses — her “babies” — away, and she needed a lawyer to stop them.
Research Preview: Science Magazine – August 25, 2023
If AI becomes conscious, how will we know?
Scientists and philosophers are proposing a checklist based on theories of human consciousness
In 2021, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines—and got himself fired—when he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he’d been testing, was sentient. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially so-called large language models such as LaMDA and ChatGPT, can certainly seem conscious. But they’re trained on vast amounts of text to imitate human responses. So how can we really know?
Previews: The Economist Magazine – August 26, 2023
Why China’s economy won’t be fixed
An increasingly autocratic government is making bad decisions
Whatever has gone wrong? After China rejoined the world economy in 1978, it became the most spectacular growth story in history. Farm reform, industrialisation and rising incomes lifted nearly 800m people out of extreme poverty. Having produced just a tenth as much as America in 1980, China’s economy is now about three-quarters the size. Yet instead of roaring back after the government abandoned its “zero-covid” policy at the end of 2022, it is lurching from one ditch to the next.
Prigozhin’s death shows that Russia is a mafia state
A healthy country uses justice to restore order. Mr Putin uses violence instead
As we published this editorial, it was not certain that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private jet was shot down by Russian air-defences, or that the mutineer and mercenary boss was on board. But everyone believes that it was and that his death was a punishment of spectacular ruthlessness ordered by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. And that is the way Mr Putin likes it.
Research: New Scientist Magazine – August 26, 2023
Environment – How we broke the water cycle and can no longer rely on rain to fall
Health – Unravelling the secrets of the vagus nerve will revolutionize medicine
Technology – Nowhere to hide: Data harvesters came for your privacy – and found it
Space – Aliens on low-oxygen worlds may never discover fireRead the latest issue
Culture: The American Scholar – Autumn 2023
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR – AUTUMN 2023:
Will the Real Vergil Please Stand Up?
Making sense of the life of a poet about whom we know so little
by Sarah Ruden
Great works of literature are sly and powerful beasts that pounce on their readers, grabbing them by the neck and shaking them back and forth. The young Augustine looks like a typical victim of Vergil’s Aeneid. The schoolboy being brought up as a Christian in fourth-century CE North Africa found the first-century BCE epic poem of pagan Rome the most impressive thing in his cultural life to date. Tellingly, his reaction shows no interest in the poem’s theme of individual sacrifice in the name of imperial destiny; rather, into middle age, the great theologian and founder of institutional Catholic monasticism remembered weeping for Dido, who commits suicide after her lover, Aeneas, abandons her at the end of Book IV.
A Room for the Ages
Oglethorpe University’s time capsule was meant to last thousands of years, but will it?
by Colin Dickey
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – August 25, 2023
The Guardian Weekly (August 25, 2023) – The issue features ‘Fever Pitch’ – The unstoppable rise of women’s football; ‘Trust me, I’m a nurse’ – How a British child serial killer went undetected, and Art, where you least expect it…
The conviction and sentencing of Lucy Letby, who murdered seven babies while working as a hospital nurse, shocked Britain this week. As she becomes only the country’s fourth woman to receive a whole-life imprisonment term, Josh Halliday recounts her dreadful crimes and why she was not investigated for so long, despite several colleagues’ suspicions.
Sports writer Paul MacInnes reports from Jeddah on Saudi Arabia’s bid to buy up chunks of world sport using its $600bn public investment fund, a makeover project that is particularly pertinent in the light of allegations in a Human Rights Watch report this week.
Culture catches up with Devo, the new wave band from Akron, Ohio, who are hanging up their curious “energy dome” hats after 50 years. And there’s a lovely feature by Claire Armitstead about hidden art, from underwater sculpture parks to pinhole dioramas concealed inside traffic bollards.
Preview: Foreign Affairs Magazine- SEPT/OCT 2023
Delusions of Détente
Why America and China Will Be Enduring Rivals
With U.S.-Chinese relations worse than they have been in over 50 years, an old fairy tale has resurfaced: if only the United States would talk more to China and accommodate its rise, the two countries could live in peace. The story goes that with ample summitry, Washington could recognize Beijing’s redlines and restore crisis hotlines and cultural exchanges. Over time and through myriad points of face-to-face contact—in other words, reengagement—the two countries could settle into peaceful, if still competitive, coexistence.
The End of the Russian Idea
What It Will Take to Break Putinism’s Grip
In June 17, 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin staged a special ceremony on the St. Petersburg waterfront to mark the anniversary of three flags: the flag of the Russian Federation, otherwise known as Peter the Great’s tricolor, formally unfurled in 1693; the imperial Russian flag, introduced by Tsar Alexander II in 1858; and the Red Banner, the Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle, adopted by the Soviet state 100 years ago and later used by Joseph Stalin. Putin watched the event from a boat as the National Philharmonic and the St. Petersburg State Choir performed the national anthem, which, thanks to a law Putin enacted in 2000, has the same melody as its Stalin-era counterpart.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – August 28, 2023
Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule
How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.
By Ronan Farrow
Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
I was searching for truth. Instead, I found a family.
By the time I was twenty-one, I had made two short films and was dead set on making a feature. I had gone to a distinguished school in Munich, where I had few friends, and which I hated so passionately that I imagined setting it on fire. There is such a thing as academic intelligence, and I didn’t have it. Intelligence is always a bundle of qualities: logical thought, articulacy, originality, memory, musicality, sensitivity, speed of association, and so on. In my case, the bundle seemed to be differently composed. I remember asking a fellow-student to write a term paper for me, which he did quite easily. In jest, he asked me what I would do for him in return, and I promised that I would make him immortal. His name was Hauke Stroszek. I gave his last name to the main character in my first film, “Signs of Life.” I called another film “Stroszek.”
Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — SEPT 2023
