Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — SEPT 2023
Tag Archives: Magazines
Views: The New York Times Magazine – August 13, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE – The 8.13.23 Issue: In this special issue, Wesley Morris on hip-hop’s 50th anniversary; Niela Orr on the ascendance of female rappers; Miles Marshall Lewis on how hip-hop changed the English language forever; Daniel Levin Becker on the history of bling; Tom Breihan on Too Short’s long career; and Danyel Smith on the rappers we lost.
How Hip-Hop Changed the English Language Forever
By MILES MARSHALL LEWIS
In just 50 years, rap has transformed the way the world speaks. Here are five words that tell the story of the genre’s linguistic power.
“I stay woke” — Erykah Badu, “Master Teacher”
HOW HIP-HOP
CONQUERED
THE WORLD
We’re celebrating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary this week. Wesley Morris traces the art form from its South Bronx origins to all-encompassing triumph.
THE FUTURE OF RAP IS FEMALE
As their male counterparts turn depressive and paranoid, it’s the women who are having all the fun.
By Niela Orr
Like American men in general, our top male rappers appear to be in crisis: overwhelmed, confused, struggling to embody so many contradictory ideals. As a result, the art is suffering, too. If the music were any more existentially morose, or stylistically comatose, mainstream hip-hop made by men might be headed the way of hair metal or disco. The narcotized indolence is everywhere; the recounting of opioid abuse is so blasé (the Percs, Xans and Oxys) that these pillbox litanies leave you wondering if the Sackler family sponsored a wing in the rap museum. And then there’s the sense of foreshortened future that’s baked into the genre but has been amplified as gangsta rap branched off into trap, drill and other grittier subgenres. Many of the male rappers are documenting social strife and commenting on the violence that comes with being young, Black, famous men. This thread can be moving and also heartbreaking. When listening to these songs, it is impossible to not ache for their makers, to be afraid right along with them. But the music bears the weight of all that anxiety and grief. Even the occasional Drake smash is not enough to disturb the disquiet.
Research Preview: Science Magazine – August 11, 2023
First up on this week’s podcast, we hear about the skewed perception of our own hands, extremely weird giant viruses, champion regenerating flatworms, and more from Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox
Previews: The Economist Magazine – August 12, 2023
Costly and dangerous: Why Biden’s China strategy isn’t working
Supply chains are becoming more tangled and opaque
On august 9th President Joe Biden unveiled his latest weapon in America’s economic war with China. New rules will police investments made abroad by the private sector, and those into the most sensitive technologies in China will be banned. The use of such curbs by the world’s strongest champion of capitalism is the latest sign of the profound shift in America’s economic policy as it contends with the rise of an increasingly assertive and threatening rival.
How America is failing to break up with China
The countries’ economic ties are more profound than they appear
When it comes to tracing the geography of global supply chains, few companies provide a better map than Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer. This year the Taiwanese giant has built or expanded factories in India, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam. The Chinese production sites once loved by Western companies are firmly out of fashion. Souring relations between the governments in Washington and Beijing have made businesses increasingly fretful about geopolitical risks. As a consequence, in the first half of the year, America traded more with Mexico and Canada than it did with China for the first time in almost two decades. The map of global trade is being redrawn.
Research: New Scientist Magazine – August 12, 2023
How working out your ageotype could help you live healthier for longer
Your body is ageing down one of four – or more – possible pathways. Figuring out your “ageotype” could help you zero in on the things you can do to stay healthier for longer
THERE is a (probably apocryphal) story about Henry Ford sending agents out to junkyards across the US in search of scrapped Model Ts. The famous industrialist wanted to know which of the car’s vital components failed first, so he could do something about it. The agents reported back that every bit of the car was susceptible to failure, but some were more susceptible than others, except for one – a component of the steering system called the kingpin, which almost never failed. They expected Ford to announce plans to extend the working lives of the weaker components. Instead, he ordered his engineers to make less resilient kingpins. No point wasting good money on a component that always outlived the others.
Cave of Bones review: Lee Berger on the discovery of Homo naledi
Sewage crisis: The truth about British rivers and how to clean them up
From time crystals to wormholes: When is a quantum simulation real?
Energy-storing concrete could form foundations for solar-powered homes
Scientists race to test claimed room-temperature superconductor
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – August 11, 2023
The Guardian Weekly (August 11, 2023) – The issue features Trump playing the victim, escape from Xinjiang, a day off with Matthew Broderick and more…
Donald Trump’s appearance in court in Washington last week to plead not guilty to his third indictment on criminal charges showed how the 45th president of the United States continues to defy every law of political physics. Washington bureau chief David Smith explores how playing the political martyr only firms up support for Trump to be the Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential race and silences critics within his party as well as among Democrats. We profile Trump’s new nemesis, prosecutor Jack Smith, while reporter Chris McGreal takes the temperature among voters in Iowa where the first Republican caucus will take place in January next year.
There have been few authoritative accounts of China’s persecution of the Uyghur people and the repression of their culture in Xinjiang province. Our main feature is an extract from poet Tahir Hamut Izgil’s memoir that details how, seeing the crackdown intensify and friends arrested, he planned to escape knowing that he dare not even say goodbye to his parents.
As the Hollywood industrial action continues, actors and directors have withdrawn from promoting their work, but luckily for Culture Xan Brooks caught up with Matthew Broderick just before the strike was called. He talks about his role as Richard Sackler in the new Netflix drama about the OxyContin scandal, playing opposite his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, on stage and why escaping his legacy as Ferris Bueller is not an option.
Preview: Archaeology Magazine – Sept/Oct 2023
Archaeology Magazine (September/October 2023):
Ukraine’s Lost Capital
In 1708, Peter the Great destroyed Baturyn, a bastion of Cossack independence and culture
By DANIEL WEISS
On November 2, 1708, thousands of Russian troops acting on the orders of Czar Peter I, known as Peter the Great, stormed Baturyn, the Cossack capital in north-central Ukraine. The Cossack leader, or hetman, Ivan Mazepa—who had been a loyal vassal of the czar until not long before—had departed with much of his army several days earlier to join forces with the Swedish king Charles XII, Peter’s opponent in the Great Northern War (1700–1721). The fortified core of Baturyn consisted of a citadel on a high promontory overlooking the Seim River and a larger adjoining fortress densely packed with buildings, above which soared the brick Cathedral of the Holy Trinity. The citadel and fortress were each surrounded by defensive walls, earthen ramparts, and moats whose sides were lined with logs. Although they sustained heavy losses, the Russian forces managed to seize Baturyn, which proved to be a key victory.
When Lions Were King
Across the ancient world, people adopted the big cats as sacred symbols of power and protection
Secrets of Egypt’s Golden Boy
CT scans offer researchers a virtual look deep inside a mummy’s coffin
Rites of Rebellion
Archaeologists unearth evidence of a 500-year-old resistance movement high in the Andes
Bronze Age Power Players
How Hittite kings forged diplomatic ties with a shadowy Greek city-state
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Aug 11, 2023
Times Literary Supplement (August 11, 2023): – Race today and yesterday – The Black and Asian British experience; Orwell’s political pilgrimage; Germany via Scotland; Adam Mars-Jones trilogy and the Grenfell play…
Preview: Art In America Magazine – Fall 2023
Meet Suzanne Jackson, Art in America’s Fall 2023 Cover Artist
Suzanne Jackson, whose work a history drawing-cracked wall (2016–19) features on the cover of the Fall 2023 issue of Art in America in a detail of the larger work shown here in full, told A.i.A. the backstory of her creation from her home in Savannah, Georgia. (Jackson is also the subject of a feature profile in the same issue.)
As told to A.i.A. The “history” in history drawing is the history of making the drawing. Over the three years I was working on it—it’s a big drawing—the whole process just happens from day to day: you’re adding something new, building it, working through composition and how elements come into the spaces in different ways. Each time you come back to work on it, something new has happened in your life.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – August 14, 2023
The Protests Inside Iran’s Girls’ Schools
From the start, women were at the center of the demonstrations that swept Iran last year. Schoolgirls emerged as an unexpected source of defiant energy.
One morning this past winter, the students at a girls’ high school in Tehran were told that education officials would arrive that week to inspect their classrooms and check compliance with the school’s dress code: specifically, the wearing of the maghnaeh, a hooded veil that became a requirement for schoolgirls in the years after the Iranian Revolution. During lunch, a group of students gathered in the schoolyard. A thirteen-year-old in the seventh grade, whom I’ll call Nina, pressed in to hear what was being said. At the time, mass protests against the government were raging across the country; refusing to wear the veil had become a symbol of the movement. An older girl told the others that it was time for them to join together and make a stand.
How Sudan Archives Became the Violin’s Domme
The twenty-nine-year-old musician pursues technical, rather than emotional, manipulation with her instrument. She can coax from it the sounds of an accordion, a drum, or a string orchestra.
“Do you listen to Sudan Archives?” Most of the time, but not every time, the response to this question is one of confusion. How can one listen to the archives of a country? Sudan Archives is, in fact, a twenty-nine-year-old musician—a singer, rapper, producer, arranger, lyricist, and violinist. She creates a “fiddle-punk sound,” as she describes it, that blends folk, ambient, soul, house, and whatever other tradition she feels is available for the taking. Sudan (the name that her colleagues, her fans, and, increasingly, her intimates call her) begins composing by striking a riff on one of her five violins, which she uses differently from most other American producers.
What Should You Do with an Oil Fortune?
The Hunt family owns one of the largest private oil companies in the country. Leah Hunt-Hendrix funds social movements that want to end the use of fossil fuels.
Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures.
