Times Literary Supplement (July 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘World at War’ – Humanity’s appetite for organized violence; Should we have babies; Posture panic; The boy on the burning deck and Wales…
For centuries, the Seine River has been Paris’s dumping ground. A billion-dollar cleanup is trying to make it swimmable again.
The history of Paris is inextricably linked to the river that flows through its center—from Neolithic settlement to this year’s Olympic games.
The opening ceremony for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics will take place on the fabled French waterway. But did you know it was named for a Gallo-Roman deity?
The new age of American exorcisms by Sam Kestenbaum
The pastor is pacing back and forth, a cordless microphone in one hand, the other extended before him. He says, “This is the awakening the American church has been waiting on,” and keeps pacing. He has readied himself before taking the elevated stage, donning a paisley shirt, top button undone, and speaks now from the wood pulpit of his revival tent.
Seamus Heaney and the end of the poetic career
The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45.
This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.
Less than six weeks before Democrats formally choose their nominee, the President is marching down a path of constant peril.
A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President’s return to the White House. By Jonathan Blitzer
From the time of the Revolutionary War to the fires of the nineteen-seventies, the history of the borough has always been shaped by its in-between-ness.
By Ian Frazier
The UK isn’t the global power that it was in 1997. But if the new government makes smart choices, we might still avoid drifting into irrelevance
For months we had been complaining about the damage the Games would inevitably bring to our city
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Feeble government response and lack of industry cooperation hamper U.S. control efforts
Scientists allege irregularities in papers on how honey bees gauge distance
Hardy zircons suggest subduction of ocean crust began 4 billion years ago
“New type of fossil” may boost efforts to bring beasts back
What does Labour’s win mean for British foreign policy?
Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside
France is desperately searching for a government
Researchers are figuring out how large language models work
The New Atlantis Magazine (July 10, 2024) : The latest issue features…
Tech ethics needs a breakthrough. The Amish have it.
Fact-checking used to be how journalists policed themselves. Now it’s how they police everyone else.
Strange things in the skies of a clockwork universe
Times Literary Supplement (July 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Ven ice Preserved – La Serenissima down the centuries; Why revolutions fail; Eating ourselves to death and Ozempic nation…
The actor talks about the origins of “Adaptation,” his potential leap to television, and the art of “keeping it enigmatic.”
By Susan Orlean
The wobbly distinction between reality and artifice fascinates Nicolas Cage. The first time we encountered each other was in 2001, during the making of “Adaptation”—a film based on Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt my book “The Orchid Thief” for the screen—in which Cage played Kaufman and his twin, Donald. He was in the middle of a scene, and I tiptoed onto the set as quietly as possible, convinced that any distraction would trigger one of the eruptions for which Cage had become famous. Between takes, he glanced at the handful of people watching, and exclaimed cheerily, “Oh, guys, look!” He pointed at me and a small, fuzzy-haired man I hadn’t noticed beside me. “It’s the real Charlie and the real Susan!” He seemed tickled by this collision between the characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts, and insisted that the crew take note. (Kaufman and I, who had never met before that moment, slunk away sheepishly.)
Three decades into “This American Life,” the host thinks the show is doing some of its best work yet—even if he’s still jealous of “The Daily.”
By Sarah Larson
It can be easy to take the greatness of “This American Life,” the weekly public-radio show and podcast hosted by Ira Glass, for granted. The show, which Glass co-founded in 1995 at WBEZ, in Chicago, has had the same essential format for twenty-eight years and more than eight hundred episodes. It was instrumental in creating a genre of audio journalism that has flourished in recent decades, especially since the podcast boom—which was initiated by the show’s first spinoff, “Serial,” in 2014. Like “The Daily Show” or Second City, “This American Life” has trained a generation of talented people, and Glass’s three-act structures, chatty cadences, and mixture of analysis and whimsy are now so familiar as to seem unremarkable.
