Новости за 31.03.2022

You know that 95 per cent of opals come from Australia, right? Wrong! RENATA BERNARD says that’s usually the first mistake when dealing with a customer in search of a quality opal.

APRIL SPOTLIGHT:

It’s currently Restaurant Week here in Chicago, an annual chance for me to sneak my way into some of the city’s fanciest joints at an affordable price—and a few of the options on this year’s list boast their Michelin stars alongside their prix fixe menus. It’s a longtime acclaim that still makes me laugh every time I…

These WIRED-tested memory sticks are a virtual filing cabinet in your pocket.

I’ve decided to let my inner weather out.Even in the nerves flashing, some things are only shadow.What’s up with that?My muse bruises me.Some days I sit hours to be relieved by a word.Today’s word is invisible.I got it in a text picturing myself in this landscape. I’m putting trouble into place, turning toward what is.Listening […]

On May 10, 1981, François Mitterrand was elected president of France. It was the first time in the twenty-three-year history of the Fifth Republic that a Socialist had wrested power from the Gaullist center-right, and his victory set off raucous waves of drunken celebration, as well as shivers of fear among business leaders who worried […]

1. It is unfair to begin an essay on Elizabeth Hardwick with an instance of her cruelty; she was one of the fairest literary critics of her time, as well as the most elegant and humane. Yet the faintest hint of certain themes, overheard in a novel or play or the chatter of a cocktail […]

In The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), Dr. Seuss’s only original screenplay, young Bart, living alone with his harassed mom, is compelled to endure piano lessons from the local music teacher, fussy, tyrannical Dr. Terwilliker. Exhausted by his fruitless labors, Bart falls asleep at the piano and dreams that he has been sent, along […]

I never tire of its nine hundred pages, of reading it, teaching it, talking about it. “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather,” with the streets full of the horse droppings that the Victorians euphemistically called mud, and the chimney smoke perpetually “lowering down,” as […]

If you’ve ever been curious about how America’s so-called deep state really works, these three memoirs are a good place to start. Their authors were, until recently, unknown to the public, having quietly risen to just below the surface of the American foreign policy establishment. None of them, it’s fair to say, would have written […]

I visited Cairo in late November 2021, after a two-year absence. I knew to expect changes, and I found them. The area around Tahrir Square, emptied of most of its cultural life, has become a decorative and heavily policed showcase. The dense lower-class neighborhood of Bulaq has been cleared to make way for hotels and […]

Reviewers of Sarah Manguso’s writing love to tally her words and pages—as is often the case for very short books (the “slim volume”) and very long ones (the “doorstop”), as though such extremes are feats beyond belief. Her work falls into the former category: books “brief as a breath” and “slim as a Pop-Tart,” written […]

You must know the parable about the frog that sits in a pot of water being gradually heated, allowing itself to be boiled alive: because the change happens gradually, it never realizes it should leap out. Reading Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality is a similar experience, as […]

For weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney remained closeted away in various undisclosed locations while Bush administration officials announced the start of a global war on terror. Cheney, the chief architect of that war, finally resurfaced in his office in the West Wing of the White House, where […]

Elizabeth I launched her defense against the Spanish Armada in 1588 with an unforgettable image: “I have the body of a weak, and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” Only a sovereign could transcend sexual difference, cloaking a king’s power in a woman’s flesh. But some saw this gender […]

Winter had come to Nicosiaand as the last daylight wentbraziers flared on the sidewalk.In some language of Crimea—or Medea—the men’s heads benttoward an ancient clock. Was it a dream? I ate potatoes“fluffy as a buttered cloud,”and sensed the red earth as “read,”like Aphrodite’s lips in the throesof love: she mouthed aloudthe tale of grave Adonis’s […]

An anecdote: it is twenty or so years ago, and two friends, J. and M., are in Florence, relaxedly on the trail of some of the city’s less well known artistic treasures. In a nondescript street, M. pauses before a nondescript church, which, according to his Royal Automobile Club guidebook to Italy, published in 1928—yes, […]

The first act of Verdi’s Don Carlos is almost an opera in itself: in a matter of minutes the prospect of a happy destiny is born, blooms, and dissolves. The elements of its setting—a forest in winter, a fire kindled in the wilderness, a starry sky—have a poetic openness not to be found in the […]

If what you want is on the other side, a closed door might become an image of your desire. In ancient Greek poetry, this motif had a name: paraclausithyron, “a lament beside a door.” In Latin poetry it was called exclusus amator, “excluded lover.” “Closed doors are useful,” complained Ovid in the Amores, “as a […]

It was thus the fashion to circulatearound the room, a holding-box for owned art,in a clockwise arcTo speak in soft toneswith the owner, the owner’s daughter, the curatorin the voluminous beige hat and gloves,the handler, the event coordinator’s assistant for lighting,the former studentsthe melancholy receptionist who writes poetrythe videographer who grinscatlikewithout fault, locked behind her […]

If there’s one thing Americans can agree about, it’s that we disagree. We are divided into warring camps on issues from abortion to guns to taxes—even on wearing masks and getting vaccinated. There have been so many diagnoses of why we are riven that it can be daunting to come up with a new explanation. […]

“Graveyard’s full,” says Timothy Hall, the man prodding the bones of the piano at the saloon in Grackle. It’s a concise expression of everything the town’s been through: the rampaging bandits, the cannibal kidnappings, the swirling tornados. Filling the graveyard has been a solemn bid for order in the wake of so much chaos.

One engineer has built a new communications protocol that he says is resistant to disaster and central points of failure.

The musician says he’s looking forward to touring his new album “Boyology”

James Beard Award-winning chef RJ Cooper is flying in fresh catch from around the globe.