FYI #48
Vanessa Bell (1879 - 1961), A Conversation, 1913-16 © Estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved, DACS 2023.
Currently reading: Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner & Rosamond Lehman, by Harriet Baker ‘Country living — choosing to embrace the daily routines of rural life — changed your perspective, these women discovered; it changed the quality of your attention to the world. It allowed for new experiments in form, and in feeling.’ The book includes a reproduction of the painting above, by Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister).
A new Freedom House report, Freedom on the Net 2024: the struggle for trust online. ‘Global internet freedom declined for the 14th consecutive year. Protections for human rights online diminished in 27 of the 72 countries covered by Freedom on the Net with 18 earning improvements’.
Trio of professors win Nobel economics prize for work on post-colonial wealth, via the Guardian. Media release on Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson’s prize.
Review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, The Message, by Parul Sehgal, via the New Yorker.
Maira Kalman on Losing a Sister to Forced Separation, via LitHub. From Kalman’s new book, Still Life with Remorse.
New Substack diary by Tina Brown, Fresh Hell.
On figuring out what beauty means to you, Vinson Cunningham, via the Creative Independent. ‘For me, politics as a context is the thing that happens before the speaker opens his or her mouth and speaks or sings. That’s what’s interesting to me.’
Moving Towards Life, by Marina Magloire, via the Los Angeles Review of Books… exploring the correspondence of June Jordan and Audre Lorde.
“That is Emily's, Branwell's, Ann's and my lands:” Exploring the Recently Catalogued Papers of Charlotte Brontë and Her Siblings, by Frances Lindemann, via the New York Public Library
Fortunate Son, by Catherine Liu
Sydney people: this exhibition at the MCA is worth seeing .. Isaac Julien: Once Again... (Statues Never Die).. open until 16 February 2025.
Podcast listening highlights this week:
David Tennant: Internal voices, LGBTQ+ activism, and 80s nostalgia, via Happy Place, with Fearne Cotton
With “The Warriors,” Lin-Manuel Miranda Takes on Another New York Story, via the New Yorker Radio Hour
Hannah Gadsby Returns: Shake the Tree, on Mike Birbiglia's Working It Out
Andrew Garfield Wants to Crack Open Your Heart, via the New York Times Modern Love
Concetta Caristo - "Remember To Have Fun", on Wilosophy with Wil Anderson
Julia Gets Wise with Alice Waters, Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus