“The Magazine That Is Considered the Best in the World”: Muriel Spark and the New Yorker

2008 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 595-616
Author(s):  
Lisa Harrison
Keyword(s):  
New Yorker ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
The World

Cool Hunting

On Trend ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 62-80
Author(s):  
Devon Powers
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
The World ◽  
Trend Forecasting

This chapter looks at “cool hunting,” the brand of trend forecasting that took root around the world during the 1990s and 2000s. Companies of the era were becoming increasingly obsessed with understanding youth trends, thereby inspiring a fleet of upstart advisory companies spearheaded by young people. The chapter discusses how these services developed and popularized and pays close attention to the role of Malcolm Gladwell, whose 1997 New Yorker article “The Coolhunt” named and rapidly spread these practices.

Receivers

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandra Bronfman
Keyword(s):  
Emerging Technology ◽  
New Markets ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Amateur Radio ◽  
The World ◽  
Radio Technology ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The Tropics

Picking up in the early 1920s, this chapter tracks the shift of radio technology from military to commercial uses. It follows linkages among the changing material conditions for Caribbean workers, the radio industry’s search for materials like mica and bakelite, and the generation of new markets. Having placed broadcasting in its ecological and political contexts, the chapter uses the trajectories of two amateur radio operators, John Grinan, a New Yorker/Jamaican son of a plantation owner and a member of the team which produced the first transatlantic wireless signals, and Frank Jones, an American plantation manager in Cuba, famous for his self-promoting shortwave transmissions to recover the world of the tinkerers’ romance with an ether jammed with distant sounds. It traces the creation of audiences and publics for the emerging technology, arguing that radio appealed to listeners not because it shrank distances, but because it underscored them, demarcating the Caribbean as exotic and remote. Ironically, it was the deeper technological connections that would propel the mapping of these imagined boundaries between the “tropics” and “the world.”

scholarly journals Evil, Feminism, and a Philosophy of Transformation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverley Clack
Keyword(s):  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Suffering ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
The World ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Way

Rather than offering another ‘solution’ to the problem of evil, in the form of, say, a theodicy, the discussion of this chapter is situated within an ethical framework concerned with unmasking the enactment and perpetuation of ‘structural evils’ on the political and social levels. Indebted to the insights of feminist philosophers such as Michèle Le Doeuff, but also Hannah Arendt’s analysis of evil, the novelist Muriel Spark, and Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social suffering, the chapter seeks, not to justify the ways of God, but to critique and transform unjust structures, and to pave the way for alternatives that might best support human flourishing. This necessitates attempting to identify and understand the sources of human wickedness—social and individual—while contending that, ultimately, the only appropriate response to evil and suffering is to commit to a reorientation of the self towards others and the world.

Does water have agency? Does it need to?

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon L. Scarborough
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Human Motivation ◽  
Organic World ◽  
The World ◽  
Plant Intelligence

Michael Pollan recently published an essay in the New Yorker (December 2013) introducing the notion of ‘plant intelligence’ and how plants have evolved by virtue of their lack of mobility to cultivate and attract the resources they require. Although not using the humanistic language identified with ‘agency’, a widely used term most frequently associated with human motivation, action and accomplishment, Pollan lends his implicit support for the communicative ‘behaviours’ of plants and their own brand of agency in effecting change in the world. Veronica Strang champions this view for the role of the non-human organic world, but moves a step or two further in suggesting that the inorganic has its own sense of agency. And though she and those phenomenologists whom she cites attribute agency to all things, it is difficult for some of us to entirely accept such a premise.

The Poetry of Ping-Pong

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Zeitlin
Keyword(s):  
Table Tennis ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Ping Pong ◽  
The World ◽  
The New Yorker

In this chapter, the author looks at the poetry of Ping-Pong, his favorite sport. According to Marty Reisman, the game of Ping-Pong died in Bombay, India, in 1952. Reisman, nicknamed “The Needle,” was favored to win the World Table Tennis Championship that day. The author says he has always loved Ping-Pong because you can get into a rhythm, hit the ball back and forth across the net for hours, with any racquet, and simply talk. Ping-Pong, like poetry, is a players' sport, not ideal for spectators. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, claims that there is palpable humor in the game. With Ping-Pong, the author insists that we are all capable of attuning ourselves to the hidden life of sports, a relationship that is about kinesthesia and embodiment.

scholarly journals “From Scotland to the World”: The Poetry of Hope Mirrlees, Helen Adam, Muriel Spark, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 184
Author(s):  
Dorothy McMillan
Keyword(s):  
Early Education ◽  
Seat Belt ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
The World ◽  
Formative Experiences

The four poets that provide the material for this chapter did not know each other and they probably did not know each other’s work. However, they had important formative experiences in common: They were all educated in Scotland and they all left Scotland after that early education. Yet, they all retained special, although different, ties to that country, to its history, and its writing. They were all “modern” in their poetry, sometimes bizarrely so: Of each of them it could be said, “There was no one like her.” This strangeness they also share, as they share a willingness, even desire, to shock, a muddling of contemporary and archaic, of real and legendary. Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s “Hold on to your seat-belt Persephone” is an indicative phrase. I aim to show that these serially inimitable modern writers have complicated and intertwined Scottish and international connections.

Schizophrenic City: Souvenirs of Minneapolis

Prospects ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 301-310
Author(s):  
Cristine M. Levenduski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
Twin Cities ◽  
Future Time ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Communicative Function ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Collecting souvenirs, an impulse nearly as universal as travel it-self, has spawned industries in tourist spots throughout the United States and most other nations of the world. Tourists purchase souvenirs both as commemorative artifacts, that at some future time will call to mind the experiences of the vacation and of the city visited, and as communicative artifacts. T-shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers proclaim, “this is where I've been” or “this is where I live” or “this is where my friends vacationed.” Some tourist spots lend themselves to this communicative function more easily than do others. Cities like San Francisco, for example, are highly imageable cities; they have a bridge or building or monument that serves as a symbol of the city consistent with the experience of visitors and residents alike.1 Minneapolis, however, lacks this kind of symbolic artifact. While any Twin Cities' resident, most Minnesotans, and many avid fans of The Mary Tyler Moore Show will recognize the Minneapolis skyline, particularly the prominent IDS building, this same site shown to a New Yorker or Californian who has never visited the area, will fail to serve as an identifiable landmark. Lacking such a symbol, creators of Minneapolis souvenirs have had to find images that represent the city and that are consistent with the sense of the place that tourists and residents experience.

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