September 9 – November 12, 2023

October 8 – November 12, 2023

Our new Fall issue includes an excerpt from Bei Dao’s book-length poem Sidetracks, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. In Sidetracks, Bei Dao reflects on his turn to making ink-dot paintings like the one here.

In April 2012, while with his family on a beach in Hong Kong, Bei Dao suffered a stroke that severely affected his language abilities. After a month of trying to learn how to read all over again, he was assessed by a speech-language pathologist to be at only 30 percent equivalency. Daily conversation was difficult; the words he depended on for his life and art would possibly never return. It was an unprecedented crisis that he later compared in an essay to being “like an animal trapped in a cage.” (I’m reminded of these lines Bei Dao’s friend Tomas Tranströmer wrote after a paralyzing stroke, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton: “I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case.”) While recovering in the hospital, Bei Dao started to doodle and brush calligraphy, and when he returned home, he started to paint, channeling the lyric impulse from the void of words into physical images. Thirty years had passed since he’d last painted a picture.

Bei Dao’s first paintings in this period were composed of repeating lines that formed an abstract landscape resembling surging hills or waves. Feeling he lacked the necessary skill and technique to manipulate the plastic line, he abandoned it and turned to one of the most fundamental elements of Chinese painting: the ink dot. A longtime photographer, he compares the ink dot to the pixel of a photograph. In his book-length poem Sidetracks, which will be published in English by New Directions in 2024, he describes the creative process of ink-dot painting like this:

nebular ink dots on rice paper—in accord with the cosmos painting pictures makes me euphoric ink dots cluster disperse depending on the flow of random scattering forest beyond the borders of language good fortune depends on disaster / disaster conceals good fortune I am aimless freedom listening closely to the whispers of snowflakes guarding the vortex of day and night at the center of the mysterious river

The Crown's movement coach on how she helps its stars become the Royals

How Coyote vs Acme is the latest film to be shelved despite already being shot

September 15 – November 12, 2023

“I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral    down /    a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appears in the new Fall issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we’ve commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on.

My parents both worked, and they both made good money, and I needed a car. It all felt very incidental. They had this image in their heads of an ideal weekend—the two of them driving around the Texas Hill Country with a large, iced drink in the cup holder. They’re sitting in the front seats, vintage-by-way-of-long-term-ownership Ray-Bans strapped on tight, and the top is, of course, down. After some searching, they found a fairly cheap used Mercedes-Benz CLK 320—convertible, two doors, soft top, black paint, black interior. They said I could drive it when they didn’t want to, which turned out to be basically every day.

I often forget that this can sound pretty cool. Not only the notion of having a car at sixteen, being able to get around or away if I needed or wanted to, but also that the car was a murdered-out drop top. It is cool to have wheels, especially in Texas. We lived in a suburb outside the Austin city limits, but my parents both grew up in small towns, one in South Texas and the other in the Panhandle. Getting a car, for them, had been the first notion of a kind of promise to leave those small towns. Leaving was, of course, the coolest thing a teenager could do—that great cliché articulated to me when my dad played me Bruce Springsteen songs. My parents saw this car and saw themselves having left, and they saw me in it, years later, as a kind of Ferris Bueller—loud, omniscient, and abjectly capable.

Poch ’n Pep treated us to another classic! Marcus, Luke, Vish and Jim relive Chelsea 4-4 Manchester City – a glorious game full of good goals, controversial goals, and goals scored with ballsacks. Join us!

Elsewhere, Marcus tries to sign everyone up to the England national team, Jonathan Pearce shows off his rich knowledge of astronomy and John Hartson takes a trip to the Toby Calfery. Plus, a disastrous tifo mishap in Switzerland. Cone om!

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Arsenal is monitoring Girona defender Miguel Gutierrez as they seek to strengthen their squad.

The Gunners boast some of the finest players in the Premier League and are committed to enhancing their options.

While Oleksandr Zinchenko holds the primary position at left-back, Arsenal has also utilised players such as Takehiro Tomiyasu, Jakub Kiwior, and Jurrien Timber in that role.

Despite having Kieran Tierney, who is currently on loan at Real Sociedad this season, Arsenal is in pursuit of a new player for that position.

According to Fabrizio Romano, the Gunners are closely tracking Girona’s Miguel Gutiérrez, who has been making a notable impact in the Spanish top flight.

A top Ukrainian military officer working under the command of the head of Ukraine’s top general played a central role in the undersea bombing of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline last year, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel jointly reported on Saturday.

The two publications said that unnamed officials in the US and Europe had identified Roman Chervinsky, a 48-year-old colonel who served in Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces, as “coordinator” of the September 26, 2022 Nord Stream bombing in which three explosions ruptured two pipelines that transport gas from under the Baltic Sea Russia to Germany. The reports say that Chervinsky “took orders from more senior Ukrainian officials, who ultimately reported to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s highest-ranking military officer.”

The initially mysterious 2022 explosions created an international whodunnit. Many initially blamed Russia. In February, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published a report claiming the United States was behind the blasts. Russia has echoed that claim.

But the Post’s report is the latest information to emerge suggesting Ukraine was responsible. Ukraine benefited from the Nord Stream disabling—even before the war, its citizens were vocal critics of the pipelines, which bypassed the country and cost Kiev revenue it had previously received from transporting Russian gas toward Western Europe. As Russia prepared to invade Ukraine in 2022, Germany, under US pressure, shut down the pipeline. But the prospect of its resumed operation, which would earn Moscow revenue it could use to wage war, gave Ukraine a motive.

Chervinsky denied playing any part in the sabotage. “All speculations about my involvement in the attack on Nord Stream are being spread by Russian propaganda without any basis,” he said in a statement to news outlets.