The Globalist, May 16, 2023: A Chinese ‘peace’ envoy arrives in Ukraine as Volodomyr Zelensky pushes for military supplies abroad, South Africa sticks to its controversial stance on Russia and the EU plans to build internet cables under the Black Sea.
Plus: we check in with film critic Karen Krizanovich as the Cannes Film Festival begins, and Monocle’s Fiona Wilson talks food diplomacy, as carbonara pancakes are on the menu in Hiroshima ahead of the G7 summit.
Despite a struggling economy, the disastrous earthquakes in February and Turkey’s drift toward one-man rule, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in the lead ahead of a runoff.
A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves.
President Biden is trying to appeal to working-class voters by emphasizing his plans to create well-paid jobs that do not require a college degree.
The special counsel’s final report nevertheless did not produce blockbuster revelations of politically motivated misconduct, as Donald J. Trump and his allies had suggested it would.
The fight over payments systems is hotting up around the world. There may be surprising winners, says Arjun Ramani
Payment is one of the most fundamental economic activities. To buy anything, you need something the seller wants. One option is barter, but that is beset by friction (what are the chances of having something your counterparty wants at any exact moment?). Early forms of money, from cowrie shells to beads to metal coins, offered a solution: they were always in demand to settle transactions.
Video timeline: 0:00 Writers’ strike has brought productions to a halt 0:50 How streaming has transformed the industry 4:20 The 2007-2008 writers’ strike 4:59 The writers’ demands 7:13 The strike’s impact on the entertainment industry
WSJ sat down for exclusive interviews with the showrunners of “Abbott Elementary” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” to understand the key sticking points that led to the writers’ strike and what’s next for the entertainment industry.
Meredith Broussard – MIT Press (2023)
An artificial-intelligence (AI) ‘glitch’ is a problem neither expected nor consequential. Bias, by contrast, is baked in and disastrous, argues data scientist Meredith Broussard, one of very few Black women in this field, who focuses on AI and journalism. “Tech is racist and sexist and ableist because the world is so,” she says. Vivid examples in her disturbing book include that of a man arrested by US police using facial-recognition technology — purely because both he and the suspect in a blurry surveillance photo were Black.
Eckart Frahm – Basic (2023)
The world’s first empire flourished in Assyria in the eighth and seventh centuries bc, and has long been seen as the epitome of barbarism. But, as Assyriologist Eckart Frahm reveals in his deeply informed, challenging history, Assyria produced many features of the modern world. Its innovations included long-distance trade, sophisticated communications networks, mass deportations and widespread political surveillance. Unlike most later empires, he writes, it was at least honest in its “open celebration of plunder, torture, and murder”.
Rebecca Struthers – Hodder & Stoughton (2023)
‘Time’ is “the most commonly used noun” in English, according to Rebecca Struthers, the first professional watchmaker in the United Kingdom to earn a PhD in horology. Each chapter of her exquisitely crafted history explores a pivotal moment in watchmaking from the past 500 years. Mechanical timekeepers, she argues, have influenced human culture as much as the printing press. Imagine trying to catch a train by depending on the Sun’s position, or to perform an organ transplant without measuring the patient’s heart rate precisely.
Michael Vecchione et al. Princeton Univ. Press (2023)
“For most people, the deep ocean is out of sight and out of mind,” write three zoologists and an oceanographer. The zone starts where penetration of sunlight can no longer support photosynthesis, about 200 metres down. This guidebook dissipates ignorance with superb colour photographs of astonishing organisms, accompanied by detailed captions and brief essays. For example, the vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) is neither vampire nor squid, but was so named because its black ‘cloak’ reminded scientists of Dracula.
Christopher J. Preston – MIT Press (2023)
Humans and domestic animals make up 96% of the mass of the world’s mammals. The outlook for wildlife “remains dire”, writes philosopher Christopher Preston. But he describes signs of hope in his well-travelled, thoughtful study of recoveries. Populations of humpback whales in the western Indian Ocean have surged since the mid-twentieth century; those of Californian black bears have quadrupled in a few decades. He visits farmland, prairie, river, forest and ocean, exploring why only certain species are recovering.
Chapters: 0:00 – Introduction 2:20 The Rise Of Louis Vuitton 8:45 A Culture Company, Not Just Luxury 16:46 The Future Of Luxury
Bernard Arnault, whose five children all hold senior executive roles within the company. With a keen eye for luxury, ruthless negotiation skills and an effective business acumen, Arnault has acquired some of the biggest names in the world. Most recently, in 2021, the company bought Tiffany & Co. for $15.8 billion after a bitter dispute about price due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and to salvage the luxury sector’s biggest-ever deal.
Though most companies struggled during the pandemic, LVMH’s stock steadily rose while it continued to report record revenue year after year as wealthy consumers participated in what McKinsey & Co. called “revenge spending.” For the first quarter of 2023, LVMH reported a 17% increase in revenue from the same period a year earlier. The Asia market, which had seen the most significant drop due to Covid-19 closures, had a 14% rise in revenue after an 8% decrease in the fourth quarter of 2022. In April 2023, LVMH became the first European company to surpass $500 billion in market value.
Rubble is like a plant’s blossoms; it is the radiant highpoint of an incessant metabolism, the beginning of a rebirth.
—Anselm Kiefer
Kiefer’s thirteenth solo exhibition at Gagosian since 1998, hortus conclusus follows Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce (Andrea Emo) at Palazzo Ducale, Venice (2022–23) and Exodus, a bicoastal exhibition presented at the gallery in New York (2022) and at Gagosian at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2022–23).
This coming October, Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut (LaM) in France will present Anselm Kiefer: Photography at the Beginning, the first exhibition dedicated to the artist’s photographs.
The Economist ‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (May 15 , 2023) – Is Chinese power about to peak? Why your job is (probably) safe from artificial intelligence (11:00) and how Mexico’s gangs are becoming criminal conglomerates (35:00).
Smithsonian Magazine – June Issue
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Cities weren’t the only subject that fascinated this acclaimed Futurist
By Amy Crawford
He famously captured industrial America—the Brooklyn Bridge, Pittsburgh’s steel mills—with his monumental canvases. But the painter Joseph Stella (1877-1946) looked to nature for respite, escaping his Manhattan studio to visit the New York Botanical Garden and to paint in southern Italy, where he grew up. “My devout wish,” the artist wrote, “[is] that my every working day might begin and end—as a good omen—with the light, gay painting of a flower.”
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After fleeing her native Germany, a young Jew found companionship and community as the Nazis approached
Boomers Daily 