
The Globalist Podcast, Tuesday, July 18, 2023: After Russia withdraws from the Black Sea grain deal, we unpack the global implications.
Plus: a new ground-breaking Alzheimer’s drug, the EU-Tunisia migration deal and a roundup of business news.

The Globalist Podcast, Tuesday, July 18, 2023: After Russia withdraws from the Black Sea grain deal, we unpack the global implications.
Plus: a new ground-breaking Alzheimer’s drug, the EU-Tunisia migration deal and a roundup of business news.

China was on track to recover after closing itself off during the pandemic. Now the country’s growth is staggering, and Beijing is signaling it is open to talking.

Russia accused Ukraine of hitting the Kerch Strait Bridge for the second time in 10 months, saying that two maritime drones had struck the bridge, an essential supply line for Russian troops.
Mayor Eric Adams named Mr. Caban as the 46th commissioner of the New York Police Department. He follows Keechant Sewell, who resigned after 18 months.
A lockdown-era program that gets landlords talking to tenants has had notable success for both. Can it continue?
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (July 17, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week: how populist Republicans plan to make Donald Trump’s second term count, NATO’s promises to Ukraine mark real progress, but there is still much more to do (10:12) and what matters about the human-dominated Anthropocene geological phase is not when it began, but how it might end (14:41).
Harper’s Magazine – August 2023 issue: The New Science Wars – The COVID Response and Its Discontents; Freud Shrinks Woodrow Wilson; Lawrence Jackson on Colson Whitehead, and more…

COVID-19 and the new science wars
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not unusual to enter common spaces across the United States—grocery stores, malls, office buildings—and experience a kind of perceptual whiplash. People wearing N-95 masks and latex gloves stood beside others wearing no mask at all—or else letting their mandatory face coverings slouch flaccidly beneath their chins.
A disappearance in Arkansas
Twenty-two years ago, a six-year-old girl—my cousin—got lost in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance would eventually connect my family to another story, a dark and bizarre one involving kidnapping, brainwashing, murder, and a cult that believed in the imminent end of the world, laced with the kind of eerie coincidences or near-coincidences that cause perfectly rational people to question what they think they know about reality.
The New Yorker – July 24, 2023 issue: Emily Nussbaum on the Nashville underground, Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Gretchen Whitmer, Anthony Lane on “Mission: Impossible,” and more.

Tennessee’s government has turned hard red, but a new set of outlaw songwriters is challenging Music City’s conservative ways—and ruling bro-country sound.
On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.

The Governor’s strategy for revitalizing her state has two parts: to grow, Michigan needs young people; to draw young people, it needs to have the social policies they want.
The Globalist Podcast, Monday, July 17, 2023: Reports from Khartoum as violence in Sudan escalates.
Plus: Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida tours the Middle East, the latest transport news and a new edition of ‘The Monocle Companion’, celebrating ideas for a better world.

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

As it turns 75, the N.H.S., a proud symbol of Britain’s welfare state, is in the deepest crisis of its history.
Calls to overhaul the police go back decades. But violent episodes of police enforcement continue. So do violent outpourings on the street.
Ongoing strikes could disrupt the entertainment industry in fundamental ways, putting the 2024 box office and the fall broadcast lineup in jeopardy.
CBS Sunday Morning (July 16, 2023) – Over the last five decades, artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has had nearly 100 shows, and in 2020 a painting of hers was the first by a Native American to join the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Now the 83-year-old is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City – the museum’s first retrospective ever of an Indigenous artist. Correspondent Serena Altschul reports on a moment that’s been described as long overdue.



Yurara Sarara Films (July 16, 2023) – Wabi sabi can be defined as “beauty in imperfection” and can incorporate asymmetry, incompleteness, impermanence, and simplicity.
In addition to gardens, wabi sabi influences many other aspects of Japanese art and culture, such as the tea ceremony and pottery making, and it is also seen as a way of life.
A garden based around wabi sabi incorporates natural and manmade elements in a way that allows visitors to appreciate their humble and imperfect forms. This typically involves using not only plants but also stones and weathered manmade objects as design elements.

July 16, 2023 – Monocle\’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, Alexandra Andrist and Chandra Kurt discuss the major topics of the weekend. Plus: we check in with our friends in London, Barcelona and Bangkok.