France-Amérique Magazine – December 30, 2023 – The new issue features ‘The Peak of French Chic’; A Century Ago – Inventing the Winter Olympics in Chamonix…
From Washington D.C. to New York City and from New Orleans to Paris, many philanthropic organizations continue to nurture the bonds connecting France and the United States through history, politics, economics, language, and culture.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (December 30, 2023):
She fell in love with a future president at 17. Marriage never waylaid her dreams.
By MICHAEL PATERNITI
Three miles lie between this life and another, between their two houses, hers in downtown Plains, Ga., and his family farm in the country surrounded by peanuts planted in red clay. Three miles between the ordinary and extraordinary.
Uncovering the unlikely story behind the singer’s first album.
By JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
To say that Sinead O’Connor never quite regained the musical heights of her 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” is not to slight the rest of her output, which contained jewels. There is no getting back to a record like that first one. It was in some sense literally scary: The label had to change the original cover art, which showed a bald O’Connor hissing like a banshee cat, for the American release. In the version we saw, she looks down, arms crossed, mouth closed, vulnerable. The music had both sides of her in it.
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – JANUARY 1, 2024 ISSUE:
The world’s largest oil exporter has a plan to transform its economy into a high-tech hub for global business. How investors can ride along.
Stocks with dividends lead our annual listing. Energy pipelines and utilities also look like good bets.
Secure 2.0 included new benefits for savers—but many employers have been slow to add them.
On the outskirts of Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, nestled among car dealerships and hardware shops, sits a two-storey factory stuffed with solar-power secrets. It’s here where UK firm Oxford PV is producing commercial solar cells using perovskites: cheap, abundant photovoltaic (PV) materials that some have hailed as the future of green energy. Surrounded by unkempt grass and a weed-strewn car park, the factory is a modest cradle for such a potentially transformative technology, but the firm’s chief technology officer Chris Case is clearly in love with the place. “This is the culmination of my dreams,” he says.
The world’s most dismal science could make Eurasia safe for illiberalism and predation—or protect it from those forces.
By Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Alexander Dugin is a bit of a madman. The Russian intellectual made headlines in the West in 2022, when his daughter was killed, apparently by Ukrainian operatives, in a Moscow car bombing likely meant for Dugin himself. Dugin would have been targeted because of his unapologetic, yearslong advocacy for a genocidal war of conquest in Ukraine. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” he screeched after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of that country in 2014, adding: “This is my opinion as a professor.” Even at his daughter’s funeral, Dugin stayed on message. Among her first words as an infant, he claimed, were “our empire.”
By James Gleick
In Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell makes a scientific case for the existence of human agency.
Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell
Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control over our actions, of continual decision-making—is part of the experience of being human, moment by moment and day by day. True, we sometimes just drift, like robots or zombies, but at other times we gird our loins and exert our will. David Hume defined will nearly three centuries ago as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” The feeling was universal then and it’s universal now.
Why have Americans not fought to sustain the unprecedented Covid-era expansion of aid to children, renters, and gig workers?
Country Life Magazine – December 27, 2023: The latest issue features ‘This Splendid Land’ – Landscapes, Landmarks, Houses and Gardens; The Art of Knot Tying; Winston Churchill’s interior-design tips; A unicorn in the garden – fantastic beasts tamed…
Country Life’s 10 best gardens stories of 2023
By Toby Keel
Long-standing Country Life contributor Charles Quest-Ritson is literally the man who wrote the book on roses — specifically The RHS encyclopedia of Roses — and back in June, he shared some tips on sharing and planting cuttings which proved enormously popular.
He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.
By Adam Gopnik
It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises—has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his hero-painter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in.
Following Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s invasion, Mosab Abu Toha fled his home with his wife and three children. Then I.D.F. soldiers took him into custody.
Three exhibitions in the Engadin Valley explore how the Swiss mountains have inspired some of the painter’s most playful work
The festive bird has often been served up by artists and writers including J.M.W. Turner and Charles Dickens
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 25, 2023 ISSUE:
Apple trades near record highs, with a market value no other company has ever attained. Now it has to justify the gains
Mexico and Brazil are heading into a favorable interest rate backdrop already in a strong position.Long read
Tesla and China-based BYD are financially similar. Both car makers generated almost identical operating profit in the third quarter. The one big difference: their valuations.Long read
Shares of smaller companies have taken off in the recent rally, but they are still a bargain compared with bigger companies.Long read
Active ETFs are the industry’s hottest trend. Picking winners is as tricky as ever.Long read
Boomers Daily 