‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (May 22 , 2023) – A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, Henry Kissinger on the new world order, how the fight for digital payments is going global (10:50) and why the Taliban is going big on animal welfare (17:10).
Category Archives: Opinion
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 29, 2023
Stephen Satterfield Puts Black Cuisine at the Center of U.S. History
The host of Netflix’s “High on the Hog” draws seductive stories from a bittersweet legacy.
Stephen Satterfield, the host of the Netflix food-history series “High on the Hog,” was bent over the stove in his parents’ kitchen, near Atlanta. It was one o’clock on a February afternoon, and he was preparing Sunday dinner for the family. Most of the meal was canonical Black Southern food: turnip greens simmered for hours, cheese grits, biscuits baked in a cast-iron skillet.
What We Owe Our Trees
Forests fed us, housed us, and made our way of life possible. But they can’t save us if we can’t save them.
By Jill Lepore
The woods I know best, love best, are made of Northern hardwoods, sugar maple and white ash, timber-tall; black and yellow birch, tiger-skinned; seedlings and saplings of blighted beech and striped maple creeping up, knock-kneed, from a forest floor of princess pine and Christmas fern, shag-rugged. White-tailed deer dart through softwood stands of pine and hemlock, bucks and does, the last leaping fawn, leaving tracks that look like tiny human lungs, trails that people can only ever see in the snow, even though, long after snowmelt, dogs can smell them, tracking, snuffling, shuddering with the thrill of the hunt and noshing on deer scat for dog treats.
Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine
In the trenches in the Donbas, infantrymen face unrelenting horrors, from missiles to grenades to helicopter fire.
A twenty-two-year-old Ukrainian sniper, code-named Student, stuffed candy wrappers into his ears before firing a rifle at the Russians’ tree line. He’d been discharged from the hospital two weeks earlier, after being shot in the thigh.Photographs by Maxim Dondyuk for The New Yorker
Preview: New York Times Magazine – May 21, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (May 21, 2023) – Sometimes it seems as if everyone is in therapy. And the language of therapy is certainly everywhere these days. So we dedicated this year’s Health Issue to a topic on all our minds.
THE THERAPY ISSUE
Does Therapy Really Work? Let’s Unpack That.
Research shows that counseling delivers great benefits to many people. But it’s hard to say exactly what that means for you.
In my late 20s, living alone in New York, I found myself in the grip of a dark confusion, unclear of how to proceed — and so I started seeing a therapist. During most visits, I sat in a chair with a box of tissues on the small table beside it, but the office also held a couch, on which I occasionally reclined, staring at the ceiling as I wrestled with what I was doing with my life, and even what I was doing in that office.
Want to Fix Your Mind? Let Your Body Talk.
By Daniel Bergner
Somatic therapy is surging, with the promise that true healing may reside in focusing on the physical rather than the mental.
I had been describing a looming fear about my writing, about encroaching failure. Price sat in front of a dangling plant in her home office in Austin, Texas. With her red-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her delicate features communicated a mix of candor and vulnerability that created a sense of shared space, of intimacy, even by Zoom. She listened, took notes and, with a gesture of her hand, suggested that we leave my account of the situation off to the side.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – May 20, 2023
Joe Biden’s global vision is too timid and pessimistic
The president underestimates America’s strengths and misunderstands how it acquired them
In the 1940s and early 1950s America built a new world order out of the chaos of war. For all its shortcomings, it kept the peace between superpowers and underpinned decades of growth that lifted billions out of poverty. Today that order, based on global rules, free markets and an American promise to uphold both, is fraying. Toxic partisanship at home has corroded confidence in America’s government.
China and the West take a step to ease Africa’s debt crisis
A deal for Ghana is the first test case for a new approach
Ghana made history when it led the wave of sub-Saharan African countries that won independence more than six decades ago. It may now be making history again, as the first test case for a new approach to debt relief. China and Western governments may have overcome one barrier to restructuring the billions of dollars owed by countries with unsustainable debts.
Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — June 2023 Issue
Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne
From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia.
Seeing Through Maps
I was splitting wood at sunset when the cat jumped up on the chopping block in front of me, arched her back, and took a long piss. My axe hung in the sky. The cat stared at me, tail up. I put my axe down and squatted before her. I hitched my gown to my waist.
Special Report: ‘Digital Finance’ – The Economist
As payments systems go digital, they are changing global finance
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.
- Emerging markets: A digital payments revolution in India
- Techfin v fintech: The old bank/card model is still entrenched in the rich world
- Cryptocurrencies: The promise of crypto has not lived up to its initial excitement
- Digital money: Central-bank digital currencies are talked about more than coming to fruition
- International finance: Could digital-payments systems help unseat the dollar?
- The future: There are risks but also big potential benefits from digital payments
Opinion: China’s Power Is Peaking, Jobs Safe From A.I., Mexico Criminal Gangs
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).
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 22, 2023
How Philipp Plein Became the King of Low-Brow High Fashion
The maximalist designer has positioned himself as an underdog hero of the common man, who is successful despite the falsity and the snobbery of the élites.
By Naomi Fry
Earth League International Hunts the Hunters
A conservation N.G.O. infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down.
By Tad Friend
How a Disaster Expert Prepares for the Worst
Lucy Easthope, who has worked on major emergencies since 9/11, says that small interventions can make a significant difference.
By Sam Knight
Preview: New York Times Magazine – May 14, 2023
The New York Times Magazine – May 14, 2023: Katie Engelhart reports on a family torn apart by dementia; plus, we take you inside the world of saildrones — the unmanned boats that measure superstorms at sea — and Jazmine Hughes reports on one woman’s efforts to ensure the conviction of the white supremacist who killed her sister in the Buffalo shooting last year.
Hurricanes of Data: The Tiny Craft Mapping Superstorms at Sea
Understanding the secrets of a warming ocean means steering straight into the biggest hurricanes. Enter the saildrone.
A Year After Buffalo: ‘There’s No Forgiveness for That. Ever.’
Court hearings, media scrums, ruined holidays — Barbara Massey-Mapps suffered through it all to see the white supremacist who killed her sister convicted.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – May 13, 2023
Is Chinese power about to peak?
The country’s historic ascent is levelling off. That need not make it more dangerous
The rise of China has been a defining feature of the world for the past four decades. Since the country began to open up and reform its economy in 1978, its gdp has grown by a dizzying 9% a year, on average. That has allowed a staggering 800m Chinese citizens to escape from poverty. Today China accounts for almost a fifth of global output. The sheer size of its market and manufacturing base has reshaped the global economy. Xi Jinping, who has ruled China for the past decade, hopes to use his country’s increasing heft to reshape the geopolitical order, too.
Small, sensible steps could help ease America’s border woes
The art of the practical in dealing with migrants, drugs and gangs
The rehabilitation of Syria’s dictator raises awkward questions for the West
Clearer principles about how and when to ease sanctions are needed
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