The Globalist Podcast (January 25, 2024) – Farmers across Europe take to the streets. Do their protests link with the far-right movement in the EU?
Then: the Philippines refuses to help the ICC’s drug-war probe, we assess the Red Sea disruption’s effect on global trade and look at the women serving in Ukraine’s armed forces. Plus: the diplomacy of alcohol as Saudi Arabia prepares to open its first liquor store – serving diplomats only.
The Globalist Podcast (January 23, 2024) – We discuss the EU’s role in Gaza as European foreign ministers met separately yesterday with their Israeli and Palestinian counterparts.
Plus: an on-the-ground report from the New Hampshire primary, Ukraine strikes Russian gas and Madrid’s new graffiti police.
How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy
By Evan Osnos
As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”
There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
By Rachel Syme
When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.
The Globalist Podcast (January 22, 2024) – .We discuss Nato’s preparations for the ‘Steadfast Defender 24’ exercises, which will test the alliance’s ability to defend its eastern flank that borders Russia.
Plus: a flick through the day’s papers, the latest climate news and a dispatch from Singapore Art Week.
Monocle on Sunday, January 21, 2024 – Georgina Godwin, Charles Hecker and Latika Bourke on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Paris and Monocle’s correspondent, Mary Fitzgerald, reporting from Granada, Spain this week.
Monocle on Saturday, January 20, 2024: What are the key takeaways from the interview with German defence minister, Boris Pistorius? Which country is the common link in the recent Middle Eastern conflicts, and why?
Join Georgina Godwin and Austrian journalist Tessa Szyszkowitz for this and more from the week’s news and culture. Plus: Monocle’s Lilian Fawcett visits Singapore’s international art fair, ART SG, to find out how Singapore is trying to establish itself as a global art hub.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 19, 2024): The new issue features ‘The Whale Who Went AWOL’ – How do you solve a problem like Hvaldmir?; How Group Chats Rule the World – They quietly became the de facto spaces to share dumb jokes, grief or even plans for an insurrection…
Hvaldimir escaped captivity and became a global celebrity. Now, no one can agree about what to do with him.
By Ferris Jabr
On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope.
They quietly became the de facto spaces to share dumb jokes, grief or even plans for an insurrection.
By Sophie Haigney
I am texting all the time. I am, at the very least, receiving texts all the time, a party to conversations in which I am alternately an eavesdropper and an active participant. This is because I am in a lot of group chats — constant, interlinked, text-message-based conversations among multiple friends that happen all day long. I dip into and out of these conversations, on my phone and on my computer. Sometimes I will put both away for two hours and return to find 279 new messages waiting.
The Globalist Podcast (January 19, 2024) – We discuss the regional fallout following Pakistan’s retaliatory strikes in Iran.
Plus: the Somalia-Ethiopia dispute over the Somaliland maritime deal, media freedom in Ukraine following reports of press intimidation and a special interview with Alexander Payne, the director of ‘The Holdovers’.
The Guardian Weekly (January 18, 2024) – The new issue features ‘State Of Emergency’ – How drug cartels upended Ecuador; Why Houthi anger could spread war; Are aliens already among us?…
Not long ago, Ecuador was chiefly known for its volcanoes, wildlife and eco-tourism. It’s an image that may now need some rehabilitation after chaos and bloodshed sparked by the prison escape last week of Adolfo Macías, the country’s most notorious gang leader and drug lord.
With cartels from Peru and Colombia routinely funnelling narcotics through Ecuador’s ports en route to Europe, Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips reports on a rising problem that threatens to tear apart the once-peaceful Andean state.
In the Middle East, Yemen’s Houthi rebels could stymie the increasingly slim chances of preventing a regional war. With the US and UK bombing Houthi bases in response to attacks on commercial shipping, diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour recounts the Houthis’ rise and why military strikes against them may not lead to the desired outcome.
Boomers Daily 