The Globalist (March 21, 2024): We discuss what will be on the agenda at the EU leaders’ summit in Brussels with associate editor at Politico, Suzanne Lynch.
Also in the programme: we get the latest on Vietnam president Vo Van Thuong’s resignation and find out why Canada is stopping future arms shipments to Israel. Plus: we flick through the April issue of Monocle as it hits newsstands.
The Globalist (March 20, 2024): As negotiations in Doha resume, we discuss the likelihood of a temporary truce in Gaza after months of devastating war.
Plus: protests in Argentina, US domestic politics and why Slovakia’s forthcoming presidential election is crucial for the EU.
Fly west across the United Arab Emirates from Fujairah, a tanker-filled port on the Gulf of Oman, towards the Persian Gulf and you get a sense of the vulnerability arid lands have to climate change. The farms around Dhaid provide a splash of green, but homegrown food is scarce, homegrown staples next to non-existent. Drinkable water comes mostly from desalination plants. The heat is growing inhumane; outside work is banned during the hottest hours of summer afternoons.
The Globalist (March 19, 2024): Israel denies the EU’s accusation that it is using starvation as a weapon of war.
Plus, Hong Kong’s Article 23 security legislation nears a vote and Mark Galeotti introduces the Kremlin elite of the future.
Can American policing be fixed?
by Ras Baraka, Rosa Brooks, Barry Friedman, Christy E. Lopez, Tracey L. Meares, Brian O’Hara, Patrick Sharkey
In May 2020, the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd sparked the largest wave of civil unrest in U.S. history. An estimated twenty-three million people took to the streets, calling for the reformation, defunding, disarming, or even abolition of police departments. Protesters pointed to policing’s disproportionate targeting of black and brown communities, its role in creating the world’s largest carceral state, and its increasing reliance on military weapons and tactics. Defenders of law enforcement countered that a militarized police force is necessary to regulating the most heavily armed civilian population on earth. These defenders claimed that racism…
MAGA meets the Age of Aquarius
Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the man the media has dubbed the QAnon Shaman, had been released from federal custody six weeks before when we met for lunch at a place called Picazzo’s, winner of the Phoenix New Times Best Gluten-Free Restaurant award in 2015. Despite a protracted hunger strike and 317 days isolated in a cell, Jacob’s prison sentence of forty-one months for obstruction of an official proceeding on January 6, 2021, had been shortened owing to good behavior, and he was let out about a year early on supervised release.
As the art market cools, Julien’s Auctions earns millions selling celebrity ephemera—and used its connections to help Kim Kardashian borrow Marilyn Monroe’s J.F.K.-birthday dress.
The sidewalks of Lower Broadway in downtown Nashville are filled with people moving among neon-lit venues owned by celebrity musicians: Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock ‘n’ Roll Steakhouse, Jason Aldean’s Kitchen & Rooftop Bar, Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa. The Hard Rock Café, which opened in 1994, when the neighborhood could still reasonably be called eclectic, sits at the far edge of the strip, overlooking the Cumberland River. One evening last November, Julien’s Auctions took over a private room at the restaurant for a three-day sale in honor of the company’s twentieth anniversary. There was a spotlighted stage full of objects that musicians had worn or touched or played: a scratched amber ring that Janis Joplin wore onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, in 1967; Prince’s gold snakeskin-print suit, small enough to fit on an adolescent-size mannequin; ripped jeans that had belonged to Kurt Cobain.
Though he has adopted a “nerd constitutional-law guy” persona, he is in lockstep with the law-flouting former President.
The Capitol Hill Club, in a white brick town house a few blocks from the House of Representatives, is a social institution exclusively for Republicans. One evening in October, Representative Mike Garcia was eating there alone when Representative Mike Johnson stopped to chat. Garcia is a first-generation immigrant and a retired Navy pilot from a Democratic-leaning district in Southern California. His predecessor, a Democrat, resigned after a scandal four years ago, and Garcia highlighted disagreements with his party to win reëlection in 2022. He was also a loyalist to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a fellow-Californian who had just been ousted by a small band of hard-line conservative rebels annoyed at his willingness to compromise on budget disputes. Garcia had formally nominated McCarthy as Speaker at the beginning of 2023, and his removal deprived Garcia of a patron.
The Globalist (March 18, 2024): We get the latest from Gaza, explore the relevance of the third Summit for Democracy and question an EU cash-for-migration deal with Egypt.
Plus: the director of the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage, and how to legislate happiness in California.
Monocle on Sunday, March 17, 2024: Emma Nelson, Terry Stiastny and Stephen Dalziel on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Lisbon and Naveena Kottoor, Monocle’s correspondent in Nairobi.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (March 16, 2024):
The fall of affirmative action is part of a 50-year campaign to roll back racial progress.
By Nikole Hannah
Anthony K. Wutoh, the provost of Howard University, was sitting at his desk last July when his phone rang. It was the new dean of the College of Medicine, and she was worried. She had received a letter from a conservative law group called the Liberty Justice Center. The letter warned that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, the school “must cease” any practices or policies that included a “racial component” and said it was notifying medical schools across the country that they must eliminate “racial discrimination” in their admissions. If Howard refused to comply, the letter threatened, the organization would sue.
Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind.
By Phoebe Zerwick
Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr’s childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness. Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr’s shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. “I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing,” Kerr told me.
Monocle on Saturday Podcast (March 16, 2024): Though voting has begun in Russia to elect the country’s next president, the results are unlikely to come as a surprise. However, there is resistance bubbling under the surface.
Join Georgina Godwin and Russia specialist Charles Hecker to discuss the run-up to the election. Plus: Tory donor Frank Hester’s racist comments, Boris Johnson’s unofficial talks in Venezuela and Monocle’s Fernando Augusto Pacheco interviews Lauro Andrade, founder of DW! São Paulo Design Week.
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