Category Archives: Politics

News: Israel-Hamas War Hostage Release, India Hosts Virtual G20 Summit

The Globalist Podcast (November 23, 2023) – Israel and Hamas are due to exchange hostages this morning but will it actually happen and what comes next?

We also discuss the virtual G20 summit, hear why Poland’s plans to create a major aviation hub have hit turbulence and assess what the calls for an Olympic Truce at the Paris games is all about. Plus: we meet iconic sculptor Antony Gormley.

News: Israel-Hamas Agree To 4-Day Truce, Ukraine’s Strategic ‘Aquatic War’

The Globalist Podcast (November 22, 2023) – The latest from the Middle East as Israel and Hamas agree on a hostage deal.

Then we discuss Ukraine’s special operation on the Dnipro river with defense specialist Alessio Patalano. And as voters head to the polls in the Netherlands, we ask whether the elections are a litmus test for European politics. Plus: the Guggenheim appoints its first female director.

News: Israel-Hamas Truce Progress, South Korea President Yoon Visits UK

The Globalist Podcast (November 21, 2023) – News from the Israel-Gaza conflict and discuss South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol’s visit to the UK.

Also. Andrew Mueller sits down with Timo Kivinen, commander of the Finnish Defence Forces, to find out more about Finland’s recent border tensions with Russia. Plus: music news with Will Hodgkinson, pop and rock critic at ‘The Times’.

Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – December 2023

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HARPER’S MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 2023: This issue features The Hofmann Wobble – Wikipedia and the problem of historical memory; Your Mind’s in the Hands of Everything – Letting go of Philip Roth; Risky Disco – A sensory workshop bridges the gap; Occult Murder and Gospel Thrillers, and more…

The Hofmann Wobble

Wikipedia and the problem of historical memory

by Ben Lerner

At twenty-six, in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched, I found myself driving a red Subaru Outback—the color was technically “claret metallic,” the friend who’d lent me the car had told me, in case I ever wanted to touch up the paint—on Highway 12 in Utah. I was heading to the East Bay after a painful breakup in New York. I remember, wrongly, that I was listening to a book on tape, a work by a prominent linguist, as I moved through the alien landscape, jagged formations of red rock towering against a cloudless sky.

Your Mind’s in the Hands of Everything

Letting go of Philip Roth

by Hannah Gold

It is difficult to predict when one will spend the night at a hotel in Newark, let alone three, and uncommon to agree to such a scenario willingly. If you live there already, you stay home. If you’re there for a professional engagement, your boss made you go. If your flight has been canceled, you go there as a last resort. Whereas, though I felt compelled to be there, I couldn’t point to an authority outside of myself that had forced my hand. The room had been booked a week in advance.

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Nov 27, 2023

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The New Yorker – November 27, 2023 issue: The new issue‘s cover features Chris Ware’s “Harvest” – The artist discusses the rituals of gathering and building memories.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self

A blackandwhite photograph of Joyce Carol Oates by Andrea Modica.

In more than a hundred works of fiction, Oates has investigated the question of personality—while doubting that she actually has one.


By Rachel Aviv

hen Joyce Carol Oates was thirty-four, she started a journal. “Query,” she wrote on the first page. “Does the individual exist?” She felt that she knew little about herself—for instance, whether she was honest or a hypocrite. “I don’t know the answer to the simplest of questions,” she wrote. “What is my personal nature?”

Barbra Streisand’s Mother of All Memoirs

A portrait of Barbra Streisand. Photograph by Irving Penn  © Cond Nast.

In “My Name Is Barbra,” the icon takes a maximalist approach to her own life, studying every trial, triumph, and snack food of a six-decade career.

By Rachel Syme

Seventy years ago, before she was galactically famous, before she dropped an “a” from her first name, before she was a Broadway ingénue, before her nose bump was aspirational, before she changed the way people hear the word “butter,” before she was a macher or a mogul or a decorated matron of the arts, Barbra Streisand was, by her own admission, “very annoying to be around.” She was born impatient and convinced of her potential—the basic ingredients of celebrity, and of an exquisitely obnoxious child. When Streisand was growing up in Brooklyn, in the nineteen-forties, she used to crawl onto the fire escape of her shabby apartment building and conduct philosophical debates with her best friend, Rosyln Arenstein, who was a staunch atheist. 

News:Israel-Hamas War Benefiting Russia, Javier Milei Wins In Argentina

The Globalist Podcast (November 20, 2023) – We discuss Vladimir Putin’s position on the Israel-Hamas war and the outcome of Argentina’s presidential election.

Also in the programme: Daniel Gorman, director of English Pen, tells us about the state of books and literature in Ukraine and Carlota Rebelo interviews Christian Kroll, CEO of sustainable search engine Ecosia.

Sunday Morning: News And Stories From Zürich, London And Bangkok

Monocle on Sunday, November 19, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, unpacks the weekend’s hottest topics with Juliet Linley and Christof Münger. We speak to Monocle’s Asia editor, James Chambers, and Christoph Amend, editorial director of ‘Zeit Magazin’.

Saturday Morning: News And Stories From London

Monocle on Saturday, November 18, 2023: Sian Bayley, news editor at ‘The Bookseller’, joins Georgina Godwin to look at the week’s global news and culture.

Plus, the two discuss the winner of this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. John Vaillant’s winning book, ‘Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World’, delves into the devastating wildfires that struck Fort McMurray, Alberta – the hub of Canada’s oil industry – in May 2016. It examines the conflicting priorities of the oil industry and climate science, the immense destruction caused by modern wildfires, and the lasting impacts of these disasters on the lives of those affected.

The New York Times Magazine – Nov 19, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (November 17, 2023): The latest issue features How David Zaslav blew up Hollywood – The inside story of a novice movie mogul in an age of disruption, discontent and disaster ; Russell Brand’s Alternate Reality – The British entertainer built an army of fans with his conspiracy-minded podcast. Now, amid sex-assault claims against him, they’ve become his whole world; Sofia Coppola’s Subversive Search for Truth in ‘Priscilla’ – Hollywood is addicted to mythologizing biopics. ‘‘Priscilla’’ offers something different…

How David Zaslav Blew Up Hollywood

David Zaslav walking  in Manhattan.

A merger put him in the driver’s seat at Warner Brothers, one of the industry’s biggest studios. It has been a wild ride.

By Jonathan MahlerJames B. Stewart and Benjamin Mullin

It was April 2022, and David Zaslav had just closed the deal of a lifetime. From the helm of his relatively small and unglamorous cable company, Discovery, he had taken control of a sprawling entertainment conglomerate that included perhaps the most storied movie studio on the planet, Warner Brothers. The longtime New Yorker had always loved movies, and against the advice of several media peers, he had moved to Hollywood and taken over Jack Warner’s historic office, hauling the old mogul’s desk out of storage and topping it off with an old-time handset telephone. So far things were going great. He had met all the stars and players, was widely feted as the next in line to save the eternally struggling industry and was well into the process of renovating a landmark house in Beverly Hills. 

Sofia Coppola’s Subversive Search for Truth in ‘Priscilla’

A photo of illustration of actors playing famous characters in history.

Hollywood is addicted to mythologizing biopics. ‘‘Priscilla’’ offers something different.

By Rafaela Bassili

As with much of her other work, the opening of Sofia Coppola’s latest film, “Priscilla,” is all about textures. A pair of manicured feet sink into a shag carpet; a fingernail is carefully polished in red; we see the back of a prodigious black bouffant, then the dexterous painting of a dramatic cat eye with black liner. Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) paces around Graceland relentlessly. There’s nothing for her to do, and too much for her to process.

News: Disinformation In The Middle East, Germany-Israel Politics & Relations

The Globalist Podcast (November 17, 2023) – Uncovering disinformation from the Middle East. Plus: how Germany’s past affects its interactions with Israel today, the latest from the Balkans and how theatres capture the zeitgeist.