Monocle on Sunday, November 26, 2023 – Emma Nelson, Latika Bourke and Tina Fordham on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to ‘Konfekt’ editor Sophie Grove and get the latest from our editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Tokyo.
Category Archives: Politics
Saturday Morning: News And Stories From London
Monocle on Saturday, November 25, 2023: David Bodanis, author of ‘Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean’, joins Georgina Godwin for a look at the week’s news and culture.
Also this week, Marketing Manager, Carley Bassett, and Sales Director, Chris Unger, give us a taste of a limited-edition magnum from Hattingley Valley. The award-winning English winery specialises in sparkling wine and released the special bottle to celebrate a decade of excellence in wine-making. Plus: Jorg Zupan became the chef of the first restaurant in Ljubljana to earn a Michelin star – and the first to give one up. Guy de Launey finds out why.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – Nov 25, 2023
Progress on climate change has not been fast enough, but it has been real
And the world needs to learn from it
The agreement at the conference of the parties (cop) to the un Framework Convention on Climate Change, which took place in Paris in 2015, was somewhat impotent. As many pointed out at the time, it could not tell countries what to do; it could not end the fossil-fuel age by fiat; it could not draw back the seas, placate the winds or dim the noonday sun. But it could at least lay down the law for subsequent cops, decreeing that this year’s should see the first “global stocktake” of what had and had not been done to bring the agreement’s overarching goals closer.
Lessons from the ascent of the United Arab Emirates
How to thrive in a fractured world
In Argentina Javier Milei faces an economic crisis
The radical libertarian is taking over a country on the brink
News: 4-Day Truce Takes Effect In Gaza, Finland Closes Russia Borders
The Globalist Podcast (November 24, 2023) – As a four-day ceasefire is announced in the Israel-Hamas conflict, we look at how the first two hours of humanitarian pause have unfolded and what comes next.
Plus: Finland closes all but one of its border crossings with Russia, what the Dutch election results mean for the right in Europe and the historic HMV shop on London’s Oxford Street reopens.
Special Report: ‘Carbon Dioxide Removal’ (NOV ’23)
Carbon-dioxide removal needs more attention
It is vital to climate stabilisation, remarkably challenging and systematically ignored
St Augustine’s climate policy
The temptations of deferred removals
Carbon dioxide removals must start at scale sooner than people think
On the other hand…
The many prices of carbon dioxide
Not all tonnes are created equal
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
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
Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self
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
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.
Boomers Daily 