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.
Category Archives: Politics
The New York Times Magazine – March 17, 2024
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (March 16, 2024):
The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked
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.
What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living
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.
Saturday Morning: News And Stories From London
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.
Commentary Magazine – April 2024 Opinion Preview
The Elite War on the American Middle Class—and How to End It
Being middle class in America used to mean something—something socially transformative, something even revolutionary. The American middle class represented a form of national social order never before seen on this earth—cultural domination not by the very rich and very educated, or the political domination either by tyrants or the mob, but by a mass of people, relatively well-to-do, who felt themselves fortunate in their circumstances. That was what made the American middle class different from the French or English bourgeoisie. Its members believed, and the country believed, that they were the nation’s backbone, its true governing class, and its moral compass.
The Four Questions of 2024
President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump squared off four years ago and are on track for the first major-party rematch since 1892. Biden and Trump are the oldest presidential candidates in history, and each man has an established political brand. Biden first won federal office in 1972, and it’s been over a decade since the GOP nominated someone other than Donald Trump. The 2024 election is like all the SIRIUS XM oldies stations—Classic Vinyl, Classic Rewind, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Radio—rolled into one.
The Hateful Candace Owens
If you had never heard of Candace Owens until recently, you aren’t alone. Less than a decade ago, she was an unknown college dropout working as a marketing professional in New York, writing pieces for her company’s website about the “bat-s—t crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party.” Then, suddenly, she claimed to have experienced a political conversion. She told the libertarian political commentator Dave Rubin in 2017, “I became a conservative overnight. . . . I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.”
News: Putin Seeks 5th Term In Russia Elections, Japan-Ukraine Military Support
The Globalist (March 15, 2024): We discuss this weekend’s presidential election in Russia, which will grant Vladimir Putin another six-year term.
Plus: US efforts to involve Japan in providing additional military support to Ukraine, the future of government in the Netherlands and theatre news.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – March 18, 2024
Among the A.I. Doomsayers
Some people think machine intelligence will transform humanity for the better. Others fear it may destroy us. Who will decide our fate?
Katja Grace’s apartment, in West Berkeley, is in an old machinist’s factory, with pitched roofs and windows at odd angles. It has terra-cotta floors and no central heating, which can create the impression that you’ve stepped out of the California sunshine and into a duskier place, somewhere long ago or far away. Yet there are also some quietly futuristic touches. High-capacity air purifiers thrumming in the corners. Nonperishables stacked in the pantry. A sleek white machine that does lab-quality RNA tests. The sorts of objects that could portend a future of tech-enabled ease, or one of constant vigilance.
Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?
The classical-education movement seeks to fundamentally reorient schooling in America. Its emphasis on morality and civics has also primed it for partisan takeover.
News: Rise Of The Far-Right In Portugal Elections, Cease-Fire Talks In Gaza
The Globalist (March 11, 2024): We get the latest results from Portugal’s elections and ask what’s next for the nation’s government as the far-right gains ground.
Plus: we discuss the likelihood of a ceasefire in Israel and Gaza before Ramadan, get the headlines from the Balkans and find out who wins big at the 2024 Academy Awards.
Sunday Morning: Stories And News From Zürich
Monocle on Sunday, March 10, 2024: Eemeli Isoaho, Juliet Linley and Benedikt Germanier join Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, to discuss the weekend’s hottest topics.
We speak to Monocle’s senior foreign correspondent, Carlota Rebelo, for the latest on Portugal’s elections and Monocle’s editor in chief, Andrew Tuck, joins us from London. Plus: authors Alex Dahl and Thomas Enger join Tyler in Zürich to discuss Norwegian crime fiction.
The New York Times Magazine – March 10, 2024
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (March 9, 2024):
Kate Winslet Pushes Her Characters, and Herself, to the Edge
As a young star, she endured Hollywood’s brutal treatment of women. Now she’s putting her resilience and grit on full display.
Kate Winslet was standing in front of a microphone, breathing hard. Sometimes she did it fast; sometimes she slowed it down. Sometimes the breathing sounded anxious; other times, it was clearly the gasping of someone who was winded. Before beginning a new take, Winslet stood stock still, hands opening and closing at her sides; she looked like a gymnast about to bound into a floor routine. Every breath seemed high-stakes, even though she was well into a long day of recording in a dim, windowless studio in London.
Why Power Eludes the French Left
France has often been the vanguard of leftist politics — but support in the streets doesn’t always translate to votes at the ballot box.
By Elisabeth Zerofsky
The signs that a protest is happening in Paris are nearly always the same: the quiet of blocked-off streets; the neat rows of police vans containing the gendarmerie stretching down the boulevard; the sound of drumbeats and whistles and the neon red flares that spit smoke into the sky. For six months last year, those signs were constant and ubiquitous, as furious, sometimes violent marches and general strikes protesting President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms brought Paris to a standstill. Students and activists, public-transit operators, custodial staff, medics, mechanics, teachers, oil-rig workers, writers and celebrities all gathered to rail against Macron’s plan to raise the national retirement age by two years, to 64.
Saturday Morning: News And Stories From London
Monocle on Saturday, March 9, 2024: US lawmakers have passed a bill that would remove TikTok from app stores – but will the ban go ahead?
And does dark matter actually exist? Join Vincent McAviney and Yassmin Abdel-Magied for this as well a background on the potential ceasefire in Sudan during Ramadan. Plus: Monocle’s Tomos Lewis interviews the CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ahead of the celebrations tomorrow and the director of the London Book Fair, Gareth Rapley, joins us to discuss next week’s event.
Boomers Daily 