‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (May 22 , 2023) – A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, Henry Kissinger on the new world order, how the fight for digital payments is going global (10:50) and why the Taliban is going big on animal welfare (17:10).
Category Archives: Politics
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 29, 2023

The New Yorker – May 29, 2023 issue:
Stephen Satterfield Puts Black Cuisine at the Center of U.S. History

The host of Netflix’s “High on the Hog” draws seductive stories from a bittersweet legacy.
Stephen Satterfield, the host of the Netflix food-history series “High on the Hog,” was bent over the stove in his parents’ kitchen, near Atlanta. It was one o’clock on a February afternoon, and he was preparing Sunday dinner for the family. Most of the meal was canonical Black Southern food: turnip greens simmered for hours, cheese grits, biscuits baked in a cast-iron skillet.
What We Owe Our Trees

Forests fed us, housed us, and made our way of life possible. But they can’t save us if we can’t save them.
By Jill Lepore
The woods I know best, love best, are made of Northern hardwoods, sugar maple and white ash, timber-tall; black and yellow birch, tiger-skinned; seedlings and saplings of blighted beech and striped maple creeping up, knock-kneed, from a forest floor of princess pine and Christmas fern, shag-rugged. White-tailed deer dart through softwood stands of pine and hemlock, bucks and does, the last leaping fawn, leaving tracks that look like tiny human lungs, trails that people can only ever see in the snow, even though, long after snowmelt, dogs can smell them, tracking, snuffling, shuddering with the thrill of the hunt and noshing on deer scat for dog treats.
Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine

In the trenches in the Donbas, infantrymen face unrelenting horrors, from missiles to grenades to helicopter fire.
A twenty-two-year-old Ukrainian sniper, code-named Student, stuffed candy wrappers into his ears before firing a rifle at the Russians’ tree line. He’d been discharged from the hospital two weeks earlier, after being shot in the thigh.Photographs by Maxim Dondyuk for The New Yorker
News: Zelensky Meets With G7 In Japan, De-Risking In China, Greece Election
The Globalist, May 22, 2023: Zelensky meets with leader at G7 meeting in Japan, de-risking with China, and Greece’s center-right Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis scores big victory in Greece elections.
Sunday Morning: Stories From London & Bangkok
May 21, 2023 – Emma Nelson, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Nina dos Santos on the weekend’s stories. We speak to Monocle’s Tyler Brûlé in Bangkok and Fiona Wilson in Tokyo. Plus: the start of this year’s Venice Biennale.
Saturday Morning: News And Stories From London
Monocle on Saturday, May 20, 2023: The weekend’s biggest discussion topics, with Georgina Godwin. Siân Pattenden reviews the papers,
Andrew Mueller recaps the week and Monocle’s Helsinki correspondent, Petri Burtsoff, brings us a taste of Finnish Eurovision mania. Plus: Taipei Dangdai art fair. Plus: Taipei Dangdai art fair.
Preview: New York Times Magazine – May 21, 2023


THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (May 21, 2023) – Sometimes it seems as if everyone is in therapy. And the language of therapy is certainly everywhere these days. So we dedicated this year’s Health Issue to a topic on all our minds.
THE THERAPY ISSUE
Does Therapy Really Work? Let’s Unpack That.

Research shows that counseling delivers great benefits to many people. But it’s hard to say exactly what that means for you.
In my late 20s, living alone in New York, I found myself in the grip of a dark confusion, unclear of how to proceed — and so I started seeing a therapist. During most visits, I sat in a chair with a box of tissues on the small table beside it, but the office also held a couch, on which I occasionally reclined, staring at the ceiling as I wrestled with what I was doing with my life, and even what I was doing in that office.
Want to Fix Your Mind? Let Your Body Talk.

By Daniel Bergner
Somatic therapy is surging, with the promise that true healing may reside in focusing on the physical rather than the mental.
I had been describing a looming fear about my writing, about encroaching failure. Price sat in front of a dangling plant in her home office in Austin, Texas. With her red-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her delicate features communicated a mix of candor and vulnerability that created a sense of shared space, of intimacy, even by Zoom. She listened, took notes and, with a gesture of her hand, suggested that we leave my account of the situation off to the side.
News: G7 Leaders Meet In Hiroshima, Candidacy Of Ron DeSantis, Cambodia
The Globalist, May 19, 2023: Fiona Wilson, Monocle’s Asia editor and Tokyo bureau chief, tells us about Japan’s aims ahead of the G7 meeting in Hiroshima; then Florida governor Ron DeSantis is expected to enter the 2024 presidential race, and we examine the state of Cambodian democracy ahead of the July elections.
Plus: the latest from the Venice Biennale with Monocle’s Nic Monisse, and Andrew Mueller’s analysis of the week.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – May 20, 2023

The Economist – May 20, 2023 issue:
Joe Biden’s global vision is too timid and pessimistic
The president underestimates America’s strengths and misunderstands how it acquired them

In the 1940s and early 1950s America built a new world order out of the chaos of war. For all its shortcomings, it kept the peace between superpowers and underpinned decades of growth that lifted billions out of poverty. Today that order, based on global rules, free markets and an American promise to uphold both, is fraying. Toxic partisanship at home has corroded confidence in America’s government.
China and the West take a step to ease Africa’s debt crisis
A deal for Ghana is the first test case for a new approach

Ghana made history when it led the wave of sub-Saharan African countries that won independence more than six decades ago. It may now be making history again, as the first test case for a new approach to debt relief. China and Western governments may have overcome one barrier to restructuring the billions of dollars owed by countries with unsustainable debts.
Financial Technology: Is There A Crypto Future?
The Economist (May 18, 2023) – The financial revolution once promised by cryptocurrencies has been knocked off course by regulators and allegations of fraud. So what does the future hold for crypto?
Video timeline: 00:00 – The crypto party is over 01:06 – The history 03:30 – What is crypto? 04:38 – Uses around the world 06:07 – Layer 2 solutions 07:12 – Web3 08:51 – Data and privacy 10:04 – What is the future of crypto?
News: Black Sea Grain Deal Extension, Democracy In Belarus, Imran Khan
The Globalist, May 18, 2023: A report on the last-minute extension of the Black Sea grain deal, Belarus’s opposition prepares for democracy and we hear from Pakistan as former prime minister Imran Khan announces that he expects to be arrested again.
Plus: Charles Hecker brings us the morning’s papers and the latest in the world of urbanism with Monocle’s Sheena Rossiter.