The Globalist Podcast (May 31, 2024): Will Biden let US weapons strike Russia? How violence marred the final day of Mexican election campaigns and we take a look at who will be the next premier of the Netherlands.
Andrew Mueller also delivers What We Learned. Plus: the latest news from the world of music and why fries are off the menu at the Paris Olympics.
A Manhattan jury found that he had falsified business records to conceal a sex scandal that could have hindered his 2016 campaign for the White House.
Until the jury’s decision on Thursday, the four criminal cases that threatened Donald Trump’s freedom were stumbling along, pleasing his advisers.
White House officials said the president’s major policy shift extended only to what they characterized as acts of self-defense so that Ukraine could protect Kharkiv, its second-largest city.
At a crucial moment they encapsulate the dilemma of how to handle populism
A backlash against abortion bans is energising the middle ground in America
They are saving like never before. But even that may not bring interest rates down
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Before its computer crashed, venerable NASA probe may have entered mysterious new region beyond the Solar System
Mouse study contradicts landmark finding, but some question its methodology
Pathogen that kills victims within days leaps from Caribbean to Red Sea
The Globalist Podcast (May 30, 2024): Have South Africa’s elections marked the end of the ANC’s political dominance?
We head to Prague for an informal Nato summit with foreign ministers, take a look back at the Bratislava Summit 2024 and assess the South Korea-UAE trade deal. Plus: the latest news from the world of aviation and a check-in from the Hay Festival.
In northeastern Ukraine, and in the part of Russia it touches, the war strains the emotions of people with relatives, and family histories, that span both sides.
A plant still under construction in Mesquite, Texas, will soon turn out 30,000 artillery shells each month, roughly doubling current U.S. output.
In 2016, Russia used an army of trolls to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. This year, an American given asylum in Moscow may be accomplishing much the same thing all by himself.
“My wife is fond of flying flags,” the justice wrote in a letter to members of Congress who had demanded he step down from two cases related to the Jan. 6 attack. “I am not.”
By Rachel Nolan
How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution
by Elizabeth Dore.
The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba
by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Frank Wynne and Rahul Bery.
In 1968, Fidel Castro invited an American anthropologist called Oscar Lewis to interview Cubans about their lives. Lewis was famous for an oral history project, conducted in a Mexico City slum, which he had turned into a book called The Children of Sánchez (1961). By recounting a poor family’s struggles and hustles, legal and otherwise, Lewis angered the country’s ruling party, which still described itself as ‘revolutionary’. The Mexican Revolution, like the Cuban Revolution after it, wasn’t supposed to have an end date. But after major gains, including redistributing land to landless farmers, it had been ‘interrupted’, as the historian Adolfo Gilly later put it. Lewis exposed the revolution’s unfinished business, and didn’t shy away from discussing the sexual peccadilloes of the poor. The Spanish-language edition of Children of Sánchez was published in 1964, but thanks to a lawsuit claiming the material was ‘obscene and denigrating’, the book wasn’t freely available in Mexico for several years.
The Freaks Came out to Write: The Definitive History of the ‘Village Voice’, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture
by Tricia Romano.
In the mid-1960s, the Village Vanguard jazz club in Greenwich Village held Monday night speak-outs. At one of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the Vanguard expecting to make common cause with the speakers, but Jones did not look kindly on us. In fact, he quickly told us we weren’t wanted in the civil rights movement, that we were just an interference, only there to make ourselves feel good. Then he pointed his finger and roared: ‘Blood is going to run in the seats of the theatre of revolution, and guess who’s sitting in those seats!’
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Researchers are striving to reverse-engineer artificial intelligence and scan the ‘brains’ of LLMs to see what they are doing, how and why.
Geological survey reveals the remains of a major waterway that ancient Egyptian builders could have used to transport materials.
As researchers mark the loss of the first living recipient of a pig kidney, they share what they’ve learnt about xenotransplantation.
Times Literary Supplement (May 29, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Kafka’s Century’ – Karen Leeder, Becca Rothfeld, Gabriel Josipovici, Michael Hofmann et al…; Colm Toibin returns to Brooklyn; India under Modi; A Jim Crow insane asylum and Literary cricket…
A defense lawyer painted Donald J. Trump as the victim of unscrupulous people, but a prosecutor said Mr. Trump had directed a scheme to conceal a hush-money payment.
At a time when the U.S. government is concerned about its reliance on a mercurial billionaire for access to space, new competitors say Elon Musk’s SpaceX is using tactics intended to squash them.
The end of Roe has turned women who terminated pregnancies for medical reasons into a political force.
Politically disengaged Americans are increasingly Trump-curious, but President Biden has a shot at winning some of them back. Reaching them in a changed media environment will be his challenge.
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