Today we look at the region of Epirus, starting in the wilderness near the Albanian border, we go through little mountain villages to the historically significant town of Ioannina and then then all the way down to the Ambracian Gulf. Learn about the lives of locals in the area, from shepherds, herb collectors, tavern owners, and the caretaker of a cliffside monastery.
Monocle on Sunday, March 24, 2024: Emma Nelson, Nina dos Santos and David Bodanis on the weekend’s biggest talking points.
We also speak to Monocle’s editorial France and North Africa correspondent, Mary Fitzgerald, and our Vienna correspondent, Alexei Korolyov, for the latest on the Slovakia elections.
As the Islamic State claimed responsibility, President Vladimir V. Putin vowed to “identify and punish” those responsible and tried to implicate Ukraine.
An investigation into the sugar-cane industry in the Indian state of Maharashtra found workers ensnared by debt and pushed into child marriages and unnecessary hysterectomies.
President Biden’s new rule cutting emissions from vehicle tailpipes has deepened a partisan battle over automotive technology.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 23, 2024):
“The Morningside” reckons with climate change and its fallout while finding hope in the stories we preserve.
By Jessamine Chan
THE MORNINGSIDE, by Téa Obreht
The elegant, effortless world-building in Téa Obreht’s haunting new novel, “The Morningside,” begins with a map. Island City resembles Manhattan, but alarmingly smaller, the borders of the city redrawn by the rising water. There’s the River to the east, the Bay to the west. Here, hurricanes and tides have made building collapse a constant danger, the freeway is visible only on low-tide days, food is government rations, the wealthy have fled “upriver to scattered little freshwater townships,” and gigantic birds called rook cranes are everywhere.
In Natalie Dykstra’s hands, the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner is a tribute to the power of art.
CHASING BEAUTY: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Natalie Dykstra
Bright, impetuous and obsessed with beautiful things, Isabella Stewart Gardner led a life out of a Gilded Age novel. Born into a wealthy New York family, she married into an even wealthier Boston one when she wed John Lowell Gardner in 1860, only to be ostracized by her adopted city’s more conservative denizens, who found her self-assurance and penchant for “jollification” a bit much.
Téa Obreht’s stunning debut novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” is a hugely ambitious, audaciously written work that provides an indelible picture of life in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from the fallout of civil war. At the same time it explores the very essence of storytelling and the role it plays in people’s lives, especially when they are “confounded by the extremes” of war and social upheaval and need to somehow “stitch together unconnected events in order to understand” what is happening around them.
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – MARCH 25, 2024 ISSUE:
Insurers may cut back on benefits as their profits get squeezed. Why a Medicare/Medigap plan could be a better deal for consumers.
The London-based mining company produces copper ore, diamonds, and platinum, but its shares are treated more like lead. It offers shareholders two ways to win.
The prospectus for former President Trump’s new media company details its potential risks to investors.
Randall W. Forsyth
Jack Hough
The Islamic State claimed the attack, the deadliest in the Moscow region in more than a decade.
After hours of delay, the Senate overwhelmingly voted for the $1.2 trillion bill to fund more than half of the government, sending the measure to President Biden’s desk.
The American draft resolution before the Security Council did not go far enough to end the Israel-Hamas war, Russia and China said, after the United States had vetoed three earlier resolutions.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (March 22, 2024):
When it’s a quick trip from the schlocky pleasures of Cancún to the remote cities of the Maya, is something lost along the way?
El Tren Maya, which links five states in southern Mexico, is one of the country’s most-debated infrastructure projects. Carved through the Yucatán Peninsula at great expense, the 966-mile loop pits the megaproject ambitions of Mexico’s departing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, against the will of environmentalists and Indigenous leaders seeking to preserve a pristine environment of jaguars, ancient ruins and sacred underwater caves.
Why had immigrants, seekers and pilgrims been drawn for centuries to the treacherous shores of Mona Island? I set off to find out.
By Carina del Valle Schorske
Every year, I spend a month or two in Puerto Rico, where my mother’s family is from. Often I go in winter, with the other snowbirds, finding solace among palm trees. But I’m not a tourist, not really. I track the developers that privatize the shoreline; I follow the environmental reports that give our beaches a failing grade. I’m disenchanted with the Island of Enchantment, suspicious of an image that obscures the unglamorous conditions of daily life: frequent blackouts, meager public services, a rental market ravaged by Airbnb. Maybe that’s why I turned away from the sunshine and started to explore caves with my friends Ramón and Javier, seeking out wonders not yet packaged for the visitor economy. I’ve been learning to love stalactites and squeaking bats, black snakes and cloistered waterfalls — even, slowly, the darkness itself.
Humanities Magazine – Spring 2024 Issue:
The great Italian poet, in light of a new documentary
Qui est per omnia secula benedictus are the final words of La Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri’s collection of poetry and prose.
The Latin renders to “who is blessed for ever” and concludes an enigmatic, brief paragraph. First published in 1294, La Vita Nuova is a tantalizing prelude to the Florentine poet’s masterpiece, La Commedia, known today as The Divine Comedy. For centuries, readers and scholars have pored over La Vita Nuova (Italian for, literally, the new life)—convinced, as we often are, that a gifted writer’s nascent work contains the answers to longstanding mysteries.
How I Created a Picture Book About Rome
“Building Stories,” the new exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., explores themes of architecture, construction, and design through children’s books, such as Rome Antics by David Macaulay.
I first met Rome as a student in 1968. Rome is complicated and demanding and can be overwhelming—especially if you are homesick. Eventually, the riches and surprises of the imperial city will render all attempts to keep one’s distance useless. I didn’t realize how attached I had become until a few years later.
REASON MAGAZINE (March 21, 2024) – The latest issue features ‘What If America Runs Out Of Bombs?’ – Due to overzealous interventionism, the U.S. is dispensing munitions faster than they can be replaced…
The U.S. is dispensing munitions to Ukraine and Israel faster than they can be replaced.
It only took a generation to go from ration cards to exporting electronics.
Opium dens in San Francisco were patronized “by the vicious and the depraved,” politicians of the 1800s claimed.
The Globalist (March 22, 2024): Bosnia and Herzegovina could be given the green light to begin EU accession talks. We discuss what this means with Monocle’s Balkans correspondent Guy de Launey.
Plus: Washington pushes for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, a row about palace furniture ramps up between Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro, and we get the latest fashion news.
Boomers Daily 