Financial, Investing, Magazines, Previews, Retirement, Reviews

Finance Preview: Barron’s Magazine – October 2, 2023

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BARRON’S MAGAZINE – October 2, 2023 ISSUE:

What the Job Market’s Baffling Strength Means

Unemployment remains near historic lows even after the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes. What’s behind the job market’s resilience—and why it could last.

Strikes in Detroit and Hollywood Are Just the Beginning

After decades of losing ground to corporate cost-cutting and globalization, labor unions face their biggest opportunity in years to forge a comeback. It won’t be easy.

General Dynamics Stock Is a Buy. A Shutdown Doesn’t Change That.

The defense contractor’s shares are cheap and the company is growing faster than its peers.

What Cava’s Board Chair Looks for in Restaurant Investments

Ron Shaich, head of Act III Holdings, founded and later sold Panera, and then backed Cava, this year’s IPO sensation. What he’s investing in now.

Car Insurance Premiums Have Gone Through the Roof. It’s Going to Get Worse.

The rising costs of new and used cars has fueled soaring claims costs—19% year over year in August. The situation hurts drivers. insurers, and investors.

Architecture, Home Design, Homes, Tours, Videos, Views

Architecture: A Modern Home In Pacific Palisades

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The Local Project (September 26, 2023) – On the hills of Pacific Palisades, in Los Angeles, is Palisades Residence by Abramson Architects, a breathtaking modern home with sweeping views of the canyon backdrop. As the house tour begins from street level, the house opens onto a one-storey main level before descending to the second floor.

Video timeline: 00:00 – Introduction to the Breathtaking Modern Home 00:59 – The Riviera Neighbourhood 01:12 – The Layout of the House 01:35 – A Walkthrough of the Home 04:03 – Designing For A Dynamic Climate 04:53 – A Simple Material Palette 05:09 – A Collaborative Process

Journeying further, the main level opens to reveal the living space with dropped ceilings that at first obscure the top of the canyon. However, as the house tour moves further into the living area, the interior design opens up with the ceiling, lifting to gift the occupants breathtaking views of the canyon. From the entry way, the architects have designed a tall space with concrete walls and split skylights, which have been designed specifically to allow light to reflect and bounce into the breathtaking modern home.

The upper level contains the primary suite, which has its own his and hers bathrooms and dressing rooms. Additionally, this level contains the kitchen, dining room, living room and the covered outdoor space that leads to the outdoor entertaining areas. From here, the house tour leads down to the second level where additional living spaces are placed – these three secondary suites complement the interior design of the breathtaking modern home.

Cities, Travel, Videos, Views

Travel: Walking Tour Of Zurich, Switzerland (4K)

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Tourist Car (September 28, 2023) – The city of Zurich, a global center for banking and finance, lies at the north end of Lake Zurich in northern Switzerland. The picturesque lanes of the central Altstadt (Old Town), on either side of the Limmat River, reflect its pre-medieval history. Waterfront promenades like the Limmatquai follow the river toward the 17th-century Rathaus (town hall).

Analysis, Essays, Foreign Affairs, Magazines, Politics, Reviews

Essay: The Dysfunctional Superpower – Can America Deter China And Russia?

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“Xi’s sense of personal destiny entails significant risk of war…”

Foreign Affairs (September 29, 2023): The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia. And no one alive can remember a time when an adversary had as much economic, scientific, technological, and military power as China does today.

The problem, however, is that at the very moment that events demand a strong and coherent response from the United States, the country cannot provide one. Its fractured political leadership—Republican and Democratic, in the White House and in Congress—has failed to convince enough Americans that developments in China and Russia matter. Political leaders have failed to explain how the threats posed by these countries are interconnected. They have failed to articulate a long-term strategy to ensure that the United States, and democratic values more broadly, will prevail.

News, Podcasts, Politics, Stories

News: Slovakia Elections, Washington Shutdown, Taiwan’s New Submarines

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https://open.spotify.com/episode/3UD0wEmCyy1OLOwfxBYXkY

The Globalist Podcast (September 29, 2023) – A look ahead to the Slovakian elections with Rikard Jozwiak. Meanwhile, tensions are high in Washington as lawmakers try to avoid a shutdown and Taiwan unveils its first domestically made submarine.

Plus: we examine the Austrian far-right’s links with the Taliban, the Académie française elects a new permanent secretary and the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ adds new words.

News, Newspapers, Views

The New York Times — Friday, September 29, 2023

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In Menendez Case, Prosecutors Confront Tighter Definition of Corruption

Senator Robert Menendez said prosecutors have misrepresented the daily work of his office.

The Supreme Court has said wrongdoing must be clear cut. Some observers say the accusations in the senator’s case pass the test.

Vulnerable Republicans Try to Head Off Blame for Shutdown

Representative Mike Lawler is one of 18 House Republicans representing a district won by President Biden. They must appeal to constituents ranging from Trump supporters to left-of-center Democrats.

Some mainstream House Republicans representing districts won by President Biden have explored a bipartisan stopgap measure as right-wing lawmakers push Congress toward a shutdown.

America’s Black Cemeteries and Three Women Trying to Save Them

In Georgia, Texas and Washington, D.C., three Black women are working to preserve desecrated African American burial grounds and the stories they hold.

Gifts, Gadgets and Greece: Inside a Huawei Lobbying Campaign

Leaked internal messages detail efforts by the Chinese tech giant to court Greek officials and fight an American-led effort against its technology.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 29, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (September 29, 2023): The new issue features The First Folio at 400; how disease shaped global history; novels of queer experience; what Britain laughs at; literary thefts and coincidences – and much more…

Germ of an idea

How disease has shaped global history

By Adam Rutherford

Scientists often make poor historians. Their shortcomings in describing and analysing the past include a failure to shed the whiggish stories that academic history moved away from decades ago. Straight lines are still drawn between Great Men and the impact of their brilliant insights on our view of reality. They also sometimes fail to treat the material of history with the seriousness they bring to their own discipline. Simple questions that are drummed into schoolchildren are frequently ignored in analysing documentary evidence: who wrote this, why, and for whom? The result is context-lite narrative that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Our Shakespeare, rise

A copy of the First Folio at Christie's, London, 2016

Works to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the First Folio

By Peter Holland

Next year, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will reopen after a three-year closure for a large-scale renovation of its building, which dates from 1932. The centrepiece of the new Shakespeare Exhibition Hall, will be, as the press release puts it, something “that only the Folger could produce: all 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare that were collected by Henry and Emily Folger”. The Folger holds slightly more than a third of all extant copies of the book and now eighty of them will be on permanent show in a “20-foot long visible vault”, while two more will be open in cases as part of an “interactive” visitor experience. Peering into the vault says much about the Folgers’ appetite for cornering the market in Folios but, since nearly all copies differ in some respects, it did make some kind of sense to buy many of them.

Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Museums, Podcasts, Reviews

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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The Week In Art Podcast (September 28, 2023): This week: three big London shows, in depth. As Marina Abramović draws huge crowds to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, we interview her about the exhibition—the first ever dedicated to a woman artist in the Royal Academy’s main galleries.

At the National Gallery, meanwhile, is a remarkable survey of the paintings of the 17th-century Dutch master Frans Hals, which will tour next year to Amsterdam and Berlin. We take a tour with Bart Cornelis, curator of the National’s incarnation of the show. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Peter Paul Rubens’s Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia of around 1625 to 1628 (painted with Frans Snyders). In the collection of the Prado in Madrid, it is one of a number of major loans to the exhibition Rubens and Women at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Amy Orrock, one of the curators of the exhibition, tells us more.

Marina Abramović, Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 1 January 2024. You can hear our interview with Marina during the Covid lockdown in our episode from 8 May 2020, and a conversation with Tate Modern’s Catherine Wood about Ulay, following his death in 2020, in the episode from 6 March that year.

Culture, Tours, Traditions, Travel, Videos, Views

Travel: The ‘Treasures Of The Mekong River’ In Laos

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DW Documentary (September 28, 2023) – With its rich biological diversity, the region around the Mekong River is a jewel of Asia. The river is also known as “the mother of waters.

” It’s a transport route, water supply and food source for millions of people. The film sets out in a journey to the former royal city of Luang Prabang in Laos. It’s regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in southeast Asia and to this day, religion determines everyday life: Every morning, hundreds of monks walk through the city’s ancient center to collect their alms.

In the isolated villages, some of which are only accessible by boat, most Laotians live off the land. There are huge rice paddies on the fertile banks on the Mekong; rice is the Laotians’ main staple, eaten three times a day here. The river also provides some welcome dietary variation in the form of fish. Locals – and the odd tourist boat – also use the Mekong as a main transit route; even today, the quickest way to reach the country’s larger cities is still by river.

At some point, several hundred kilometers downstream, we reach the capital Vientiane, the economic heart of Laos and a trading center for the famous Laotian woven textiles, exported from here all over the world.

#documentary #dwdocumentary #laos #mekong

Magazines, Podcasts, Previews, Research, Reviews, Science

Research Preview: Science Magazine – Sept 29, 2023

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Science Magazine – September 29, 2023: This special issue examines the threats to human health and how they can be mitigated.

AN UNHEALTHY CLIMATE

Introducing a special issue of Science

Earth scientists often call climate change a “great global experiment,” which humanity is heedlessly performing as we pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The dire consequences are already becoming clear—not just for the workings of the planet, but for our own health. Over the next few days, the stories in this special package will explore the threats, and how we can minimize them.

Will flu outbreaks ease in a warming world?

From cold viruses to influenza to respiratory syncytial virus, viruses that spread through the air cause billions of infections each year. That makes it important to understand how they will respond to climate change. But little is known so far, except that different viruses will react differently. Measles, for instance, spreads efficiently in all climates, suggesting global warming will make little difference to its transmission.