Monocle on Saturday, July 29, 2023: A look at the week’s news and culture with Georgina Godwin.
We’re joined by the deputy publishing editor of ‘Newsweek’, Paul Rhodes, to flick through the morning’s papers and Monocle’s culture editor, Chiara Rimella, guides us through Italian beach club culture.
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – JULY 31, 2023 ISSUE –
A renewed focus on lower costs and doing what it does best could help the media titan’s shares recover from a long slump.
The Liberty Media cluster of companies is dauntingly complicated for investors. Now may be the right time to get in.
The industry has launched a legal war against a new law that would let Medicare negotiate prices. The odds are in Big Pharma’s favor.Long read
The accusation that former President Donald J. Trump wanted security camera footage deleted at Mar-a-Lago added to a pattern of concerns about his attempts to stymie prosecutors.
The city has long grappled with street homelessness and a shortage of housing. Now fentanyl has turned a perennial problem into a deadly crisis and a challenge to the city’s progressive identity.
The S&P 500 is up more than 19 percent this year, but some still warn that the future may not be as rosy as that implies.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JULY 30, 2023:
On this week’s cover, we feature biographies of composers Arnold Schoenberg and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that emphasize the extent to which each was a singular genius attuned to his culture and times; our reviews are by Anthony Tommasini (formerly The Times’s chief classical music critic) and the composer John Adams.
In Patrick Mackie’s “Mozart in Motion,” the socially observant composer embraces modernity.
Musicians tend to be wary of ascribing specific meanings to music or making too much of a piece’s extra-musical associations. In one of his Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1973, turning to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, Leonard Bernstein asked the audience to forget all about “birds and brooks and rustic pleasures” and instead concentrate on “pure” music. He then demonstrated how every phrase of the entire first movement is derived from little motifs of notes and rhythms in the first four bars of the score.
John Adams reviews “Schoenberg: Why He Matters,” in which Harvey Sachs explores the artistic, academic and spiritual life of a 20th-century cultural giant.
In 1955 Henry Pleasants, a critic of both popular and classical music, issued a cranky screed of a book, “The Agony of Modern Music,” which opened with the implacable verdict that “serious music is a dead art.” Pleasants’s thesis was that the traditional forms of classical music — opera, oratorio, orchestral and chamber music, all constructions of a bygone era — no longer related to the experience of our modern lives. Composers had lost touch with the currents of popular taste, and popular music,
In the southwest corner of the square, La Pescheria weekday fish market is a rowdy spectacle surrounded by seafood restaurants.
Video timeline: 00:00 – Intro to the Nordic-Inspired Apartment 00:25 – An Inner-City Suburb Location 00:48 – The Instant Connection 01:21 – A Walkthrough of the Nordic-Inspired Apartment 01:51 – The Process of Identifying a Unique Aesthetic 02:30 – The Initial Stages of the Design Process 03:20 – A Monochromatic Mood 03:33 – A Predominant Material Colour 04:26 – Repurposing and Reusing
Upon arrival, the apartment immediately stood out to the owner with its arched windows, high ceilings and window seats that complemented the home’s interior. Yet, as with all projects, Anna.Carin Design Studio worked to draw out the unique aesthetic of the apartment with architecture and furniture design.
Beginning with removing some of the walls in the apartment, Anna.Carin Design Studio delved into an array of contemporary design methods that revealed the home’s true nature. Additionally, as the inspiration of song comes into play with each project that Anna.Carin Design Studio works on, Anna-Carin chose the song Solid Air by John Martyn to influence the interior design. With the apartment tour beginning in the hallway space, Anna.Carin Design Studio has placed two main rooms on the left and two to the right.
On the left, the light-filled study allows space for work and play, whilst the master bedroom is stationed on the right side of the hall, along with the main and guest bathrooms. The primary living spaces include a kitchen, dining and living room that are all filled with a natural light from the large arched bay windows.
Through renovating the interior and architecture, Anna-Carin also considered how she wanted to feel within her own home, the emotions she wanted to evoke and, most importantly, how she wants to live there. As such, Anna-Carin McNamara sought to find three emotive words that would express the space of her apartment and decided on ‘serene’, ‘evocative’ and ‘cosmopolitan’.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 30, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, David Quammen reports on the ongoing mystery of Covid’s origin, what we do know — and why it matters. Plus, a profile of a poet who was kidnapped from his Black father by his white grandparents and a look at a group of English activists’ fight for the right to access public lands.
We still don’t know how the pandemic started. Here’s what we do know — and why it matters.
By David Quammen
Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic and untold millions of people dead, that question about the Covid-19 coronavirus remains controversial and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought holds that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spilled into humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a messy emporium in Wuhan, China, brimming with fish, meats and wildlife on sale as food. Another school argues that the virus was laboratory-engineered to infect humans and cause them harm — a bioweapon — and was possibly devised in a “shadow project” sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army of China.
A group of English activists want to legally enshrine the “right to roam” — and spread the idea that nature is a common good.
By Brooke Jarvis
The signs on the gate at the entrance to the path and along the edge of the reservoir were clear. “No swimming,” they warned, white letters on a red background.
On a chill mid-April day in northwest England, with low, gray clouds and rain in the forecast, the signs hardly seemed necessary. But then people began arriving, by the dozens and then the hundreds. Some walked only from nearby Hayfield, while others came by train or bus or foot from many hours away. In a long, trailing line, they tramped up the hill beside the dam and around the shore of the reservoir, slipping in mud and jumping over puddles. Above them rose a long, curving hill of open moorland, its heather still winter brown. When they came to a gap between a stone wall and a metal fence, they squeezed through it, one by one, slipping under strings of barbed wire toward the water below.
The town hall is covered in delicate frescoes and has a Renaissance-style courtyard. The Rosgartenmuseum chronicles the region’s cultural history, exhibiting prehistoric to 20th-century objects.
The recording of it now becomes the headline work in Ott’s latest Deutsche Grammophon album, Beethoven. The pianist has paired it with a series of solo works, including “Für Elise” and the “Moonlight” Sonata.
Boomers Daily 