The Globalist Podcast, Thursday, August 10: West African leaders meet in Abuja after the military junta in Niger refuses to reinstate the country’s president, Mohamed Bazoum.
Plus: political uncertainty in Thailand shakes investor confidence, culture news and a Canadian breed of cow that could help cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
The Guardian Weekly (August 11, 2023) – The issue features Trump playing the victim, escape from Xinjiang, a day off with Matthew Broderick and more…
Donald Trump’s appearance in court in Washington last week to plead not guilty to his third indictment on criminal charges showed how the 45th president of the United States continues to defy every law of political physics. Washington bureau chief David Smith explores how playing the political martyr only firms up support for Trump to be the Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential race and silences critics within his party as well as among Democrats. We profile Trump’s new nemesis, prosecutor Jack Smith, while reporter Chris McGreal takes the temperature among voters in Iowa where the first Republican caucus will take place in January next year.
There have been few authoritative accounts of China’s persecution of the Uyghur people and the repression of their culture in Xinjiang province. Our main feature is an extract from poet Tahir Hamut Izgil’s memoir that details how, seeing the crackdown intensify and friends arrested, he planned to escape knowing that he dare not even say goodbye to his parents.
As the Hollywood industrial action continues, actors and directors have withdrawn from promoting their work, but luckily for Culture Xan Brooks caught up with Matthew Broderick just before the strike was called. He talks about his role as Richard Sackler in the new Netflix drama about the OxyContin scandal, playing opposite his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, on stage and why escaping his legacy as Ferris Bueller is not an option.
The Globalist Podcast, Wednesday, August 9 2023: Is Belarus’s Lukashenko aggravating Poland without direction from Putin?
Also in the programme: we discuss why India is banning makers of military drones from using Chinese parts, get the latest from France’s bubbling wine harvest and flick through the day’s papers.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (August 6, 2023) –
Many writers are looking for ways to capture the everyday realities that the government keeps hidden — sometimes at their own peril.
By Han Zhang
On an August evening in 2021, the best-selling Chinese novelist Hao Qun, who writes under the name Murong Xuecun, was procrastinating in his one-bedroom apartment. He needed to be at Beijing Capital International Airport around 6 the next morning to catch a flight to London, but he found it hard to pack. Though Hao had a valid tourist visa to Britain, the Chinese government had kept tabs on him for years, and it was possible that he would be prevented from leaving; other public intellectuals had tried to travel abroad only to discover that they were under exit bans. Hao might have been packing for a life of exile or a futile trip to the airport.
It was an explosive claim — that a Virginia school district covered up a crime in order to protect transgender rights. But was it true?
For months a sort of aerosolized fury had hung over the Loudoun County school district. There were fights over Covid closures and mask mandates, over racial-equity programs, over library books. Now, in the weeks before the school board’s meeting on June 22, 2021, attention had shifted to a new proposal: Policy 8040, which would let transgender students choose pronouns, play sports and use bathrooms in accordance with their declared gender identity. In May, an elementary-school gym teacher announced that as a “servant of God,” he felt he could not follow the policy. The district swiftly suspended him — and just as swiftly, the antennae of conservative media outlets and politicians swiveled toward Loudoun County.
The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on helping people who are institutionalized against their will.
By Kwame Anthon
In the weeks following the policy change, global prices of oil, copper, and other commodities rose on expectations that Chinese demand would surge. In March, then Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced a target for real GDP growth of around five percent, and many external analysts predicted it would go far higher.
The Globalist Podcast, Tuesday, August1, 2023: Italy is the latest European country to rethink ties with China. Also, Israel proposes a new rail line to Saudi Arabia, and the latest theatre news.
The Globalist Podcast, Wednesday, July 26, 2023: The Belarusian ministry of emergency situations is arming its personnel to prepare for potential armed conflict.
Plus, we discuss why crime in Ecuador is increasing ahead of the country’s elections in August, the latest in the world of aviation and investigate what Elon Musk is up to over at Twitter HQ.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 16, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, Greta Gerwig takes us deep inside her vision for the “Barbie” movie. Plus, the former World Cup-winner with the hardest job in soccer, the war for semiconductor chips and Robert Downey Jr. on his post-Marvel career.
Mattel wanted a summer blockbuster to kick off its new wave of brand-extension movies. She wanted it to be a work of art.
The moment Greta Gerwig knew for certain that she could make a movie about Barbie, the most famous and controversial doll in history, she was thinking about death. She had been reading about Ruth Handler, the brash Jewish businesswoman who created the doll — and who, decades later, had two mastectomies. Handler birthed this toy with its infamous breasts, the figurine who became an enduring avatar of plastic perfection, while being stuck, like all of us, in a fragile and failing human body.
The Biden administration thinks it can preserve America’s technological primacy by cutting China off from advanced computer chips. Could the plan backfire?
Last October, the United States Bureau of Industry and Security issued a document that — underneath its 139 pages of dense bureaucratic jargon and minute technical detail — amounted to a declaration of economic war on China. The magnitude of the act was made all the more remarkable by the relative obscurity of its source. One of 13 bureaus within the Department of Commerce, the smallest federal department by funding, B.I.S. is tiny: Its budget for 2022 was just over $140 million, about one-eighth the cost of a single Patriot air-defense missile battery.
The Globalist Podcast, Thursday, July 6, 2023: A discussion of the future of NATO – will Sweden be in it?
Also, campaigning for Spain’s general election begins and Japan Airlines launches a clothing rental service. And the latest technology news.
The Globalist Podcast, Wednesday, July 5, 2023: Threats to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant after Russian workers are told to evacuate.
Why are China and the US limiting exports of each other’s semiconductors? Plus, the mail-order catalogue that changed perceptions of masculinity in the US.
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