Design/Culture: Monocle Magazine – November 2023
Tag Archives: Culture
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 30, 2023
China’s Age of Malaise
Party officials are vanishing, young workers are “lying flat,” and entrepreneurs are fleeing the country. What does China’s inner turmoil mean for the world?
By Evan Osnos
Twenty-five years ago, China’s writer of the moment was a man named Wang Xiaobo. Wang had endured the Cultural Revolution, but unlike most of his peers, who turned the experience into earnest tales of trauma, he was an ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life. In his novella “Golden Age,” two young lovers confess to the bourgeois crime of extramarital sex—“We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breath.” They are summoned to account for their failure of revolutionary propriety, but the local apparatchiks prove to be less interested in Marx than in the prurient details of their “epic friendship.”
Plundering the Planet’s Resources
Our accelerating rates of extraction come with immense ecological and social consequences.
The town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, doesn’t have a lot to say for itself. Its Web site, which features a photo of a flowering tree next to a rusty bridge, notes that the town is “conveniently located between Asheville and Boone.” According to the latest census data, it has 2,332 residents and a population density of 498.1 per square mile. A recent story in the local newspaper concerned the closing of the Hardee’s on Highway 19E; this followed an incident, back in May, when a fourteen-year-old boy who’d eaten a biscuit at the restaurant began to hallucinate and had to be taken to the hospital. Without Spruce Pine, though, the global economy might well unravel.
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – October 20, 2023
The Guardian Weekly (October 20, 2023) – The new issue features escalating events in Israel and Gaza that continue to cause deep distress and alarm, with several thousand people known to be dead or wounded on either side of the border. US president Joe Biden was expected to visit Israel this week, amid growing expectations of a ground invasion of Gaza and fears of a wider regional escalation.
Also, a primer on the historical background to events by Chris McGreal, while on the opinion pages the Israeli author and historian Yuval Noah Harari and Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein provide thoughtful and grounded perspectives.
There was sadness for many Aboriginal Australians after a move to recognise Indigenous people in the country’s constitution was rejected in a referendum, as Sarah Collard and Elias Visontay report. Also from Oceania, Henry Cooke examines what aspects of Jacinda Ardern’s political legacy might survive after New Zealand elected a new conservative government.
From Egypt to Hong Kong, the 2010s were a decade when mass protest movements looked set to change the world. But in most cases, the hope embodied by many massive street demonstrations was soon crushed by authoritarian regimes. Vincent Bevins asks organisers and others who were there where it all went wrong.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 23, 2023
Beyond the Myth of Rural America
Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.
Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us can’t help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood, it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who “would fit into such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, “American Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most famous art work ever produced in the United States.
When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby
In many states, lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.
American Chronicles – Beyond the Myth of Rural America
Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.
What Happened to San Francisco, Really?
It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask.By Nathan Heller
The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle
Offsetting has been hailed as a fix for runaway emissions and climate change—but the market’s largest firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that weren’t real.
France Culture: The Gulf Of Morbihan In Brittany
The largest of them, l’Île aux Moines, is the most popular with tourists. Others belong to private owners, who live out their desert island dream. Oysters are farmed all year round on this storm-protected inland sea.
We take a closer look. Read more about this story in our article: https://f24.my/9r7U.y
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – October 13, 2023
The Guardian Weekly (October 13, 2023) – The new issue features Hamas militants’ devastating incursion into Israel from Gaza resulting in thousands of deaths, provoking a declaration of war and upending the fragile diplomacy of the Middle East.
The swirling composite of images on the magazine’s cover this week tries to encapsulate the human chaos and grief of civilians, both in Israel and Gaza, caught in the chaos of war. The central image shows a vast explosion filling the sky above Gaza City, an ominous portent of many violent acts still to come.
As the region faces its worst conflict for 50 years, Bethan McKernan reports from a kibbutz ransacked by militants and finds shocked residents still struggling to process events. Guardian correspondents Harriet Sherwood, Patrick Wintour and Peter Beaumont provide context and analysis, while international affairs commentator Simon Tisdall argues that the ultimate blame lies with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s controversial prime minister.
Ahead of this weekend’s elections in Poland that could give the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party an unprecedented third term in office, Shaun Walker goes on the campaign trail with Donald Tusk whose centre-right Civic Coalition is hoping to reverse the country’s slide away from democratic norms. And Brussels correspondent Lisa O’Carroll reports on the EU’s Granada summit where Hungary’s Viktor Orbán accused fellow leaders of attempting to impose a “diktat” with a proposal on a bloc-wide agreement on migration.
With global temperatures for September described as “gobsmackingly bananas” by leading climatologist Zeke Hausfather, our interview with the president of Cop28 could not be more timely. Sultan Al Jaber explains to environment editor Fiona Harvey how he believes he can square his job as the chief of the United Arab Emirates’ national oil company with leading a global conference focused on net zero carbon emissions.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 16, 2023
Jake Sullivan’s Trial by Combat
Inside the White House’s battle to keep Ukraine in the fight.
On a Monday afternoon in August, when President Joe Biden was on vacation and the West Wing felt like a ghost town, his national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, sat down to discuss America’s involvement in the war in Ukraine. Sullivan had agreed to an interview “with trepidation,” as he had told me, but now, in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, steps from the Oval Office, he seemed surprisingly relaxed for a congenital worrier. (“It’s my job to worry,” he once told an interviewer. “So I worry about literally everything.”)
The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat
China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost.
By Ian Urbina
In the past few decades, partly in an effort to project its influence abroad, China has dramatically expanded its distant-water fishing fleet. Chinese firms now own or operate terminals in ninety-five foreign ports. China estimates that it has twenty-seven hundred distant-water fishing ships, though this figure does not include vessels in contested waters; public records and satellite imaging suggest that the fleet may be closer to sixty-five hundred ships.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – October 9, 2023
Kwame Onwuachi’s Cuisine of the Self
How the chef at Tatiana brought Afro-Caribbean cooking—and his life story—to the center of New York City’s fine-dining scene.
Among the Cabin Fanatics of Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty
For more than a hundred years, the Neshoba County Fair has drawn revellers from all over the country. Why do they keep coming back?
CULTURE: FRANCE-AMÉRIQUE MAGAZINE – October 2023
France-Amérique Magazine – October 2023 – The new issue features a walk through France’s vineyards and observe the changing cultural landscape. An estate near Epernay is working to produce the world’s greenest Champagne, while other producers are turning to no- and low-alcohol wines to cater to to sober-curious generation. Welcome to the Age of Raisin. Also in this issue, read about “Wemby-mania” and the success of French NBA players; meet French-American composer Betsy Jolas who, at the age of 97, still creates with the same intensity; and discover a new art space near Paris – a former blimp hangar, masterpiece of Belle Epoque industrial architecture.
NOLO WINES – New Culture or Sour Grapes?
Sales of no- and low-alcohol wines soar in France amid deep-seated cultural change. Your correspondent keeps his true feelings bottled up.
By Anthony Bulger
LUDOVIC DU PLESSIS – Telmont, the Green Champagne Revolution
The contagiously enthusiastic “climate optimist,” a former executive for Dom Pérignon in the United States, is working to produce the world’s most environmentally friendly Champagne. In pursuit of this objective, he is working with an American investor renowned for his environmental activism, Leonardo DiCaprio.
By Clément Thiery
HANGAR Y – Outside Paris, a New Art Space Takes Flight
On the banks of a lake in the Meudon forest southwest of the French capital, a masterpiece of Belle Epoque industrial architecture is looking to become a hub of contemporary creation.
By Jean-Gabriel Fredet
Travel: The ‘Treasures Of The Mekong River’ In Laos
” 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.
Boomers Daily 