July 23, 2023– Monocle’s editorial director Tyler Brûlé is joined by Priska Amstutz and Marcus Schögel. Plus, check-ins with our friends and correspondents in London, Ljubljana and Istanbul.
Once a vaccine advocate, the Florida governor lost his enthusiasm for the shot before the Delta wave sent Covid hospitalizations and deaths soaring. It’s a grim chapter he now leaves out of his rosy retelling of his pandemic response.
Gas flares and leaking pipelines from Venezuela’s once-booming oil industry, hobbled by U.S. sanctions and mismanagement, are polluting towns and a major lake.
In Belarus, the Protests Were Three Years Ago. The Crackdown Is Never-Ending.
Aleksandr G. Lukashenko brutally repressed those who opposed his claim of re-election as president. The crackdown on dissent has only deepened since.
Far Right May Rise as Kingmaker in Spanish Election
A messier political landscape has lent leverage to the extremes, leaving a hard-right party with a chance to share power for the first time since Franco.
Insider Business (July 22, 2023) – Once pierced, century-old maple trees drip sap referred to as liquid gold. It will take roughly 50 gallons of these drops to make one 1 gallon of 100% pure Grade A maple syrup.
Farms in the Hudson Valley, New York State, can sell that gallon for over $200, almost 29 times more than popular imitation syrup. Despite the price, Grade A maple syrup is incredibly sought-after. So much so that C$18 million worth of it was stolen in one of the largest heists in Canadian history.
But why is Grade A maple syrup worth so much? And why is it so expensive?
CBS Sunday Morning (July 22, 2023) – Photographer John Fielder took a leap of faith that kickstarted his career. From department store worker to nature photographer, John shares how he lives and views life, Fielder, recently diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, looks back on his life with CBS News’ Barry Peterson.
John Fielder has been capturing the beauty of Colorado for 40 years. From majestic sunrises over the Rockies to colorful Colorado wildflowers bordering alpine lakes, his photos portray Colorado in all its glory.
World Economic Forum (July 22, 2023) – This week’s top stories of the week include:
0:15Solar panels are sending silver prices up – A new, more efficient panel design uses silver in paste for. This year, the solar sector could account for 14% of silver consumption, up from 5% in 2014. But globally, there’s a shortage of primary silver mines and demand is growing faster than supply. Experts say that solar panels could exhaust 85-90% of silver reserves by 2050. Here are 3 more news stories about energy this week.
1:41This phone costs $12 – Its makers hope it will help close India’s digital divide. It’s not a smartphone, but a feature phone, that is, a simple handset with a keypad and a small screen. It’s called Jio Bharat. 250 million Indians still use 2G phones. But 2G technology is more than 30 years old. Its users can make calls and send texts but they can’t connect to the internet. Jio Bharat’s users can access 4G internet services from instant digital payments to music streaming
3:08Europe’s largest green facade – It’s home to 30,000 young trees arranged in 8km of hedges. Covering an area the size of 4 soccer pitches. The facade covers a building called Kö-Bogen II in the heart of Düsseldorf, Germany. It shades the concrete roof from the sun and prevents the building and the surrounding air from getting too hot.
4:47These blocks can help beat the climate crisis – Antora Energy uses excess renewable electricity to heat up blocks of solid carbon. These thermal batteries reach temperatures above 1500°C. This heat can be safely stored in the blocks for days on end until it’s needed to power 24/7 industrial processes. The industrial sector accounts for a quarter of global emissions and the majority of that stems from the need for heat.
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The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 23, 2023) – In this issue, Robert Kolker on a family’s struggle with a genetic mutation that leads to dementia in middle age; Caity Weaver tries to track down Tom Cruise; Jon Gertner on the future of Wikipedia as A.I. feeds off its human input; and more.
They all have a 50-50 chance of inheriting a cruel genetic mutation — which means disappearing into dementia in middle age. This is the story of what it’s like to live with those odds.
By Robert Kolker
Barb was the youngest in her large Irish Catholic family — a surprise baby, the ninth child, born 10 years after the eighth. Living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, her family followed the football schedule: high school games on Friday night, college games on Saturday, the Steelers on Sunday. Dad was an engineer, mom was a homemaker and Barb was the family mascot, blond and adorable, watching her brothers and sisters finish school and go on to their careers.
Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process?
By JON GERTNER
In early 2021, a Wikipedia editor peered into the future and saw what looked like a funnel cloud on the horizon: the rise of GPT-3, a precursor to the new chatbots from OpenAI. When this editor — a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the handle Barkeep49 on the site — gave the new technology a try, he could see that it was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements (a false name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual and coherent answers.
The action star has gone to great lengths to avoid the press for more than a decade. But maybe our writer could track him down anyway?
By CAITY WEAVER
In an interview with Playboy in 2012, Tom Cruise described Katie Holmes as “an extraordinary person” with a “wonderful” clothing line, and someone for whom he was fond of “doing things like creating romantic dinners” — behavior that, he confided, “she enjoys.” It would prove to be his last major interview with a reporter to date. Despite what may be recalled through the penumbra of memory, this sudden silence was not directly preceded by either of Cruise’s infamous appearances on television: not by his NBC’s “Today” show interview (in which he labeled host Matt Lauer both “glib” and “Matt — MattMattMattMatt”), nor even by his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (in which he reverse-catapulted himself onto Winfrey’s fawn-colored couch multiple times in a demonstration of his enthusiasm for Holmes).
Monocle on Saturday, July 22, 2023: A look at the week’s news and culture with Georgina Godwin.
Plus, we are joined by historian and screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann to flick through the morning’s papers and Gregg Scruggs reviews the work of Japanese artist Manabu Ikeda in Whistler, British Columbia.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s request to delay the trial until after the election but pushed the start date past the Justice Department’s request to begin in December.
Russia held exercises demonstrating its power to sink ships and stop those that try to run its blockade. For Ukrainian food exports to resume, Moscow said, a list of demands must be met.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s ruling to start the Trump documents trial in May 2024 showed, for now, that she is the jurist defenders have described: level-headed and not beholden to the man who appointed her.
Pressured by Biden, A.I. Companies Agree to Guardrails on New Tools
Amazon, Google and Meta are among the companies that announced the guidelines as they race to outdo each other with versions of artificial intelligence.
Boomers Daily 