Monocle on Saturday (June 22, 2024): Monocle brings Switzerland to Midori House. Alex Herrmann, UK & Ireland Director of Switzerland Tourism, joins Georgina Godwin to tell us all about the different regions and Swiss delicacies at Monocle’s Swiss Summer Market.
Plus: Georgina and political journalist Terry Stiastny flick through the global papers and Monocle’s Helsinki correspondent, Petri Burtsoff, explains how the wider Nordic region is celebrating midsummer this weekend.
The Guardian Weekly (June 19, 2024) – The new issue features Emmanuel Macron’s ballot box gamble – Could the far right gain political power in France? Plus: the record detectives fighting back against bootleggers
Spotlight | Kharkiv under siege
Luke Harding and Artem Mazhulin report from Ukraine’s second city where living conditions are increasingly precarious
Environment | The fight to save Norway’s arctic foxes
Captive breeding has helped reduce threats from predators and the climate crisis – but can the species survive long-term?
Feature | The vinyl frontier
John Harris meets the record detectives going after music’s retro bootleggers
Opinion | Starmer’s quiet man appeal
The UK Labour leader has been accused of being a “political robot”. But, argues Jonathan Freedland, that’s exactly why he’s so far ahead in the opinion polls
Culture | Alive and Kicken
On its 50th anniversary, culture writer Eliza Apperly pays tribute to the Berlin gallery that helped pioneer photography as an art discipline
Before and after artificial intelligence
We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in its path, a chaos that engulfed generations in an orgy of destruction lasting almost a hundred years. A war with a death toll so high that it left a permanent scar on humanity’s soul. But we will never know the names of those who fought and died in it, or the immense suffering and destruction it caused, because the Butlerian Jihad, abominable and devastating as it was,…
Can AI think creatively? Can we?
“Far as the east from even, / Dim as the border star, / Life is the little creature / That carries the great cigar.” So wrote Emily Dickinson, with some unfortunate help from a computer. As I read that stanza in February 2022, I was more than six months into a scientific experiment I was conducting with my friend and colleague Morten Christiansen, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell, where he and I are professors. In 2021, two years before ChatGPT would become a household name, Christiansen had been impressed by the initial technical descriptions of GPT-3, the recently released version of the generative large language…
Nanotechnology can already puncture cancer cells and drug-resistant bacteria. What will it do next?
By Dhruv Khullar
The rise of the far right in Europe might help Americans deprovincialize their own crisis. The single wave has struck many coastlines.
By Adam Gopnik
The eminent editor’s wife and daughter sift through a lifetime’s worth of collectibles: quirky plastic purses, a porcelain Miss Piggy, and many, many books.
By Zach Helfand
Monocle on Saturday (June 15, 2024): Authors and attendees have been boycotting literary festivals for their sponsorship by Baillie Gifford – and now music festivals are under fire.
Charles Hecker and Georgina Godwin explore whether this will do more harm than good, as well as the top stories from global papers. Then: Richard Village, founder of new independent publisher Foundry Editions, joins to talk about bringing Mediterranean authors to the attention of English-speaking audiences. Plus: Nigerian-American artist and poet Precious Okoyomon speaks about her magical exhibition in Basel, Switzerland.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt.
Allen Lane, 385 pp., £25, March, 978 0 241 64766 0
In the 1980s the term ‘anxiety’ was almost eliminated from the lexicon of American psychiatry. The infamous DSM-III (the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) took an axe to various legacies of psychoanalysis that had dominated psychiatric thinking in the postwar decades. Among them was a preoccupation with anxiety. Anything and everything could, it seemed, be attributed to anxiety: whether it presented as a specific phobia or a panic attack, a somatic symptom or just a lurking sense of dread, anxiety was at the root. It was this sort of all-purpose explanation, with no apparent scientific rigour or falsifiability, that the authors of DSM-III were trying to root out.
When Ariel Sharon withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there.
The State of Israel v. the Jews
by Sylvain Cypel, translated by William Rodarmor.
Other Press, 352 pp., £24, October 2022, 978 1 63542 097 5
The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.
Deux peuples pour un état?: Relire l’histoire du sionisme
by Shlomo Sand.
Seuil, 256 pp., £20, January, 978 2 02 154166 3
Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-78
by Geoffrey Levin.
Yale, 304 pp., £25, February, 978 0 300 26785 3
Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life
by Joshua Leifer.
Dutton, 398 pp., £28.99, August, 978 0 593 18718 0
The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance
by Shaul Magid.
Ayin, 309 pp., £16.99, December 2023, 979 8 9867803 1 3
Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm
edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner.
OR Books, 336 pp., £17.99, Ap
The Guardian Weekly (June 13, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Blood Lines’ – The human cost of Europe’s cocaine habit’; The Far Rights surges across EU; A doughnut theory of the universe; The muscular rise of steroids…
In a week when much of the attention in Europe was on far-right political gains in the parliamentary elections, the Guardian Weekly’s cover shines a light on another of the continent’s disturbing undercurrents.
A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of unaccompanied child migrants across Europe are being forced to work for increasingly powerful drug cartels to meet the continent’s soaring appetite for cocaine.
In cities including Paris and Brussels, gangs are exploiting the “unlimited” supply of vulnerable African children at their disposal, using brutal means to control their victims, including torture and rape if they fail to sell enough drugs, as they seek to expand Europe’s $13bn cocaine market.
Mark Townsend reveals the plight of the illegal trade’s child foot soldiers, while Annie Kelly explains the growing problem of cocaine use in Europe. And from Ecuador, Tom Phillips reports on how death and destruction follow the drug on its complex journey across the Atlantic.
The truly disquieting thought was that the cult of personality around the Prime Minister had become suffocating and seemingly impossible to pierce—until now. By Isaac Chotiner
After Governor Kathy Hochul’s flip-flop on congestion pricing, a cop reconsiders his retirement while inching his Lexus through snarled-up traffic on the F.D.R.
By Ben McGrath
Many left-leaning, middle-class Americans speak of kids as though they are impositions, or means to an end.
By Jay Caspian Kang
Monocle on Saturday (June 8, 2024): Writer and social commentator Lijia Zhang joins Georgina Godwin to talk about the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, organising her own protest, China’s relationship with Russia and Ukraine and the K-pop balloons sent to North Korea.
Plus: Kate Mosse, author and founder director of the Women’s Prize, joins to discuss the organisation’s live event and Bookbanks founder Emily Rhodes on her initiative bringing books to foodbanks.
Monocle on Saturday (June 1, 2024): Will the conviction of former President Donald Trump affect his chance of winning the US election in November?
And why does Iceland’s election today have more candidates running than ever before? Join Emma Nelson and communications consultant and journalist Simon Brooke as they look through the week’s news and culture. Plus: we look at art and tourism, including co-founder and director of London Gallery Weekend Jeremy Epstein, who joins the show to talk about this weekend’s highlights.
Boomers Daily 