Tag Archives: Politics

Culture, Magazines, Politics, Previews, Reviews, Society

Politics: The Guardian Weekly – July 28, 2023

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The Guardian Weekly (July 28, 2023) – Has Vox’s far-right bubble popped? The gridlocked reign in Spain. Plus: Goodbye to Britain’s fish and chips?

Pedro Sánchez rules out return to polls after Spanish vote delivers hung parliament

Workers use harnesses and a suspended platform in Madrid to remove a large electoral banner showing the face of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of Spain's conservative People's party

Socialist leader assures party ‘democracy can find a formula for government’ as left and right blocs try to form viable coalitions

The Spanish Socialist leader, Pedro Sánchez, has ruled out a return to the polls following Sunday’s inconclusive snap general election, insisting a new government can be formed after his ruling coalition was narrowly beaten by the opposition conservative People’s party (PP).

A funeral for fish and chips: why are Britain’s chippies disappearing?

Fish and chips at the Anstruther Fish Bar in the East Neuk of Fife in Scotland.

Plenty of people will tell you the East Neuk of Fife in Scotland is the best place in the world to eat fish and chips. So what happens when its chippies – and chippies across the UK – start to close?

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – July 31, 2023

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A series of images of the Earth inside a microwave getting redder with each year.
“Recipe for Disaster,” by Christoph Niemann.

The New Yorker – July 31, 2023 issue: The ‘rich and famous’ above the law, a small-town newspaper lands ‘Big Stories’, how Larry Gagosian reshaped the art world, and more…

How Alex Spiro Keeps the Rich and Famous Above the Law

Alex Spiro stands holding a folder under one arm and points at something out of the frame.

With a common touch that appeals to juries and a client list that includes Elon Musk, Jay-Z, and Megan Thee Stallion, he’s on a winning streak that makes his rivals seethe.

By Sheelah Kolhatkar

From the issue of July 31, 2023

In the summer of 2018, four years before he bought Twitter, the entrepreneur Elon Musk was facing legal consequences for two of his more reckless forays on the social-media platform. A boys’ soccer team in Thailand had been trapped in a flooded cave for more than two weeks, and a caver involved in the rescue said on CNN that a bespoke submarine Musk had sent to save the children was a “PR stunt.” Infuriated, Musk told his twenty-two million Twitter followers, without basis in fact, that the caver, Vernon Unsworth, was a “pedo guy.” The tweet went viral, and Unsworth’s attorney threatened to sue Musk for defamation.

How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World

Larry Gagosian stands in front of art by Richard Prince.

The dealer has been so successful selling art to masters of the universe that he has become one of them.

By Patrick Radden Keefe

It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion, looking pretty relaxed for a man who, the next day, would host a party for a hundred and forty people. A pair of French bulldogs, Baby and Humphrey, waddled about, and Gagosian’s butler, Eddie, a slim man with a ponytail and an air of informal professionalism, handed him a sparkling water. 

News, Podcasts, Politics, Stories

Saturday Morning: News And Stories From London

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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.

Culture, Magazines, Politics, Previews, Reviews, Society

Politics: The Guardian Weekly – July 21, 2023

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The Guardian Weekly (July 21, 2023) – Hollywood on strike; extreme heat is here. Plus the Women’s World Cup kicks off.

When the result of the Hollywood actors’ strike ballot was announced last Thursday, the big-name stars of Oppenheimer left the film’s London premiere.

This show of solidarity by Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh was a demonstration of the far-reaching effects of creatives taking to the picket lines. For our big story, arts reporter  Vanessa Thorpe looks at what the historic joint walkout by writers and actors means for all of us as movie-goers and TV viewers as well as the stars, lesser-known actors and technicians struggling to make a living.

And we look at what lies behind the dispute with our film editors  Catherine Shoard and Andrew Pulver while Los Angeles reporter Lois Beckett hears from actors finding it ever harder to make a living in the age of streaming and the use of AI in the entertainment industry.

Culture, Magazines, Media, Opinion, Politics, Previews, Reviews

Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — August 2023

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Harper’s Magazine – August 2023 issue: The New Science Wars – The COVID Response and Its Discontents; Freud Shrinks Woodrow Wilson; Lawrence Jackson on Colson Whitehead, and more…

Doctor’s Orders

Photographs from the series The Masks We Wear by Benjamin Lowy © The artist

COVID-19 and the new science wars

by Jason Blakely

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not unusual to enter common spaces across the United States—grocery stores, malls, office buildings—and experience a kind of perceptual whiplash. People wearing N-95 masks and latex gloves stood beside others wearing no mask at all—or else letting their mandatory face coverings slouch flaccidly beneath their chins. 

Who Walks Always Beside You?

A disappearance in Arkansas

by Benjamin Hale

Twenty-two years ago, a six-year-old girl—my cousin—got lost in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance would eventually connect my family to another story, a dark and bizarre one involving kidnapping, brainwashing, murder, and a cult that believed in the imminent end of the world, laced with the kind of eerie coincidences or near-coincidences that cause perfectly rational people to question what they think they know about reality.

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – July 24, 2023

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The New Yorker – July 24, 2023 issue: Emily Nussbaum on the Nashville underground, Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Gretchen Whitmer, Anthony Lane on “Mission: Impossible,” and more.

Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville

A man in a cowboy had stands amid a group of women in cowgirl hats at NashVegas.

Tennessee’s government has turned hard red, but a new set of outlaw songwriters is challenging Music City’s conservative ways—and ruling bro-country sound.

By Emily Nussbaum

On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.

How Gretchen Whitmer Made Michigan a Democratic Stronghold

Gretchen Whitmer photographed by Paola Kudacki.

The Governor’s strategy for revitalizing her state has two parts: to grow, Michigan needs young people; to draw young people, it needs to have the social policies they want.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

News, Podcasts, Politics, Stories

Saturday Morning: News And Stories From London

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Monocle on Saturday, July 15, 2023: A look at the week’s news and culture with Georgina Godwin.

Plus: we are joined by journalist and author Charlotte Henry to flick through the morning’s papers and Monica Lillis explores the history of book bans and educational censorship. 

Analysis, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews, Technology

REVIEWS: ‘Warfare After Ukraine – Battlefield Lessons’ (The Economist)

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The Economist – Special Reports (July 8, 2023): The war shows how technology is changing the battlefield. But mass still counts, argues Shashank Joshi.

Like the first world war, but with high technology

The war shows how technology is changing the battlefield. But mass still counts, argues Shashank Joshi

The latest in the battle of jamming with electronic beams

Jamming is knocking drones and missiles out of the sky

Read full report

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – July 10, 2023

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The New Yorker – July 10 & 17, 2023 issue:

On Killing Charles Dickens

A man with a top hat hovering over London.

I did everything I could to avoid writing my historical novel. When I finally started “The Fraud,” one principle was clear: no Dickens.
By Zadie Smith

For the first thirty years of my life, I lived within a one-mile radius of Willesden Green Tube Station. It’s true I went to college—I even moved to East London for a bit—but such interludes were brief. I soon returned to my little corner of North West London. Then suddenly, quite abruptly, I left not just the city but England itself. First for Rome, then Boston, and then my beloved New York, where I stayed ten years. When friends asked why I’d left the country, I’d sometimes answer with a joke: Because I don’t want to write a historical novel. Perhaps it was an in-joke: only other English novelists really understood what I meant by it. And there were other, more obvious reasons.

The Tyranny of the Tale

Scheherazade behind a colonnade of pens.

We’re told that story will set us free. But what if a narrative frame is also a cage?

By Parul Sehgal

After a millennium, she remains the hardest-working woman in literature. It was not enough to be saddled with a husband who had the nasty habit of marrying and murdering a new virgin every day to assure himself of spousal fidelity. Nor was it enough to produce a series of nested stories under such deadlines (truly, I complain too much), stories so prickly and tantalizing that the king postponed her murder every night to wait for the next installment. That’s to say nothing of the entirely forgotten three children she bore over those thousand and one nights. Who recalls that there was always a new baby in Scheherazade’s arms?