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.
The New Yorker (May 30, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features John Cuneo’s “A Man of Conviction” – The former President is found guilty on all thirty-four counts.
The jury has convicted the former President of thirty-four felony counts in his New York hush-money trial. Now the American people will decide to what extent they care.
When the Verdict Came In, Donald Trump’s Eyes Were Wide Open
In the courtroom with the former President at the moment he became a convicted felon.
London Review of Books (LRB) – May 29 , 2024: The latest issue features Daniel Trilling – Trouble with the Troubles Act; Primordial Black Holes; The Village Voice….
In 1968, Fidel Castro invited an American anthropologist called Oscar Lewis to interview Cubans about their lives. Lewis was famous for an oral history project, conducted in a Mexico City slum, which he had turned into a book called The Children of Sánchez (1961). By recounting a poor family’s struggles and hustles, legal and otherwise, Lewis angered the country’s ruling party, which still described itself as ‘revolutionary’. The Mexican Revolution, like the Cuban Revolution after it, wasn’t supposed to have an end date. But after major gains, including redistributing land to landless farmers, it had been ‘interrupted’, as the historian Adolfo Gilly later put it. Lewis exposed the revolution’s unfinished business, and didn’t shy away from discussing the sexual peccadilloes of the poor. The Spanish-language edition of Children of Sánchez was published in 1964, but thanks to a lawsuit claiming the material was ‘obscene and denigrating’, the book wasn’t freely available in Mexico for several years.
The Freaks Came out to Write: The Definitive History of the ‘Village Voice’, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano.
In the mid-1960s, the Village Vanguard jazz club in Greenwich Village held Monday night speak-outs. At one of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the Vanguard expecting to make common cause with the speakers, but Jones did not look kindly on us. In fact, he quickly told us we weren’t wanted in the civil rights movement, that we were just an interference, only there to make ourselves feel good. Then he pointed his finger and roared: ‘Blood is going to run in the seats of the theatre of revolution, and guess who’s sitting in those seats!’
The New Yorker (May 27, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features
Sergio García Sánchez’s “Scoot” – The artist depicts the thrill of leaning into summer in the city.
The People’s Commencement at Columbia
It’s 1968 all over again, as New York Ivy Leaguers flip the script and stage an unofficial counter-graduation ceremony at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
The Bronx Cheers—Mostly—for Trump
Biden’s a pedophile; Trump’s a fascist; the maga Hasidim have to get their act together—and other sentiments spewed at the former President’s rally in Crotona Park.
How to Pick Stocks Like You’re in Congress
The team at Autopilot, an app that lets you copy the trades of Nancy Pelosi’s husband (up forty-five per cent last year) or Dan Crenshaw (up forty-one), choose their newest offering.
Monocle on Saturday (May 25, 2024): Georgina Godwin is joined by Daniella Peled, managing editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, for a look back at the week’s news and culture.
Plus: author Rupert Thompson joins to discuss his new book ‘How to Make a Bomb: A Novel’ and Monocle’s Helsinki correspondent, Petri Burtsoff, visits the independent publishing imprint Cozy.
Naturally, I too will be staying at the Bayerischer Hof. —Franz Kafka
The Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich is an indestructible fortress of Mitteleuropean culture where tour guides like to pause. Richard Wagner repaired to the Hof for tea after his opera performances in Munich; Sigmund Freud fell out with Carl Jung in the Hof over the status of the libido; Kafka stayed at the Hof when he gave his second, and final, public reading to a hostile audience. A decade later, Hitler learned to crack crabs at the Hof under the supervision of a society hostess, and Joseph Goebbels counted on its rooms for a good night’s rest. The Hof weathered the revolutions of 1848; it withstood the revolution of 1918–19, in which the socialist leader Kurt Eisner was assassinated in front of the hotel and Bavaria briefly became a workers’-council republic; it rebuffed the Nazis’ attempts to buy it in the Thirties; and, after it was nearly destroyed by an Allied bombing raid in 1944, it was reconstructed with beaverlike industry. Today its wide façade of three hundred and thirty-seven rooms imposes itself over the small Promenadeplatz like a slice of meringue cake too large for its plate. Every February, hundreds of diplomats, politicians, academics, and arms dealers convene here for the Munich Security Conference.
Money—where it comes from, where it goes—was on my mind as I drove from Brooklyn to Philadelphia last fall, a Friday the thirteenth. I spent most of the trip on a Zoom call with my wife and our doula, discussing what combination of night nurses, babysitters, and nannies we’d need come the birth of our twins, our second and third sons. Nary a dollar figure was uttered, seemingly out of respect, just as those attending a funeral avoid naming the actual cause of death.
The New Yorker (May 13, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresBarry Blitt’s “Class of 2024” – The campus tensions take center stage.
An Israeli Newspaper Presents Truths Readers May Prefer to Avoid
Haaretz consistently attempts to wrestle with the realities of what is going on in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.
By David Remnick
A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?
Colleagues reportedly called Lucy Letby an “angel of death,” and the Prime Minister condemned her. But, in the rush to judgment, serious questions about the evidence were ignored.
Monocle on Saturday (May 11, 2024): The Eurovision final is nearly here. Latika Bourke, Sîan Pattenden and Georgina Godwin discuss the latest news from Malmö as well as Sîan’s eleventh consecutive charity live draw.
Monocle’s resident Eurovision expert, Fernando Augusto Pacheco, speaks to the show’s production designer, Florian Wieder, and the lighting and screen-content designer, Fredrik Stormby, from the competition’s main stage. Plus: David Lammy in the US and the tourist crackdown in the Balearic Islands.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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