From the time of the Revolutionary War to the fires of the nineteen-seventies, the history of the borough has always been shaped by its in-between-ness.
Monocle on Saturday (July 13, 2024): Charles Hecker joins Georgina Godwin to talk about the Democrats’ dwindling support for Biden, the future of Paris and ‘The New York Times’ list of the best-selling books of the 21st century.
Plus: the founder of Weatherglass Books, Neil Griffiths, talks about co-founding a small publishing house and the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.
Prospect Magazine (July 11, 2024)– The latest issue features ‘Fixing The Mess’ – How Britain can recover, and find its place in the world; Gaza’s Future; Asylum King – Meet the man cashing in on the system; Giorgia Meloni – How the extreme became mainstream….
London Review of Books (LRB) – July 18 , 2024: The latest issue features ‘Bad Times For Biden’; James Butler on ‘What’s a Majority For?; Poems by A.E. Stallings and Rae Armantrout and Thomas Meaney on Red Power Politics…
The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History by Allen D. Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Stephen Sedley
Poem: ‘Hell’
Rae Armantrout
The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future by Franklin Foer
The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House by Chris Whipple
The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump by Alexander Ward
At the William Morris Gallery: On Mingei
Thomas Meaney
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History by Ned Blackhawk
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes
The actor talks about the origins of “Adaptation,” his potential leap to television, and the art of “keeping it enigmatic.”
By Susan Orlean
The wobbly distinction between reality and artifice fascinates Nicolas Cage. The first time we encountered each other was in 2001, during the making of “Adaptation”—a film based on Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt my book “The Orchid Thief” for the screen—in which Cage played Kaufman and his twin, Donald. He was in the middle of a scene, and I tiptoed onto the set as quietly as possible, convinced that any distraction would trigger one of the eruptions for which Cage had become famous. Between takes, he glanced at the handful of people watching, and exclaimed cheerily, “Oh, guys, look!” He pointed at me and a small, fuzzy-haired man I hadn’t noticed beside me. “It’s the real Charlie and the real Susan!” He seemed tickled by this collision between the characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts, and insisted that the crew take note. (Kaufman and I, who had never met before that moment, slunk away sheepishly.)
It can be easy to take the greatness of “This American Life,” the weekly public-radio show and podcast hosted by Ira Glass, for granted. The show, which Glass co-founded in 1995 at WBEZ, in Chicago, has had the same essential format for twenty-eight years and more than eight hundred episodes. It was instrumental in creating a genre of audio journalism that has flourished in recent decades, especially since the podcast boom—which was initiated by the show’s first spinoff, “Serial,” in 2014. Like “The Daily Show” or Second City, “This American Life” has trained a generation of talented people, and Glass’s three-act structures, chatty cadences, and mixture of analysis and whimsy are now so familiar as to seem unremarkable.
And so has the world in which they are used, says Shashank Joshi
Afew years ago intelligence analysts observed that internet-connected cctv cameras in Taiwan and South Korea were inexplicably talking to vital parts of the Indian power grid. The strange connection turned out to be a deliberately circuitous route by which Chinese spies were communicating with malware they had previously buried deep inside crucial parts of the Indian grid (presumably to enable future sabotage). The analysts spotted it because they were scanning the internet to look for “command and control” (c2) nodes—such as cameras—that hackers use as stepping stones to their victims.
No bloc of countries has, for the past 75 years, been as umbilically tied to the United States as Europe. First, its western half and, since the end of the Cold War, much of its eastern half have prospered under the world’s most extensive bonds in trade, finance, and investment. Europe could also depend on the U.S. military’s iron commitment—enshrined in the 75-year-old NATO alliance—to come to its defense. Together with a few other nations, the United States and Europe defined many of the institutions that comprise what we call the Western-led order. The U.S.-European alliance has arguably been the bedrock of the global system as we know it today.
Without Washington’s embrace, the continent could revert to an anarchic and illiberal past. By HAL BRANDS
Which is the real Europe? The mostly peaceful, democratic, and united continent of the past few decades? Or the fragmented, volatile, and conflict-ridden Europe that existed for centuries before that? If Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November, we may soon find out.
The New Yorker (July 1, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Kadir Nelson’s “Soft-Serve” – Keeping it cool while keeping cool…
Finally, a Leap Forward on Immigration Policy
President Biden has offered help to undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, in the most consequential act of immigration relief in more than a decade. By Jonathan Blitzer
High-Roller Presidential Donor Perks
Give now to get your name on the wing of a fighter jet!
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Scabrous Satire of the Super-Rich
In “Long Island Compromise,” wealth is a curse. Or is that just what we’d like to think?
Monocle on Saturday (June 29, 2024): Thursday saw an extraordinary US debate between presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump; what happened and what comes next?
International journalist Isabel Hilton joins Georgina Godwin to discuss the fallout of the event and the global reaction, the comparatively uneventful debate in the UK, Bradford Literature Festival and the latest news from China. Plus: Monocle’s senior news editor, Chris Cermak, speaks to the debate director of Braver Angels, Jessie Mannisto, about its debate watch party and how they are fighting political polarisation.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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