The New Yorker (April 29, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresFaith Ringgold’s “Sonny’s Bridge, 1986” – The late artist’s work recalls her pioneering spirit through vivid, inventive designs.
Also: Kamasi Washington, “The Outsiders” reviewed, Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival, and more.
The Return, Again, of the Power Lunch
Four Twenty Five, a luxe new dining room from the mega-restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongerichten, takes square aim at the expense-account crowd.
Donald Trump’s Sleepy, Sleazy Criminal Trial
The most striking aspect of the former President’s hush-money trial so far has been that, for the first time in a decade, Trump is struggling to command attention.
Monocle on Sunday, April 21, 2024: Emma Nelson, Simon Brooke and Lynne O’Donnell on the weekend’s biggest talking points.
We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Marbella, Monocle’s New Delhi correspondent, Lyndee Prickitt, for the latest on the India elections and Monocle’s Bangkok correspondent for the news in Thailand.
The New Yorker (April 15, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresAna Juan’s “Clickbait” – The artist captures the mesmerizing—and distracting—glow of modern entertainment.
Can the World Be Simulated?
Video-game engines were designed to closely mimic the mechanics of the real world. They’re now used for movies, TV shows, architecture, military trainings, virtual reality, and the metaverse.
Monocle on Sunday, April 14, 2024: Emma Nelson, Dimi Reider, Tessa Szyszkowitz and Kat Hanna on drone strikes on Israel by Iran overnight, as well as more of weekend’s biggest talking points.
We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Geneva and we check-in with Monocle’s correspondent in Marseille, Mary Fitzgerald, for the latest headlines from the regions.
The New Yorker (April 1, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Pascal Campion’s “Into the Light” – The artist depicts stepping out of the subway into the overwhelming glow of the city.
When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”
It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.
Black holes are, of course, awesome. But, for scientists, they are more awesome. If a rainbow is marvellous, then understanding how all the colors of the rainbow are present, unified, in ordinary white light—that’s more marvellous. (Though, famously, in his poem “Lamia,” John Keats disagreed, blaming “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow.) In recent years, the amount of data that scientists have discovered about black holes has grown exponentially. In January, astronomers announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had observed the oldest black hole yet—one present when the universe was a mere four hundred million years old. (It’s estimated that it’s now 13.8 billion years old.) Recently, two supermassive black holes, with a combined mass of twenty-eight billion suns, were measured and shown to have been rotating tightly around each other, but not colliding, for the past three billion years. And those are just the examples that are easiest for the public to make some sense of. To me, a supermassive black hole sounds sublime; to a scientist, it can also be a test of wild hypotheses. “Astrophysics is an exercise in incredible experiments not runnable on Earth,” Avery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and at the Perimeter Institute, told me. “And black holes are an ideal laboratory.”
Monocle on Sunday, March 31, 2024: Emma Nelson, Charles Hecker and Yossi Mekelberg on the weekend’s biggest talking points.
We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Zürich and get the latest on Turkey’s local elections with Monocle’s Istanbul correspondent, Hannah Lucinda Smith.
The New Yorker (March 25, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresMark Ulriksen’s “Standing Guard” – The artist depicts the tail-wagging occasion of the first signs of spring.
“The Caring Hand,” by Eva Oertli and Beat Huber, is one of more than fifty sculptures at the new Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.Photographs by Kris Graves for The New Yorker
The civil-rights attorney has created a museum, a memorial, and, now, a sculpture park, indicting the city of Montgomery—a former capital of the domestic slave trade and the cradle of the Confederacy.
The National Monument to Freedom, in Montgomery, Alabama, is a giant book, standing forty-three feet high and a hundred and fifty feet wide. The book is propped wide open, and engraved on its surface are the names of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Black people, documented in the 1870 census, who were emancipated after the Civil War. On the spine of the book is a credo written for the dead:
Your children love you. The country you built must honor you. We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement. We commit to advancing freedom in your name.
What if building on the water could be safer and sturdier than building on flood-prone land?
In a corner of the Rijksmuseum hangs a seventeenth-century cityscape by the Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Berckheyde, “View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht,” which depicts the construction of Baroque mansions along one of Amsterdam’s main canals. Handsome double-wide brick buildings line the Herengracht’s banks, their corniced façades reflected on the water’s surface. Interspersed among the new homes are spaces, like gaps in a young child’s smile, where vacant lots have yet to be developed.
Monocle on Sunday, March 24, 2024: Emma Nelson, Nina dos Santos and David Bodanis on the weekend’s biggest talking points.
We also speak to Monocle’s editorial France and North Africa correspondent, Mary Fitzgerald, and our Vienna correspondent, Alexei Korolyov, for the latest on the Slovakia elections.
The New Yorker (March 18, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Klaas Verplancke’s “On the Grid” – The artist blends the preferred pastimes and stylish attire of New York’s commuters. By Françoise Mouly with Art by Klaas Verplancke.
As the art market cools, Julien’s Auctions earns millions selling celebrity ephemera—and used its connections to help Kim Kardashian borrow Marilyn Monroe’s J.F.K.-birthday dress.
The sidewalks of Lower Broadway in downtown Nashville are filled with people moving among neon-lit venues owned by celebrity musicians: Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock ‘n’ Roll Steakhouse, Jason Aldean’s Kitchen & Rooftop Bar, Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa. The Hard Rock Café, which opened in 1994, when the neighborhood could still reasonably be called eclectic, sits at the far edge of the strip, overlooking the Cumberland River. One evening last November, Julien’s Auctions took over a private room at the restaurant for a three-day sale in honor of the company’s twentieth anniversary. There was a spotlighted stage full of objects that musicians had worn or touched or played: a scratched amber ring that Janis Joplin wore onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, in 1967; Prince’s gold snakeskin-print suit, small enough to fit on an adolescent-size mannequin; ripped jeans that had belonged to Kurt Cobain.
The Capitol Hill Club, in a white brick town house a few blocks from the House of Representatives, is a social institution exclusively for Republicans. One evening in October, Representative Mike Garcia was eating there alone when Representative Mike Johnson stopped to chat. Garcia is a first-generation immigrant and a retired Navy pilot from a Democratic-leaning district in Southern California. His predecessor, a Democrat, resigned after a scandal four years ago, and Garcia highlighted disagreements with his party to win reëlection in 2022. He was also a loyalist to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a fellow-Californian who had just been ousted by a small band of hard-line conservative rebels annoyed at his willingness to compromise on budget disputes. Garcia had formally nominated McCarthy as Speaker at the beginning of 2023, and his removal deprived Garcia of a patron.
Monocle on Sunday, March 17, 2024:Emma Nelson, Terry Stiastny and Stephen Dalziel on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Lisbon and Naveena Kottoor, Monocle’s correspondent in Nairobi.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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