Monocle on Sunday, January 14, 2024 – Emma Nelson, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Nina dos Santos on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Tokyo and our Singapore correspondent in Taiwan, Naomi Xu Elegant.
Tag Archives: Stories
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Jan 15, 2024
Has School Become Optional?
In the past few years, chronic absenteeism has nearly doubled. The fight to get students back in classrooms has only just begun.
Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health, and elevated youth violence.
What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On
From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.
More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.
Sunday Morning: Stories From Zürich And Istanbul
Monocle on Sunday, January 7, 2024 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, is joined by Juliet Linley and Chandra Kurt to discuss the weekend’s hottest topics.
We also speak to our editor in chief, Andrew Tuck, our deputy head of radio, Tom Webb, and Monocle’s Istanbul correspondent Hannah Lucinda Smith.
Sunday Morning: Stories And News From London
Monocle on Sunday, December 31, 2023 – For our final show of 2023, Emma Nelson and a panel of special guests discuss the latest news and culture, live from Monocle’s studio in London.
The New York Review Of Books – January 18, 2024
The Fate of Free Will
By James Gleick
In Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell makes a scientific case for the existence of human agency.
Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell
Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control over our actions, of continual decision-making—is part of the experience of being human, moment by moment and day by day. True, we sometimes just drift, like robots or zombies, but at other times we gird our loins and exert our will. David Hume defined will nearly three centuries ago as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” The feeling was universal then and it’s universal now.
Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic
Why have Americans not fought to sustain the unprecedented Covid-era expansion of aid to children, renters, and gig workers?
The Pandemic Paradox: How the Covid Crisis Made Americans More Financially Secure by Scott Fulford
The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher
Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from Covid-19 by Zachary Parolin
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Jan 1 & 8, 2024
How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence
He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.
By Adam Gopnik
It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises—has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his hero-painter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in.
A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza
Following Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s invasion, Mosab Abu Toha fled his home with his wife and three children. Then I.D.F. soldiers took him into custody.
Sunday Morning: Stories And News From Zürich
Monocle on Sunday, December 24, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, brings us a festive programme from the radio studio in Zürich.
Featuring journalist Juliet Linley, as well as Monocle’s Andrew Tuck, Nic Monisse and Robert Bound.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Dec 25, 2023
Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?
The puzzles spread from the United States across the globe, but the American crossword today doesn’t always reflect the linguistic changes that immigration brings.
By Natan Last
Root around in the alphanumeric soup of the U.S. visa system for long enough and you’ll discover the EB-1A, sometimes known as the Einstein visa. Among the hardest permanent-resident visas to obtain, it is reserved for noncitizens with“extraordinary ability.” John Lennon got a forerunner of it, in 1976, after a deportation scare that could have sent him back to Britain. (His case, which spotlighted prosecutorial discretion in immigration law, forms the legal basis for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or daca.) Modern-day recipients include the tennis star Monica Seles and—in a tasteless bit of irony—the Slovenian model Melania Knauss, in 2001, four years before she became Melania Trump.
The World’s Fastest Road Cars—and the People Who Drive Them
“Hypercars” can approach or even exceed 300 m.p.h. Often costing millions of dollars, they’re ostentatious trophies—and sublime engines of innovation.
By Ed Caesar
A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, near the company’s factory, in Molsheim, France. The car, which has lusciously curved side panels, has been produced in a limited run of five hundred. Although its engine is as big as a Shetland pony, the interior is eerily quiet.
Return to New York City
Revisiting old haunts leads to revelations about “real life.”
By Julia Wertz
Sunday Morning: Stories From Zürich, Helsinki, London, Paris & Belgrade
Monocle on Sunday, December 17, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, is joined by Florian Egli and Marcus Schögel to discuss the weekend’s biggest talking points.
Also, a check-ins with our friends and correspondents in London, Helsinki, Paris and Belgrade.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Dec 18, 2023
All the Carcinogens We Cannot See
We routinely test for chemicals that cause mutations. What about the dark matter of carcinogens—substances that don’t create cancer cells but rouse them from their slumber?
In the nineteen-seventies, Bruce Ames, a biochemist at Berkeley, devised a way to test whether a chemical might cause cancer. Various tenets of cancer biology were already well established. Cancer resulted from genetic mutations—changes in a cell’s DNA sequence that typically cause the cell to divide uncontrollably. These mutations could be inherited, induced by viruses, or generated by random copying errors in dividing cells. They could also be produced by physical or chemical agents: radiation, ultraviolet light, benzene. One day, Ames had found himself reading the list of ingredients on a package of potato chips, and wondering how safe the chemicals used as preservatives really were.
The Troubled History of the Espionage Act
The law, passed in a frenzy after the First World War, is a disaster. Why is it still on the books?
In March, 1940, Edmund Carl Heine, a forty-nine-year-old American automobile executive, reached an understanding with a company then known as Volkswagenwerk GmbH. Heine, who immigrated to the United States from Germany as a young man, had spent years at Ford, first in Michigan and then in its international operations in South America and Europe, landing finally in Germany. In 1935, two years after the Nazi regime came to power, Ford fired him, for reasons that are unclear. Heine next signed on with Chrysler, in Spain, but the Spanish Civil War was tough on the car business. And so he was out of a job again.
Boomers Daily 