Monocle on Sunday, November 12, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, is joined by Eemeli Isoaho and Marcus Schögel to unpack the weekend’s hottest topics.
Plus, check-ins with our friends and correspondents in London, Ljubljana and Paris.
THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE (November 12, 2023) – T’S TRAVEL ISSUE features the writer Aatish Taseer embarked on an epic 40,000-mile journey through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq. What he learned was less a life-altering revelation and more a lesson in curiosity itself.
The writer Aatish Taseer embarked on a journey through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq. What he learned was less a life-altering revelation and more a lesson in curiosity itself.
Travel, the movement of people from one place to another, has always existed. But long before we thought to travel for pleasure, we traveled for purpose: for commerce, and for faith.
Even the most casual student of the Silk Road, that fearsome, wondrous network of routes that people began plying in the second century B.C. (and did so for approximately the next 1,600 years) knows that the two — business and God, whoever or whatever your god was — often intermingled. Merchants and adventurers returned with new kinds of goods, but also with new kinds of ideas: of art, of architecture, of ideology, of faith. The Silk Road brought Islam to India, and Buddhism to Japan. It’s why travel has always been both thrilling and dangerous. You never know how a new land is going to change you; it never knows how you’re going to change it.
The dozens of books that T writer Aatish Taseer read before his journey through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq, and what he learned from each pilgrimage.
Eighteen months ago, when the New York-based T writer at large Aatish Taseer began planning his reporting trips for this month’s three-part feature story — an exploration of religious travel in Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq — he was already well acquainted with the idea of pilgrimage. His first book, the 2009 memoir “Stranger to History,” opens with what is arguably the world’s best-known faith-motivated journey, the hajj to Mecca, and ends with what he describes as a personal pilgrimage to meet his estranged father in Pakistan. In Delhi, India, where Taseer grew up, quick trips for the purpose of worship were commonplace. “People would do a pilgrimage on an ordinary Sunday,” he says, “instead of going to an amusement park.”
Does the director of “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” and “Gladiator” see himself in the hero of his epic new film?
On the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte was full of catastrophic confidence. His seventy-three thousand troops were camped on a ridge near a tavern called La Belle Alliance. His nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, occupied a slope across the fields, with a mere sixty-seven thousand troops. Over breakfast, Napoleon predicted, “If my orders are well executed, we will sleep in Brussels this evening.” When his chief of staff offered a word of caution, Napoleon snapped, “Wellington is a bad general and the English are bad troops. The whole affair will not be more serious than swallowing one’s breakfast.”
Some people think that we can’t be held responsible for what we do, given that our actions are the inevitable consequence of the laws of nature. They’re only half right.
The civil-rights mastermind was sidelined by his own movement. Now he’s back in the spotlight. What can we learn from his strategies of resistance?
By Adam Gopnik
Life on Our Planet,” a new Netflix nature documentary, renews our fascination with our most feared and loved precursors.
Monocle on Sunday, November 5, 2023 – Emma Nelson, Juliet Linley, Oliver Strijbis and Simon Brooke on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to Monocle’s Istanbul correspondent, Hannah Lucinda Smith.
Israel’s current war seems to be as much a brutal insistence on the collective punishment of the Palestinian people as an offensive against Hamas.
The scenes of devastation in Israel’s south on October 7 were almost beyond description. Children killed in their beds, babies taken from their mothers’ arms, the elderly slaughtered in their kitchens. Kfar Aza, a kibbutz close to the separation barrier with Gaza, was burned nearly to the ground: a charnel house. Between a quarter and a third of nearby Kibbutz Nir Oz’s residents were killed or kidnapped. Roughly 10 percent of Kibbutz Be’eri’s population was murdered. At least a dozen of tiny Kibbutz Holit’s two hundred members are dead. The streets of the city of Sderot were littered with bodies. At an outdoor rave near Kibbutz Reim, more than 260 young men and women were gunned down as they tried to flee.
Most of Albert Camus’s evaluations from his promotional trips across the Atlantic are superficial or laughably snotty. What’s intriguing is how quickly he demands that things make sense.
Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World by Albert Camus, edited and with an introduction by Alice Kaplan, translated from the French by Ryan Bloom
Nothing in a professional writer’s life more resembles the life of a traveling salesman than the literary book tour. The superficial difference between writers on tour and salesmen on the road is that writers are encouraged to imagine themselves prized personae whose pitch is eagerly awaited by the anonymous crowd, whereas salesmen know themselves to be an intrusion, albeit one with an edge. While both are beggars at the gate, each one singing for a bit of supper, salesmen are independent entrepreneurs, pretty much calling their own shots; writers, on the other hand, are performers in someone else’s show—a talk at ten, a class at twelve, a panel at three, a reading at seven, and oh, did I forget the ten or twelve interviews tucked in at every break in the day?—all the while being dragged around by people otherwise known as “handlers” who every half-hour tell them how much they are loved, how much their work is prized, how many lives it has changed, and yes, they know how tired you must be by now, but would you mind giving just one more very small interview, this guy’s been waiting all day to talk to you.
Lahaina’s wildfire was the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century. Now the community is grappling with the botched response as it tries to rebuild.
At 4 p.m. on August 8th, Shaun Saribay’s family begged him to get in their car and leave the town of Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The wind was howling, and large clouds of smoke were approaching from the dry hills above the neighborhood. But Saribay—a tattooist, a contractor, and a landlord, who goes by the nickname Buge—told his family that he was staying to guard their house, which had been in the family for generations. “This thing just gonna pass that way, downwind,” Saribay said. At 4:05 p.m., one of his daughters texted from the car, “Daddy please be safe.”
The Hamas massacre, the assaults on Gaza, and what comes after.
The only way to tell this story is to try to tell it truthfully and to know that you will fail.
On the evening of Wednesday, October 18th, with the entire Middle East in a state of mourning and outrage, I took a taxi to the information offices of the Israel Defense Forces, a heavily guarded compound in northwest Tel Aviv. Like many reporters, I’d accepted an invitation to see video evidence of the worst massacre of Jews in generations, certainly in the history of Israel—Hamas’s rampage through Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Kibbutz Be’eri, and other communities near the Gaza Strip, extending to an outdoor electronic-music festival, Nova. At last count, the attack throughout what Israelis call Otef Aza—“the Gaza envelope”—had claimed some fourteen hundred lives; thousands were wounded, and around two hundred and twenty people had been kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. Hamas gave the operation a name, the Al-Aqsa Flood.
October 29, 2023 – From London, Emma Nelson, Isabel Hilton and David Bodanis on the weekend’s top news stories. Also, Monocle editorial director Tyler Brûlé in Hong Kong and our Helsinki correspondent, Petri Burtsoff.
Party officials are vanishing, young workers are “lying flat,” and entrepreneurs are fleeing the country. What does China’s inner turmoil mean for the world?
By Evan Osnos
Twenty-five years ago, China’s writer of the moment was a man named Wang Xiaobo. Wang had endured the Cultural Revolution, but unlike most of his peers, who turned the experience into earnest tales of trauma, he was an ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life. In his novella “Golden Age,” two young lovers confess to the bourgeois crime of extramarital sex—“We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breath.” They are summoned to account for their failure of revolutionary propriety, but the local apparatchiks prove to be less interested in Marx than in the prurient details of their “epic friendship.”
Our accelerating rates of extraction come with immense ecological and social consequences.
The town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, doesn’t have a lot to say for itself. Its Web site, which features a photo of a flowering tree next to a rusty bridge, notes that the town is “conveniently located between Asheville and Boone.” According to the latest census data, it has 2,332 residents and a population density of 498.1 per square mile. A recent story in the local newspaper concerned the closing of the Hardee’s on Highway 19E; this followed an incident, back in May, when a fourteen-year-old boy who’d eaten a biscuit at the restaurant began to hallucinate and had to be taken to the hospital. Without Spruce Pine, though, the global economy might well unravel.
October 22, 2023 – From Zürich, Monocle’s editorial director Tyler Brûlé, Fabienne Kinzelmann, Juliet Linley and Florian Egli discuss the weekend’s hottest topics. Plus: check-ins with our friends and correspondents in Palma, Helsinki and Paris.
Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.
Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us can’t help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood, it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who “would fit into such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, “American Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most famous art work ever produced in the United States.
In many states, lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.
Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.
It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask.By Nathan Heller
Offsetting has been hailed as a fix for runaway emissions and climate change—but the market’s largest firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that weren’t real.
Boomers Daily 