October 15, 2023 – From London, Emma Nelson, Latika Bourke and Yossi Mekelberg on the weekend’s big talking points. We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, as well as our friends and correspondents in Ljubljana, Turin, and Zurich.
Tag Archives: Stories
The New York Review Of Books – November 2, 2023
When the Barbarians Take Over
Uwe Wittstock’s new account of writers considering whether to flee or to remain in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power sheds light on the choices faced by many writers in India and Russia today.
February 1933: The Winter of Literature
by Uwe Wittstock, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles
“It will have become clear to you now,” Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig in mid-February 1933, “that we are heading for a great catastrophe.” Two weeks previously, on January 30, Germany’s eighty-five-year-old president, Paul von Hindenburg, had appointed as chancellor a man who for more than a decade had spoken and written frankly about his resolve to extirpate democracy and Jews from the country. Roth, who left Berlin the same morning Adolf Hitler came to power and never returned to Germany, was desperate to make his complacent friend recognize the perils before them.
Mozart the Modernist
In his new biography, Peter Mackie conjures a vertiginous version of Mozart as the quintessential artist of the modern world.
By Simon Callow
Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces
by Patrick Mackie
Biographies of composers are a relatively recent genre; those of Mozart were among the first examples.Though his life was not as sensational as that of Gesualdo, for example, who murdered his wife, Mozart was, from his early years, an international celebrity whose very personality posed questions beyond the eternal riddle of creativity. How could a mere child—he started performing publicly on the clavichord at the age of six—be so astoundingly versatile? As he toured Europe, going from court to court and salon to salon with his father, Leopold, and his older sister, Maria Anna—a talented musician as well—the delightful little boy in his nattily embroidered outfits enchanted his listeners, readily obliging them with requests, however crass: now playing with the keys covered, now with only one finger, to delighted applause.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 16, 2023
Jake Sullivan’s Trial by Combat
Inside the White House’s battle to keep Ukraine in the fight.
On a Monday afternoon in August, when President Joe Biden was on vacation and the West Wing felt like a ghost town, his national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, sat down to discuss America’s involvement in the war in Ukraine. Sullivan had agreed to an interview “with trepidation,” as he had told me, but now, in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, steps from the Oval Office, he seemed surprisingly relaxed for a congenital worrier. (“It’s my job to worry,” he once told an interviewer. “So I worry about literally everything.”)
The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat
China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost.
By Ian Urbina
In the past few decades, partly in an effort to project its influence abroad, China has dramatically expanded its distant-water fishing fleet. Chinese firms now own or operate terminals in ninety-five foreign ports. China estimates that it has twenty-seven hundred distant-water fishing ships, though this figure does not include vessels in contested waters; public records and satellite imaging suggest that the fleet may be closer to sixty-five hundred ships.
Sunday Morning: Stories From Zurich, London, Marseille And Tel Aviv
October 8, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, Fabienne Kinzelmann and Eemeli Isoaho discuss the weekend’s hottest topics. Plus: check-ins with our friends and correspondents in London and Marseille, and the latest about the forthcoming Frieze London art fair.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – October 9, 2023
Kwame Onwuachi’s Cuisine of the Self
How the chef at Tatiana brought Afro-Caribbean cooking—and his life story—to the center of New York City’s fine-dining scene.
Among the Cabin Fanatics of Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty
For more than a hundred years, the Neshoba County Fair has drawn revellers from all over the country. Why do they keep coming back?
Sunday Morning: Stories From Zurich, London, Bangkok And Ankara
October 1, 2023 – Monocle editorial director Tyler Brûlé, Juliet Linley, Samuel Schumacher and Adrien Garcia unpack the weekend’s hottest topics. Plus: check-ins with our friends and correspondents in London, Bangkok, and Ankara.
Travel: The ‘Treasures Of The Mekong River’ In Laos
” It’s a transport route, water supply and food source for millions of people. The film sets out in a journey to the former royal city of Luang Prabang in Laos. It’s regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in southeast Asia and to this day, religion determines everyday life: Every morning, hundreds of monks walk through the city’s ancient center to collect their alms.
In the isolated villages, some of which are only accessible by boat, most Laotians live off the land. There are huge rice paddies on the fertile banks on the Mekong; rice is the Laotians’ main staple, eaten three times a day here. The river also provides some welcome dietary variation in the form of fish. Locals – and the odd tourist boat – also use the Mekong as a main transit route; even today, the quickest way to reach the country’s larger cities is still by river.
At some point, several hundred kilometers downstream, we reach the capital Vientiane, the economic heart of Laos and a trading center for the famous Laotian woven textiles, exported from here all over the world.
The New York Review Of Books – October 19, 2023
‘We Return Fighting’
By Gary Younge
Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont
The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the United States during World War II was matched only by the ambivalence the United States demonstrated toward the principles on which the war was fought.
The Voyage Out
Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel After Sappho is populated by the notable lesbians who helped modernism blossom.
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
One of my favorite novels is by Compton Mackenzie, a Scottish writer known today, if he is known at all, for his whimsically comic Whisky Galore (1947) and his ambitious early novel Sinister Street (1913). The one I love, however, is Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations (1928), a satirical roman à clef about the sapphic adventures of the unorthodox and eccentric inhabitants of an island modeled after Capri during World War I. After Sappho, a novel by Selby Wynn Schwartz that was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, is many things, none of them satirical, but I kept thinking of the title of Mackenzie’s book as I read it.
Culture: Iceland Review Magazine – Oct/Nov 2023
ICELAND REVIEW MAGAZINE (OCT/NOV 2023): The latest issue features ‘Island In The Making’ – A Scientific Expedition of Surtsey Island; Mycological Magic – Foraging with Iceland’s Mushroom Queen, and more…
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – October 2, 2023
Is an All-Meat Diet What Nature Intended?
The hyper-carnivory movement conjures a time when men hunted and lunch was literally on the hoof. What does the research say?
The Emotionally Haunted Electronic Music of Oneohtrix Point Never
Daniel Lopatin talks with Amanda Petrusich about his collaborations with the Weeknd and the Safdie brothers.
Boomers Daily 