August 27, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, is joined by Emma Nelson, Eemeli Isoaho and Chandra Kurt to discuss the weekend’s hottest topics.
Plus: check-ins with our friends and correspondents in London, Ljubljana and Berlin.
Tag Archives: Stories
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – August 28, 2023
Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule
How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.
By Ronan Farrow
Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
I was searching for truth. Instead, I found a family.
By the time I was twenty-one, I had made two short films and was dead set on making a feature. I had gone to a distinguished school in Munich, where I had few friends, and which I hated so passionately that I imagined setting it on fire. There is such a thing as academic intelligence, and I didn’t have it. Intelligence is always a bundle of qualities: logical thought, articulacy, originality, memory, musicality, sensitivity, speed of association, and so on. In my case, the bundle seemed to be differently composed. I remember asking a fellow-student to write a term paper for me, which he did quite easily. In jest, he asked me what I would do for him in return, and I promised that I would make him immortal. His name was Hauke Stroszek. I gave his last name to the main character in my first film, “Signs of Life.” I called another film “Stroszek.”
Sunday Morning: Stories From Zurich, London, Helsinki & Copenhagen
August 20, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, Emma Nelson, Juliet Linely and Florian Egli discuss the weekend’s hottest topics. Plus: check-ins with our correspondents in London, Helsinki and Copenhagen.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – August 21, 2023
How the Writer and Critic Jacqueline Rose Puts the World on the Couch
Enlisting Freud and feminism, she reveals the hidden currents in poetry and politics alike.
By Parul Sehgal
“Psychoanalysis brings to light everything we don’t want to think about,” she said. “If you can acknowledge the complexity of your own heart
The Ukrainians Forced to Flee to Russia
Some are brought against their will. Others are encouraged in subtler ways. But the over-all efforts seem aimed at the erasure of the Ukrainian people.
By Masha Gessen
How Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life
He sorted and systematized and coined names for more than twelve thousand species. What do you call someone like that?
Sunday Morning: Stories And News From London, Helsinki And Istanbul
August 13, 2023 – Emma Nelson, Nina dos Santos and John Everard unpack the weekend’s hottest topics. Plus: check-ins with Petri Burtsoff in Helsinki and Hannah Lucinda Smith in Istanbul.
War Analysis: How Ukraine Sank The Moskva – Russia’s Flagship Missile Cruiser
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (1843 magazine August 7, 2023): A special edition of Editor’s Picks from The Economist’s summer double issue. This week, we take a deep dive into how Ukraine’s virtually non-existent navy sank the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea.
How Ukraine’s virtually non-existent navy sank Russia’s flagship
The Moskva was the most advanced vessel in the Black Sea. But the Ukrainians had a secret weapon, reports Wendell Steavenson with Marta Rodionova
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – August 14, 2023
The Protests Inside Iran’s Girls’ Schools
From the start, women were at the center of the demonstrations that swept Iran last year. Schoolgirls emerged as an unexpected source of defiant energy.
One morning this past winter, the students at a girls’ high school in Tehran were told that education officials would arrive that week to inspect their classrooms and check compliance with the school’s dress code: specifically, the wearing of the maghnaeh, a hooded veil that became a requirement for schoolgirls in the years after the Iranian Revolution. During lunch, a group of students gathered in the schoolyard. A thirteen-year-old in the seventh grade, whom I’ll call Nina, pressed in to hear what was being said. At the time, mass protests against the government were raging across the country; refusing to wear the veil had become a symbol of the movement. An older girl told the others that it was time for them to join together and make a stand.
How Sudan Archives Became the Violin’s Domme
The twenty-nine-year-old musician pursues technical, rather than emotional, manipulation with her instrument. She can coax from it the sounds of an accordion, a drum, or a string orchestra.
“Do you listen to Sudan Archives?” Most of the time, but not every time, the response to this question is one of confusion. How can one listen to the archives of a country? Sudan Archives is, in fact, a twenty-nine-year-old musician—a singer, rapper, producer, arranger, lyricist, and violinist. She creates a “fiddle-punk sound,” as she describes it, that blends folk, ambient, soul, house, and whatever other tradition she feels is available for the taking. Sudan (the name that her colleagues, her fans, and, increasingly, her intimates call her) begins composing by striking a riff on one of her five violins, which she uses differently from most other American producers.
What Should You Do with an Oil Fortune?
The Hunt family owns one of the largest private oil companies in the country. Leah Hunt-Hendrix funds social movements that want to end the use of fossil fuels.
Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures.
Sunday Morning: Stories And News From London, Zurich, Lisbon & Bangkok
August 6, 2023 – Emma Nelson, Damita Pressl and Charles Hecker unpack the weekend’s hottest topics. We also hear from Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, and our Bangkok correspondent, Gwen Robinson.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – August 7, 2023
Inside the Wagner Group’s Armed Uprising
How Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private military company went from fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine to staging a mutiny at home.
By Joshua Yaffa
Revisiting My Rastafari Childhood
Babylon was everything forbidden, and looming all around us—and my father tried to protect us from it at all costs.
How an Amateur Diver Became a True-Crime Sensation
As the founder of Adventures with Purpose, Jared Leisek carved a lucrative niche in the YouTube sleuthing community. Then the sleuths came for him, Rachel Monroe writes.
Sunday Morning: Stories From London & Merano
July 30, 2023 – Emma Nelson, Latika Bourke and David Bodanis on the weekend’s biggest talking points.
We are joined from the Alps by Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, and also speak to our North Africa correspondent, Mary Fitzgerald.
Boomers Daily 