The Israeli government is taking a leaf out of Ariel Sharon’s playbook to try to undo what it regards as Sharon’s biggest mistake. This essay is on the ‘regime change’ planned for Gaza, and the carnage it entails.
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.
Monocle on Saturday, October 21, 2023: Charles Hecker and Georgina Godwin discuss the Rafah border crossing opening in Egypt, turmoil in the US House of Representatives, the UK’s by-election results and hibernation season in Japan.
Plus: Monocle’s Isabella Jewell explores the Horniman Museum’s new exhibition on the history of tea, followed by a tasting of some unusual brews.
REASON MAGAZINE (DECEMBER 2023) – The latest issue features The Endangered Species Act at 50 – Why have so few species been taken off the endangered species list?; Dobbs and the abortion debate is reshaping American Politics; Will Russia ever be free?, and more…
Why have so few species been taken off the endangered species list?
Some progressives want to remove bureaucratic obstacles to growth—in the service of Democrats and big government.
A wave of ballot measures reminds us most Americans are moderate on abortion.
Promise and peril in post-Putin Russia
The Guardian Weekly (October 20, 2023) – The new issue features escalating events in Israel and Gaza that continue to cause deep distress and alarm, with several thousand people known to be dead or wounded on either side of the border. US president Joe Biden was expected to visit Israel this week, amid growing expectations of a ground invasion of Gaza and fears of a wider regional escalation.
Also, a primer on the historical background to events by Chris McGreal, while on the opinion pages the Israeli author and historian Yuval Noah Harari and Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein provide thoughtful and grounded perspectives.
There was sadness for many Aboriginal Australians after a move to recognise Indigenous people in the country’s constitution was rejected in a referendum, as Sarah Collard and Elias Visontay report. Also from Oceania, Henry Cooke examines what aspects of Jacinda Ardern’s political legacy might survive after New Zealand elected a new conservative government.
From Egypt to Hong Kong, the 2010s were a decade when mass protest movements looked set to change the world. But in most cases, the hope embodied by many massive street demonstrations was soon crushed by authoritarian regimes. Vincent Bevins asks organisers and others who were there where it all went wrong.
In the summer of 2016, a fifty-seven-year-old Texan named Stephen McRae drove east out of the rainforests of Oregon and into the vast expanse of the Great Basin. His plan was to commit sabotage. First up was a coal-burning power plant near Carlin, Nevada, a 242-megawatt facility owned by the Newmont Corporation that existed to service two nearby gold mines, also owned by Newmont.
The anti-avocado militias of Michoacán
Phone service was down—a fuse had blown in the cell tower during a recent storm—and even though my arrival had been cleared with the government of Cherán in advance, the armed guard manning the highway checkpoint, decked out in full fatigues, the wrong shade to pass for Mexican military, refused to wave me through. My guide, Uli Escamilla, assured him that we had an appointment, and that we could prove it if only we could call or text our envoy. The officer gripped his rifle with both hands and peered into the windows of our rental car.
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.
The Guardian Weekly (October 13, 2023) – The new issue features Hamas militants’ devastating incursion into Israel from Gaza resulting in thousands of deaths, provoking a declaration of war and upending the fragile diplomacy of the Middle East.
The swirling composite of images on the magazine’s cover this week tries to encapsulate the human chaos and grief of civilians, both in Israel and Gaza, caught in the chaos of war. The central image shows a vast explosion filling the sky above Gaza City, an ominous portent of many violent acts still to come.
As the region faces its worst conflict for 50 years, Bethan McKernan reports from a kibbutz ransacked by militants and finds shocked residents still struggling to process events. Guardian correspondents Harriet Sherwood, Patrick Wintour and Peter Beaumont provide context and analysis, while international affairs commentator Simon Tisdall argues that the ultimate blame lies with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s controversial prime minister.
Ahead of this weekend’s elections in Poland that could give the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party an unprecedented third term in office, Shaun Walker goes on the campaign trail with Donald Tusk whose centre-right Civic Coalition is hoping to reverse the country’s slide away from democratic norms. And Brussels correspondent Lisa O’Carroll reports on the EU’s Granada summit where Hungary’s Viktor Orbán accused fellow leaders of attempting to impose a “diktat” with a proposal on a bloc-wide agreement on migration.
With global temperatures for September described as “gobsmackingly bananas” by leading climatologist Zeke Hausfather, our interview with the president of Cop28 could not be more timely. Sultan Al Jaber explains to environment editor Fiona Harvey how he believes he can square his job as the chief of the United Arab Emirates’ national oil company with leading a global conference focused on net zero carbon emissions.
