Monocle on Sunday, February 24, 2024: Emma Nelson, Tina Fordham and David Schlesinger on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Zürich, before he flies to Porto and Gwen Robinson, Monocle’s correspondent in Sri Lanka.
Plus: Andrew Mueller joins us from the Munich Security Conference.
Lawsuits. Unlicensed dispensaries. Corporations pushing to get in. The messy rollout of a law that has tried to deliver social justice with marijuana.
The Florida Republican is among the most brazen and controversial figures in Donald Trump’s G.O.P. He’s also among the most influential.
Representative Matt Gaetz arrived at the White House in the last days of 2020, amid a gathering national crisis. President Donald Trump had lost his bid for reëlection the previous month, and his allies were exploring strategies to keep him in office. Though only thirty-eight years old, Gaetz, the scion of a political family in Florida’s Panhandle, had become one of the Republican Party’s most prominent and divisive figures. His dark hair styled in a kind of bouffant, his lips often curled in a wry smile, Gaetz bore a resemblance to Elvis Presley, or, in the description of a Florida friend, “either Beavis or Butt-head.” He was quick-witted and sometimes very funny, and he loved to taunt his enemies, who were numerous, especially in his own party. “He’s the most unpopular member of Congress, with the possible exception of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and he doesn’t care,” a fellow-congressman told me.
Monocle on Sunday, February 11, 2024: Damita Pressl and Sarah Frattaroli join Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, to discuss the weekend’s hottest topics.
We also speak to Monocle’s Helsinki correspondent, Petri Burtsoff, about Finland’s presidential election, Hannah Lucinda Smith gives us the latest news from Istanbul and Monocle’s design editor, Nic Monisse, joins us from London.
The Supreme Court must decide if it will honor the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and bar Donald Trump from holding public office or trash the constitutional defense of democracy against insurrections.
In Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, Ulinka Rublack traces the global connections of the merchants who were the creative agents of the European art market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World by Ulinka Rublack
In 2017, the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moved from São Paulo to a small city in the Amazon. Her new book vividly uncovers how the rainforest is illegally seized and destroyed.
Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World by Eliane Brum, translated from the Portuguese by Diane Whitty
He doesn’t run very fast or jump very high, and seems to prefer the company of horses. But he has mastered the game’s new geometry like nobody else.
When Golden was a young curator in the nineties, her shows, centering Black artists, were unprecedented. Today, those artists are the stars of the art market.
The philosopher was a champion of political and intellectual freedom, but he had no interest in being a martyr. Instead, he shows us how prudence and boldness can go hand in hand.
By Adam Kirsch
Monocle on Sunday, February 4, 2024: Emma Nelson, Isabel Hilton and Vincent McAviney on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Gustavia and our Asia editor in Bangkok, James Chambers.
A federal program promised to bring foreign investment to remote parts of the country. It soon became rife with fraud.
As the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, Bill Stenger rose most days around 6 a.m. and arrived at the slopes before seven. He’d check in with his head snowmaker and the ski-patrol staff, visit the two hotels on the property, and chat with the maintenance workers, the lift operators, the food-and-beverage manager, and the ski-school instructors—a kind of management through constant motion. Stenger is seventy-five, with white hair, wire-rimmed reading glasses, and a sturdy physique that makes him look built for fuzzy sweaters.
We thought we could master nature, but we were playing with fire.
With elections postponed and no end to the war with Russia in sight, Volodymyr Zelensky and his political allies are becoming like the officials they once promised to root out: entrenched.
By Masha Gessen
Monocle on Sunday, January 28, 2024 – Florian Egli and Marcus Schögel join Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, to discuss the weekend’s hottest topics.
We also speak to Monocle’s Helsinki correspondent, Petri Burtsoff, about Finland’s presidential election and Guy De Launey gives us the latest news from the Balkans. Plus: we’re joined by our senior news editor in London, Chris Cermak, and Isabella Smith, owner and founder of Books and Company.
How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy
By Evan Osnos
As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”
There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
By Rachel Syme
When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.
Monocle on Sunday, January 21, 2024 – Georgina Godwin, Charles Hecker and Latika Bourke on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Paris and Monocle’s correspondent, Mary Fitzgerald, reporting from Granada, Spain this week.
