Monocle on Sunday, December 17, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, is joined by Florian Egli and Marcus Schögel to discuss the weekend’s biggest talking points.
Also, a check-ins with our friends and correspondents in London, Helsinki, Paris and Belgrade.
We routinely test for chemicals that cause mutations. What about the dark matter of carcinogens—substances that don’t create cancer cells but rouse them from their slumber?
In the nineteen-seventies, Bruce Ames, a biochemist at Berkeley, devised a way to test whether a chemical might cause cancer. Various tenets of cancer biology were already well established. Cancer resulted from genetic mutations—changes in a cell’s DNA sequence that typically cause the cell to divide uncontrollably. These mutations could be inherited, induced by viruses, or generated by random copying errors in dividing cells. They could also be produced by physical or chemical agents: radiation, ultraviolet light, benzene. One day, Ames had found himself reading the list of ingredients on a package of potato chips, and wondering how safe the chemicals used as preservatives really were.
The law, passed in a frenzy after the First World War, is a disaster. Why is it still on the books?
In March, 1940, Edmund Carl Heine, a forty-nine-year-old American automobile executive, reached an understanding with a company then known as Volkswagenwerk GmbH. Heine, who immigrated to the United States from Germany as a young man, had spent years at Ford, first in Michigan and then in its international operations in South America and Europe, landing finally in Germany. In 1935, two years after the Nazi regime came to power, Ford fired him, for reasons that are unclear. Heine next signed on with Chrysler, in Spain, but the Spanish Civil War was tough on the car business. And so he was out of a job again.
Monocle on Sunday, December 10, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, is joined by Emma Nelson for a festive show during our Christmas market at Midori House, London. Andrew Tuck, Nina dos Santos and Charles Hecker complete the panel.
After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was to be tried for treason. Does the debacle hold lessons for the trials awaiting Donald Trump?
By Jill Lepore
Jefferson Davis, the half-blind ex-President of the Confederate States of America, leaned on a cane as he hobbled into a federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. Only days before, a Chicago Tribune reporter, who’d met Davis on the boat ride to Richmond, had written that “his step is light and elastic.” But in court, facing trial for treason, Davis, fifty-eight, gave every appearance of being bent and broken. A reporter from Kentucky described him as “a gaunt and feeble-looking man,” wearing a soft black hat and a sober black suit, as if he were a corpse. He’d spent two years in a military prison. He wanted to be released. A good many Americans wanted him dead. “We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour-apple tree,” they sang to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.”
The companies had honed a protocol for releasing artificial intelligence ambitiously but safely. Then OpenAI’s board exploded all their carefully laid plans.
At around 11:30 a.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, was having his weekly meeting with senior leaders when a panicked colleague told him to pick up the phone. An executive from OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence startup into which Microsoft had invested a reported thirteen billion dollars, was calling to explain that within the next twenty minutes the company’s board would announce that it had fired Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O. and co-founder. It was the start of a five-day crisis that some people at Microsoft began calling the Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck.
Monocle on Sunday, December 3, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, brings us a festive programme as our Christmas market takes place in Zürich. Featuring Florian Egli and Damita Pressl plus Monocle’s Andrew Tuck and Georgina Godwin.
The promises and failures of the American twentieth century suffuse Ben Lerner’s new book of poems and Tom Piazza’s new novel.
The Lights by Ben Lerner
The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza
Imagine a festive dinner near Topeka during the fall of 1879 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Kansas Territory, with Walt Whitman as a featured speaker. Partially paralyzed by a stroke and described as “reckless and vulgar” by The New York Times—Leaves of Grass was soon to be banned for indecency by the Boston district attorney—Whitman, who had just turned sixty, may well have wondered why he, instead of some respectable graybeard like Emerson, was invited. Was it because he had defended John Brown, the hero of free-soil Kansas? Or was it hoped that a visit might inspire something like his 1871 “Song of the Exposition,” in which Whitman admonished the Muse:
Migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath…
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you.
Nature documentary has of late become a haunted genre. Not so Prehistoric Planet, which revels in portraying that which is already dead and gone, no longer our responsibility.
Prehistoric Planet a BBC Studios series streaming on Apple TV+
Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday
One early myth about the dinosaurs was that they would return. In 1830 Charles Lyell—earth scientist, Scot—gazed into the far future and posited as much in his Principles of Geology, arguing that since the planet’s climate was cyclical (or so he believed), vanished creatures could yet be revived, along with their habitats, when the right conditions came back around: “The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.” As to whether people would get to witness the spectacle of this resurrected bestiary—well, if Lyell was never drawn to that question, it was because the answer was not up for debate. His was an age in which the prospect of Earth bereft of human occupancy was too abominable, too sacrilegious, to contemplate.
The company’s C.E.O. bet it all on a new kind of chip. Now that Nvidia is one of the biggest companies in the world, what will he do next?
By Stephen Witt
The revelation that ChatGPT, the astonishing artificial-intelligence chatbot, had been trained on an Nvidia supercomputer spurred one of the largest single-day gains in stock-market history. When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars. A few months earlier, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., had informed investors that Nvidia had sold similar supercomputers to fifty of America’s hundred largest companies. By the close of trading, Nvidia was the sixth most valuable corporation on earth, worth more than Walmart and ExxonMobil combined. Huang’s business position can be compared to that of Samuel Brannan, the celebrated vender of prospecting supplies in San Francisco in the late eighteen-forties. “There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer,” one Wall Street analyst said.
The conduct of the trials, their fairness, and their possibly damning verdicts will be at the center of the 2024 election. Transparency is crucial.
On November 6th, Donald Trump emerged from a New York City courtroom, where he had testified in a civil trial alleging that he and others in the Trump Organization had committed fraud, and gave himself a great review. “I think it went very well,” he told reporters. “If you were there, and you listened, you’d see what a scam this is.” He meant that the case was a scam and not that his company was. “Everybody saw what happened today,” he went on. “And it was very conclusive.”
The German actress Sandra Hüller probes characters with unusual depth. But to portray a Fascist wife, in “The Zone of Interest,” she reversed her usual approach—and withheld her empathy.
By Rebecca Mead
In “Anatomy of a Fall,” Hüller stars as a successful novelist accused of murdering her husband. The camera often lingers on her face as it shifts like quicksilver between playfulness, defiance, and evasion.Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker
Monocle on Sunday, November 26, 2023 – Emma Nelson, Latika Bourke and Tina Fordham on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to ‘Konfekt’ editor Sophie Grove and get the latest from our editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Tokyo.
In more than a hundred works of fiction, Oates has investigated the question of personality—while doubting that she actually has one.
By Rachel Aviv
hen Joyce Carol Oates was thirty-four, she started a journal. “Query,” she wrote on the first page. “Does the individual exist?” She felt that she knew little about herself—for instance, whether she was honest or a hypocrite. “I don’t know the answer to the simplest of questions,” she wrote. “What is my personal nature?”
In “My Name Is Barbra,” the icon takes a maximalist approach to her own life, studying every trial, triumph, and snack food of a six-decade career.
By Rachel Syme
Seventy years ago, before she was galactically famous, before she dropped an “a” from her first name, before she was a Broadway ingénue, before her nose bump was aspirational, before she changed the way people hear the word “butter,” before she was a macher or a mogul or a decorated matron of the arts, Barbra Streisand was, by her own admission, “very annoying to be around.” She was born impatient and convinced of her potential—the basic ingredients of celebrity, and of an exquisitely obnoxious child. When Streisand was growing up in Brooklyn, in the nineteen-forties, she used to crawl onto the fire escape of her shabby apartment building and conduct philosophical debates with her best friend, Rosyln Arenstein, who was a staunch atheist.
Monocle on Sunday, November 19, 2023 – Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, unpacks the weekend’s hottest topics with Juliet Linley and Christof Münger. We speak to Monocle’s Asia editor, James Chambers, and Christoph Amend, editorial director of ‘Zeit Magazin’.
