In examining this compendium of newsletters spanning the first week of January 2026, we encounter what Foucault (1972) termed an “archive”—not merely a collection of documents, but a system that governs “the appearance of statements as unique events” (p. 129). These digital dispatches from Monocle, ARTnews, CNBC, UBS Insights, The Economist, Semafor, Bloomberg, and The New York Times from January 1-7, 2026, constitute a prismatic snapshot of global consciousness at a moment of profound geopolitical rupture. As Benedict Anderson (1983) observed of newspapers’ role in creating “imagined communities,” these publications perform similar work at a transnational scale, simultaneously fragmenting and integrating the world through their distinctive editorial lenses (p. 35).

The week’s dominant narrative—the United States’ military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—serves as an organizing axis around which other stories orbit: European anxieties about American expansionism, China’s economic resilience, cultural consumption patterns, and the minutiae of daily life that persist despite geopolitical upheaval. This juxtaposition of the extraordinary and the mundane recalls Walter Benjamin’s (1968) conception of history as composed not of grand narratives but of “chips of Messianic time” scattered throughout the everyday (p. 263).

The newsletters and dispatches—chiefly from Monocle but echoed in excerpts from The New York Times—present a striking tableau of a world simultaneously indulging in refined pleasures and teetering on the edge of upheaval. On one side, we encounter the familiar Monocle terrain: meditations on bespoke diaries, alpine military training, pet-friendly private jets, and the latest shifts in luxury fashion houses (Hermès thriving, Versace absorbed by Prada, Chanel under Matthieu Blazy). On the other, a seismic geopolitical rupture dominates: the United States, under a re-elected Donald Trump, executes a swift military operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, installing a pliant interim government while openly coveting the country’s vast oil reserves. This juxtaposition—of artisanal knitwear and gunboat diplomacy, of chocolate soufflé recipes and special-forces raids—reveals deeper tensions in economics, society, policy, and culture at the start of 2026.

This week, thus, presents a startling tableau of a world bifurcated between hyper-accelerated technological optimism and a brutal return to 19th-century geopolitical kinetics. It is a week where the “end of history” has not only been refuted but aggressively dismantled by the spectre of gunboat diplomacy. As the S&P 500 hits record highs fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) speculation, United States special forces conduct a cinematic raid to capture a head of state in Venezuela, and the White House openly contemplates the annexation of Greenland. This cognitive dissonance—between the sleek, friction-free promise of the digital economy and the raw, territorial violence of statecraft—defines the zeitgeist of early 2026.

Three dominant storylines recur. First: a dramatic re-assertion of geopolitics — most visibly the US capture of Nicolás Maduro, the resulting scramble over Venezuela’s oil and the wider reverberations (including talk of Greenland) — which reintroduces hard power and resource geopolitics into headline politics. Second: infrastructural and institutional fragility — from sabotage and mass outages in Berlin to anxieties about Europe’s industrial base and defence-readiness (NATO training in the Alps, debates about aircraft production), and urban governance questions such as New York’s scaffold redesign. Third: cultural-economic reworkings — the fashion sector’s consolidation and the simultaneous resurgence of niche/independent makers; museums experimenting with citizens’ assemblies; new cultural markets (pet-centric airlines, luxury travel); and a persistent conversation about culture and health. These threads are not separate beats but a single, interlocking conjuncture: resource-driven geopolitics reshapes markets and regulatory incentives; weakened or contested infrastructures (physical, legal and institutional) alter risk calculations for firms and publics; and culture — from couture to museums — both indexes and helps manage these transitions.

The U.S. military operation in Venezuela, detailed extensively across these newsletters, represents what Giorgio Agamben (2005) would recognize as a “state of exception” made permanent—a moment when sovereign power suspends legal norms while claiming to act in their service (p. 6). The operation’s very name, “Absolute Resolve,” carries echoes of what Orwell (1949) identified as “newspeak,” language designed to narrow thought rather than expand it (p. 52). The absoluteness brooks no negotiation; the resolution is predetermined.

The New York Times‘ coverage emphasizes the theatrical dimensions of the operation. Trump’s statement—”I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show”—collapses the distinction between governance and entertainment that Neil Postman (1985) warned was fundamental to the degradation of public discourse. When political action becomes indistinguishable from spectacle, we enter what Guy Debord (1967) called “the society of the spectacle,” where “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (p. 12). The image Trump posted of Maduro “blindfolded and handcuffed” functions not as documentation but as what Susan Sontag (1977) termed a “trophy”—visual evidence that transforms human suffering into symbolic capital (p. 14).

The operation’s legal architecture reveals deeper contradictions. As The Economist notes, the Trump administration frames the seizure as a “law enforcement action” rather than military invasion, exploiting what Judith Shklar (1964) identified as “legalism”—the tendency to channel political questions into legal forms that obscure their fundamentally political nature (p. 111). The indictment of Maduro on narco-terrorism charges provides juridical cover for what Semafor more accurately characterizes as “an imperial oil grab.” This recalls Rosa Luxemburg’s (1913) observation that capitalism’s expansion requires constant recourse to “extra-economic force,” with legal frameworks serving to legitimize rather than constrain violence (p. 432).

David Sanger’s characterization of the U.S. approach as a “virtual occupation” merits sustained attention. This concept updates what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) theorized as “Empire”—a new form of sovereignty that operates through networks rather than territories, “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule” (p. xii). Yet the Venezuelan case suggests Empire still requires territorial manifestations: 15,000 troops positioned in the Caribbean, the threat of “boots on the ground,” control over oil infrastructure.

Trump’s explicit acknowledgment of oil as motivation—”U.S. oil companies would go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure... and start making money”—represents a striking departure from previous justifications for intervention. Where the Iraq War was ostensibly about weapons of mass destruction and democracy promotion, Venezuela dispenses with such pretenses. This nakedness recalls what David Harvey (2003) termed “accumulation by dispossession,” the ongoing process whereby capital expands through direct seizure rather than productive investment (p. 145). Venezuela’s 300 billion barrels of proven reserves become, in this framework, what Marx (1867/1976) called “primitive accumulation”—the violent foundation upon which “civilized” economic relations supposedly rest (p. 873).

UBS Insights provides a more sanguine reading, noting that “any recovery in production would require substantial investment given the crumbling infrastructure resulting from years of mismanagement.” This technocratic framing obscures the colonial dynamics at play. As Frantz Fanon (1961) observed, colonialism presents itself as rescue: “The colonialist bourgeoisie... hammers into the native’s mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity” (p. 36). The promise of reconstruction through foreign investment carries the same logic—Venezuela’s resources can only be properly managed by external actors.

The operation’s hemispheric implications receive extensive treatment across publications. The New York Times quotes reporter Jack Nicas: “The moment shook Latin America perhaps more than any single event this century.” This assessment gains credence when viewed through the framework of what Greg Grandin (2006) called “Empire’s Workshop”—his history of how U.S. policy in Latin America served as a laboratory for techniques later deployed globally (p. 2).

The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, as several newsletters term it, represents a formalization of long-standing practice. As Juan González and Joseph Torres (2011) documented in News for All the People, U.S. intervention in Latin America has been continuous since the 19th century, with media consistently framing such actions as defensive rather than aggressive (p. 87). What distinguishes the current moment is the explicitness of the claim to hemispheric dominance, unvarnished by humanitarian rhetoric.

Brazil’s President Lula’s condemnation of the intervention as crossing “an unacceptable line” and the “first step toward a world of violence, chaos and instability” echoes what Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) theorized as the “semi-periphery’s” structural position—nations caught between the core’s power and the periphery’s vulnerability, attempting to maintain autonomy through careful navigation (p. 349). Gabriel Boric of Chile’s warning—”Today, it’s Venezuela. Tomorrow, it could be anyone”—articulates this anxiety with particular clarity.

The differential responses across the political spectrum that Semafor notes (”Those on the left said it confirmed their view of U.S. imperialism... those on the right saw an operation that had liberated Venezuela from a leftist dictator”) demonstrate what Antonio Gramsci (1971) termed “hegemony”—the process whereby dominant groups secure consent through ideological means, making their interests appear universal (p. 12). The right’s celebration of “liberation” and the left’s denunciation of “imperialism” operate within the same discursive field, structured by U.S. power.

Trump’s simultaneous pursuit of Greenland—threatening military action to acquire the autonomous Danish territory—extends the logic of the Venezuelan operation into new terrain. The juxtaposition is instructive. As The Economist reports, “Leaders in Greenland and Denmark are in shock. Is the president serious?” The question itself reveals a cognitive dissonance: the Venezuelan operation demonstrated absolute seriousness, yet European allies struggle to accept that similar logic might apply to them.

Greenland’s significance lies partly in its mineral wealth—rare earth elements crucial for advanced technology—but more fundamentally in its geographic position. As Alfred Thayer Mahan (1890) established in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, control of strategic waterways and positions determines global power (p. 25). Greenland’s proximity to Arctic shipping routes, which climate change is making increasingly navigable, positions it as what Halford Mackinder (1904) might have called a “pivot area”—a zone whose control shapes broader geopolitical configurations (p. 422).

The Danish Prime Minister’s declaration that “Greenland belongs to its people” and European leaders’ joint statement supporting this position articulate what John Ruggie (1982) identified as the post-World War II international order’s core principle: sovereign equality among states, regardless of power disparities (p. 380). Trump’s dismissal of such principles—his press secretary stating “the formal position” is that “Greenland should be part of the United States”—marks what G. John Ikenberry (2001) would recognize as a fundamental challenge to liberal internationalism’s institutional architecture (p. 23).

Semafor‘s report that “the CIA and the National Security Agency have reportedly been tasked with identifying locals sympathetic to America” recalls the long history of what Timothy Mitchell (2002) called “the rule of experts”—the deployment of technical knowledge to facilitate political domination (p. 7). The cultivation of local collaborators follows patterns established throughout the colonial era and refined during the Cold War, documented extensively by William Blum (2004) in Killing Hope (p. 12).

The attempt to “bypass those pesky Danes entirely” by dealing directly with Greenlanders reprises the strategy of indigenous collaboration that Patrick Wolfe (2006) identified as central to settler colonialism: “The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (p. 388). The prospect of enriching Greenlanders through direct deals with the U.S. presents what Gayatri Spivak (1988) termed the colonial dynamic of “white men saving brown women from brown men”—or in this case, American benefactors rescuing Greenlanders from Danish “control” (p. 296).

The newsletters’ coverage of China provides crucial counterpoint to the Venezuelan drama. Semafor notes that China “recorded the first $1 trillion trade surplus in history” despite Trump’s tariffs, while Bloomberg‘s Singapore edition reports that “China’s increasingly advanced military capabilities are alarming the West and reshaping the global balance of naval power.”

This juxtaposition of economic and military strength recalls Paul Kennedy’s (1987) thesis in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that long-term geopolitical position derives from relative economic capacity (p. 515). China’s ability to maintain growth while developing indigenous AI capabilities (the DeepSeek example cited across newsletters) suggests what Giovanni Arrighi (2007) identified as a potential “Beijing Consensus” emerging to rival Washington’s neoliberal model (p. 89).

The Economist‘s observation that “China was able to make up for reduced exports to the U.S. by selling more to other markets” points to the limits of bilateral pressure in an interconnected global economy. As Branko Milanovic (2019) argued in Capitalism, Alone, contemporary global capitalism features “two systems” that compete while remaining interdependent (p. 11). The U.S. cannot simply “decouple” from China without disrupting value chains that American corporations depend upon.

The newsletters also note growing concerns about China’s influence in other nations’ domestic politics and infrastructure. Semafor reports that “Beijing’s unofficial ban on Korean pop culture will likely stay in place,” demonstrating what Joseph Nye (2004) termed “soft power”—the ability to shape preferences through cultural means (p. 5). Yet this sits alongside “hard power” manifestations: China’s export controls on rare earths to Japan, its development of “carrier killer” missiles, and its advancing submarine capabilities.

Multiple newsletters address whether the Venezuelan operation provides a “template” for Chinese action against Taiwan. Semafor quotes experts who dismiss the analogy: “Beijing already employs aggressive tactics against Taipei, regardless of international norms; any shift in strategy would come from China’s own calculations, not ‘inspiration’ from the U.S.”

This debate reveals competing theories of international relations. The “template” concern reflects what Alexander Wendt (1992) called the “social construction” of international politics—the idea that state behavior depends on shared understandings and precedents (p. 397). If the U.S. can seize a leader with impunity, perhaps China can unify Taiwan by force. The counterargument adopts a more realist position, suggesting states act based on material capabilities and interests rather than normative constraints (Mearsheimer, 2001, p. 2).

Yet as The New York Times observes, there are crucial differences: “Taiwan is a vibrant democracy, not a corrupt authoritarian government—plus it makes the advanced microchips the U.S. relies on.” These distinctions matter not because of any inherent moral logic in international politics, but because they shape the calculations of other powerful actors. Japan’s indication that it might respond militarily to an attack on Taiwan, reported in these newsletters, reflects what Thomas Schelling (1960) analyzed as the interdependence of commitments—each nation’s decision depends on expectations about others’ responses (p. 35).

The newsletters’ financial coverage presents a remarkable disjuncture between market performance and geopolitical volatility. CNBC notes that “the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average notched fresh records” following Maduro’s capture, while UBS Insights observes: “Markets keep climbing like a teenager with noise-canceling headphones, oblivious to the chaos around them.”

This apparent paradox resolves when we recognize, following Hyman Minsky (1986), that financial markets operate according to an internal logic often disconnected from “real” economic fundamentals (p. 172). Minsky’s “financial instability hypothesis” suggests that periods of prosperity breed complacency, as investors increasingly take on risk based on recent experience rather than structural analysis. The newsletters’ repeated emphasis on AI-driven growth, particularly in semiconductors and data infrastructure, echoes previous boom periods—the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble—when transformative technologies seemingly justified perpetual expansion.

The Economist‘s observation that “geopolitics only has long-term market impacts when it affects variables like growth and inflation” adopts what economists call the “efficient market hypothesis”—the idea that prices incorporate all available information (Fama, 1970, p. 383). Yet as Robert Shiller (2000) demonstrated in Irrational Exuberance, markets are fundamentally shaped by psychological and sociological factors, not merely rational calculation (p. 135). The “wow effect” that Bloomberg‘s review of Hong Kong’s Peridot bar notes—the emphasis on spectacle over substance—applies equally to financial markets, where narrative often trumps analysis.

The newsletters devote considerable attention to commodity markets, particularly oil and rare earth elements. CNBC reports that “oil prices slid to the lowest level in three weeks after US President Donald Trump said Venezuela will relinquish up to 50 million barrels of oil,” while Semafor notes concerns about China’s control over rare earth supplies.

These dynamics reflect what Michael Klare (2001) termed “resource wars”—conflicts increasingly driven by competition for essential materials (p. 6). Yet the resource in question matters profoundly. Oil, as Timothy Mitchell (2011) argued in Carbon Democracy, structures political possibilities in ways that renewable energy sources do not (p. 12). The concentration of oil in extractable reservoirs creates chokepoints where organized labor can exercise power; it also creates the geographic concentration of wealth that enables resource nationalism.

Venezuela’s nationalization of oil infrastructure in the 2000s, now cited by Trump as “stolen” rights that U.S. companies deserve to reclaim, followed a long history of what Fernando Coronil (1997) called “the magical state”—the petro-state’s ability to generate wealth seemingly independent of productive labor (p. 5). The promise of Venezuelan oil “making money” for both Venezuelans and Americans obscures the distributional questions: who captures the rents? This is not a technical matter but, as Terry Lynn Karl (1997) demonstrated in The Paradox of Plenty, a fundamentally political question that oil wealth tends to resolve in favor of concentrated elite interests (p. 16).

ARTnews‘ coverage of collapsing auction prices and rising art-backed loan defaults provides a different window into capital’s metabolism. The observation that “half of non-bank lenders offering loans against artworks experienced defaults in 2024” signals broader credit stress, while the note that “China’s property crisis helped crash its art market” demonstrates the interconnection between real estate speculation and cultural consumption.

Pierre Bourdieu (1984) analyzed art collecting as a form of “cultural capital”—a means of converting economic resources into social distinction (p. 12). The art market’s dependence on ultra-high-net-worth individuals makes it particularly sensitive to shifts in wealth concentration. When ARTnews reports that “Vincent van Gogh’s Le Zouave sold at a private auction for just above $190 million,” we witness what Thorstein Veblen (1899) termed “conspicuous consumption”—spending designed to signal status rather than satisfy need (p. 68).

The controversy over AI-generated “book clubs” that ARTnews also covers—Amazon and ElevenLabs offering AI bots to discuss books with readers—extends similar logic into cultural consumption. The Authors Guild’s objection that this creates “a new, interactive book format, for which authors’ rights should be renegotiated” points to what Mark Fisher (2009) identified as capitalism’s tendency to colonize all domains of experience, converting even reading from a contemplative activity into an “interactive” commodity (p. 9).

The widespread protests in Iran, sparked by currency collapse and economic stagnation, receive extensive coverage across newsletters. The New York Times reports that demonstrations have spread to 27 of Iran’s 31 provinces, with at least 35 dead including four children. The government’s response—offering citizens a monthly cash handout of $7 alongside an anti-corruption drive and the firing of the central bank chief—exemplifies what James Scott (1998) called the “authoritarian high modernist” state’s combination of technocratic intervention and coercive control (p. 4).

The protests’ economic origins recall Göran Therborn’s (2013) observation that inequality’s most politically volatile form is often not absolute deprivation but “existential inequality”—the denial of recognition and dignity (p. 49). Iranian demonstrators’ chants of “freedom” and “death to the dictator,” alongside economic demands, suggest what E.P. Thompson (1971) identified in his study of 18th-century English bread riots: economic grievances become political when they violate shared norms about justice and reciprocity (p. 79).

Trump’s threat to intervene if Iranian authorities “violently kill” protesters introduces another layer of complexity. As Noam Chomsky (1999) documented extensively, U.S. declarations of humanitarian concern typically correlate poorly with actual patterns of intervention, which track more closely with strategic interests (p. 23). The selective invocation of human rights—Venezuela’s Maduro seized, Iran’s protesters championed—demonstrates what Samuel Moyn (2010) called the “last utopia” of human rights discourse, its deployment serving as often to legitimize power as to constrain it (p. 4).

Europe’s response to Trump’s Venezuelan operation and Greenland threats reveals fractures in transatlantic relations. The Economist notes that while European leaders issued statements supporting Denmark, they “have been hesitant to criticize Trump’s military interventionism in Venezuela, although his actions there have even unsettled some of Europe’s far right.”

This hesitation reflects Europe’s structural position in what Perry Anderson (2009) called the “American imperium”—simultaneously dependent on U.S. security guarantees and chafing under American dominance (p. 12). The joint statement defending Greenland’s sovereignty carries limited force when European NATO members remain reliant on American military capabilities for collective defense. As The Economist observes, European leaders are “still dependent on Washington to contain Russia” and therefore “have little appetite to antagonize Washington ‘over a distant theater.’”

The divergence between European far-right support for Trump’s cultural politics but discomfort with his territorial expansionism points to what Cas Mudde (2019) identified as the “populist radical right’s” fundamental contradiction: nationalism that celebrates sovereignty at home while aligning with foreign powers that threaten it (p. 7). Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán’s admiration for Trump runs up against their own rhetoric about national self-determination when that determination is exercised by Venezuela or Greenland.

The inauguration of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s mayor receives notably different treatment across newsletters. The New York Times emphasizes the historical significance—”the first Muslim and South Asian to govern America’s largest city”—while also noting that “what comes next will determine whether Mamdani will be viewed as the catalyst for a new era or as a failed idealist.”

Mamdani’s self-identification as a “democratic socialist” and his focus on affordability position him within a longer tradition that Mike Davis (1986) traced in Prisoners of the American Dream—periodic attempts to build an independent left political force within U.S. cities (p. 8). His campaign’s focus on “halalflation” (rising prices for street food) and public transportation reflects what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2019) called the “new municipal agenda”—addressing structural inequality through local policy innovation (p. 167).

Semafor‘s reporting that Mamdani’s allies see an opportunity to build “a new national party, operating like a coalition partner to Democrats, that could leverage successes in governing” echoes what Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (1977) analyzed in Poor People’s Movements—the tension between building institutional power and maintaining mobilized grassroots pressure (p. 12). The question is whether municipal office will enable broader transformation or, as happened with previous progressive mayors, lead to cooptation and compromise.

The criticism that Mamdani rescinded executive orders on antisemitism, reported by The New York Times, immediately subjects his administration to the polarized conflicts over Israel-Palestine that have fractured left coalitions. As Judith Butler (2012) observed, accusations of antisemitism increasingly function to police permissible discourse about Israel and Zionism, creating a terrain where principled positions become difficult to articulate (p. 2).

Subscribe

The newsletters’ cultural coverage reveals how platform capitalism reshapes aesthetic experience and cultural production. ARTnews reports on Amazon and ElevenLabs’ AI-generated “book clubs,” which allow readers to “generate discussion of characters, plot, or themes with AI bots.” The Authors Guild’s objection that publishers and authors cannot opt out points to what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) termed “surveillance capitalism”—the unilateral claiming of human experience as raw material for commercial exploitation (p. 8).

This transformation extends beyond books. Semafor‘s coverage of BTS’s comeback after a four-year hiatus notes the group’s enormous economic impact—estimated at 0.2% of South Korea’s GDP before their break—alongside concerns that “many acts are stagnating creatively and haven’t replicated BTS’ success.” The industrialization of K-pop, analyzed by Jin Lee (2019), creates what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944/2002) called the “culture industry”—the standardization of cultural production according to industrial principles (p. 94).

Yet the newsletters also document resistance to and complication of platform dominance. Monocle‘s extensive coverage of independent fashion designers, small-batch food producers, and niche cultural institutions presents what Trebor Scholz (2016) might recognize as “platform cooperativism”—attempts to create alternative models of cultural and economic organization (p. 12). The article on Quiet Corner, a Tokyo-style kissaten in Singapore serving specialty coffee in an elegant setting with 5,000 vinyl records, represents what David Harvey (2012) called the production of “spaces of hope”—localized attempts to create different social relations (p. 182).

Multiple newsletters note a broader trend toward analog experiences and aesthetics. Monocle praises keeping physical diaries with pen and paper; Bloomberg describes listening bars in Tokyo where audiophiles gather to hear music on high-end equipment; The Economist covers the popularity of vinyl records and film photography among young people.

This embrace of analog technologies might seem paradoxical in an age of digital ubiquity, yet it reflects what Svetlana Boym (2001) identified as “restorative nostalgia”—not a desire to return to the past but to recover experiences that modernity has foreclosed (p. 41). The appeal of writing with fountain pens or listening to vinyl operates according to what Walter Benjamin (1936/1968) called “aura”—the sense of unique presence that mechanical reproduction diminishes (p. 221).

Simultaneously, this trend has been fully incorporated into consumer capitalism. The expensive Japanese pens, audiophile turntables, and film cameras that Monocle features are luxury goods that convert cultural capital into economic capital and vice versa. As Frédéric Jameson (1991) observed, postmodern culture is characterized by “pastiche”—the evacuation of historical depth in favor of stylistic signifiers (p. 16). Vinyl records sold at Urban Outfitters to people too young to remember when records were the only format do not represent genuine historical continuity but its commodified simulation.

The newsletters’ wellness coverage—The New York Times‘ five-day brain health challenge, Monocle‘s profiles of Alpine spas, Semafor‘s report on South Korea’s president calling for state-funded hair loss treatments—participates in what Nikolas Rose (2007) termed “biological citizenship,” the reconfiguration of identity around somatic and neurological characteristics (p. 132).

The Times‘ brain health program, with its emphasis on individual behavioral modification (better sleep, specific foods, exercise), exemplifies what Barbara Cruikshank (1999) called “technologies of citizenship”—practices that shape subjects who govern themselves according to expert knowledge (p. 1). The challenge format itself—five days of prescribed activities—mirrors the gamification that Sarah Sharma (2014) identified as characteristic of neoliberal temporality, where even self-care becomes a project requiring optimization (p. 89).

South Korea’s situation presents a more state-directed version of biological citizenship. The president’s proposal to cover hair loss treatments through public health insurance, motivated by rigid beauty standards where “your appearance is also a credential,” demonstrates how biopolitical governance operates differently across national contexts. As Sun-ha Hong (2020) documented in Technologies of Speculation, South Korean governance increasingly centers on managing biological and aesthetic potential as economic resource (p. 145).

Bloomberg‘s Singapore edition documents that city-state’s infrastructure expansion—three major MRT extensions coming online in 2026, completion of a 13-kilometer harbourfront promenade in Hong Kong, new highways in both cities. This attention to circulation reflects what Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991) called the “production of space”—the ways that spatial arrangements both enable and constrain social possibilities (p. 26).

The completion of Hong Kong’s harbourfront walkway after “a dozen-plus years of work and wrangling” exemplifies what Deborah Cowen (2014) analyzed as infrastructure’s political dimensions—not neutral technical systems but “sticky assemblages” that embody particular visions of social order (p. 23). A continuous pedestrian promenade privileges certain forms of mobility (walking, running) while arguably naturalizing the separation of the waterfront from productive activity that its construction required.

Singapore’s imposition of a “green fuel levy” on air passengers—up to S$41.60 per ticket—represents what Peter Dauvergne (2016) termed “environmentalism of the rich,” market-based mechanisms that preserve elite consumption while symbolically addressing ecological crisis (p. 8). The levy funds purchase of sustainable aviation fuel, allowing wealthy travelers to maintain mobility while ostensibly reducing emissions. As Andreas Malm (2016) observed, such approaches ignore capitalism’s fundamentally expansionary logic, attempting to reform rather than transform the systems that produce environmental destruction (p. 391).

The newsletters document climate change’s highly differentiated impacts. Monocle notes that Southeast Asia “will be bracing for more wet weather in 2026, brought on by a cooling of the Pacific Ocean, known as the La Niña phenomenon. Losses across the region are mounting; hundreds of people have died and at least $20 billion worth of damage has been caused to infrastructure, crops, and commerce.”

Meanwhile, The Economist reports on Kenya’s lakes rising due to “shifting rainfall patterns,” displacing 75,000 people and destroying agricultural land. The matter-of-fact tone—”The lakes have risen in the past... but that’s little consolation for [displaced people who] now cannot go home without risking confrontations with hippopotamuses”—illustrates what Rob Nixon (2011) called “slow violence,” environmental destruction that occurs gradually enough to evade dramatic representation (p. 2).

This unevenness extends to adaptation capacity. Monocle features Amsterdam as “Europe’s Original Climate-Resilient City,” celebrating its sophisticated water management systems. The Netherlands can afford extensive infrastructure to manage sea-level rise; Kenya’s displaced lakeside communities cannot. As Christian Parenti (2011) argued in Tropic of Chaos, climate change acts as “threat multiplier” that exacerbates existing inequalities, with the Global South bearing disproportionate costs for emissions generated primarily in the North (p. 7).

The coverage of energy infrastructure reveals competing visions of technological futures. Monocle profiles district heating systems in Nordic countries that pair data centers with residential heating—capturing waste heat from computer processing to warm homes. This represents what Jesse LeCavalier (2016) analyzed as “infrastructural intelligence,” the creative reconfiguration of technical systems to serve multiple purposes (p. 112).

Simultaneously, Semafor notes that “Southeast Asia is set to miss its 2025 renewable energy target, and fossil fuels continue to dominate the power mix.” This reflects what Gregory Unruh (2000) termed “carbon lock-in”—the ways that existing infrastructure, institutions, and interests create path dependencies that resist transformation (p. 817). The region’s continued investment in coal and gas power plants creates sunk costs that will shape energy systems for decades.

The controversy over nuclear energy appears obliquely in coverage of France’s energy policy and Japan’s post-Fukushima reconstruction. As Gabrielle Hecht (2012) demonstrated in Being Nuclear, nuclear technology carries cultural and political meanings beyond its technical characteristics (p. 15). France’s continued nuclear reliance and Japan’s cautious return to it after the 2011 disaster reflect different national imaginaries about risk, progress, and energy sovereignty.

The very form of these newsletters—brief items juxtaposing disparate topics, links to longer articles, daily or weekly delivery—embodies what Zygmunt Bauman (2000) called “liquid modernity,” characterized by fragmentation, speed, and the constant displacement of stability (p. 6). Knowledge arrives as discrete packets requiring minimal sustained attention, tailored to reading on mobile devices during commutes or between meetings.

Yet different publications structure this fragmentation distinctively. Monocle‘s lengthy, literary pieces on fashion designers and Scandinavian architecture contrast sharply with CNBC‘s bullet points on market movements. The New York Times maintains narrative coherence through reporter bylines and sustained analysis; Semafor explicitly foregrounds its algorithmic curation with sections like “London Review of Substacks.” These variations suggest what Michael Schudson (1978) identified as different journalistic epistemologies, each constructing reality according to distinct professional norms and market pressures (p. 6).

The newsletters’ international focus—Bloomberg from Singapore, UBS from Zurich, The Economist from London, Semafor from New York—creates what Arjun Appadurai (1996) termed “mediascapes,” imagined worlds constituted by flows of information that transcend territorial boundaries (p. 33). A reader in Manila might begin their day with The New York Times‘ interpretation of Venezuelan politics, proceed to Monocle‘s recommendations for Oslo restaurants, and conclude with Bloomberg‘s analysis of Singapore’s property market. This global circulation of perspectives potentially enables cosmopolitan consciousness; it also, as Edward Said (1978) warned, can reproduce metropolitan perspectives that marginalize non-Western viewpoints (p. 12).

The New York Times‘ solicitation of reader advice on “how you stay informed without feeling overwhelmed” acknowledges what Clay Shirky (2008) identified as the contemporary information problem: not scarcity but “filter failure,” the difficulty of managing abundance (p. 15). Readers’ responses reveal diverse coping strategies: consuming only positive news, comparing multiple ideological sources, forcing oneself to exercise after reading upsetting content, watching puppy videos.

These individual tactics address symptoms rather than causes. As Robert McChesney (2013) argued, the commercialized media system produces information overload as a feature, not a bug—fragmentation and sensationalism drive engagement metrics that determine advertising revenue (p. 89). The newsletters themselves participate in this dynamic even as they purport to curate signal from noise.

The recommendation to “give yourself moments of grace by noticing the weeds growing around buildings” offers a different epistemological stance. This counsel, echoing what Rebecca Solnit (2016) called “hope in the dark,” suggests that managing information requires not better filtering but occasional disconnection.

The most arrestive narrative of the week is undoubtedly the United States’ intervention in Venezuela, resulting in the capture of Nicolás Maduro. This event, described by Semafor and The Economist as a crystallization of a new “Donroe Doctrine”—a portmanteau of Trump and the 1823 Monroe Doctrine—signals a definitive shift from the liberal international order to a starker realism.

The raid, executed with “textbook” precision and watched by President Trump “like a television show,” evokes Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord (1967/1994) argued that social relations are mediated by images; here, geopolitical dominance is performed as media content, intended as much for domestic consumption as for strategic gain. The operation creates a “virtual occupation,” where control is exerted not through boots on the ground but through the threat of overwhelming kinetic force and the control of resources (oil).

This aggressive reassertion of a sphere of influence aligns with the offensive realism propounded by John Mearsheimer. In The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer (2001) posits that great powers will always seek regional hegemony to ensure their security. The Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela, coupled with renewed threats to annex Greenland, suggest a shedding of the diplomatic niceties that previously veiled these impulses. As The Economist notes, this is a world “governed by strength,” a sentiment that echoes the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Thucydides, ca. 431 B.C.E./1972).

However, the regional reaction—outrage from Brazil and Mexico, caution from Europe—highlights the tension between this neo-imperial thrust and the concept of Westphalian sovereignty. The installation of a “pliant” interim government in Caracas raises questions about legitimacy that recall Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. Schmitt (1922/1985) defined the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.” By suspending the norms of international non-intervention, the U.S. has asserted a global state of exception, prioritizing resource security (oil) over the proceduralism of international law.

The removal of an entrenched incumbent in Caracas and the explicit tying of the operation to control of oil supplies recasts foreign policy as a direct instrument of economic strategy. The newsletters repeatedly frame Venezuela as a resource problem first and a polity problem second, and they register anxiety at the return of overt interventionist practice (what some pieces call a revived “gunboat” or “Donroe” doctrine).

Analytically this episode sits comfortably in a realist account of international politics: great powers view strategic resources as instruments of security and leverage (cf. Mearsheimer, 2001). But it also exposes limits and costs: occupying or directing resource extraction requires functioning domestic institutions, legal indemnities for investors, and the political legitimacy to stabilise supply chains — none of which are guaranteed by a spectacular raid alone. The newsletters capture this ambivalence: markets cheer the prospect of oil access even while commentators warn of political and legal obstacles.

Beyond classical realism, two further frames are useful. First, political economy: state action to secure resources becomes itself an economic policy instrument — a blunt industrial intervention that reshapes incentives for firms, insurers and traders (see The Economist commentary on oil majors’ hesitancy). Second, normative/political theory: the reappearance of coercive intervention raises familiar ethical questions about sovereignty and justice in forcible regime change (questions addressed at length by Walzer’s reflections on war and legitimacy). (Walzer, 1977).

A second cluster of texts in the newsletters — Berlin’s blackout, NATO alpine training and the debate about Europe’s industrial capacity — points to an underappreciated theme: the politics of infrastructure. When critical nodes (power lines, airports, shipyards, supply chains) fail or are threatened, the social and political order is made precarious. The Berlin outage is a microcosm: citizens lose heat, hospitals fall back on generators, schools close, and the political debate turns to surveillance, resilience and the policing of sabotage.

Two interpretive moves help: first, see infrastructure as political technology (following scholarship that treats pipelines, grids and ports as sites where governance, market logics and strategic rivalry meet). Second, treat the public reaction — mutual aid, neighbourliness, and the mobilisation of private hotels or informal shelters — as a form of civic adaptation that both compensates for and reveals the limits of formal institutions. This duality — institutional brittleness and civic robustness — is the operating logic of many of the week’s items.

Policy implication: securing the “soft” function of the state (permanent maintenance capacity, redundant supply chains, rapid procurement and legal clarity) is as decisive as deploying hard assets. The newsletters’ coverage of stalled aircraft manufacturing and slow infrastructure projects underscores that contemporary security is as much industrial-policy as geopolitics.

While commandos breached palaces in Caracas, global markets remained audaciously buoyant. The CNBC and Bloomberg newsletters report record highs for the S&P 500 and the Dow, driven by the AI sector and stocks like Nvidia. This disconnect between geopolitical instability and market euphoria illustrates what Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism”—the pervasive sense that the capitalist system is the only viable reality, capable of metabolizing even the most disruptive crises into profit opportunities (Fisher, 2009).

The newsletters reveal a “K-shaped” global economy of stark contrasts. On one limb of the K, we have the “AI supercycle” boosting US productivity and the luxury fashion houses of Paris and Milan recalibrating for 2026. On the downward limb, we see the deadly cost-of-living protests in Iran, where the price of survival has outstripped the populace’s endurance, and the affordability crisis in New York City that propelled the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to the mayoralty.

This inequality brings to mind Thomas Piketty’s warnings in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty (2014) argues that without intervention, the return on capital ($r$) exceeds the rate of economic growth ($g$), leading to extreme concentration of wealth. The juxtaposition of luxury “statement knitwear” (Monocle) and the desperate street protests in Tehran serves as a grim validation of this thesis. The “market” has become an entity distinct from the “economy” of human subsistence, operating in a layer of abstraction insulated from the fires—literal and metaphorical—burning below.

The tragic fire at Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, which claimed 40 lives, serves as a sombre counterpoint to the week’s triumphalist narratives. Occurring in a space of leisure and privilege, it is a reminder of the fragility inherent in human systems. It echoes the sudden, arbitrary nature of catastrophe found in Albert Camus’ The Plague, where disaster strikes amidst the banality of daily life, stripping away the illusion of safety (Camus, 1947/1991).

In the aftermath of such tragedies, and amidst the relentless “back to work” pressure noted by Monocle’s Tyler Brûlé, there is a palpable sense of exhaustion. Byung-Chul Han, in The Burnout Society, describes a neuronal violence inherent in a society driven by the imperative of achievement (Han, 2015). The newsletters’ focus on “wellness,” from “MIND diets” to “alcohol-light” lifestyles in Singapore, can be read as a symptom of this burnout—individualized attempts to cope with systemic overload.

Yet, there are glimpses of a search for deeper meaning. The ARTNews reports on British museums establishing “citizens’ assemblies” to democratize decision-making suggest a desire to reconnect cultural institutions with the public sphere. This aligns with the ideas of Jürgen Habermas regarding the necessity of communicative action to legitimize social institutions (Habermas, 1981). Furthermore, the turn towards “vernacular architecture” and “local ecology” in design (Monocle) reflects a yearning for what philosopher Simone Weil called “rootedness”—a reaction against the homogenizing forces of globalization (Weil, 1949/2002).

Technology in 2026 is not merely an economic engine; it is a mechanism of control and a challenger to human agency. The use of AI in medicine (pancreatic cancer detection) offers hope, yet the proliferation of AI in creative industries (Bollywood filmmaking, “interactive” ebooks) raises concerns about the displacement of human authorship.

Moreover, the digital realm is increasingly contested terrain. The Australian ban on social media for under-16s, and France’s consideration of the same, signals a pushback against what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019). The state is attempting to reclaim the developmental space of childhood from the algorithmic imperatives of Big Tech. Conversely, the “sabotage” of undersea cables and the “cyber-harassment” trials in France highlight the vulnerability of the digital infrastructure upon which modern life depends.

ARTnews and related coverage highlight an important institutional experiment: museums convening citizens’ assemblies to help shape policy and priorities. This is not mere PR; it is an institutional reflex — museums, long guardians of cultural capital, are experimenting with deliberative forms to enhance legitimacy and relevance.

Habermas’s account of the public sphere is instructive here: institutions that mediate public meaning can either reproduce elite closure or help cultivate discursive spaces where reasoned deliberation reshapes policy (Habermas, 1989). A citizens’ assembly in a museum is a small experiment in the latter; its success will depend on the quality of information, the distribution of influence (experts vs. lay participants), and, crucially, whether institutions are prepared to act on the assembly’s recommendations rather than performatively convene them.

The Monocle fashion pieces do several things at once: they note consolidation (Prada buys Versace), celebrate enduring luxury houses (Hermès), and insist that independence and narrative-driven, craft-oriented brands will shape taste — especially as consumers recoil from conspicuous “logomania” toward niche signals of distinction.

Here Bourdieu’s classic argument is useful: taste functions as social signalling; changes in market structure (platform amplification, celebrity cycles, conglomerate consolidation) reconfigure the fields of cultural production, but the fundamental mechanism of distinction — who gets to display what and why — persists (Bourdieu, 1984). Simultaneously, Benjamin’s insight about reproducibility helps explain the paradox: the “aura” of artisanal or bespoke pieces is precisely what gains value in an era saturated by mechanically reproduced images and influence metrics (Benjamin, 1968).

Economically, the newsletters show that fashion’s uncertainty sits beside a calculable investor logic: conglomerates buy established names to capture intangible cultural capital and amortise investments across global retail, while independent houses capture scarcity and authenticity premiums. That is why readers are told to watch Hermès and Versace in the same breath: one is a perennial store of value, the other a leveraged creative bet.

The Monocle entries curate a vision of cosmopolitan aspiration: Natalie Theodosi celebrates a post-shakeout fashion landscape where heritage houses like Hermès and Chanel reaffirm enduring value, while independents and joyful daywear signal renewal. Architectural reflections on snow-bound cabins, Ukrainian-designed puffer jackets, and dog-centric airlines underscore a preoccupation with comfort, mobility, and narrative-driven consumption. Cultural recommendations—Korean novels, Shakespeare adaptations, Belgian pop—complement recipes and travel notes, reinforcing Monocle’s ethos of thoughtful, aesthetically attuned living. Yet this idyll is repeatedly interrupted by reports of crisis: a deadly New Year’s Eve fire in a Swiss ski resort, NATO’s cold-weather training in the Alps amid Arctic tensions, Berlin’s infrastructure blackout claimed by far-left activists, and, most dramatically, the U.S. intervention in Venezuela. The operation—framed alternately as law enforcement, regime stabilization, and resource extraction—provokes global condemnation from Latin America, China, and Russia, while European responses range from cautious to tacitly relieved. Trump’s subsequent threats toward Colombia, Cuba, and Greenland amplify the sense of a reasserting “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

Economic Dimensions

The fashion coverage illustrates a luxury sector navigating consolidation and creative risk. Hermès’s resilience despite macroeconomic headwinds and Chanel’s reinvention under Blazy echo Thorstein Veblen’s classic analysis of conspicuous consumption as a marker of status that persists through economic turbulence (Veblen, 1899/2007). The Prada Group’s acquisition of Versace for $1.38 billion exemplifies the concentration of ownership in an industry where scale increasingly determines survival—a trend documented in Dana Thomas’s Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (Thomas, 2007), which warned that corporatization erodes the very aura that sustains premium pricing. Simultaneously, the Venezuelan intervention lays bare the enduring primacy of energy commodities. Trump’s candid admission that U.S. firms will “fix the badly broken infrastructure… and start making money” recalls Daniel Yergin’s magisterial history of oil as the lifeblood of 20th- and 21st-century geopolitics (Yergin, 1991/2011). Venezuela’s reserves—larger than Saudi Arabia’s—become both prize and pretext, underscoring how resource nationalism and great-power rivalry continue to shape global markets even in an ostensibly post-oil age.

Social and Cultural Currents

Andrew Tuck’s paean to diary-keeping invokes a quiet act of resistance against digital ephemerality, resonant with Michel Foucault’s late reflections on techniques of the self—practices of writing that foster ethical self-formation amid overwhelming noise (Foucault, 1988). In an era of algorithmic curation and geopolitical shock, the private notebook becomes a refuge of agency. Pet-friendly airlines and narrative-driven knitwear (Bode’s Peter Pan–inspired cardigan) reflect a broader anthropomorphic turn in consumer culture, where emotional connection and storytelling compensate for alienation. This mirrors Arlie Hochschild’s concept of “emotional labor” extended into leisure and consumption (Hochschild, 1983/2012), as brands increasingly sell not merely products but affective experiences. Culturally, the newsletters’ eclectic recommendations—from Lee Heejoo’s visceral K-pop kidnapping novel to Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet—suggest a hunger for narratives that grapple with grief, identity, and rupture, perhaps unconsciously mirroring the global mood.

Policy and Geopolitical Implications

The Alpine training of NATO forces, framed against Arctic strategizing post-Sweden and Finland’s accession, signals a quiet re-militarization of Europe’s high north. This echoes Mary Kaldor’s thesis on “new wars” blending traditional interstate rivalry with non-state and environmental dimensions (Kaldor, 2012). Most consequential, however, is the Venezuelan operation. By bypassing regime change in favor of a “virtual occupation” under a cooperative vice president, the U.S. revives 19th-century gunboat diplomacy in 21st-century guise. Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism (Said, 1978) finds a hemispheric parallel: the construction of Latin America as a zone of perpetual disorder justifying intervention. The operation also tests the post-1945 liberal order; as The New York Times dispatch notes, it violates the UN Charter’s prohibition on force absent Security Council authorization or self-defense. The muted European response—contrasting sharper Latin American and Chinese condemnation—reveals transatlantic ambivalence. Leaders like Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron appear relieved to see a troublesome autocrat removed, even as they recoil from the precedent.

What binds these threads is a profound dissonance: the newsletters’ celebration of refinement and resilience unfolds against a backdrop of systemic fragility—whether infrastructural (Berlin’s blackout), environmental (Arctic militarization), or normative (the erosion of sovereignty norms). Luxury consumption, as Pierre Bourdieu argued, functions as cultural capital that distinguishes elites even during crises (Bourdieu, 1984). In 2026, the ability to contemplate a linen-bound diary or a Bode cardigan while U.S. forces secure oil fields becomes its own form of distinction—an insulation from the very disruptions that make such insulation possible.

This echoes Walter Benjamin’s melancholic observation in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Benjamin, 1968, p. 256). The curated lifestyle of early 2026 is inseparable from the imperial assertion that sustains the global order enabling it. As the year begins, these newsletters—intended as dispatches from a sophisticated present—read instead as artifacts of a precarious interregnum: between the liberal order’s slow collapse and whatever assertive multipolarity, or revived unipolarity, may follow.

Subscribe

The week presents a world in flux, oscillating between the archaic and the futuristic. We see the return of the “strongman” in geopolitics, the dominance of the algorithm in economics, and a fragile, anxious citizenry caught in between. The “interregnum” famously described by Gramsci—where the old is dying and the new cannot be born—seems to have passed (Gramsci, 1971). In its place, a hybrid order has emerged: one where 19th-century imperialism coexists with 21st-century technology, and where the spectacle of power often obscures the precariousness of human existence.

Reading across the newsletters, three interlocking propositions emerge:

1. Resource geopolitics shapes cultural economies. Control of commodities (oil, rare earths) alters capital flows, investment appetites and sovereign risk assessments — and these economic shifts ripple through cultural markets (luxury goods supply chains, tourism, hospitality projects). The reportage on US moves in Venezuela and the downstream questions for oil majors make this point plainly.

2. Infrastructure fragility politicises everyday consumption. Power outages, broken airports, and supply-chain delays do not only create inconvenience; they reframe consumer expectations and corporate strategies (e.g., insurers, logistics, fashion production). The Berlin blackout and New York scaffolding stories instantiate how the quotidian becomes political.

3. Cultural legitimacy is now both defensive and generative. Museums’ turn to citizens and fashion’s courtship of authenticity are defensive responses to declining institutional trust and platform-mediated performance. At the same time, they are generative: new, smaller cultural actors claim authority by offering alternative modes of value (craft, provenance, ethical sourcing). This is visible in reports about small-batch food producers (maple-syrup ventures), independent fashion names, and museum governance experiments.

The newsletters present a world in which the longue durée of great-power rivalry and resource politics returns to the foreground, while quotidian fragilities (power grids, scaffolding, airports) make the abstractions of strategy immediately tangible for millions. Culture — whether couture, museums or new niche markets — both registers and helps manage those shifts. Reading the week’s items together encourages a synthetic perspective: policy, economy and culture are braided dimensions of the same historical moment, and understanding one requires attending to the others.

Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). Schocken Books. (Original work published 1950)

Benjamin, W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217–252). Schocken Books.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979)

Calvino, I. (1974). Invisible Cities (W. Weaver, Trans.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Camus, A. (1991). The Plague (S. Gilbert, Trans.). Vintage International. (Original work published 1947).

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967).

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton, Eds.). University of Massachusetts Press.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Trans.). International Publishers.

Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1981).

Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962)

Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling (3rd ed.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1983)

Kaldor, M. (2012). New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era (3rd ed.). Stanford University Press.

Mearsheimer, J. J. (2001). The tragedy of great power politics. W. W. Norton & Company.

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Belknap Press.

Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.

Schmitt, C. (1985). Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (G. Schwab, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1922).

Thomas, D. (2007). Deluxe: How luxury lost its luster. Penguin Press.

Thucydides. (1972). History of the Peloponnesian War (R. Warner, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published ca. 431 B.C.E.).

Veblen, T. (2007). The theory of the leisure class. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1899)

Walzer, M. (1977). Just and unjust wars: A moral argument with historical illustrations. Basic Books.

Weil, S. (2002). The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (A. Wills, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1949).

Yergin, D. (2011). The prize: The epic quest for oil, money & power (2nd ed.). Free Press. (Original work published 1991)

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

[Written, Researched, and Edited by Pablo Markin. Some parts of the text have been produced with the aid of Claude, Anthropic, Gemini, Google, ChatGPT, OpenAI, and Grok, xAI, tools (January 9, 2026). The featured image has been generated in Canva (January 9, 2026).]

[Support the Open Access Blogs: https://openaccessblogs.gumroad.com/l/openaccessblogssupport.]

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (January 9, 2026). The Architecture of Power: Luxury, Fragility, and Spectacle in the the Reshaped Global Order. Open Economics Blog.

Share

In examining this compendium of newsletters spanning the first week of January 2026, we encounter what Foucault (1972) termed an “archive”—not merely a collection of documents, but a system that governs “the appearance of statements as unique events” (p. 129). These digital dispatches from Monocle, ARTnews, CNBC, UBS Insights, The Economist, Semafor, Bloomberg, and The New York Times from January 1-7, 2026, constitute a prismatic snapshot of global consciousness at a moment of profound geopolitical rupture. As Benedict Anderson (1983) observed of newspapers’ role in creating “imagined communities,” these publications perform similar work at a transnational scale, simultaneously fragmenting and integrating the world through their distinctive editorial lenses (p. 35).

The week’s dominant narrative—the United States’ military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—serves as an organizing axis around which other stories orbit: European anxieties about American expansionism, China’s economic resilience, cultural consumption patterns, and the minutiae of daily life that persist despite geopolitical upheaval. This juxtaposition of the extraordinary and the mundane recalls Walter Benjamin’s (1968) conception of history as composed not of grand narratives but of “chips of Messianic time” scattered throughout the everyday (p. 263).

The newsletters and dispatches—chiefly from Monocle but echoed in excerpts from The New York Times—present a striking tableau of a world simultaneously indulging in refined pleasures and teetering on the edge of upheaval. On one side, we encounter the familiar Monocle terrain: meditations on bespoke diaries, alpine military training, pet-friendly private jets, and the latest shifts in luxury fashion houses (Hermès thriving, Versace absorbed by Prada, Chanel under Matthieu Blazy). On the other, a seismic geopolitical rupture dominates: the United States, under a re-elected Donald Trump, executes a swift military operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, installing a pliant interim government while openly coveting the country’s vast oil reserves. This juxtaposition—of artisanal knitwear and gunboat diplomacy, of chocolate soufflé recipes and special-forces raids—reveals deeper tensions in economics, society, policy, and culture at the start of 2026.

This week, thus, presents a startling tableau of a world bifurcated between hyper-accelerated technological optimism and a brutal return to 19th-century geopolitical kinetics. It is a week where the “end of history” has not only been refuted but aggressively dismantled by the spectre of gunboat diplomacy. As the S&P 500 hits record highs fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) speculation, United States special forces conduct a cinematic raid to capture a head of state in Venezuela, and the White House openly contemplates the annexation of Greenland. This cognitive dissonance—between the sleek, friction-free promise of the digital economy and the raw, territorial violence of statecraft—defines the zeitgeist of early 2026.

Three dominant storylines recur. First: a dramatic re-assertion of geopolitics — most visibly the US capture of Nicolás Maduro, the resulting scramble over Venezuela’s oil and the wider reverberations (including talk of Greenland) — which reintroduces hard power and resource geopolitics into headline politics. Second: infrastructural and institutional fragility — from sabotage and mass outages in Berlin to anxieties about Europe’s industrial base and defence-readiness (NATO training in the Alps, debates about aircraft production), and urban governance questions such as New York’s scaffold redesign. Third: cultural-economic reworkings — the fashion sector’s consolidation and the simultaneous resurgence of niche/independent makers; museums experimenting with citizens’ assemblies; new cultural markets (pet-centric airlines, luxury travel); and a persistent conversation about culture and health. These threads are not separate beats but a single, interlocking conjuncture: resource-driven geopolitics reshapes markets and regulatory incentives; weakened or contested infrastructures (physical, legal and institutional) alter risk calculations for firms and publics; and culture — from couture to museums — both indexes and helps manage these transitions.

The U.S. military operation in Venezuela, detailed extensively across these newsletters, represents what Giorgio Agamben (2005) would recognize as a “state of exception” made permanent—a moment when sovereign power suspends legal norms while claiming to act in their service (p. 6). The operation’s very name, “Absolute Resolve,” carries echoes of what Orwell (1949) identified as “newspeak,” language designed to narrow thought rather than expand it (p. 52). The absoluteness brooks no negotiation; the resolution is predetermined.

The New York Times‘ coverage emphasizes the theatrical dimensions of the operation. Trump’s statement—”I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show”—collapses the distinction between governance and entertainment that Neil Postman (1985) warned was fundamental to the degradation of public discourse. When political action becomes indistinguishable from spectacle, we enter what Guy Debord (1967) called “the society of the spectacle,” where “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (p. 12). The image Trump posted of Maduro “blindfolded and handcuffed” functions not as documentation but as what Susan Sontag (1977) termed a “trophy”—visual evidence that transforms human suffering into symbolic capital (p. 14).

The operation’s legal architecture reveals deeper contradictions. As The Economist notes, the Trump administration frames the seizure as a “law enforcement action” rather than military invasion, exploiting what Judith Shklar (1964) identified as “legalism”—the tendency to channel political questions into legal forms that obscure their fundamentally political nature (p. 111). The indictment of Maduro on narco-terrorism charges provides juridical cover for what Semafor more accurately characterizes as “an imperial oil grab.” This recalls Rosa Luxemburg’s (1913) observation that capitalism’s expansion requires constant recourse to “extra-economic force,” with legal frameworks serving to legitimize rather than constrain violence (p. 432).

David Sanger’s characterization of the U.S. approach as a “virtual occupation” merits sustained attention. This concept updates what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) theorized as “Empire”—a new form of sovereignty that operates through networks rather than territories, “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule” (p. xii). Yet the Venezuelan case suggests Empire still requires territorial manifestations: 15,000 troops positioned in the Caribbean, the threat of “boots on the ground,” control over oil infrastructure.

Trump’s explicit acknowledgment of oil as motivation—”U.S. oil companies would go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure... and start making money”—represents a striking departure from previous justifications for intervention. Where the Iraq War was ostensibly about weapons of mass destruction and democracy promotion, Venezuela dispenses with such pretenses. This nakedness recalls what David Harvey (2003) termed “accumulation by dispossession,” the ongoing process whereby capital expands through direct seizure rather than productive investment (p. 145). Venezuela’s 300 billion barrels of proven reserves become, in this framework, what Marx (1867/1976) called “primitive accumulation”—the violent foundation upon which “civilized” economic relations supposedly rest (p. 873).

UBS Insights provides a more sanguine reading, noting that “any recovery in production would require substantial investment given the crumbling infrastructure resulting from years of mismanagement.” This technocratic framing obscures the colonial dynamics at play. As Frantz Fanon (1961) observed, colonialism presents itself as rescue: “The colonialist bourgeoisie... hammers into the native’s mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity” (p. 36). The promise of reconstruction through foreign investment carries the same logic—Venezuela’s resources can only be properly managed by external actors.

The operation’s hemispheric implications receive extensive treatment across publications. The New York Times quotes reporter Jack Nicas: “The moment shook Latin America perhaps more than any single event this century.” This assessment gains credence when viewed through the framework of what Greg Grandin (2006) called “Empire’s Workshop”—his history of how U.S. policy in Latin America served as a laboratory for techniques later deployed globally (p. 2).

The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, as several newsletters term it, represents a formalization of long-standing practice. As Juan González and Joseph Torres (2011) documented in News for All the People, U.S. intervention in Latin America has been continuous since the 19th century, with media consistently framing such actions as defensive rather than aggressive (p. 87). What distinguishes the current moment is the explicitness of the claim to hemispheric dominance, unvarnished by humanitarian rhetoric.

Brazil’s President Lula’s condemnation of the intervention as crossing “an unacceptable line” and the “first step toward a world of violence, chaos and instability” echoes what Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) theorized as the “semi-periphery’s” structural position—nations caught between the core’s power and the periphery’s vulnerability, attempting to maintain autonomy through careful navigation (p. 349). Gabriel Boric of Chile’s warning—”Today, it’s Venezuela. Tomorrow, it could be anyone”—articulates this anxiety with particular clarity.

The differential responses across the political spectrum that Semafor notes (”Those on the left said it confirmed their view of U.S. imperialism... those on the right saw an operation that had liberated Venezuela from a leftist dictator”) demonstrate what Antonio Gramsci (1971) termed “hegemony”—the process whereby dominant groups secure consent through ideological means, making their interests appear universal (p. 12). The right’s celebration of “liberation” and the left’s denunciation of “imperialism” operate within the same discursive field, structured by U.S. power.

Trump’s simultaneous pursuit of Greenland—threatening military action to acquire the autonomous Danish territory—extends the logic of the Venezuelan operation into new terrain. The juxtaposition is instructive. As The Economist reports, “Leaders in Greenland and Denmark are in shock. Is the president serious?” The question itself reveals a cognitive dissonance: the Venezuelan operation demonstrated absolute seriousness, yet European allies struggle to accept that similar logic might apply to them.

Greenland’s significance lies partly in its mineral wealth—rare earth elements crucial for advanced technology—but more fundamentally in its geographic position. As Alfred Thayer Mahan (1890) established in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, control of strategic waterways and positions determines global power (p. 25). Greenland’s proximity to Arctic shipping routes, which climate change is making increasingly navigable, positions it as what Halford Mackinder (1904) might have called a “pivot area”—a zone whose control shapes broader geopolitical configurations (p. 422).

The Danish Prime Minister’s declaration that “Greenland belongs to its people” and European leaders’ joint statement supporting this position articulate what John Ruggie (1982) identified as the post-World War II international order’s core principle: sovereign equality among states, regardless of power disparities (p. 380). Trump’s dismissal of such principles—his press secretary stating “the formal position” is that “Greenland should be part of the United States”—marks what G. John Ikenberry (2001) would recognize as a fundamental challenge to liberal internationalism’s institutional architecture (p. 23).

Semafor‘s report that “the CIA and the National Security Agency have reportedly been tasked with identifying locals sympathetic to America” recalls the long history of what Timothy Mitchell (2002) called “the rule of experts”—the deployment of technical knowledge to facilitate political domination (p. 7). The cultivation of local collaborators follows patterns established throughout the colonial era and refined during the Cold War, documented extensively by William Blum (2004) in Killing Hope (p. 12).

The attempt to “bypass those pesky Danes entirely” by dealing directly with Greenlanders reprises the strategy of indigenous collaboration that Patrick Wolfe (2006) identified as central to settler colonialism: “The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (p. 388). The prospect of enriching Greenlanders through direct deals with the U.S. presents what Gayatri Spivak (1988) termed the colonial dynamic of “white men saving brown women from brown men”—or in this case, American benefactors rescuing Greenlanders from Danish “control” (p. 296).

The newsletters’ coverage of China provides crucial counterpoint to the Venezuelan drama. Semafor notes that China “recorded the first $1 trillion trade surplus in history” despite Trump’s tariffs, while Bloomberg‘s Singapore edition reports that “China’s increasingly advanced military capabilities are alarming the West and reshaping the global balance of naval power.”

This juxtaposition of economic and military strength recalls Paul Kennedy’s (1987) thesis in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that long-term geopolitical position derives from relative economic capacity (p. 515). China’s ability to maintain growth while developing indigenous AI capabilities (the DeepSeek example cited across newsletters) suggests what Giovanni Arrighi (2007) identified as a potential “Beijing Consensus” emerging to rival Washington’s neoliberal model (p. 89).

The Economist‘s observation that “China was able to make up for reduced exports to the U.S. by selling more to other markets” points to the limits of bilateral pressure in an interconnected global economy. As Branko Milanovic (2019) argued in Capitalism, Alone, contemporary global capitalism features “two systems” that compete while remaining interdependent (p. 11). The U.S. cannot simply “decouple” from China without disrupting value chains that American corporations depend upon.

The newsletters also note growing concerns about China’s influence in other nations’ domestic politics and infrastructure. Semafor reports that “Beijing’s unofficial ban on Korean pop culture will likely stay in place,” demonstrating what Joseph Nye (2004) termed “soft power”—the ability to shape preferences through cultural means (p. 5). Yet this sits alongside “hard power” manifestations: China’s export controls on rare earths to Japan, its development of “carrier killer” missiles, and its advancing submarine capabilities.

Multiple newsletters address whether the Venezuelan operation provides a “template” for Chinese action against Taiwan. Semafor quotes experts who dismiss the analogy: “Beijing already employs aggressive tactics against Taipei, regardless of international norms; any shift in strategy would come from China’s own calculations, not ‘inspiration’ from the U.S.”

This debate reveals competing theories of international relations. The “template” concern reflects what Alexander Wendt (1992) called the “social construction” of international politics—the idea that state behavior depends on shared understandings and precedents (p. 397). If the U.S. can seize a leader with impunity, perhaps China can unify Taiwan by force. The counterargument adopts a more realist position, suggesting states act based on material capabilities and interests rather than normative constraints (Mearsheimer, 2001, p. 2).

Yet as The New York Times observes, there are crucial differences: “Taiwan is a vibrant democracy, not a corrupt authoritarian government—plus it makes the advanced microchips the U.S. relies on.” These distinctions matter not because of any inherent moral logic in international politics, but because they shape the calculations of other powerful actors. Japan’s indication that it might respond militarily to an attack on Taiwan, reported in these newsletters, reflects what Thomas Schelling (1960) analyzed as the interdependence of commitments—each nation’s decision depends on expectations about others’ responses (p. 35).

The newsletters’ financial coverage presents a remarkable disjuncture between market performance and geopolitical volatility. CNBC notes that “the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average notched fresh records” following Maduro’s capture, while UBS Insights observes: “Markets keep climbing like a teenager with noise-canceling headphones, oblivious to the chaos around them.”

This apparent paradox resolves when we recognize, following Hyman Minsky (1986), that financial markets operate according to an internal logic often disconnected from “real” economic fundamentals (p. 172). Minsky’s “financial instability hypothesis” suggests that periods of prosperity breed complacency, as investors increasingly take on risk based on recent experience rather than structural analysis. The newsletters’ repeated emphasis on AI-driven growth, particularly in semiconductors and data infrastructure, echoes previous boom periods—the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble—when transformative technologies seemingly justified perpetual expansion.

The Economist‘s observation that “geopolitics only has long-term market impacts when it affects variables like growth and inflation” adopts what economists call the “efficient market hypothesis”—the idea that prices incorporate all available information (Fama, 1970, p. 383). Yet as Robert Shiller (2000) demonstrated in Irrational Exuberance, markets are fundamentally shaped by psychological and sociological factors, not merely rational calculation (p. 135). The “wow effect” that Bloomberg‘s review of Hong Kong’s Peridot bar notes—the emphasis on spectacle over substance—applies equally to financial markets, where narrative often trumps analysis.

The newsletters devote considerable attention to commodity markets, particularly oil and rare earth elements. CNBC reports that “oil prices slid to the lowest level in three weeks after US President Donald Trump said Venezuela will relinquish up to 50 million barrels of oil,” while Semafor notes concerns about China’s control over rare earth supplies.

These dynamics reflect what Michael Klare (2001) termed “resource wars”—conflicts increasingly driven by competition for essential materials (p. 6). Yet the resource in question matters profoundly. Oil, as Timothy Mitchell (2011) argued in Carbon Democracy, structures political possibilities in ways that renewable energy sources do not (p. 12). The concentration of oil in extractable reservoirs creates chokepoints where organized labor can exercise power; it also creates the geographic concentration of wealth that enables resource nationalism.

Venezuela’s nationalization of oil infrastructure in the 2000s, now cited by Trump as “stolen” rights that U.S. companies deserve to reclaim, followed a long history of what Fernando Coronil (1997) called “the magical state”—the petro-state’s ability to generate wealth seemingly independent of productive labor (p. 5). The promise of Venezuelan oil “making money” for both Venezuelans and Americans obscures the distributional questions: who captures the rents? This is not a technical matter but, as Terry Lynn Karl (1997) demonstrated in The Paradox of Plenty, a fundamentally political question that oil wealth tends to resolve in favor of concentrated elite interests (p. 16).

ARTnews‘ coverage of collapsing auction prices and rising art-backed loan defaults provides a different window into capital’s metabolism. The observation that “half of non-bank lenders offering loans against artworks experienced defaults in 2024” signals broader credit stress, while the note that “China’s property crisis helped crash its art market” demonstrates the interconnection between real estate speculation and cultural consumption.

Pierre Bourdieu (1984) analyzed art collecting as a form of “cultural capital”—a means of converting economic resources into social distinction (p. 12). The art market’s dependence on ultra-high-net-worth individuals makes it particularly sensitive to shifts in wealth concentration. When ARTnews reports that “Vincent van Gogh’s Le Zouave sold at a private auction for just above $190 million,” we witness what Thorstein Veblen (1899) termed “conspicuous consumption”—spending designed to signal status rather than satisfy need (p. 68).

The controversy over AI-generated “book clubs” that ARTnews also covers—Amazon and ElevenLabs offering AI bots to discuss books with readers—extends similar logic into cultural consumption. The Authors Guild’s objection that this creates “a new, interactive book format, for which authors’ rights should be renegotiated” points to what Mark Fisher (2009) identified as capitalism’s tendency to colonize all domains of experience, converting even reading from a contemplative activity into an “interactive” commodity (p. 9).

The widespread protests in Iran, sparked by currency collapse and economic stagnation, receive extensive coverage across newsletters. The New York Times reports that demonstrations have spread to 27 of Iran’s 31 provinces, with at least 35 dead including four children. The government’s response—offering citizens a monthly cash handout of $7 alongside an anti-corruption drive and the firing of the central bank chief—exemplifies what James Scott (1998) called the “authoritarian high modernist” state’s combination of technocratic intervention and coercive control (p. 4).

The protests’ economic origins recall Göran Therborn’s (2013) observation that inequality’s most politically volatile form is often not absolute deprivation but “existential inequality”—the denial of recognition and dignity (p. 49). Iranian demonstrators’ chants of “freedom” and “death to the dictator,” alongside economic demands, suggest what E.P. Thompson (1971) identified in his study of 18th-century English bread riots: economic grievances become political when they violate shared norms about justice and reciprocity (p. 79).

Trump’s threat to intervene if Iranian authorities “violently kill” protesters introduces another layer of complexity. As Noam Chomsky (1999) documented extensively, U.S. declarations of humanitarian concern typically correlate poorly with actual patterns of intervention, which track more closely with strategic interests (p. 23). The selective invocation of human rights—Venezuela’s Maduro seized, Iran’s protesters championed—demonstrates what Samuel Moyn (2010) called the “last utopia” of human rights discourse, its deployment serving as often to legitimize power as to constrain it (p. 4).

Europe’s response to Trump’s Venezuelan operation and Greenland threats reveals fractures in transatlantic relations. The Economist notes that while European leaders issued statements supporting Denmark, they “have been hesitant to criticize Trump’s military interventionism in Venezuela, although his actions there have even unsettled some of Europe’s far right.”

This hesitation reflects Europe’s structural position in what Perry Anderson (2009) called the “American imperium”—simultaneously dependent on U.S. security guarantees and chafing under American dominance (p. 12). The joint statement defending Greenland’s sovereignty carries limited force when European NATO members remain reliant on American military capabilities for collective defense. As The Economist observes, European leaders are “still dependent on Washington to contain Russia” and therefore “have little appetite to antagonize Washington ‘over a distant theater.’”

The divergence between European far-right support for Trump’s cultural politics but discomfort with his territorial expansionism points to what Cas Mudde (2019) identified as the “populist radical right’s” fundamental contradiction: nationalism that celebrates sovereignty at home while aligning with foreign powers that threaten it (p. 7). Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán’s admiration for Trump runs up against their own rhetoric about national self-determination when that determination is exercised by Venezuela or Greenland.

The inauguration of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s mayor receives notably different treatment across newsletters. The New York Times emphasizes the historical significance—”the first Muslim and South Asian to govern America’s largest city”—while also noting that “what comes next will determine whether Mamdani will be viewed as the catalyst for a new era or as a failed idealist.”

Mamdani’s self-identification as a “democratic socialist” and his focus on affordability position him within a longer tradition that Mike Davis (1986) traced in Prisoners of the American Dream—periodic attempts to build an independent left political force within U.S. cities (p. 8). His campaign’s focus on “halalflation” (rising prices for street food) and public transportation reflects what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2019) called the “new municipal agenda”—addressing structural inequality through local policy innovation (p. 167).

Semafor‘s reporting that Mamdani’s allies see an opportunity to build “a new national party, operating like a coalition partner to Democrats, that could leverage successes in governing” echoes what Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (1977) analyzed in Poor People’s Movements—the tension between building institutional power and maintaining mobilized grassroots pressure (p. 12). The question is whether municipal office will enable broader transformation or, as happened with previous progressive mayors, lead to cooptation and compromise.

The criticism that Mamdani rescinded executive orders on antisemitism, reported by The New York Times, immediately subjects his administration to the polarized conflicts over Israel-Palestine that have fractured left coalitions. As Judith Butler (2012) observed, accusations of antisemitism increasingly function to police permissible discourse about Israel and Zionism, creating a terrain where principled positions become difficult to articulate (p. 2).

Subscribe

The newsletters’ cultural coverage reveals how platform capitalism reshapes aesthetic experience and cultural production. ARTnews reports on Amazon and ElevenLabs’ AI-generated “book clubs,” which allow readers to “generate discussion of characters, plot, or themes with AI bots.” The Authors Guild’s objection that publishers and authors cannot opt out points to what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) termed “surveillance capitalism”—the unilateral claiming of human experience as raw material for commercial exploitation (p. 8).

This transformation extends beyond books. Semafor‘s coverage of BTS’s comeback after a four-year hiatus notes the group’s enormous economic impact—estimated at 0.2% of South Korea’s GDP before their break—alongside concerns that “many acts are stagnating creatively and haven’t replicated BTS’ success.” The industrialization of K-pop, analyzed by Jin Lee (2019), creates what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944/2002) called the “culture industry”—the standardization of cultural production according to industrial principles (p. 94).

Yet the newsletters also document resistance to and complication of platform dominance. Monocle‘s extensive coverage of independent fashion designers, small-batch food producers, and niche cultural institutions presents what Trebor Scholz (2016) might recognize as “platform cooperativism”—attempts to create alternative models of cultural and economic organization (p. 12). The article on Quiet Corner, a Tokyo-style kissaten in Singapore serving specialty coffee in an elegant setting with 5,000 vinyl records, represents what David Harvey (2012) called the production of “spaces of hope”—localized attempts to create different social relations (p. 182).

Multiple newsletters note a broader trend toward analog experiences and aesthetics. Monocle praises keeping physical diaries with pen and paper; Bloomberg describes listening bars in Tokyo where audiophiles gather to hear music on high-end equipment; The Economist covers the popularity of vinyl records and film photography among young people.

This embrace of analog technologies might seem paradoxical in an age of digital ubiquity, yet it reflects what Svetlana Boym (2001) identified as “restorative nostalgia”—not a desire to return to the past but to recover experiences that modernity has foreclosed (p. 41). The appeal of writing with fountain pens or listening to vinyl operates according to what Walter Benjamin (1936/1968) called “aura”—the sense of unique presence that mechanical reproduction diminishes (p. 221).

Simultaneously, this trend has been fully incorporated into consumer capitalism. The expensive Japanese pens, audiophile turntables, and film cameras that Monocle features are luxury goods that convert cultural capital into economic capital and vice versa. As Frédéric Jameson (1991) observed, postmodern culture is characterized by “pastiche”—the evacuation of historical depth in favor of stylistic signifiers (p. 16). Vinyl records sold at Urban Outfitters to people too young to remember when records were the only format do not represent genuine historical continuity but its commodified simulation.

The newsletters’ wellness coverage—The New York Times‘ five-day brain health challenge, Monocle‘s profiles of Alpine spas, Semafor‘s report on South Korea’s president calling for state-funded hair loss treatments—participates in what Nikolas Rose (2007) termed “biological citizenship,” the reconfiguration of identity around somatic and neurological characteristics (p. 132).

The Times‘ brain health program, with its emphasis on individual behavioral modification (better sleep, specific foods, exercise), exemplifies what Barbara Cruikshank (1999) called “technologies of citizenship”—practices that shape subjects who govern themselves according to expert knowledge (p. 1). The challenge format itself—five days of prescribed activities—mirrors the gamification that Sarah Sharma (2014) identified as characteristic of neoliberal temporality, where even self-care becomes a project requiring optimization (p. 89).

South Korea’s situation presents a more state-directed version of biological citizenship. The president’s proposal to cover hair loss treatments through public health insurance, motivated by rigid beauty standards where “your appearance is also a credential,” demonstrates how biopolitical governance operates differently across national contexts. As Sun-ha Hong (2020) documented in Technologies of Speculation, South Korean governance increasingly centers on managing biological and aesthetic potential as economic resource (p. 145).

Bloomberg‘s Singapore edition documents that city-state’s infrastructure expansion—three major MRT extensions coming online in 2026, completion of a 13-kilometer harbourfront promenade in Hong Kong, new highways in both cities. This attention to circulation reflects what Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991) called the “production of space”—the ways that spatial arrangements both enable and constrain social possibilities (p. 26).

The completion of Hong Kong’s harbourfront walkway after “a dozen-plus years of work and wrangling” exemplifies what Deborah Cowen (2014) analyzed as infrastructure’s political dimensions—not neutral technical systems but “sticky assemblages” that embody particular visions of social order (p. 23). A continuous pedestrian promenade privileges certain forms of mobility (walking, running) while arguably naturalizing the separation of the waterfront from productive activity that its construction required.

Singapore’s imposition of a “green fuel levy” on air passengers—up to S$41.60 per ticket—represents what Peter Dauvergne (2016) termed “environmentalism of the rich,” market-based mechanisms that preserve elite consumption while symbolically addressing ecological crisis (p. 8). The levy funds purchase of sustainable aviation fuel, allowing wealthy travelers to maintain mobility while ostensibly reducing emissions. As Andreas Malm (2016) observed, such approaches ignore capitalism’s fundamentally expansionary logic, attempting to reform rather than transform the systems that produce environmental destruction (p. 391).

The newsletters document climate change’s highly differentiated impacts. Monocle notes that Southeast Asia “will be bracing for more wet weather in 2026, brought on by a cooling of the Pacific Ocean, known as the La Niña phenomenon. Losses across the region are mounting; hundreds of people have died and at least $20 billion worth of damage has been caused to infrastructure, crops, and commerce.”

Meanwhile, The Economist reports on Kenya’s lakes rising due to “shifting rainfall patterns,” displacing 75,000 people and destroying agricultural land. The matter-of-fact tone—”The lakes have risen in the past... but that’s little consolation for [displaced people who] now cannot go home without risking confrontations with hippopotamuses”—illustrates what Rob Nixon (2011) called “slow violence,” environmental destruction that occurs gradually enough to evade dramatic representation (p. 2).

This unevenness extends to adaptation capacity. Monocle features Amsterdam as “Europe’s Original Climate-Resilient City,” celebrating its sophisticated water management systems. The Netherlands can afford extensive infrastructure to manage sea-level rise; Kenya’s displaced lakeside communities cannot. As Christian Parenti (2011) argued in Tropic of Chaos, climate change acts as “threat multiplier” that exacerbates existing inequalities, with the Global South bearing disproportionate costs for emissions generated primarily in the North (p. 7).

The coverage of energy infrastructure reveals competing visions of technological futures. Monocle profiles district heating systems in Nordic countries that pair data centers with residential heating—capturing waste heat from computer processing to warm homes. This represents what Jesse LeCavalier (2016) analyzed as “infrastructural intelligence,” the creative reconfiguration of technical systems to serve multiple purposes (p. 112).

Simultaneously, Semafor notes that “Southeast Asia is set to miss its 2025 renewable energy target, and fossil fuels continue to dominate the power mix.” This reflects what Gregory Unruh (2000) termed “carbon lock-in”—the ways that existing infrastructure, institutions, and interests create path dependencies that resist transformation (p. 817). The region’s continued investment in coal and gas power plants creates sunk costs that will shape energy systems for decades.

The controversy over nuclear energy appears obliquely in coverage of France’s energy policy and Japan’s post-Fukushima reconstruction. As Gabrielle Hecht (2012) demonstrated in Being Nuclear, nuclear technology carries cultural and political meanings beyond its technical characteristics (p. 15). France’s continued nuclear reliance and Japan’s cautious return to it after the 2011 disaster reflect different national imaginaries about risk, progress, and energy sovereignty.

The very form of these newsletters—brief items juxtaposing disparate topics, links to longer articles, daily or weekly delivery—embodies what Zygmunt Bauman (2000) called “liquid modernity,” characterized by fragmentation, speed, and the constant displacement of stability (p. 6). Knowledge arrives as discrete packets requiring minimal sustained attention, tailored to reading on mobile devices during commutes or between meetings.

Yet different publications structure this fragmentation distinctively. Monocle‘s lengthy, literary pieces on fashion designers and Scandinavian architecture contrast sharply with CNBC‘s bullet points on market movements. The New York Times maintains narrative coherence through reporter bylines and sustained analysis; Semafor explicitly foregrounds its algorithmic curation with sections like “London Review of Substacks.” These variations suggest what Michael Schudson (1978) identified as different journalistic epistemologies, each constructing reality according to distinct professional norms and market pressures (p. 6).

The newsletters’ international focus—Bloomberg from Singapore, UBS from Zurich, The Economist from London, Semafor from New York—creates what Arjun Appadurai (1996) termed “mediascapes,” imagined worlds constituted by flows of information that transcend territorial boundaries (p. 33). A reader in Manila might begin their day with The New York Times‘ interpretation of Venezuelan politics, proceed to Monocle‘s recommendations for Oslo restaurants, and conclude with Bloomberg‘s analysis of Singapore’s property market. This global circulation of perspectives potentially enables cosmopolitan consciousness; it also, as Edward Said (1978) warned, can reproduce metropolitan perspectives that marginalize non-Western viewpoints (p. 12).

The New York Times‘ solicitation of reader advice on “how you stay informed without feeling overwhelmed” acknowledges what Clay Shirky (2008) identified as the contemporary information problem: not scarcity but “filter failure,” the difficulty of managing abundance (p. 15). Readers’ responses reveal diverse coping strategies: consuming only positive news, comparing multiple ideological sources, forcing oneself to exercise after reading upsetting content, watching puppy videos.

These individual tactics address symptoms rather than causes. As Robert McChesney (2013) argued, the commercialized media system produces information overload as a feature, not a bug—fragmentation and sensationalism drive engagement metrics that determine advertising revenue (p. 89). The newsletters themselves participate in this dynamic even as they purport to curate signal from noise.

The recommendation to “give yourself moments of grace by noticing the weeds growing around buildings” offers a different epistemological stance. This counsel, echoing what Rebecca Solnit (2016) called “hope in the dark,” suggests that managing information requires not better filtering but occasional disconnection.

The most arrestive narrative of the week is undoubtedly the United States’ intervention in Venezuela, resulting in the capture of Nicolás Maduro. This event, described by Semafor and The Economist as a crystallization of a new “Donroe Doctrine”—a portmanteau of Trump and the 1823 Monroe Doctrine—signals a definitive shift from the liberal international order to a starker realism.

The raid, executed with “textbook” precision and watched by President Trump “like a television show,” evokes Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord (1967/1994) argued that social relations are mediated by images; here, geopolitical dominance is performed as media content, intended as much for domestic consumption as for strategic gain. The operation creates a “virtual occupation,” where control is exerted not through boots on the ground but through the threat of overwhelming kinetic force and the control of resources (oil).

This aggressive reassertion of a sphere of influence aligns with the offensive realism propounded by John Mearsheimer. In The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer (2001) posits that great powers will always seek regional hegemony to ensure their security. The Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela, coupled with renewed threats to annex Greenland, suggest a shedding of the diplomatic niceties that previously veiled these impulses. As The Economist notes, this is a world “governed by strength,” a sentiment that echoes the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Thucydides, ca. 431 B.C.E./1972).

However, the regional reaction—outrage from Brazil and Mexico, caution from Europe—highlights the tension between this neo-imperial thrust and the concept of Westphalian sovereignty. The installation of a “pliant” interim government in Caracas raises questions about legitimacy that recall Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. Schmitt (1922/1985) defined the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.” By suspending the norms of international non-intervention, the U.S. has asserted a global state of exception, prioritizing resource security (oil) over the proceduralism of international law.

The removal of an entrenched incumbent in Caracas and the explicit tying of the operation to control of oil supplies recasts foreign policy as a direct instrument of economic strategy. The newsletters repeatedly frame Venezuela as a resource problem first and a polity problem second, and they register anxiety at the return of overt interventionist practice (what some pieces call a revived “gunboat” or “Donroe” doctrine).

Analytically this episode sits comfortably in a realist account of international politics: great powers view strategic resources as instruments of security and leverage (cf. Mearsheimer, 2001). But it also exposes limits and costs: occupying or directing resource extraction requires functioning domestic institutions, legal indemnities for investors, and the political legitimacy to stabilise supply chains — none of which are guaranteed by a spectacular raid alone. The newsletters capture this ambivalence: markets cheer the prospect of oil access even while commentators warn of political and legal obstacles.

Beyond classical realism, two further frames are useful. First, political economy: state action to secure resources becomes itself an economic policy instrument — a blunt industrial intervention that reshapes incentives for firms, insurers and traders (see The Economist commentary on oil majors’ hesitancy). Second, normative/political theory: the reappearance of coercive intervention raises familiar ethical questions about sovereignty and justice in forcible regime change (questions addressed at length by Walzer’s reflections on war and legitimacy). (Walzer, 1977).

A second cluster of texts in the newsletters — Berlin’s blackout, NATO alpine training and the debate about Europe’s industrial capacity — points to an underappreciated theme: the politics of infrastructure. When critical nodes (power lines, airports, shipyards, supply chains) fail or are threatened, the social and political order is made precarious. The Berlin outage is a microcosm: citizens lose heat, hospitals fall back on generators, schools close, and the political debate turns to surveillance, resilience and the policing of sabotage.

Two interpretive moves help: first, see infrastructure as political technology (following scholarship that treats pipelines, grids and ports as sites where governance, market logics and strategic rivalry meet). Second, treat the public reaction — mutual aid, neighbourliness, and the mobilisation of private hotels or informal shelters — as a form of civic adaptation that both compensates for and reveals the limits of formal institutions. This duality — institutional brittleness and civic robustness — is the operating logic of many of the week’s items.

Policy implication: securing the “soft” function of the state (permanent maintenance capacity, redundant supply chains, rapid procurement and legal clarity) is as decisive as deploying hard assets. The newsletters’ coverage of stalled aircraft manufacturing and slow infrastructure projects underscores that contemporary security is as much industrial-policy as geopolitics.

While commandos breached palaces in Caracas, global markets remained audaciously buoyant. The CNBC and Bloomberg newsletters report record highs for the S&P 500 and the Dow, driven by the AI sector and stocks like Nvidia. This disconnect between geopolitical instability and market euphoria illustrates what Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism”—the pervasive sense that the capitalist system is the only viable reality, capable of metabolizing even the most disruptive crises into profit opportunities (Fisher, 2009).

The newsletters reveal a “K-shaped” global economy of stark contrasts. On one limb of the K, we have the “AI supercycle” boosting US productivity and the luxury fashion houses of Paris and Milan recalibrating for 2026. On the downward limb, we see the deadly cost-of-living protests in Iran, where the price of survival has outstripped the populace’s endurance, and the affordability crisis in New York City that propelled the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to the mayoralty.

This inequality brings to mind Thomas Piketty’s warnings in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty (2014) argues that without intervention, the return on capital ($r$) exceeds the rate of economic growth ($g$), leading to extreme concentration of wealth. The juxtaposition of luxury “statement knitwear” (Monocle) and the desperate street protests in Tehran serves as a grim validation of this thesis. The “market” has become an entity distinct from the “economy” of human subsistence, operating in a layer of abstraction insulated from the fires—literal and metaphorical—burning below.

The tragic fire at Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, which claimed 40 lives, serves as a sombre counterpoint to the week’s triumphalist narratives. Occurring in a space of leisure and privilege, it is a reminder of the fragility inherent in human systems. It echoes the sudden, arbitrary nature of catastrophe found in Albert Camus’ The Plague, where disaster strikes amidst the banality of daily life, stripping away the illusion of safety (Camus, 1947/1991).

In the aftermath of such tragedies, and amidst the relentless “back to work” pressure noted by Monocle’s Tyler Brûlé, there is a palpable sense of exhaustion. Byung-Chul Han, in The Burnout Society, describes a neuronal violence inherent in a society driven by the imperative of achievement (Han, 2015). The newsletters’ focus on “wellness,” from “MIND diets” to “alcohol-light” lifestyles in Singapore, can be read as a symptom of this burnout—individualized attempts to cope with systemic overload.

Yet, there are glimpses of a search for deeper meaning. The ARTNews reports on British museums establishing “citizens’ assemblies” to democratize decision-making suggest a desire to reconnect cultural institutions with the public sphere. This aligns with the ideas of Jürgen Habermas regarding the necessity of communicative action to legitimize social institutions (Habermas, 1981). Furthermore, the turn towards “vernacular architecture” and “local ecology” in design (Monocle) reflects a yearning for what philosopher Simone Weil called “rootedness”—a reaction against the homogenizing forces of globalization (Weil, 1949/2002).

Technology in 2026 is not merely an economic engine; it is a mechanism of control and a challenger to human agency. The use of AI in medicine (pancreatic cancer detection) offers hope, yet the proliferation of AI in creative industries (Bollywood filmmaking, “interactive” ebooks) raises concerns about the displacement of human authorship.

Moreover, the digital realm is increasingly contested terrain. The Australian ban on social media for under-16s, and France’s consideration of the same, signals a pushback against what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019). The state is attempting to reclaim the developmental space of childhood from the algorithmic imperatives of Big Tech. Conversely, the “sabotage” of undersea cables and the “cyber-harassment” trials in France highlight the vulnerability of the digital infrastructure upon which modern life depends.

ARTnews and related coverage highlight an important institutional experiment: museums convening citizens’ assemblies to help shape policy and priorities. This is not mere PR; it is an institutional reflex — museums, long guardians of cultural capital, are experimenting with deliberative forms to enhance legitimacy and relevance.

Habermas’s account of the public sphere is instructive here: institutions that mediate public meaning can either reproduce elite closure or help cultivate discursive spaces where reasoned deliberation reshapes policy (Habermas, 1989). A citizens’ assembly in a museum is a small experiment in the latter; its success will depend on the quality of information, the distribution of influence (experts vs. lay participants), and, crucially, whether institutions are prepared to act on the assembly’s recommendations rather than performatively convene them.

The Monocle fashion pieces do several things at once: they note consolidation (Prada buys Versace), celebrate enduring luxury houses (Hermès), and insist that independence and narrative-driven, craft-oriented brands will shape taste — especially as consumers recoil from conspicuous “logomania” toward niche signals of distinction.

Here Bourdieu’s classic argument is useful: taste functions as social signalling; changes in market structure (platform amplification, celebrity cycles, conglomerate consolidation) reconfigure the fields of cultural production, but the fundamental mechanism of distinction — who gets to display what and why — persists (Bourdieu, 1984). Simultaneously, Benjamin’s insight about reproducibility helps explain the paradox: the “aura” of artisanal or bespoke pieces is precisely what gains value in an era saturated by mechanically reproduced images and influence metrics (Benjamin, 1968).

Economically, the newsletters show that fashion’s uncertainty sits beside a calculable investor logic: conglomerates buy established names to capture intangible cultural capital and amortise investments across global retail, while independent houses capture scarcity and authenticity premiums. That is why readers are told to watch Hermès and Versace in the same breath: one is a perennial store of value, the other a leveraged creative bet.

The Monocle entries curate a vision of cosmopolitan aspiration: Natalie Theodosi celebrates a post-shakeout fashion landscape where heritage houses like Hermès and Chanel reaffirm enduring value, while independents and joyful daywear signal renewal. Architectural reflections on snow-bound cabins, Ukrainian-designed puffer jackets, and dog-centric airlines underscore a preoccupation with comfort, mobility, and narrative-driven consumption. Cultural recommendations—Korean novels, Shakespeare adaptations, Belgian pop—complement recipes and travel notes, reinforcing Monocle’s ethos of thoughtful, aesthetically attuned living. Yet this idyll is repeatedly interrupted by reports of crisis: a deadly New Year’s Eve fire in a Swiss ski resort, NATO’s cold-weather training in the Alps amid Arctic tensions, Berlin’s infrastructure blackout claimed by far-left activists, and, most dramatically, the U.S. intervention in Venezuela. The operation—framed alternately as law enforcement, regime stabilization, and resource extraction—provokes global condemnation from Latin America, China, and Russia, while European responses range from cautious to tacitly relieved. Trump’s subsequent threats toward Colombia, Cuba, and Greenland amplify the sense of a reasserting “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

Economic Dimensions

The fashion coverage illustrates a luxury sector navigating consolidation and creative risk. Hermès’s resilience despite macroeconomic headwinds and Chanel’s reinvention under Blazy echo Thorstein Veblen’s classic analysis of conspicuous consumption as a marker of status that persists through economic turbulence (Veblen, 1899/2007). The Prada Group’s acquisition of Versace for $1.38 billion exemplifies the concentration of ownership in an industry where scale increasingly determines survival—a trend documented in Dana Thomas’s Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (Thomas, 2007), which warned that corporatization erodes the very aura that sustains premium pricing. Simultaneously, the Venezuelan intervention lays bare the enduring primacy of energy commodities. Trump’s candid admission that U.S. firms will “fix the badly broken infrastructure… and start making money” recalls Daniel Yergin’s magisterial history of oil as the lifeblood of 20th- and 21st-century geopolitics (Yergin, 1991/2011). Venezuela’s reserves—larger than Saudi Arabia’s—become both prize and pretext, underscoring how resource nationalism and great-power rivalry continue to shape global markets even in an ostensibly post-oil age.

Social and Cultural Currents

Andrew Tuck’s paean to diary-keeping invokes a quiet act of resistance against digital ephemerality, resonant with Michel Foucault’s late reflections on techniques of the self—practices of writing that foster ethical self-formation amid overwhelming noise (Foucault, 1988). In an era of algorithmic curation and geopolitical shock, the private notebook becomes a refuge of agency. Pet-friendly airlines and narrative-driven knitwear (Bode’s Peter Pan–inspired cardigan) reflect a broader anthropomorphic turn in consumer culture, where emotional connection and storytelling compensate for alienation. This mirrors Arlie Hochschild’s concept of “emotional labor” extended into leisure and consumption (Hochschild, 1983/2012), as brands increasingly sell not merely products but affective experiences. Culturally, the newsletters’ eclectic recommendations—from Lee Heejoo’s visceral K-pop kidnapping novel to Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet—suggest a hunger for narratives that grapple with grief, identity, and rupture, perhaps unconsciously mirroring the global mood.

Policy and Geopolitical Implications

The Alpine training of NATO forces, framed against Arctic strategizing post-Sweden and Finland’s accession, signals a quiet re-militarization of Europe’s high north. This echoes Mary Kaldor’s thesis on “new wars” blending traditional interstate rivalry with non-state and environmental dimensions (Kaldor, 2012). Most consequential, however, is the Venezuelan operation. By bypassing regime change in favor of a “virtual occupation” under a cooperative vice president, the U.S. revives 19th-century gunboat diplomacy in 21st-century guise. Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism (Said, 1978) finds a hemispheric parallel: the construction of Latin America as a zone of perpetual disorder justifying intervention. The operation also tests the post-1945 liberal order; as The New York Times dispatch notes, it violates the UN Charter’s prohibition on force absent Security Council authorization or self-defense. The muted European response—contrasting sharper Latin American and Chinese condemnation—reveals transatlantic ambivalence. Leaders like Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron appear relieved to see a troublesome autocrat removed, even as they recoil from the precedent.

What binds these threads is a profound dissonance: the newsletters’ celebration of refinement and resilience unfolds against a backdrop of systemic fragility—whether infrastructural (Berlin’s blackout), environmental (Arctic militarization), or normative (the erosion of sovereignty norms). Luxury consumption, as Pierre Bourdieu argued, functions as cultural capital that distinguishes elites even during crises (Bourdieu, 1984). In 2026, the ability to contemplate a linen-bound diary or a Bode cardigan while U.S. forces secure oil fields becomes its own form of distinction—an insulation from the very disruptions that make such insulation possible.

This echoes Walter Benjamin’s melancholic observation in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Benjamin, 1968, p. 256). The curated lifestyle of early 2026 is inseparable from the imperial assertion that sustains the global order enabling it. As the year begins, these newsletters—intended as dispatches from a sophisticated present—read instead as artifacts of a precarious interregnum: between the liberal order’s slow collapse and whatever assertive multipolarity, or revived unipolarity, may follow.

Subscribe

The week presents a world in flux, oscillating between the archaic and the futuristic. We see the return of the “strongman” in geopolitics, the dominance of the algorithm in economics, and a fragile, anxious citizenry caught in between. The “interregnum” famously described by Gramsci—where the old is dying and the new cannot be born—seems to have passed (Gramsci, 1971). In its place, a hybrid order has emerged: one where 19th-century imperialism coexists with 21st-century technology, and where the spectacle of power often obscures the precariousness of human existence.

Reading across the newsletters, three interlocking propositions emerge:

1. Resource geopolitics shapes cultural economies. Control of commodities (oil, rare earths) alters capital flows, investment appetites and sovereign risk assessments — and these economic shifts ripple through cultural markets (luxury goods supply chains, tourism, hospitality projects). The reportage on US moves in Venezuela and the downstream questions for oil majors make this point plainly.

2. Infrastructure fragility politicises everyday consumption. Power outages, broken airports, and supply-chain delays do not only create inconvenience; they reframe consumer expectations and corporate strategies (e.g., insurers, logistics, fashion production). The Berlin blackout and New York scaffolding stories instantiate how the quotidian becomes political.

3. Cultural legitimacy is now both defensive and generative. Museums’ turn to citizens and fashion’s courtship of authenticity are defensive responses to declining institutional trust and platform-mediated performance. At the same time, they are generative: new, smaller cultural actors claim authority by offering alternative modes of value (craft, provenance, ethical sourcing). This is visible in reports about small-batch food producers (maple-syrup ventures), independent fashion names, and museum governance experiments.

The newsletters present a world in which the longue durée of great-power rivalry and resource politics returns to the foreground, while quotidian fragilities (power grids, scaffolding, airports) make the abstractions of strategy immediately tangible for millions. Culture — whether couture, museums or new niche markets — both registers and helps manage those shifts. Reading the week’s items together encourages a synthetic perspective: policy, economy and culture are braided dimensions of the same historical moment, and understanding one requires attending to the others.

Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). Schocken Books. (Original work published 1950)

Benjamin, W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217–252). Schocken Books.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979)

Calvino, I. (1974). Invisible Cities (W. Weaver, Trans.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Camus, A. (1991). The Plague (S. Gilbert, Trans.). Vintage International. (Original work published 1947).

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967).

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton, Eds.). University of Massachusetts Press.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Trans.). International Publishers.

Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1981).

Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962)

Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling (3rd ed.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1983)

Kaldor, M. (2012). New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era (3rd ed.). Stanford University Press.

Mearsheimer, J. J. (2001). The tragedy of great power politics. W. W. Norton & Company.

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Belknap Press.

Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.

Schmitt, C. (1985). Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (G. Schwab, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1922).

Thomas, D. (2007). Deluxe: How luxury lost its luster. Penguin Press.

Thucydides. (1972). History of the Peloponnesian War (R. Warner, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published ca. 431 B.C.E.).

Veblen, T. (2007). The theory of the leisure class. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1899)

Walzer, M. (1977). Just and unjust wars: A moral argument with historical illustrations. Basic Books.

Weil, S. (2002). The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (A. Wills, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1949).

Yergin, D. (2011). The prize: The epic quest for oil, money & power (2nd ed.). Free Press. (Original work published 1991)

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

[Written, Researched, and Edited by Pablo Markin. Some parts of the text have been produced with the aid of Claude, Anthropic, Gemini, Google, ChatGPT, OpenAI, and Grok, xAI, tools (January 9, 2026). The featured image has been generated in Canva (January 9, 2026).]

[Support the Open Access Blogs: https://openaccessblogs.gumroad.com/l/openaccessblogssupport.]

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (January 9, 2026). The Architecture of Power: Luxury, Fragility, and Spectacle in the the Reshaped Global Order. Open Economics Blog.

Share