The newsletters from Monocle, The Economist, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Newsweek, Semafor, CNBC and ARTNews from January 22–28, 2026, present a remarkably compact map of contemporary globalization’s paradoxes: cultural goods flow more widely than ever even as institutions keep old gates in place; places on the global periphery suddenly matter strategically and economically; grand infrastructural wagers coexist with intimate practices of daily life; and markets of taste (luxury fashion, film awards) concentrate value even while claiming universality. Reading these dispatches together helps us see pattern in apparently disparate stories — the Oscars’ language category, Nuuk’s geopolitical moment, Ethiopia’s airport, and Paris runway politics are different nodes of the same structural transformation.

The dispatches from the final week of January 2026 paint a portrait of a world suspended in a volatile interregnum. From the frozen fjords of Greenland to the tear-gassed streets of Minneapolis, and from the rarefied air of Davos to the rubble of Gaza, the global order appears to be undergoing a violent restructuring. The overarching theme emerging from these newsletters is the collapse of the liberal international order into a raw, transactional realism. The “rules-based order,” long eulogized by Western technocrats, has been supplanted by what might be termed the “Deal-Based Order,” where sovereignty, human rights, and territory are fluid assets on a ledger managed by “personalist” leaders (Semafor, Jan 27).

This shifts recalls the warning of Antonio Gramsci (1971), who observed that “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (p. 276). The “morbid symptoms” of 2026 include the commodification of sovereign territory (Greenland), the gentrification of war zones (”New Gaza”), and the turning of the state security apparatus inward against its own citizens (Minneapolis).

These dispatches weave threads of crisis and resilience: aggressive federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis escalates into fatal clashes with protesters, killing U.S. citizens like nurse Alex Pretti and Renee Good amid widespread outrage and service disruptions; a massive winter storm ravages the U.S., crippling infrastructure and economies; cultural vignettes spotlight late-blooming stardom (e.g., 79-year-old Tânia Maria de Medeiros Filha’s Oscar-nominated role), avian filoplumes as emblems of subtle adaptation, hygge-inspired winter coping, and celebrity feuds; international notes include Rifaat al-Assad’s death, Ukraine peace talks, and Xi Jinping’s military purges. Collectively, they evoke a society strained by state power, nature’s indifference, and human ingenuity.

The newsletters present a fascinating palimpsest of the early 21st-century condition, where the hyper-globalized flows of capital and culture clash violently with the re-erecting borders of the nation-state. Spanning the haute couture of Paris Fashion Week to the frozen geopolitical anxieties of Nuuk, these snippets serve as a barometer for a world oscillating between the “liquid modernity” described by Zygmunt Bauman (2000)—where social forms are melting faster than new ones can be forged—and a desperate grasping for solid ground, be it through tradition, national sovereignty, or the tactile comfort of a ceramic vase.

The newsletters, thus, archive a peculiar temporal disjunction: they capture a world suspended between the residual protocols of liberal internationalism and the emergent logic of punitive transactionalism. Reading these dispatches in aggregate reveals not merely discrete news items but a structural atmosphere—a condition of permanent crisis wherein sovereignty, culture, and capital recombine under the sign of what David Harvey (2003) termed “accumulation by dispossession” (p. 145). This commentary excavates the latent theoretical coherences linking Greenlandic mineral futures with Brazilian cinematic prestige, German telemedical governance with ICE violence in Minneapolis, arguing that these fragments collectively diagnose the exhaustion of post-Cold War multilateralism and the normalization of extractive authoritarianism.

The spectacle of President Donald Trump’s attempt to acquire Greenland—followed by a “framework” deal that placated markets but rattled NATO—represents a return to a pre-Westphalian conception of territory as patrimony rather than polity. The Bloomberg and New York Times reports on the “Donroe Doctrine”—a clumsy portmanteau of Trump and the Monroe Doctrine—suggest a re-assertion of hemispheric dominance that treats allied nations not as partners, but as vassal states or real estate opportunities.

This geopolitical maneuvering resonates with Carl Schmitt’s concept of the Großraum (greater space), where a dominant power exerts hegemony over a specific geographic sphere, excluding external influence. However, unlike Schmitt’s theoretical framework which sought legal justification, this 2026 iteration is purely mercantile. As noted in The Economist (Jan 22), the transactional nature of the Greenland dispute—where tariffs are the stick and “mineral rights” are the carrot—strips international relations of normative pretenses.

The European reaction, described as “dread and skepticism” (Semafor, Jan 23), highlights the continent’s realization that the Atlanticist security guarantee is now conditional. The EU-India “Mother of All Deals” (Bloomberg, Jan 28) is a direct response to this vulnerability—a Polanyian “double movement” where society (or in this case, a bloc of nations) organizes to protect itself against the ravages of an unregulated, unpredictable market hegemon (Polanyi, 1944).

The unveiling of the “New Gaza” plan by Jared Kushner at Davos—replete with renderings of skyscrapers and marinas (Semafor, Jan 23; NYT, Jan 22)—is a grotesque manifestation of what Naomi Klein (2007) termed the “Shock Doctrine.” Disaster capitalism exploits crises to push through controversial policies while citizens are too distracted or traumatized to resist.

However, this goes beyond mere capitalism; it is high-modernist social engineering. As James C. Scott (1998) details in Seeing Like a State, authoritarian high modernism often views the chaotic, organic reality of human settlement as something to be rationalized, ordered, and aestheticized. The “New Gaza” plan seeks to erase the political and historical reality of the Palestinian territory, replacing it with a sterilized, depoliticized zone of commerce. It attempts to solve a political problem (sovereignty and statelessness) with an architectural and economic solution, ignoring the “human condition” that requires political recognition, not just economic development (Arendt, 1958).

Conversely, the geopolitical situation in Gaza and the reconstruction plans by Jared Kushner offer a macabre inversion of biopolitics: the power to “make live and let die” (Foucault, 1976). Kushner’s “New Gaza” plan, with its renderings of “shimmering tower blocks,” seeks to reconstruct the physical infrastructure of life while ignoring the political will of the inhabitants. It is an architectural embodiment of what Edward Said (1978) critiqued as Orientalism—a Western fantasy projected onto a landscape, erasing the complex human reality in favor of a tabula rasa. As the article notes, the absence of Gazans from the “Board of Peace” renders the plan a hollow simulacrum, a “hyperreal” construct as described by Jean Baudrillard (1994), where the map precedes the territory.

While the physical world fractures, the digital world accelerates toward a singularity of efficiency and exclusion. The newsletters highlight the rise of “agentic commerce” in China (CNBC, Jan 23) and the massive investment in AI by SoftBank and OpenAI (Bloomberg, Jan 28). This juxtaposition—AI agents booking flights while humans in Minneapolis are shot for protesting—highlights a growing dissonance.

This technological trajectory evokes Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, where he predicts a time when the “general intellect” becomes a direct force of production, potentially rendering human labor superfluous (Marx, 1973, p. 706). The anxiety expressed in the Semafor business section regarding the AI bubble (Jan 27) reflects the tension between the financialization of technology and its actual social utility. We are building what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls the “instrumentarian power” of surveillance capitalism, where human experience is merely raw material for prediction and control, even as the ecological cost (water consumption by data centers, as noted in Semafor Jan 28) mounts.

The policy sections reveal a preoccupation with the management of biological life—the concept of “biopolitics” introduced by Michel Foucault (2008). In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s crackdown on telemedicine and sick days represents a state anxiety regarding the productivity of the biological body. By framing sick leave as a “scourge” on the economy, the state attempts to discipline the workforce, viewing health not as a human right but as an economic input. This reflects a shift from a welfare state to a “workfare” mentality, where the body is regulated to ensure the continuity of capital accumulation.

Perhaps the most harrowing narrative within these newsletters is the domestic crisis in Minneapolis. The killing of Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and nurse, by federal immigration agents marks a terrifying evolution in the American “state of exception.” The New York Times Magazine report (Jan 25) describes the city as a “giant eyeball,” surveillance serving as the only recourse for a citizenry under siege.

This situation perfectly illustrates Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) theory of the state of exception, where the law is suspended by the sovereign to deal with a crisis, eventually becoming a permanent paradigm of government. The federal agents, operating with impunity and stripping citizens of their rights (and lives) based on a mandate of “order,” have reduced the citizens of Minneapolis to homo sacer—life that can be taken without it being considered homicide in the traditional legal sense.

Hannah Arendt’s (1970) distinction between power and violence is also instructive here. Power, Arendt argues, corresponds to the human ability to act in concert; violence is instrumental and appears where power is in jeopardy. The heavy-handed federal response, characterized by tear gas and live fire against protesters, signals not the strength of the administration, but the brittleness of its authority. As Semafor (Jan 26) notes, even Republican allies are wavering, suggesting the legitimacy of this violence is fracturing.

Minneapolis’s “dystopian unraveling”—federal agents pepper-spraying and shooting protesters—mirrors scholarly warnings of backlash in immigration protests, where enforcement breeds polarization and erodes trust in state sovereignty. Communal grief and solidarity emerge, akin to post-Floyd trauma, with residents sharing warmth against literal and figurative cold. Hannah Arendt’s lament in The Human Condition resonates: the “social realm” invades the public sphere, dissolving labor-work-action distinctions into survivalist conformity, as seen in hygge rituals and protest mutual aid. Refugee detentions and racial profiling during crises further dehumanize, per qualitative analyses of COVID-era ICE tactics.

Trump’s ICE surge invokes 10th Amendment clashes, with Minnesota courts challenging warrantless searches and force against peaceful demonstrators, paralleling European deportation protests’ sovereignty contests. Vaccine optionality and Greenland bids highlight personalist leadership over institutional norms, risking impunity as Philippe Sands fears in human rights law. Xi’s general purges, meanwhile, disrupt PLA readiness, echoing Arendt’s “banality of evil” where thoughtless hierarchies enable chaos. Interrelations amplify: economic storm costs fund policy escalations, while social media disinformation (e.g., AI-generated smears of Pretti) privatizes protest into violence.

Briefing Overview

The reporting on Ethiopia’s planned Bishoftu mega-airport frames it as an infrastructural wager: high ambition, large displacement (≈15,000 people), and financing dependent on international capital. The airline’s managerial success is invoked to justify the project’s audacity; yet the extract notes political brittleness and unresolved compensation.

Scholars of megaprojects emphasize how such investments are as much political performances as technically rational choices (Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius, & Rothengatter, 2003). Flyvbjerg’s work on optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation is relevant: mega-infrastructure often oversells benefits and undersells social costs. Paired with Acemoglu and Robinson’s institutionalist account, the airport becomes legible as a political instrument — a state-led narrative that binds modernization to regime legitimacy (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012). The airport’s financing through international capital, rather than domestic budgetary means, insulates it from immediate fiscal pain but amplifies long-term obligations and exposure to global market vicissitudes. The ethical-political problem is classic: can infrastructure be emancipatory when it is premised on displacement and when institutional safeguards are weak? The Monocle reporting invites precisely this normative question.

The winter storm exemplifies how environmental extremes amplify economic fragility, with power outages, flight cancellations, and supply chain halts projected to cost billions—echoing research on severe weather’s drag on GDP by 0.5-2% annually through commerce interruptions. In Minneapolis, ICE operations strain healthcare, education, and transit, underscoring “crimmigration’s” hidden fiscal toll on local services. These interlink with broader policy choices, as Trump’s Greenland overtures and tariff threats ripple into energy markets, where copper hunts and LNG deals signal resource scrambles amid climate volatility.

Monocle’s piece on the Academy Awards argues that language-based categories now look anachronistic: performance and film travel as cultural capital even while institutional categories lag (the “acting could travel but the film still needed a passport”). The reporting tracks two linked processes — the technical-democratic widening of circulation through streaming and the institutional persistence of Anglocentric gatekeeping.

This tension maps neatly onto Bourdieu’s account of cultural fields: fields are both spaces of symbolic circulation and sites of institutional monopoly (Bourdieu, 1984). Streaming platforms redistribute access (new publics, new patterns of reception) but prestige institutions (award bodies, major festivals) remain powerful producers of cultural distinction. At the level of media studies, Jenkins’s idea of participatory and convergent cultures explains why subtitles are less of a barrier for younger cohorts (Jenkins, 2006): audiences now practice cross-linguistic consumption as a routine form of cultural literacy. Yet the structural asymmetry remains: institutions like the Academy perform a gatekeeping function that sustains old hierarchies even as popular viewing practices democratize taste.

The policy and economic implications are subtle but real. A film’s commercial prospects and soft-power effects now depend on transnational streaming exposure as much as on festivals or awards. This hybrid economy of attention privileges works that can move across platforms and languages, and it helps explain why non-English films can secure acting prizes while still being compartmentalized institutionally — a sign that symbolic capital has become porous but not yet entirely redistributed.

Monocle’s reporting from Nuuk shows how a localized population suddenly finds itself at the centre of a global security narrative: threats, troop movements, procurement decisions in Copenhagen, and the arrival of foreign journalists. The island’s newfound visibility — and Denmark’s multi-billion defence purchases — makes clear that geography, once marginal, has become a political asset and a policy constraint.

This is a striking instance of what security scholars have called the dissolution of the boundary between economics and security: defensive purchases, infrastructure, and tourism interact in the same register (Buzan, Wæver, & de Wilde, 1998). Greenland’s case also recalls classic literatures on coloniality and resource geopolitics: strategic lands that were once “backwaters” become sites of extraction and contestation when geopolitical calculations shift (Dodds, 2010). Local actors’ pragmatic responses — converting media attention into tourism income, or reviving traditional industries such as Qiviut production — illustrate how communities can instrumentally use global attention while also confronting dependence and vulnerability.

For policy, the lesson is twofold. First, strategic reassurance (troops, hardware) is only one dimension; durable outcomes depend on governance, local economic resilience, and negotiated authority — otherwise securitization can reproduce dependency. Second, visibility creates both vulnerabilities and opportunities: outside interest can finance local projects, but it can also predetermine local trajectories in ways that compound inequality and political marginalization.

The geopolitical dispatches from Greenland and Davos highlight the fragility of sovereignty in the 21st century. Andrew Mueller’s report from Nuuk captures the stoicism of a people caught between colonial legacies and neo-imperial ambitions. The anxiety of the Greenlanders, contrasted with the pragmatic “business as usual” attitude of locals, illustrates the tension between the Imagined Communities of the nation-state (Anderson, 1983) and the pragmatic necessities of survival in a globalized Arctic. The purchase of tupilaks—charms meant to deter enemies—reveals a resort to mythopoeic protection mechanisms against the very real, technologically advanced threat of US expansionism. This creates a jarring associative link to Andrew Tuck’s Saturday column on mascots. Tuck’s humorous dive into the world of costumed performers, governed by the “National Mascot Association” (motto: “Fuzzier Together, Safer Together”), serves as a surreal counterpoint to the hard power politics discussed elsewhere. The mascot, a “soft” avatar of corporate or civic identity, contrasts with the “hard” identity of the nation-state under threat. Yet, both rely on performance: the mascot wiggles for tips; the politician (like Trump or Carney) performs statecraft for votes and leverage.

The dominant narrative thread across these newsletters concerns President Trump’s threats regarding Greenland, which The Economist (January 22, 2026) frames as representing “the total annihilation of the [NATO] alliance” while simultaneously noting Trump’s eventual pivot toward “the framework of a future deal.” This oscillation between military menace and commercial negotiation exemplifies what Wendy Brown (2015) identified as the erosion of liberal democratic legitimacy in favor of “neoliberal rationality,” wherein states operate increasingly as corporate entities and territory becomes liquid financial asset rather than sacred national soil (p. 18).

The New York Times (January 21, 2026) reports Trump’s Davos declaration—”All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland”—alongside his subsequent claim to have reached a deal with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. This performative contradiction, resolved through what Semafor (January 22, 2026) calls “the TACO trade” (Trump Always Chickens Out), masks a deeper structural transformation: the conversion of Arctic sovereignty into a speculative derivative. As the newsletters note, Denmark announced “the greatest military buildup in its history” (Monocle, January 26, 2026), yet simultaneously engaged in negotiations that would grant the U.S. “sovereign claim to its bases” while restricting Russian and Chinese resource extraction. This bifurcation—militarization alongside economic concession—mirrors the “new imperialism” Harvey (2003) described, where territorial control serves not national interest but the facilitation of global capital flows (p. 182).

The cultural dimension of this territorial crisis appears in Monocle’s dispatch from Nuuk (January 26, 2026), where Greenlanders respond to existential threat with “pragmatism” and where tourism paradoxically booms because of Trump’s “delirious aspirations of conquest.” This recalls Achille Mbembe’s (2003) concept of “necropolitics”—the subjugation of life to the power of death—yet here inverted: the population survives through the commodification of their own vulnerability, selling “tupilait” (Inuit protective charms) depicting “the vanquishing of Trump” to anxious tourists. The Arctic becomes what Mark Fisher (2009) called a “capitalist realist” zone, where even resistance is subsumed into the market logic of the spectacle (p. 15).

If Greenland represents the macro-politics of territorial extraction, the newsletters simultaneously trace the micro-physics of biopolitical governance. Monocle (January 22, 2026) reports German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s campaign against telemedicine and sick leave, noting that Germans averaged 14.5 sick days in 2025 compared to 4.5 in Britain and the U.S. This disparity illuminates what Jonathan Crary (2013) termed “24/7” capitalism’s relentless colonization of recuperative time—the German resistance to which marks a last bastion of social-democratic somatic protection against the totalization of productivity (p. 76).

Conversely, the Minneapolis ICE operations documented across multiple outlets (New York Times, January 24–28, 2026; DealBook, January 26, 2026) demonstrate the necropolitical flip side: the state’s withdrawal of protection from specific populations. The killing of Alex Pretti—a U.S. citizen and Veterans Affairs nurse—by Border Patrol agents, described as occurring while filming on his phone and subsequently mischaracterized by officials as a “massacre” attempt, illustrates Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) “state of exception” becoming the rule. The Times (January 26, 2026) notes that federal agents “blocked state and local investigators from the crime scene,” creating a sovereignty-free zone within the body politic where “the act of recording law enforcement activity” becomes a capital offense.

The connection between these regimes—German austerity at one pole, American paramilitarism at the other—lies in their shared management of disposable populations. As Saskia Sassen (2014) argued in Expulsions, contemporary capitalism increasingly operates through “systemic expulsions” from economic and political life (p. 2). Whether through the denial of sick leave or the denial of due process, both systems prioritize the “flexibility” of capital over the fragility of bodies.

A recurring tension in this week’s edition is the politics of perception: who gets to see, and who gets to be seen. The critique of the Academy Awards’ “foreign-language” category by Catherine Balston strikes at the heart of postcolonial discourse. Balston argues that the category is a relic of Anglocentrism, a linguistic border that the screen has already dissolved. This resonates with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) concept of the “subaltern”—the segregation of non-English art into a “foreign” ghetto relegates the universal human experience to the status of the exotic “Other.” As Balston notes, the success of films like Parasite or O Agente Secreto proves that “cinema is... a universal language.” The persistence of the category is an institutional failure to acknowledge the deterritorialization of culture in the streaming age, a phenomenon Arjun Appadurai (1996) would identify as the disjuncture between the “technoscapes” of global distribution and the “ideoscapes” of outdated national award bodies.

This dialectic of seeing is further explored in Robert Bound’s reflection on the Turner and Constable exhibition at Tate Britain. Bound contrasts Turner’s “internal, emotional terrain” with Constable’s “truth in what’s there.” This distinction mirrors Immanuel Kant’s (1790/2007) philosophical delineation in the Critique of Judgment between the Dynamically Sublime (Turner’s terrifying, overwhelming nature) and the Beautiful (Constable’s harmonious, purposeful landscapes). In a week dominated by the “biliousness out of Washington” and the anxiety of invasion, Turner’s chaos seems the more appropriate aesthetic for our times. Yet, the exhibition suggests that truth requires both the internal feeling and the external reality—a synthesis lacking in the “Plan B”-less rhetoric of the US “Board of Peace” described in the Friday briefing.

Paris Fashion Week coverage in the bundle reads fashion as both aesthetic practice and a site where geopolitics enters everyday consumption — designers respond to tariffs and supply-chain dislocations, while brands refocus on top wealth segments (VICs) to salvage margins. Monocle’s interview and reportage capture how designers celebrate the ordinary as a strategy for staying relevant during economic contraction.

Here Appadurai’s cultural flows and Bourdieu’s social reproduction are both useful analytic tools: garments circulate with symbolic meanings that index class and national identity (Appadurai, 1996; Bourdieu, 1984). The political economy of luxury — where 2% of customers account for a disproportionate share of sales (Bain’s VICs statistic used by Monocle) — demonstrates how inequality underwrites cultural production. Tariffs reconfigure supply chains and the social ecology of craftsmanship (weavers, dyers), which are vulnerable because margins at that level are thin; policy shocks cascade into artisanal livelihoods even as luxury houses maintain profitability through rarity and brand power.

Tânia Maria’s “simplicity”-driven cult fame at 79 celebrates “successful aging” via authenticity, countering Hollywood’s youth cult in ensemble action tropes. Filoplumes—nature’s vibration-sensors—metaphorically evoke Arendtian action: attuned plurality amid parasites (state overreach?). Beckham feuds and Heated Rivalry‘s campy culture wars parody polarization, while Chloé Zhao’s death-doula pivot in Hamnet confronts mortality’s “shame,” linking personal terror to societal grief over Pretti. Literature like Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (Zhao’s source) probes child-loss universality, paralleling Gaza’s last hostage recovery.

Cultural production in these newsletters appears simultaneously as sanctuary and commodity. Monocle’s coverage of the Oscars (January 23, 2026) critiques the “Anglocentric awards circuit” while celebrating Brazilian cinema’s breakthrough, particularly Wagner Moura’s quip at the Critics’ Choice Awards: “or as we call it in Brazil, best foreign picture.” This moment of linguistic resistance—what Pierre Bourdieu (1979/1984) would recognize as the struggle over “symbolic capital”—occurs within an industry where, as ARTnews (January 21, 2026) notes, NADA now hosts “collectors’ salons” to combat the “intimidation factor” of contemporary art spaces (p. 34).

The art market’s democratization efforts—NADA’s mentorship programs, the Monocle critique of streaming platforms dissolving language barriers—exist in tension with the newsletters’ documentation of extreme wealth concentration. ARTnews reports Bonhams’ \$970 million annual sales and the \$31.4 million auction of François-Xavier Lalanne’s “Hippopotame Bar,” while The Economist (January 27, 2026) notes gold breaking \$5,000 per ounce as investors seek shelter from “geopolitical uncertainty.” This juxtaposition suggests what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (1999/2005) identified as the “new spirit of capitalism”: the absorption of critical artistic practices into the portfolio diversification strategies of the ultra-wealthy (p. 419).

Yet cultural production retains its resistant potential. The Monocle review of Tate Britain’s Turner and Constable exhibition (January 23, 2026) emphasizes “two ways of seeing the world”—Turner’s subjective sublime versus Constable’s empirical observation—as alternatives to the “pugilistic” framing of contemporary politics. This aesthetic pluralism offers, perhaps, a model for what Hannah Arendt (1958) called “natality”—the capacity for new beginnings through creative action (p. 246)—within a political field increasingly dominated by iterative crisis.

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Amidst the political fragmentation, the cultural sphere offers a paradoxical glimmer of cosmopolitanism. Monocle (Jan 22) reports on the Oscars embracing foreign-language films like Brazil’s O Agente Secreto and Norway’s Sentimental Value. While political borders harden (tariffs, walls, visa bans), the “screen itself has already dissolved” these borders.

This recalls the Frankfurt School’s analysis of the Culture Industry, but with a twist. While Adorno and Horkheimer (2002) feared mass culture would enforce conformity, in 2026, cinema appears to be one of the few arenas where a shared humanism persists against the tide of nativism. However, one must remain critical; as ARTnews (Jan 21) notes, the art market is busy courting the same oligarchs and sovereigns (e.g., Sotheby’s in Saudi Arabia) who are architects of the illiberal order. Culture is not immune to the transactional logic of the age; it is merely the most aesthetically pleasing asset class.

Amidst this geopolitical and economic churn, the lifestyle and culture sections point toward a retreat into the material and the local as a form of resistance. The obsession with Parisian “calcaire” (hard water) and the specific, laborious process of removing it mirrors the cultural obsession with “authenticity” in a digital age. Similarly, the focus on craftsmanship—whether it is Domyo’s kumihimo braided cords, the vegetarian tasting menu at Altatto in Milan, or the crab korokke recipe—signifies a “slow” counter-culture. Richard Sennett (2008), in The Craftsman, argues that craftsmanship is a basic human impulse: the desire to do a job well for its own sake. In an era of instant streaming and instant diplomatic threats, the tactile, slow process of braiding cord or simmering tomato sauce offers a grounding agency. It is a reclaiming of time and space, much like Turner and Constable claiming the landscape of England against the encroaching smoke of the Industrial Revolution.

Taken together, the newsletter fragments instantiate several linked dynamics:

1. Porous cultural universality and institutional lag: cultural products now travel transnationally with ease, but cultural institutions (awards, prizes) retain gatekeeping functions (Monocle on Oscars).

2. Security as development and vice versa: places like Greenland or Ethiopia become sites where strategic calculations and development ambitions intersect; defence procurement and airports are both instruments of statecraft and drivers of economic change.

3. Concentrated value and precarious production: luxury sectors, cultural prestige, and flagship infrastructure concentrate returns at the top while creating precarity for peripheral producers and displaced communities.

4. Visibility politics: media attention — from Davos to Oscars to fashion week — acts as a catalytic resource that local actors can convert into economic opportunity, even as it can also ossify outside narratives and externalize decision-making.

Economic shocks (storms) exacerbate social divides (protests), fueling policy backlashes that cultural narratives refract—hygge as privatized resilience amid public erosion. Arendt illuminates: modernity’s “loss of the world” via social conquest portends chaos when action yields to labor, as Minneapolis’s fellowship defies occupation. Implications urge mindful plurality: protests as natality’s spark, per Arendt, against banal enforcement; economic adaptation (microvacations, crypto aid) as filoplume-like attunement. Yet, without reflective policy, personalist purges (Xi, Trump) risk global impunity, echoing Sands’ “new age.”

The meteorological metaphors recurring throughout these dispatches—a “monster snowstorm” paralyzing the U.S. (New York Times, January 26, 2026), the “uncharted waters” of Monocle’s weekend edition—suggest an environment become hostile to human habitation, both literally and politically. The newsletters collectively document what Rob Nixon (2011) termed “slow violence”—the incremental catastrophes of climate change, institutional decay, and democratic backsliding that exceed the attention economy’s capacity for spectacle (p. 2).

Yet the persistence of documentary practice itself—whether in the Times’ frame-by-frame analysis of Pretti’s shooting or Monocle’s radio dispatches from Nuuk—suggests what Ariella Azoulay (2008) called “the civil contract of photography,” the obligation to witness and testify (p. 24). In an era when, as DealBook (January 26, 2026) reports, tech companies deploy AI to screen college applications and immigration agents deploy pepper spray against protesters, the human labor of attention—reading, connecting, remembering—becomes the last reservoir of democratic possibility.

The January 2026 news cycle thus emerges not as random assemblage but as coherent symptom: a world where Greenland’s ice and Minnesota’s streets are equally subject to extraction and abandonment, where cultural prestige camouflages economic predation, and where the biopolitical management of health serves as template for the necropolitical management of death. Only by reading these fragments against one another, with the theoretical tools provided by critical geography, political philosophy, and aesthetic theory, can we glimpse the totality of our present condition—a totality that, like Turner’s sunsets, reveals itself only in “great washes of cloud, fire, mist and colour” (Monocle, January 23, 2026).

The cycle of newsletters concludes with Tyler Brûlé’s vignette on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Zürich. Carney’s maxim—”if we’re not at the table, then we’re on the menu”—encapsulates the realpolitik of the moment. Whether it is Denmark bolstering its Arctic defenses or Brazil celebrating its Golden Globes, the imperative is active participation. However, Brûlé contrasts Carney’s “politeness” with the aggression of other leaders, suggesting that soft power and “manners” might be the ultimate weapon in a fractured world.

Ultimately, these snippets paint a picture of a world struggling to integrate the global and the local. The “foreign” is no longer abroad; it is in the living room via Netflix, yet the political borders are hardening. The solution offered by these diverse voices—from the curators at Tate to the cooks in Milan—seems to be a refusal to be flattened by the chaos. Like the Greenlanders carving their protective tupilaks or the Parisians fighting their calcium build-up, there is a persistent, quiet insistence on maintaining one’s own specific reality, even as the tides of history rise.

The newsletters document a world where the center is not holding. The “rupture” described by Mark Carney is not merely economic but ontological. We are witnessing the clash between a digitized, post-national economy and a violent, re-territorialized politics. To navigate this, we might look to the stoicism of the Greenlanders interviewed by Monocle, who view the geopolitical storm with pragmatism, or the resistance of the Minneapolis protesters, who insist on the visibility of the citizen against the state. The future described here is not determined, but it is precariously balanced between the “Board of Peace” and the barrel of a gun.

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Dodds, K. (2010). Geopolitics in a changing world. Routledge. (For a concise introduction to Arctic geopolitics and the strategic revaluation of peripheral geographies.)

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.

Flyvbjerg, B., Bruzelius, N., & Rothengatter, W. (2003). Megaprojects and risk: An anatomy of ambition. Cambridge University Press.

Fooks, J. (2026). Economic impacts of severe weather. Institute for Business in the Global Environment.[apnews]

Foucault, M. (1976). The history of sexuality, Volume 1: An introduction. Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Gates, P. (2017). Hollywood’s ageing ensemble action hero series. Canadian Review of American Studies. https://scholars.wlu.ca/engl_faculty[[scholars.wlu](https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=engl_faculty)]

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

Harvey, D. (2003). The new imperialism. Oxford University Press.

Homans, C. (2026, January 25). Watching America unravel in Minneapolis. The New York Times.[ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws]

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. NYU Press.

Kant, I. (2007). Critique of judgment (J. H. Bernard, Trans.). Dover Publications. (Original work published 1790).

Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Metropolitan Books.

Koopmans, R., & Michalowski, A. (2019). Contesting the deportation state? Ethnic and Racial Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1562194[[tandfonline](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01419870.2018.1562194?needAccess=true)]

Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (M. Nicolaus, Trans.). Penguin Books.

Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Farrar & Rinehart.

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

Sands, P. (2026). This could end very badly. The New York Times Magazine.[ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws]

Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Harvard University Press.

Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty (G. Schwab, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1922).

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.

Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. Yale University Press.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.

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 Alibaba, Google, Moonshot, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Zhipu tools (February 1, 2026). The featured image has been generated in Canva (February 1, 2026).]

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (February 1, 2026). The Return of the Mascot: Materiality, Comfort, and the “Slow” Counter-Culture. Open Economics Blog.

The newsletters from Monocle, The Economist, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Newsweek, Semafor, CNBC and ARTNews from January 22–28, 2026, present a remarkably compact map of contemporary globalization’s paradoxes: cultural goods flow more widely than ever even as institutions keep old gates in place; places on the global periphery suddenly matter strategically and economically; grand infrastructural wagers coexist with intimate practices of daily life; and markets of taste (luxury fashion, film awards) concentrate value even while claiming universality. Reading these dispatches together helps us see pattern in apparently disparate stories — the Oscars’ language category, Nuuk’s geopolitical moment, Ethiopia’s airport, and Paris runway politics are different nodes of the same structural transformation.

The dispatches from the final week of January 2026 paint a portrait of a world suspended in a volatile interregnum. From the frozen fjords of Greenland to the tear-gassed streets of Minneapolis, and from the rarefied air of Davos to the rubble of Gaza, the global order appears to be undergoing a violent restructuring. The overarching theme emerging from these newsletters is the collapse of the liberal international order into a raw, transactional realism. The “rules-based order,” long eulogized by Western technocrats, has been supplanted by what might be termed the “Deal-Based Order,” where sovereignty, human rights, and territory are fluid assets on a ledger managed by “personalist” leaders (Semafor, Jan 27).

This shifts recalls the warning of Antonio Gramsci (1971), who observed that “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (p. 276). The “morbid symptoms” of 2026 include the commodification of sovereign territory (Greenland), the gentrification of war zones (”New Gaza”), and the turning of the state security apparatus inward against its own citizens (Minneapolis).

These dispatches weave threads of crisis and resilience: aggressive federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis escalates into fatal clashes with protesters, killing U.S. citizens like nurse Alex Pretti and Renee Good amid widespread outrage and service disruptions; a massive winter storm ravages the U.S., crippling infrastructure and economies; cultural vignettes spotlight late-blooming stardom (e.g., 79-year-old Tânia Maria de Medeiros Filha’s Oscar-nominated role), avian filoplumes as emblems of subtle adaptation, hygge-inspired winter coping, and celebrity feuds; international notes include Rifaat al-Assad’s death, Ukraine peace talks, and Xi Jinping’s military purges. Collectively, they evoke a society strained by state power, nature’s indifference, and human ingenuity.

The newsletters present a fascinating palimpsest of the early 21st-century condition, where the hyper-globalized flows of capital and culture clash violently with the re-erecting borders of the nation-state. Spanning the haute couture of Paris Fashion Week to the frozen geopolitical anxieties of Nuuk, these snippets serve as a barometer for a world oscillating between the “liquid modernity” described by Zygmunt Bauman (2000)—where social forms are melting faster than new ones can be forged—and a desperate grasping for solid ground, be it through tradition, national sovereignty, or the tactile comfort of a ceramic vase.

The newsletters, thus, archive a peculiar temporal disjunction: they capture a world suspended between the residual protocols of liberal internationalism and the emergent logic of punitive transactionalism. Reading these dispatches in aggregate reveals not merely discrete news items but a structural atmosphere—a condition of permanent crisis wherein sovereignty, culture, and capital recombine under the sign of what David Harvey (2003) termed “accumulation by dispossession” (p. 145). This commentary excavates the latent theoretical coherences linking Greenlandic mineral futures with Brazilian cinematic prestige, German telemedical governance with ICE violence in Minneapolis, arguing that these fragments collectively diagnose the exhaustion of post-Cold War multilateralism and the normalization of extractive authoritarianism.

The spectacle of President Donald Trump’s attempt to acquire Greenland—followed by a “framework” deal that placated markets but rattled NATO—represents a return to a pre-Westphalian conception of territory as patrimony rather than polity. The Bloomberg and New York Times reports on the “Donroe Doctrine”—a clumsy portmanteau of Trump and the Monroe Doctrine—suggest a re-assertion of hemispheric dominance that treats allied nations not as partners, but as vassal states or real estate opportunities.

This geopolitical maneuvering resonates with Carl Schmitt’s concept of the Großraum (greater space), where a dominant power exerts hegemony over a specific geographic sphere, excluding external influence. However, unlike Schmitt’s theoretical framework which sought legal justification, this 2026 iteration is purely mercantile. As noted in The Economist (Jan 22), the transactional nature of the Greenland dispute—where tariffs are the stick and “mineral rights” are the carrot—strips international relations of normative pretenses.

The European reaction, described as “dread and skepticism” (Semafor, Jan 23), highlights the continent’s realization that the Atlanticist security guarantee is now conditional. The EU-India “Mother of All Deals” (Bloomberg, Jan 28) is a direct response to this vulnerability—a Polanyian “double movement” where society (or in this case, a bloc of nations) organizes to protect itself against the ravages of an unregulated, unpredictable market hegemon (Polanyi, 1944).

The unveiling of the “New Gaza” plan by Jared Kushner at Davos—replete with renderings of skyscrapers and marinas (Semafor, Jan 23; NYT, Jan 22)—is a grotesque manifestation of what Naomi Klein (2007) termed the “Shock Doctrine.” Disaster capitalism exploits crises to push through controversial policies while citizens are too distracted or traumatized to resist.

However, this goes beyond mere capitalism; it is high-modernist social engineering. As James C. Scott (1998) details in Seeing Like a State, authoritarian high modernism often views the chaotic, organic reality of human settlement as something to be rationalized, ordered, and aestheticized. The “New Gaza” plan seeks to erase the political and historical reality of the Palestinian territory, replacing it with a sterilized, depoliticized zone of commerce. It attempts to solve a political problem (sovereignty and statelessness) with an architectural and economic solution, ignoring the “human condition” that requires political recognition, not just economic development (Arendt, 1958).

Conversely, the geopolitical situation in Gaza and the reconstruction plans by Jared Kushner offer a macabre inversion of biopolitics: the power to “make live and let die” (Foucault, 1976). Kushner’s “New Gaza” plan, with its renderings of “shimmering tower blocks,” seeks to reconstruct the physical infrastructure of life while ignoring the political will of the inhabitants. It is an architectural embodiment of what Edward Said (1978) critiqued as Orientalism—a Western fantasy projected onto a landscape, erasing the complex human reality in favor of a tabula rasa. As the article notes, the absence of Gazans from the “Board of Peace” renders the plan a hollow simulacrum, a “hyperreal” construct as described by Jean Baudrillard (1994), where the map precedes the territory.

While the physical world fractures, the digital world accelerates toward a singularity of efficiency and exclusion. The newsletters highlight the rise of “agentic commerce” in China (CNBC, Jan 23) and the massive investment in AI by SoftBank and OpenAI (Bloomberg, Jan 28). This juxtaposition—AI agents booking flights while humans in Minneapolis are shot for protesting—highlights a growing dissonance.

This technological trajectory evokes Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, where he predicts a time when the “general intellect” becomes a direct force of production, potentially rendering human labor superfluous (Marx, 1973, p. 706). The anxiety expressed in the Semafor business section regarding the AI bubble (Jan 27) reflects the tension between the financialization of technology and its actual social utility. We are building what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls the “instrumentarian power” of surveillance capitalism, where human experience is merely raw material for prediction and control, even as the ecological cost (water consumption by data centers, as noted in Semafor Jan 28) mounts.

The policy sections reveal a preoccupation with the management of biological life—the concept of “biopolitics” introduced by Michel Foucault (2008). In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s crackdown on telemedicine and sick days represents a state anxiety regarding the productivity of the biological body. By framing sick leave as a “scourge” on the economy, the state attempts to discipline the workforce, viewing health not as a human right but as an economic input. This reflects a shift from a welfare state to a “workfare” mentality, where the body is regulated to ensure the continuity of capital accumulation.

Perhaps the most harrowing narrative within these newsletters is the domestic crisis in Minneapolis. The killing of Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and nurse, by federal immigration agents marks a terrifying evolution in the American “state of exception.” The New York Times Magazine report (Jan 25) describes the city as a “giant eyeball,” surveillance serving as the only recourse for a citizenry under siege.

This situation perfectly illustrates Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) theory of the state of exception, where the law is suspended by the sovereign to deal with a crisis, eventually becoming a permanent paradigm of government. The federal agents, operating with impunity and stripping citizens of their rights (and lives) based on a mandate of “order,” have reduced the citizens of Minneapolis to homo sacer—life that can be taken without it being considered homicide in the traditional legal sense.

Hannah Arendt’s (1970) distinction between power and violence is also instructive here. Power, Arendt argues, corresponds to the human ability to act in concert; violence is instrumental and appears where power is in jeopardy. The heavy-handed federal response, characterized by tear gas and live fire against protesters, signals not the strength of the administration, but the brittleness of its authority. As Semafor (Jan 26) notes, even Republican allies are wavering, suggesting the legitimacy of this violence is fracturing.

Minneapolis’s “dystopian unraveling”—federal agents pepper-spraying and shooting protesters—mirrors scholarly warnings of backlash in immigration protests, where enforcement breeds polarization and erodes trust in state sovereignty. Communal grief and solidarity emerge, akin to post-Floyd trauma, with residents sharing warmth against literal and figurative cold. Hannah Arendt’s lament in The Human Condition resonates: the “social realm” invades the public sphere, dissolving labor-work-action distinctions into survivalist conformity, as seen in hygge rituals and protest mutual aid. Refugee detentions and racial profiling during crises further dehumanize, per qualitative analyses of COVID-era ICE tactics.

Trump’s ICE surge invokes 10th Amendment clashes, with Minnesota courts challenging warrantless searches and force against peaceful demonstrators, paralleling European deportation protests’ sovereignty contests. Vaccine optionality and Greenland bids highlight personalist leadership over institutional norms, risking impunity as Philippe Sands fears in human rights law. Xi’s general purges, meanwhile, disrupt PLA readiness, echoing Arendt’s “banality of evil” where thoughtless hierarchies enable chaos. Interrelations amplify: economic storm costs fund policy escalations, while social media disinformation (e.g., AI-generated smears of Pretti) privatizes protest into violence.

Briefing Overview

The reporting on Ethiopia’s planned Bishoftu mega-airport frames it as an infrastructural wager: high ambition, large displacement (≈15,000 people), and financing dependent on international capital. The airline’s managerial success is invoked to justify the project’s audacity; yet the extract notes political brittleness and unresolved compensation.

Scholars of megaprojects emphasize how such investments are as much political performances as technically rational choices (Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius, & Rothengatter, 2003). Flyvbjerg’s work on optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation is relevant: mega-infrastructure often oversells benefits and undersells social costs. Paired with Acemoglu and Robinson’s institutionalist account, the airport becomes legible as a political instrument — a state-led narrative that binds modernization to regime legitimacy (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012). The airport’s financing through international capital, rather than domestic budgetary means, insulates it from immediate fiscal pain but amplifies long-term obligations and exposure to global market vicissitudes. The ethical-political problem is classic: can infrastructure be emancipatory when it is premised on displacement and when institutional safeguards are weak? The Monocle reporting invites precisely this normative question.

The winter storm exemplifies how environmental extremes amplify economic fragility, with power outages, flight cancellations, and supply chain halts projected to cost billions—echoing research on severe weather’s drag on GDP by 0.5-2% annually through commerce interruptions. In Minneapolis, ICE operations strain healthcare, education, and transit, underscoring “crimmigration’s” hidden fiscal toll on local services. These interlink with broader policy choices, as Trump’s Greenland overtures and tariff threats ripple into energy markets, where copper hunts and LNG deals signal resource scrambles amid climate volatility.

Monocle’s piece on the Academy Awards argues that language-based categories now look anachronistic: performance and film travel as cultural capital even while institutional categories lag (the “acting could travel but the film still needed a passport”). The reporting tracks two linked processes — the technical-democratic widening of circulation through streaming and the institutional persistence of Anglocentric gatekeeping.

This tension maps neatly onto Bourdieu’s account of cultural fields: fields are both spaces of symbolic circulation and sites of institutional monopoly (Bourdieu, 1984). Streaming platforms redistribute access (new publics, new patterns of reception) but prestige institutions (award bodies, major festivals) remain powerful producers of cultural distinction. At the level of media studies, Jenkins’s idea of participatory and convergent cultures explains why subtitles are less of a barrier for younger cohorts (Jenkins, 2006): audiences now practice cross-linguistic consumption as a routine form of cultural literacy. Yet the structural asymmetry remains: institutions like the Academy perform a gatekeeping function that sustains old hierarchies even as popular viewing practices democratize taste.

The policy and economic implications are subtle but real. A film’s commercial prospects and soft-power effects now depend on transnational streaming exposure as much as on festivals or awards. This hybrid economy of attention privileges works that can move across platforms and languages, and it helps explain why non-English films can secure acting prizes while still being compartmentalized institutionally — a sign that symbolic capital has become porous but not yet entirely redistributed.

Monocle’s reporting from Nuuk shows how a localized population suddenly finds itself at the centre of a global security narrative: threats, troop movements, procurement decisions in Copenhagen, and the arrival of foreign journalists. The island’s newfound visibility — and Denmark’s multi-billion defence purchases — makes clear that geography, once marginal, has become a political asset and a policy constraint.

This is a striking instance of what security scholars have called the dissolution of the boundary between economics and security: defensive purchases, infrastructure, and tourism interact in the same register (Buzan, Wæver, & de Wilde, 1998). Greenland’s case also recalls classic literatures on coloniality and resource geopolitics: strategic lands that were once “backwaters” become sites of extraction and contestation when geopolitical calculations shift (Dodds, 2010). Local actors’ pragmatic responses — converting media attention into tourism income, or reviving traditional industries such as Qiviut production — illustrate how communities can instrumentally use global attention while also confronting dependence and vulnerability.

For policy, the lesson is twofold. First, strategic reassurance (troops, hardware) is only one dimension; durable outcomes depend on governance, local economic resilience, and negotiated authority — otherwise securitization can reproduce dependency. Second, visibility creates both vulnerabilities and opportunities: outside interest can finance local projects, but it can also predetermine local trajectories in ways that compound inequality and political marginalization.

The geopolitical dispatches from Greenland and Davos highlight the fragility of sovereignty in the 21st century. Andrew Mueller’s report from Nuuk captures the stoicism of a people caught between colonial legacies and neo-imperial ambitions. The anxiety of the Greenlanders, contrasted with the pragmatic “business as usual” attitude of locals, illustrates the tension between the Imagined Communities of the nation-state (Anderson, 1983) and the pragmatic necessities of survival in a globalized Arctic. The purchase of tupilaks—charms meant to deter enemies—reveals a resort to mythopoeic protection mechanisms against the very real, technologically advanced threat of US expansionism. This creates a jarring associative link to Andrew Tuck’s Saturday column on mascots. Tuck’s humorous dive into the world of costumed performers, governed by the “National Mascot Association” (motto: “Fuzzier Together, Safer Together”), serves as a surreal counterpoint to the hard power politics discussed elsewhere. The mascot, a “soft” avatar of corporate or civic identity, contrasts with the “hard” identity of the nation-state under threat. Yet, both rely on performance: the mascot wiggles for tips; the politician (like Trump or Carney) performs statecraft for votes and leverage.

The dominant narrative thread across these newsletters concerns President Trump’s threats regarding Greenland, which The Economist (January 22, 2026) frames as representing “the total annihilation of the [NATO] alliance” while simultaneously noting Trump’s eventual pivot toward “the framework of a future deal.” This oscillation between military menace and commercial negotiation exemplifies what Wendy Brown (2015) identified as the erosion of liberal democratic legitimacy in favor of “neoliberal rationality,” wherein states operate increasingly as corporate entities and territory becomes liquid financial asset rather than sacred national soil (p. 18).

The New York Times (January 21, 2026) reports Trump’s Davos declaration—”All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland”—alongside his subsequent claim to have reached a deal with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. This performative contradiction, resolved through what Semafor (January 22, 2026) calls “the TACO trade” (Trump Always Chickens Out), masks a deeper structural transformation: the conversion of Arctic sovereignty into a speculative derivative. As the newsletters note, Denmark announced “the greatest military buildup in its history” (Monocle, January 26, 2026), yet simultaneously engaged in negotiations that would grant the U.S. “sovereign claim to its bases” while restricting Russian and Chinese resource extraction. This bifurcation—militarization alongside economic concession—mirrors the “new imperialism” Harvey (2003) described, where territorial control serves not national interest but the facilitation of global capital flows (p. 182).

The cultural dimension of this territorial crisis appears in Monocle’s dispatch from Nuuk (January 26, 2026), where Greenlanders respond to existential threat with “pragmatism” and where tourism paradoxically booms because of Trump’s “delirious aspirations of conquest.” This recalls Achille Mbembe’s (2003) concept of “necropolitics”—the subjugation of life to the power of death—yet here inverted: the population survives through the commodification of their own vulnerability, selling “tupilait” (Inuit protective charms) depicting “the vanquishing of Trump” to anxious tourists. The Arctic becomes what Mark Fisher (2009) called a “capitalist realist” zone, where even resistance is subsumed into the market logic of the spectacle (p. 15).

If Greenland represents the macro-politics of territorial extraction, the newsletters simultaneously trace the micro-physics of biopolitical governance. Monocle (January 22, 2026) reports German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s campaign against telemedicine and sick leave, noting that Germans averaged 14.5 sick days in 2025 compared to 4.5 in Britain and the U.S. This disparity illuminates what Jonathan Crary (2013) termed “24/7” capitalism’s relentless colonization of recuperative time—the German resistance to which marks a last bastion of social-democratic somatic protection against the totalization of productivity (p. 76).

Conversely, the Minneapolis ICE operations documented across multiple outlets (New York Times, January 24–28, 2026; DealBook, January 26, 2026) demonstrate the necropolitical flip side: the state’s withdrawal of protection from specific populations. The killing of Alex Pretti—a U.S. citizen and Veterans Affairs nurse—by Border Patrol agents, described as occurring while filming on his phone and subsequently mischaracterized by officials as a “massacre” attempt, illustrates Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) “state of exception” becoming the rule. The Times (January 26, 2026) notes that federal agents “blocked state and local investigators from the crime scene,” creating a sovereignty-free zone within the body politic where “the act of recording law enforcement activity” becomes a capital offense.

The connection between these regimes—German austerity at one pole, American paramilitarism at the other—lies in their shared management of disposable populations. As Saskia Sassen (2014) argued in Expulsions, contemporary capitalism increasingly operates through “systemic expulsions” from economic and political life (p. 2). Whether through the denial of sick leave or the denial of due process, both systems prioritize the “flexibility” of capital over the fragility of bodies.

A recurring tension in this week’s edition is the politics of perception: who gets to see, and who gets to be seen. The critique of the Academy Awards’ “foreign-language” category by Catherine Balston strikes at the heart of postcolonial discourse. Balston argues that the category is a relic of Anglocentrism, a linguistic border that the screen has already dissolved. This resonates with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) concept of the “subaltern”—the segregation of non-English art into a “foreign” ghetto relegates the universal human experience to the status of the exotic “Other.” As Balston notes, the success of films like Parasite or O Agente Secreto proves that “cinema is... a universal language.” The persistence of the category is an institutional failure to acknowledge the deterritorialization of culture in the streaming age, a phenomenon Arjun Appadurai (1996) would identify as the disjuncture between the “technoscapes” of global distribution and the “ideoscapes” of outdated national award bodies.

This dialectic of seeing is further explored in Robert Bound’s reflection on the Turner and Constable exhibition at Tate Britain. Bound contrasts Turner’s “internal, emotional terrain” with Constable’s “truth in what’s there.” This distinction mirrors Immanuel Kant’s (1790/2007) philosophical delineation in the Critique of Judgment between the Dynamically Sublime (Turner’s terrifying, overwhelming nature) and the Beautiful (Constable’s harmonious, purposeful landscapes). In a week dominated by the “biliousness out of Washington” and the anxiety of invasion, Turner’s chaos seems the more appropriate aesthetic for our times. Yet, the exhibition suggests that truth requires both the internal feeling and the external reality—a synthesis lacking in the “Plan B”-less rhetoric of the US “Board of Peace” described in the Friday briefing.

Paris Fashion Week coverage in the bundle reads fashion as both aesthetic practice and a site where geopolitics enters everyday consumption — designers respond to tariffs and supply-chain dislocations, while brands refocus on top wealth segments (VICs) to salvage margins. Monocle’s interview and reportage capture how designers celebrate the ordinary as a strategy for staying relevant during economic contraction.

Here Appadurai’s cultural flows and Bourdieu’s social reproduction are both useful analytic tools: garments circulate with symbolic meanings that index class and national identity (Appadurai, 1996; Bourdieu, 1984). The political economy of luxury — where 2% of customers account for a disproportionate share of sales (Bain’s VICs statistic used by Monocle) — demonstrates how inequality underwrites cultural production. Tariffs reconfigure supply chains and the social ecology of craftsmanship (weavers, dyers), which are vulnerable because margins at that level are thin; policy shocks cascade into artisanal livelihoods even as luxury houses maintain profitability through rarity and brand power.

Tânia Maria’s “simplicity”-driven cult fame at 79 celebrates “successful aging” via authenticity, countering Hollywood’s youth cult in ensemble action tropes. Filoplumes—nature’s vibration-sensors—metaphorically evoke Arendtian action: attuned plurality amid parasites (state overreach?). Beckham feuds and Heated Rivalry‘s campy culture wars parody polarization, while Chloé Zhao’s death-doula pivot in Hamnet confronts mortality’s “shame,” linking personal terror to societal grief over Pretti. Literature like Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (Zhao’s source) probes child-loss universality, paralleling Gaza’s last hostage recovery.

Cultural production in these newsletters appears simultaneously as sanctuary and commodity. Monocle’s coverage of the Oscars (January 23, 2026) critiques the “Anglocentric awards circuit” while celebrating Brazilian cinema’s breakthrough, particularly Wagner Moura’s quip at the Critics’ Choice Awards: “or as we call it in Brazil, best foreign picture.” This moment of linguistic resistance—what Pierre Bourdieu (1979/1984) would recognize as the struggle over “symbolic capital”—occurs within an industry where, as ARTnews (January 21, 2026) notes, NADA now hosts “collectors’ salons” to combat the “intimidation factor” of contemporary art spaces (p. 34).

The art market’s democratization efforts—NADA’s mentorship programs, the Monocle critique of streaming platforms dissolving language barriers—exist in tension with the newsletters’ documentation of extreme wealth concentration. ARTnews reports Bonhams’ \$970 million annual sales and the \$31.4 million auction of François-Xavier Lalanne’s “Hippopotame Bar,” while The Economist (January 27, 2026) notes gold breaking \$5,000 per ounce as investors seek shelter from “geopolitical uncertainty.” This juxtaposition suggests what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (1999/2005) identified as the “new spirit of capitalism”: the absorption of critical artistic practices into the portfolio diversification strategies of the ultra-wealthy (p. 419).

Yet cultural production retains its resistant potential. The Monocle review of Tate Britain’s Turner and Constable exhibition (January 23, 2026) emphasizes “two ways of seeing the world”—Turner’s subjective sublime versus Constable’s empirical observation—as alternatives to the “pugilistic” framing of contemporary politics. This aesthetic pluralism offers, perhaps, a model for what Hannah Arendt (1958) called “natality”—the capacity for new beginnings through creative action (p. 246)—within a political field increasingly dominated by iterative crisis.

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Amidst the political fragmentation, the cultural sphere offers a paradoxical glimmer of cosmopolitanism. Monocle (Jan 22) reports on the Oscars embracing foreign-language films like Brazil’s O Agente Secreto and Norway’s Sentimental Value. While political borders harden (tariffs, walls, visa bans), the “screen itself has already dissolved” these borders.

This recalls the Frankfurt School’s analysis of the Culture Industry, but with a twist. While Adorno and Horkheimer (2002) feared mass culture would enforce conformity, in 2026, cinema appears to be one of the few arenas where a shared humanism persists against the tide of nativism. However, one must remain critical; as ARTnews (Jan 21) notes, the art market is busy courting the same oligarchs and sovereigns (e.g., Sotheby’s in Saudi Arabia) who are architects of the illiberal order. Culture is not immune to the transactional logic of the age; it is merely the most aesthetically pleasing asset class.

Amidst this geopolitical and economic churn, the lifestyle and culture sections point toward a retreat into the material and the local as a form of resistance. The obsession with Parisian “calcaire” (hard water) and the specific, laborious process of removing it mirrors the cultural obsession with “authenticity” in a digital age. Similarly, the focus on craftsmanship—whether it is Domyo’s kumihimo braided cords, the vegetarian tasting menu at Altatto in Milan, or the crab korokke recipe—signifies a “slow” counter-culture. Richard Sennett (2008), in The Craftsman, argues that craftsmanship is a basic human impulse: the desire to do a job well for its own sake. In an era of instant streaming and instant diplomatic threats, the tactile, slow process of braiding cord or simmering tomato sauce offers a grounding agency. It is a reclaiming of time and space, much like Turner and Constable claiming the landscape of England against the encroaching smoke of the Industrial Revolution.

Taken together, the newsletter fragments instantiate several linked dynamics:

1. Porous cultural universality and institutional lag: cultural products now travel transnationally with ease, but cultural institutions (awards, prizes) retain gatekeeping functions (Monocle on Oscars).

2. Security as development and vice versa: places like Greenland or Ethiopia become sites where strategic calculations and development ambitions intersect; defence procurement and airports are both instruments of statecraft and drivers of economic change.

3. Concentrated value and precarious production: luxury sectors, cultural prestige, and flagship infrastructure concentrate returns at the top while creating precarity for peripheral producers and displaced communities.

4. Visibility politics: media attention — from Davos to Oscars to fashion week — acts as a catalytic resource that local actors can convert into economic opportunity, even as it can also ossify outside narratives and externalize decision-making.

Economic shocks (storms) exacerbate social divides (protests), fueling policy backlashes that cultural narratives refract—hygge as privatized resilience amid public erosion. Arendt illuminates: modernity’s “loss of the world” via social conquest portends chaos when action yields to labor, as Minneapolis’s fellowship defies occupation. Implications urge mindful plurality: protests as natality’s spark, per Arendt, against banal enforcement; economic adaptation (microvacations, crypto aid) as filoplume-like attunement. Yet, without reflective policy, personalist purges (Xi, Trump) risk global impunity, echoing Sands’ “new age.”

The meteorological metaphors recurring throughout these dispatches—a “monster snowstorm” paralyzing the U.S. (New York Times, January 26, 2026), the “uncharted waters” of Monocle’s weekend edition—suggest an environment become hostile to human habitation, both literally and politically. The newsletters collectively document what Rob Nixon (2011) termed “slow violence”—the incremental catastrophes of climate change, institutional decay, and democratic backsliding that exceed the attention economy’s capacity for spectacle (p. 2).

Yet the persistence of documentary practice itself—whether in the Times’ frame-by-frame analysis of Pretti’s shooting or Monocle’s radio dispatches from Nuuk—suggests what Ariella Azoulay (2008) called “the civil contract of photography,” the obligation to witness and testify (p. 24). In an era when, as DealBook (January 26, 2026) reports, tech companies deploy AI to screen college applications and immigration agents deploy pepper spray against protesters, the human labor of attention—reading, connecting, remembering—becomes the last reservoir of democratic possibility.

The January 2026 news cycle thus emerges not as random assemblage but as coherent symptom: a world where Greenland’s ice and Minnesota’s streets are equally subject to extraction and abandonment, where cultural prestige camouflages economic predation, and where the biopolitical management of health serves as template for the necropolitical management of death. Only by reading these fragments against one another, with the theoretical tools provided by critical geography, political philosophy, and aesthetic theory, can we glimpse the totality of our present condition—a totality that, like Turner’s sunsets, reveals itself only in “great washes of cloud, fire, mist and colour” (Monocle, January 23, 2026).

The cycle of newsletters concludes with Tyler Brûlé’s vignette on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Zürich. Carney’s maxim—”if we’re not at the table, then we’re on the menu”—encapsulates the realpolitik of the moment. Whether it is Denmark bolstering its Arctic defenses or Brazil celebrating its Golden Globes, the imperative is active participation. However, Brûlé contrasts Carney’s “politeness” with the aggression of other leaders, suggesting that soft power and “manners” might be the ultimate weapon in a fractured world.

Ultimately, these snippets paint a picture of a world struggling to integrate the global and the local. The “foreign” is no longer abroad; it is in the living room via Netflix, yet the political borders are hardening. The solution offered by these diverse voices—from the curators at Tate to the cooks in Milan—seems to be a refusal to be flattened by the chaos. Like the Greenlanders carving their protective tupilaks or the Parisians fighting their calcium build-up, there is a persistent, quiet insistence on maintaining one’s own specific reality, even as the tides of history rise.

The newsletters document a world where the center is not holding. The “rupture” described by Mark Carney is not merely economic but ontological. We are witnessing the clash between a digitized, post-national economy and a violent, re-territorialized politics. To navigate this, we might look to the stoicism of the Greenlanders interviewed by Monocle, who view the geopolitical storm with pragmatism, or the resistance of the Minneapolis protesters, who insist on the visibility of the citizen against the state. The future described here is not determined, but it is precariously balanced between the “Board of Peace” and the barrel of a gun.

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[Written, Researched, and Edited by Pablo Markin. Some parts of the text have been produced with the aid of Alibaba, Google, Moonshot, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Zhipu tools (February 1, 2026). The featured image has been generated in Canva (February 1, 2026).]

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Pablo Markin (February 1, 2026). The Return of the Mascot: Materiality, Comfort, and the “Slow” Counter-Culture. Open Economics Blog.