COP25, the twenty-fifth edition of the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, saw delegates from the international community meet in Madrid on Monday to commence two weeks of talks. Madrid then serves as the resting place for this crucial climate summit which has twice changed venue: originally planned for Brazil before the government pulled out late last year, citing economic reasons and the ‘transition process’ as the country prepared for the inauguration of newly elected President Jair Bolsonaro, a pronounced climate sceptic; subsequently switched to Chile, before ongoing civil protests in the country over growing inequality prompted a late change, and a glance towards Europe.
Alongside the twenty-fifth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international environmental treaty adopted in 1992 and ratified a couple of years later, the conference in Madrid also incorporates the fifteenth meeting of the parties for the Kyoto Protocol (CMP15) and the second meeting of the parties for the Paris Agreement (CMA2). The conference is doubly important this year because come 2020, a raft of both binding and non-binding environmental commitments towards the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions – agreed as part of the Kyoto Protocol and implemented in two periods from 2008-2012 and from 2013-2020 – will come to an end making way for the Paris accord.
The Paris agreement looks to go further than the Kyoto Protocol. Agreed in 2015, it set a goal of keeping the increase in the global average temperature to ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, seen as a tipping point above which the world will find itself locked into a pattern of rising sea levels, frequent floods, heatwaves, and wildfires, crop failure, and depleted water resources. Recognising the risks of even a 2 degree rise in the global temperature, the Paris agreement also pledged to ‘pursue efforts’ to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. So far it has been ratified by 187 of 195 signatories, but the agreement has been rocked by the intended withdrawal of the United States, while its commitments are non-binding and determined locally. COP25 will encourage countries to step up the level of their nationally determined contributions, which tangible measures and funding towards the future of the environment.
Around 25,000 people from 200 countries, including heads of state, scientists, activists, and the UN secretary-general António Guterres, are expected to attend over the two weeks in Madrid. Article 6 of the Paris agreement will be on the agenda, as countries attempt to resolve lingering disputes over carbon trading. The backdrop to the conference has seen a highly-publicised climate action summit in New York in late September, and an alternative event dubbed the ‘Forest COP’ which took place in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, at Terra do Meio in Brazil, in mid-November: academics and activists who attended those meetings have in some cases faced a race against time to reach Madrid. Meanwhile environmental organisations are staging another alternative climate event in Santiago, where COP25 was scheduled to take place.
Thousands of climate activists gathered in Madrid as COP25 headed into the weekend, for a march through the city organised by local groups with those in attendance set to include Greta Thunberg and the actor Javier Bardem. The timing of the conference could not be more pressing. Last week, a United Nations Emissions Gap Report showed that greenhouse gas emissions rose to a record high in 2018, keeping the world firmly on course for a devastating temperature rise of 3.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And a bulletin released by the World Meteorological Organisation showed that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is also rising, as overall levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide increased beyond the average annual rate over the past decade. On Saturday in Madrid the picture darkened further, as an IUCN report indicated that climate change and nutrient pollution are resulting in an increase in the number of ocean sites with dangerously low concentrations of oxygen.
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At an awards ceremony at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on Monday night, Lionel Messi and Megan Rapinoe won the men’s and women’s Ballon d’Or, the prestigious award presented by the French weekly France Football which celebrates the best footballers of the calendar year. This was Messi’s sixth time winning the award, a record set on the back of a year which saw him lead Barcelona to the league title in Spain, and Argentina to a third-placed finish at the Copa América. He ended the 2018/19 La Liga season as the league’s top goalscorer with 36 goals from 34 appearances, and despite a disappointing end to Barcelona’s Champions League campaign, in the first leg of the semi-final against Liverpool he recorded the 600th goal of his club career. Virgil van Dijk, the Liverpool centre-back, and Cristiano Ronaldo of Juventus finished second and third in the rankings.
Meanwhile Rapinoe – who domestically captains Reign FC out of Tacoma, Washington – enjoyed a year defined by the success of the United States women’s national team, who triumphed at the World Cup in France over the summer. Rapinoe scored six goals during the tournament, including one from the penalty spot in the final as she inspired her side’s 2-0 victory versus the Netherlands. That goal came just days after her thirty-fourth birthday, and Rapinoe ended the World Cup with the Golden Boot for top goalscorer and the Golden Ball for best player. For the Ballon d’Or, Rapinoe beat out England’s Lucy Bronze and her American compatriot Alex Morgan, fellow World Cup stars who finished in second and third respectively. Off the pitch, Rapinoe is just as well known for her LGBTQ advocacy, her spat with Donald Trump which marked the latter stages of the World Cup, and the gender-neutral lifestyle brand re—inc which she founded with her fellow athletes.
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It was a big night for Daniel Lee and Bottega Veneta at the Fashion Awards in London on Monday, as the brand and its creative director won in every category for which they were nominated: Brand of the Year, Designer of the Year, Accessories Designer of the Year, and British Designer of the Year – Womenswear. The awards ceremony serves as a fundraiser for the not-for-profit British Fashion Council, and is held annually, often at the Royal Albert Hall, with an increasingly international focus. Fenty, the fashion house founded by Rihanna which has been under the auspices of LVMH since May, won the Urban Luxe Award, a boost for the singer, actress, and designer who stands as the first black woman to head a major luxury brand. The South Sudanese-Australian Adut Akech won Model of the Year, Rejina Pyo and Bethany Williams triumphed in the emerging talent categories, and there were legacy awards for Naomi Campbell, Giorgio Armani, and Sam McKnight. Tracee Ellis Ross hosted the ceremony, and Tyler, The Creator and Janet Jackson were among the presenters on a star–filled night.
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As 2019 draws to a close, some of the world’s biggest entertainment platforms began releasing their annual lists of our viewing and listening habits. What’s more, as the world teeters on the brink, some of their lists came burdened with decade-long retrospectives. Spotify Wrapped showed Post Malone, Billie Eilish, and Ariana Grande as the most-streamed artists globally in 2019, with the Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello duet ‘Señorita’ the most-streamed song, and breakout artists including Lunay, Lil Nas X, and Lizzo. Drake took pride of place as the most-streamed artist of the decade – with Ed Sheeran and Post Malone completing a male top three, Ariana Grande, Rihanna, and Taylor Swift keeping up the female side of the bargain – while beneath clammy sheets, Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’ emerged as the most-streamed track of the decade.
Over on YouTube, Mendes and Cabello trumped BTS and Blackpink with ‘Señorita’ the most-liked music video of 2019. Videos by MrBeast, with the aptly-named ‘Make This Video The Most Liked Video On Youtube’, by PewDiePie who offered a montage of his wedding, and by the Brazilian comedian whinderssonnunes topped the list of most-liked creator videos. PewDiePie was once again YouTube’s most-viewed creator, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Grand Theft Auto were the platform’s most-viewed video games, and there were successes for James Charles, Shane Dawson, and Kylie Jenner in the popular beauty category. Words on the page are rarely YouTube’s thing, so this year you can dispense with the text as the platform decided that its much-maligned annual Rewind video would also take the form of a listicle.
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Tibet House US, located at 22 West 15th Street in New York City, was founded in 1987 on the initiative of the Columbia University professor Robert Thurman, the actor and International Campaign for Tibet chairman Richard Gere, and the composer Philip Glass. Inaugurated by the Dalai Lama as one of a group of loosely affiliated international institutions towards the preservation of Tibetan culture, Tibet House US offers lectures, philosophy and meditation classes, a shrine room, library, and gallery, touring exhibits, and an annual star-studded benefit concert which takes place at Carnegie Hall and has featured such luminaries as David Bowie, Björk, FKA twigs, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, and Debbie Harry. Next year’s concert is set for 26 February, and the lineup announced this week includes familiar faces in the forms of Smith, Pop, and Anderson, plus Margo Price, Phoebe Bridgers, Bettye LaVette, Matt Berninger, Jesse Paris Smith, and the Tibetan artist Tenzin Choegyal, with Glass to return as artistic director.
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Every year brings with it hopes and dreams and the inevitable curve of triumphs and disappointments, for some bold new relationships, for others painful sundering or desperate avoidance, it boasts its own sounds and smells and shapes and fashions, the diminishing of seasons, and it turns out also its own commercially-approved colour. For each year Pantone – the company whose proprietary colour system is ubiquitous in professional design contexts – declares but one hue as the colour to define the calendar. The Pantone Color of the Year for 2020 was announced on Wednesday as blue: not just any blue but classic blue, the colour of Miles Davis and pristine oceans, according to Pantone ‘suggestive of the sky at dusk’, a shade that ‘brings a sense of peace and tranquility to the human spirit’, offering refuge, reflective, ‘imprinted in our psyches as a restful color’. That’s Pantone 19-4052 for short. Splash it on your walls, buy a new couch, or save it for some saucy undergarments.
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Art Basel Miami Beach took place across four days from its usual home at the Miami Beach Convention Center, the American edition of the prestigious art fair which now competes with Art Miami while remaining at the core of Miami art week. The week is spattered with satellite fairs and special exhibitions from the city’s various private and public collections, and Art Basel Miami Beach alone boasts artworks from more than 4,000 artists, mostly for sale, represented by leading galleries from across the world. This year Art Basel Miami Beach introduced Meridians, a special section of the fair curated by Magalí Arriola of the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, which housed installations and monumental artworks in the convention center’s newly renovated ballroom. The week attracts thousands of visitors, whether they’re looking to shop or to party, to see or be seen, and as an extra incentive this time round there was also a celebrity-laden runway show in the form of Dior’s pre-fall 2020 menswear collection, designed by Kim Jones and replete with Stussy and Air Jordan collabs.
More than all of this though, this year’s Miami art week achieved crossover success thanks to a couple of quirks: another hastily arranged Kanye West opera, and even more pertinently an overripe banana, handily duct-taped to an exhibit wall. On the back of his operatic debut Nebuchadnezzar, based on the Biblical depiction of the Neo-Babylonian monarch, which played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles at the end of last month, Kanye’s sophomore effort saw him turn his attention to the Virgin Mary, courtesy of a verse from the Gospel of Luke. Like Nebuchadnezzar, Mary was directed by the Italian performance artist Vanessa Beecroft and featured music from Kanye’s Sunday Service troupe, and it was performed on Sunday on the water at Miami Marine Stadium. Meanwhile the banana hung, or at least its remaining edition did, for two of the three editions of the work by Maurizio Cattelan sold quickly whether in spite of because of the $120,000 asking price. Entitled ‘Comedian’, the objet d’art – comprising one locally procured banana plus a piece of duct-tape – survived until Saturday, and became the talk of Miami and beyond, before the performance artist David Datuna plucked it from the wall and ate it all up. No matter: according to the will of the artist, the banana being perishable can be easily replaced.
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In a lengthy post on Instagram on Friday, Caroline Wozniacki announced that she will retire from tennis following next month’s Australian Open, the site of her greatest triumph when in 2018 she achieved long-anticipated Grand Slam success. Wozniacki reached the final of the US Open in 2009 and 2014, and she finished the 2010 and 2011 seasons ranked number one in the world, but a Grand Slam title still eluded her as she headed into the 2018 Australian Open on the back of a strong run of form. A resurgent Wozniacki had closed out the 2017 season with the biggest win of her career courtesy of victory over Venus Williams at the WTA Finals in Singapore, and she entered Sydney as the second seed. She had to save two match points in the second round against Jana Fett, then wins over Kiki Bertens, Magdaléna Rybáriková, Carla Suárez Navarro, and Elise Mertens led her to the final, where she triumphed in three sets over world number one Simona Halep.
Wozniacki subsequently regained the world number one spot – taking her time at the top of the tennis rankings to a total of 71 weeks – but her form since then has been intermittent and she has struggled with injuries. In October 2018, the Dane announced that she had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, but would continue to play. Announcing her impending retirement, Wozniacki stated that she has ‘accomplished everything I could ever dream of on the court’, while noting that she plans to start a family with her husband, the former NBA champion David Lee, and to raise awareness through upcoming rheumatoid arthritis projects.
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Has the sport of Muhammad Ali, Smokin’ Joe Frazier, Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, and Jack Dempsey – proud men who never did anything wrong – been reduced to mere amateur bluster? When they were the kings of the heavyweight division, for all the broken noses and cauliflower ears boxing had reach, it had meaning, and more than any other sport it had glamour. Now what are we left with? An Englishman having to dim his lustre and shed the pounds so as to stay on the outside throwing jabs against a tubby Mexican? Or is another heyday for the heavyweights on the horizon, and this mere course correction?
Either way, in the dubious location of Diriyah, Saudi Arabia on Saturday night, Anthony Joshua avenged his loss over Andy Ruiz Jr. – a technical knockout in the seventh round at Madison Square Garden six months ago, which sent shock waves through the sport, widely regarded as one of the biggest upsets in heavyweight history – to reclaim the unified WBA, IBF, WBO, and IBO heavyweight titles. A cagey fight but a strong tactical performance from Joshua saw him take the victory after twelve rounds by unanimous decision, the scorecards reading 118-110, 118-110, and 119-109 in his favour. The boxing world will renew its clamour for a fight between Joshua and the hard-hitting American Deontay Wilder, who retained his WBC title a couple of weeks ago with a seventh-round knockout of Luis Ortiz, or between Joshua and his compatriot Tyson Fury. Meanwhile Ruiz, who cannot be accused of making the most out of his unexpected success, admitted that he had simply been too busy eating.
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The rapper Juice WRLD died on Sunday at the age of just twenty-one after reportedly suffering a cardiac arrest at Chicago Midway International Airport. The Cook County medical examiner’s office in Illinois confirmed the death of the artist, whose real name was Jarad Anthony Higgins, after he was taken to nearby Advocate Christ Medical Center. Born in Chicago, Higgins began self-releasing his music in 2015, and swiftly emerged at the crest of a wave of SoundCloud rappers. His first extended play under the name Juice WRLD was released on the platform in February 2017: by the end of the year he had added four more tapes, including the EP 9 9 9 which contained the track ‘Lucid Dreams’ and brought him to wider attention. In December, he released the three-track EP Nothings Different, whose lead song ‘All Girls Are The Same’ received a music video directed by Cole Bennett, founder of the rap blog and multimedia company Lyrical Lemonade. Juice WRLD subsequently signed with Interscope Records.
In May 2018, ahead of his debut studio album Goodbye & Good Riddance, Interscope officially released ‘Lucid Dreams’, an anguished breakup song built around a sample of Sting’s ‘Shape of My Heart’, which over the summer ascended to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. Juice WRLD’s fledgeling career saw other successes: Goodbye & Good Riddance went platinum by the end of the year, and was followed by Wrld on Drugs, a collaborative mixtape with Future which reached number two on the Billboard 200, before his sophomore studio album Death Race for Love, released in March, saw Juice WRLD attain his first number one in America. Known for his short and sometimes spartan songs, blending the lyrical angst of emo with jagged rock-infused rap stylings, Juice WRLD also collaborated on records with Ellie Goulding and his near-contemporaries Lil Uzi Vert, Ski Mask the Slump God, and YoungBoy Never Broke Again. His lyrics often discussed issues of mental health and substance abuse, while the song ‘Legends’ released in the wake of the deaths of XXXTentacion and Lil Peep contained the lines ‘What’s the 27 Club? We ain’t making it past 21 / I been going through paranoia, so I always gotta keep a gun’. The Cook County medical examiner’s office said an autopsy would be performed on Monday.
