In 1837, French businessman Thierry Hermès founded the company that bears his surname as a harness and saddle workshop for European nobles. He could not have imagined that, almost two centuries later, this company would not only still be standing, but become a luxury fashion brand that sells its goods to international stars like Madonna, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Jennifer Lopez. The Hermès company has annual profits of €11.6 billion ($12,483,862,000) and is worth 202 billion on the stock market; it has brought prosperity to successive generations of the founder’s family for decades without attracting attention. Until now, that is. Nicolas Puech, a fifth-generation descendant and the company’s first shareholder, has announced that he wants to adopt his gardener and make him the heir to his fortune.
Day: December 6, 2023
My generation was one of the first to come across gay people in TV series and books without having to look for them. We didn’t have to go to specialized bookstores or video stores. During my childhood I saw that television included homosexual characters as an emblem of modernity in the Spain of get-rich-quick culture and gay marriage. In less than 20 years, that representation has spread as wide as the market’s imagination. On streaming platforms there are gay Christmas romantic comedies, gay Nordic dramas, and movies based on gay novels in which gay English princes marry the bisexual son of the president of the United States. As you might expect, all of these stories that I watch and read avidly are deeply unsatisfying in their desire to shoehorn the gay into contemporary (Western, capitalist) life.
Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a widely documented instigator of human rights violations in Latin America and Asia, died last week at the age of 100. Journalist Spencer Ackerman, author of his obituary in Rolling Stone, will not miss him. “Henry Kissinger, war criminal loved by the American ruling class, finally dies” was the headline with which Ackerman dispatched the politician. In the very first paragraph, just in case there was still someone waiting for a laudatory comment in the text, the author recalled the figure of the white supremacist Timothy McVeigh, the murderer with the highest number of confirmed deaths (168 people, including 19 children) executed by United States, to then point out: “McVeigh never remotely killed anywhere on the scale of Kissinger.”
