◊ POLITICS ◊
US Congressional Elections
The 2018 United States elections will mostly be held on Tuesday, November 6, 2018. These midterm elections will take place in the middle of Republican President Donald Trump’s term. All 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives and 33 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate will be contested. 39 state and territorial governorships and numerous other state and local elections will also be contested. Experts say that the Democratic Party may have a chance to take back the majority on the Senate.
Brazil’s President Election
The next Brazilian general elections are scheduled for October 2018, and will elect the President and Vice President, the National Congress, state Governors and Vice Governors and state Legislative Assemblies. The presidential race remains wide open as half a dozen potential contenders across the political spectrum stand a chance to win the country’s top job. However, Brazil’s electorate is deeply divided between former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the leftist Workers’ Party and far-right congressman Jair Bolsonaro. Yet Lula may not be allowed to run if a higher court upholds a corruption sentence against him, leaving the race even more unpredictable.
◊ MUSIC ◊
Rock In Rio Lisboa Rock In Rio Lisboa have confirmed the 2018 dates for their biennial fiesta in the Portuguese capital. Following the latest edition in Rio De Janeiro in September 2017, the festival makes its way across the Atlantic for consecutive weekends on the Saturday 23rd & Sunday June 24th and then on Friday 29th & Saturday June 30th.
Last time out, the festival played host to Rock In Rio legends Queen and Bruce Springsteen as well as modern megastars Maroon 5 and Avicii. Who knows what 2018 might hold?
◊ ARTS ◊
Tarsila do Amaral at MoMA
Tarsila do Amaral, foundational figure in the history of modernism in Latin America, will have the first exhibition in the United States exclusively devoted to her from February 11th to June 3rd, 2018 at MoMA, in New York. The show focuses on her pivotal production from the 1920s, from her earliest Parisian works, to the emblematic modernist paintings produced in Brazil, ending with her large-scale, socially driven works of the early 1930s. The exhibition features over 130 artworks, including paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, and other historical documents drawn from collections across Latin America, Europe, and the United States.
◊ TV ◊
Game of Thrones: The Final Season
Season 8 of Game of Thrones was announced by D.B. Weiss and David Benioff on March 12, 2017. Like the Season 7, Season 8 will be shorter than previous seasons, consisting of six episodes, due to the smaller amount of story content remaining, as well as the increased production values and time required to film episodes involving larger set pieces than in previous seasons. The season is expected to premiere in late 2018. Like the sixth and seventh seasons, Season 8 will be based on an outline of the two final, presently-unpublished novels in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. Season 8 will be the final season of Game of Thrones, though after the conclusion of Season 8, five potential “successor shows”, more likely prequels, are certainly possible.
◊ SPORTS ◊
FIFA World Cup
The 2018 FIFA World Cup will be the 21st FIFA World Cup, a quadrennial international football tournament contested by the men’s national teams of the member associations of FIFA. It is scheduled to take place on June 14th to July 15th. This will be the first World Cup held in Europe since 2006; all but one of the stadium venues are in European Russia, west of the Ural Mountains to keep travel time manageable. The tournament will involve 32 national teams. A total of 64 matches will be played in 12 venues located in 11 cities. The final will take place on July 15th in Moscow at the Luzhniki Stadium.
◊ ARCHITECTURE ◊
New York New Skyline
The Steinway Tower is a supertall residential project by developers JDS Development Group and Property Markets Group in midtown Manhattan in New York City. Located at 111 West 57th Street, the development will be a combination of the original land-marked Steinway Building designed in 1925 by Warren & Wetmore, and a new tower addition on the adjacent site. The building will rise to be 1,438 ft. The tower will become the most slender building in the world with a width-to-height ratio of about 1:23. In the summer of 2017, after rising 20 stories, the status on construction of the tower has stalled. The project has gone over budget and could be headed for foreclosure. However, despite the building’s monetary issues, a number of apartments in the tower have already gone to contract. During August 2017, all work on the Steinway Tower had resumed and is expected for completion in 2018. As of November 2017, the tower has reached a height of roughly 500 feet.
