◊ POLITICS ◊
U.S. Congressional Elections
The elections in the United States in 2018 will be held primarily on Tuesday, November 6, 2018. These midterm elections will occur in the middle of the term of Republican President Donald Trump. All 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 33 of the 100 seats in the U.S. 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 regain the majority in the Senate.
Presidential Election in Brazil
The upcoming general elections in Brazil 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 open, with a half-dozen potential candidates from across the political spectrum having a chance to win the highest office in the country. However, the Brazilian electorate is deeply divided between former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the leftist Workers’ Party and far-right Congressman Jair Bolsonaro. Still, Lula may not be allowed to run if a higher court confirms a corruption sentence against him, making the race even more unpredictable.
◊ MUSIC ◊
Rock In Rio Lisboa has confirmed the dates for 2018 for its biennial festival in the Portuguese capital. Following the most recent edition in Rio de Janeiro in September 2017, the festival crosses the Atlantic for consecutive weekends on Saturday, June 23, and Sunday, June 24, and then on Friday, June 29, and Saturday, June 30.
In the last edition, the festival hosted legends of Rock In Rio like Queen and Bruce Springsteen, as well as modern megastars like Maroon 5 and Avicii. Who knows what 2018 holds?
◊ ARTS ◊
Tarsila do Amaral at MoMA
Tarsila do Amaral, a key figure in the history of modernism in Latin America, will have the first exhibition in the United States dedicated exclusively to her, from February 11 to June 3, 2018, at MoMA in New York. The show focuses on her pivotal production from the 1920s, from her early Parisian works to the emblematic modernist paintings produced in Brazil, ending with her large-scale and socially engaged works from the early 1930s. The exhibition features over 130 works of art, including paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, and other historical documents from collections in Latin America, Europe, and the United States.
◊ TV ◊
Game of Thrones: The Final Season
The 8th season of Game of Thrones was announced by D.B. Weiss and David Benioff on March 12, 2017. Like the 7th season, the 8th will be shorter than previous ones, with six episodes, due to the reduced amount of story content remaining, as well as increased production values and the time needed to film episodes with larger sets than in previous seasons. The season is expected to premiere in late 2018. Like the 6th and 7th seasons, the 8th will be based on an outline of the two final, unpublished novels in the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin: The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. The 8th season will be the final one for Game of Thrones, although after its conclusion, five possible “successor shows,” most likely prequels, are feasible.
◊ SPORTS ◊
FIFA World Cup
The 2018 FIFA World Cup will be the 21st edition of the quadrennial international football tournament contested by the men’s national teams of the member associations of FIFA. It is scheduled to take place from June 14 to July 15. It will be the first World Cup held in Europe since 2006; all stadiums, except one, are in European Russia, west of the Ural Mountains, to keep travel times manageable. The tournament will involve 32 national teams. A total of 64 matches will be played in 12 venues across 11 cities. The final will take place on July 15 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, New York. Located at 111 West 57th Street, the project will combine the historic Steinway Building, designed in 1925 by Warren & Wetmore, with a new tower on the adjacent lot. The building will reach 1,438 feet in height. The tower will be the slimmest building in the world, with a width-to-height ratio of about 1:23. In the summer of 2017, after reaching 20 stories, construction of the tower stopped. The project exceeded budget and may be heading for a tax foreclosure. However, despite the financial troubles of the building, several apartments in the tower have already been sold by contract. In August 2017, all work on the Steinway Tower resumed, and completion is expected in 2018. In November 2017, the tower reached about 500 feet in height.
