Reading

Wheatley’s writing was the supposed product of her leisure time rather than her enslaved labour. She imitated white aesthetics while drawing attention to her Blackness in ways that mixed humility with boldness. She was held up as a prodigy who merited exceptional liberation and as proof that all people had an inalienable right to freedom.

Teachers, classmates, relatives would remember Mansfield as ‘completely self-centred’, ‘careless’, ‘lazy’, ‘impatient’, ‘the last child in the world they ever expected to become a writer’, less sweet than her sisters, and less obliging. When she started writing stories, her family thought she was trying to show off.

You do walk through the world with some people. You don’t know anything about them, but you walk through the world; if they die, you do not get used to it.

First-person narration is a rich medium in which difference can simply be suspended, without the need to announce the fact. For readers of a novel, the question ‘What is the gender affiliation of this narrator?’ may not seem particularly important.

The modernity of Upton Sinclair’s California is at odds with his style. He had no time for recent developments in literary technique and his primary models were Zola (from whom he learned the importance of shoe-leather research) and Dickens (from whom he derived a sense of social scale, but not a sense of humour).

The Chinchorro culture began mummifying their dead in what is now southern Peru and northern Chile around 6000 BCE, making South America’s earliest mummified bodies two thousand years older than those of Egypt. When the Inca conquered much of the Andes in the 15th century, they found that their new subjects practised many ways of preserving the dead. 

Dear Eleven Adults Responsible for the Majority of Book Bans in Schools,

I’m sorry for that cold salutation. I don’t know all your names yet. But shout out to you, Jennifer Petersen. The Washington Post reported that you’re one of the eleven, working from Spotsylvania, which I imagined as a dark and misty town where dogs became vampires. My imagination got the best of me—I just love speculative fiction. Turns out, it’s a real place in Virginia.

If I’m being honest, I’ve been feeling more than a little overwhelmed with the state of our country lately. It feels like every day, something happens that makes me wonder whether I’ve stumbled right into the fifth dimension from A Wrinkle in Time and lost a couple of decades. I’m guessing you all know that book, since some of your schools have banned it.

What an unexpected pleasure it was to feel an actual jolt of joy when I read that the entire movement to ban books in US public schools is coming from fewer people than I fed this Thanksgiving. Thank god (do you have an issue with me saying “god”? Or “God”? I’m guessing no) it’s just eleven of you.

Rock crystal’s status stemmed from its rarity and its extraordinary beauty, made even more glorious through carving and polishing. But above all it was the stone’s unparalleled clarity that provoked wonder in those who beheld it.

The strength of Pan-Africanism today lies not in its failed ambitions for a united Africa, but in the wealth of curiosity about Black cultures which was present from the movement’s inception and lives on in the diaspora, enriched by the modest trickle of migrants from Africa and the Caribbean into the US.

The awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation inspired revolutionaries of various kinds – liberal, socialist, anticolonialist – worldwide until at least the mid-20th century. Only the Anglo-American world, perhaps because it thought itself already emancipated, has remained largely immune to the messianic allure of 1789.

The Hundred Years War created a sense of nationhood, especially in France. In England, the Anglo-Norman dialect died out, and though French was still part of the equipment of ladies and gentlemen, it was Parisian French they learned, and they learned it as a foreign tongue. In France, speaking English was enough to get your throat cut – because, after all, who spoke English except the English? 

We had our shoes off and maybe this was a place where we were washing for gold, somewhat lost in the world.

In discussions of translation, we hear a lot about difficulty, impossibility, loss, riches, invention, triumph – all justified and interesting avenues. But texts may suggest something else: agreement, for example, or honourable hard work. In Proust’s case, when the topic is memory and chance, the convergences are remarkable.

Netflix has reversed the classical publishing strategy of throwing content at the wall of public indifference in the hope something will stick. It sees a scattered public whose attention can be pinned under a toppling wall of content.

Time passes more intensely in dreams. It is a Robert Louis Stevenson hallmark, the quicksilver evolution of thought and the fabular turn, the victory of original perception. He was born with what he later called an ‘internal theatre’, a mode of production that serves to make the dramas of the mind visible.

You can’t buy what Edinburgh has. You can, however, rent out certain kinds of access to it. This, as  David Harvey writes, is a recipe for self-destruction. The influx of international capital produces homogenisation, or worse, Disneyfication.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 1 (Friday 15 December 2023)

Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 1 (Friday 15 December 2023)

Contrary to the myth that from itsa founding document America was dedicated to capitalism, private property and the personal accumulation of wealth, ‘happiness’ in its 18th-century definition meant public – not private – wellbeing. Happiness was not a synonym for property. 

The rocks individuated as peopleif you register peopleas individuals, which I do,haplessly, helplessly, when forced,fright or flight or love or _______.The plants need water.The rhododendrons are...

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: SNL, What If…?, Star Trek: Prodigy, Stranger Things 5, Archer, Doctor Who, Ghosts, Last Week Tonight & more!

Many atrocities were committed during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7. Yet the president of the United States continues to repeat debunked falsehoods.

The post Joe Biden Keeps Repeating His False Claim That He Saw Pictures of Beheaded Babies appeared first on The Intercept.

This is the fourth chapter of my book “The Construction of Reality.” It is about what makes  us human.

It’s first draft, so not completely edited, and is a reward for reaching a milestone in our fundraiser. The next milestone is $8,350 (a little over $800 from our current total), and will include chapters:

5. Identity and Identification (how we expand our bodies beyond our physical selves)

6. The Ritual (how we create identification)

7. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)

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We learn to be human from other humans. Identity, ideology, language, empathy and role taking all require other humans initiate us.