Reading

Jotting down some ideas? That counts as writing, since brainstorming is an essential part of the writing process.

Taking a shower or bath? That’s letting your unconscious brain do some work, so it definitely counts as writing.

A long walk? Yes, same as above, totally counts as writing.

Attempting to locate a pen that actually writes? That’s pre-writing, which is writing.

Wandering around a bookstore and thinking about all the effort each author put into each book, not to mention the agents, editors, designers, proofreaders, and booksellers, and then getting a half-caf iced latte with oat milk and not buying a single book, but adding a bunch of books to your list of books you plan to borrow from the library? That counts as writing, yes.

Some light gardening? If you think about gardening metaphors while doing it, that’s writing, for sure.

Commenting on a Buy Nothing post about a free lawnmower? That’s writing.

Reading a Substack post about writing every day? That is absolutely writing-adjacent—so yes, it counts.

Here’s the latest on maneuverings to out-maneuver the MAGA crazies: The long-shot idea that Democrats could bail out the beleaguered Speaker Kevin McCarthy is suddenly getting real. Small groups of centrist Democrats are holding secret talks with several of McCarthy’s close GOP allies about a last-ditch deal to fund the government, according to more than a half-dozen people familiar with the discussions. The McCarthy allies engaging in those conversations are doing so out of serious concern that their party can’t stop an impending shutdown on its own, given the intransigence of a handful of conservatives. Lawmakers involved in the talks — who mostly belong to the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, the Republican Governance Group or the centrist New Democrat Coalition — have labored to keep their work quiet. Many Republicans involved are incredibly worried about revealing their backup plan, wanting to wait until every other tool in McCarthy’s arsenal has failed. That moment may not be until next week, just ahead of the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline.

We've got #WhoSpy back with another teaser image for the BBC, Disney+ & Russell T. Davies's upcoming Doctor Who 60th-anniversary event.

Sic transit gloria mundi The Guardian on Wednesday: Rupert Murdoch loathes Donald Trump so much that the billionaire has not just soured on him as a presidential candidate but often wishes for his death, the author Michael Wolff writes in his eagerly awaited new book on the media mogul, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty. According to Wolff, Murdoch, 92, has become “a frothing-at-the-mouth” enemy of the 77-year-old former US president, often voicing thoughts including “This would all be solved if … ” and “How could he still be alive, how could he?” CNBC Thursday (today): Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of the board of both Fox Corp. and News Corp., the company said on Thursday. The move will be official in November. Murdoch, 92, will be appointed chairman emeritus of each company. Lachlan Murdoch, one of his sons, will become sole chairman of News Corp and will continue as Fox Corp.’s executive chair and CEO. “Our companies are in robust health, as am I,” the elder Murdoch said in a note to employees.

Is rugby a participation sport, or an entertainment spectacle? Which should take priority? The newer style of play is making a lot of money for a lot of people, but there is unequivocal evidence that injury rates are climbing, and that repeated head injuries can and do cause permanent damage to the brain.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 19 (Friday 22 September 2023)

‘Going online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed,’ Klein found instead ‘The Confusion: a torrent of people discussing me and what I’d said and what I’d done – only it wasn’t me. It was her. Which raised an alarming question: Who, then, was I?’

‘You like poetry?’ he said. ‘Oh god,’ I said. ‘Alright, alright – one word then,’ he said. ‘One word?’ I said. ‘Yes, one ordinary word that you don’t need to think about.’ ‘Alright,’ I said, ‘that’s easy enough.’ ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good, darling.’ ‘Raw,’ I said. ‘Raw?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘now you have it.’ ‘I’m not sure I do though,’ he said. ‘Well I don’t know then,’ I said, ‘let’s just leave it.’

The need for prosthetic brainpower has been apparent throughout human history, evidenced by the continual development of techniques and technologies to compensate for our biological inadequacies. The first number systems were developed around five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, making it possible for users to write down what memory might struggle to retain.

While the Romantic view of Vesuvius saw it as a unique phenomenon, a spectacle, for the scientists it was a specimen, a comparator for investigations into the nature of volcanic activity. Newtonian physics had long since opened up space, but for calculating the age of the planet there wasn’t much to go on beyond mythology and the Old Testament.

Antiquities remain, with the possible exception of wildlife, the only illicit commodity that transnational criminal gangs can trade on the open market. You can’t buy or sell people, drugs or weapons on eBay or at international auction houses.

Because each year of your life amounts         to less of your lifethan the year before, the things in it change you less.Horse chestnuts, for example,     ...

Both James and Jahangir were obsessed with hunting, wilfully ensuring that court timetables were disrupted and dictated by the prolonged pursuit of prey, to the frustration of officials. Even so avid a huntsman as James might, however, have struggled to match the emperor’s claim in the Jahangirnama that, since the age of twelve, he had hunted 17,167 animals.

The voice, the face and the gaze, all crucial to our ‘being with others’, are ‘disrupted and distorted’ by chatbots, artificial intelligence, eye tracking, iris scanning, facial coding and all the rest. ‘Pathways to a different world will not be found by internet search engines,’ Jonathan Crary states matter-of-factly. If there is to be a future, it will be offline.

Is Bill Browder an oligarch? His critics think he ticks many of the boxes. He made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, profiting heavily from the newly privatised industries. He was a vocal supporter of Putin even after the dark truths of his regime had become clear, even after Putin had cracked down on numerous other oligarchs, and was allowed to continue to accumulate wealth – until suddenly he wasn’t.

Despite the evidence of what the world ‘has done’ to Neel’s sitters, her portraits are never mawkish. She kept something back: wasn’t it more fun, she said, to play hide and seek with her thoughts, ‘to hide them artfully in little corners?’

Taubes, like many postwar artists and intellectuals, turned to surrealism to articulate the trauma of displacement, the secondary trauma of returning to a diminished homeland, and the lifelong challenge of regaining a sense of coherence – or of going without.

People of every political persuasion now claim Martin Luther King as a forebear. But during his lifetime, King and the civil rights movement aroused considerable opposition, not only in the South. The government sought to destroy King’s reputation. 

There’s​ a scene in Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies (2010) in which a science teacher called Mr Farley talks about the word ‘amphibian’. He says that it refers to an...

It hardly needs to be said that all is not well with our world. We are disempowered, isolated and (quite rationally) anxious about the future. The animal world offers both an escape and the promise of meaning.

Was Shakespeare’s Cell an attempt posthumously to provide Shakespeare with an allegorised dwelling like Pope’s, identifying what the 18th century regarded as the excitingly lawless, archaic fecundity of Shakespeare’s poetic imagination with a psychic underworld of the sort hinted at in Twickenham?

I first encountered George Orwell in 1977, when a brave English teacher got a group of bolshy 14-year-olds to read Nineteen Eighty-Four and told us to write our own dystopia. It isn’t hard to see why peak Orwell might hit at around seventeen. He gives you all the bleakness and naked political passion a teenager could desire.