Reading

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:47

Carles Viñas’ latest book is not a history of football in the Soviet Union. It’s the story of how the sport gained a foothold in the Russian Empire and how the Bolsheviks decided it could be useful to them. As Viñas puts it in the introduction: ‘There were members of the Tsarist court who rejected […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:46

When the techno DJ Jeff Mills pulled up in his cab to play at Sankeys Soap in Manchester in the mid-1990s, he said, ‘Oh my god, this is just like Detroit.’ At that time, Emma Warren of the club’s promoters Bugged Out confirms, ‘There was nothing around — just some cabbies, an old pub and cafe. […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:46

Architecture, or at least construction, is one of the ugliest, thorniest problems of the entire climate crisis. It depends upon who you ask, and one can certainly find a bewilderingly inconsistent array of statistics, but the construction, running, and maintenance of buildings contributes something around half of all global carbon emissions. Producing cement and steel, […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:46

Eurotrash, which has now been re-issued in its entirety on DVD and is also available to stream, started in 1993 and, initially at least, aired on Friday nights at 10.30 PM on the ever-interesting Channel 4 of the day. It was one of the first programmes to be explicitly pitched at the ‘post-pub’ crowd, or […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:46

T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999) opens by imagining an archaeologist in the post-apocalyptic future surveying surviving remnants of modernism. If they gazed at a Picasso painting in isolation from its original social context, Clark asks, ‘What forms of life would future viewers reconstruct from this material?’ […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:45

In 2022, architecture’s social media is divided between ‘I Luv Brutalism’ accounts — all snapshots of the National Theatre — and ‘Traditional Western Architecture’ accounts apparently managed by Greek statues. Modernism, it seems, is still controversial. Except on the furthest fringes of the far right, debate does not still rage about whether or not Picasso or Stravinsky […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:44

An old man is talking into a microphone, standing in front of the wire fence of a children’s playground between decrepit prefab blocks amid lovely greenery. ‘On the 2nd of September was the birthday of our Dimitrovgrad,’ he says and starts singing: ‘The city we built, we built with love, the city of our youth.’ […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 07:30
What’s he actually saying? Aaron Blake takes a look at Trump’s latest slogan: Even for a former president known for casting situations in the most apocalyptic terms possible, and his enemies as being as nefarious as possible, it was a remarkable rhetorical flourish. “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” Donald Trump said Saturday night at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” The line validates long-held suspicions that Trump’s 2024 campaign amounts to something of a “revenge tour.” Trump has disputed that his goal is to stick it to his enemies; now he’s admitting that it is a revenge tour of sorts — if not for him personally, then for his supporters. But as much as anything, it reflects just how much the Republican Party, despite its apparent interest in turning the page in 2024, has enabled Trump to rise again.
Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 07:00
‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomists have for years been arguing (e.g. here) about the importance of the New Classical Counter Revolution in economics. ‘Helping’ to change the way macroeconomics is done today — with rational expectations, Euler equations, intertemporal optimization, and microfoundations — their main critique of New Classical macroeconomics is that it didn’t incorporate price stickiness […]
Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 05:30
Tucker: "To this day, there is dispute over how Chansley got into the Capitol building." False. You can literally see QAnon Shaman entering in footage he aired moments earlier. He wasn't snuck in some back door, he came in moments after the door was kicked in. Tucker is lying. Here is Jacob Chansley entering the Capitol less than 40 seconds after the breach. There is no dispute. https://ia902307.us.archive.org/10/items/Cwxj9RMtddritN4Ds/Cwxj9RMtddritN4Ds.mpeg4 Also the “someone” who opened the door, as Tucker Carlson referred to him, is an anti-abortion extremism who purported to respect the sanctity of life until he (allegedly) plotted to kill a FBI agent following his Jan. 6 arrest. #Parasnooper “Kelley and Carter discussed collecting information and plans to kill the individual law enforcement personnel on the list that included an attack on the FBI’s Knoxville, Tennessee Field Office.” https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-tennessee-men-arrested-planning-attacks-law-enforcement-personnel-and-fbi-s-knoxville You can also see QAnon Shaman here at the front of rioters breaching the police line, near Brent Bozell III’s adult son Brent Bozell IV.
Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 05:29

The history of the North of England is a history of astonishing visions, great attempts to realise true progress, and painful deferrals of these dreams, so argues Alex Niven, who constructs this argument incisively, elegantly and movingly in The North Will Rise Again: Searching for the Future in Northern Heartlands (Bloomsbury).  Niven’s intervention is a […]