Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 10 (Friday 05 May 2023)
Reading
Is there a thread we can trace back through the post-independence era that might help us arrive at an explanation for what is happening in Khartoum now? There’s no doubt that successive experiments in modernity were stifled by crony capitalism, insider dealing, firesale bargains for the well-connected, a tangle of illicit trafficking and contrivances against years of sanctions, imposed on Washington’s insistence.
Europeans were eager for Native Americans to tell them the location of precious metals and the source of beaver pelts. But less practical Indigenous knowledge needed either to be assimilated into the existing intellectual scheme of the world or placed outside it as a monstrous anomaly. Like the jumbled artefacts in Renaissance Wunderkammern, Indigenous travellers to Europe were made into spectacles: ethnographic specimens and sensational sideshows.
One could, broadly speaking, describe the history of Western cosmological thinking in terms of three vocabularies: classical, Christian and scientific. Zoom out, and the three appear chronologically sequential. Zoom in and the picture is messier and more complicated, with areas of overlap, syncretism and accommodation, latent tensions and open conflicts.
The scale of the loss is mind-boggling. For every three hundred green turtles that swam the Caribbean before industrialised fishing, just one is left. Ninety per cent of the world’s large fish and oyster beds have gone. Seagrass meadows are disappearing at a rate of 7 per cent per year. Only one in twenty blue whales remain.
What’s so impressive about Anaximander is that he was willing to ‘redesign the universe’ – to hypothesise an extra hemisphere of reality – on the basis of evidence that would have been easy to explain away. It’s less the discovery itself than the intellectual courage that Carlo Rovelli admires: such radical questioning, he says, is the essence of science.
French moralists are not usually moralisers. They explore moral ground by turning its difficulties into aphorisms. They are because they think; they are frightened by the eternal silence of...
I wonder how we got here. How is it that Vermeer’s paintings now strut the world stage, having skulked for two centuries in the wings? And I wonder where Vermeer himself thought he was heading. What sense can we make of the directions in which he chose to take his work?
What exactly Jim Ede was eludes classification. He was a collector, up to a point, though he never had much money; a patron, but only in a small way; an aspiring artist who never made a career of it; a one-time curator at the Tate whose suggestions were mostly ignored and who retired early after years of frustration.
Themes that recur in James Purdy’s later work include power struggles (liable to sudden inversions), extreme emotional states (also subject to reversal), and polar contrasts of riches and poverty, youth and age. Moments of poetic magic rather than developments in plot or character make the experience of reading compulsive.
Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund HallFor E.M.Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:what news of the underground,the weather in Hell?Your toes are tickledby the beards of the dead, theirslanted...
Humza Yousaf narrowly won the SNP leadership against Nicola Sturgeon’s former finance secretary Kate Forbes, a member of the fundamentalist Free Church of Scotland, who emerged from the contest as the backbench standard-bearer of the social and fiscal conservatism that still lurks within her party and in the Scottish media. Perhaps the SNP really is ‘doing it deliberately’, and taking the left for a ride.
The Portuguese were said to be uniquely at home in the tropics, their colonies places of multiracial harmony. Portugal’s empire was fated to endure. In the 1950s and 1960s, as anticolonial movements gathered strength, Salazar’s regime continued to insist that Portuguese imperialism was different from other forms of European colonial rule. Lídia Jorge is alert to the hypocrisies of lusotropicalist rhetoric.
Other people aren’t hell, Lauren Berlant writes, just bothersome, ‘which is to say that they have to be dealt with’. Why is it so hard to live with other people? And why do we seek to ease the friction of intimacy and collective life even as we are driven towards encounters that create friction?
By piecing together the details of Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça’s campaign, José Lingna Nafafé shows that abolitionism began not with William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, but with a transnational African movement a century earlier. In order to make this case, he has to reconstruct the complex and intertwined worlds of Angola, Brazil and Southern Europe in the 17th century.
Fans make no pretence of balance or reason. They are drunk on irrationality and obstinacy, hurling themselves after the fortunes of their chosen team, band, TV show or celebrity. A fan may feel aggrieved at the unfairness of the world (as embodied in a referee, critic or prize panel), but the last thing they aspire to be is fair. A fan is someone with a dog in the fight.
Positioned higgledy-piggledy in London streets, a battery of defunct cannons threatens to destroy ordinary people’s homes and livelihoods, day-to-day infrastructure and basic amenities, art and nature, new things and old things. You would be hard pressed to find a better metaphor for the current political regime and the national climate it has produced.
Donatello was driven to devise original solutions by the success of the older Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose mastery of linear perspective in relief sculpture could never be surpassed. But there can be little doubt that Donatello also came increasingly to relish angular collisions of form, rough finishes, ragged edges and natural disorder to a degree never previously found in sculpture.
There was something perverse about Israel’s choice of Asunción as a destination for dispossessed Palestinians. Alfredo Stroessner had been running Paraguay as a military dictatorship for fifteen years when the transfers began. It was also where Nazi war criminals – Josef Mengele is the most famous – had gone to hide. More interesting for Palestinians is the under-reported legacy of indigenous resistance in the country.
The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. The statistics are stunning. This year’s proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion — more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In... Read more
Florida lives down to its image It was a tad disorienting the first time I entered a public men’s room in Europe and there was a woman attendant standing inside keeping the place clean and neat. But what the hell. When in Rome, right? (Was it Rome?) So it’s hard to understand the parochial freakout on the American right over trans people using bathrooms. Well, not that hard. They react to anyone outside their black-and-white categories as they might at encountering a snake or a spider the size of a Buick. With a visceral shudder. Count on Florida to model how to overreact for the rest of MAGAstan (Washington Post): Florida’s legislature Wednesday passed a bill that bans transgender people from using many bathrooms and changing areas that match their gender identity, on penalty of criminal trespass charges, in the latest spate of anti-LGBTQ legislation that has been taken up by state lawmakers. A small number of Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in opposing House Bill 1521, which applies to schools, government buildings, prisons and detention centers. It now heads to the desk of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who is expected to sign it into law.
. Comme l’a soutenu Braunstein, le wokisme est une véritable religion sectaire absurde. Il est évident qu’il est en train de construire un nouveau totalitarisme de la pensée quasi-religieuse. Et c’est certainement une attaque farouche contre la science et contre la vérité. Mais il est aussi un mouvement sociopolitique qui a gagné en popularité ces […]
‘It’s totally unnecessary… They are disenfranchising people.’ Josiah Mortimer and colleagues report from across England as ID is rolled out for the first time.
1.
In love two melons are. Yet run off and marry they do not. Why?
Because elope, they cannot.
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2.
On a seafood diet, I am. Food I see; eat it I do.
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3.
I sense much fear in six. Fear of seven. Why?
Because nine, seven ate.
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4.
YODA: Knock knock.
LUKE: Who’s there?
YODA: Banana.
LUKE: Banana who?
YODA: Knock knock.
LUKE: Who’s there?
YODA: Banana.
LUKE: Banana who?
YODA: Knock knock.
LUKE: Who’s there?
YODA: Banana.
LUKE: Can we wrap this up?
YODA: Patience you must have. Knock knock.
LUKE: Who’s there?
Zarina Zabrisky explains how Putin’s seizure of the company property is just a continuation of his state-sponsored looting which began 30 years ago in St Petersburg