The suggestion, I think, is that life as we live it may be largely an affair of props and sets, and Wes Anderson is inviting us not to feel too bad about this possibility. The question ‘Who framed Asteroid City?’ looks towards the same answer as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. We did, with some prompts from the directors.
Reading
The first two decades of the USSR saw what was then the fastest and largest instance of urban growth in human history. In just thirteen years, the population living in cities and towns more than doubled from 26 million to 56 million. Modernisation was achieved at a tremendous human cost, with gruelling constraints imposed on the bulk of the population, even as it opened up new horizons.
Three hundred characters in 260 pages. How do you possibly keep track of so many names, so much intrigue? It’s hard to imagine a reader of Camilo José Cela’s masterpiece, The Hive, who hasn’t asked this question – who hasn’t wondered, after twenty or thirty pages, whether or how to go on. Do you just accept the confusion? Or, alternatively, keep elaborate notes – perhaps sketching out, as I did, a web of relations on a very large sheet of paper?
At the height of the war two women sat talking at the kitchen table, one tall one short and each reporting back on what they’d last heard from their husbands, those men now said to be dead...
The question that motivates Matthew McNaught’s Immanuel is simple, but hard to answer. What prompted these white, Middle England Christians to leave their homes and families to join a church, the central beliefs of which are so obviously, manifestly, bonkers?
At trials for crimes against humanity, some of the most eloquent testimony comes not from survivors but from skeletons: a bullet hole, or the marks left by a sharp weapon, may be all it takes for defendants’ claims to unravel. But before they can be presented as evidence, the bones must be exhumed, brushed, washed, catalogued and articulated – assembled into a skeleton. Only then can they provide their testimony.
For the past 25 years, Kamila Shamsie has been working on a vast scale. There's a thrill that comes with the grand sweep, the comparison between Western imperialist projects, but Shamsie writes best about Karachi, where she grew up.
Despite evidence showing that only the top 10 per cent of earners received above-inflation pay rises last year, Rishi Sunak has threatened to squeeze public sector wages further in an effort to combat inflation. This is the talk of a technocrat who learned economics from outdated textbooks, not a man fighting for his political life.
Missionaries in Jamaica had campaigned for emancipation and were loathed by the planters, who blamed them for the rebellion in 1831 which helped bring slavery to an end. I wanted to know what stories these missionaries told the abolitionist public in Britain. How did they shape British racial thinking? What was particular about this historical moment when abolitionists defeated pro-slavers? How did it relate to the long history of violence between the two islands?
“There must be some kind of way out of here…” As night fell over the South River Forest, the music festival was in full swing. Young and old swayed to the sounds of Suede Cassidy. Families gathered around the grill. Little ones frolicked in an inflatable bouncy house bedecked with a banner that read: “Stop Cop City.” While the band played on, a strike force of Georgia state troopers assembled in the shadows. They were there to clear the way for the creation of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City,” a $90-million training ground for the future of urban warfare. It would destroy more than half of that urban forest. For years, the project had... Read more
Source: American Inquisition appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Well over half the recent migrants come from the top 15 countries globally hardest hit by explosive weaponry
The Russian ‘revolt’ that wasn’t, strengthens Putin’s hand.
The post Seymour Hersh: Prigozhin’s Folly appeared first on MintPress News.
With the Government's flagship policy in legal disarray, will the Conservative leadership finally stand up for the rule of law or continue stoking their culture wars?
Ramzy Baroud on the resilience and ongoing struggle of the Palestinian people in Jenin as they defy Israel's attempts to crush their resistance to its brutal occupation.
The post Unmasking Israel’s Failed Raid: The Battle of Jenin and Its Resilient Community appeared first on MintPress News.
The sheer desperation of the US to halt China’s rise is on display with the news that America blacklisted fourty-four flight schools for teaching Chinese pilots.
Ain’t gonna work, sunshine, and it makes you look like petty fools. Also this whole extraterritorial law thing is now beyond tiresome and pissing everyone off. Ain’t anyone but your lackeys who doesn’t want this to end and to see America in the graveyard of empires.
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In the sort of lovely Covid news we’ve become used to, it seems that about one-third of everyone who gets Covid gets short or long term mental issues:
In the beginning, I created the apartment and the lease. Then I said, “Let there be tenant”; and there was tenant. And I saw the tenant and that she had sufficient pay stubs and no criminal record, which was good. For I am the landlord your God, and wish not to reveal my wrath upon our first meeting.
Then I said, “Let there be skylight”; and there was skylight. For it gave the apartment a majestic view of the sun and the stars, which I created too, because, lest you forget, I am the landlord your God, sovereign over all things real estate.
Then I said, “Let there be furnishing.” For the tenant was created in my image and my image alone. Let there be a kitchen backsplash, goblet drapery, TV (with built-in Roku), and a mustard-colored sectional. And it was so. For toiling in the name of home improvement is very good.
And thus, I said to the tenant: “Behold your new palace. I have led you into the land of milk and honey. Eat grapes off my landlord vine. Be fruitful and multiply on your bed fit for a queen!”
In a letter to The New York Times in 2005, Donald Trump wrote that “some people cast shadows, and other people choose to live in those shadows.” Mike Pence went a little further and chose to be Trump’s shadow. He has ended up as a gray man of no substance, who has to insist ever […]
The post Unrepentant Pence appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
David Sirota and ProPublica’s Justin Elliott discuss new revelations surrounding the Supreme Court.
- by Aeon Video
- by Shihan Li
- by Huw Price & Ken Wharton
An analysis of survey data finds no direct correlation between pandemic-related interruptions to immigration and continued labor market tightness.
[Jevons] is a man of some ability, but he seems to me to have a mania for encumbering questions with useless complications, and with a notation implying the existence of greater precision in the data than the questions admit of. John Stuart Mill Fixation on constructing models — “implying the existence of greater precision in […]
The UAE, reliant on producing and exporting heavily polluting fuels, is likely to oppose the transformative measures required to incentivise nations to move away from new oil and gas production
In the 1890s, industrial capitalism had reached the point where the pain inflicted on workers in search of private profits by the industrialists reached a point where the workers could no longer tolerate it and they started to realise that in unity they had strength. This was a period of major industrial disputes and a…