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Putin's partial mobilisation has failed to compensate for his military failures, and will deplete Russia's domestic workforce for generations ahead

Governance doesn’t bleed It should be no surprise by now that the press covers the circus before it turning to boring non-nonsense. The former president’s performances fascinate (and draw eyeballs and clicks) in the way The Joker is an iconic Batman villain. His antics bleed and lead. The challenge in how the news covers Donald Trump “news” is to cover what is news and not what is more Trumpish nonsense, suggests Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN. “Formerly,” because as a media critic he routinely “said the quiet part out loud” about the fecklessness of major news coverage. It got him cancelled. News sources don’t like having their dirty laundry exposed in public. The problem for Democrats is that taking governing seriously is not headline news. If their daily activities are not as eye-catching as frontal nudity or AR-15 parades or street violence, it is easy to assume they are doing nothing. Just yesterday, an acquaintance on Twitter complained that as Republicans cheer Trump’s violations of law and civic norms, Democrats mostly stand by and do nothing. Two impeachments? Nothing.

Gertrude Trevelyan was enough of a contrarian to steer clear of the decade’s many left-leaning literary networks. Indeed, she seems entirely to have escaped the notice of her contemporaries: quite a feat, given how inquisitive some of them were. Scarcely a trace of her survives in the second-hand bookshops or in scholarly accounts of mid-20th century British fiction.

The story of artists’ studios intersects with the history of real estate, just as it shadows the expansion of other ‘curated’ spaces in late capitalism. Today hairdressers, potters, nail technicians, dental hygienists and personal trainers all aspire to the studio. Like the ‘salon’, the studio is a gentrifying brand, denoting exclusivity, luxury and expensive hardware. It would be a mistake to consider these spaces in isolation.

Unlike Kathryn Scanlan’s short stories, which dispense with context and explication, Kick the Latch is precisely detailed. Her character, Sonia, describes the importance of X-raying horses’ hooves to determine where their coffin bones lie before shoeing them: ‘Some horses are low in the heel so they’ll get wedges or mud nails or caulks or blocks.’ These things matter.

Ralph Bunche is a complex subject, someone who chose administration over advocacy and international service over national politics, but who, because of his race, but more precisely because of white America’s racial obsessions, could never fully control the use that was made of his life. Half a century after his death, we still can’t see him whole.

It’s wonderful that family turmoil no longer claims space in gay lives, though perhaps a little too good to be true. No false steps on the way to maturity, no floundering – it’s almost as if  Brandon Taylor’s characters were born adult and pre-loaded with Grindr.

A. 2042 was designed to be sent to family or friends at home by those on active service. It began by warning that ‘nothing is to be written on this side’ other than the sender’s signature and the date, and ‘if anything else is added the post card will be destroyed.’ It then offered a series of phrases, each of which could be deleted, to create a rudimentary narrative. The opening words, ‘I am quite well,’ could be crossed out or supplemented with more troubling news.

Research into intellectual auxiliaries has thrived in recent years. Translators, interpreters, secretaries and amanuenses are no longer considered intermediaries, but contributors in their own right. Martin Mulsow isn’t interested in financial precarity so much as risky thinking. Professors could also be precarious, he argues, if they engaged in clandestine intellectual activity.

The Realist‘You can’t really think I would like this!’ and he hands the gift back to his wife. ‘Did you ever know me to have anything like this?’   ...

Konstantin Paustovsky’s fiction tends to be set in public and among strangers, so that one is tempted to think: ‘Aha, the great frieze of society,’ or ‘Is this perhaps social realism?’ But that’s probably wrong: what he is describing is Nature, give or take a few human figures.

Most of us would find it horrible to be told that we aren’t worth engaging with, that our views are socially unacceptable or merely a function of demography. But that it is painful to be on the receiving end of such remarks doesn’t mean that one’s own rights to ‘free speech’ are thereby imperilled; it might simply be a reminder that speech can wound.

My brother John and I knew that the telephones in both our parents’ houses were tapped. My dad had been a surveillance target since the formation of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), and probably before. It was obvious, sometimes, talking to a schoolfriend on the phone, that we were actually having a three-way call with the police. You heard a continual clicking.

Some final-year students may not graduate this summer; others will ‘graduate’ without their assessments being marked, or even read – including capstone assessments such as dissertations. If marks don’t matter, what is an examination system for? What does a degree mean?

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 13 (Friday 16 June 2023)

Unlike most realists, Marx does not see art as precious because it reflects reality. On the contrary, it is most relevant to humanity when it is an end in itself. Art is a critique of instrumental reason. In its free, harmonious expression of human powers, it is a prototype of what it is to live well.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 13 (Friday 16 June 2023)

The DifferenceIn those days, fearlessnesshadn’t come to mean bravery yet, just an absenceof fear. What they called holiness could meanthe drama of reindeer stampedingcounter-clockwise in the...

Coward absorbed many of the ideals of the lower-middle-class Edwardian England in which he grew up and never repudiated them. Patriotic, enthusiastic about the Empire, mistrustful of intellectualism and deferential to the monarchy – if he made fun of these attitudes from time to time, he held them all the same.

Fassbinder predicted a world of ubiquitous screens. He was flamboyantly gay, proudly ugly, extremely left-wing, outrageously productive and had an astonishing eye. It’s easy to imagine him, if he’d lived, being one of those strange boomers who have managed a seamless transition to the new media reality.

Fashions change, but monarchical regalia tends towards ossification: Charles III and Camilla left their coronation this year swathed in robes of ermine-trimmed purple, just as George III and his queen consort, Charlotte, did in 1761. 

The price of Israel's major plans in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank is not just humanitarian. It is essentially political, aimed at cutting off Palestinian communities from one another, isolating Jerusalem completely, and ensuring a Jewish demographic majority for generations to come.

The post Permanent Apartheid in Palestine: Why Israel Wants to Reactivate The E1 Plan appeared first on MintPress News.

Report exposes delayed pandemic preparation due to government machine having to focus fully on avoiding a crash-out exit from the EU without a deal.

As it turns out, it’s never too late. I mention that only because last week, at nearly 79, I managed to visit Mars for the first time. You know, the red planet, or rather — so it seemed to me — the orange planet. And take my word for it, it was eerie as hell. There was no sun, just a strange orange haze of a kind I had never seen before as I walked the streets of that world (well-masked) on my way to a doctor’s appointment. Oh, wait, maybe I’m a little mixed up. Maybe I wasn’t on Mars. The strangeness of it all (and perhaps my age) might have left me just a bit confused. My best... Read more

Source: Living on a Smoke-Bomb of a Planet appeared first on TomDispatch.com.