The question of agency here is vexed and political (it’s also gendered). Does the authorship of Hilma af Klint’s spiritualist paintings lie with the medium or her spirit guides? And why do so many drawings by mediums look so similar? Is this the visual language of the living or the dead?
Reading
DESIGNER HILARY: So tell me about your house.
HOMEOWNER AVERY: It’s in a beautiful neighborhood, not far from a Starbucks. It has a charming llama habitat, and I love the wood built-ins in the dining room.
HOMEOWNER TRENT: There’s only one bathroom though. It’s accessible by shimmying through an abandoned mine shaft and riding a rusted minecart to an open pit.
AVERY: Even though I love this house, I’d really like a faucet in the kitchen. Right now, we have to lower a bucket into a well, and the water is full of toxic metals.
TRENT: I want to sell it. I have double vision from mercury poisoning, and there are demons in the basement.
REALTOR DAVID: You absolutely should sell it. This ugly house makes me retch.
AVERY: I want to stay. Our toddler is possessed and crawling up walls, but the dining room is Jamaican mahogany.
In the Byzantine world, Normans were ‘Franks’, and to the Scots they were English. Like the Vikings, the Normans didn’t maintain an empire but were assimilated where they invaded. What then remains of their myth of multiple conquests?
When I was 78, I wrote a book about being old. I don’t think I’d ever felt the need to swim more than twenty lengths at that time, let alone record my paltry daily achievements. Now I put letters and numbers in my diary (a sort of code) to remind me that I’ve walked at least five thousand Fitbit steps and swum a kilometre, which is forty lengths of the pool.
You didn’t have to work in the financial services industries to be a yuppie, but the most famous cultural depictions were from that sector. Even their clothes and accessories acquired a broader audience. The Filofax was an ancestor of the smart phone in its capacity to blur the boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘life’.
Students want – or think they want – more and faster feedback. So tutors write more and more, faster and faster, producing paragraph on paragraph that students, in moments of sheepish honesty, sometimes admit they don’t read. However infuriating, it’s understandable. This material is far from our best work. Much of it is vague, rushed or cribbed.
At the interface of the orchestra and the audience the conductor is the recipient of two quite different waves of transference. At his back, an amorphous crowd of strangers beam expectation at him. They have paid to experience something amazing. Variously informed about what exactly he is doing, they are happy to submit themselves to his mystique and charisma. To them, he is the high priest, guardian of the sacred texts, the leader.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 6 (Friday 03 March 2023)
If you have enough money, even being sanctioned by the British government is no impediment to using London’s courts to silence your critics. The Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 explicitly excludes money sent to the UK to pay for legal advice and litigation. Among the beneficiaries of this exemption was Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 6 (Friday 03 March 2023)
Ovens, fridges, vacuums, car keys, radios, speakers: all of them now contain microchips. An ordinary car contains dozens of them. A posh car contains a thousand. And those are just the standard consumer items of the mid-20th century. As for the things we think of as being this century’s new technology, they are some of the most complicated and beautiful artefacts humanity has ever made, mainly because of the chips they contain.
Letter from right-wing, pro-Israel group warns Green party leaders not to offer a home to Jews who support human rights for Palestinians – or who dare to say what the Forde report and others already admitted: Labour’s ‘crisis’ was a scam. The Greens will shame themselves if they cave in to this bullying Showing no […]
The five-page document mentions a 1993 visit to the U.S. and a fantasy book the Russian mercenary leader co-wrote with his children.
The post Hacked Resume Gives Inside Look at Wagner Group Founder Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared first on The Intercept.
What passes for leadership in the West is becoming more agitated, particulalry over Ukraine.
For many Uyghur families, a new search tool has allowed them to find vital pieces of information – but many urge the international community to do more, reports Tasnim Nazeer
Having used arms control to gain unilateral advantage over Russia, the cost to the U.S. and NATO in getting Moscow back to the negotiating table will be high.
The post Scott Ritter: Reimagining Arms Control Under Ukraine appeared first on scheerpost.com.
By Binoy Kampmark / CounterPunch Censorship is never innocent, made worse for its strained good intentions. For those responsible for setting and policing such policies, the inner judge comes out, stomping on assumed meanings, interpreting and removing things to ensure the masses are not corrupted. Children’s stories and tales have not been exempted from this […]
The post Sensitivity Rewrites: The Cultural Purging of Roald Dahl appeared first on scheerpost.com.
By Dean Baker / Beat the Press (CEPR) The January data on consumer expenditures released yesterday had a lot of people freaking out. The story is that the Fed is going have to get out the big guns to really shoot inflation down. For those of us hoping that inflation would come down, without a […]
The post Is Inflation Out of Control, Again? appeared first on scheerpost.com.
- by Aeon Video
Only Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) voted against the resolution.
The post House Overwhelmingly Approves Resolution to Maintain Syria Sanctions After Earthquake appeared first on scheerpost.com.
The underground has achieved a 50-year goal: free abortion on demand without apology.
The post As Texas Judge Stalls, the Abortion Rights Movement Won’t Wait appeared first on The Intercept.
- by Vivek V Venkataraman
Only when England can see itself as England will it be possible to challenge the idea that Britain is England, writes former Labour MP John Denham
Firms in countries with high GDP per capita tend to have larger and more highly educated workforces and to be organized differently than firms in poor countries.